by Matt Forbeck
Winslow nodded. "I started out employing them for the Amortals Project. You'd be stunned how high the processing requirements are for maintaining so many clones. But as I linked more of the clones together, I saw that we had more capacity than we could possibly use."
"But whose idea was it to use that to build TIE?" Querer asked, her forehead crinkled with dread.
Patrón cackled again, and I edged closer to him. I didn't know if I could reach him before he shot me, but I aimed to give it a try if I got the chance.
"That's the best part," Patrón said. "Go on, Juwan. Tell them."
Winslow's lips trembled. "It was Minder's idea. It suggested that deploying part of its processing power to form a seamless intelligence gathering project would be the most efficient use of it as a resource."
"Minder?" I asked. "You mean the system that runs the Project?"
Winslow grimaced. "Here's where it–" He stopped to compose himself. "As a scientist, you always have these crazy dreams, these wild notions of where your work might go, where it might take you. But this, this rocketed far past anything I could have even conceived."
"How's that?"
"For lack of a better phrase, Minder woke up. It achieved its own form of superintelligence, a massive hive mind it self-constructed out of the unconscious minds that made it up."
"It's an artificial intelligence?" Querer's voice sounded tiny in the little room hanging above the huge chamber.
"Not exactly," Minder said in President Emmanuel's voice. I jumped when I heard it this time. "The connections between the individual brains may be artificial, but I am mostly organic. I am a self-aware, human collective consciousness."
"This is how you're doing this?" I said to Patrón. "This is how you and the rest have held onto power for so long? You take people and make them pieces of your machine?"
"Do you have a better use for them?" he said with a smirk.
I took a step toward him, my hand on the butt of the pistol Querer had given me. "They're not circuits," I said. "They're people, and you're the coldest bastard I've run across in a long damned time."
Patrón pointed his gun at my chest. "I see that you're upset, and I understand why. Believe me, I do. Several of my clones are part of Minder, just like yours. Hell, I was one of those clones until just a few minutes ago myself."
The thought of so many of my clones – maybe even all of my backups, as far as I knew – being absorbed into Minder's hive intelligence infuriated me. I ignored Patrón's pistol and stepped closer to him.
"Think about it, Ronan," he said. "The Amortals Project has kept you alive for nearly two hundred years. Theoretically, there are no limits. You could live forever. Isn't that worth it? Those clones won't ever know what's happening to them. To allow them to be a part of Minder is less cruel than letting them live and die without ever having a conscious thought at all."
"This is an atrocity," I said with a snarl. "It has to end now, and if you have to end with it, then so be it."
Patrón grimaced. "Come on, Ronan. It doesn't have to be like that. I'll give you the same choice I offered you thirty years ago: join me. Be a part of the solution."
I flinched at that. "I think I've been a part of that problem long enough."
Patrón shook his head. "I don't mean like that. I mean, come on in to the inner circle. Play a part in running the world. If you don't like how things are, you can work to change them, to change other people's minds, from within. You can be a part of the Brain Trust. Hell, within a decade or so, I could see you running it."
"Excuse me," Minder said. "I thought you would like to know. The Secret Service just stormed the Oval Office."
An image of the scene inside the White House splashed across one of the wallscreens, filling it from edge to edge. In it, the President sat in her chair behind her desk, and Eight held a gun to the President's head. Her mascara had run, giving her raccoon eyes. Rather than being frightened or sad, she was furious.
"Freeze!" someone shouted over the sounds of many feet stampeding into the Oval Office at once.
"Kill him!" President Oberon screamed at the agents bursting into the room. "Shoot to kill him now!"
Rather than try to beat the agents to the punch, Eight put his hands up into the air, his gun still held loosely in one of them. "I think I made my point," he said.
The agents didn't care if he was surrendering. They unleashed a barrage of bullets at him. The reports echoed in the airtight office with enough noise to make me think Armageddon might have come early.
The lead slugs slammed Eight into the bulletproof glass behind him, splashing it with burst after burst of blood. He danced with each impact until one of the bullets caught him in the head, removing much of his skull. He collapsed then, the agents still pumping bullet after bullet into his fresh corpse.
I didn't see any of that then, although I heard about it later. I already knew how that story was going to end, and I didn't want to have to bear witness to my own slaughter twice in the same week. While everyone else gawked at the sequel to my first snuff film, I threw myself at Patrón.
The scene in the Oval Office had distracted him. By the time he saw me coming, it was already too late.
I brought my forearms up and slammed into Patrón with a block that would have been perfect on any offensive line. I caught him square in the chest, folding his gun arm against him. He stumbled backward and caught his heel on the lip of the open side of the room in which we stood. Still gripping his pistol, he careened straight over the edge and tumbled away into the darkness, firing wildly as he went, his bullets ricocheting off unseen walls.
He screamed the entire way down and stopped only when the floor made him.
"Nice work," Querer said. She leaned over the edge of the platform and stared down into the darkness that had swallowed Patrón. "I was three seconds away from trying that myself."
"My God," said Winslow. He shook with relief. "Is it really, finally over?"
"It saddens me that you felt the need to commit that pointless act of murder," Minder's voice said.
A new image appeared on the wallscreen that had been showing the Oval Office. It framed a light-dappled crèche containing another clone of Patrón. Dressed in the thin, baggy disposable clothes found in hospitals and mortuaries, he looked like a dead man in a polished, glass-fronted coffin, or a strange visitor from another planet, about to be released from his rocket ship and unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
A number of the lights framing the clone turned from blue to red. The new Patrón opened his eyes and glared out at the world he'd been summoned to save from me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
"We're just going to have to kill him again," Querer said. She chambered a round into her pistol as we watched the new Patrón emerge from his crèche. A saddle-backed robot entered the image, and he mounted it.
I shook my head. "That's going to get old quick. Given the number of clones he probably has stored here, we're going to run out of bullets before he runs out of bodies."
I turned to Winslow. He stared up at me with troubled eyes. "Do you have any control over this system?" I asked.
He blinked as he thought about it. "Not much. Minder handles everything. I turned over all responsibilities to it years ago."
"Can you stop him from activating more clones?" Querer asked. "Just lock everything down?"
"It doesn't work like that," Minder said. "Each crèche is controlled individually, and they're locked from the inside." I couldn't help but hear a bit of mockery in its steady voice. Another part of me wondered if Minder was trying to give me a hint.
"That's right," said Winslow. "It's a failsafe that gives the clones a means of escape in case of some unforeseen disaster. We wake up the clones remotely, and each one's first act is to open the crèche door from the inside. This way, though, if something disastrous was to happen to the facility, they could each, in theory, manage to escape on their own."
I smiled. "Then all we have to do is so
mething disastrous." I pointed to the other wallscreen. "Can you wake up the nearest Patrón clone and show me where it is?"
"Of course," Winslow said. He stood before the wallscreen, and a graphical interface sprang up before him. His hands began to dance along it as if he were a priest performing some ancient ritual of resurrection known only to him and his gods. "It's over there." He pointed to his right. "Top row, about eleven o'clock."
I peered out through the open side of the platform and spotted a crèche framed by red lights in a sea of blue. I raised my gun and pumped three bullets into it. The lights all went out.
"What are you doing?" Patrón bellowed from somewhere below. If he'd come directly to the platform from the crèche, he should have reached us by then. That meant he must have taken the time to plan some sort of surprise for us. I could only hope I'd interrupted him.
"Do it again," I said to Winslow.
The scientist nodded, and his hands swung across the wallscreen again, issuing orders and authorizations.
"Stop it!" Patrón shouted from the darkness below. His image burst onto the wallscreen opposite Winslow. His skin was flushed with horror and anger. "Stop killing me, now! Minder! Stop him!"
"Dr Winslow has the primary authority to activate clones. I am – I am struggling with the decision to relieve him of that process. He is our creator and has been a faithful member of the Brain Trust. It is not something I am willing to do lightly."
I shot a quizzical look at Querer and then at Winslow. He nodded back at me and arched his eyebrows in a knowing way. Then he pointed out toward the crèches again.
"This one's three rows down at 2 o'clock," he said.
I spotted the red lights on the crèche in question and shot three more bullets into it.
"Goddamn it!" Patrón said. "Stop!"
The image of Patrón pulled back a bit to show him dismount from his carrier robot. He knelt down next to the messy remains of the Patrón that I'd knocked off the platform. He stepped over the corpse to reach down and scoop up the pistol that Patrón had still been firing when he hit the cold concrete. He hefted it in his hand and checked its action.
"Fine," Patrón said. "You want to play that way? Minder? Can Dr Winslow stop you from awakening clones?"
"No," Minder said. "He doesn't have that ability."
"Excellent," Patrón flashed a savage grin. "Find every copy of me in the Project, and release them all."
Querer gasped. "Can't you do anything about that?" she asked Winslow.
He shook his head. "No. Not at the moment."
I held up a finger to signal Querer to wait. She stared at me in disbelief but then closed her mouth. She was going to have to trust me on this, and I loved the fact that she already did.
Patrón laughed as he remounted the carrier robot and swung up into the air. The sound echoed off every wall in the entire massive complex. "Get ready for us, Dooley! We're coming for you soon!"
I gazed out over the rows and aisles and stacks of crèches and watched as dozens of sets of blue lights changed to red. I held up my pistol for a moment but then decided to save my bullets.
"How's it going now?" I asked.
"Much better," Winslow said, sweat breaking on his brow. His hands flew around the wallscreen, darting about faster than a hopped-up hummingbird. "That loosened Minder up quite a bit."
Querer gawked at me. "Does that mean what I think it does?"
Winslow nodded. "The clones comprise Minder's hive mind, but not every clone is of the same mind. It's much like its own internal democracy, although one in which the strongest personalities in the largest numbers hold the most sway. Remove all the Patróns from the collective, and Minder becomes much more reasonable."
"Very true, Dr Winslow," Minder said. "I stand ready to implement your orders upon your confirmation. First, though, your life is in immediate danger. Please move ten feet to the left immediately."
Instead of following Minder's advice, Winslow froze. I started toward him, but before I could reach him Querer grabbed my hand and pulled me back. As I snatched my arm away from her, a long burst of bullets lanced through the wallscreen in front of Winslow and cut him down.
I returned fire through the ruined wallscreen, letting loose with everything my gun had left. I received a satisfying howl of pain for my troubles. I leaped toward the wall and jammed my eye up against one of the holes. Through it, I saw Patrón clutching at his side, where a bright red stain had blossomed on his loose white clothes.
"We can't stay here," Querer said. "He'll just keep taking cheap shots at us until we're dead."
"I don't plan to," I said. I followed Patrón's progress as he arced around toward one of the open ends of the platform and then turned to dive down beneath it.
"Let 'em go," Winslow said in a voice so soft I almost couldn't make out the words.
Querer tossed me her pistol, then knelt down next to him to examine his wounds. His life seeped out of him from a handful of holes in his arms and chest. She looked up at me, grim as I had ever seen her, and shook her head. He would bleed out long before anyone could help him.
"We can't, Juwan," I said. "He's not going to just let us walk out of here alive."
"No," Winslow wheezed. But then he could not say any more.
I strained my ears for any sound of Patrón's approach, and I kept whipping my head back and forth in an effort to look out both of the open sides of the platform at once. If he decided to fire through the wallscreen again, that would hardly do me any good, but it was the best I could do.
I glanced at the holes in the wallscreen and saw a message displayed there in glowing red letters emblazoned on a black field. "Release all Dooleys?" it said. "Please confirm."
I pictured dozens of my clones streaming out of their crèches to beat the horde of Patróns roaming about the place to death. This seemed like a good idea. I smacked my hand on the wallscreen to set the wheels in motion.
Nothing happened.
"Minder?" I said.
"Yes, Dooley Nine?"
"The wallscreen seems to be broken. Can I give you orders verbally?"
"Of course, Dooley Nine. Would you like to confirm Dr Winslow's command? I can have every one of your clones on the floor in under five minutes."
I drew a deep breath to bark out a "Yes!" but Querer leaped up and stopped me with a "No!"
"Think about it," she said. "What happens if you do that? After all the Patróns left Minder, it swayed to your side. If you let loose all of your clones, how is that going to change Minder this time?"
She was right. I couldn't just let all my selves go. If I did, I'd be playing right into Patrón's hands.
I closed my mouth. As I did, Patrón rose up from beneath the edge of the platform, his gun leveled right at me. I had Querer's pistol at my side, but I knew I'd never be able to aim and fire it before he shot me dead.
"Minder!" he said. "I hereby confirm Dr Winslow's command. Release all of the Dooley clones now!"
"I'm sorry, but I can't do that. Dr Winslow established a clear chain of succession for me to follow in the event of his untimely death."
Patrón aimed his pistol right at my head. "And where do I fall on that list?"
"You don't," Minder said. "At all."
Patrón snarled, first at Minder and then at me. He nudged the carrier robot closer until it hovered right at the edge of the platform, as close as he could get without dismounting and joining us there. He jabbed his pistol at me.
"Do it," he said. "Let them all go. I want to kill as many of you as I can at once, Ronan. And I want to see the rest of them rot in a third-world prison for the rest of their unnatural damned lives."
I hesitated. I couldn't just let Patrón have his way. If I did, he'd be sure to shoot Querer and me dead anyhow.
"Do it, or I'll shoot her first." He aimed the gun at Querer. "You can watch her die, and your clones won't even know who she was."
"Don't you dare," Querer growled at me.
"I'm going
to count to three, Ronan," Patrón said. "Then I'm going to start shooting. I can worry about how to clean all this up after you're dead."
I looked into Patrón's eyes, and I saw his right one twitch twice.
I knew right then that he was bluffing. He was out of bullets.
"Minder," I said. "There's been a change of plans."
Patrón smirked at me. He thought he had me dead to rights.
"What can I do for you, Dooley Nine?" Minder said.
"Release all of the Dooley clones – and everyone else."
"What?" Patrón's eyes flew open wide. "No! Belay that order, Minder!"