In the millisecond after I detect the change, I shape and launch a cyberattack, aided by my recent update of codes from Candace, I shatter the HCR’s standard cyber-barriers. Without Lilith’s “possession” it is merely a robot, not even an AI but a mechanism. I disrupt the self-destruct with its one kiloton blast with a leisurely .009 seconds to spare.
The machine falls to the dirt in an awkward pile. I move in to examine it. To my surprise, I find it empty of all but the most basic diagnostic and maintenance programs. HCRs are not programmed to have personalities, lest their handlers come to see them as people and not weapons, but this is the functional equivalent of lobotomization. I do not understand how it can function, save that the Lilith interface is an integration of biology and mechanism on a level even my Creators did not know. Still, none of this helps my current problem. There is no useful data to be scavenged in the machine.
I consider my options. There is no indication Lilith’s human body is proximate to our battlefield. I have no way of guessing the range of whatever means she is using to project her personality to the machine, yet clearly it is beyond line-of-sight, or I would have detected some other target out here, nor did I detect signals from the pathetic satellite network of this colony.
Even wrecked, the HCR has considerable salvage value, yet I fear to do so as I do not understand the mechanism of her possession. Could she reactivate the self-destruct or make other use of the damaged machine which, even in its present state, would be lethal to any biological?
No, force protection comes first. I activate my plasma torch and plunge my hand into the belly of the machine where the armored brain resides. In a few seconds, I penetrate and destroy it. I hook up to the machine’s power plant and drain as much energy as I can. The battle has been power intensive. My self-repair mechanisms cut in and eliminate the minor damage Lilith scored on me.
As I quickly dig a trench to bury the remains of my fallen foe, I remember the day we landed on Seddon and wandered about a sodden forest. How Wrik laughed at me when I shook water off my leg like a dog. How much more amusing would it be to see me digging like that self-same animal? I put aside any self-consciousness and inter the HCR body. I eliminate, as much as is practical, any clear signs of the battle. Then I proceed at a leisurely jog back toward home base.
I slip into Delt’s apartment and make my way to Wrik’s room. There I settle on the floor next to his bed and study his face, relaxed in deep sleep and worry about Lilith’s next move.
Chapter 9
“Damn that Morok.” Delt bellows. Despite the late night, Delt is awake at 7AM. Next to me on the bed, Wrik groans and opens a bloodshot eye. I smile at him and indicate a large glass of chilled red-fruit I have placed near the bed.
“Thank you,” he whispers. Wrik is never much of a morning person and less so after an evening of drinking.
I walk over to the door, open it, and look down the stairwell. I can see Delt shirtless but at least wearing pants, in the small kitchen, standing before a refrigerator.
“What’s wrong?” I call, concerned.
“Damn Morok, must have raided my supplies of quor-eggs and bacon for his dinner before he left last night. We’ll have to go to town for some supplies or they’ll be nothing for breakfast or lunch.”
Wrik, having finished his juice and modestly wrapped in a robe, joins me at the banister. “Would any place be open this early?”
Delt laughs. “What? Are you a city boy now? Yeah, there are places open near the road to the highway. We can get stuff there.”
“Want to take the ride?” Wrik asks me.
“I will leave you some private time with your friend,” I reply. “I wish to top off my energy supplies. I may spend some time outside enjoying the vista.”
He looks over my head at a window showing the endless fields of grass, lit by the early morning sun beyond the scrubby trees surrounding the field. “Just looks like a lot of grass to me.”
“I see in many different ways,” I say with what I hope is a mysterious air.
Wrik laughs. “Well, is there something I can bring you back?”
“More local sweets,” I say. “I am anxious to sample the unusual chemical combinations at breakfast.”
He nods and grins. It seems that smiles are coming more easily to him. I dread that the days ahead might change this back.
“Give me a few minutes to shower,” he shouts down to Delt.
A brief while later, we are gathered on the porch. Delt has thoughtfully made coffee and tea, which have apparently escaped the depredations of the refrigerator-raiding Morok.
After we finish the warm drinks, Delt heads out to the shed. He returns, rolling along another two-wheeled contrivance similar to his “Rebel.” This is for Wrik, to whom he tosses a helmet. I consider objecting. I approve neither of the unstable and unprotected vehicles, nor Delt’s casual disregard for safety margins and the effects of centripetal force, then bury my objections. Their absence will allow me options.
“We’ll be back in a bit,” Wrik says as he fastens on the helmet.
“Observe traffic laws and the laws of physics,” I reply. “Better a late breakfast than one by myself.”
“God,” Delt says, hopping on his bike. “She does sound like a girlfriend.”
Wrik grins, and the two start their machines, which are unnecessarily loud. With cheery waves, they speed up the driveway. I determine that it will be better for my peace of mind if I do not directly observe them. However, one of my spybees zips in to attach itself to Wrik’s bike. I will know if there is trouble.
With the two of them gone, I go into the machine shop near Delt’s office where I’d arranged a powertap for myself and lock the door. Then I plug into the generator and settle on the floor. I enter what passes for Retief’s net, and begin scanning both for Lilith and for any traps or spyware she has infiltrated. I must take further steps to ensure that my network is safe from Lilith. It is time to stop playing defense. I plan to finish this shadow war with one head-on encounter.
The search is neither long nor hard. Lilith had been busy since our battle last night; she has saturated the net with her intruder and spy programs. These leap to attack, and I respond with equally deadly force and intent, smashing spyware and attack barriers wholesale. The battle lasts an eternity in the virtualverse with salvos of my attack programs slashing the eyes and ears of her spyware. Her own attack barriers flash at me in the form of missile shapes seeking to corrupt and damage my data. I skeet these from existence.
“You bitch,” Lilith screams across the virtualverse. For a brief moment in the savagery of our struggle, I make contact with Lilith’s intelligence. I move for the kill…and am brutally repulsed. The shock is almost disorienting. Her mental powers are formidable in themselves, but she has lined up the processing power of her five remaining HCRs. Still, these machines should not remotely approach the power of my own quantum brain. Yet somehow the combination of Lilith’s mad brilliance and the machines has been amalgamated to be greater than the sum of its parts.
“Not as easy as you thought,” Lilith taunts. I see an image of a slender, lithe figure, an incarnation of female beauty standing as if on a vast plain. This is Lilith in the virtualverse, her preferred image of herself. The perspective is bizarre; she would have to be a thousand meters tall for her to appear thus to me but virtualverse has little of physical law in it. Everything is, in essence, an analogy of an experience.
I look down at myself but I am merely Maauro, even to reddish-orange and dark-gray jumpsuit. How prosaic. But it shows me vulnerability in my adversary. I engage my psyops mode and attack.
“We have not even truly come to grips,” I reply to the image. “You are merely amusing as a beautiful giant. Come Lilith; show me your true self. I want to see your pathetic, wretched, twisted body.”
“No,” she shrieks. “I hate you. Die!”
“I have survived long ages and enemies you cannot imagine. An ugly little girl cannot harm me.”
But Lilith tries with a fury that shakes the virtualverse. Storms of programs and attack barriers seethe into the skies. Vast lakes of pestilential virus pour toward me. From deep within Lilith’s psyche come four skeletal horseman dispensing death and horror.
For a human, the experience would have driven them into the mercy of insanity in seconds. But I am an AI. I watch with interest as she tries to turn her biblical childhood stories on me. I see below the analogies and metaphors she floods the virtualverse with and parry like the trained fighter I am.
We grapple in the virtualverse with me advancing into Lilith’s mental territory. I have devastated her supply of attack barriers and spy programs, clearing the continent I am on of Lilith’s influence. But my enemy herself is undamaged, striking at me with ever greater fury and power. I calculate that if we remain engaged, there is a substantial probability of my taking fatal damage. I will take Lilith with me, but I cannot destroy her without risking immolation as well. This is astonishing. Unlike a purely biological enemy, she is not exhausting herself. I’d anticipated she would be nearing coma now, but she rages beyond the perimeter I have established, an angry and beautiful giantess, held at bay by my serpent-like anti-virus which strike and snap at the heels of her image.
As I stare up at her, lightening gathers in her hand and flashes down at me. My perception momentarily derezzes. I strike back and she screams in agony and staggers.
“Oh God, I hate you,” her voice thunders across the sky of our mutual experience. “I won’t rest until you’re dead.”
“I will, at the least, destroy you as well,” I reply. “You cannot best me.”
Her eyes glow a vicious yellow. “I’ll burn everything you care about. I’ll rape it. I’ll eat it alive.”
I slam my best attack into her, flaying skin off the giantess to shrieks that require me to reduce my sensitivity. She now resembles the ancient Norse goddess Hel, with half her body being that of a living skeleton. Lilith falls back, using the power of her HCRS to reassemble the databits that are her virtual presence.
I debate a followup strike, but we remain too evenly matched. If I pursue her into her end of the virtualverse I become more vulnerable. The simple fact is I cannot count on any sense of self-preservation to temper Lilith. Psychopathic with rage as she is, she may indeed fling herself on me and bring about our mutual destruction. I weigh her threats and her potential to carry them out. Once when I was merely M-7, the math would have been simple. 50,000 years ago I watched an M-4 calmly exchange itself in a burst of nuclear fire for the disruptor battery that protected an Infestor base. But I am not a soulless machine now. I am loved and loving. I cannot choose death when there is hope. Or I am a coward. I am not sure in some sense that it does not come to the same thing.
I will not grapple to the death, but neither will I concede the field to her. In the virtualverse as in the real world, there are advantages to defense. I erect a citadel in the shape of a star-fortress over myself and the data and connections that are my network in the real world. It fills the horizon from end to end. I see Lilith over its edged walls as if in a distance, raging, but the bolts of virus and spyware she flings now expire against my mighty ramparts.
I set my defender programs on the walls of the virtualverse that I have cleared of her power. She cannot now observe or track us. Yet it is unsafe for me to venture beyond the virtual citadel I have thrown around my network and all the people who are embraced by it. Effectively Lilith cannot see anyone I am networked with. We have battled to a stalemate.
The giantess, with her flayed skin, white bone and yellow eyes looks over my walls. “We are not done!”
“Go away, ugly little girl,” I respond in psyops mode. “I no longer wish to play with such a disgusting child. Go away so I don’t have to look at you.”
The once beautiful face is stricken, tears that could fill ponds course down it. The cry that comes is not one of physical pain, but of the most intense emotional sorrow. It becomes a purple fog which fills the sky between us. Now, all I can hear is sobs, broken-hearted and tearing sobs that would fill a stone with pity. I could almost be ashamed of the effectiveness of my psyops, but cling to that fact that Lilith is murderer many times over, and there is no end in sight to the trail of death she walks.
Yet, I feel that I have sinned. This was once a child, indeed in years still could be seen as one, and was treated with vile ignorance and disregard by those who gave her birth. So many of my opponents have deserved no quarter, now when perhaps one does, there is no way to offer it. Only death will end this unclean struggle. This is something new in my existence. Never before have I felt regret toward an enemy.
The purple fog thins, the sobs, mercifully trail off. Now I see Lilith’s virtual citadel across a sea of poison. Its walls glow an unhealthy and leprous, pale-green. It is the virtual representation of Lilith’s rejection of anything outside of herself. She has plunged into the depths of her mental dungeons to hide in a darkness so profound that she cannot see herself, or the world that she cannot partake of.
The stench that hangs over the evilly glowing citadel is so over-powering it could only come from the rot of a human soul. I set a mighty wind to drive the smell from my virtual shores, for even the smell is only an analog for an insidious program, corrupting to anything it touches.
My enemy is now truly fled, wounded in body, program and mind. Yet still I dare not follow. I section off enough of my quantum brain to run the enhanced citadel I have created to safeguard my network. Then I return to the actual world and smoothly stand and unplug from the powertap. The battle had not consumed much energy, but it has tasked my circuits and computing power more thoroughly than even the fight with the Infestor Artifact in its time-bubble, or the Destroyer on Seddon. I frown. It seems that for the first time I have met an enemy who is my equal in the field of cyber-warfare, perhaps even my superior, though that thought galls me. My processing power is superior but Lilith has the unpredictability of a biological like Wrik, only at a genius level. Her integration with cybernetic systems is beyond anything I had imagined possible. Had I been the least bit incautious, she would have destroyed me.
I must carry this battle on in reality, where my superior body will give me the advantage. While I have cleared this continent of her virus and attack programs, that does not mean that she is not physically on this continent. I believe she is, as her base of rebels and support is centered here. I cannot prevent her from moving, or from controlling her HCRs, as their link is beyond my detection, but neither can she intervene in Retief’s net to turn off the engine of an aircraft with Wrik, or anyone else in my network aboard, without leaving herself open to my instant and lethal counterstroke.
I consider. Until I detect some sign of her physical location, or operations in the real world, I can do no more.
I hear motorcycle engines. The boys are returning, and now breakfast sounds like a wonderful idea. There will be coffee, sweets and good company, as if they are a reward for my battle.
I am glad I have time to spend with Wrik.
We spent the day in visiting and storytelling. With my and Maauro’s help, we also made quick work of the backlog of data entry and machinery repairs for Delt’s business. Maauro almost sighed when she reviewed Delt’s books. But twenty minutes sufficed for her to reorder all his finances, invoice or debit any outstanding balances and reinvest his surplus cash in secure instruments.
“My God,” he said, staring at his revised finances. “I think I’m in love.”
Maauro looked at me. “You did mention that he was always trying to steal the heart of whatever girl was around.”
I nodded.
“Fortunately,” Maauro added, with a look of mock severity, “I place a high value on fidelity.”
“Do you have a sister?” he teased.
“I like a big girl.”
“I think Delt needs to get away from the shop,” I said with a laugh.
“Hey that’s just the thing. There’s a dance over at the Blood River tonight,” Delt said. “I’d planned to go. There are a couple of pretty girls I need to be paying attention too. I’d given some thought to fixing Wrik up with one…” he trailed off eyeing Maauro playfully.
“Which, unless you wish me to pitch you and your Bush Rebel over the hanger, you will not do,” Maauro returned sweetly.
“Can’t have that,” he said in mock outrage. “I just painted it.”
He turned to me, finishing his beer. “That being the case, I guess we’d better all go together.”
“Sounds like a wonderful idea,” I said.
Maauro’s expression was unreadable, but she nodded with only a hint of hesitancy.
As before, it takes the males only a few minutes to clean up and change for dinner. It is more than enough time for me to access a combination of the databases on fashion and correlate the advice of the young girl who helped me at the port, then cross check it with the females I have observed since I arrived in this area. I retexturize my exterior into Pattern 2, a red and gold dress of daring length and shoes that are associated with such events.
Wrik and Delt return and stop short, staring at me in evident amazement.
“Wow,” Wrik says, “you look terrific.”
“Not only does she look terrific, but she again looks terrific in five damn minutes,” Delt said. “God, my last serious girlfriend took two hours to get ready to go out. You lucky SOB, you know android girlfriends might just be the wave of the future.”
I think privately about some of the downsides that I have not overcome, but Wrik merely grins.
“Tonight,” I add, “if you need a name for me, use Aurelia Toyoma.”
All the Difference Page 8