“Do it tonight,” Sorbel told him.
Ordered him.
Golden Lotus, June 17
Demeter was keying into her hotel room when a hand touched her elbow.
“Demeter?”
She knew without looking that it was Lole Mitsuno, probably come to give her more explanations. Demeter jerked her arm out of his grasp.
“Don’t try to mess with my mind, Lole. I know what I know.”
Her thumb stabbed at the lockplate. The door clicked open.
“I have something to show you,” he said. He took her elbow again, but lightly.
“I don’t want to—” But she didn’t pull away again.
Through the crack in the door, her cubicle beckoned. It was a safe place for her. It had a bed, all her clothing, access to metered water, a terminal she could eventually teach to take accurate dictation, and a degree of privacy. After the shit that had come down today, all she wanted was to go in there, lie down, and not even dream.
“What?” Demeter asked finally.
“I can’t tell you.” Lole was doing that thing with the eyebrows again. Was it some kind of twitch? “I have to show you.”
He was drawing her down the corridor, but gently. It was like the tug of microgravity, or a cat’s-paw breeze.
She sighed. “Is it far?”
“You know the way.”
“All right.” She pulled the door closed, turned, and came with him.
After three changes of level and four cross tunnels, she dragged her steps. “If you think I’m going back to that room and…service you, think again. Lole, I am not in the mood.”
“It’s not that.”
“But you said the room was for…partying.”
“Among other things. We have a lot to talk over.”
“We did talk, at the Hoplite, remember?”
“Talk over in private, I mean.” He headed off down the corridor. She could either stare at his back, or follow.
Demeter hurried to keep up.
Over the bridge and into the abandoned workings, Mitsuno led her up to the sheetmetal door. He moved his shoulder to hide the lock as he twirled the tumbler, then grunted and let her see.
“You know how to spring this?”
“Nope.”
“Then how—?”
“I know the combination.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got to be more careful, next time.” Mitsuno went in and turned on the lights. The room was just as they had left it Demeter was nothing if not a neat spy.
“Now, where was it you thought you saw a computer?” he prompted.
“Not ‘thought.’ Did see. Back behind that pile of stuff—” She pointed to the replaced supplies. “—there’s a secret room. More secret, anyway. The computer is on a table in there.”
Mitsuno relaxed. His shoulders came down a fraction. ‘You really did a job in here, didn’t you?’ He went over to the pile, tipped the base box up on a corner, and pivoted it out of the way. Then he went down in a duck-walk and passed through the connecting tunnel. Demeter followed him.
“Yup, that’s a computer all right,” he said, standing in front of the table.
“Like I said, you lied to me.”
“No, I didn’t. It wasn’t turned on when we were making love. That’s your condition, isn’t it?”
“But you said these things were always on.”
“Not this one.” He reached over to the switch on the power supply, flipped it to the one’s position. A heat crackle from the wires and boards was the only response. “Now it’s on.”
“What’s the input-output scheme here?” she asked. “I couldn’t figure that part out.”
“Voice operated, like your chrono.”
“Oh. Can it hear us?”
“I hear you.”
The sound was deep and hollow, like a rusty old lawnmower. Whoever programmed this machine hadn’t paid much attention to the personality modules—if there were any—or to the vocal inflection. It was the same as with the lock on the door: default values had been good enough.
“What are…what are you called?” Demeter asked.
“Lethe.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s Ellen’s idea of a joke,” Mitsuno explained. “Lethe is a river in Greece, on the Eurasian Continent, Earth. Its water is supposed to have a hypnotic quality that makes people forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Everything they hear, for one. Lethe is our community memory. We come here, tell him something, and then we can forget about it. He does the remembering and correlating.”
“Who is ‘we’? You and Ellen and who else?”
“A group of us. You’ve met Dr. Wa Lixin? He’s part of our organization.”
“Are you a rebel group?” Demeter asked.
“You might say that. Well, yes, that’s probably what we are. Revolutionaries.”
“Then who are you rebelling against? You Martians don’t have much of a government. None that I can see. There’s barely a city administration around here. So who?”
“Against the machines, as I told you before. We don’t trust them.”
“Yet you use them. This one, for example.” She pointed to the components piled on the table.
“Lethe is special. Ellen built him in here, from the circuit boards up. Each piece was obtained separately and at random, wiped down electronically, brought in here, and assembled. Lethe only knows what Ellen put in his head. It was all done with voice programming, starting from a kernel system that she wrote out in longhand on a scribe pad, all zeros and ones. He brings in nothing from the outside except raw silicon and empty registers. And, of course, he has no connection to outside resources. Lethe is our child, born and bred.”
“Why go to all that trouble?” Demeter asked.
“He is our safeguard. Lethe protects us from the grid finding out what we know. In the early days, we kept notes in pencil on paper. It was cumbersome, but safe. Except that paper is a special requisition on Mars, as are pencils, pens, and charcoal sticks. We pretended an interest in the arts and asked for paints, but even that drew inquiries from the accounting section. So, rather than attract further attention to ourselves, we decided to make Lethe He puts our collection and collation effort on a much higher level, too.”
“That’s a nice story,” Demeter said. “But of course the grid knows about him.”
“It can’t!” Mitsuno replied sharply.
“Sure it can. Lethe radiates low-frequency electromagnetic fields, like any device. The grid’s sensors are proficient at detecting and coupling onto those.”
“This place is thoroughly shielded.”
“Not really. I’ve seen your Faraday screen,” Demeter said. “It’ll keep out static electricity, probably. Maybe even ground faults, too. But it won’t block field emissions. Anyone who holds a pickup within a kilometer of this room can read your machine’s mind like an open book.”
While she talked, Mitsuno started grinning. By the time she finished, he was laughing out loud. “Between us and the grid’s closest nexus, the main array in Tharsis Montes, there’s about a million liters of water,” he said. “That tank farm blocks all kinds of radiation.”
“What about roving units on the surface?” She pointed straight up, over their heads. “Like your walkers?”
“Can they read a source through forty meters of solid rock? Remember, this patch of ground has a high ferrous content,” he added seriously. “Our tunnel is dug in too deep. We’ve done spot checks. Trust me, nobody—and no thing—can find this machine.”
“All right.” She sighed. “I’ll accept, provisionally, that you’ve found a way to avoid alerting the grid with your activities…That’s assuming, of course, the grid much cares what you think about it. And I don’t know why it should. It’s just a machine.”
Mitsuno looked thoughtful. While he pondered, the man reached over and casually switched Lethe off, without even a “Thank you” for its services. Demete
r felt a pang at that. An artificial intelligence, even a caged one—no, especially a caged one—was not made any saner by having its sensorium interrupted at random. With that kind of treatment, Lethe’s world-view must be somewhere between that of a toddler and a psychopath by now. Demeter thought of that deadened voice. She wouldn’t want to spend much time with Lethe, or entrust it with any vital information.
“I’m not sure exactly where your feelings lie,” Mitsuno told her. “You’re clearly afraid of the machines, because of the accident one of them dealt you. You’ll hardly undress in front of them, and that implies a certain deep-seated fear. Yet, at the same time, you don’t seem to think much of them. In your own words, they are ‘just machines.’ As if that explained everything. I’m confused, Demeter.”
“It’s really simple.” She took a calming breath. “I would prefer not to think of them at all. I’d rather deal with people. Or with inanimate objects, like pens and paper, knives and forks. For me, the grid and its cousins are a middle ground. Not human. But not inanimate, either. I don’t know how to relate.”
“But can we trust you to keep our secret?”
“Oh, sure! I mean, what’s to tell?”
Lole was frowning now.
“Reading motives into the grid is the newest indoor parlor game these days,” Demeter hurried on. “All said and done, it’s just a switching system, isn’t it? To be sure, it’s very big, very fast, and so darn complex that it sometimes tosses off apparently random results. After a while it can begin to feel, well, alive. Like the weather used to be—on Earth, at least. Anything that seems to move of its own volition, and that has the power to knock you down when it wants to, becomes a magnet for people’s curiosity. Give them enough time and insufficient understanding, and they’ll eventually worship it as a god.”
“Yet you don’t believe,” Lole said simply.
“I sure as hell do not.” She smiled back at him.
“What if I were to tell you that the Autochthonous Grid, comprising the interlinked systems on both Mars and Earth, was tossing off more than just random numbers?”
Demeter’s smile held, but she could feel it trying to slip. Mitsuno read her expression and nodded. “You don’t believe that. But it’s true. The evidence is all there, stored in Lethe, and, if we had all night and most of tomorrow, he could spell it out for you. But the short form is that we’ve found imbalances all over the system. Debits for consumption of energy and supplies that aren’t accounted for anywhere to anyone’s credit. Our watchers say the grid is up to something, but the pattern hasn’t emerged yet.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What do you think is happening?”
“The grid is preparing an attack against humanity.”
Demeter kept herself unfazed. “Give me a for-instance.”
“Three shiploads of industrial-grade explosives—inert, high-impact resin, with fusing modules—were ordered for delivery to Mars, ostensibly for mining purposes. As near as we can trace from the cargo manifests and hull numbers, they never arrived. Hell, they never left low Earth orbit. When you query the grid about them, though, it denies that the transports even exist—and that’s going all the way back to their construction in orbit and the waybills on other cargoes that we know traveled in them. Just another random number?”
“All right, the grid made an error and tried to cover for it,” Demeter said. “Could be the work of a virus.”
“Then there’s the new power satellite, the one being built over the Marineris region. Ellen asked you to check it out, didn’t she?”
“I—uh—” Coghlan stopped to think. “I took a packaged V/R tour of the power stations, yes. And I thought it included a pass through the one under construction, leeched off the construction monitoring circuits. But apparently the signals got crossed up and I was seeing something else.”
“Funny about that, hey?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“The machines are building that station, ostensibly under contract to the North Zealanders. That much is confirmed by our mutual friend, Nancy Cuneo, although she’s never seen plans on the satellite. No one from her agency has gone aboard to inspect the work to date, even in V/R. No one is even sure of the rated output.”
“But I know that,” Demeter burst in.
“You do?…Well, what is it?”
“Three times the projected consumption of the Canyonlands development, however much that is. I only know the proportions, not the numbers.”
“How do you know?”
“Sun Il Suk told me.”
“All right, I’ll get to him in a minute…So, the power station is a mystery. Except that, under telescopic magnification from the planet’s surface—this is working purely by optics, mind you, without any electronic image enhancement—we can detect some strange features on the outside. We see things that look like turrets, maybe weapons pods. Who knows what’s happening on the inside?”
“You think three shiploads of high explosives are going to end up as part of the package? Making a weapon they can hold, literally, over your heads?”
“I don’t know what to think at the moment. Just that, when we try to communicate with the grid—your simple, garden-variety, random-number-tossing machine—about these things, then we get screwy answers. It gives us facts that don’t compute. And the pattern of lies seems to be, well, pretty desperate.”
“Hmm…” Demeter stood, looking down at the inert cyber on the table. It was an ugly thing, made of dented metal and twisted wire. It had none of the compactness and spherical elegance of her lost Sugar.
“What do you know about friend Sun?” she asked finally.
“That’s why I wanted to search you. Sun Il Suk’s been a busy little bee, fluttering all over Tharsis Montes, from the moment he arrived. And he asks questions like—”
“I know.” Demeter rolled her eyes.
“He showed a keen interest in Ellen and me. He kept dropping hints, asking leading questions. I think he was angling to get invited here.”
“But you didn’t bring him, did you?”
“No. During the quarantine examination, Dr. Lee found an implant in his skull. Sun said it was a hormone-triggering device, to aid in his diet. But the ultrasonics in Dr. Lee’s examining table showed it was self-powered and had a lot of circuitry inside. More than a hormone pump would need. We think it might have been subverted to other uses.”
“Such as?”
“Monitoring and recording whatever Sun sees and hears. Then reporting back to some control device—attached to the grid, of course, either here on Mars or somewhere on Earth. Not that it makes much difference.” Mitsuno shrugged. “Lagtime in the signal processing, is all.”
“Golly.”
“We thought you might have an intelligent prosthesis, too. But you’re clean.”
“Thank you.”
Mitsuno led her back out through the low tunnel, into the first room where they could sit on the comfortable, castoff chairs.
“So, what does it all mean?” she asked “I wish I could give you a hard answer, but all we’ve got is guesswork. We don’t know for certain that anything is really wrong with the computers. But the, um, rather artful lack of certainty worries us.”
“It’s like the old argument about the intelligence of dolphins,” Demeter said. “No one’s ever seen them attack a human being. So, either they are secretly hostile to humans and hiding their attacks, or they’re positively friendly because they sense a comparable intellect despite the whale hunting and other predatory things humans have done. Both answers would tend to prove their intelligence. Similarly, the grid either is producing systematic errors, or it’s operating secretly and hiding its intentions.”
“A perfectly circular argument,” Lole pointed out.
“Yeah—except that both answers are a sign of bad things for us humans.”
“We’ve considered turning all the computers off, you know. That would be very difficult, of course, because the grid controls our
air and water supplies. In fact, the whole environmental balance of the tunnel complexes up here is under cyber control.”
“Not to mention a lot of your social dynamics,” Demeter pointed out. She was thinking of the system of electronic monitoring, gas sniffers, food additives, and homing bracelets that maintained the heterogeneous population of Tharsis Montes somewhere below the boiling point.
“Of course,” she went on, “if you try to shut down the machines and fail, you might precipitate the very thing you’re afraid of.”
“Right,” he said with a nod. “Retaliation. That’s why I have to ask you—as a friend, as someone who cares what happens to Ellen and me and all the other people you’ve met—not to talk about anything you’ve seen or heard here.”
“I won’t.”
“Not even among ourselves, unless it’s in the confines of this room.”
“I said I wouldn’t.”
“It’s not that we’re afraid the grid is going to send the Citizen’s Militia to round us up. It’s just that, when we’re ready to take action, we have to catch the machines completely off guard, with something they’re not ready for. We have to succeed on the first try.”
“I know.” Demeter nodded. “They’re very quick, like nanoseconds.”
“And they’ll never give us a second chance.”
Chapter 15
I’ve Got a Secret
Tharsis Highlands, June 18
Roger Torraway did not sleep—not like other humans who curled into a warm nest of linen sheets and woolen blankets, or nylon sacking and hollow fiberfill, or dried grass and a buffalo robe. He had no need to rest the mechanical parts of his body, and his mind functioned at peak efficiency twenty-four hours a day, supported by his computerized sensorium. But at regular intervals the meat portion of his brain did become tired. Then fatigue poisons built up in his remaining cells and had to be washed out again.
His makers’ solution, Alexander Bradley’s solution, was to let Torraway continue whatever he had been doing—walking, digging, sampling, surveying—under instructions from the backpack computer while his mind went into slowdown mode. Then his feet raced over the sand, his fingers flew about their business, and the world streamed past his faceted eyes, all beyond the reach of his own synapses. If something attracted his wandering attention, it was gone before Roger himself could frame a response. He effectively slept while his Cyborg body toiled onward.
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