Michael Swanwick - Wild Minds

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Wild Minds by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1998

Wild Minds by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's

Science Fiction, May 1998. Nominated for Best Short Story.

I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London. The room was in the back of a

pub that was all brass and beveled glass, nostalgia and dark oak. The doorkeeper

hesitated when it saw how many times I'd attended in the last month. But then I

suggested it scroll up my travel schedule, and it saw that I wasn't acting out a sex-

addiction script, but properly maintaining my forebrain and hindbrain balances.

So it let me in.

Inside, the light was dimly textured and occasionally mirrored. Friendly hands

helped me off with my clothing. "I'm Thom," I murmured, and "Annalouise . . .

Enoch . . . Abdul . . . Magdalena . . . Claire," those nearest quietly replied. Time

passed.

I noticed Hellene not because she was beautiful—who pays attention to beauty,

after the first hour?—but because it took her so long to find release. By the time

she was done, there was a whole new crowd; only she and I remained of all who

had been in the room when I entered.

In the halfway room, we talked.

"My assemblers and sorters got into a hierarchic conflict," I told her. "Too many

new faces, too many interchangeable cities."

She nodded. "I've been under a lot of stress myself. My neural mediator has

become unreliable. And since I'm scheduled for an upgrade, it's not worth it

running a purge. I had to off-line the mediator, and take the week off from work."

"What do you do?" I asked. I'd already spotted her as being optimized.

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Wild Minds by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1998

She worked in human resources, she said. When I heard that, I asked, "Is there

any hope for people like me? Those who won't accept optimization, I mean."

"Wild minds?" Hellene looked thoughtful. "Five years ago I'd've said no, open-

and-shut, end of story. Period. Zero rez. Today, though . . ."

"Yes?"

"I don't know," she said in an anguished voice. "I simply don't know."

I could sense something significant occurring within myself, intuit some

emotional sea-change organizing itself deep on the unseen levels—the planners

building new concept-language, the shunts and blocks being rearranged. Of

course I had no way of knowing what it was. I hadn't been optimized. Still—

"Can I walk you home?" I asked.

She looked at me for a long and silent second. "I live in Prague."

"Oh."

"We could go to your place, if it's not too far."

We took the hypermetro to Glasgow. Got off at the Queen Street Station and

walked up to my flat in Renfrew Street. We talked a little on the train, but Hellene

fell silent when we hit the street.

They don't like the old places, the new people, cluttered with seedy pubs and

street corner hang-outs, the niches where shabby men sit slumped over their

whisky in paper bags, the balconies from which old women watch over the street.

It unnerves them, this stench of accommodation and human dirt. It frightens them

that it works so well, when it so obviously shouldn't. "You're a Catholic," she

said.

She was looking at my icon, a molecular reproduction of Ad Reinhardt's "For

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Michael Swanwick - Wild Minds

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