Vor increased his kindjal’s speed and considered surprise tactics, knowing the update ship ahead of him would be captained by an inflexible robot. He was more than a match for any thinking machine’s methodical imagination.
Both ships pulled away from the embattled Earth. All across the dwindling blue-green sphere behind them, white-and-yellow fireclouds erupted in flashes that hurt Vor’s eyes. The major nuclear storm across the skies and land masses must have diverted the Armada’s attention from him. Nobody saw the vital importance of what he was trying to do.
The update ship climbed above the ecliptic, constantly increasing speed. The robot captain could endure accelerations that no human could survive. Nevertheless, Vorian shot after it, at the edge of consciousness, barely able to breathe against the crushing force. His League kindjal was faster than his prey—a mere update-class ship—and he closed the gap. With hands that seemed to weigh hundreds of kilograms, he powered up his ship’s weapons.
In the battle for Earth he had vaporized a dozen machine fighters, but in this case Vor meant only to cripple the targeted vessel. As an update ship, it would have only minimal armor, like the Dream Voyager. He intended to stop the vessel in space and board it.
As soon as his target came within range, high above the solar system and at the edge of the diffuse cometary halo, the fleeing robot captain went through a predictable set of maneuvers.
Vor opened fire. His precision shots damaged the exhaust ports so that the engines began to build toward an overload. Unable to properly vent its waste heat, the vessel would either explode or shut down.
As the wounded ship lurched forward, decelerating, Vor shot two warning projectiles across its bow. The shockwaves knocked the update ship off course. “Stand down and prepare to be boarded!”
The robot responded with surprising sarcasm. “I am aware of the various bodily orifices humans possess. Therefore, I invite you to take a power tool and insert it where the—”
“Old Metalmind?” Vor cried. “Let me come aboard. It’s Vorian Atreides.”
“That cannot be true. Vorian Atreides would never fire upon me.”
Vor transmitted his image, not surprised that Seurat would be captaining another update ship, since Omnius did not vary in his routines. Seurat’s mirror-smooth oval face emitted a colorful curse that Vor had often used after losing a military game.
Vor linked his craft with the damaged vessel. Knowing the risk, he entered via the main access hatch and marched through the confined interior toward the command bridge.
My definition of an army? Why, tame killers, of course!
—GENERAL AGAMEMNON,
Memoirs
From deep within his widely distributed citadels of power, the Omnius evermind watched over Earth. His mobile and stationery watcheyes recorded every facet of the bold human attack. He saw the tide of battle turn.
Omnius studied the trajectories of the thousands of spacecraft that came in, counted the numbers that his robotic defenders destroyed.
Even so, some of the atomics got through.
With a separate subset of calculational routines, Omnius maintained a tally of the thinking-machine vessels he had lost. Individually, those robot ships were expendable and could easily be replaced from stock materials and designs. Fortunately, Seurat’s update ship had broken through the descending masses of hrethgir vessels and escaped outward into the solar system. His important thoughts and decisions would be distributed among the Synchronized Worlds.
In spite of the sheer computational ability devoted to the question, Omnius still had not found a solution to the crisis by the time the first atomic warheads detonated above him. Nuclear air bursts sent out electromagnetic pulses that scoured the air and surface of Earth. Waves of energy spread, and in a flash obliterated every gelcircuitry network and thinking-machine mind, as if they were gasoline-soaked tissue paper touched by a spark.
Earth-Omnius was in the midst of an important thought when the shockwave consumed him.
IN THE PAST, the wisecracking robot captain had carried no private weapons. Vor, however, carried an electronic scrambler, a short-range circuitry-damaging device designed for hand-to-hand combat against thinking machines.
“So, you’ve come back to join me, after all,” Seurat said. “Bored with your humans already? They aren’t as fascinating as I am, are they?” He simulated a raucous laugh that Vor had heard many times before. “Did you know that your father considers you a traitor? Perhaps you now feel guilty for deactivating me, stealing the Dream Voyager and—”
“None of that, old Metalmind,” Vor said. “This is another game you have lost. I can’t allow you to deliever that update.”
Seurat chuckled again. “Ah, humans and their silly fantasies.”
“Nevertheless, we persist in our hopeless causes.” Vor raised the electronic scrambler. “And sometimes we win.”
Seurat said, “You were my friend, Vorian. Remember all the jokes I told you? In fact, I have a new one. If you make a cymek out of a mule’s brain, what do you—”
Vor fired the electronic scrambler. Static arcs thrashed out like thin ropes, wrapping around Seurat’s flexible body core of organic-polymer skin and reinforced fibers. The robot shuddered, as if from a seizure. Vor had adjusted the settings so that the burst shut down Seurat’s systems, but did not destroy his brain core. That would have been tantamount to murder.
“The joke is on you, old friend,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
While Seurat remained frozen at his captain’s station, Vor searched the update ship until he found the sealed gelsphere, a complete reproduction of every thought Earth-Omnius had recorded just before the Armada attack.
Holding the shimmering compact data sphere, Vor took one last look at his stricken robot friend, then left the crippled update ship, sealing it behind him. He could not bring himself to destroy it. In any case, the ship was no longer a threat to humanity.
In his kindjal, Vor pulled away, leaving the thinking-machine vessel to drift in the vacuum of space, powerless and lost. It would wander far away from Earth and into the deep freeze of the solar system, to be lost forever in the cometary cloud.
IN THE AFTERMATH, while Earth glowed with simmering atomic fires, Segundo Harkonnen gathered the mismatched remnants of his assault force. They had suffered tremendous losses, much higher than they had anticipated.
“It will take months just to scribe the names of those who sacrificed their lives here, Cuarto Powder,” Xavier said to his adjutant. “And much longer to mourn them.”
“All enemy ships and facilities are destroyed, sir,” Powder responded. “We have accomplished our objective.”
“Yes, Jaymes.” He felt no elation over the victory. Only sadness. And anger toward Vorian Atreides.
When Agamemnon’s son finally returned from deep space, the segundo dispatched a squadron of kindjals to escort him back under heavy guard. Seething, he shut down the Holtzman shields so the kindjals could bring in Vorian’s ship. Many of the fighter pilots wanted to shoot him down as soon as his ship came within range, but Xavier forbade it. “We’ll put the bastard on trial for desertion, perhaps treason.”
Segundo Harkonnen strode into the docking bay on the ballista’s lowest level, to the inside deck where the ships were being brought in with slide cranes and extruding hooks, all manually controlled by human operators.
The lean, dark-haired Vorian stepped boldly out of his battered vessel, looking surprisingly triumphant. The audacity of the man! Uniformed pilots surrounded Vor and brusquely checked him for weapons. The turncoat appeared irritated by their roughness, and protested when they took a package away from him, along with his sidearm.
Amazingly, his face lit up as soon as he saw Xavier. “So Earth-Omnius is destroyed? The attack was a success?”
“No thanks to you,” Xavier said. “Vorian Atreides, I order you confined to the brig for the duration of our return to Salusa Secundus. There, you will face a League tribunal for your cowardly
actions.”
But the young man did not look frightened. With an expression of disbelief, he pointed to the package that one of the guards had. “Perhaps we should show the tribunal that as well?”
Vor’s gray eyes were wary, but he grinned as Xavier unwound the plazwrap and popped open the seal to reveal a metallic ball that seemed made of gelatinous silver.
“It’s a complete copy of Omnius,” Vor said. “I intercepted and neutralized an update ship that was about to escape.” He shrugged. “If I had allowed it to get away, all the other everminds would have received the complete intelligence of this attack. In exchange for all of our dead, Omnius would have lost nothing, and the other Synchronized Worlds would know about our Holtzman shields and our tactics. This entire operation would have been pointless. But I stopped the update ship.”
Xavier looked at Vor, stunned. The surface of the orb was pliable to his touch, as if made of living tissue. The League had never imagined such a boon. This alone was worth the gigantic attack on Earth. The horrific loss of life. If Vor was telling the truth.
“I’m sure League intelligence officers will have a field day with this,” Vor said, beaming. “Not to mention”—he added with a quirk of his eyebrow—“what a valuable hostage Omnius will make for us.”
THE BATTERED SHIPS of the unified Armada departed from the solar system, which was now devoid of murderous thinking machines.
Vor took one last look at wounded Earth, remembering the lush blue-and-green landscape and wispy clouds. This had once been a fabulously beautiful world, the birthplace of the human race, a showpiece of natural wonders.
But by the time Xavier ordered the fleet to set course for home, the planet was nothing more than a radioactive slag heap. It would take a long time for anything to ever live there again.
The logic which is sound for a finite system is not necessarily sound for an infinite universe. Theories, like living things, do not always scale up.
—ERASMUS,
secret records (from the Omnius databank)
On Corrin, the robot’s villa followed a similar pattern to that of its counterpart on Earth, with both habitat and laboratory complexes designed by the creative mind of Erasmus. The slave pens behind the tall house were enclosed by high sandstone walls and wrought-iron gates, all topped by electro-barbs and energy-spike fields.
It felt very much like home to him. Erasmus looked forward to beginning work.
The enclosures teemed with humanity, nearly a thousand sweating bodies performing exercise routines beneath a red-giant sun that filled the sky like a huge bloodstain. It was a sweltering afternoon, but the slaves did not rest or complain, knowing that the robots would only punish them if they did.
The erudite thinking machine observed their daily routines from a bell tower on the south quadrant of his property, a favorite spot of his. Down in a pen, two old men collapsed under the glaring heat, and one of their downtrodden companions rushed to help them up. Thus, Erasmus counted three punishable infractions: the two who faltered and the good Samaritan. Reasons were of no importance.
Erasmus had noted that the slaves grew increasingly agitated when he did not respond to their transgressions with immediate discipline. He found it amusing to let the anticipation and fear grow within them, and then note how agitation caused them to make even more mistakes. Human behavior was the same on Corrin as on Earth, and he was glad to continue his experiments and studies without interruption.
He pressed a button, causing automatic weapons to fire capriciously into one of the pens, killing or injuring dozens of slaves. Confused and panicked, the survivors tried to get away, but had nowhere to run. The fences were high and electrified. Some of the captives pushed their fellows in front of them for protection, while others played dead or hid under bodies. He continued to fire, but this time aimed so that he didn’t hit any more of them.
Yes, it was very gratifying to be continuing his research once more. He still had so much to learn.
An hour passed with no more gunfire, and people began to move around again, more cautiously than before. They pushed the bodies to one side and huddled together, not realizing what was going on. Some of them became openly defiant, shouting in the direction of the automatic weapons and waving their fists. With careful settings, Erasmus shot their arms off, one by one, and watched the victims writhe on the ground. Even the bravest humans could be reduced to bleeding, blithering fools.
“I see you are playing with your toys again,” the Corrin-Omnius said, from a viewing screen to the left of Erasmus in the bell tower.
“Everything I do is for a purpose,” Erasmus said. “I am learning more and more.”
The Corrin-Omnius did not know how badly the robot’s wager and the loyalty test had turned out with his counterpart on Earth. Erasmus had learned a significant lesson from the wildfire of rebellion he had inadvertently fostered, but the data had raised a host of new questions. He did not want the evermind to engage in a full-scale war of eradication, committing genocide against all human captives on the Synchronized Worlds—even if he had to discreetly keep certain subsets of information to himself.
Even if he had to lie.
A fascinating prospect. Erasmus was not accustomed to thinking in such terms.
The main gate swung open, and robotic guards removed the bodies of the dead and injured, then prodded a new group of slaves into the pens. One of the newcomers, a large sallow-skinned man, whirled abruptly and tackled the nearest robot, clawing at the structural fibers and trying to disrupt the protected neurelectric circuitry. Bloodying his fingers to break a seal, the slave grabbed a handful of mobility components, causing the robot to stagger. Two other robots fell on the man, and in a macabre burlesque of what the slave had done, one of them slammed steel fingers into his chest, cracking through skin, cartilage, and the sternum to rip his heart out.
“They are no more than stupid animals,” Omnius said, derisively.
“Animals cannot plot, scheme, and deceive,” Erasmus said. “These slaves no longer seem so complacent. I detect seeds of rebellion, even here.”
“No revolt could ever succeed on Corrin,” said the voice of Omnius.
“One can never know everything, dear Omnius—not even you. And that is why we must remain eternally curious. While I can estimate crowd behavior to a reasonable extent, I cannot consistently predict what any given human will do next. This is a supreme challenge.”
“It is self-evident that humans are a mass of contradictions. No model can reliably explain their behavior.”
Erasmus gazed down at the slave pens. “Still, they are our enemies, and we must understand them. Only in that way can we assure our dominance.”
The robot felt a strange surge in his sensory simulators. Anger? Frustration? On impulse, he ripped a small tympanic bell out of its housing in the tower and hurled it against the floor with a discordant clang. He found the sound…unsettling.
“Why did you damage that bell?” Omnius asked. “I have never seen you commit so unusual an act before.”
Erasmus further assessed his feelings. He had seen humans do such things, releasing pent-up emotions in the form of a tantrum. From his perspective, though, he felt no sense of satisfaction. “It was…just one of my experiments.”
Erasmus still had much to learn in his quest to absorb the essence of human nature, which he hoped to use as a springboard from which machine sophistication would rise even higher, reaching the zenith of existence. He gripped the tower railing with powerful, steely fingers, breaking off a chunk and letting it tumble to the pavement below. “I shall explain it to you later.”
After observing his slaves for another moment, he turned back to the screen. “It would not be wise to exterminate all humans. Instead, through more intense subjugation methods, we could break their willingness and ability to resist.”
The evermind, always enjoying the debate with Erasmus, delighted in catching a flaw. “But if we do that, Erasmus, are we not changing the fundament
al character of the humans you wish to study? Is the observer not affecting the experiment?”
“An observer always affects the experiment. But I would rather change the subjects than destroy them. I will make my own decisions with respect to my humans here on Corrin.”
Omnius finally said, “I do not understand you any more than I understand humans.”
“I know that, Omnius. It will always be your weakness.”
The robot looked fondly down at his enslaved humans as his guards carried off the corpses and the injured. Erasmus thought of all the wonderful things he had learned from this species…and how much more he could discover, if granted the opportunity. Their collective lives were balanced on a tightrope over a dark, bottomless chasm, and Erasmus stood with them. He would not give them up easily.
On the bright side, he saw that in his absence, two more sets of twins had been born. As always, the possibilities were endless.
Human life is not negotiable.
—SERENA BUTLER
In honor of the bittersweet nuclear victory on Earth, the League Worlds hosted a massive celebration for their returning heroes and a touching farewell for their fallen dead.
The battered ships had limped back after their long voyage, while faster scouts and couriers raced back to Salusa Secundus bearing the news and letting the League know what to expect when the Armada arrived, scarred and diminished.
But the Earth-Omnius was destroyed, and the thinking machines had suffered a terrible blow. They clung to their triumph.
In the hot and humid arena, Vorian Atreides felt sticky with perspiration in his dress uniform. No matter the weather, the people would want to see him and Segundo Harkonnen in full regalia. Xavier stood beside him now on the reviewing stand as Viceroy Butler and Serena quieted the crowd, demanding their full attention.
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