SUGGEST DIRECT FEED FROM SHIP.
At his strained command, the ship began to feed him energy directly through his skin, by exposing it to low-temperature ultraviolet light. The receptors in the ink-black "uniform" skin soaked up the power and replenished him; he thought he could sense the energy flowing into the superconductor rings in his abdomen.
"H o w. . . f a r. . . t o. . . f l a g s h i p. . . o r b i t?"
"One million six hundred thousand kilometers and increasing. Our current course is now completely undetermined by the Sun's gravity. If we continue this course, the ship's fuel supply will be insufficient for successful turnaround. Navbutler strongly, strongly recommends: begin deceleration test and subsequent return to flagship in a lunar orbit. Please decelerate with great, great care."
"O k a y. . . h e r e . . . g o e s. . ."
He slowly, gently lowered, then killed the booster output. They were in freefall, still heading for another star at breathtaking speed - and weightless again. Argus again could move his limbs with his former ease. He rotated the ship so that it fell "backwards", and ignited the booster again with what he thought was modest force - a mistake, him grown used to thinking in percentages instead of absolute force.
And the absolute braking force hit him like a freight train. Less than 0.01 percentage of deceleration caused the ship to vibrate and rattle wildly; the vibro-dampers were too slow to catch up. Argus could feel the G-forces literally pulling at his face and eyeballs, as if someone was trying to pry his eyes out of their sockets. He shut his eyes as hard as he could, and decelerated still harder.
When the accumulated braking force was reaching 10 G he asked for reactor status, and feared the answer.
"Reactor core is barely stable. Pressure support, dampers and stabilizers at maximum. Extreme caution recommended."
The pilot obeyed Navbutler's voice of reason, and released some more foot pressure from the booster throttle; deceleration sank to 7 G, and the vibrations felt less likely to tear the ship apart. All time-dilation effects were gone.
"Control to F-3020 Flight One. Request status report!"
"Status hunky-dory, Control. Prepare to dock. I think I pushed this sports vehicle as far as it can go."
"Yes, Colonel. Are you ready for the next test?"
"As ready as I'll ever get."
Just about 72 hours had elapsed since he last saw Venix, in Old Copenhagen. The counter in the corner of his vision counted the lost days, hours, seconds and microseconds, as he had programmed it...
15: Gilded Cage
A week in prison - even a large, luxurious one - can seem like a month to the prisoner.
To a cyborg like Venix, who perceived each second as a minute, a week in imprisonment passed like a year. She spent most of the time living in her memories... all of them as sharp and clear as living experience. It was a blessing and a curse. The more vivid the memories of her one night with Gus, the more she missed him, and her longing increased far beyond what had been possible in her previous flesh-and-blood existence...
***
A song on a hologram-channel caught her attention, as she sat in the garden and watched the nightly sky through a telescope. The channel played a 19th-century pop song, remixed to fit the changing fashions of the 22nd century. The crooning singer, dressed in a cowboy hat and starched striped shirt, sat and pretended to play an antiquated tall piano, while the sponsor's furry robot puppets in 19th-century costume gathered around him.
"She's ooonly a bird... in gi-ilded cage... for her beauty was sold... for an old man's gold... she's a bird in a giiii-ilded cage!"
Venix put down the small telescope and switched off the music. The yearning she felt took more than sentimental music and stargazing to alleviate - and she had seen almost nothing of the Fleet's announced takeoff from the Moon to Jupiter. Venix walked around the spacious gardens of the Fleet-owned country mansion. Its whereabouts were unknown to her, but the Kansler must have exerted considerable authority to shut out his own people from this beautiful resort. Not one human was in sight. For company, Venix had a regiment of guard robots, and a dozen civilian robots to take care of her needs.
She tried immersing herself in the memories of her childhood - back when she was still young Venice Cherkessian - and og her family on her home planet. Few robots were around on Venus back then, apart from the huge, lumbering kind used for mining and digging.
In those hard but happy years, her family could not have dreamed of affording a personal robot to look after them. Labor was scarce on their hot, cloudy world. All her brothers and sisters, like herself, were forced to work from the age of seven.
Still, it had been fun: the family struggling together, seeing their settlement grow from hovels to clean domed cities. Things improved with each year. She had been happy; she had had a place in society, strong and confident in the future.
Then they moved to Earth. Or, in the Venusian jargon she still remembered: "They went Blue-in-the-Face. They've gone up the gravity well. They crawled back to mama." She still wasn't certain just what had forced her family to leave Venus. A lingering sense of shame clung to that memory, some public scandal never quite explained to her and her siblings.
Sometimes, even now, a passing noise or the flash of a certain color would bring back the painful memories of leaving her homeworld. The black-and-yellow stripes on a construction vehicle, on a door, triggered a flashback of her family's own half-track crane-car, that could house the whole family.
And she flashbacked to the day when they sold the car to afford the flight ticket. Her little brothers cried and tried to protest; she had to pry little Ronan ("Lava-Face Ronan" they used to call him, while he suffered his first Venusian allergy) out of the car's airlock. Then their home, that they had all helped build together, was sold too.
It was not the view from the top floor she missed the most. The surface view on Venus was always the same: Cloudy and foggy, with daily acid rains. But the little things she missed painfully...
A wall section where she and her four siblings painted images of Earth, blue sky and green hills.
The greenhouse, where they grew their food under sunlamps. They had used to carve faces in apples at Halloween.
Venix wondered now, watching the bright spot of her home planet in the darkening night, if her family had managed to buy back their old home when they returned. She hadn't talked to them since, in almost four years. Perhaps in some not-too-distant future, she could visit them again, with the support of Argus.
As she gazed at the dark horizon of the surrounding lands, a faint distant point of light moved in the corner of her view. A craft, maybe, and it went down in the south. Quickly, Venix went back to her telescope and scanned the southern horizon. And indeed she could spot aircraft or shuttles lifting and landing, at least 60 kilometers from the mansion. If she could get there unseen... and it wasn't a military airfield... then she had a miniscule chance of escape.
All surface exits from the mansion compound were monitored by satellite and robot guards. Even in an armored sky-car or a fast one-man pod, she'd be tracked down and arrested. Or... the surface was a blind alley. On her homeworld, an easier route would be to simply dig a tunnel.
Venix regarded the gardening-robots, and dismissed them as far too slow and puny for such work. And her own battery-cells needed solar energy to recharge; if she dug a tunnel for hours underground, she could run out of energy before long. Unless...
Venix walked over to a small servant drone, and accessed the planetary computer network. The Fleet supervisors who guarded her also blocked out most of the network, but she had found ways to sneak around them.
She searched for data under the heading ENGLISH HISTORY AND ARCHITECTURE, and found a vast index of old buildings. The mansion she lived in had no name, and the Fleet deliberately withheld its position from her. In the image databases, she could search manually for the likeness of the mansion. For a flesh-and-blood woman, such a search would have taken hours.
Venix needed only a minute... and she found the file. The mansion was situated in the south of England, purchased from the bankrupt and decrepit remains of the Windsor family. The house itself was several hundred years old; the Net files included old maps of its rooms. Venix skimmed the images and came to the underground area. She read the facts at enormous speed, and found more.
The original building had contained underground sewer tunnels and large storage cellars as late as one hundred years ago. An obscure text source, dating back to the early 21st century, mentioned that the Windsors built a secret escape tunnel from the mansion during the war of 1939-1945. And it led to a private airfield; in case of an enemy invasion, the tunnel was meant for evacuating the royal family to a waiting plane.
The network files ended there, and did not mention what became of the airfield when the Fleet bought the mansion. A map sketch of the underground rooms indicated two likely, now walled-over exits to the old tunnel system. Venix memorized the map and cleared the servant's search-memory.
It was a long shot - sixty kilometers through a derelict tunnel and then on foot - but it just might work. The only way to cover the escape route, was to cause such mayhem, that the Fleet would spend hours searching for Venix, until they realized where she had went. A chaotic diversion was just the thing to confuse her not-too-bright robotic guardians.
Venix looked at the building, with its beautiful ornaments and tall windows. Such a shame to ruin the quaint old house... and such a pleasure to infuriate the Kansler, and as a bonus relieving Gus from the burden of her being held hostage to ensure his obedience. And the war? War was stupid and she wanted none of it; the talk of "patriotism" failed to register in her Venusian mindset. The colonists of Jupiter had never threatened her own homeworld.
Maybe she ought to wait for another opportunity, another night? Another week in this unbearable automated prison, surrounded and pandered by machines she hated... and where she might be held indefinitely, until Gus was killed in action.
"NOOO!"
Venix lashed out at a marble plant-pot, and smashed it with her hand. One of the posted guard robots stirred in response, and aimed a spotlight at her face. Its sweet, over-friendly speech sickened her.
"Vandalizing Fleet property isn't very nice. You are fined 2,000 Popularity Points. Don't destroy - consume! Consume more, and find happiness. Find a designated stress-center where you can relieve your tensions in proper simulated violence."
Against her will, the computer that ran the mansion's robot staff detected the wrecked plant pot. As the guard played its recorded lecture to Venix, the "house" ordered out a gardening-robot to fix the plant - plus a leisure android to keep Venix with soothing company.
The female cyborg had very little need for sleep or food, and indulged in some eating and drinking just to quench the memory of what hunger used to be like. The other urges had changed from when she had been a young woman of flesh and blood. With her old body's demise disappeared the hormones and chemicals that regulated fertility and mood, and she virtually lost interest in sex as such.
Her union with Argus had changed all that. Now she was aware of a new level of intimacy which could only exist between her and another, compatible cyborg.
The leisure android that sauntered up to her on the garden path was something else entirely. She loathed it, for it was neither human nor cyborg. Its outer shape was built to perfectly resemble a living man - complete with skin, hair, sweat, and breath. According to the public channels, this model was quite popular with affluent women. It was six feet tall, muscular, and had shoulder-long hair. But it was the android's face that irritated her the most.
"Brutus at your service, Miss Venix."
For some reason - the Kansler's orders, most likely - the Fleet technicians who installed the Brutus-G model had given him a head that resembled Colonel Haruman Clarke - the man the world thought was Argus. Not her Gus. Brutus-G retained his smooth-talking seducer personality, and it fitted badly with the Colonel's stern face.
"What's the matter, Venix?" asked the android in a smooth, dark voice. "You can talk to me about anything. Just the two of us. I won't tell those fools in the Fleet. Trust me. I understand what it's like." That didn't sound like Fleet directives. Venix ceased ignoring the android.
"What do you mean?" she asked, still suspicious.
The android with Argus's face moved closer, fixing its lifelike eyes on hers. It tried to touch her, but she quickly withdrew from its hands. "I know what it's like to be alone. I have been looking for someone who can understand. Maybe you can. We are not so different, you and I."
"I am human. Underneath this plastic skin that doesn't sweat or grow old. Underneath your organic tissue you are just a common AI, playing out your manuscript. We couldn't be more different."
Her outspoken sincerity caught Brutus-G off-guard, and the android stood still for a few moments while it processed the new information.
"How long have we known each other, Venix?" it tried.
"I've been here a week. I've never known you. There is nothing to know."
"You are wonderfully witty. I've never met a woman as intelligent and beautiful as you."
Disgust filled the female cyborg. Could she shut off that stupid machine, or had the Kansler made that impossible too? "Just... shut... down. Please."
"I know what you need," the android insisted. "I can make you happy. You deserve it. You can resist me no longer."
"But... can you shut... UP?!"
Her outburst took even her by surprise. Momentarily, Venix looked at her violent handiwork and refused to believe she had done it.
But there it was in her hand, the marble pot she had picked up and bashed the android's face in with. Its body lay at her feet, jerking spasmodically, sparks flying out of its open neck... and a few feet away lay its head, face broken and bruised. It bled oil on the limestone tiles, and a robot rolled closer to clean up the mess. The thumping noise of several approaching guard drones interrupted her daze.
Venix jumped over a stone fence and ran for the mansion's open entrance door. The guard robots were fairly quick, though she could outrun them long enough to carry out her design.
The spacious mansion contained almost no sharp objects and no weapons for Venix to use. What about flammables? The modern foam-sprinkler system guaranteed to stop any fire almost before it began. She feinted her way past a trudging robot butler that tried to block her, and rushed upstairs.
"I say , Miss Venix. Do stop, Kansler's watching over you," the butler said after her in its excessively dry mock-British accent.
And it was still there, as she had hoped it would - a genuine open fireplace, with large logs crackling in the flames. Venix reached into the flames and grabbed a couple of glowing logs. Her hands tingled, but did not melt - the plastic skin could withstand a very high temperature, plus her internal cooling-system kicking in to keep the fingers stable. Venix drew the flames across the walls, as she ran in a wide circle.
The draperies, carpets and old paintings did not catch fire - they were all impregnated with common teflon coating. But the wooden beams in the ceiling, for some reason, had been forgotten, and were dry. She scraped the low ceiling with her torches and they began to smolder.
The fire alarm beeped.
"Stop!" the house computer's bass-voice commanded her from the door panel. "The house is not entirely fireproof. Put that flaming object back into the fireplace now! Foam-sprinkler system on." The foam sprinkler's moving head sprayed blue foam onto the floor, not quite able to reach the burning ceiling. With a quick leap, Venix grabbed the sprinkler's feed-pipe and bent it with her weight. The sprinkler head broke off from the pipe, and the foam spilled onto the antique carpet. She darted out into the main hall, just as the house computer automatically began to respond.
One flight of stairs below, the household and guard robots began to walk up to catch her, lead by the incessantly talking butler. "Mind the floorboards, lads, they can barely hold your weight... Miss
Venix, I shall be forced to report to the landlord, this most unladylike behavior..."
Venix laughed at them, ripped up a few floorboards, and set them on fire with a rapid rubbing of torch against old dry wood. Three seconds later, she tossed the burning wood down on the staircase, and the advancing robots retreated as the flames spread. Venix flung burning logs into another room, jumped across the wide staircase, and landed feet-first on the hall-floor, six meters below.
She rushed down into the open cellars, past the many shelves and barrels of wine being stored there. She paused only to roll a few heavy barrels in front of the entrance door, and hurried onward into the depths of the large basement. Somewhere there had to be a weak wall, or some opening to the old escape tunnels.
She kept running from corridor to corridor, with no need to stop, glimpsing treasures and art from several past centuries. Her escape led further downstairs, to the small power plant that kept the mansion and its machines running. She attempted to lock the door to the machine hall, but the mansion's master computer had reacted to the alert and ordered all doors of the house wide open.
Venix stopped by a large cabinet in the center of the humming machinery, and read the red warning label: EMERGENCY POWER SWITCH - OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF COMPUTER MALFUNCTION OR SHUTDOWN.
The cabinet was padlocked. Venix grabbed a steel chair and smashed down at the padlock. Easier to be violent, she thought, once you feel almost invulnerable. The lock broke, and she pulled the door open - then she heard the guards entering through the stairway, seconds from reaching her. Her hands pulled the big lever and the entire mansion went dark. Instinctively, she adjusted her eyes to see ultraviolet light; the dark hall became fully visible in black-and-white view. The robots were closing in, and she couldn't see another exit!
Dazed by her appetite for destruction, Venix grabbed one of the thick cables in the open cabinet by her side, and she pulled it loose in a single, groaning effort. The exposed electrical cable endings flickered with sparks, almost blinding her ultraviolet vision, and she threw the cable end at the first robot that came charging at her.
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 11