Chimera

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Has there been anyone since Nyom?”

  Coren frowned thoughtfully, then picked up his glass. He shook his head. “I haven’t made the time.”

  “Not interested, or just not ready?”

  He glanced at her speculatively. “Are you making a suggestion?”

  Ariel laughed, surprised. Am I? Thinking about it now, with Coren watching her, waiting, she realized that the same question applied to her. It’s been a year since Jonis. How long is long enough?

  “Maybe,” she said. “When we have more time.”

  “Ah.”

  “Nova Levis,” she said with emphasis.

  “Yes. Our phantom research company. Or the colony.” The fragile mood broke and Ariel felt mildly self-conscious.

  “They could be connected,” she said.

  Coren set down the glass and rubbed his eyes. “Maybe. Probably. Nova Levis, formerly Cassus Thole, is apparently involved in baleys in a big way. Warehouses, shipping, stolen cargo. Your complaining Spacers and their delayed shipments.” He waved a hand. “Too much. I need sleep.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “I can call you a cab if you want.”

  Ariel studied him, realizing that she did not want to go back to the embassy. Perhaps it was just being away from other Spacers and the confines of the mission precincts, but she was enjoying being here too much. That thought surprised her, too.

  Coren looked at her. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay here.”

  “Don’t you have to report in?”

  “Not if I don’t want to.”

  “Senator Taprin--” Coren began.

  “Old business.”

  “But is it over?”

  “I thought it was. It would be nice to know for certain.”

  Coren coughed. “I am really, really tired.”

  “Do you have anything I can go over, then?” She smiled at him. “Or you can sleep. I’ll watch.”

  He pushed himself up. “Let me finish up a couple of things.” He walked woodenly into his office. Ariel could see him from where she sat. She wondered at herself: just what it was she intended with Coren Lanra; what she would do, and why. For the moment she was content to let her feelings run their course. It had been months since she had been interested in anything beyond her own self-denigration. Right now she felt in control, free to act instead of waiting for something to react against.

  “Desk,” Coren said, “have you completed compilation of the case files of Ree Wenithal?”

  “I am sorry, “ the Desk said, “I have no record of such a request. “

  Coren’s face went blank. “Desk, run review. I requested a survey of relevant material concerning the investigations of Ree Wenithal, reference downloaded material from disk yesterday.”

  A moment passed. “No such material is extant in memory.”

  “Run diagnostic.”

  Ariel felt her pulse quicken. “Your system is buffered, I assume?”

  “Of course. The whole office is--”

  “Diagnostic complete. Reference nine-one-oh. “

  Coren snatched Ariel’s disk from the reader and tossed it to her. He worked furiously over the surface, then stood. He came back into the private room and went to the shelves.

  “Something’s infiltrated your system,” Ariel said.

  “That’s the code reference you heard.” He tucked small objects into his pockets, then grabbed an overcoat and a soft travel bag. He piled things in quickly, slammed the drawers, and returned to his desk. He studied readouts, nodded once, and entered more commands.

  “What--?”

  He raised a hand and shook his head. Ariel fell silent. Finally, he shrugged on the overcoat, shut down the Desk, and indicated the exit. Ariel preceded him through the door, across the reception area, and waited.

  Coren Lanra pulled out a handgun. Ariel suppressed a shudder at the sight--the weapon looked compact and heavy, with an ominous green light on the frame just above the trigger guard. She was guessing, but it seemed lethal.

  He leaned out into the hall, looked left and right, then took her arm. He guided her in the direction of the stairs and gave her a slight push.

  Ariel stepped onto the stairwell landing and waited for Coren. When he emerged into the dusty gloom of the shaft, she asked quietly, “Do I get one of those?”

  He studied her intently. “You know how to use one?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  He reached within the voluminous overcoat. A second later he pressed a fatal shape into her hand.

  Ariel held it gingerly for a few seconds, studying it. A modified stunner with an extra powerpack and an amplifier along the generator coils. At close range, it would probably kill. She thumbed it on, felt the energy as a faint, numbing surge against her palm. She sited along the barrel a couple of times to get the feel of it, then nodded to Coren.

  Coren led the way down the stairs. They had not seemed so dark on the way up, but now the shadows oppressed, the turns threatened. Ariel’s pulse was racing by the time they reached the bottom.

  “Stay here,” Coren said, and stepped quickly out the door. A few seconds later he came back in. “This way.”

  Beneath the stairs he turned on a handflash. Ariel saw a heavy metal door with a keypad upon which Coren deftly entered a command. Old bolts lurched back and the door swung away from them.

  In the light of Coren’s flash Ariel made out another landing and a flight of skeletal stairs leading down to a sublevel. Coren closed the door behind them and shined the light above and around. A few cobwebs had gathered in high comers but not so many as might be expected.

  Their feet clattered loudly on the bare metal steps. At the bottom, reddish-orange light pooled. Coren switched off his flash.

  “That way,” he said, pointing down one corridor, “leads to the garage. This way--” he indicated the passage leading straight from the stairs “--runs under the next several buildings in this block. There’s access to lower levels.”

  “Do you own transport?”

  “No.”

  “Then...”

  He headed toward the garage.

  Halfway down the passage a sound stopped Ariel. She glanced back, trying to comprehend what she had heard--a rasping noise, like rough cloth over gravel, or the hissing of water against a hot surface--yet fearing to see what could make it. But the narrow corridor was empty. She hurried to catch up to Coren.

  They entered a storeroom. In the light of Coren’s flash, she saw bins stacked high to the ceiling, filled with packages and angular shapes, and clusters of components and discarded parts. A workbench held a complicated mechanism that had been thoroughly dismantled.

  Through another door they emerged into one of the garage levels. Bright lights imbedded in the ceiling painted sharp highlights upon the sleeping transports sitting in rows. Coren strode quickly along them, head swiveling, until he came to the end of one row. He dug in his jacket for something, then inserted a card into the reader on the transport door. He tapped a code into the lock. A moment later the door slid open.

  “Get in. “

  Ariel went around to the passenger door.

  Coren powered up the transport and eased it out of the slot.

  Ariel glimpsed movement off to the right. Before she could speak, a large shape shot out in front of them, bounced off the hood, and landed heavily on the roof.

  “What--?” Coren began.

  His window burst in, spraying bits of shattered plastic across them. Ariel clutched the pistol while her free hand came up to protect her face.

  The transport lurched to a halt.

  Coren was half out the window when she looked again. He hooked his left leg awkwardly under the steering column and his right hand clutched at the frame separating the front and rear sections. An ugly hacking sound came from where she imagined his head must be.

  Ariel opened her door. She gave the line of nearby transports a qu
ick survey, then rolled out. She came up facing the vehicle and brought her weapon to bear.

  The shape on the roof of the transport looked human. It was large, mostly covered in a long, colorless overcoat, one leg thrust back for balance along the front screen, foot sheathed in a heavy black boot.

  She aimed.

  A head appeared over the hunched shoulder. Eyes fixed her, unblinking and sharp. The face...the skin looked rough, disfigured...the hair was a ragged growth of oily brown and red.

  It grinned at her.

  It moved with alarming speed, turning toward her, crouching to spring

  Ariel fired.

  The weapon felt warmer in her hand. The bolt of energy, nearly invisible, slammed into the assailant and tossed him from the roof of the transport like a mass of compressed air buffeting a rag.

  He hit the pavement with a solid, meaty impact and a puff of air.

  He sat up, shook his head, and looked at her.

  Terrified, Ariel fired again.

  The head snapped back, so savagely that it must have broken the neck. A few moments later, though, he began to stand.

  Ariel watched, seized by amazement and fear, as he rose, to his full height.

  Shoot it again, she thought, but her finger did not flex against the stud.

  He took a step toward her.

  A brilliant splash of crimson-white burst against him. She glanced back toward the bolt’s source: Coren had managed to get off a shot. The attacker screamed, a sound like a million sheets of paper ripping at once, and staggered back.

  Ariel fired a third time. A pungent burnt odor filled the air.

  The attacker fell to his knees, rose, then ran away.

  All at once the stillness engulfed her.

  Coren coughed.

  Ariel came around the transport and found him lying on the pavement, holding his throat in one hand and his pistol in the other. She set her weapon down and helped him sit up with his back to the transport. He coughed and hacked for a minute, spit out a gob of phlegm, and sucked air in huge gasps.

  “I know that hand,” he said finally. “Son of a…”

  He got to his feet shakily and looked around.

  “Get your weapon,” he rasped.

  Ariel snatched up the stunner.

  Coren accessed a different transport. He drove fast now, taking the turns recklessly until they made the avenue. Ariel waited till he slowed down to a normal speed before saying anything.

  Before she could speak, though, Coren made an ugly throat-clearing noise and said, “He should’ve died. Only thing I can think of that could resist a shot like that is a robot. So tell me, Ambassador Burgess of the goddamned Calvin Institute, when did you people start making humanoid robots?”

  “It wasn’t a robot.”

  “No? Then what the hell was it?”

  “Something we stopped playing with a very long time ago,” she said. “A cyborg.”

  Ariel’s hands trembled.

  Figures, she thought wryly, now that we’re safe.

  Relatively safe, anyway, she added. Her eyes ached from trying to see all around her and into the darkness of third shift faux night. Coren drove them out of D.C., southwest, past industrial enclaves and private neighborhoods, through abandoned sections, and into an area Ariel had never been to. She recognized the main building from the subetheric--dimly, an old memory--as the headquarters for DyNan Manual Industries.

  Coren got through all the security checks, sent the transport back where it belonged, and took her through unpopulated corridors to a suite of offices.

  She watched him work a desk that was similar to the one in his private office, though, from the attention he gave to each command, it was far less sophisticated, not even close to an AI. Her pulse slowed, adrenalin drained away, and her fears took over in the form of the shakes.

  Coren glanced her way and stopped what he was doing long enough to pour her a drink. Gratefully she sipped at the dark liquid. She had never been sure why alcohol helped at times like this--perhaps it was the care with which one had to take it in that distracted the mind from its own terrors--but she finished the tumbler of whiskey at the same time Coren sat down across from her.

  “We’re secure for the time being,” he said.

  Ariel nodded toward his desk. “Smart matrix?”

  “An old one.”

  “Your desk is an AI. “

  “Was. Rega would never allow one on his property.”

  “I don’t understand. If you’re willing to use one, how do you?”

  “Life is a compromise. I prefer working for Rega to working for anyone else. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says or believes.” He smiled thinly. “Much like you, I imagine. “

  “Ah, well. To coin a phrase, ‘That’s different:”

  “Really. Well, I won’t argue. How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said, raising the empty glass.

  “Want another one?”

  “Yes, but later. Too much comfort dulls the reflexes. How are you?”

  Coren shook his head.

  “Let me see your shoulder,” Ariel said. She reached for his shirt.

  Coren leaned away from her. “I’m all right.”

  “Of course you are. Let me see.”

  With obvious reluctance, Coren unzipped his shirt and pulled the left half away, revealing his shoulder. Ugly bruising spread from the base of his neck down to his clavicle.

  “Have you seen a doctor?” she asked.

  “In my spare time,” he said grumpily and pulled the shirt back on. “Painblock.”

  “You’ll pay for that.”

  “I know.” He shrugged. “I made an appointment, but...”

  He went to a sofa and sat down heavily, letting his head fall back.

  “Your desk,” Ariel said. “What happened?”

  “Something got through my buffers,” he said. “I had the AI doing a lot of in-depth searches. It was spread fairly thin and it must’ve become vulnerable.”

  “Or some of the files it was accessing were corrupted.”

  “Sleeper programs?”

  “Maybe. If I could look at the software I could tell you. But bringing it here--”

  “--would corrupt this system. Unless we knew exactly what had gotten through.”

  “Go to the head of the class.”

  Coren rubbed his shoulder, frowning. “This...cyborg. He’s the one who rolled me in Petrabor.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I think I’d remember a deathgrip like that.” He frowned at her. “Unless there’s more than one?”

  “No,” Ariel said suddenly, hoping it was true. “Let’s not get more paranoid than we need to. “

  “You said it was a cyborg.”

  “I was guessing. I could be wrong--”

  “But if you’re not, what is it you’re talking about?”

  “A composite. An organic machine.”

  “I’ve seen some pretty impressive soldiers come out of--”

  Ariel shook her head. “No, this different. I’ve seen those people, too, and they aren’t like this.”

  “You said an organic machine. Like augmentation? Prostheses?”

  “Far more intimately involved than that. Yes, you could claim that people with artificial limbs, organs, new skin, bone replacements are cyborgs, but it’s a much too limited use of the term. No, people like that are still fundamentally human--there’s a clear line of separation between the organic and the augmentation. You haven’t replaced their basic being with a full-partner robotic symbiote. A cyborg is a blend of the two into a third kind of being. “

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Neither did we. That’s why we stopped fooling with them.”

  Coren scowled skeptically. “I thought Aurorans were the experts on robotic intelligence.”

  Ariel sat forward. “We are. That’s what I mean. This isn’t robotic intelligence. It’s...something else. And we couldn’t figure out wha
t.”

  His disdain faded to a guarded respect. Ariel sat back, mollified.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “A positronic brain,” Ariel said, “is basically a sensory-data receiver-collator that operates by a collection of discrete parameters arranged in constellations that shift in response to new data. That’s a gross simplification, but accurate enough for our purposes. We’re talking about a few billion discrete parameters and nanosecond processing time, and a complete lack of an unconscious, and a few other additions and subtractions that allow us to actually program it while granting it a modicum of creative responses--”

  Coren held up his hand. “I get the idea. I think. But that sounds like any other AI system.“

  “True. The key defining factor is in self-perception. A positronic brain is aware of itself. It is also aware of others as both distinct and collective entities that possess similar attributes. “

  “But--”

  “I’m using the word ‘aware’ in exactly the way you would use it to describe yourself. An AI, no matter how sophisticated, is not aware. The best of them have fully-mapped models of their own make-up and function: a reference, if you will, that tells them what they are. But the relationship is always and only one of data referencing data in a strict modular process. A positronic brain possesses a sense of Self that is independent of models--it will continue to perceive itself as a Self even with extensive reprogramming that might in any other respect change the nature of what it does and what it knows--and a basic understanding of Self in others. That opens a huge gulf between an AI and a positronic brain. For instance, you could never infiltrate a positronic brain the way your desk was infiltrated. An AI, unless specifically commanded, will regard that infiltration as a problem in programming. It’s just data. The more sophisticated the infiltration, the less likely it is to be aware of anything wrong. A positronic brain would immediately detect the attempt not as data but as damage. It would respond to it by treating it more or less as an infection. It would feel wrong. And if the infiltration were inimical to its loyalties, then the Three Laws would come into play. If it could not purge the infiltration, it would collapse. It would not tolerate a violation of its Self.”

  “Humans don’t even do that, “ Coren said.

  “Not as effectively, no,” Ariel agreed. “But we have far fewer hardwired parameters and far more self-reprogramming parameters. We have both a sub- and an un-conscious. We can dream, we can imagine, we can lie, we can hallucinate. Reality is a conditional set of perceptions. The plasticity of our minds enables us to function even through gross distortions in our initial parameters. We imagine more richly and much faster than we process information. We’re inextricably linked to our environment, but our perceptions of our environment are fluid. We can be fooled, deceived, manipulated. But it’s a two-way exchange--the manipulator will be manipulated in turn through the interaction--but we can still function in the midst of deception and illusion. We can set aside our moral restrictions if need be--and we define our own need--and resume them later. If we choose. Humans, in short, can remake who they are at will. A positronic brain cannot.”