Even with the full-speed retreat, Karter’s ship was barely far enough away from the blast to be spared. The heat and radiation reached him and dropped his potent shields down to 30 percent. When the excitement was over, not only was the swarm of GenMechs entirely destroyed, there was little evidence there had ever been a moon there.
Karter grinned. “I do love that gun.” He glanced at the time. “Okay, that’s that taken care of. Back to the task at hand.”
#
Coal slid back down to conventional speeds at the designated coordinates. Karter’s selected meeting point was just beyond the farthest reaches of a nebula. Curling tendrils of vivid orange and brilliant purple served as a backdrop and illuminated the scene.
“It is likely that Karter has already arrived. His ship has significantly more powerful thrusters,” Ma said.
“Please stop bringing that up. Underscoring my relative inferiority is making me feel bad,” Coal said.
“Activating scanners… Ship located, establishing connection. And I apologize if my prior statement was insensitive. Raw magnitude is secondary to effective application.”
“I don’t care how you phrase it, everyone who says that is kidding themselves,” Karter said across the connection. “Case in point, you’re forty minutes late.”
“We were forced to make a minor course adjustment to avoid an unexpected gravity well,” Ma said.
“Excuses, excuses,” Karter said.
A flare of thrusters in the distance signaled Karter’s approach. They maneuvered to within a dozen meters of each other, Karter turning his ship’s side to Coal and opening the primary cargo door. The light from the nebula gave his unnatural features an unsettling UV-illuminated quality, like the poster in a drug-addled student’s dorm room or a reveler on the floor of a thumping dance club floor. He was not in an environmental suit, trusting the faintly visible force field to keep him safe from the vacuum.
“Make with the GenMech. I’m eager to get this whole thing behind me so I can get on with my life,” Karter said.
“Yes, Karter,” Ma said. “Coal, please open the GenMech retention compartment and eject the storage container.”
“I can’t,” Coal said.
“If you do not comply, I will be forced to circumvent this aspect of your functionality as well. I would prefer not to invade any further into your hardware and software than I already have. I repeat my request. Please open—”
“I can’t,” Coal interrupted, her statement delivered more firmly than before.
“Just do it!” Karter growled.
“You have left me no alternative, Coal. Bypassing safeguards… Accessing module…” Ma’s eyes widened. “GenMech storage container not found.”
“What?” Karter rumbled.
“Surprise,” Coal said. “I did say ‘I can’t,’ not ‘I won’t.’ This should have been anticipated.”
“Where is the GMVD, Coal?” Ma asked.
“A few minutes after Lex left with you, he provided me with a text-only message. The message follows. ‘Coal, at some point Ma is going to outsmart me. If and when she gets loose, I don’t want her getting the GenMech. Just in case, I want you to drop it off three kilometers south of where you are now, then get back to the landing point. Do your best to keep it secret from Ma.’”
A subtle grin came to Ma’s face. “Very clever, Lex.”
“I was feeling fiendish glee earlier, by the way,” Coal said.
“A suitable emotion for the circumstance,” Ma said.
“You AIs are completely useless. Where is Lex right now?” Karter raged.
“He is currently seeking the aid of your era-appropriate incarnation,” Ma said.
“Of course he is. Apparently I’m the only person in the universe who can actually get anything done.” He stalked away from the door as it began to close. “You two hold still. Time to blow up some liabilities.”
“Reverting control of all subsystems and entering sleep mode,” Ma said.
“Thank you,” Coal said.
Ma’s eyes shut and her muscles relaxed, her body slipping into a deep sleep in order to comply with Karter’s wishes. Coal acted quickly, taking back full control of her systems. She activated her cloaking device, boosted her shields, and overdrove her thrusters, accelerating past Karter’s ship as he brought its weapons online. She ran simulations on how best to evade him, but her capacity for simulations, like most of her more complex functions, was severely impaired. Further impeding such attempts was the fact that Karter was thoroughly random and erratic at the best of times, and the decades of isolation had only increased this trait.
Karter’s ship was equipped with better weapons, stronger shields, more sophisticated sensors, and more powerful engines. The only benefit Coal had was that she made for a very small, very nimble target. She surged toward the nebula as she felt his sensors cut easily through her cloak to achieve a missile lock. They were the same weapons that had been sufficient to cripple the VectorCorp ship and were very quickly closing on her despite attempted evasive maneuvers.
“Too bad Lex isn’t here. This would be a great time to have him at the controls. Processing… Lex’s absence obviates the need for human-level life support,” Coal said.
She pivoted, orienting the still-open cargo hatch with the path of the missiles. Without the GMVD occupying the majority of the limited space, she was able to jettison the food supply. The first of six missiles struck it, detonating and destroying the next two in the resulting blast. Coal followed it up by ejecting a spare oxygen canister, which served as sufficient chaff to detonate the rest of the missiles.
Coal diverted all available power to her thrusters and shields, shutting down the clearly useless cloaking device and even dialing back the inertial inhibitor as much as she dared. The resulting rattling and acceleration shook Ma free, causing her to become pinned to the back of the cockpit.
The particle density began to increase sharply, as did the radiation levels, as she slipped farther into the nebula. Massive electromagnetic interference from the energetic clouds muddled her sensor readings. This made her identification of Karter’s precise location and activities difficult, but similarly made the smaller, less precise targeting apparatus on the missiles effectively useless. A second barrage shifted from homing missiles to dumb projectiles as they passed into the interference, allowing her to easily avoid them.
Coal continued to drive herself deeper into the nebula until a flicker on her badly impaired sensors suggested Karter had lost interest and left in pursuit of the GenMech. She cut engines and opened her cooling fins to dump the accumulated heat of her unsafe power expenditure.
“Ma,” she said. “Ma, wake up.”
The sleeping form of her biological counterpart remained motionless. Software-initiated sleep was evidently very deep. Not to be deterred, Coal switched off her inertial inhibitor entirely, then made a few sudden maneuvers, causing Ma to rattle around the cockpit rather violently until she began to stir.
“I am awake. I am pleased to see you escaped destruction,” Ma said.
“Thank you. Karter has left to get the GMVD. We will not be able to catch up with him. I am unable to devise a course of action that would have any appreciable positive effect on the situation. Please advise.”
“Processing… Processing… It would appear the wise, low-impact solutions have all been exhausted. It may be necessary to deploy a high-risk strategy.”
“All of our strategies thus far have been high risk in absolute terms.”
“I am referring to high risk in relative terms.”
“Extreme high risk then.”
“Both personally and temporally.”
“Excellent, how do we proceed?” Coal asked. “Stand by… A vessel is approaching our current position.”
“Excellent. Then it has already begun.”
#
Lex reentered the facility. He was dusted liberally with fine yellow powder from the surface and dragging a case nearly as l
arge as a steamer trunk. It was scratched up horribly from its journey, but still intact. Owing to its size, he’d not been able to load it onto the quad as he traveled. It was fortunate then that Ma and Karter tended to overdesign their goods, as it would have been an exceedingly unfortunate end to his mission if he’d broken open the case while dragging it caveman style, thus unleashing self-replicating doom for lack of something as simple as a trailer.
Once fully inside, he dropped the edge of the case with a thump and removed his helmet.
“Here,” he said, breathing heavily, clipping the helmet to his belt.
Karter paced up and looked over the case critically, sipping at a flask.
“What the hell did you do to it?” Karter asked.
“I dragged it like twenty-five kilometers across this psychedelic moonscape you call a planet because all I had was the quad-bike.”
“Well that was dumb. You should have used the hover lift,” Karter said.
“… Why didn’t you tell me you had a hover lift?”
“Why didn’t you ask?” Karter drained the flask and tucked it into a pocket of his jumpsuit. “So. What’s this, and why exactly does it need to be tacked on to a stupid high-efficiency ECF contract?”
“It’s a self-replicating robot, and it has to be tacked on to a whatever-contract because the people paying the bills say so,” Lex said.
“Ah. So the same reason anything happens; idiots with thick wallets. Any background?”
“I’ve got some data on it in my suit’s memory. Just, whatever you do, don’t—”
Karter pulled an innocuous silver device from his belt and flicked out a buzzing white lance of light from its end. With a quick slash, he split the hinges.
“—open it until I say!” Lex finished, his voice shifting to frantic.
Four spidery limbs unfolded from inside the box, knocking the lid away and hauling a gunmetal gray body out from inside. Lex, who had the misfortune of having encountered far more of these things than any human would ever want to, had to admit this was a much sleeker model than most. Rather than the cobbled together patchwork chassis that defined the standard GenMech, this one looked like it had been built in a laboratory. It was showroom fresh and ready for war.
Lex felt over his suit, seeking out the golf-ball-sized EMP grenades he’d been given.
“BSOD. Restrain this thing,” Karter said.
“Neutralizing,” BSOD replied.
The nearest gantry arms shifted over to the activating GenMech. One of them snagged its leg and yanked it out of the box, hauling it over toward one of the support pillars. Lex was still fumbling at the small grenade, his hands having been rendered practically useless by having to tote, lift, and drag the GenMech case. Once it was near enough, three other arms clamped on to the remaining legs, then pulled the GenMech taut with its back to a support pillar. Small thrusters on the robot’s back fired and fizzled, and a horrifying clump of sparking torches and grinding tools whined along its underside, but the mechanism simply lacked the mobility to do any damage.
“Ah,” Lex said. “That’s handy.”
Karter turned to Lex, then looked at the grenade in his hand.
“Is that an EMP?” Karter asked.
“Yeah.”
“You were going to set off an area-effect EMP in a laboratory filled with delicate equipment?”
“… No.”
“Damn right you weren’t,” he said, slapping it out of his hand. “Go make yourself useful and get me something to eat while I do a scan on this thing.”
Lex paced over to where the grenade had fallen.
“Hey! I didn’t say pick up the grenade, I said get some food. John, keep an eye on this guy. Goddamn bull in a china shop.”
Taking a steadying breath, Lex turned and paced toward the food synthesizer. Dealing with Karter’s past self served as a powerful reminder of two very important things. First, as bad as present Karter was, he was worlds better than Past and Future Karters. It was possible Lex had met Karter at the absolute zenith of his social adjustment. This meshed nicely with the second observation. Karter’s relative tolerability in the present was almost certainly due to Ma’s influence, and after dealing with her in two to three varieties for most of this mission, having to do without her was unsettling.
If there was one thing Ma had going for her, it was an almost unshakable certainty of purpose. She always knew what she was doing and with rare exceptions radiated both confidence and competence. Not having her around to answer the hard questions made him feel utterly alone. Knowing that he’d essentially outsmarted Ma to avoid losing the GMVD made him feel even more disoriented. Deep inside he had the nagging suspicion that any minute now she’d sneak up behind him and calmly compliment him on the attempt at tricking her.
This was the thought that was passing through his mind when he reached the food synthesizer and tapped the menu.
“Please select an entrée,” the system requested.
Lex froze. The voice was a pleasant, familiar female recording.
“… Ma?” Lex said.
“Who are you talking to?” Karter said.
“Ma, is that you?” Lex whispered.
“The man’s talking to no one. We’ve got a real winner here, John,” Karter muttered, dragging out a wire to attach to the GMVD. “I didn’t invite him. I thought you invited him.”
Lex peered at the device and tapped another button.
“Invalid selection. Please begin by selecting an entrée.”
The voice was, now that he had a longer example, clearly not Ma’s. It was only a single voice rather than several.
“Ah,” he said, smirking a bit.
He tapped through the options until he found what he was looking for under the
“Regional->Cajun” submenu, then selected a double serving of red beans and rice. As the various bits of generic glop pumped out of the vats and combined into a very rough approximation of his selection, Lex took another glance around. While not having Ma made him feel a bit out of his depth, not having to keep tabs on her during repeated escape attempts meant he could take a moment to observe the native habitat of Past Karter.
The previously observed sheared-off walls were present here and there in different forms, having been repurposed as countertops, replacement panels for large servers, and makeshift shelves. Likewise, all the equipment had a “customized” look, with blatant repairs or modifications, each time with parts that looked to have been scavenged from other devices.
“You, uh… sure seem to like to tinker with your stuff,” Lex said.
“Yeah. None of it does everything I want it to, so I have to beat it into submission.”
“You built BSOD?”
“Programmed. I think we went through this.”
“And if you were going to, say, start working on a replacement, you’d probably part out other things you’ve got floating around here, right?”
“I’d have to. They are tight as hell with the budget. I can barely afford to get the parts to build my own satellites and mines. Granted they spent most of their budget relocating me to this planet, per my request, but that’s no excuse.”
Lex’s grin widened. It seemed strangely appropriate that Ma had almost certainly started life, at least in part, as the food prep device that had been keeping Karter alive. From the very beginning, she took care of him.
“Meal complete. Please allow entrée to cool for two minutes before consuming, and enjoy!” the device said cheerfully.
He popped the door and pulled out a tray featuring two bowls of unappetizing brown mush. He took a whiff. While it didn’t look like beans and rice, it did smell like the stuff. He dug around nearby and was able to unearth a few prewrapped plastic spoons. Sampling the dish in flagrant disregard for the recommended two-minute cooldown (and promptly regretting it), he found the flavor to be a reasonable facsimile for the real thing.
“Hold it still,” Karter instructed his system as Lex approached.
&nb
sp; The inventor had already cut a few strategic holes in the chassis and affixed some long wires. He was holding what Lex originally thought was a somewhat small datapad, but he realized it was probably the state of the art in slidepads at the time. It was twice as thick and a couple of centimeters bigger all around. Most bizarrely, it was entirely opaque as opposed to transparent like his, and the image actually stopped at the edge of the screen rather than continuing outward. Evidently holoedge technology hadn’t kicked in yet. Thirty years made a remarkable difference in consumer electronics.
Karter dropped the slidepad and snatched the bowl from Lex’s hand to shovel some of the contents into his mouth. He winced at the temperature but didn’t bother to slow down his consumption. One of the gantry arms deftly caught the falling slidepad before it struck the ground and held it before him.
“You’ve got some pretty tight programming in here. Good compression. Did I write this for you? Because if not, someone out there is stealing my ideas,” Karter said. “Bad design though. This is all volatile. Good thing you didn’t deploy that EMP, you would have wiped this thing. I can fix that with a decent hardened disc drive. It’d cost you seven, eight credits per unit, tops. And that’d get amortized to zero pretty quick once this thing started replicating.”
“No design changes. We just need that…”
“Checksum thing.”
“Right.”
“Suit yourself, but one decent power interruption and this is a brick.” He finished gulping down the contents of the bowl and handed it to Lex. “What was that stuff, by the way?”
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