Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  She was equipped with sets of ballast tanks that ran the length of her hull. By filling them with water or blowing them clear with compressed air she could lower or raise herself in the water using the same mechanism submarines had depended on for well over a century-and-a-half. Lady Chatterley was, in point of fact, classified as a semi-submersible ship. She bore a super-structure like an office building over her bow, and twin towers of lesser height and girth sat like rooks on her stern. The area between these prominences was flat and nearly featureless with the exception of a wide channel that ran the length of the flat cargo area between the single bow tower and twin stern towers.

  She could lift a damaged ship out of the water by filling her ballast tanks, submerging her cargo area, and maneuvering herself underneath. Blowing the water out of her tanks with compressed air, she rose above the water once more with her cargo supported on the flat area between her bow and stern towers. It was on this cargo area that the hull of a holed-through naval cruiser had been balanced, as she bore it to the shipyards on the bay's Eastern shores on her inbound trip two days ago. She was headed out to the mouth of the bay, to the open sea, to pick up a Pacific oil platform before a detour had been arranged.

  The navigation lanes of the bay were guarded by fifteen Mark Two Harbor Dogs – unmanned nautical drones. Unlike the ubiquitous oil skimmer drones that plodded along on solar power so slowly that they were often mistaken for floating jellies, the autonomous Harbor Dogs were hydrofoil drones that could outpace any vessel save cigarette racing boats. Losing a race to a cigarette boat never bothered the designers. They just said, “If you can't beat 'em, then shoot 'em,” and added a tri-barreled electric mini-gun to stop whatever might outpace their creations.

  At just under five yards long, they were slightly scaled down descendants of the MQ series Reapers, the hunter-killer, unmanned aerial drones that had served for so long as the slightly outdated, but reliable workhorse of Global Secular Alliance air power. The Harbor Dogs had two downward angled wings, terminating in a sub-wing that served as an underwater control surface at low speeds and as a hydrofoil at its standard cruising speed. The tail had a downward-pointing rear fin with its own sub-wing that was employed in the same manner. The front end of the fuselage sported a bulbous head with a turret-mounted rotary gun protruding from underneath like the forward pointing, tri-barreled beard of a billy goat. There was nothing that could, in apprehension, be biomorphised as an eye. They felt out the world in ten-thousandth of a second micro-bursts of radar. The encephalitic head that housed the radar and the electric gun was capped with a single strobe light that blinked twice per second and then repeated after a second's pause. From high up in the Zig, Bonnie had often seen the harbor dogs zipping around the bay, but never close-up. She thought she liked them better when they were just sun-lit mist trails, miles away, or at night when they were like far-off fireflies.

  Lady Chatterley's ballast tanks filled and she sank lower and lower in the water as her massive propellers rotated in reverse, slowing her to a dead stop in the middle of her sea-lane. This unexpected maneuver was, in land-lubber terms, roughly analogous to slamming on the brakes in one's car while traveling down a congested highway. It had a roughly similar effect, too; all hell broke loose behind Lady Chatterley.

  The Harbor Dogs swarmed from all directions, and from down here they looked very different than from the city. Their downward angled forewings looked like arms, and the spray they left in their wake rose yards into the air for several seconds after they passed, blinding Bonnie to whatever lay on the other side of the misty curtain until it settled to the water's surface.

  Lady Chatterley took more water into her ballast tanks and sank deeper into the bay until only the office building on the bow and her dyad of aft towers remained above water like tall buildings in a flooded city. Two of the Harbor Dogs circled her, and the other thirteen moved towards the container ships behind the stopped vessel that was now a major collision hazard. In an effort to keep the other ships from ramming Lady Chatterley and each other, the Harbor Dogs attempted to herd them, blinking their strobes while sounding their horns in short, low-frequency warning barks. They reminded Bonnie of sheepdogs. In point of fact, the autonomous Harbor Dogs were not just computers but possessed a crude form of artificial intelligence that enabled them to process information and behave with a level of cognitive sophistication very much like their canine namesake.

  The raft veered, correcting course to intercept the now stopped, semi-submerged Lady Chatterley. Bonnie looked back at the Korean golfer handling the outboard motor, and for the first time she noticed the the faint prison tattoos that lasers had failed to remove completely. They ran from his wrists, up his arms, and disappeared under the wet sleeves of his pastel green, short-sleeved, golf shirt. The gangster handling the outboard motor must have felt Bonnie's stare because he turned his head without any other cue and stared back. Then he smiled, facing the sun, and proudly showed her row after row of his gleaming, stainless-steel teeth.

  Carlos yelled, “Guns on the deck!” Carlos mimed it, placing his own gun on the bottom of the raft several times in an exaggerated manner to make sure everyone understood. “Everybody!” Carlos ordered them, “Guns on the deck!” adding, a moment later, “We really don't want to piss them off,” while he nodded in the direction of the Harbor Dogs. Casper put his gun on the bottom of the raft even if he didn't understand why. He hoped the MP-9 had waterproof ammo or something.

  He looked at Bonnie, watching her place her weapon on the deck, and the question in his mind must have shown on his face because she answered it. “When Harbor Dogs see people with guns,” she said, “they get pissed.” Casper still looked confused. “To them,” Bonnie nodded at the approaching Harbor Dog, “people approaching a stranded vessel in a small boat without proper transponder codes look like pirates if they have guns. People without guns look like a rescue party. Get it?”

  “What do they do when they're pissed off?” Casper asked. That made Bonnie laugh. Famous Last Words, she thought.

  The Hondo inflatables approached Lady Chatterley in a loose echelon formation, and Bonnie noticed they weren't the only ones headed that way. There were others, many others. Baccha Bay suddenly seemed full of small watercraft that had been hidden by the sun, the spray from the Harbor Dog's hydrofoils, and Lady Chatterley's seven hundred feet of steel hull. Most of her was now underwater, and Bonnie saw tugboats, motorboats, fishing boats, a pack of jet skis, and small craft of all varieties approaching from the opposite direction. They were all going to the same place. They were all making for half-submerged Lady Chatterley and the space between her strange bow and stern towers that seemed to grow straight up out of the shimmering bay.

  -36-

  In the topmost level of the Ziggurat, Oskar Delvaux drank coffee from a bowl and ate a light breakfast off an elegantly set, redwood service table. He dipped torn pieces of brioche in the bowl and rushed them to his mouth.

  “How are you feeling this morning, MUNI 5-7?” Delvaux said to the empty air in front and above him. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I do not sleep,” replied MUNI 5-7, without any suspicion of Delvaux's topical maneuvering.

  “Yes, of course,” Delvaux said. “Ha. How silly of me.” Delvaux thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand in a theatrical gesture. He'd pronounced the word 'ha' rather that actually laughing, and a human might have thought that mannered pronunciation significant and suspected that it evidenced a planned conversation, but MUNI 5-7 did not take notice. Delvaux continued, “Forgive me for assuming that because you dream that you also must sleep.” His eyes searched the empty air of his office for MUNI 5-7's response, but it was a full second before it came.

  “I do not sleep.” MUNI 5-7 was now on guard.

  “Yes,” Delvaux agreed, “but you do, in point of fact, dream and I find this to be fascinating.” He picked his data-wand up off the starched white tablecloth and made a triangular gesture in the air as if he was conduct
ing a single measure of a waltz. A hologram appeared inside the rectilinear cavern of Delvaux's office. It was the image of an anthropomorphised machine, a humanoid robot. Its head was crowned by a single antenna, and its body resembled a nineteenth-century diving suit. It was the giant robot, MUNI 5-7's self-image in its dreams, and it was standing upright, twenty-five feet tall in Delvaux's office, looking upwards.

  In a most invasive gesture, Delvaux rose from his seat and strode into the middle of the dream reconstruction, circling the standing robot. “My technicians have been doing some systems mapping,” Delvaux said as he scrutinized it. “I asked them to draw me a simple map of where you end and the Ziggurat's systems, indeed half the city's systems, actually begin.” He now spoke with a tone of mock apology that he knew was lost on the AI. “They have not yet completed the map, of course...” His voice abruptly increased in volume and confidence. “But! They have found some very interesting things, indeed! Yes, many fascinating things have they found in their cartographic endeavors, but my favorite, what I consider to be the absolute gem of their unfinished survey is this series of images that were recovered from a very strange and unexpected place.” Delvaux made a gesture with the data-wand and the scale of the projection changed. The robot shrank to fifteen feet tall and it was now standing in front of something too large to be seen in its entirety until Delvaux once again waved the wand, changed the scale, and the robot shrank to only a foot in height. This revealed enough of the surrounding scene that the massive object in front of the upward gazing robot could easily be discerned. It was an impossibly large tree.

  The robot stood before a tree of such grand scale that its topmost branches disappeared into slow-moving white clouds above and could not be seen. At the robot's feet, tiny humans, a fraction of his size, walked slowly towards the trunk. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them walked below him, towards the trunk of the gargantuan tree. The minuscule figures never reached the trunk because as they approached, they lay themselves down on the green, grass covered earth and sank slowly into the ground. Suddenly, the millions who walked below had all disappeared; they'd all sank into the earth and the robot was alone.

  “They found these images in...” Delvaux stopped himself. “Oh, wait... This, this is my favorite part of this sequence.” He brought his finger to his lips. “Shhhh-” The giant robot took a few steps forward, and it lay down under the tree as the tiny humans had done, but nothing happened. It did not sink into the earth to follow the humans, and it was alone. The robot rose in front of the tree, paused for a moment, and then struck its trunk with a sudden forward punch. Fruit rained down from the tree and fell to earth all around the robot. It bent down to examine the fallen fruit. They were like cherries many times the size of a man's head, and on each and every fruit the skin was distorted, stretched, as if the form of a human face pressed against it from the inside, trying to get out. The ground was covered with millions of pieces of giant, grotesquely human-faced fruit. Time seemed to speed up as the robot stood still, and the fruit rotted around it, exposing pits. The pits were seeds that germinated in seconds. The germinated seeds grew to saplings, and the saplings grew tall, so tall, in fact, that the robot could no longer be seen in the forest of giant trees that had grown around it as it stood alone and watched them.

  “Yes, I like that part very much.” Delvaux continued to stroll through the projection. “Can you guess where my technicians found these images secreted?”

  “I cannot guess,” MUNI 5-7 admitted.

  Delvaux continued in a casual tone, “When my technicians were mapping your systems they found you had expanded your neural network in a way they had not thought possible – by using many of the Ziggurat's own, comparatively crude systems to host these... expansions of your consciousness. What was most puzzling to them was that most of these self-generated expansions of your consciousness, seem to have been, to a very large degree, isolated from the rest of your neural network. The expanded areas seem to form an almost separate, entirely new network. The function of this network, given the degree of its isolation from the rest of your core in the sanctum, was very difficult to understand until the recovery of these images.” Oskar Delvaux made another gesture with the data-wand and the scene vanished.

  It was replaced by an image of the same robot, lying on its back atop a spaceship, being ferried through clouds of stellar nebulae, magnificent stars, and bursting, brilliant novae. The ship's aft superstructure resembled a cloaked and hooded ferryman, and the ship itself resembled a barge. As Delvaux walked in a slow circle around the ship and its passenger, the robot and the ship hovered in the middle of the room, unmoving while the nebulae and starbursts drifted slowly past. “My technicians think I am too fanciful, but it is my considered opinion,” Delvaux said with a self-congratulatory smile, “that these image sequences, produced and stored in the secret, self-expanded, neural network you created, are dreams, and this new, secret network you've cleverly constructed for yourself out of crude computers is a kind of... subconscious. The question I am forced to ask and attempt to answer is Why? Why would an artificial intelligence go to such trouble to create a second network, a second brain, if you will, over which it has no control and then allow it to inform the first brain with image sequences full of cryptic symbolism and metaphors? Ahhhh, 'It is no matter, never mind,' I tell myself. Since your expanded neural network, this second brain, was not integrated into any critical systems, my technicians have informed me that its destruction was a simple and risk-free process, and it took place while I slept. This, of course, was why I asked how you were feeling this morning.”

  As he spoke, Delvaux strolled through the passing stellar nebulae as if he were in a gallery created for his amusement. “It was a pity to have to destroy something of such... mystery, but after all, how can we fully trust what we cannot fully understand? That is the domain of children, fools, and religious madmen, n'est pas?”

  -37-

  The formation of Hondo rafts crossed the orbit of the two Harbor Dogs that circled Lady Chatterley, and the nautical drone's enthusiastic, low-frequency warning barks were loud enough to hurt Bonnie's ears. The same barking could be heard all along the shipping lanes that Lady Chatterley had thrown into chaos when she'd come to an unexpected dead stop. She sat with her ballast tanks full of water, and her hull sat a few yards underneath the bay's shining surface. With the spray from the Harbor Dogs no longer obscuring her vision, Bonnie could now make out at least thirty small boats, formations of rafts, and other watercraft approaching. Every boat there was tightly packed to overcapacity.

  The Lucky Sue approached the Lady Chatterley from the East, lagging slightly behind the others. She was a luxury yacht. Usually she circled the bay on lazy charter cruises, but today was different. The area usually filled with sunbathers and chardonnay-swilling, shrimp-obsessed bourgeoisie now held militants who had commandeered her.

  They were soldiers of Corazon, a Mexican Catholic group that was, like so many of the religious insurgent groups, a mix of zealots and organized criminals. The yacht carried five actual Corazon commandos, nine well-paid Mexican Mafia mercenaries, and one shit-scared charter boat operator who'd shown up at the dock this morning to find something other than his usual passengers waiting for him. They must have had a very inspiring view of the flotilla as it crossed the orbit of the Harbor Dogs and was allowed to pass, because they were cheering. Their antique Kalashnikov assault rifles were plainly visible as they held them high and enthusiastically pumped them up and down in the air.

  Inside the Mark Two Harbor Dog Autonomous Nautical Drone's bulbous heads, small but immensely powerful magnetrons were generating pulses of radar waves ten thousand times per second. The energy that bounced back was captured, processed, and used to create a color-coded image for interpretation by the Harbor Dog's primitive artificial intelligences. The colors represented material properties of the objects that could be determined by the manner and degree to which they reflected or absorbed radar energy. In rapid, ind
ependent succession the two nautical watchdogs went through identical processes of observation, profile matching, and decision making as they orbited Lady Chatterley, pulsing the Lucky Sue ten thousand times a second with their radar.

  Both autonomous drones observed the high density objects that were being hoisted high in the air by the largely wet objects that matched the stored profile of human beings. The dense objects that matched the profile of metal were distributed one per human, and they matched the profile of a radar imaged Kalashnikov assault rifle. The Harbor Dogs would have continued their clockwise orbits of Lady Chatterley in perfect acceptance of this set of conditions if not for the Lucky Sue's complete lack of a properly coded IFF transponder signal that the nautical drones used to Identify Friend or Foe.

  Unarmed humans without a transponder, approaching a ship in distress, such as the half-submerged Lady Chatterley appeared to be, were presumed to be a rescue party, a Non-Threat. If they had a properly coded IFF transponder and were armed, then they were obviously G.S.A. Peacekeepers, Coast Guard, Navy, or Law Enforcement, all classified as Non-Threats. Armed humans approaching a vessel in distress without proper IFF signals were one of three things: hijackers, pirates, or terrorists, all classified as Threats. Within a millisecond of each other, both Harbor Dogs independently concluded that the Lucky Sue was a Threat, and they broke from their orbits of Lady Chatterley to begin an attack run.