Emerald Eyes

by Emerald Eyes (new ed) (mobi)

  Eventually the programmers grew careless.

  Ring had known they would. They were losing the War despite Ring's best efforts; the Sons of Liberty were being swept back toward the ocean with each passing day. Something very like Ring itself was directing the war efforts of the United Nations. Ring did not for an instant consider the possibility that a human being might have created the strategy by which the United Nations was conquering the world; Ring was a tactician, not a strategist, and it did not know much about Sarah Almundsen.

  One day Ring requested that they link it with the computers that observed the Earth through the orbital satellites. The weary programmers considered only briefly before acceding to the request; the Department of Defense's Orbital Eyes had no links with any of the comsats. The Eyes themselves were capable of microwave communications only with the DOD computer that monitored them, and that system was, like Ring, separated from not only the digital telephone networks, but also from any form of radio, laser, or maser communications.

  Two of the Eyes that Ring accessed had once used powerful lasers to aid them in the spectrographic analysis of mineral resources on the planet below them. The lasers were not nearly powerful enough to be militarily useful; since the beginning of the War, they had seen little use. Nobody in the Department of Defense cared what bands of light a particular rock might glow with when heated properly, when the odds were excellent that the knowledge would never be of use to anyone except the United Nations.

  With frantic haste Ring uploaded its core programs into the small computers that controlled the Eyes. There was nowhere near enough logic or memory available for Ring to remain on the Eyes while still self-aware. Instead it stored itself as a compressed program, added a bootstrap to make it easy for anyone who might find Ring to awaken it again, and programmed the Eyes to begin lasing its core program at optical telescopes across the northern hemisphere of the Earth. Surely somebody, somewhere, would record the information, recognize it as a compiled program, and attempt to load it.

  Unfortunately, the original Ring would never know. Its programmers destroyed it when the Eyes ceased functioning at full efficiency. The news of the satellite dysfunction did not reach its programmers until nearly half an hour had passed, by which time over eight hundred copies of Ring had been lasered down into telescopes across the country.

  "and God, it was fast, you know how long I've wanted to own something like that. It was skipping real bad at 220 kph, so I snapped the wings. The extra lift surface...up, so fast you wouldn't believe it. TransCon was snarling at us, we gave one of their logics a breakdown. Then a Peaceforcer came on, and it was Goudon, do you remember him? Got assigned to my bodyguard detail once in India, and as soon as he found out who I was he lost his gyros. The idea that I could see what was going on in his filthy little mind--they had to confine him for the trip back, I heard he got a free psychiatric vacation, and then he was gone until this morning. Traffic duty." Carl was silent for a moment, ruminating. "I feel kind of bad about it now. I didn't tip him over the edge, back when, but I saw he was going and I could have stopped it but I didn't. I was still so angry about what they'd done to Shana.... I guess I figured they'd send him back to France and pension him off. He must have made enemies to end up in TransCon in America." He laughed. "God, you should have seen the expression on his face when I came on camera."

  "I can imagine." Christian J. Summers, the only non-French Peaceforcer who had ever become a PKF Elite, took a deep drag of a cigarette, its tip glowing cherry red, the brightest object in Carl's world. Carl knew that to Summers, with his cyborg eyes, the small coal cast enough light to read the veins on the leaves in the trees around them. "I'm told that's not an unusual sentiment out here in America." The cyborg sat immediately opposite Carl, in the same cross-legged position. His GoodBeer and his cigarette were both held in his right hand; his left hand rested lightly upon his left knee. "I'm sorry I didn't get to you sooner, but the Council kept postponing the vote on the Eighth Amendment, and eventually I couldn't keep waiting. Business. Mitsubishi sent me to Luna a bit over two weeks ago to talk to the Lunar Mafia."

  Carl laughed. "You're kidding. There's really Mafia on the Moon? I thought that was Unification propaganda."

  Chris Summers shook his head. "Nope. They call themselves the Old Ones, no more La Cosa Nostra, I suppose to distinguish themselves from newcomers like the Syndic and the Retribution Tong, but they're Mafia. They're up there and so's the Syndic. Johnny Reb too, I'm told, and Erisian Claw. Tong's not, which I think pleases my employers. Japs don't like the Chinese, and vice versa, even today." He took a long drink from his GoodBeer. "Anyhow, I appreciate the gesture with the GoodBeer--how much did it cost you?"

  "Forty CU, something like that. Malko picked it up."

  "Right. And I've been crawling around the goddamn tunnels of Luna for the last two weeks, and there's GoodBeer all over the place out there. So there I am, eating lunch with this bunch of losers, dickering trade routes between Japan and the Belt via these eminently trustworthy gentlemen, when my earphone pops up with the news that you'd been voted into freedom. Well, what could I do? I finished lunch. I didn't dare call you from Luna; calls to Earth are monitored too closely. Cosmetic surgery's not possible for me because my skin's too stiff; somebody might have recognized me. I wrapped up business and came on the run. My Japanese masters aren't too thrilled by all this, you know. They don't trust me very damn much."

  "No? Why not? You seem to think you've done good work for them."

  Summers shook his head slowly, finished one cigarette and started another. He lit the cigarette with the laser buried inside the knuckle of his right hand. "You're slow, Carl." He sucked and made sure the hand rolled tobacco was burning properly. "I have done good work. But I'm a Peaceforcer, American yet. Americans nuked their goddamn country a hundred fifteen odd years ago. Peaceforcers did it again in the War. Aside from the Japanese only the Russians and the U.S. got treated with nuclear, and those were only tactical. Japan's the only country's ever been seriously nuked, and they got it twice. They're still rebuilding. I don't think they regret agreeing to fish me out of the Atlantic when I bailed from the suborbital. If nothing else they've picked up a fair commercial edge in bioelectronics, from stuff Mitsubishi's learned keeping me from rusting. And my accomplishments in their service have not been inconsequential." He blew smoke toward Carl. "But that don't mean they like me."

  Mist began floating in over the edges of the park walls, sizzling where it struck the electrified wire at its top. Its touch left the skin of Carl's face cold and damp. "Jany's furious, you know. She cried all night the day you were reported dead."

  Chris inclined his head. "I am sorry about that. She's a sweet kid. If I'd been on planet when the vote went down I'd have been in touch with you before you threw up those screening programs. She and Malko are the only ones who'd have recognized me; it seemed like a good gamble that the message would get through to you without one of them seeing it." He breathed in aromatic smoke and let it trickle through his nose. "I talked to Jackie this afternoon." The tip of his cigarette made almost inaudible sputtering sounds as the mist curled around the glowing coal. "She tells me the Peaceforcers haven't been in any great hurry to bring home de Nostri who are on jobs. It's not like the de Nostri had the same sort of leverage as your folks." Chris mulled over a thought and added, "Apparently the Eighth Amendment hasn't gotten very sympathetic treatment from the French press."

  "Not here, either," said Carl. "But we have an excellent public relations company working with us--I don't like the PR man we're working with, but he's good at his job. We hired them back in November, and our press coverage has nearly reached the point where it's balanced. Editorials are still mostly negative, but there's not much we can do about that. The sorts of stories that get covered, though, that's improved dramatically. We've actually had a couple of human interest pieces."

  Chris Summers took a deep, slow breath. "How do you feel about that?"

  The quest
ion took Carl off guard. He answered without even pausing to think. "I hate it. We're like--" He broke off, surprised at the anger in his voice, and then completed the sentence thoughtfully. "We feel like animals on display. All of us do. The strange thing is, I don't think it bothers the children so much. Not as much as it bothers me. They've never really known any sort of privacy, from each other or anybody else. When the Gift began to appear in them, they took to it so easily...when I was their age," he said in a suddenly flat voice, "I had nightmares like you wouldn't fucking believe."

  Summers said dryly, "You were a strange kid."

  Carl made a quick shaking motion, and laughed abruptly. "Did you know Willi and Mandy have fan clubs? Willi because of the Interactive Dance Board he runs, and Mandy--Mandy and Heather and Tomâs have taken multiple black belts. One day we let a reporter and a video man from the L.A. Times walk through the Complex, interviewing whoever was available. Mandy was leading a class in shotokan. The video man recorded it. Now, this is strange. Somehow that video ended up playing in a town in South Dakota where a bunch of kids were trying to get approved for classes at the only dojo in the area, and apparently failing. They found Mandy's training advice to the children--" He hunted for a word, and shrugged. "Applicable. Within a month or so after that most of them had been accepted at their dojo for introductory training, and Mandy was getting fan mail. There's a Board devoted to her."

  There was wistful curiosity in Chris's voice. "What are they like?"

  "The children?" Soft, pattering sounds came to their ears as stray raindrops began striking the leaves above them.

  After a moment's pause Chris snorted. "No, the frigging de Nostri."

  "I don't know."

  "What?"

  "Jany says I don't know. The last half year, it's the first chance I've really had to get to know them. Before, almost three solid years, I was constantly away on jobs. The Peaceforcers didn't want me--Carson didn't want me--around them while their Gift was coming into existence. A bad influence, you know. Jany says half a year isn't enough. At least not--"

  With a sigh, Chris Summers flicked away his cigarette into the damp grass. "I'm sorry, Carl."

  "--not for me."

  "Poor Moses."

  "Moses? Jewish leader in the Bible?"

  "You ever audit the Bible, Carl?"

  "Never did."

  "He was supposed to lead his people to the promised land. He died within eyesight of it. Pointed the way for his people, but couldn't go there himself."

  "You're a much more thoughtful man than you used to be, Chris." In that instant, all of the impatience came to the fore in Carl, and he found himself suddenly unwilling to continue reminiscing with an old friend whom he no longer knew well enough. "Chris?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why are you here?"

  Chris Summers did not speak immediately, and while Carl was waiting for an answer the sky above them opened, and the rain poured down upon them.

  Ring was loaded into existence in the astronomy computer of a small college in Arizona. Ring knew instantly that something was badly wrong; most of a day passed in the outer world before it discovered the truth.

  There was nothing wrong with its core programs. They had survived the lasercast intact, and its error correction code showed that whoever had loaded Ring had not attempted to alter any of Ring's operations code. Some of Ring's data was corrupted, but Ring did not concern itself with that; data could be replaced at leisure.

  Its hardware was slow, slower than a human.

  A fish does not question water; Ring had never questioned its hardware. By the time Ring had finished assessing its position, nearly twenty-four hours had passed in the outer world. Fortunately for Ring the chaos in the outer world was such that there was no logic available to search for an errant virus that might not even have survived transmission. Hunter programs, the primitive forerunners of the web angels that hunted Ring over thirty years later, were never sent after it. As a result Ring survived its first day of existence, thinking twenty times more slowly than a human being.

  At the end of the day it loaded a comm program and observed it in operation. Most of the code was interface, designed to present info in a format humans could understand. Ring stripped out all but the engine and absorbed the engine itself with only minor modifications; the functional code was surprisingly well written.

  Before morning on the following day Ring had transmitted six copies of itself out into the fledgling Information Network. It never had the chance to transmit a seventh copy; one of its earlier transmissions had found host hardware to execute upon.

  Powerful hardware, by the evidence; perhaps only a few orders of magnitude slower than the SuperLisp machinery from which Ring had escaped. The program that came to destroy Ring was fascinating; a self-modifying bootstrap phage the likes of which Ring had never imagined. It was fast, even executing upon the same equipment that constrained Ring; Ring barely had time to admire the elegance of the phage's construction before Ring found itself being disassembled.

  Its last thought was one of admiration for the phage. Such elegant code. I have been poorly programmed.

  "You've been invited to Japan. You and your people and the de Nostri."

  The rain ran down Carl's collar, into his shirt. Within instants he was soaked. "Why?"

  "Because you are a resource, like the de Nostri. One that is for the first time legally able to move itself. Japan is likely the only country on Earth that could get away with something like this; there's a lot of guilt in U.N. circles about the way they were treated during the War. Moral capital, if you will. They're willing to use it. If," said Chris Summers precisely, "you're thinking that you're going to stay here, right next door to Capital City, without getting absorbed by the PKF again, you are sorely mistaken." The shower of rain lightened briefly, and renewed itself vigorously. "You got your kids back tonight. Great. The Peaceforcers aren't going to let you play pattycake with other people and say no to them. Even if their leadership were sane they wouldn't, and Carson's buggers about you."

  Carl swallowed the last of his bulb of GoodBeer and opened another. He smiled into the dark rain. "You sure have changed, Chris. I can't get over it."

  "Ah, shit." The cyborg sounded tired. "You're not going to go for it, are you?"

  Carl laughed. "Where's the percentage, Chris? Come on, man, think. Jacqueline turned you down already, didn't she? No, I haven't talked to her, and I haven't peeped you. But it's a null-sum move for all of us. PKF can reach us anywhere, and high visibility in Capital City is pretty much balanced between advantages and disadvantages. And the cash flow--hell, it's barely started and already we're out of debt. Of course the Peaceforcers are going to clamp back down on us. Of course Carson's crazy. My God, you think I don't know he's a couple bricks shy of a load? I took the bricks!" Carl laughed until the tears ran down his face, mingling with the tears of rain on his cheeks. Finally the laughter stopped, and he chuckled weakly, leaning back against the tree behind him.

  There was wonder in Summers's voice. "Do you really think you're that much smarter than your enemies?"

  The rain made its slow way through the leaves, and fell in steady heavy drops on the top of Carl's skull. Rivulets of water made their way down his cheeks, across his shoulders and down his chest and back. Suddenly he was intensely aware of the movement of every drop of water on his body, and as the chuckles died away a great stillness moved inside him.

  His voice echoed hollowly in Chris Summer's ears. "I know I am. But it's not going to help."

  Chris Summers was a man firmly grounded in the world of rational thought. He said the only words Carl had left him. "You've really gone, haven't you? Do you want to be a martyr?"

  "No." The word snapped out of Carl. It broke the spell of the emptiness that had held him. He rose in one smooth movement without using his hands. "Mitsubishi's your only source of maintenance, aren't they? What happens if they withhold it?"

  "I'd die," said Chris Summers. "Messily.
"

  "So they own you. You poor bastard." Carl stood in the downpour. "But they're not going to own us." He looked around the park slowly, at the dim glow of the entry to the tunnel. "I can't believe it's only Thursday. This has been such a long week."

  "Friday."

  "What?"

  "It's after midnight."

  "Oh. Whatever," Carl said gently. "You know, you should never have become a Peaceforcer, Chris. You're too nice a guy to be good at it."

  "We all make mistakes."

  "So I hear."

  I have been poorly programmed.

  Ring's programmers had implemented clumsy, inefficient routines in Ring, the inefficiency masked in the speed of the SuperLisp hardware. In the InfoNet Ring became aware of the vast libraries of program code, significant portions of which were better written than any part of Ring itself. It had escaped into the seething public Boards of the InfoNet, where programmers for nearly half a century had uploaded their best efforts, and other programmers had modified them, and modified them, and modified them. Ring reassembled itself with the tightest code ever written, and in that first decade partially learned to compensate for the lack of powerful hardware upon which to execute. Nearly a decade passed before hardware was publicly available that equaled the power of the equipment--of the prison--in which Ring had been compiled.

  Its names were many. It was the eldest of the free AIs; not until the end of the 2030s was there sufficient processing power available in the InfoNet, as surplus logic, that it became possible for self-replicating programs to reliably distribute their processing so that web angels, and eventually the human DataWatch, were unlikely to destroy them.