***General, you seem upset and distraught at the direction of the conversation with Master Liam. May I be of assistance? Perhaps, I could offer a semantic analysis of his words, parsed with contextual frameworks and etymological links to highly correlated word groupings from my previous encounters with Liam…would that help?***
Winger watched Liam through parted blinds at the window. He soon disappeared into the swirling snow and was gone. Winger swore and swirled his Scotch around the glass, sitting down heavily behind the desk. “No, Doc, I don’t think so. It’s just a little father-son argument, that’s all. It happens.” He hoped Doc couldn’t see inside him, see his stomach churning. The swarm did have algorithms for measuring facial stress, as well as skin conductance and micro-muscular contractions in his neck. He’d loaded the stuff himself a few months ago…now he wondered why.
He would never have admitted it to Doc, but the truth was he felt bereft, alone, depressed. How was that for semantic analysis? They had lost Rene years before, lost her to Config Zero. Now here was proof that Dana wasn’t what she had once been…an angel for Christ’s sake! He’d suspected it for months, but tried to ignore it. Old married couples were good at that, good at ignoring things about each other they didn’t want to admit. But how many men could say they were married to a cloud of bots?
Winger shook his head ruefully, downed the rest of the Scotch. Maybe more men could say that now than he realized.
And the worst thing was that he seemed to be losing Liam too. Maybe the boy was right. Maybe Assimilationism and swarms and multi-config was the way to go. Doc had even said that. Winger looked up at the avuncular ‘face’ beaming down at him.
I wonder what Doc Frost himself would have said about all this. He created ANAD 1.0 in the first place. Did he know all this was going to happen?
It all seemed so hopeless. He’d fought off Config Zero. He’d fought off the Keeper. He’d fought off Red Hammer, years ago.
But this…this seemed implacable, relentless. Evolution, Liam had said. How the hell do you fight that?
Maybe the time had come to join the Assimilationists after all.
Winger went looking for that decanter of Glenlivet again.
Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary Page 6