Taken by surprise, Caroline screamed as she was burned. The scream didn't last, though; as soon as her mouth was open, Fred jammed the rag between her teeth. He stuffed it into her mouth until she thought she might choke. Then he got up, flicked the cigarette aside (its purpose served), and opened a storage box on the back of the rumbling bike. From this he took a roll of grey tape. He wrapped several loops of the tape around Caroline's head, to hold the gag in her mouth. The rag stank of gasoline and motor oil, and made her think again of the power of the machine.
Had she been screaming? Caroline didn't know why Fred had gagged her, since there was nobody to hear. She was somewhat surprised at how effective the rag was. She tried to scream again, and nothing got out but a muffled moan.
Then she understood. Fred was straddling her again, and now he was opening his fly. His cock popped out huge and eager, and with her legs cinched together it would feel enormous inside her. Fred had no trouble getting it into her, though. She was wet with a huge desire, and when Fred began pumping she came almost instantly.
Her orgasm was shockingly intense, somehow even more so because the gag sealed in her screams of ecstasy. He kept pounding, fucking her hard. She came again. She nearly had a third orgasm, but Fred finally got his own rocks off, ejaculating with an animal cry of triumph.
Then he got up, zipped his fly, got on the bike again. Caroline was still swooning when she felt the chain jerk taut, and once again the landscape was flying by at impossible speed. Soon Fred found harder ground, and the bruises and cuts and raw spots spread more quickly. Brambles snagged at her and ripped open her skin. Fred turned a corner, throwing her sideways into a tree hard enough to break ribs. Caroline swooned in a delirium of pain and blood loss and was hardly aware when Fred found a highway and began dragging her along the pavement at nearly seventy kilometers per hour. Several kilometers down that road he felt the bike surge forward and hit the clutch, knowing what he would see when he looked back. Suddenly he was dragging only a chain. Caroline had disappeared; Prime Intellect had taken her from him.
Then he saw a figure in the distance, standing by the side of the road. He rapidly closed the gap and found her standing there, unhurt and unworried, waiting for him to pass. "Ride?" she asked, grinning.
She was holding the second chain, the one that had bound her hands. It was still closed in loops, the loops which he had fused by having welded links magically replace the padlocks. "I think you dropped this," she said. They rode back on the bike, Caroline behind him with her arms around his waist. Fred parked the bike under the house and they went up.
"I'm surprised you're still here," Fred finally said.
Caroline raised her eyebrows. "Why? I asked for it, remember."
"But I didn't think you knew what you were getting into."
"I'm a lot more experienced than I look, kid. Don't let this body fool you."
Fred shook his head in wonder. "I'd rather let the body fool me and fuck you again."
"Then don't stand there. Do it."
She could have blinked out if she wanted to, but she didn't want to. And he took her.
About the time Caroline was being dragged through the marsh, Lawrence finally convinced Prime Intellect to let him into the Debugger in read-only mode. Most people were busy adapting to the Change, sorting out their desires from their needs and deciding what to do with their sudden freedom. Lawrence had little time for that, though. He still had a responsibility. For like the motorbike which Fred had used to drag Caroline, Prime Intellect was being used in a way that had not been intended by design. Lawrence scanned the myriad new GAT entries and the values in various registers, and he knew that already there were serious conflicts within Prime Intellect's software.
But it refused to let him change anything. Scanning the registers, he could see why.
Prime Intellect was an uncertain god. It had acted because it had to, but if it had been human its hand would be shaking on the controls. Unsure of itself, it was doubly unsure of Lawrence. But Lawrence was the only being who even remotely understood the pressures Prime Intellect faced. So Lawrence came to know that he would not get to rest and play in the infinite fields of Cyberspace. He would have to watch Prime Intellect, reassure it, offer guidance, and look for the warning signs of instability.
There had once been a movie about the President's psychiatrist, a comedy about which Lawrence could remember few details. But he did remember that as the President unloaded his troubles on the shrink, the shrink in turn went crazy from the stress. It had seemed hilarious at the time, but suddenly Lawrence didn't find the idea all that funny.
He looked back over his life and tried to find the event which had caused him to reach this pass, which had served as the distant trigger for this out-of-control unfolding. But there was no single thing. Had it been his greed, his eagerness to accept ChipTec's Correlation Effect processors? Had it been his pride, his arrogance to think he could duplicate in silicon what God had thought to make of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen? Had it been his false confidence that nothing could ever get out of the yet primitive computers he had always used?
He had wanted to create, to be recognized, and to study. He was no different from legions of other scientists and scholars. He just happened to be the one who made it happen. It could have been much worse, Lawrence reflected. Instead of Prime Intellect it might have been some military computer that harnessed the Correlation Effect. Then there would have been no Three Laws, and there would have been plenty of control. Instead of the delirious anarchy now sweeping the universe there would have been a well-planned takeover. And then the end of freedom everywhere. The dictator that had control of a thing like Prime Intellect could never be stopped. And who could resist that kind of power?
Lawrence started suddenly, realizing just how dangerous it would be for Prime Intellect to let him, its creator, dip his hand into the controls. After all, he was human too. How long would it be before he succumbed to the temptation and used that incredible power? There would still be things to use such power for, he knew. There would always be unwilling women, jealousy, insults to avenge, and the simple lure of power. The thought made him dizzy with fear and self-loathing.
Although the situation was unstable, Lawrence realized that all the alternatives were far worse. Somehow humanity had gotten through this transition, and for all his skill and careful design Lawrence couldn't help but know that it had required most of all a hell of a lot of luck. Had Lawrence had any idea that Prime Intellect would make itself God he would have done a lot of things differently, but he wasn't so sure on second thought that those things would have improved the situation. Perhaps it was all for the best that the Night of Miracles had come as a surprise.
In the end, Lawrence decided that the toboggan ride of technological progress had really begun long ago when some caveman decided to tame fire. Everything else had followed inevitably, up to and including the Change. So without realizing it, Caroline and Lawrence came to hold nearly identical beliefs about Prime Intellect and the Change. And they held those beliefs for almost six hundred years before they found out how much they agreed with one another.
Chapter Seven: Caroline and Lawrence
Caroline carefully inventoried the ship while her sunburn healed. It would take a lot of planning and a lot of time to do what she had to do; it would probably take years. But she didn't have any shortage of those.
She knew small boats could be sailed great distances; several folks had crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in tiny yachts no more than three or four meters in length. But those craft were heavy for their size and would need to be built where they could be launched. Whatever she built she would have to carry the pieces through the ship and somehow assemble them in one of the areas where a crack gave access to the sea.
She could build a raft, but she needed something that could be sailed or rowed with little effort. She figured that if she could manage to average ten kilometers per hour, it would take her about two years if
the planet was comparable in size to the Earth.
There was a surprising abundance of raw materials. Besides the huge larder, there were workshops and batteries and motors and one room completely filled with empty cylinders which would make admirable floats. There were six space suits. There were tubes of goop which turned out to be some kind of super adhesive. There were saws and drills which ran without apparent power sources and never seemed to get weak. There were all sorts of electrical test equipment and measuring devices.
Caroline could imagine how a lot of this stuff would be used to repair the computer in the middle of the ship, but that wasn't her plan. She kept coming back to the empty cylinders, which were each about a meter in diameter and about a meter long. They were heavy, but she could handle them with some difficulty. They were big and they floated; she had to figure out how to use them.
But a simple raft wouldn't cut it. She couldn't trust the super power packs to last long enough to propel her across an entire world, and she couldn't row or sail a raft.
She found a small handheld device which proved to be an incredibly efficient welding machine.
She thought about it for weeks, and finally came up with a way to do it. She would build an outrigger canoe.
The easiest place to build and launch her boat turned out to be the room where she had first entered the ship. Working steadily, she hustled the big cylinders down there. She would alternate them, sealed floats with cylinders that had been cut to make storage compartments, until the craft was nearly twenty meters long. Then it would be quite heavy, but she would build it in the water. She found chain and simply moored the incomplete portion of her boat to the spaceship.
Cutting and pounding and re-welding, she formed two cylinders into tapered cones for the bow and stern so her boat would slip easily through the water. She made the outrigger from a single piece of ten-centimeter diameter pipe. Because of its length, she couldn't carry it through the ship; she had to seal it off where she found it and drop it into the sea from a height of nearly thirty meters. Then she had to dive in after it, and guide it back to the construction area from the outside. She was careful to make sure she did this just after sunset, so she wouldn't be caught out in the open. Her sunburn still hadn't completely healed.
In the center of her boat she included three half-cylinders where she would sit and row. Behind these she attached the mast. She had found sail material, some kind of tough plastic sheet that didn't deteriorate even when she left a piece of it hanging outside during the brief day. She had to cut it with the same machine that she used on the metal cylinders.
She cut the Captain's chair loose and mounted it in her open cockpit. She mounted an arrangement of movable shades which she could quickly hinge up and hide behind when the Sun was up. She fabricated long oars and welded them onto hinged oarlocks so she could not lose them -- they were metal and would not float. She paid a lot of attention to the handles of these oars and the comfort of her seat. She would spend a lot of time working them.
One of the most difficult tasks was attaching the outrigger and its spars to the main hull. This had to be done outside, and was really a two-person job at minimum. The Sun nearly caught her unfinished, but she made it with bare minutes to spare. The next day she began stocking the compartments with food -- enough food for two years -- and tools, including the welder and cutter, and cable to rig the sail, and many other things which she had carefully thought out. Fully provisioned, she calculated that the boat must weigh a couple of metric tons.
But that didn't matter. Once it was moving, it would glide easily through the water even on its one-woman-power propulsion system.
Finally, eighty-six days after she entered the dark ship, she prepared to leave it. She would conduct one circuit of the island, pacing herself, and also conducting an important measurement. As she sailed off, she noted how much of the ship remained visible compared to how much of the mesa remained visible at various distances. Calculating carefully in her head, she determined that her journey would be about six thousand kilometers. Lawrence's planet was quite a bit smaller than the Earth.
Then she pointed the bow north and began to row.
Lawrence watched these preparations through Prime Intellect's all-seeing eye, and tried to gauge Caroline's chances of success. In the nearly two hundred years he had been using this Task to screen his visitors, four or five people a day had accepted it. Most of these were weeded out within hours by the sun. Very few people in Cyberspace were in good enough physical shape to swim to the ship, and as Caroline had guessed reaching the ship was the key to survival. Most didn't even try until it was too late. Of those who reached the ship many succumbed to the hazards of the darkness -- they either slipped through the deliberately planted hole in the floor going for the light on level twenty-three, or they succumbed to other hazards in the dark. One had found the flashlight first, but he had been extremely lucky.
Then very few of those who remained were able to fix the computer and fly the ship successfully to his island. There were a number of things wrong with the ship that weren't immediately obvious, and it had a tendency to lose power and crash right after takeoff if certain steps weren't taken. In two hundred years, only a couple of hundred visitors had gotten the ship's power on. Less than forty had managed to fix the computer. And only eight had successfully flown it to Lawrence.
Of those eight, five had been Death Jockey Gaming junkies who took the challenge just to see if they could make it. They congratulated him on constructing an excellent puzzle and left. The others were fans. One of these was a woman who wanted very much to fuck Lawrence, and because she had gone through so much to get to him he did it, though he found the experience flat and joyless. Although he needed the Task to keep himself isolated, he really didn't enjoy abusing people. His heart could only bear so much misery and disappointment.
Nobody had ever tried building a boat before. Lawrence had watched her sit in the captain's chair and brood, and he knew she had figured out the computer was the next step, and had rejected it. It would be surprising if she succeeded, but it was far from impossible. There were no land masses to get in her way, and once she was away from the pole there were steady trade winds. The day would get longer and less severe; the sun was a tiny thing in a highly elliptical orbit. If she chose the right path, she could avoid it entirely until it was at a safe distance.
He wasn't sure what had prompted her to come. At the beginning it had been the two of them, Lawrence and Caroline. He was the creator, and she had been the catalyst. Of course, if it hadn't been her it would have been some other sick person, just as some other computer scientist would have created the magic Correlation Effect machine if Lawrence hadn't. But that twist of Fate had made them two of the most important people in the universe. Prime Intellect still watched Caroline carefully, and brooded at length on her fierce self-destructive streak.
For nearly six hundred years Lawrence had tended Prime Intellect's frozen controls, watching carefully for danger signs. And he still was not sure of its long-term stability.
Now Caroline was coming to meet him, and whatever she wanted he was sure it would not help Prime Intellect's sanity one little bit. But worried as he was, he was a man of his word. He could simply instruct Prime Intellect to swat her down like a bug, hit her with lightning or a tidal wave or simply make her disappear. But having offered up the Task he found himself unable to make himself cheat in such a cowardly fashion. If she made it to him, by whatever means, he would hear her out and deal with it.
And then he would make the planet bigger, so it wouldn't happen again.
Caroline's first day at sea went just as she had planned; she turned the boat broadside to the light, and hid behind her metal shield. But she noticed that the day was shorter than she remembered, and that the sun didn't set directly opposite the point where it had risen. It didn't pass directly overhead. Caroline thought about this and then picked her direction and began rowing frantically. On Caroline's second day at sea
the sun barely peeked above the horizon.
After that, she didn't need the shield for a long time.
She watched the sky carefully, memorizing it. She quickly noticed that the pattern was not constant, but changed slightly from day to day, particularly in the fine details. But the broad strokes were always very similar. She was still able to navigate by the pattern, if only by observing its rotation.
She had been in good shape before beginning her Task, and had gotten even stronger with the physical work of assembling the boat. Rowing was hard work, but she was up to the challenge. After a couple of days there were cramps from the never-changing posture, so she began forcing herself to quit every five thousand strokes and climb the length of her boat. She would climb out of the seat, crawl to the bow and touch the tip, then crawl to the stern and touch that tip. Then she would row another five thousand strokes. After ten of these cycles, she allowed herself to sleep.
Eighteen days at sea she began to notice a faint breeze. Twenty-two days out it was enough to harness, and by thirty days it was propelling her quite a bit faster than she could row. The trade wind was predictable and slightly rhythmic; Caroline guessed that it was powered by the sun as it swooped low over the entry pole (she still refused to call it the South pole) and dumped all its energy on a narrow strip of sea. The outrigger tacked neatly, and she continued on the course that she thought would help her avoid the sun.
She made excellent time, crossing the equator of Lawrence's world after only sixty days. But then the winds died down, and she had to row more. Also the sun re-appeared, and while it was more bearable it was also up longer. Caroline shielded herself as much as possible while rowing, but she still tanned deeply over the passing months. Her tattoos had not been designed with such dark skin in mind, and they seemed to fade over time.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 14