Three Times Chosen

by Alan J. Garner

  "Dog is as bad an actor as he is a liar,” Norton stated. “As I've already said, he is incapable of falsifying data. Ask him anything to prove it."

  Durgay did just that. “What colour is the sky usually?"

  Najoli regarded him queerly. “What sort of question is that?"

  "The strangest one I can think to ask,” said Durgay.

  "Blue,” was Dog's reply. Simple. Sincere. Satisfactory.

  "You really did make him, us, all of this,” Najoli cogitated, taking the measure of the unbowed manbot.

  "Tell her will you, Dog."

  "When operating as a biologic, Norton multitasked and wore many construction hardhats—financer, architect, project manager, systems coordinator, father figure."

  "Alright, I get the idea!” snapped Najoli, irritated by not understanding the foreign terms. “No need to go on about it.” Her turn to put a question to the cybernate, she posed, “Dog, if you aren't the Sea God, then just what are you?"

  "Let me field that one,” Norton interjected before the forthright computer could answer in his inimitable manner. Putting his reply into terms comprehendible to more primitive minds, he explained, “Best regard him as the living, talking spirit of this ice grotto. Dog is my unseen helper, working backstage behind the scenes, executing my will."

  "The complete opposite of how you two first presented yourselves,” Najoli softly said, condemnation congealing in her voice.

  The manbot remained unmoved on the skywalk. “Dog can't help but spout the truth. I never said I don't lie."

  "For what purpose did you make us?” Najoli bluntly asked him. “Gratifying your own twisted pleasure can't be your sole reason."

  Norton's cyclopean gaze centred on the mermaid. “Clever girl. The fairer sex always is more intuitive than their male counterparts. The downside to that advantage is women tend to be more emotional and less objective. In my experience girls can theoretically do anything, although men make for better specialists. They don't break down and cry at the slightest hiccup.” He watched her bridled reaction to his goad with detached amusement. No amount of genetic alterations could erase the fact that women were vastly different creatures from men.

  Straightening, Norton folded his mechanical arms, his robot body language projecting no-nonsense haughtiness. “I make no bones about it. You were created to fulfil a higher function than to merely exist as my playthings. The complexities of your race's place in the universe are quite beyond your grasp, so don't give yourselves a headache trying to fathom the meaning of life. Remember only that I am the founding father of your people. It is my job to protect you all, to ensure your survival and prosperity by whatever means at my disposal. That is what solely matters. You came to me asking for help. I'm prepared to give it."

  "I pray it hasn't come too late for Bounty Reef,” grumbled Durgay. Even accounting for the vague Cetari concept of time and the indeterminable days locked in captivity at Ice Station, the Fisher feared their creator's delay at smiting the Landhoppers would not commute the merpeoples death sentence.

  "Don't fret about your tribe,” Norton consoled him. “They've somehow escaped annihilation and are in the middle of shifting house. I have ears in this region's ocean and they can be heard making their way up the coast south of here."

  In the tense decades of the American-Russo Cold War, spying was of paramount importance to the opposing superpowers. Genuinely paranoid about Soviet ballistic missile submarine deployments, America fixed undersea sensor stations on the ocean floor at strategic points worldwide. Their own backyard was amply covered; the eastern seaboard boasted no fewer than thirteen submerged listening posts, arrayed between Newfoundland and Mexico, with a couple off the Bahamas thrown in for added measure. Norton tasked Seadog with the routine maintenance and mending of these obsolete and passive sonar systems, cannibalising unfixable units for spare parts. That resulted in less than half remaining repairable and in working order, providing Swiss cheese surveillance of local seas. As coverage did not extend to South American offshore waters anyway, the Cetari were able to dwell hidden from Norton's eavesdropping until the day they swam out of history back into earshot.

  Comforted to hear they were not the last merpersons left alive, Najoli and Durgay's relief was diluted at the thought of the exiled Cetari fleeing for their lives, homeless and at the merciless whim of the sea. The Fisher took some solace in the fact that their maker retained a vested interest in watching over his handiwork and would not allow the exiles to come to harm. He hoped Lasbow was in the thick of the retreat.

  Jumo returned to the conversation and posed the pertinent question, “How many are left?"

  "Going by the sonar readings, a good number,” Norton was happy to report.

  The former jailer guessed where the refugees were headed and pleaded that Norton return him and his fellow prisoners to their people forthwith. The manbot refused him point blank. “If I did that I would be compromising my position here, which for security reasons must remain veiled in the secrecy of myth. Nobody outside these walls can ever know of my ongoing scrutiny. I'm afraid your coming here was a one way trip."

  "I got brought against my will,” Jumo reminded his captor.

  "Makes no difference how or why you arrived. You all violated the sanctity of this station. Such indiscretion means I can't ever allow you to leave."

  Jumo grew animated. “You have no right keeping us against our will any longer!"

  "Pipe down, sport, or I'll have you put to sleep again,” Norton brashly threatened him. The agitated merman quieted.

  "He's right, Norton. Just because you made us, doesn't mean you control us,” Najoli threw up at the manbot.

  "Human slavery has been formally outlawed on the continental United States for nearly nine centuries ago,” cut in Dog.

  "If I want your encyclopaedic opinion, I'll call for it!” Norton barked irritably at the monitoring computer's ceiling mounted sensor module. Adamant he would stamp out the beginnings of this moral insurrection quickly and ruthlessly, the once human manbot decreed, “It's a matter of genetic licence, not personal liberty. I didn't buy you lot at some desert slave auction. You were conceived and patented by me. From the outset, I copyrighted the recipe and the final dish. You aren't here by the grace of god, but because I turned a vision of mine into workable reality.” Norton shook a fist at the mortified Cetari. “I own every one of you and as such you are nothing but tools to be used as I see fit."

  Digesting their irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, the three merfolk felt perilously small and fragile. Finding the courage to speak challengingly at their imperious and callous creator, Durgay asked in a pitiably subdued voice, “Does this mean you won't be granting help to our fellows?"

  Norton's ire receded like an outgoing tide. “What on earth makes you think that preposterous notion?"

  "You just finished saying we're virtually pieces of whalebone, unimportant until shaped by you into something useful."

  The imagery of the analogy escaped him, but Norton understood the connotation. “I didn't go to all this hassle and headache to idly stand by and watch my foolish children get exterminated. Just because they're journeying to safer waters doesn't necessarily mean trouble won't follow. I only wish I had more to go on in order to effectively destroy these Landhoppers."

  "Durgay might be able to help you there,” Najoli offered. “He was their prisoner awhile."

  Norton nodded knowingly, pointed at the scarred male and called upon Dog. “Transfer that one to the sea dock."

  "He has a name,” said Najoli, sticking up for her merman. “We all have names."

  "From hereon each of you will be allotted a number. You will respond only to the individual designation Dog assigns you. I'll not personalise any of you with a forename. Such indulgence can only lead to problems. It's unprofessional getting attached to lab rats."

  The very act of preserving humanity utterly dehumanised Doctor Abraham Norton, stripping him of the attributes that not only
made him a man but a healer. Bereft of compassion, that unsociability could be ascribed to his robotic distantness shining through, whereas in fact he had undergone a radical transformation into the proverbial mad scientist, degenerating into an unfeeling doctor of experimentation motivated by passion, not purpose. That same drive made him tramp from the chamber, the metal-upon-metal clang of his footsteps on the grating rebounding hollowly off the undecorated walls.

  A circular panel in the wall at Durgay's back slid innocuously open and from deep within the darkness of its bowels a suction pump coughed into life. The merman felt a slight tug as the concealed machinery chugged faster, the rapidly whirling blades of the impeller sitting unseen at the end of the tunnel increasing in pitch and speed, funnelling the water. Durgay's heart skipped a beat when he was unsubtly dragged backwards by invisible tendrils. Mechanically resisting the draw of the rising backflow, the Fisher clutched gamely at the sides of the aperture as he was steadily pulled tail first into the tunnel.

  "Durgs!” Najoli cried out, powerless to do anything but watch on in frustrated horror.

  Holding on by his fingertips, struggling to fight the pressure of the strengthening current, Durgay glimpsed Najoli's despondent face pressed up against the clear dividing wall moments before his grip failed and he was sucked down the chute.

  Zipping along the tube as a passenger instead of driver, Durgay's uncomforting ride was made the more distressing by the unlighted innards blacking the enclosed watercourse. Far from rushing wildly through the dark, powerful water jets spaced at regular intervals along the curved walls buffered the merman's flight, keeping him centred and off the sides. The fluxing jets simultaneously imparted an element of control, smoothly steering him around bends as he confusingly changed directions several times.

  Many centuries of disuse had not tarnished the transfer tubes, kept scrupulously clean and functioning by the station's worker robots. In times past, the labyrinth of ducts piped drugged Aquapeople between the assorted holding tanks and habitat pools lining the lower levels of the chambered iceberg in accordance with the working needs of their manufacturers. Numbed to reduce the strain of being manhandled, that luxury was denied Durgay and his stress level shot up through the roof.

  His elevated blood pressure did not come down when the conduit finally spat him out bum first, ejecting him from a similarly round portal into a dimly lit pool cluttered with shadows. Fearful and all at sea, the hazy forms of foreign apparatus assailed Durgay's perpetually wide eyes as he limply floated amid a confusion of drifting tether cables and coiled power feeds at odds with the rigidity of inert robot cranes and service arms. He had been dumped into the station's submarine hangar, a titanic tank filled to the brim with inconceivable gadgets and contraptions for conducting undersea exploration.

  A frighteningly large shadow anchored in the farthest corner caught Durgay's wary interest like a worm wriggling on a fisherman's hook. Its bigness aside, the silhouetted bulk plainly differed from the jumble of unfathomable devices stocking the submerged machine bay. Its shadowy, torpedo-like outline conveyed an impression of organic form to the staring Fisher, as opposed to the synthetic feel generated by the various devices arrayed around him. He began to quietly and slowly back up.

  Floor lights flashed on with alarming brightness, momentarily blinding Durgay and he blundered into a tangle of coiled leads. Panicked, his writhing and contorting only succeeded in getting him hopelessly entangled. Essentially netted, he ceased struggling and promptly lost control of all bodily functions when the lighting dimmed sufficiently for him to realise he was face to face with the unveiled monstrosity that was the kraken.

  * * * *

  En route to the handiest lift that would convey him to the hangar dock situated far below the iceberg's waterline, a juddering of the corridor's floor broke Norton's stride. Hurled against the wall as his internal gyros failed to compensate fast enough for the unexpected jolt, his outstretched hands felt the wall convulse as the alloyed lining groaned in anguish.

  Braced against the shuddering sheet, the manbot locked his metalled legs rigid even as the corridor rocked even more violently a second time. Swivelling his camera-eye up to the loosened sensor lozenge dangling by its connecting wires from the shaking ceiling, he calmly enquired, “Dog. Report on station status. What on frozen earth caused that?"

  "Unknown,” came the mainframe's baffled reply, his echoey voice made tinnier by the damaged lozenge.

  Beneath Norton's metal digits the pulsations stilled. He pushed away from the wall to stand bemused in the middle of the quieted corridor. “Well something forceful enough to wobble this berg did just that. Could anything have smacked into us?"

  "Logs for the external sensors do not record a proximity alert within the ice field,” reported Dog. “There was no apparent collision."

  "Maybe not surface side. What about an underwater bump of some sort?"

  "Negative. Sonar registers no colliding contacts."

  "Are you certain nothing has breached Guard Dog perimeters?"

  Perceiving the true meaning of Norton's concern, Dog iterated, “The island biologics are too distant and technologically backward to have any impact upon this facility."

  "Must be internal then,” surmised Norton.

  Computing faster than the manbot, Dog's omnipresent intelligence scanned sensor analyses pulled from throughout the operational sections of the complex. He rattled off the pertinent readouts verbally for Norton's unplugged benefit. “Sublevel Eleven oxygen tanks sealed and secure. Reactor core secure on all relevant sublevels, namely Six, Seven, and Eight. Level Two aviation fuel depot sealed and-."

  "Hold up there, Dog,” interrupted Norton, an unpleasant suspicion slithering into his mind. “Check the sensor log for Section 91."

  "I cannot. You rendered that section off limits and inaccessible to my scans."

  "Then check the readout from the hallway outside 91"s hatch."

  "What am I scanning for?"

  "Anything obvious out of the ordinary,” stated Norton. “Clouds of smoke, buckled steel plating. That sort of stuff."

  "I am registering a marked elevation of corridor air temperature by tens of degrees. I am concurrently detecting diffused heat warming the outside steel face of the bulkhead door. Precisely what is contained in that compartment?"

  "Something that has evidently blown up in my face.” As heavy as his metal body was, the manbot broke into a trot, thudding down the corridor. The mainframe followed him with electronic quickness, jumping from one ceiling sensor lozenge to the next.

  Aware that Dog was hot on his heels, Norton needlessly bellowed out orders; Ice Station's computerised overseer was neither deaf nor dumb. “Sound the fire alarm and dispatch firefighting droids up to Sublevel Four on the double!"

  Klaxons blared stridently throughout the complex. Dog necessarily had to raise his voice to be heard over the din. “The compartment's automatic fire suppression system will logically douse any internal blaze,” he boomed, keeping pace with his master.

  "I'm not sure that'll be sufficient to put out the likely inferno raging inside,” Norton shouted back. At the corridor's end he clunked to a standstill and waited edgily for the lift to arrive. When no sign of the conveyance was to be seen, he thumped impatiently on the closed doors. “Where's the blasted lift, Dog?"

  "Sublevel Twelve."

  "What in blazes is it doing there?"

  "Absolutely nothing."

  "Get it up here. Now!"

  "Unable to comply,” Dog said unapologetically, explaining, “For the duration of the fire alarm lift operations are suspended, as per standard safety procedures. Lifts have returned to the bottommost level to await the all clear signal."

  "Any fire should be restricted to that one compartment. Override the damn controls."

  "There are certain protocols even I cannot circumvent. This is one such instance."

  "Can I expect the stair door to be functioning?” There was a note of petulance in the manbot
's query.

  "All fire doors are opened, as per standard evacuation procedures."

  "Since when were you programmed to be so safety conscious,” Norton muttered. Bursting into the stairwell, he took the steps two at a time and headed up, his whirring leg motors uncomplainingly taking the strain.

  Dog leapfrogged ahead of the inconvenienced manbot to reach the sensor lozenge overlooking the first landing and waited there for Norton to catch up. “Withholding data hampers my effectiveness,” the mainframe chided him. “You must know the form of the catalyst for the conflagration in Section 91."

  "I can make an educated guess,” admitted Norton, pounding up the next flight, “and the cause of the fire is also acting as its accelerant. But that's not the worrying part. If the flames are not brought under control and the item in the adjoining compartment heats up unduly, the result might be a double whammy explosion that'll vaporise this berg and a fair sized portion of the surrounding ice field."

  The incongruity of an iceberg catching on fire escaped the dogmatic mainframe. “The nature of your secret weapon is clearly thermonuclear,” he theorised.

  The computer's powers of deduction never ceased to astound Norton. With only the barest of information, the amateur sleuth could come up with uncannily accurate suppositions. No wonder city fathers favoured prototyped robots over human cops when the law and order of civilisation began breaking down. That, and the fact they worked unpaid. “Now you see my dilemma,” Norton said.

  Dog was indeed puzzled. “Where is the logic in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction? This facility is a scientific research complex, not a munitions compound."

  "For home protection,” argued the manbot. “Why else does a homeowner purchase a gun?"

  "Ownership of a firearm for personal defence is not comparable to hoarding an atomic bomb."

  "The difference lies only in the size and potency of the weapon, Dog. The principle remains the same. We can debate ethics afterwards ... assuming this crisis gets hosed down and cools off."

  Reaching his desired floor, Norton jogged heavily down the main thoroughfare of Sublevel Four toward a chamber innocuously marked SUPPLY CUPBOARD located at its farthest end on the eastern side of the iceberg. His own onboard thermometers noted the hotness of the air rising incrementally the closer he approached the massively thick steel door squatting at the corridor's terminus. Three autonomous emergency response robots were parked at the ready outside the compartment, the flashing blue lights atop their conical heads winking in harmony with the ululating siren wailing throughout the length and breadth of Ice Station.