by Stanley Bing
“What will happen?” asked Livia. “When it happens.”
“Chaos,” said Stevie. “It’ll be like the zombie apocalypse, with people all over the world wandering around looking for brains to eat.”
“People will die,” said Liv, very level. But her emotionless tone didn’t fool Gene. Good old Liv, he thought. Always the one to mention the unmentionable. Always cutting to the heart of things.
There was a short, embarrassed silence as the room chewed on this inescapable and unpleasant aspect of the great deed being contemplated. Then Tim spoke, a voice from just this side of the grave.
“Yes,” he said with equal dispassion. “People will die. Cars will crash. Planes will fall out of the sky. Dams will fail. Trains will go off the rails. The cities will temporarily go dark. There will be looting. Rioting. It will be the rictus of the old world dying.” There was another appalled silence in the room, and then the force of their belief closed the part of their shared mind that raised such objections, and pushed them forward to the deed, as it has with revolutionaries, terrorists, and madmen throughout history.
Stevie continued. “The Faraday cage holds the brain stem. It’s a high, metal mesh enclosure. Very strong. You gotta get inside it because it’s designed to protect the central mainframe from exactly the kind of action that we’re going to initiate.”
“Okay,” said Gene. “We’ll get in.”
“I may be too old for this shit,” said Bob. All the air seemed to have gone out of him. He walked over to the foot of Tim’s bed and, seeing that there was no chair available, sat down on the end of the mattress.
“Dude,” said a very faint voice from the area of Tim’s head. “You’re sitting on my foot.”
“Oh,” said Bob. “Sorry, Tim. Sorry, sorry.” He moved over.
“What happens to the people who set this off?” asked Livia. “Who are, you know, in the vicinity?”
“Hard to say,” said Bob. “Right, Stevie? EMPs have been around since Andrei Sakharov started working on them in the nineteen fifties. Nobody has been killed yet.”
“Okay, Bob,” said Liv. “Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.”
“Of course,” Bob added thoughtfully, “these are superbombs, guys. We don’t know the full extent of their capabilities.”
Outside, the very faint, extremely ugly sound of a hornet disturbed in its greasy nest intruded from somewhere far above.
“God,” said Liv, “that sounds very close.”
A low whistling approached the space around the house. It grew louder and higher in pitch. Then suddenly it ceased—followed by a profound, ominous silence.
“False alarm,” said Gene.
The air above the little village exploded into a nightmare wall of liquid flame, a roaring maelstrom of bright blue and orange. Tim sat bolt upright, his hair radiating straight from his head in all directions.
“You see?!” he bellowed in a voice as deep and powerful as thunder. “You see why this must all be stopped?”
Gene saw. But he could not speak.
“Bee is out there,” said Bob. He ran outside into the flames.
26
Battle Lines
“What did you do?” Sallie screamed into Mortimer’s bland, dismissive face.
“It was O’Brien,” said Mortimer. Then he added, a bit defensively, “Even machines make mistakes.”
“Mistakes?! Mistakes!?” An apoplectic fit is not a pretty thing to witness. Initially, you lose your sight. Immediately thereafter, you experience a sudden, piercing headache. Then comes nausea, sometimes followed by vomiting, and then you faint. Sallie did not actually get to full apoplexy quite yet as she stood, mouth agape at the sight of the giant orange blossom that filled the sky, the heat shimmering in the air. But she was close. She could not take her eyes from the aerial display. A second explosion followed the first, and she screamed again, full throated, all out, a wild banshee howl that ended only when her breath gave out.
“He was in the last vehicle, as you know,” Mortimer reported calmly when she had once again subsided a bit, “and he had instructions to ‘guard the perimeter.’ Perhaps those orders were, you know, a little vague.”
“A little vague?! A little vague!? We just firebombed a peaceful village of hippies!”
“Yeah, well,” said Mort, and it would be a lie to say that there was not the very slightest curl of satisfaction about one corner of his grim little smile.
Sallie said, “Ooh. Oh, my.” Then the full effect truly hit her, and she bent over from the waist, put one palm on the ground for support, and emitted a short noise, something like “Oog,” and sat heavily in one semicircular motion on the turf of the pinewood glen a mile or so outside the village. “I don’t feel very well,” she said softly. She was in the phase of physical disorientation that immediately precedes unconsciousness. Anyone who has experienced it, either for a benign reason, such as intoxication, or a malign one, such as a heart attack or extreme fright, will testify that it is highly unpleasant. All you want is for it to go away.
“Bring the robot here,” she said in a voice so wobbly it could barely be heard above the snap, crackle, and pop of the distant fire.
“I beg your pardon, General?” said Mort with perhaps a bit too much tone. Sallie looked up at him.
“What did you say to me?”
“I couldn’t quite hear you.” He snapped to something like attention. There was something Mortimer didn’t like about Sallie’s aspect all of a sudden.
“Mort, you know what?” Sallie stumbled very slowly to both feet, although she was still bent over at the waist. That established, she straightened up until she was fully standing, her hands on the hips of her olive-green pants more for support than anything else. Mort did, however, take a very small step backward.
“I will have you killed, do you understand? Give me your weapon.”
Mort simply stood there in front of her as if someone had struck him sharply on the back of the head with a rubber mallet.
“Give me your weapon, you dumb fuck,” she said and held out her hand.
Mort reached into his itty-bitty jockstrap of a holster and took out his neural phase transmitter. There may have been an instant where he seemed to be deciding which end to present to Sallie, the handle or the muzzle end in her face, but maybe not. At any rate, that moment passed, and he handed it over, grip first. Sallie took it, adjusted the weapon with no hesitation whatsoever, turned the thing on Mortimer, and shot him in the face.
Being neuralized may not be as unpleasant as suffering an apoplectic fit, but it’s no mall walk, either. First you fall over on your back and twitch uncontrollably for several minutes, depending on your constitution. Then there’s the foaming, sometimes not only from the mouth, followed by a mercifully brief episode of full paralysis, after which, aside from a torpor that dissipates after an hour or so, you feel pretty much all right, capable of walking and talking, if not resisting.
“Now, Mort, I want you to understand me very clearly,” said Sallie as he convulsed on the ground. “We’re going into the village now and fixing whatever we broke.”
“Yes, Sallie,” Mort choked out. After a time, he was able to sit up. Sallie allowed him to do so and then said, “Get O’Brien over here.”
“Come on, Sallie, it was a mistake. Please don’t hurt him.”
“Mort, he’s a robot. He fucked up. I’m going to decommission him. He’s flawed. It will only take a second. Then we’re going in there.”
“All right, Sallie, I’ll get him. But let me do it when the time comes. We owe him that much.”
Flushed with emotion and a wee bit wet in the shorts, Mort strode away, albeit with very short strides. Sallie went over to the Humvee she had been driving when the missile hit the barn. The unfortunate error that had ignited the Peaceable Kingdom was a combination of two snafus: O’Brien’s failure to properly interpret his orders and, at the same time, the breakdown of the fail-safe Lifeform Discernment System, which, of course
, comes with all armed self-guiding cruise missiles. Simply put, the drone got the order, and instead of executing a number of preventive routines based on the heat patterns in the village below, it simply didn’t. These things happen. Thankfully, the missile was a small one, because its target turned out to be the barn in which all the unarmed citizens—men, women, and children—had been gathered together for safety. It was that building that was burning. Very, very faintly, over the night air, the attentive ear might have caught the sounds of many voices screaming.
“What now, honey?” said Sallie to the little green lizard thing that sat cogitating in the shotgun seat.
“Complicated situation,” said Arthur. The voice was a weird combination of his own signature growl mixed with the mildly strobed-out, pleasantly canine singsong of Lucy. “On the one hand, the whole situation is very unfortunate insofar as the village is concerned. Too bad about that.”
“That’s an understatement, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Don’t go all squishy on me now. What’s done is done, and we’ll do our best to ameliorate the thing when we have a chance. It doesn’t change the basic, underlying challenge here.”
“I suppose not,” Sallie said, just to say something. She was looking at Lucy but listening to her husband. It was confusing. Her mind was rejecting not only the visual input but also the content of his remarks, and, more disconcerting still, his features seemed to be materializing before her eyes, superimposed onto the flat, shiny green countenance of the creature. She realized that, aside from her awe at the miraculous transformation of consciousness achieved by the upload and subsequent download engineered by Bob’s tech, she was pretty thoroughly creeped out. And still, she listened, driven by the dynamic willpower that now inhabited the reptilian form of the entity that was once her beloved pet and friend, and was now her beloved husband. Sort of.
“Look,” said Arthur, who then paused for a moment to think. He blinked twice, his eyelids clicking back and forth from side to side, and a shiver ran down Sallie’s spine and back up into the nape of her neck, and a coldness reached into the tips of her fingers. This thing was Arthur, certainly, but wasn’t Lucy in there somewhere? She looked deep into its eyes.
“We have to deploy our forces a little bit differently than anticipated,” Arthur continued slowly, piecing together the strategy as he went along now. “I imagine you want to go to the village and see what can be done there.”
“Yes, Arthur. I do.”
“Okay, then. You go, and take the elite squad of the army with you. They’ll follow your orders. I’ll take the rest. You can have Mort along to enforce any measures you feel are appropriate either among the population there or our own security people who might not understand that their role has gone from pacification to search and rescue.”
“And you?”
“What about me?” He seemed preoccupied. Annoyed.
“What are you going to do?”
“Pick me up. I want you at eye level. I also like the feeling of my tail in your arms.” Sallie picked up Arthur and held him close, his tail tucked into her armpit, his trapezoid of a head looking up at her intently. “I’m going to take O’Brien along in one of the fastest hovercraft we can find,” he said, “and try to reach Vancouver before that motherfucker who stole my body gets there.”
“And what, Arthur? Then what?”
“Then . . . I will reassert myself. I’m here. And I’m in his head. He won’t be able to push against me from both directions.”
“But—”
“We don’t have a lot of time, Sal,” the lizard said abruptly, and he suddenly didn’t seem quite so lovable to her anymore. “I have a vague idea of what he’s going to try to do there, because he’s in my head, too, you know. And it means the destruction of all that the human race has built up over twenty thousand years of civilization. It’s also against our business plan. I can’t let that happen. And neither can you.”
“Me?”
“I’m pretty sure that they acquired the weapons here in the Not So Peaceable Fucking Kingdom to do what they want to do. We have to get to Vancouver first and stop them, no matter what.” The little green lizard thought for a moment and then added, “The future of humanity is at stake.”
She stared at the creature, eye to eye. It was Lucy’s face, one she had loved since it had been printed for her by Bob’s production facility and implanted with the consciousness of a cocker spaniel, with subsequent upgrades to achieve its current state of . . . What was it? Intelligence?
“Okay, Arthur,” she said at last. “But you take Mortimer. I don’t want him.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure. He’s not suited for the work we have to do. He’s not human enough.”
“Good. Okay. Now give me a little kiss and get going.” She kissed the top of its head, but gingerly. “I can’t wait to get my body back,” he added, with a touch of the old romantic in his voice. Sallie shivered. Then she held out her arms to their full extension and gently set Arthur on the forest floor.
“I’m going to get going,” she said, and briskly climbed back into the vehicle, where she touched the communications module behind her right ear. “We’re going to move out now,” she said to all those, human and artificial, within the sound of her command. Multiple engines roared to life around and behind them as she fired up her own vehicle and felt it rise into the air ever so slightly. “Hovers engaged. Full speed. Single file. Follow me. When we get to the village, all ordnance is to be disengaged. Assemble in Square Alpha on your maps and await further instructions.” For a moment, she looked down at Arthur/Lucy, seeing both, as they stood on their tiny legs in the middle of the clearing.
“Go, honey,” said Arthur. And then, quite unexpectedly, as if surprised by itself, it added, “Woof woof.”
Sallie looked at Lucy and smiled. Lucy smiled back, her tongue poking slightly out of her little green lips. Then she was gone and Arthur came back.
“Get goin’ now, sweetie pie,” he said.
Sallie rolled. The convoy, one by one, followed. The final vehicle, now on auto, brought up the rear and was empty. A small silence reverberated through the woods. One bird chirped tentatively, then another. Then they were gone.
A sharp rustling shook the shrubbery. Mortimer, followed by the rolling pseudopod his friends called O’Brien, entered the clearing.
“She gone?” Mortimer asked softly.
“Yeah, she’s gone,” said Arthur. “Pick me up.”
“Yes, sir.” Mortimer did so. Arthur’s stubby little tail was in Mortimer’s face and its head faced O’Brien, who simply stood there on his big wheel, nervously awaiting his fate.
“First of all, let’s get a couple of things straight.”
“Yes, Arthur,” said O’Brien, his head unit downcast.
“I’m proud of you.” O’Brien raised his ocular units slightly, daring to hope that what he had just heard was possible. “True,” the green lizard synth that was actually the ancient business mogul said, “you missed the primary target by a couple hundred yards, so I guess this moron guru asshole still lives, but the essential purpose of our mission was accomplished. My tenderhearted wife is headed off to do good in the world, and we are all free to do what we have set out to do.”
O’Brien, overcome with input at this development, his stabilizing platform collapsing one segment at a time, essentially did whatever might be interpreted in machine language as falling to what passed for his knees. “My life in your service, Arthur,” he said, bowing his cranial structure in submission.
“He’s downloaded too much sword and sorcery stuff,” said Mortimer, with a small, indulgent smile.
“Cut off his head,” said Arthur softly.
“Really?” said Mortimer. After a confirmatory glance at his lord and master, and without further comment, he approached O’Brien from behind and, in one swift motion, grasped him firmly by what would have been his ears and twisted the machine’s head from its shoulders.
The thing that had once been Officer O’Brien of the Citizens’ Police Force, and then Sergeant O’Brien of the Corporate Army, who secretly aspired to become General O’Brien in the company’s developing expeditionary army, ceased to exist, although there was always a possibility, as with all creatures real and artificial, that his consciousness could be booted up in another structure if his cranial unit was conserved. At this point, however, in any meaningful sense, O’Brien was gone. He had given his body to the cause.
“Mount me in his auxiliary vertebral unit,” said Arthur. “Make sure I have good line of sight and full access to his power banks and motion controls.”
This proved to be a little more complicated than either Mortimer or Arthur had anticipated, and instructions had to be downloaded from the Cloud to complete the procedure. Further difficulties were encountered when these directions turned out to be in Chinese, and Arthur was forced to download and install translation software, which itself was lacking in many respects. In the end, it required more than an hour to mount Lucy’s body into the hover-capable Segway that had been O’Brien. The result was not attractive—in fact, it was rather monstrous—but it was functional.
“Now, it’s safe to assume they have a head start on us,” said the newly created being.
“Not for long,” said Mort.
They headed for the fastest hovercraft in the fleet and set off at top speed.
27
Back at the Ranch
“I’ll die later,” said Tim, swinging his feet off the bed and onto the floor. For a moment, he seemed to plant himself, wobbling a bit before confirming that both legs would serve him. “Maybe I’m doing a little bit better than I thought,” he commented. The Master coughed twice and then straightened up, a new sparkle in his bright-blue eyes.
The before and after of the explosion itself was ridiculously sudden. First, silence. Then the boom, which had an electronic quality to it in addition to the more conventional sounds of things igniting. Then the crackle and roar, followed by the many smells that accompany a variety of burning: wood smoke; followed by a mélange of odors far less palatable: melting rubber; the hot rock of the pathways cracking under the heat; the creosote, bubbling and dripping down the sides of the structure that was hit; and very faintly, the odor of cooking meat. A tremendous heat suffused the air, making it shimmer and dance. Outside the world was red, orange, yellow, throbbing with waves of beautiful rainbow colors.