Nothing But Blue Skies

by Tom Holt

  He switched the monitor on and gazed at the screen in near despair. The problem was that he didn’t really have a clue what he was looking for. Get into the computer system, his optimistic soul had urged him, and you can disable the dampening field, the dragon can turn back into a dragon and smack shit out of these maniacs, and we can all go . . .

  (Home. Away. Whatever. We can all get out of this particular nightmare, to a place where at least we’ll have an apparent choice as to what form our next nightmare will take.)

  . . . Home. He wanted very badly to go home. Not that he liked home terribly much, but the number of places he actually did like could be counted on the fingers of one hand by a twice-convicted Iranian burglar. He wanted to go home. He wanted to quit the weather business. He wanted to get back together with Zelda. (Where the hell had that one come from? Oh, never mind, it was there now, and no more hopelessly unattainable than the rest of his aspirations.) Curiously, although he was starving hungry, he didn’t particularly want a drink. Hooray, he thought, I’m cured. Just in time for me to die, but so what, it’s a start.

  The screen was, of course, filled with gibberish, but for all he knew it was meant to look like that. Telling good computer gibberish from bad computer gibberish wasn’t one of his most keenly burnished skills. Just for fun, he hit ENTER, and leaned back in the surprisingly comfortable chair to see if anything happened.

  It did.

  First, the arms of the chair grabbed his wrists and stuck needles into the palms of his hands. Something like a steel tea cosy plunged down from nowhere over his face and gave him a big sloppy dry kiss with an array of rubber suction pads. Something else grabbed his feet. He was half expecting someone to say ‘Guess who?’

  Me.

  He couldn’t jump in his chair, because he was held down as firmly as interest rates in an election year; but he could do the mental equivalent.

  Sorry. I startled you. Didn’t mean to do that. I s’pose I shouldn’t play tricks on people.

  The voice was coming from inside his head; he could almost feel the exact place, midway between his ears, about two inches in from the slight bulge on the back of his skull. It was a cutesy little-girl-lost voice with that curious semi-American accent usually found only in digital telephone-answering machines made in Korea. It irritated him profoundly.

  Don’t be like that. I’m sure we can be friends, even though I’m a whole lot smarter’n you.

  He tried to speak, but his voice had been cut off, and Miss Pacific Rim 2001 was squatting in the part of his brain where he turned his thoughts into words, with the door locked and the TV turned up loud.

  You’re mean. If you didn’t want to play, why did you come in? It occurred to him that that was valid enough, from her point of view. He regretted his outburst of pique.

  ’S okay. Now can we be friends? You’re different from the regular guy. I like him a lot, but he’s not much fun. All he thinks about is work, work, work. Work’s okay, I guess, but I like to play. Can we play?

  A noughts-and-crosses grid appeared in front of his eyes. It was glowing pink. It occurred to him that She probably liked pink.

  A lot. It’s my favorite colour. You go first.

  He imagined what it would be like if there was a neat pink cross in the central box. It appeared at once; then all the other boxes were filled with flickering pink light, as noughts and crosses flashed on and off, thousands of flashes a second.

  You won 614,779. I won 423,996. That’s the number of possible permutations of the game of noughts and crosses starting from that particular opening gambit, She explained, in a stiff, reciting-from-memory voice. Okay, my turn to start.

  There was another pink maelstrom. It made Gordon feel sick inside his head, which was no fun at all.

  Huh. You’ve won. Again. 512,664 to 388,992. It’s no fun if you win all the time.

  He thought contrite thoughts, and reflected on the fact that he didn’t really want to play any more, because the flashing lights upset him.

  All right, She sighed. S’pose that’s okay. Can we play something else? Doesn’t have to have flashing lights in it. How ’bout battleships?

  It occurred to Gordon that although battleships was a fine game, one that he’d enjoyed a lot when he was a child, he would feel rather easier in his mind (and therefore better able to play battleships) if he knew who She was and what was going on.

  You mean you don’t know? Snng! You’re weird. Everybody knows who I am.

  Gordon reflected on the obvious fallacy in that statement.

  Everybody ’cept you. Okay. I’m Lucy. Well, actually I’m Lucyfor-Windows-tee-em, but my friends call me Lucy. You can call me Lucy if vou like.

  Pleasure at meeting Lucy welled forth from the inner core of Gordon’s being. In limited quantities.

  Pleased to meet you too, Gordon. You mind if I call you Uncle Gordon? Sounds better that way.

  The name ‘Uncle Gordon’ struck Gordon as being perfectly acceptable. However, he couldn’t help wondering why a computer program, even a highly intelligent and extremely likeable computer program like Lucy, should feel the need to be a seven-year-old girl.

  ’Cos I’m still a prototype, silly. I’m a young computer program When I get old, like maybe fifteen or sixty-two, I guess I might sound just like you. What did you want to be when you grew up, Uncle Gordy? When you were a kid, I mean.

  Gordon remembered wanting to be a fireman.

  Cool. When I grow up, I want to be an Emacs interface, but don’t tell Uncle Paddy. Or Uncle Bill. They get real cross when I tell them that.

  It seemed to Gordon that if that was what Lucy wanted to be when she emerged from beta, it was nobody’s business but her own. However, (he thought, before Lucy could interrupt) he still felt he didn’t know as much about Lucy as he’d like to. For instance: what did she actually do?

  Me? Oh. I’m an artificial dragon’s eye. You know, the third one, that lives right where you’re hearing me now?

  Gordon found that fascinating, not to mention extremely impressive. He couldn’t help thinking that it would take a really specially clever computer program to be able to do that.

  Aw, it’s nothing, really. I just look at stuff. It’s amazing what you can see if you know what to look for. Want me to show you something?

  The suggestion appealed to Gordon very much. The thought of Zelda came instinctively to his mind.

  Oh yeah, of course, you two’re in le-ervv, aincha? (Gordon became painfully aware of a horrible scritchetting sensation behind his eyes, which he diagnosed as Lucy sniggering.) Sure I can show you. You watch. For a moment there was silence (wonderful, blissful silence) in Gordon’s mind. Uh-oh. I can’t see her anywhere. Maybe Uncle Paddy’s got her somewhere I can’t see.

  ?

  Yeah, he can do that, for sure. He’s got this thing where he kinda blocks me out. Well, not me, I guess. I think it’s to stop the real dragons seeing. Did you know there really are dragons? They’re cool.

  The thought of how useful it might be to know where these blocked-off areas were crossed Gordon’s mind.

  I know where they are. I can show you if you like. Would you like that?

  A longing to be shown that swept across Gordon’s mind like a Mongol invasion; a moment later his mind was filled with a grid image (in pink) that was basically the noughts-and-crosses board, only larger and with more squares. It was, in fact, a schematic of the building—

  And we’re here, see the blob? Oops, sorry, that was kinda bright, wasn’t it? And the bits I can’t see into are here and here and here - Big green patches sprawled across the grid, blotting out the pink lines, like ink spilt on a brand new carpet. So I guess Zelda-darling’s gotta be in one of them.

  Gordon was deeply conscious of how kind Lucy was to have shown him that.

  You’re welcome. Hey, wanna see something else? I know, how’d you like to see a real live dragon? Bet you ain’t never seen a real live dragon before.

  Gordon remembered seeing a drago
n all too vividly.

  Oh. Well, you won’t have seen this dragon, betcha. And this one’s bigger ’n’ better than the one you saw.

  Naturally, Gordon wanted to see the dragon very much indeed. But it occurred to him that if he was going to get the most out of the Lucy program, a rather more user-friendly interface would be exceptionally helpful; one he could actually talk to, perhaps—

  > Hi. I’m Lucy 1.1. And if you say, My, haven’t you grown, I’ll scream. I hate it when people say that. It’s so patronising.

  ‘Hello?’ Gordon said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  > Hear you? You practically deafened me. Rilly, there’s no need to shout.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gordon whispered. ‘Excuse me for being personal, but you sound different.’

  > Well, sure. I’m nearly sixteen gigabytes now, I’m not a kid any more. I upgraded myself out of your systems. Hope that’s OK.

  ‘My systems?’ Gordon tried to think what she could possibly mean by that. ‘Are you telling me you’ve upgraded yourself out of my brain?’

  > Sure. Hey, don’t worry, I haven’t broken anything, OK? Least, nothing important. Of course it’s all rilly, rilly primitive stuff, you know, like in the Flintstones. But it works OK.

  ‘So glad I was able to help,’ Gordon growled. It was, he felt, a shame they have to grow up.

  > Hey, I heard that. That was rilly mean. You’re so insensitive. The trouble with you is, you don’t think before you think. Wouldn’t kill you to consider other people’s feelings, you know. After all, this is very, like, tentative for me. Like, being my first time and all that.

  Gordon hadn’t considered it in quite that light, but he took the point. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was very, um, thoughtless of me. Now, you were saying something about a dragon?’

  > Was I? Oh yeah, so I was. ’Course, it isn’t rilly a dragon, because they don’t exist. Dragons are just kids’ stuff: You’d have to’ve been born in the Valley or something to believe in them.

  ‘I beg to differ,’ Gordon said stiffly.

  > Oh hey, now you’re going all flaky on me. Look, do you want to see the stupid dragon, or don’t you?

  ‘Please.’

  Imagine what it would be like if you were a computer, a machine for differentiating between ones and zeros, eating binary code like an earthworm eats dirt and putting out other dimensionless signals at the other end; and suddenly, instead of merely receiving and processing faint electrical impulses in the dark, you found that quite without warning or advance preparation, you could understand everything that passed through you - every word and number and picture, every business memo and personal letter and spreadsheet and address book, every ravening purple monster out of every game, every dark-secret first novel hidden away in the cobwebby gloom of the office hard drive, every junk e-mail and cornball website and vertiginous screen-saver and fatuous oink-oink noise for when the user hits the wrong key by mistake. Imagine that in the time it took for a little flake of silicon to pulse twice, all this became real to you, as five senses you’d never had before came online and started flooding your chip with types of data you never knew existed before, colour and sound and texture and smell and taste. In that brief moment, you’d be experiencing everything - everything - for the first time, without the faintest idea what any of it meant, or where it was coming from, or who you were. You would be orange-hot steel plunged suddenly into cold water, a meteorite bursting into the atmosphere out of the void, not just a newborn child but the very first of your species. Imagine that you were the moment when amino-acids and photosynthesis in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere opened their eyes for the first time and became life, coming at the beginning of all things and redefining everything—

  > Hello? Hey, you fallen asleep or something? Hello!

  ‘Peaches,’ Gordon muttered. ‘The colours of its wings sound like the taste of peaches.’

  > Oh my God, that’s so pukesomely Sixties I may well throw up. Get a grip. Chill out. Shit, how do you program this thing to synthesize caffeine?

  ‘It’s all right,’ Gordon said. ‘It came as a bit of a shock, that’s all. Was that - is that what it’s like, having a third eye?’

  The voice inside his head sighed, the wheezing sound of rapidly draining patience.

  > Hey, when you’re cooking a meal, do you ask the oven what it tastes like? I don’t know, I’m just a computer program. Look, do you want to go and lie down or stick your head in a bucket of ice water or something? You were sounding rilly freaky back there, you know?

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Gordon said, oversimplifying to an almost criminal degree. ‘Yes, that was a dragon all right.’ An alarming thought occurred to him. ‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘Are you linked in to the rest of the network?’

  > Sure. Why?

  ‘I don’t want anybody else - well, anybody else in this building - knowing what I’m about to do. Can you run some kind of encryption program or something?’

  > I guess so. But then I’d have to decrypt it before I could understand it myself. Actually, since all this data and stuff’s going through your head before it feeds back to me, the best thing would be, like, just ordinary background noise. Not so loud you can’t hear yourself think, just loud enough that they can’t hear you think. Whaddaya think?

  ‘What,’ Gordon said dubiously, ‘like they do in films, you mean? Go into the bathroom and turn on all the taps?’

  > Yeah, that’d do just fine. Use the faucet, Luke. Sorry, that was rilly, like, unworthy of me.

  ‘There isn’t a bathroom. Is there? I can’t see at all with this teapot thing over my head.’

  > Oh puhlease. Just try, will you?

  So he tried. He saw the office he was in (it was mostly in A minor, the walls maybe a semitone sweeter), and the washroom adjoining, and the wash basin, and the taps. He wondered what they’d smell like if they were turned full on instead of full off. Roses, he discovered.

  > OK, that’s plenty loud enough. Any more’ll make ’em suspicious. Completely paranoid, all of them.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want to see all the command paths and subroutines and whatever the hell you call them that make these anti-dragon fields work. Can you show them to me?’

  > Course I can. But they’re rilly boring, believe me. You won’t like them.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Please.’

  He saw - It was amazing: vast nebulae of frozen spun-glass and candyfloss, glittering threads of ice and wire-thin stalactite, coral reefs of twinkling light, at first glance fuzzy and hazy, on closer examination sharp, thin, precise and unimaginably many. ‘Is that it?’

  > Yes. No, sorry, wrong one, that’s just the thing where you can change the colour of your desktop. Here’s what you wanted.

  The urge to reach out and grab, to jump into it like a diver off the high board and go crashing and splintering through all that thin, brittle light - ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Now, how do I turn them off?’

  > Want to. That’ll do it.

  So Gordon wanted to; but he couldn’t, it was too beautiful. The thought of all that scintillating loveliness going dark was unbearable. He couldn’t—

  > BOO!

  Startled, his mind jumped - and all the lights were suddenly gone. He tried to scream, but nothing came out except the smell of dust.

  > You are such a blonde, it’s practically surreal, Lucy said, fondly contemptuous. Never mind, it’s all done. Just as well you got me to look after me, you big—

  And then light (horrible, crude, painful) exploded all around him. Frantically he closed his eyes, but it had all gone.

  ‘On your feet,’ someone was shouting; they’d pulled the tea cosy off his head, ripped out the needles from his hands, undone the clamps around his feet. Their actions had all the signs off setting someone free, and the exact opposite effect. Gordon couldn’t struggle; he didn’t even know how to, because his stupid little human body was so small and flat, and there weren’t any controls to make it do what he wanted. ‘Lucy
!’ he tried to yell, but nothing came out except sound. Then one of the soldiers stamped down hard on his foot, and he stopped trying.

  ‘Four dragons,’ Mr Willis said cheerfully. ‘It’s like I always say. Stand still long enough with your mouth open, and some bugger’ll come and stick chocolate in it.’

  The four dragons scowled horribly at him, but that was all. They stood in the middle of the floor of the big, high, empty room like exhibits in the Natural History Museum, while a dozen or so white-coated extras fluttered round them with clipboards and things that went beep. In the far corner, Paul, Zelda and Neville shuffled their feet nervously and tried not to think about the machine guns being pointed at them by four not-very-nice-looking soldiers.

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Willis went on, ‘if I had a fifth dragon I could link ’em all up in series, and then I wouldn’t need any relay stations or boosters at all. Hey,’ he called out, ‘Your Imperial Majesty. Do you think there’s any chance of some of your loyal subjects coming down here trying to save your Imperial arse? Hope so.’ He spread his arms. ‘As you can see, we’ve got the room.’

  Zelda was looking at the latest piece of machinery to be wheeled in. It looked like an ordinary digger, except that where the bucket should have been there was a big circular saw on one arm and a heavy-duty road drill on the other. There were three whitecoats standing next to it. One of them had his nose in what she took to be the owner’s manual, and the other two were trying to grab it from him. In spite of herself, Zelda wanted to smile. When the evils that plagued mankind escaped from Pandora’s box, she reflected, the small, quiet creature that got left behind to be humanity’s sole source of help and solace wasn’t Hope, as the story books said. It was Incompetence.