Chapter 9
Karter and Lex stood in a stainless steel service elevator, silently waiting. The unstable host scratched at the socket where his arm should be, a vaguely distracted look on his face.
“So . . . what? The arm is running on automatic right now?” Lex asked.
“Wireless control.”
“So you’re calibrating that thing blind?”
“There’s a camera on it.”
“And where’s the video--”
“It is being broadcast into my eye,” he answered impatiently. “Look, let’s get all of that out of the way first. I lost my left arm at the shoulder and my left leg below the knee in two different explosions. The arm’s got a camera; it is wireless, with a half-mile range indoors and who knows how far outdoors, it can operate semi-autonomously, the hand has programmable fingerprints, a vibration motor, data interface capabilities--”
“Wait. A vibration motor in your hand? Why?”
“I’m a man, and I’m alone on the planet. Figure it out. Back to the prostheses. I was going to put wheels or something on the false foot, but then I’d keep busting my shoe, so basically the leg is just a leg. There’s a storage compartment, though. The eye and most of the right side of my head got wrecked by a coolant leak. The guts of my ear are still natural, but the flappy part on the outside, along with my scalp and eye, are replaced. The eye has video recording and playback, heads-up display, network connectivity, the works. Aside from that, most of my internal organs are either cybernetic or synthetic. No bells and whistles. I don’t like to tinker with the vitals.”
“Most of your organs? Seriously?”
“Yep. One kidney, my liver, both lungs, my heart, I don’t even have a gall bladder. I don’t have an appendix, either, but I replaced it with an organ that synthesizes caffeine. The fact that I didn’t have one already is a glaring evolutionary oversight, if you ask me. Then there’s the spleen, the pancreas . . . Hell, in many legal territories, I don’t count as alive. I’m on permanent life support. It just happens to be internal.”
“Hang on. If your arm was cybernetic, why did it bleed?”
“Oh, that’s the beauty part. All of the mechanical bits run on blood glucose fuel cells with battery backup. That way I don’t have to worry about running wires and charging things and what not, but it wreaks havoc with my blood sugar if I try anything fancy. And if I don’t remember to pump the blood back out of the limb before I remove it, I start to get a little woozy. Gotta work on that.”
The elevator gave a pathetic little plink and the doors opened. Immediately, Lex was hit by a number of things. For one, this area was much less antiseptic and lifeless than the rest of the facility. It was subtle, but there was a disorganization, a lived-in quality, that indicated this was where he spent most of his time. Another interesting aspect was the almost museum-like presentation. The hall that greeted him was just as wide as those on the first floor, and was likewise lined with doors and display windows, but each one bore a lighted and labeled shelf. The shelves held rough, homemade-looking devices, surrounded with images, schematics, warnings, and manuals, all written in pencil.
One thing thrust the rest of these observations aside and demanded to be addressed first. The smell.
It wasn’t strictly a bad smell, but it certainly wasn’t a good one, and there was a lot of it. Lex didn’t have anything in his mental tool kit to compare the odor to. It was definitely biological, but nothing that would be found in a locker room or bathroom. Not a human one, anyway. Whatever it was, it seemed to lay low, slipping under the nose’s radar until it got deep into the back, then asserting itself to the point that Lex could almost taste it.
If Karter noticed it, he didn’t let on.
“Welcome to the Hall of Rejects,” Karter said, with a magisterial wave of his arm, “It isn’t usually this crowded, but my usual beta testers aren’t available right now, so nothing is making it to 1.0, which means nothing is making it to 0.1, so things start to pile up all along the line.”
“What happened to your beta testers? They quit?”
“No. They’re serving multiple consecutive life sentences for committing war crimes.”
“You let war criminals test your stuff?”
“Only one of them was a war criminal beforehand. The rest became war criminals for using my stuff. It’s their own fault. I put it right in the EULA. The user assumes responsibility for any interstellar treaties that may be violated by the application of the device in a field environment.”
“What the hell sort of person puts a clause like that in a user agreement?”
“A prudent one. I’ve got pretty much all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I’m also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that’s a nasty one--tectonic inversion--”
“Okay, I get it. Um . . . before we get started, what’s that smell?”
“What smell?” he asked, sniffing for a moment before nodding, “Oh, right. The Funk.”
“Yeah, what’s causing that?”
Karter looked at him blankly. “I just said. The Funk.” He turned and raised his voice into a piercing falsetto. “So-o-o-lb-y-y!”
Almost instantly. there came a tapping sound from around the corner of the hallway. Something emerged a moment later. At first, Lex thought it was a smallish black and white dog. As it came closer, it became clear that if it was a dog, it wasn’t any breed he’d ever seen before. The creature was entirely black and white, with a wide, bushy tail nearly as large as the rest of its body. It had a very fox-like head, though a bit large and in strictly black and white rather than the traditional black, white, and red. Its eyes were a bit too large, as well, and silvery-tan in color. Twin white lines ran down its back and along its tail to a white tip.
It tapped its way excitedly along the hallway toward them, pointed ears perked and twisted forward with interest. Whatever the creature was, it was almost maddeningly cute. It looked more like the latest in a line of stuffed animals that his niece would beg for until they completely covered her bed.
When it got close, Karter crouched down with his hand on his knee, babbling to it in baby talk. It pranced around him, a look of wide-eyed, open-mouthed glee on its face. After collecting a few scratches and pats from Karter, the energetic little thing turned its attention to Lex, who took a cautious step back. It sniffed and scurried around him for a few laps, slightly oversized paws constantly in motion. Finally, it sprang from the floor to the young freelancer’s shoulder in a single, deceivingly effortless leap.
“Gah, oh, jeez, get it off!” Lex blurted in one of the less manly reactions of his life.
It continued to investigate his head, as well as make it exceptionally clear that it was indeed the epicenter of the potent aroma that filled the hall, until Karter stepped over to Lex. The critter moved to the offered shoulder, then draped itself like a feather boa across his neck, fluffy tail hanging down over the missing arm, head alert and inquisitive on the other side. It sat there with a comfort and casualness that illustrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was its preferred location.
“What is that thing?” Lex asked.
“It is a fox/skunk cross. A Funk. This little guy is technically out of beta, but I’m not planning on taking it to market. I kind of like having the only one.”
“So you do gene splicing?”
“Pff. No. Gene splicing is clumsy and stupid. If you do anything beyond swapping out one chemical for another, it gets ridiculously hard to produce a viable creature. No, I back-tracked foxes and skunks to their common ancestor, sequ
enced the DNA, then developed an environmental/genetic simulator program and ran it through a few million years of evolution a couple of hundred times, tweaking the environment until I got a smooth union of the two. Then I ran a few hundred thousand iterations of selective breeding to up the intelligence and add a few other traits I was looking for, exported the resulting DNA, synthesized a sperm and egg, fertilized, incubated, and presto! Solby.”
Lex blinked a few times. “Why a fox and a skunk?”
“Enormous pun potential,” he explained, fishing the burrito out of his pocket and holding it up for the creature to munch on.
“You created an entirely new species because it would lead to good jokes.”
“No. I did it because it would lead to bad jokes. For instance, Solby is short for Soul Brother. Get it?”
“No.”
“Uncultured swine,” Karter said bitterly, “You go look up the greatest composer of the last four hundred years and then we’ll talk. Horrific musical ignorance aside, though, take a look around and see if anything looks interesting to you.”
“Look, I really don’t want--”
“I’ll fix your ship.”
“Really?”
“Sure. The salvage bots are carting back what’s left of it now. You do enough work for me, I’ll get your ship up and running. You do more, I’ll do more.”
It was a tempting offer. Lex wasn’t usually a sentimental guy, but he’d put a lot of time into that ship. It had gotten him through a few rough spots, and he owed a fair amount of his good reputation to the performance he’d squeezed out of it. The thought of getting it back was tempting. The thought of it not costing him an arm and a leg was even better. He glanced at his host and instantly wished he’d selected a different metaphor. The lunatic was staring off into space, eyes darting back and forth as he fiddled with some machinery half a building away.
Still, if Lex was careful, this could be well worth it. He looked over the contents of the hall, pacing along. There was a lot to see, and in a staggering variety. They all had one thing in common, though. Each had a handmade quality to it. Enclosures were boxy and screwed together. Wires and tubes were exposed. Duct tape made an appearance in virtually all of them, often to the point that nothing else was visible. Some things were fairly obvious--weapons, hand tools, appliances, and other things of that nature. Others were completely unidentifiable, or so innocuous it was difficult to determine what could possibly be worth testing. One such device looked to be little more than a set of thick, bright blue work gloves with a lumpy bundle attached to the wrists.
“What are these?” Lex asked.
“Just a second. Finishing up . . . Okay, Ma, put the power module through the paces and let me know the test results when they’re done. Also, fab up a fresh arm to replace the one I blew up.”
“The arm is already replaced. Testing on the module will begin shortly,” the computer replied.
“Good,” Karter said. He turned to Lex. “Now, what were you jabbering about?”
“Um . . . Before we go into that . . . what’s the deal with, uh . . . ‘Ma’?” he asked, adding finger quotes to the name.
“Oh, Ma has been out of beta for years. No more testing needed.”
“Yeah, but what’s her story?”
“Oh, she was my attempt at Altruistic AI,” he said with a shrug. “See, I’d tried the whole ‘Three Rules of Robotics’ method, but it was problematic. Full of loopholes and logical pitfalls. The alternative is Altruistic AI. You teach a computer to be generally friendly, generous, helpful--stuff like that. That way, when faced with an issue that doesn’t fall neatly into black and white territory, it will be able to discern the lighter shade of gray. The goal with Ma was to produce an AI control system that was nurturing. It didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, though. She can be kind of petty.”
“It is not petty to expect appropriate treatment,” the voice stated flatly.
“So . . . she has feelings?”
“Ish,” he said, with a waggle of his hand. “Algorithmic approximations thereof.”
“Oh . . . Why did you name her Ma? I guess because of that nurturing thing?”
“She’s an enormous nag, and she does all of the housework. What would you call her?”
Lex stared at him blankly. “Wow. That’s . . . That’s a very antiquated view of women.”
“It doesn’t count as sexist if it’s against a computer.”
An automated device, similar to the one that had performed surgery on Lex, emerged from a nearby access panel. This one was little more than a mechanized gripper, and it was currently holding another prosthetic arm.
“Here is your arm, Mr. Dee,” the voice said, dropping the arm on the floor as he reached for it.
Karter leaned down and fetched it without comment, the creature on his shoulders flicking its tail out of the way to allow him to click it back into place.
“Right, so, you were asking about the glove,” he said. “Kinetic capacitor demo unit. Modern inertial inhibitors cancel out inertia, but I figure that’s wasteful, so I tried to see if I could absorb it and store it for later. I didn’t quite achieve it, but I got close.”
The inventor slipped a glove onto his false hand and paced into the room behind the shelf, where a number of pressure gauges and gym-style punching bags were set up.
“See, when active, these suckers soak up kinetic energy,” he explained, tapping the bundle at the base of the glove, and slowly heaving it in a circle, like a cartoon character winding up for a punch. It looked like it was taking all of the strength he could muster to do so. “Soaking up kinetic energy makes them very hard to move, but that tapers off as they fill up.”
Steadily, the circling arm moved a bit faster until it seemed unaffected.
“Once it is full, you pull back, clench the fist to prime the discharge, then put a little momentum behind it, relative to your starting velocity. Relative was the hard part. I have to filter out most, but not all, motion. Otherwise, activating this thing on a moving train--or a rotating planet, for that matter--would have serious consequences.”
He began a punching motion. At first, it was normal, but after a few inches it seemed to accelerate, and when he struck the padded pressure gauge panel, the whole refrigerator-sized contraption rolled backward. When he tried to withdraw his hand, he had to tug with all of his might, and even still it just crept through the air.
“And therein lies the problem. I can sort of manipulate the charge speed, but the discharge is always all at once. Not terribly useful. And it might screw your arm up pretty bad if you were to throw a punch without something to hit within arm’s length. Wanna give it a try?”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t have a metal hand. Punching with that kind of force would turn my fist into gravel.”
“Yeah, it would. Which is why I created this nano-lattice cloth. Pump some juice into it and it goes rigid. Structural strength falls somewhere in the high-gauge stainless steel range.”
“Nice. I guess you probably made a killing with that stuff already.”
“What, the cloth? The cloth is a side product. Why would anyone want that?”
“Well, if I’d had a flight suit made of that, you wouldn’t have had to fix that hole in my leg.”
Karter looked at Lex flatly for a moment, then glanced off thoughtfully, and finally shrugged, grabbing a nearby pad and scribbling ‘Nano-lattice flight suits.’
“Right. Next.”
The pair wandered out into the hall again. After looking over the offerings some more, he lingered upon an odd bundle of wires and antennae, all wrapped in a layer of duct tape and sporting a set of shoulder straps.
“What is this, some kind of jet pack?”
“No, no. Here, watch,” he said, scooping up Solby and depositing him on Lex’s shoulder.
“No, come on! This thing reeks!” Lex complained, as the creature cuddled around his neck and licked his ear.
Karter strapped on the device and twisted
a knob on the side a few degrees. Nothing happened. Lex stared at him for a few seconds, then glanced around, starting to feel foolish. Steadily, he began to wonder what he’d been doing alone in the room to begin with. Hadn’t there been someone in here a minute ago? The pilot paced around the room, leaning out the door, absentmindedly scratching the fuzzy little creature on his shoulder, and generally trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing.
An instant later, Karter twisted the knob again and Lex suddenly noticed he had been standing there the whole time. Evidently Solby noticed as well, as he was eager to leap back to his master’s shoulder as soon as the device was removed.
“What . . . what just happened? Were you here? Wait . . . You were here,” Lex said, confused. “What did you do?”
“I call it the mental cloak. This device broadcasts a pair of psionic frequencies that stimulate the recognition center of the brain. It makes any sufficiently developed mind dismiss the person wearing it as though they were supposed to be there. You know that they are there, but it doesn’t warrant your attention. Sort of the same way as you can always see your nose, but your brain just tunes it out.”
“You can’t always see your . . . oh, wow.”
“Uh-huh. At full power, it works on everyone in a twenty-five kilometer radius. Metal and other infrastructure severely decreases the range, but . . . you’re still hung up on the nose thing, aren’t you?”
“It’s mind-blowing,” Lex said, darting his eyes back and forth. “But, anyway, your thing is amazing! What’s wrong with it as it is that it needs more testing? It worked perfectly. And it would do it to everyone in a twenty-five kilometer radius?”
“Yes, but there are tons of flaws. It only really works to camouflage humanoids. You could strap it to a tank, but the effect is much weaker. Don’t know why. Probably psychological. Also, it doesn’t work on electronics, so security cams and such still see you, and people looking at you remotely still see you as long as they are outside of the range. The damn thing weighs forty kilos, so it isn’t really what you’d call portable. Oh, and at full power, it causes seizures.”
“Causes seizures? In who!?”
“Everyone in a twenty-five kilometer radius,” he repeated.
“You . . . didn’t turn it up to full just now, did you?”
“No.”
“Good. Okay. Seizures. Yeah, I can see how a device that might accidentally give seizures to an entire city would be a tough sell. I guess you could always just sell it as a weapon of mass destruction,” Lex offered with a nervous chuckle.
“Meh,” he said with a shrug, “there are easier ways to cause mass brain trauma. But, then, I guess you can never have too many ways to skin a cat.”
He scratched down ‘Seizure Bomb’ on his pad and moved on. Lex made a mental note to choose his words wisely. The pair worked their way through a series of inventions with defects ranging from low battery life to massive radiological risk.
Karter must have been unbelievably single-minded in their creation, because even the most harmless observations seemed to inspire him. Granted, the inspirations tended heavily toward the destructive, such as the prototype humidifier that was now well on its way to being an ‘oxidation accelerator,’ which evidently had something to do with causing rust.
After an hour or two, the tour of the Hall of Rejects was nearly complete.
“Well, it just goes to show you,” the inventor said, as he flipped through the pages of notes and ideas. “It is easy to think outside the box when you aren’t smart enough to know where the box is.”
“Uh-huh, you’re welcome,” Lex said. “What’s that?”
At the end of the hallway was a massively reinforced section of wall. It had the sort of door Lex would expect on a nuclear reactor, and some sort of hazardous materials suit hung conspicuously outside.
“Oh, come on, check it out!” he said, almost excitedly.
“No, thanks. As a rule, I stay away from rooms that require an outfit like that.”
“The suit’s a leftover from when I ran this thing off of an isolated power supply. We’re hooked into the mains now. No more danger. At least, not the kind that suit would help with.”
“See, that doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
“Relax! I want to show you this. It is one of my favorite dead ends. Let me give you one little demo and you are good for a complete rebuild on that ship, plus upgrades. Okay? Either that or I’ll kill you if you don’t. Whatever you find more motivating.”
“Upgrades, you say?”
“Or death.”
“Fine.”
“Excellent. Ma! Open the door to the magic mirror and start the power up sequence!”
“Yes, sir,” the voice replied.
Bolts the size of Lex’s thigh began to steadily unscrew themselves on the door. Behind it, an ominous hum began to throb with an increasing ferocity like the beginning of every techno song ever made. Eventually, the restraints finished retracting and the ponderous door swung open like that of a bank vault. Instantly, the sound of the pounding hum became ten times louder and was joined by the whine of cooling fans and the random click of large electrical relays.
“You should inform your guest of the safety precautions,” the computer’s voice sounded over the din.
“You do it,” Karter barked as he jogged into the room.
The chamber was tiny in comparison to the others. Its walls were covered with cabling, control panels, and gauges. Most of the floor space was dominated by a machine about the size of a large car. The bottom third of it was metallic brick. The sides of it were mostly featureless, besides a seemingly gratuitous amount of bolts and welds. The top was bristling with a nail bed of what appeared to be black spikes, each studded with glowing lights. The front had a ring, nearly as tall as Lex, bolted securely into it, with nodes at regular intervals that crackled with power. Behind the ring were four missile-like cylinders, two stacks of two that ran the length of the apparatus and pointed gaping open ends at the ring.
“Please observe caution in the vicinity of the magic mirror,” the computer began. “It is a dangerous tool. Do not stand directly in front of the magic mirror. A red line is painted on the floor below you. This is the minimum safe distance line. Do not cross it. Please secure any loose clothing. Any clothing or jewelry passing the minimum safe distance line is a serious hazard. For maximum safety, please secure yourself to--”
“That’s plenty,” Karter said from behind the machine.
He was busy plugging in cables roughly the size of fire hoses, and with similar connectors. There were five of them. Each time he clicked another into place, lights on the device flared and the lights of the rest of the building dimmed. Finally, he sidled past the machine, grabbed a rung on one side of the door, and smiled.
“Are you sure about--” Lex began.
“Let ‘er rip, Ma!”
There was the echoing, mechanical clunk of a huge relay actuating. The lights dimmed, the throbbing power sound faded, and the fans slowed. For a few seconds, there was only comparative silence and the dim glow of the various indicator LEDs. A moment later the lights and fans were restored and the various noises returned to full volume, now joined by a crackle of power and an odd, hard-to-place hiss. In the center of the ring, which was now wreathed in pale blue light, there was a tiny black dot. Strangely, the view of the machine through the ring seemed closer, like the ring was a magnifying glass. Around the machine, the cables on the walls all seemed to pull slightly toward the center of the ring, and the whole of the facility seemed to tilt toward it. Lex leaned back and held a little tighter to the door’s rung.
“Ta-da!” he said.
“I don’t get it. You created the least efficient magnifying glass in the universe?”
“Ma! Show us an external view!”
The view thorough the ring began to shift. It was pulling back, like a camera on a dolly, until it swept past them and continued down the hall. Lex turned to see what was
viewing them, but there was nothing there. He looked back to the “mirror” to see the view retreating further down the hallway. When it reached the wall, it continued, flickering to blackness when the viewpoint passed into solid metal and stone. Then it moved off to the outside.
“Uh . . .”
“This sucker, in its current state, can give me a view of anything within roughly 0.05 astronomical units. I can even dial it a few days into the past or future. Give us a demo, Ma.”
The view swiveled toward the sky, and abruptly seemed to show a time lapse. Thin, wispy clouds rocketed across the sky, the fuzzy white disk of the sun flowed from horizon to horizon. As it did, the view became far less focused and the whir of fans increased. He watched his ship crashing in reverse in the distance, then blinked as the sun began to whip in the other direction, ticking forward in time to replay the crash and continue onward. The once-clear image became an unrecognizable blur, with a vast blotch of darkness high in the sky, then collapsed into the black dot in the center. Whatever that dot was, it was larger now, having grown from a pinpoint to a small, featureless black marble.
“That’s . . . that’s remarkable. How does it work?”
“Using a proprietary blend of high-velocity particles and gravitational interaction. In theory, if I dialed up the power and tuned the filtering algorithms enough, I could show any location in the universe at any point in time.”
“How the hell is this still considered a reject!?”
“It is taking about ninety-seven percent of the planetary power output to pull off this stunt. Seeing even to the next star system would take us into supernova levels of energy. That and the fact that those cylinders there are high-intensity particle beam cannons, and the dot is an artificially stabilized miniature black hole that grows exponentially during operation. Basically, this is four siege weapons firing at a weapon of mass destruction. Not very marketable.”
“Approaching critical levels,” the computer warned.
“Yeah, shut ‘er down.”
“Please evacuate the area, and prepare for hawking radiation discharge,” Ma warned.
The pair of men hustled out of the room. Lex watched as the door started to close.
“Okay, so you owe me a fully rebuilt ship and . . .” Lex began, slowly realizing that Karter was still running at a fairly brisk pace down the hall.
He stopped talking and started running. It is a lesson he learned pretty quickly when spending time around a race track: If someone is running, follow first, then ask questions. It had saved him from being pancaked by rogue hoversleds on more than one occasion, and it turned out it was a pretty good policy for life in general. After closing the gap between them, Lex and Karter turned a corner in the hallway, where the older man caught his breath. A moment later, there was a soft clap and a wave of heat wafted down the hall.
“Why’d you run?” Karter asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me to run?”
“Because that wouldn’t have killed you. It just would have singed you a little. You big baby.”
“Well then why did you run?”
“I didn’t want to get singed.”
“Attention. The salvage vehicles have returned with the remains of Mr. Alexander’s ship,” Ma alerted.
“Great! Let’s go check it out!” Karter said, rubbing his hands together.
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