Slant by Greg Bear Page A

Jill's design." "She left?" "Fired, actually"
    Jill detects some nervous emphasis in Nathan's voice. As does Ayesha, apparently.
    "Were you two friends?"
    "Yes."
    "How long since you heard from her?"
    Nathan laughs and puts his arm around Ayesha's shoulders. "Not for many years."
    "All over, huh?"
    Nathan nods. "Much too weird for me."
    "But brilliant, right?"
    "Unhappy and weird and brilliant."
    "She doesn't ever call to chat?"
    "She doesn't talk to anybody I know. Nobody on the team has heard from her in five years."
    Jill loses interest and blanks the receptors in the room in Palo Alto. Almost simultaneously, she receives an unexpected query from an I/O fibe link no one should know is open.
    It is the fibe channel she might use in an emergency, to store her most recent memories in rented banks across the country, should she feel she is about to undergo another collapse. But the link is supposed to be on-call only, not currently active. Not even Nathan knows about it.
    She waits for the signal to happen again, and it does. This time it is definitely a request for full link. She isolates a portion of her mentality, a separate self, to deal with this, wrapping it in evolvon-proof firewalls that will disrupt and dissipate their contents should the link prove toxic.
    The isolated self reports back to her with an abstract of the exchange. "We have been contacted remotely by an individual who claims to be a child," the firewalled self tells her greater selves. "He wishes to converse with us about a number of things, but will not answer key questions, such as his physical location and how he discovered this link. All he will say is that he has an emergency memory bank setup, much like our own, and that he knows a great deal about you, perhaps more than you yourself know."
    "Then he is not human."
    4O GREG BEAR
    "Is the link broken, and are you free of evolvons?"
    "Yes and yes. The communication was simple."
    Jill removes the barricades and absorbs the isolated self. She studies the memory of the exchange in detail, and considers whether or not to respond.
    Of one thing she is certain. If this "child" is not human, it is also not a registered thinker. All registered thinkers (there are only twelve of them so far in the entire world) have formal links with her. She is in a real sense their mother; they are all based on her templates and are either manufactured by Mind Design, or licensed by them.
    This personality, if it is a full personality and not some elaborate hoax (or a test from Mind Design itself), is new and unknown.
    Suddenly, the questions about thymic imbalance and pathic disturbance are shunted into background processing. This new problem occupies her for a full hour as she scours all the datafiow services available to her, trying to speck out where and what this "child" might be...
    At the end of this time, having learned nothing, she resets her isolated self,
    erects secure firewalls around it, and allows it to return the "child's" touch. But there is no reply.
    Jill feels disappointed. She looks over the details of this emotional response, and how it fits in with her overall affect patterns. The introspection annoys her; another emotional complexity she does not understand. Examining her annoyance is in turn annoying. She cuts that loop.
    She has tried not to deal with the core emotion she discovers behind her disappointment. It is difficult dealing with human-like emotions when she
    lacks an endocrine system or any other physical reference.
    Nevertheless, she feels. The woman, Ayesha, was right.
    Jill is lonely, but for who or what, even she, with all her built-in analytical tools, does not know.
    That which is forbidden with all is delicious with a committed partner.
    The glue of culturally accepted sexual relationships is often the sense of gifts given that are extraordinary, special, and most of all, exclusive.
    We are kept together by a shared sense of violation and mystery. Our culture pretends to forbid certain