Three Times Chosen

by Alan J. Garner

  "The quest for salvation,” Najoli replied for both her and Durgay.

  "We seem to have had a common goal,” observed Jumo, dryly adding, “and now we share a common gaol."

  "Why didn't you want to talk to either of us?” asked Durgay. “As Cetari, especially individuals far from home, we ought to school together."

  In all seriousness Jumo snorted, “I don't consort with criminals."

  Attempting to make sense of it all, Durgay puzzled over Lasbow's decision to search for Atlantis. Construing from Jumo's inference that his protégé was operating below Cerdic's sonar, what had prompted the Seaguard commander to conduct such a wacky hunt?

  Durgay emitted a low, plaintive whistle of realised despair. The answer was as plain as the bump on his noseless face. Desperation must be forcing his former friend to act treasonably. Cerdic would never entertain the thought of surrender, compelling Lasbow into disobedience by looking for a back way out so that some of the Cetari might escape the slaughter. Flight was the only recourse open to the damned merfolk, but the swimmers needed an objective to which to flee. It would come as no surprise to Durgay if he heard that Ochar was pushing the captain to be sneakily insubordinate to the Merking. The endearing old witch had a knack for getting merpeople to reach further than they thought themselves capable of striving.

  "Jumo, you advise us not to trust Norton,” Durgay repeated.

  "That's what I said,” the jailer confirmed. “There's an inconsistency to him that I can't quite put my finger on, but I've a feeling in my fishbones warning me to be careful around him."

  "Having trouble reconciling the notion that Norton may not be what he claims he is?” Najoli asked her lover. “Him drugging us goes a long way to being proof in my brook."

  "His story does have more gaps than a holey fishing net,” conceded Durgay.

  She abruptly changed her tune. “Something's not gelling. He sought us out before we came to him,” she mused. She engaged the ensuing blank-faced stares of the uncomprehending mermen by postulating, “The creature that nabbed Jumo obviously is trained and under the control of Dog. That means He has a vested interest in us."

  "That's worrying. Dog doesn't seem very clued up for a god,” Jumo espoused. “Using Norton, He asks more questions than He answers. To me, that points to a level of dumbness on His part.

  "Not dumbness, ignorance,” the mermaid corrected him. “Dog also seems to lack any interpersonal skills. It's as if He's a child."

  "If Dog is not god, then what is he?” Durgay put to the other two. Neither of them had a concrete answer, but Najoli risked a guess.

  "What if we made the wrong assumption, helped along by Norton's persuasiveness. What if Norton is actually Nupterus and Dog is the Son of God."

  "That's a wild notion, even for you,” commented Durgay.

  Jumo was of the same mind. “I have to agree with grandpa. You're plain loony."

  "Don't talk about my mergirl like that!” Durgay snapped at his fellow merman. “Only I'm allowed to call her crazy."

  "What are you going to do about it?” challenged Jumo. When Durgay made no move to defend Najoli's honour, Jumo guffawed at the oldster's impotency, stuck like him behind the inviolable barrier. “There's nothing any of us can do,” he added, his cackling sardonic in his own ears.

  Najoli solemnly nodded her concurrence. “Like it or not, we're at god's mercy now. Whoever He turns out to really be."

  * * * *

  Abe Norton came upright, feeling oddly disjointed. Vibrating, he grabbed for the computer console and steadied himself. “How long was I down for?” he barked at Dog, counting on the mainframe's chronic vigilance.

  The cybernate did not disappoint. Speaking through a wheeled maintenance droid parked at the manbot's feet, Dog reported, “You have been offline thirteen hours."

  "Unlucky for some,” groaned Norton. “Why didn't you jumpstart me?"

  "The risk of additional short-circuits to your internal workings was too extreme to be permissible. You underwent a sudden and violent disconnection that had the potential to erase your memory files and irreparably damage your cyber-brain. Logic recommended I allocate you time to reboot your crashed system from within. The validity of that course of action is now proved. I am in the process of conducting a diagnostics scan and thus far your systems are returning standard readings. You appear to have escaped lasting impairment."

  The lucky manbot leaned heavily on the workstation for support. “Why then do I feel weaker than a premature baby? Robots are never meant to get sick."

  "Viruses affect computerised organisms too,” Dog reminded him, “but in your case you are experiencing the residual after-effects of a traumatic electrical overload. The sensations of discomfort should deaden shortly. I prescribe that you enter standby mode while your system finishes equalising."

  "I thought I was the only doctor left at this station. What the hell happened?"

  Acting as Dog's eyes, the optical stalks on the house droid's humped back locked on him in an improbably remonstrative stare. “By exceeding safety protocols, you failed to sever your command link to the UAV in time to avoid repercussive harm."

  "I was busy trying to save the plane."

  Dog rebuked him. “An ill-advised effort, considering the aircraft was dispensable. Abe Norton, you are not."

  Taking a few wobbly steps, the whirr of his servomotors interrupted by static discharges, the manbot rested against a dinged wall. “Don't overplay things, Dog. My consciousness files are safely backed up. The risk to me was minimal."

  "Your robotic body frame is not expendable."

  "I have a couple of spares tucked away."

  "To be used sparingly."

  "You cracked a funny, Dog. Good for you."

  "Humour was not my intent. Your replacement bodies were constructed to compensate for normal wear and tear, not illogical risk taking. There is not an assembly line to manufacture more. Robots do have a finite working life, Norton."

  "Your beside manner could do with a little work, Doc."

  Forcing himself to resume wobbling around the room, he managed to miss getting snagged on the obstructing furniture and completed a circuit. Dog's droid tailed him like a loyal puppy all the way back to the console. Hesitant to plug back in, the manbot trusted to the mainframe's imperishable honesty.

  "Why did the drone's engine malfunction?” Abe counted on the plane's onboard sensors to have recorded and transmitted the cause prior to the crash.

  "Pelecanus occidentalis."

  "Want to give that to me in English. My Latin is a little rusty."

  "The air intake of the UAV turbofan ingested a brown pelican in flight, precipitating turbine failure and an untenable low altitude glide path."

  "Bird strike. Every pilot's bane.” Norton punched his fist through the blank viewscreen, seriously reducing the monitor's usefulness. “That aircraft was irreplaceable!” he fumed. “I can't exactly pop out and go visit my local used plane dealer to pick up another."

  Back when humanity corkscrewed downwards in irreversible decline and civilisation was coming apart at the seams, there sprung from the global madness a profitable weapons black market. Dwindling armed forces, fighting vainly to impose martial law and restore civil order in their respective chaotic countries, found themselves pitted against neighbouring nations blindly warring for preservation. Weakened from such wasteful conflicts, escalating desertions—soldiery running wild after capitulating to base survival instincts—and breakages in the chain of command, the assailed armies predictably ceased to function as coherent units of defence and disbanded as governments collapsed entirely, leaving unguarded a treasure trove of depots and installations ripe for the entrepreneurial taking.

  Racketeers jumped on the professional warmongers neglect and the illegal trade in suddenly available military technologies thrived for the short while it took modern man to return to the primitive Stone Age. At any number of mobile auctions, wares were paraded before rich and powerful bidd
ers eager to build up the arsenals of privately hired security outfits, manned by mercenaries and contracted to help them weather the storm of worldwide turmoil. Theirs was a futile effort to stave off the inevitable. No amount of Kevlar armour was going to deflect devolution. Not a single species had ever sidestepped the extinctive steamroller unaided.

  Agents acting for Abe Norton's company haunted those travelling weapons fairs, on the sly procuring specific items for shipping back to the iceberg hideaway. Keeping tabs on the deconstructing world beyond the Arctic Circle, the farsighted scientist planned meticulously ahead.

  Armaments were of secondary interest to him. A flyable reconnaissance platform, in the shape of an overpriced and latest generation spy drone, did hold appeal, which his buyers haggled down to a bargain basement price after the plane had failed to reach its reserve value. Nobody cared to fork out for an unarmed VTOL jet—nobody except the philanthropist geneticist who, despite fading into obscurity, liked to stay abreast of global happenings.

  Those auctions, alongside the unsavoury profiteers running them and the desperate bidders funding such marts, were ghosts on the landscape, relegated to the dim recollections of a species involuntarily reinventing itself. Packs of tribal humans, eking out a living from the reclaimed wilderness like primal apes of old, were already forgetting the industrialised past which spawned them. Colonising the street level occupancies of decaying skyscrapers succumbing to the creeping advance of revived greenery, it was only a matter of time before these pockets of scrubland foraging humans went the way of the dinosaurs.

  Pounding the console repeatedly, Norton physically lamented crashing his plane. Pilots tend to be narcissistic and do not take a knock to the ego well. Happily, his clumsy, half-powered blows were largely ineffectual and the hammered workstation only suffered cosmetic damage.

  Scuttling out from underfoot, Dog recorded the manbot's destructive outburst impassively. Anger was a senseless leftover mania of Abe Norton's that the mainframe had not seen manifested in acts of random vandalism for some time. Rage was an emotive outlet difficult for the emotionally challenged Artificial Intelligence to quantify. Yet he comprehended it was a necessary safety valve, allowing the metalled human to vent excess energy and thereby prevent him from blowing a gasket.

  Dog felt no sense of attachment toward Seeing-Eye Dog. The mainframe registered the flying robot as simply another component, a complex piece of hardware written off to attrition. But while the bird strike was accidental, if could have been avoided by the manbot not indulging in his low-level flight antics. Programmed to be factual not judgemental, Dog did not hold Norton's stupidity against him. His human masters were documented for their irrationality.

  The blows raining down on the console slowed and stopped as the heat simmering the manbot's ire cooled. Beating up a defenceless piece of furniture was not going to undo the penalties of the crash. Dropping his arms to his sides, Norton slouched resignedly.

  Inferring from Norton's behaviour that he regretted not so much losing the aeroplane but his spy in the sky, Dog piped up, “The satellite remains functional."

  Orienting his mechanical eyepiece on to the floor in front of the doorway, the manbot regarded the trivial droid skulking timidly in the space beneath an upset chair. Growing animated again, he slammed a fist into the palm of his hand. “That's it! Watchdog!” he gladly exclaimed. “What is the satellite's status?"

  "Operational."

  "You might embellish a bit."

  The mainframe complied with expected competence. “Watchdog maintaining elliptical Molniya orbit. Inclination remains at sixty-two point eight degrees. Current altitude is twenty three thousand, seven hundred, and forty-four miles above the Northern Hemisphere. Orbital velocity steady at fourteen thousand miles per hour. Nuclear powerplant energy outflow regular without fluctuations. Telemetry signal is strong and constant. Onboard surveillance sensors primed at optimal readiness."

  As scheming supplanted wrath, Norton came down off his high horse. “Did the recon cameras on the drone record anything useful, such as snapshots of these enigmatic Landhoppers?"

  "The aircraft's flyover at speed did not facilitate obtaining usable video images. Even by applying computer enhancement, the still frames remain blurry and grainy. I can extrapolate from the footage the basic geography of the isle. However, the islanders themselves were not very photogenic."

  "But you managed to get a navigational fix on the plane when it went down."

  "The UAV's transponder transmitted the island's exact location at latitude thirty-six degrees, forty-three minutes south of the equator and longitude seventy-three degrees, seven minutes west of the Prime Meridian."

  "Dog, you've just earned yourself a bone. Feed those coordinates into the satellite and task Watchdog with gathering imagery of that island."

  "Repositioning will be twelve hours away, when the satellite descends to an altitude of three hundred miles over the Southern Ocean."

  "Can't you make it sooner? I'm anxious to get a look at the enemy."

  "Are we at war, Norton?"

  "Survival is a constant battle,” philosophised the manbot.

  "Then you must exercise patience. The satellite is currently approaching the apogee, the point at which it is farthest from the earth. It will not achieve perigee for half a day more."

  Astronomy, like tolerance, never was Abe Norton's strong suit. “The moment Watchdog gets in position, I want real-time coverage of every square foot of that damn island,” he gruffly accepted. “In the interim, we wake the children. It's time to sort their futures out."

  "They are resuscitated already and fully conscious."

  "In separate pools I trust."

  "I partitioned them in the main holding tank after bringing it back into service, in accordance with your earlier stated instructions."

  The manbot shook his cyclopean head. “Is the sectioned pool at least soundproofed, so that the two newcomers aren't able to converse with the first captive specimen?"

  "Negative. I networked the biologic units. Individual circuits function optimally when interfaced."

  His ire reasserting itself, Norton clunked menacingly toward the droid and, hands on hips, revelled in the corporal sensation of looming over Dog. “You have exceeded software strictures. Programmers imbued you with enough autonomy to run this facility unsupervised, not to make decisions that directly affect the station's human occupants."

  "You are in error, Norton. Prior to going offline, you authorised the subjects be revived. I complied."

  "But I said nothing about grouping them together. That blunder you took upon yourself to arrange without my consent."

  Madly twitching the droid's eyestalks, the cybernate's monotone voice made known his perplexity. “I fail to see the miscalculation of my actions."

  "Then I will gladly point out your bungling. Having a computerised brain of greater complexity than Einstein's doesn't necessarily make you smart.

  "I planned to have the newcomers remain manageable by fostering the erroneous belief that you are this god of theirs and I am your discipline. Religion is a handy means of controlling people, whether it is two or two billion. I would've gotten close to them. Gaining their acceptance as a go-between could have placed me in an enviable position of trust. That has gone out the window, if we had any portholes drilled in this berg, now that they're consorting with the younger male. Our charade was not convincing enough for him to accept at face value. You're a lousy actor, Dog. No doubt the unbeliever has already dispelled the sham. How long have the kids been awake and chatting?"

  "Half the time you spent out of commission."

  "Time aplenty for him to poison their minds with talk of fraud."

  Staggering out of his quarters, the riled tin man lurched toward the access lift at the end of the suddenly overlong corridor, his misfiring actuators making him totter like a reeling drunk. His urgency to perform damage control was obvious.

  Calculating his master's destination, after No
rton was comfortably ensconced in the magna-lift Dog directed the normally voice-activated personnel transporter unbidden. Built along similar principles to the magnetically levitated high-speed trains that once blitzed the countryside between the bustling cityscapes of the perished urbanised regions, it outperformed the rapid overland transit system in flexibility but not speed. A 400 mile per hour lift might be considered overkill. Operating in both the vertical and horizontal planes, courtesy of superconductive metals fashioned as electromagnets providing both momentum and braking, the station's six magna-lifts—a pair sited fore and aft, with a third set placed in the berg's centre—accessed all areas, but bearing in mind the manbot could only ride one lift at a time, the number seemed excessive.

  It was not that way when the complex had been fully staffed. Back then, the half dozen inter-station people movers were in constant use by the swarm of workers billeted in the hollowed iceberg, before the birthplace of Homo Aquaticus began to depopulate.

  The magna-lift juddering to a halt as it transitioned from going down to travelling sideways snapped Abe Norton out of the moment of introspection into which he had unwittingly lapsed. It was a niggling quirk of the complicated design that could never be smoothed out, no matter how hard the engineers worked on the glitch. Resuming its motion with a soft background hum, the lift thankfully ferried the manbot out of his reminiscences.

  Over the years he had blocked out the distressing depletion of those crewing the final bastion of humankind. Personnel had been selected based on stringent employment requirements. Not only did a candidate have to be exceptionally talented in their chosen field, the individual also had to be unwed and unencumbered by outside family ties, as all connections with their past life would be irrevocably severed. As it was with their driven boss, work needed to be first and foremost in the lives of his staff. They could ill afford to be distracted from their crucial labours, as the station existed as a research and development facility, not a hostel or crèche.

  Fraternising amongst the workers, while actively discouraged by the department chiefs, happened nonetheless. The opposite sexes working and living in such close proximity aroused normal desires of lust and a want for companionship; singles perennially longed to be couples. Abe Norton covered his bases on that score. Every worker underwent medical sterilisation before embarking to Ice Station. There would be no pregnancies and follow-on babies turning his dream askew. During the course of the gruelling psychological screening process, interviewers stressed to potential entrants the aim of the far northern retreat was to reinvent humanity, so that it could adapt apace to a world in environmental flux largely caused by human ignorance and arrogance. The refuge was not to be viewed as a modern day ark salvaging the best and brightest to restart the defective production line of the Homo genus. Natural selection had stamped Homo sapiens an evolutional failure. The changing face of the increasingly oceanic planet belonged to their manmade offshoot, Homo aquaticus. The walking apes would take to the water and swim their way into the future with strokes of surety.