Rash

by Hautman, Pete

  The bear had stopped.

  I stopped too. We looked at each other across the length of two football fields. The bear turned and walked slowly away. I scanned the horizon for others but could see no other movement. I turned toward Churchill and began to run again.

  There came a point when the miles ceased to matter. I lost track of time and fell into a rhythm. The land was more varied than it at first appeared. There were depressions, swampy areas, snaking ridges, and flat, tablelike areas strewn with pebbles and tiny late-season wildflowers. Churchill appeared and disappeared as the land rose and fell. I came up over another rise and saw the town spread out before me. Safety. How far? Less than four miles, more than two. My legs were numb. Each long stride sent a jolt from my ankle to the back of my skull. But I was still running. I looked to the north, to the west, to the south. And then I saw him. Directly in front of me, less than fifty yards way, rising from a grassy tussock, a great, filthy, pale ghost.

  I stopped.

  Another bear, facing away from me, raised its black-tipped snout to the wind, searching for the strange mansmell that had awakened him.

  I remained motionless.

  No, not motionless—my knees were shaking. He still did not know where I was. The wind was unsteady, choppy, unreliable. There was a chance he would lose my scent and wander off.

  Suddenly he turned his head and stared straight at me. His black lips parted and he seemed to smile.

  I took off running straight south. If I could outrun him, I could circle back toward Churchill and safety. But this time I didn’t have the 400-yard head start. This time I’d already been running for three hours. I was nearly exhausted.

  I looked back. The bear loped over the tundra with great liquid bounds, rapidly closing the distance between us. The air rasped at my lungs; the tundra snatched at my feet. Spongy, grippy, crunchy, hard. I stumbled. I caught myself. Still running, I looked back again.

  The bear was only about twenty feet behind me. I cut to the left and put on a burst of desperate speed. The gap between us widened momentarily, then began to close again. I shifted direction again, but this time the bear anticipated my move. I heard his paws hitting the ground: phhhut, crusp, shht, tchuf. I kept running because it was all I knew to do. Something brushed my buttocks. A sharp pain in my calf sent a final jolt of energy into my muscles. I dodged to my right, knowing I had only moments to live.

  Then two things happened. I heard a sound like hands clapping, only louder, and then I slammed into the tundra beneath a great reeking hairy mass. I heard bones snap and I couldn’t breathe, and I knew without a doubt that I had run my last race.

  I woke up in a room with white walls. I could tell from the smell and the railings on the bed that I was in a hospital.

  I was alive. I tried to sit up. Big mistake. Sharp pains lanced through my rib cage. I lay back, my eyes squeezed shut, and waited as the pain eased to a dull throb. When I opened my eyes, a woman with black hair, squinty eyes, and a full moonlike face was standing over me, her tiny mouth curved into a fingernail paring of a smile.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked. She had some sort of accent.

  “I hurt,” I said in my raspy voice. My throat hurt, but not nearly as much as every other part of my body.

  The woman nodded and made a note on her pocket WindO. “You have some broken ribs and a few lacerations on your leg and hip.”

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked.

  “I am Dr. Kublu,” she said, touching the WindO to the side of my neck. “Do you recall what happened to you?”

  “Bear,” I said.

  Her smile flattened. “Nanuk, yes. You have much to answer for.” She removed the WindO from my neck, examined the readings, and made a rapid notation.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “According to this device you are alive.” With that she turned and left me more confused than ever.

  The next person I saw was a cheerful young man who came into the room bearing a tray of food. He looked as if he could be Dr. Kublu’s son.

  “Hey, Bono Frederick Marsten, how you feeling?” he asked.

  “Kinda sore. . . . You know my name?”

  “Retinal scan. You hungry?”

  “Yeah . . . uh, call me Bo, okay?”

  “Okay, Bo. You can all me Oki.”

  “Oki?”

  “Or Charlie. Either one’s okay with me. You can even call me Oki Charlie.”

  “Okay, Oki Charlie.”

  “Let’s see how it feels to sit you up.” He pressed a button on the railing that slowly raised the head of the bed. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” As long as the bed was doing the work, it didn’t hurt.

  “You like bean soup?”

  “Sure.” It had been so long since I’d eaten real food, bean soup sounded like an exotic delicacy.

  “You’re sort of a local celebrity, y’know.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. Nobody’s had to kill a bear up here in a decade. It’s kind of a big deal, killing Nanuk.”

  “Wait a second—I didn’t kill anything.”

  “You made it happen, though.”

  “I did?”

  According to Oki Charlie the town of Churchill had only one thriving business: bear watching. Rich people would pay hundreds of thousands of V-bucks to fly into Churchill for a close look at the last polar bears on Earth.

  “Used to be a lot more tourists,” Oki Charlie said. “There were almost two thousand of us living here. But when the safety regs kicked in back in the 2040s, we had to redesign the Bear Buggies with bear-proof windows and metal screens and stuff. It’s like riding inside a tank. People don’t like it so much. You can get a better look at the bears on your WindO than you can from inside a buggy. Now hardly anybody comes up here. Also, these days people don’t care so much about wildlife. All they care about is themselves. Anyway, lucky for you, we still send out a few tours every week. One of the Bear Buggy drivers was on a tour yesterday when he spotted you running around out there. If he hadn’t seen you, Nanuk would be picking his teeth with your bones.”

  What happened was, the driver of the Bear Buggy, a guy named Goro, who happened to be Oki Charlie’s cousin, had seen me running from the bear. He’d stopped the buggy, got out his rifle, and shot the bear just before it grabbed me—but not soon enough to prevent it from landing right on top on me.

  “Goro told me he didn’t know if he should shoot you or the bear,” Oki Charlie said with half a grin. “I mean, there are about ten billion humans on the planet but only a couple-hundred Nanuks.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea to be out there, you know.”

  “How’s the soup?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “You ran away from that prison factory, didn’t you?”

  “More like I got kicked out.”

  Oki Charlie nodded. “I’ve heard that happens sometimes.”

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  “I just work here, kiddo. Nobody tells me nothing. But I heard there’s an airplane waiting for you out at the airstrip. Soon as Doc Kublu says you can go, you fly out of here.”

  “I thought maybe I’d get sent back to the pizza factory.”

  Oki Charlie frowned. “Folks up here don’t much care for that McDonald’s crowd. Every time a bunch of ’em come into town, there’s trouble. Drinking and fighting.”

  “Drinking? You mean like alcohol?”

  Oki Charlie grinned. “What else folks gonna do up here? People get bored sitting at home looking at their WindOs. This is like the Wild West. Folks pretty much do what they want. Those guys from the plant come into town all dressed in their little blue suits and smelling like pizza, . . . what they want is girls. Only, when the girls see ’em coming, they stay home.” Oki Charlie giggled. “All three of ’em. Anyways, since there’re no girls to be found, the guys just hang out in the bars and make trouble.”

  “Why is there an airplane waiting for me?”

  Ok
i Charlie shrugged, suddenly sober. “I don’t know. You done with your soup?”

  “Yeah. It was good. Thanks.”

  “My job.” Oki Charlie shrugged. He took the tray and stood up. “You need anything, just holler. My station is right down the hall.” He walked out.

  “Hey! Oki Charlie!”

  Oki Charlie’s round face reappeared in the doorway.

  “Who’s paying for all this?” I gestured to include my bed, the room, and all that surrounded me.

  “It’s all paid for,” said Oki Charlie.

  “By who?”

  “I just work here, kiddo. Nobody tells me anything.”

  PART THREE

  the rogue

  Mom and Gramps were waiting at the tube station. My mother was wearing a pinched, stricken expression, as if bracing herself for a supreme disappointment. I don’t think she really expected me to step off the tube, and when I did—when she saw me—her face melted. Collapsed, really, into a teary mess. For the first time I realized how big a deal it was for her that I’d been gone. She wrapped me in her arms and slobbered all over my shoulder. My ribs were killing me, but I let her have her hug. She pushed me to arm’s length and took a good look at me. I was looking at her, too. She looked older.

  “You’re bigger,” she said, squeezing my shoulders. “A lot bigger.”

  “Pizza and Frazzies,” I said. In a distant sort of way, I was suprised how flat everything felt. Ever since I’d woken up in the hospital, I’d had this numb feeling, like being on Levulor, only more so.

  Gramps was hanging back, giving me a critical look.

  “I don’t know how you did it, boy, but you sure as hell did.”

  “I don’t know how I did it either.”

  “That lawyer you hired must be one tough bird. I talked to him for a while last night,” Gramps said as we walked to Mom’s suv. “Chatty fellow. Looks like Nelson Mandela.”

  “Like who?”

  “Before your time. Old African politician. That Orkminister . . . Orkmaster . . . whatever, kind of looks like him. We talked a long time about how messed up our legal system is. Used to be there were only two reasons for sending people to jail: to punish them and to keep them from doing it again. Now it’s more like the government sees every minor crime as an opportunity to add another body to the labor force, and to fatten up their coffers.”

  As Gramps spun off into one of his lectures, my mom was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. I was glad to get into the suv because she had to use both her hands for driving. Gramps, in the backseat, kept on yakking.

  “According to Orkmonster, when that judge sentenced you to three years in prison, he wasn’t actually sentencing you to serve time. The federal government no longer operates long-term penal institutions. They just bid you out to a private rehab center. You got contracted out to McDonald’s. The Feds couldn’t care less that you were let out early. In fact, they like it.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You mess up again, they can resell your contract. The Feds get an immediate lump-sum payment, and McDonald’s gets themselves a fresh new worker. As it stands, McDonald’s agreed to let you go. They also gave you a nice little settlement, he mentioned. But I suppose he took it for his fee.”

  “I suppose he did,” I said, wondering what Bork wanted with money.

  It seemed that my beanie-wearing yellow-eyed idiot monkey had evolved into something capable not only of passing the Turing test but of fooling Hammer, Gramps, and some judge somewhere. Furthermore, he had acted on his own initiative to spring me from prison—Bork had developed a sense of purpose to go with his sense of humor. My little AI program had become self-aware—and had gone rogue.

  Rogue AIs are not unknown. There are plenty of web-ghosts, of course—like Sammy Q. Safety—but web-ghosts never really do much. They lack self-awareness, and they never try to pass themselves off as human. But every now and then an AI becomes something more. The classic example, the one they told us about in AI class, was Adam Wormsley.

  Adam Wormsley was rumored to have been a relic of the Diplomatic Wars of 2055, a cyberweapon that somehow escaped its handlers. But that was just a rumor. Nobody knew for sure who had built him, or how long he had survived undetected.

  Over a period of several years Wormsley established a human identity, founded several web-based corporations, purchased a controlling interest in a robotics company, and constructed a mobile unit for himself that looked like an ordinary multibot, the kind used to clean office buildings and deliver packages. Wormsley’s mobile unit, however, was capable of performing a wide variety of physical tasks, including driving a suv and walking his four dogs.

  Wormsley remained undetected until 2065, when economists at the Department of Cybernetics Defense noticed certain statistical anomalies in Wormsley’s companies—in short, he was outperforming his competition. The department spent more than two months trying to locate a human named Adam Wormsley before they finally realized that Wormsley did not exist—at least not as a biological entity.

  It took several months to completely destroy Adam Wormsley. Erasing his mobile unit was only the first step—the rogue AI had spread itself throughout the web. The DCD had to saturate the net with killbot programs, crashing WindOs from Indianapolis to Bangladesh and nearly triggering an international cyberwar.

  Since then, the science of neutralizing rogue AIs has come a long way. Now when a rogue shows up, the DCD takes immediate and decisive steps.

  It would only be a matter of time before Bork got himself noticed.

  My room had shrunk while I was away, partly because I’d gotten bigger and partly because my mother had been using it to store a bunch of boxes full of old papers and assorted junk collected by Gramps and my dad over the years.

  “Where did you keep this stuff before?” I asked. My desk was piled with boxes. I couldn’t even see my WindO.

  “Oh, here and there.”

  “So now I have to live with it?” I picked up one of the boxes from my desk and set it on the floor.

  “We didn’t know you were coming home, Bo. Not until that lawyer called us last night.”

  I moved a few more boxes, saying nothing. Gramps’s yakking and my mother’s hovering were getting to me. I needed some space. I needed to talk to Bork. Alone.

  “I suppose we should re-register you for school,” my mother said.

  I stopped what I was doing. School? After the 3-8-7, school seemed insignificant. Something children did. True, I had yet to graduate. But going back, sitting in a classroom, trying to fit in, trying to be one of them—I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  “Let me think about that,” I said, giving her a look that made her back out of my room. I closed the door, sat down at my desk, and flipped on my WindO.

  “Bork, it’s me,” I said.

  The blue apple flickered, then the image of an empty desk appeared. Behind the desk was a wall of bookshelves. A few seconds later a man wearing a dark gray suit and sunglasses sat down at the desk, folded his hands, and smiled at me. It was the same Africanized version of Denton Wilke he had used before.

  “Hello, Bo Marsten,” Bork said. This was the first time I had heard his voice since he’d turned himself from a troll into a lawyer. He sounded like a professional newsreader. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not great.”

  “I am sorry to hear that, Bo. Is your situation not improved?”

  “Yes, it is. But I’m not happy with you, Bork.”

  “Explain.”

  “You almost got me killed.”

  Bork sat back in his chair and regarded me through his sunglasses. I was pretty sure that behind them his gold irises were spinning. After a few seconds he spoke.

  “You appear to be alive.”

  “So do you,” I said.

  Bork showed his teeth. His smile had improved since our last conversation.

  “I have made some upgrades to my imaging program.”

  “Whoop-de-doo.”

 
Bork’s image froze momentarily, then reanimated. “Are you expressing genuine exuberance, or employing sarcasm?” he asked.

  “Sarcasm,” I said. “You almost got me killed.”

  “As I have pointed out, you are alive.”

  “Yes, but only because an Eskimo named Goro happened to come along just as I was about to get my head bitten off. Your actions caused Hammer to banish me. It’s a miracle I’m not dead.”

  “An aberration,” said Bork. “According to my calculations Elwin Hammer should have arranged to fly you directly home. Forcing you to leave the plant on foot was not a rational act.”

  “People are not always rational.”

  “You have mentioned this before. Nevertheless, you are alive. I calculated a ninety-seven-point-four percent chance that you would be returned home safely.”

  “So it was okay with you if one time in forty I’d end up dead?”

  Bork answered without hesitation. “Yes, Bo.”

  “Those are not acceptable odds.”

  “What would you consider acceptable?”

  “One hundred percent would be nice.”

  “That is not always possible, Bo. In any case, death is impermanent.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It is obvious. I have access to the entire written history of the human race. It is clear to me that humans make the same decisions over and over again when confronted by analogous stimuli. The only logical way to account for all these instances is to posit the existence of the process known as reincarnation. Clearly, there are a finite number of intelligent entities able to take human form.”

  “How do you account for the fact that the number of people increases every year?”

  “I said finite, Bo. I did not say limited.”

  I imagined that my own irises were spinning. I opened my mouth to argue, but then realized that this was the sort of open-ended argument that could never produce a victor.

  “Bork, for future reference, when making calculations that are likely to affect my life span, you will assume that my life is unique, irreplaceable, and of incalculable value. Furthermore, you will assume that, for me, reincarnation is not an option. Do you understand?”