"Here is the signal-converter you need." Venix put a fingertip against her forehead. "I've done it before."
"Moy!" The gridders could not keep still in their excitement, and shouted Finnish-Martian slang to each other. "Juttu!" In the low gravity they pogo-danced out to their prototype transmitter, bouncing up and down. "Uuno Turhapuro!"
***
A few minutes later, Venix sat on a chair and let the gridders connect the cortex port in her hand to their transmitter.
She strained her eyes to the utmost, scanning the premises for surveillance devices. She couldn't see any, so she had to trust the gridders they were under control.
"How much longer?" she asked. "I've been here -"
"Two minutes," Arjja interrupted. "Just relax."
"If this doesn't work, what do we do? I must get in touch with him again."
"One of us wants to send stealth drones, straight to Jupiter," a researcher said, while he quickly attached a series of cables to the transmitter's base. "The drones could spray-paint a message directly on the frozen surface of the moon Europa. The letters would be visible from orbit and Argus-A can see them while he is in flight."
"Brilliant," Arjja said, sneering. "Let's try this first, shall we?"
"We're ready," Venix was told. "Just concentrate on what you want to say, and the machine will convert it to neutrino signals at the exact frequency of the signals we detected before."
"Good luck," Juan said with a slight nod, and he seemed older than he had acted the first time he met Venix.
"This is insane."
With her free hand, she fixed the hand with the connected cortex port, to keep it from shaking. She shut her eyes, blocked out her surroundings, and thought of the one person in the world she wanted to speak to.
The converter sent its sequence commands to the transmitter's mini-cyclotron. The cyclotron started to spit out neutrinos in the given sequence.
The others stood in silence around Venix and watched her beautifully curved, smooth-skinned face. Before their eyes, she grew ever more still until she resembled a painted sculpture...
39: Voices In The Vacuum
G....u....s....?
What? Who's there?
Gus.....? Listen... Gus...... It's... me... Venice...
This is it, I'm going crazy at last. It can't be her. I'm just imagining it.
Gus... you big lug, listen! You know it's me... I know things about you that only the two of us know...
Ven? Venice? How can I hear you in my mind?
Remember how we connected in Old Copenhagen? I've connected my cortex port to a new kind of transmitter... I can't hear you, but I hope you can hear me...
Ven, honey, I've missed you so bad... where are you?
Gus, we don't have much time... I'll explain later, but I'm safe. I've escaped to Mars... anything else they told you is a lie. Boulder Pi told me how to disarm the Kansler's remote-control... You must remove it yourself, there is no other way. Listen...
She explained it three times, to make sure he got it right. He was perfectly happy to sit through the repetition, just to hear her again.
That was all I could find out... Gus... no matter what you have done, or been forced to do... it doesn't matter to me. We are more important to each other than this stupid war...
Love you, Ven. I wish you could hear me, even if I can't transmit what I'm thinking. I'll do as you say. I think of you all the time. Goodb... no, I don't want to say goodbye. We'll meet in our memories, if nothing else.
We can still meet in our memories... whatever happens. Love you...
I have a plan. Tell you about it later. Love you, Ven.
***
An hour passed - and the machines reacted before the humans could...
General Zodong-Petain, located on the Phobos Station, received an automatic warning from Fleetcom - the system-spanning computer network that coordinated the Terran Fleet's robots, ship routes and surveillance stations.
He was advised to investigate a suspect neutrino transmission from Olympus Mons, and send a Class Red report back to the Kansler.
The MSF commander lacked top-level security clearance, so he had not learned about the Kansler's means of controlling Argus-A. He also lacked the intelligence to connect the warning to certain rumors within the Fleet, about something called "Direct Control".
He pondered the automatic message, alone in his capsule of screens that showed him surveillance footage of Mars' surface. He called up the hidden spy-cams that were posted in the Olympus Mons observatory: they showed it was empty, except for an obese, bearded astronomer who sat asleep at his post.
According to MSF surveillance reports, the man had been asleep for four hours, while watching an experiment in sending neutrino signals to alien civilizations. The general chuckled.
Lazy, stupid Martians, he thought with some satisfaction. Trying to rise against the Inner Planets with antique mechanical weapons. With the squeeze of a button, I could pop that observatory... like a balloon... on a pretext. But I have to wait until Islington, the Kansler's lapdog, arrives. Damn. Have to wait. Can't risk getting us into a two-front war now. The Kansler has promised us more victories later. More victories will get me away from this sinkhole station. Soon...
***
The next day, in the early morning hours, Venix met up with Arjja and her son, and the council (minus one member) and some coordinators from the local militia.
"He heard me," she told them, joy radiating from her face, and she hugged herself as if the person she talked of were inside her. "He couldn't send anything back, but I know it. He will break free. I know he can."
Dave Roman raised himself from his easy chair and looked at her with a strange gaze. Supported on his stick, he walked up to her, and for a (subjectively) long moment Venix prepared to catch him if he should fall. But he moved with greater strength, and there was an expression of awareness about him.
He clasped her arm with unexpectedly firm fingers and felt at it, like a physician checking her muscles and bones. She stood still, stunned.
"You haven't realized how important you are, girl." Roman's gaze, unflinching, bored into her mind. "You're like a kid who just learned to fly. Hasn't anyone told you? Of course they haven't. The eggheads, the military, the colonists, the mutants, they're too scared, too narrow-minded, too dumb. I dreamed of going to the stars, and look where I got. But you... and him... you're going there. You hear me? You have to tear down that wall. You're going there."
Dave Roman grinned - and when he blinked, that spark of awareness in his eyes died out, and his grip foundered. Again he became a withered ex-astronaut, barely aware of his surroundings.
But Venix felt a great affection for the man; he had opened her eyes to a greater understanding. If she could have wept for him, she would have.
"Does Dave talk of the stars a lot?" Venix asked the others. They shook their heads and shrugged; Juan seemed eager to speak, but clenched his lips.
"Now it's in his hands," she told them. Hurry up, Gus, she thought.
40: Inner Space
Neutrinos?
Argus recalled from his schooling periods: neutrinos were so small and light that over two centuries after their initial discovery, nothing less than a water-tank was enough to detect one.
Which meant the neutrino receptor in his body should contain water, or something like it. On an impulse, he shook his limbs and head to check for gurgling noises. Nothing was heard.
His insides were dry - apart from the liquids which lubricated metal muscles and joints, distributed excess heat, and helped converting some heat back into battery power. Water it wasn't.
So he lay down on his cot and shut his eyes. The internal menu display appeared before his view. He programmed a search for water deposits in his artificial body... and the results, within seconds, came up negative.
He grew suspicious. The control implant might be classified even to his own systems. A little thinking gave him an idea.
; SHOW THERMAL BODY IMAGE
Scanning his thermal image inch by inch, layer by layer, Argus looked for unusual pockets of heat that stood out from his resting-temperature of 15 degrees Celsius.
Again, nothing. And there was nobody he could ask, without alerting the Kansler.
A distant, flickering memory stirred in his consciousness: Boulder Pi, very nervous, telling him something... "The mind controls the body... also on the smallest level..." Not much of a clue. Argus dived into his internal menu system again, calling up vast tree-diagrams of his components.
He came upon a small sub-menu called ENDO-MAINTENANCE, uncertain what the word meant, and opened it on his retinal display.
ENDO-MAINTENANCE SUBSYSTEMS:
1: THERMOSTATIC COOLING PROBES (AUTO)
2: ENDOBOTIC SYSTEMS AND TISSUE REPAIR (AUTO)
3: EMERGENCY ENDOBOTIC CLUSTER (MANUAL)
It had to be the answer. Activating the last option took a microsecond. A menu he had not come across before, lit up:
ENDOBOTIC CLUSTER CAN BE USED TO DETACH FOREIGN OBJECTS FROM THE BODY (EJECTION THROUGH ABDOMINAL CAVITY)
SELECT CONTROL MODE:
1: MAP-DIRECTED GUIDANCE
2: DIRECT VISUAL CONTROL
(CAUTION: PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE WITH DVC-EB MK 24 STRONGLY RECOMMENDED)
Visual? He preferred to see what was actually going to happen, and selected "2."
3-D MAP MODE ACTIVE
The screen prompt shrunk to a corner of his view: the main view showed what resembled a subterranean maintenance tunnel. Only, the tunnel walls were long bundles of pulsating silver threads: Artificial muscles, interspersed with black threads - those were the nerves, insulated at their stems.
The view was just a graphic representation - the hollow spaces of his real body were filled with lubricants, hydraulic oils and liquid coolants that reduced visibility to near zero. His endobots could "swim" through it.
A blue-glowing screen indicator read:
ENDOBOT 01
MAGNIFY: X 1000
PRESSURE: NORMAL
CAUTION: DO NOT STIR BODY OR USE MUSCLES DURING DVC
He saw through an imaginary microscopic camera. A tiny round robot, fitted with vibrating paddles, swam past, followed by several others - like a family of microscopic animals. In a few seconds, a whole cluster of them had gathered in full view, waiting for a command.
The light, in this sealed representative space, came from strips of fluorescent material lining the sides of the tunnel - maybe those actually existed also in the real body?
The steering menu came up, controllable through minute finger movements. A "compass" also appeared, showing the general outline of Argus's body shape. An arrow marked "N" indicated the direction of his head.
He gave a careful command to move "north" - and the endobots' paddles began to vibrate. They shot away with seemingly tremendous speed, his selected cam-bot in the middle.
Through the winding, narrow tunnels and crevices of his insides they speeded, toward the spinal column. His body seemed soft and hollow in this perspective, so different from his outward appearance.
When the central stem of the spinal column appeared from out of the haze, surrounded by the perforated metal segments of the vertebrae, his mind staggered at the sight.
He dived into one of the holes in the spinal segments, and entered the thin space between vertebrae and neural stem.
The stem, with its countless branches spreading outward into the body, was so huge he could not see its end in either direction. Other, even smaller maintenance machines darted along the stem, stopping only to repair cracks and tears in the structures. Their repair work was slow, but persistent.
Argus sent the other endobots skimming along the surface of the spine, darting between the thick trunks of nerve branches, searching for a foreign object.
He discovered that he could select one or many individual endobot cameras at one time - it was like having a hundred eyes, seeing behind and around corners. He became as one with the endobots. Intoxicating power of vision dizzied him, to the point where he almost grew nauseous as the endobots swarmed around the seemingly endless spinal terrain.
Brief flashes of light passed through the coolant every now and then; Argus couldn't identify them, and they seemed random, with no pattern. Perhaps it was just harmless cosmic radiation? He ignored the flashes.
A smaller group of endobots passed across an alien texture, and he stopped them instantly. This was not part of his original construction.
The object was large, large enough to form a ring around the spinal column, and it was made of smooth gold - with numerous rows of holes in it. Argus steered one endobot toward one of the openings; it was just small enough to swim through.
Inside, it should be dark, but fluorescent blue strips illuminated the circuitry. There he saw what must be the mechanism of the neutrino receptor: a gold sphere. In reality no larger than four millimeters, but in this perspective a small planetoid.
Argus ordered the endobot to start searching the surface of the sphere. He found a small lid, and the letters on it read: "H2O PORT".
The container held one or two drops of water - the substance that could stop a neutrino - and it was connected to the converter in the surrounding ring-shape, which in turn sent the decrypted signal straight into Argus's spine and brain.
Had he been a programmer, Argus reckoned, he should have programmed his nervous system to reject the foreign signals - but as long as the receiver was there, he would never be truly free. It had to be destroyed.
One by one, he sent the other microscopic robots inside the spinal ring, faster and faster as he grew more confident in controlling them. Within seconds, he had gathered several hundred of them in there.
Then, the neutrino receiver moved, by its own force: its internal defenses had finally noticed it was discovered. Argus waited for hostile endobots to appear from inside the ring-shaped thing.
Nothing came. The ring moved more... the two halves of it began to slowly fold into each other, squeezing the plastic spinal column. And a sharp serrated edge began to emerge on its inside.
He had to suppress a moan: it felt like a big-bladed knife was cutting into his back. If the ring continued to contract, it might cut off his spine and paralyze him below the chest - the Kansler's last means of preventing Argus from rebellion.
The automatic endobots reacted and tried to mend the cut, but couldn't repair the increasing damage nearly quickly enough.
He thought frenetically, as the pain kept nudging him in the back. Think, you big oaf! The ring lies inside the metal skeleton of your spine - how can you possibly reach in there and pull the damned thing out, without ripping the nerve stem apart?
Tense fractions of seconds passed, as Argus tried to recall every single bit of wisdom he had gathered in his existence, every thing Argus the cyborg and Gus the man had ever thought of.
Years of trial and error and learning and re-learning, of always falling short of others who were smarter, more farsighted...
What would Ali have done , he asked himself twenty, thirty times over... but it was futile, for Ali had never fought a foe this small, this clever.
What would Dad have done? He would have gotten drunk on moonshine, driven off into the Australian desert, shot some wildlife, probably returning with a dead animal strapped to the hood of his car...
What would his stepmother have done? No, no wisdom to find there.
Then: What would Venice have done?
He still possessed parts of her memories, from the night when their minds were fused through their serial ports. Venix had almost no knowledge of complex technology. But something was there, among those bits and pieces, a fleeting memory from Venix' life dominated: a dance lesson.
Argus played the memory, saw what she had experienced as if through her senses...
Venice was dancing with a man, some sort of teacher... she was young, her muscles not very strong, and she was shorter too. The room was wide a
nd low, and a passing glimpse of a thick, grimy window showed the clouded Venusian landscape outside.
The teacher began to grasp at her body in an unsettling way. She tried to grab his wrists and pull away his arms, but he was older, stronger, and stood behind her back.
This memory was nauseating; Argus could sense the memory of the teacher's bad breath at the girl's neck...
Then Venice stopped struggling, and stuck her fingers between her body and the man's arms holding her. She knitted her fingers together, and braced with her arms, pushed outward and upward.
The man's hold broke, she pushed herself free, and sent herself forward with a backward kick into the attacker's midsection. The teacher tumbled into a wall, hit his head hard, and groaned. Staggering across the floor, he threw up.
Venice trembled with terror and stress, but that was not all she felt ... she had proved that with the right leverage, she could deflect and defeat an attacking force. Pride filled her.
And in that memory, Argus found the solution.
He alerted his entire internal defense system, called upon all endobots from the vessels, tubes and cavities inside him. From the legs, the head, the batteries, the motors, the arms.
Ninety thousand microscopic robots, all gathered around the foreign metal object around his spinal column, crawled inside it, formed chains, linked together... and pushed, as one living fiber...
The ring-shaped mechanism split in two halves, still clinging to his spine, but dead and unable to contract. The water container was punctured. His endobots automatically began to isolate and transport away the debris.
And at last that imaginary knife in his back was gone.
He opened his eyes, and looked around as if he had already been found out. No alarms went off; no armed soldiers could be heard screaming and running toward his room. He shivered a little, and was still high on stress...
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 26