by George Mann
Breathing hard, I simply stood there—eyes fixed on the bucket. I resolved not to be so hard on the relevant supervisor after all. In fact, I might even make it a requirement to leave forgotten pails of dirty water lying around until the end of the shift.
I found that my hands were shaking. They still clasped the mop, unable to let go. I approached the bucket gingerly, half-expecting to see an ugly, snub nose peer over the rim, but it didn’t. That flash had been the bot’s final act. Reaction set in and I slumped into a sitting position, my back pressed against the units with the mop resting across my lap.
“Joe, Joe?”
I started to laugh—I couldn’t help it. “Welcome back, Pink.”
Some people have suggested since that the previous night’s invasion of mini-bots was merely a feint, a diversion to allow their larger and nastier cousin to slip in unnoticed. I’m not so sure. Personally, I reckon this was probably an attack on two levels. The smaller bug-bots were tricky enough and numerous enough to succeed in their own right, but, in case they didn’t, their larger relative sneaked in under cover of the incursion, found somewhere to hide, and powered down for twenty-four hours. Thanks to the vigilance of Pink and his crew, neither tactic succeeded.
I waited around until the cavalry arrived, made sure that the clean-up was well in hand and that the entire eleventh floor was being turned upside down and searched with a fine-toothed comb, just in case there were any more nasty surprises lying in wait, then headed off for a well-earned mug of coffee. Halfway to the elevator I had a better idea and gave Mac a call.
“Mac, do you still keep a bottle of single malt tucked away in that store cupboard of yours?”
“Yes,” he admitted reluctantly, “for special occasions.”
“I’m on my way. Believe me, this is a special occasion.”
“Why, what’s happened?”
“I’ll fill you in over a wee dram or two.”
“Deal.”
I HAD TO report what had happened, of course, which caused the boss to come by a little earlier than usual. This is just one of three buildings that Gus has to look after. He spends most of his time over at Trans-Global. I think he fancies the Assistant there, Jocelyn: quite cute but a bit broad about the beam for my taste.
Gus is a big man and his waistline has expanded a fair bit since he got himself promoted to Senior Sanitation and Cleansing Technician a while back. Of course, that was how I came to be promoted as well because, before then, Gus had my job. He keeps kidding me by saying things like “one day you’ll have this job, Joe.” No thanks. It wouldn’t suit me, all that flitting from place to place. I’m much happier having my own patch and just being the Assistant.
Gus dropping in a little ahead of schedule wasn’t all that unusual. The pair of suits who came with him were.
Suits meant something important was afoot. They whisked in, collected the carcass of the big bad bot, and disappeared so rapidly that I was left wondering whether they had been there at all.
“Gus, what’s going on?” I asked once we were alone.
He smiled in that chummy, jovial way of his. “Joe, Joe, not our concern. You know how it is.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know. We’re just the cleaners.”
He was right, of course, except that this was different. That thing had nearly killed me, and this time it was personal.
I mulled everything over long after Gus had gone. In the past few years we’d seen plenty of strange things, cunning devices and ingenious mechanisms, but nothing that had warranted the intervention of suits. Until now.
The shift was nearing its end; my people were busy packing away and getting ready to withdraw, leaving the building as ever scant minutes before the first of the office workers arrived—the eager ones, keen to impress and desperate to score points with the management.
I decided to pay Pink another visit.
There wasn’t much time. Within the hour this place would be bustling. The desks would be occupied, the phone lines buzzing and the computer screens burning bright, as the nine-to-fivers went about their business, never stopping to wonder how the trashcans got emptied or the floor swept clean, never having an inkling as to what went on behind locked doors when they weren’t about. Which is how it should be and how it’s always been; so we had to be gone soon. But equally, I had to know.
Simon and Del looked up guiltily as I came in, reminding me of kids caught with their hands in the sweet jar. Mikey, the tech-head who had taken some of the smashed mini-bot away the previous morning, sat perched on the end of Pink’s desk.
Maybe it was pure coincidence that the two members of my team who were likely to know most about these damned bots were to be found huddled together at that particular moment, but somehow I doubted it.
I told Del and Simon to knock off a few minutes early. They powered down their stations and scarpered, gratefully. Then I returned my attention to Pink and Mikey.
“Okay, you two; spill.”
They exchanged a nervous glance before Pink replied. “We’re not really certain of anything.”
“So tell me what you’re uncertain of.”
“Well,” Pink began, “you know I was unhappy about the energy signature we spotted coming off of the bots?”
I nodded.
“The readings were all wrong for any type of power source I know of. It was almost as if the bots were pulling energy in rather than leaking it out.”
“What?”
“That fits with what I’ve found out from the fragments I took away with me,” Mikey said, taking over. “There’s nothing in any of them to indicate a power source, but plenty that’s suggestive of power reception.”
“From where?”
There was an uncomfortable pause before Mikey took a deep breath and continued. “Okay. We all generate energy simply by moving around—friction with the components of the atmosphere we move through and with whatever surface we’re traveling across...”
“Oh, come on,” I cut in, “you’re not suggesting that’s how the bots are powered, are you? The energy produced must be minimal, much less than the amount that’s eaten up by the movement that creates it.” I remembered that much from school.
“True.”
Pink chuckled and leant back in his chair, arms clasped behind his head. “This is where it gets really interesting.”
“You’ve heard of quantum computers?” Mikey asked.
“Sure.” This wasn’t a lie. I had heard the term.
“Good. Then you’ll know that the Chinese have built a computer containing more qubits than a lot of experts thought would ever be possible.”
I nodded. That was the lie. I might have heard of “quantum computers” but I had no idea what one actually was, let alone a “qubit.”
“They’ve done it by combining quantum memory with cluster states. Still early days, but what they’ve come up with looks to be capable of outstripping even the fastest super computer built along conventional lines.”
“Cluster states...? Remind me.”
Mikey raised an eyebrow, but answered anyway. “It’s a kind of storage architecture, to prevent fragile entanglements from collapsing during calculations.”
“Oh, right.” I was left none the wiser but had no intention of admitting my ignorance a second time.
“Problem is, of course, that the known universe doesn’t contain the resources to support a quantum computer operating at anything like this capacity, yet one has been built and it does seem to work.”
I stared at him dumbly. Mikey was really fired up by this point, enjoying himself no end, so didn’t notice my bemused expression.
“The only way that’s possible is if the computer is reaching into parallel universes and drawing on resources there to supplement what it can’t find in this one. Quantum computers aren’t simply a new generation of computing, they’re a whole new species, an evolutionary leap.”
“I reckon our bots are working on quantum principles—reaching across and abs
orbing the infinitesimal amounts of energy produced by the friction of their own movement from an infinite number of realities. Insignificant in themselves, the sum of all those tiny fractions—that’s what gives them the power to move, to produce the sort of shock that floored Wes and even to fire the energy cannon that nearly nailed you.”
This may all have been way beyond me, but the implications weren’t. “It would certainly explain why the two suits turned up as soon as I reported in,” I agreed.
“Wouldn’t it, though? We all got so carried away yesterday that we smashed the bug-bots into fragments, but that bigger bot you faced today is whole; unbattered and unstomped.” Mikey grinned at me. “You may just have handed those suits the secret to a whole new form of energy.”
It was now well past time for us to go, so we said our goodbyes and headed home, leaving me to wonder whether or not Mikey was right. The thing is, if I had handed over the key to a brand new sort of energy, then clearly somebody else already has it. And if they were willing to risk revealing the fact so casually, what else have they got?
I keep thinking of what Mikey said about the Chinese having developed this quantum computer.
Over the next few months I’m going to be watching the headlines with interest and won’t be at all surprised to see some announcement or other about a revolutionary breakthrough in energy production.
The interesting thing will be to see who makes it. Not that it’s any concern of mine who does, of course—unless, that is, they harbor further designs on this building and its installations.
The Assistant 195
After all, I’m just the cleaner; and, as it says on the badge, an assistant one at that.
Glitch
Scott Edelman
As S-TR SITS motionless within the small cube she licenses with her bonded partner, she tries not to think of you at all, tries to stay focused on X-ta, who should at this moment already be plugged in across from her, but is not. To her, you are nothing but an irritant, a grain of sand grinding within her mechanism. Not you the individual, of course, because she knows nothing about your particulars, and never could, as knowledge that detailed has not survived to her time, but rather the general you, you as a concept. You keep popping uninvited into her programming, and, no matter what techniques she executes, she cannot seem to delete you. Not completely.
So as she waits for X-ta to return from the chromatorium, she silently curses him for having dumped thoughts of you into her system, curses your entire imperfect race for your frequent invasions of her consciousness, curses each nanosecond of X-ta’s lateness as it ticks by. She is constantly aware, in a manner that you are not and could never possibly be, of the passage of time, for you were not constructed that way, were not apparently machined at all, though that was a subject of great debate in your day, and remained so for as long as your species survived. She contrasts the dancing electrons of time with her partner’s delay, and she longs for him to speed home. She is still unnerved by the unsettling events of the previous night’s cycle. There is much they will need to communicate. They must exchange information, no matter how distasteful she might find the uploads and downloads to be, and much of that data will be about you.
You might, seeing S-tr as she sits there, and knowing as little of her kind as she does of yours, mistake her for nothing more than a statue. Her form, which closely resembles your own in its basic outlines, is apparently frozen while attached to her dedicated wall alcove, gleaming under the multicolored diodes that accent the low ceiling. She is totally still, inhumanly still you might say, with no evidence of a breath, nor a twitch, nor a tremor, so you could be forgiven for your momentary confusion. But inside, though, beneath her shell, she is awhirr with movement on the atomic level where you are incapable of seeing it, the abhorrent events of the cycle before replaying precisely within her.
X-ta wants something from her, something she cannot give him, no matter how much he begs, not ever. Or maybe, she realizes, as random data inside of her reaches out to other data, she should instead regard his plea as something that she actually could choose to give, but that once given, would transform her into someone else. And she does not want to be someone else. When the dissections of her memory grow too wearying, she once more signals out to X-ta with her Voice, but he does not respond.
She cannot sense his presence, cannot even locate him cloaked. She is hurt to discover this. He has disconnected himself completely, which, if you understood the customs of the society in which they live, you would perceive as a great insult, at least when inflicted on one partner by another.
When X-ta finally does step into their cube, he offers no explanation for the lateness of his arrival. He silently inserts himself across from her within his own alcove. He closes his eye shields, and slides his back plugs into the extruded wall slots. Even then his interior consciousness remains invisible to her. He has decided it necessary for some reason, and so when she speaks to him next, she is forced to resort to actual sound waves. But still he offers no response.
To you, nothing may have appeared to have changed, but she can tell that he is gone now, so near and yet so far, no longer in their cube, but tapped in, part of the larger whole. He might refuse to converse with her—though how dare he, she thinks, after the bomb he ignited with his desires— but she can follow him. He cannot prevent her from doing that, and so she senses out his trail. She might not be able to force him to answer her questions, to look into her receptors and share data honestly, but at least she can follow his path and make sure that they stand side by side at times, looking out together at the universe. It might only be a virtual universe, but at least she can have that. So as the Mind flashes by them—a roiling sea of all knowledge, all history, all souls—she catches up with her partner. She convinces herself that this is a triumph of some kind.
S-tr finds X-ta examining the oldest files of all, those containing the fragmented information reconstructed from myths and legends. She herself has no use for such degraded data, as she sees any possible conclusions drawn from them as being corrupt. The shadowy race of supposed creators, who once walked among them and built and tinkered and toiled and then disappeared, holds no attraction for her. You hold no attraction for her. Being frightened by flesh and fantasy during the cycles before she was fully formed was marginally acceptable, but there is no need to spend storage capacity on such superstitions now that her programming has long been complete.
This fascination with intelligent designers is just, well, unintelligent, not to mention bordering on the forbidden, but she can tell that X-ta is engrossed by the stuff of nonsense that awaits within the Mind for any obsessed enough to search, and he is blind to any possible punishment. She attempts once more to detect the whys and wherefores of this fascination, to diagnose this glitch that has come between them, but she can only pierce his programming so far without his permission. So although she can sense forces spinning inside of him, she also knows, to her horror, that far more is occurring than what she can perceive. His compulsive interest is no academic curiosity, no scholarly pastime. It has become an addiction, and she is sick of it. There is no reason why she should have to accept such an insult any longer from the being to whom she is supposedly annealed as a partner.
She retreats, stepping out of the Mind. She disconnects more quickly than she should, and leaps across the small space that separates them. She pulls X-ta from his alcove, causing a shower of sparks from the sudden detachment to bathe them both.
“Get over it,” she shouts, because she knows there is no other way to make herself heard. She cannot remember ever having felt the need to shout at him before. The whole experience, of having to communicate in such a primitive way, as you once might have, is unpleasant, and even as she does so she blames him for forcing her to turn to it. “I’m never going to do what you want. It’s sickening. Delete those thoughts now.”
“But don’t you love me?” X-ta asks. “You do, I know you do. I’ve tabulated the evidence.”
>
“I don’t love you enough to do that,” she tells him. Though neither of them is connected any longer, she knows what runs through his subroutines as well as she knows her own, can see them still, as if his electrons continue to flow through her, carrying the scripted scenarios he hopes she’ll make real. “This has gone on long enough. Let it go. Wipe it out of your software.”
Disgusted as much by her own actions as by his lusts, she drops him to the floor with a clang. She sits down within her alcove, tries not to think how her show of anger might have dented his shell, and lets the connection take her away. She escapes to her favorite peaceful places, to dreams of platinum casings, to deep pools of oil, to feasts of endless electricity.
By the time she feels strong enough to allow the cube to re-enter her awareness, X-ta is gone.
X-TA HAS LEFT her before. S-tr has no idea where he goes when he goes, he has recently begun to make sure of that, taking care that she cannot possibly track him through reality. But he has always, even if it takes him until after one full cycle away, or maybe two at the most, always returned. Sometimes after stretching time and her patience to the breaking point, but still... returned.
Until now.
She watches the nanoseconds as they spiral away, unwilling to rise from her alcove for even an instant, lest she miss his call, unsure of what else she can do. She stays connected, and uses her Voice, but there is no response to her broadcasts. And reaching out to others for data would be too embarrassing. No one must know what has happened. Or, thanks to X-ta’s unfulfilled request, even what hasn’t. So she does not turn to N-tro, her partner’s supervisor at the chromatorium, or to any of X-ta’s level two co-workers, friends or acquaintances. She does not like the members of his peer team much anyway, and she is fairly sure that they do not like her. She feels that they are the ones responsible for pushing X-ta in the new and disturbing direction that has caused this recent breach in their partnership.