At last he was free.
He wanted to thank Venix, and Boulder. He flicked on a wall screen and ordered a search for news relating to Boulder Pi. An official Fleet bulletin flashed on-screen:
MISSING: BOULDER PI, top scientist, surgeon and lead designer of the Argus Project. Recent surveillance footage showed him exiting an airlock on the E.S.S. William Jefferson, in a stolen spacesuit. His present whereabouts are unknown. Fleet Intelligence has issued an arrest warrant. Boulder is a security risk and must be approached with caution.
Argus said nothing, did not move, showed no outward reaction; surely he was being monitored. He knew what he had to do - what he wanted to do - badly - to the Kansler. A slight discomfort stirred in his stomach region.
He thought: Getting the butterflies? But I have no stomach. Then he remembered, cupped a hand under his mouth, and coughed it up.
Into the palm of his hand fell a few miniscule gold fragments, and a drop of water.
41: Kansler!
While Argus was performing microsurgery on himself, the Kansler in his own quarters was being dressed up in his finest parade uniform.
Fitted with every medal and insignia the Fleet could produce, the white uniform was quite heavy on his shoulders, even in the low artificial gravity.
Again the Kansler dreamed of power, and now he felt confident of ultimate success. The Argus-A prototype had proved that the transformation process did work, that a man's identity survived the grueling process.
Already the Kansler was reconsidering his recent murder of Boulder Pi, and thought it a wise move after all; the little engineer had had to be eliminated anyway, to ensure stricter control of the cyborg-making process.
Not long now, he thought to himself. Not long before I am made immortal, and then my dream comes true.
The Kansler sat down as a robot polished his boots, and he imagined himself as the last in that long lineage of powerful men (and, he grudgingly admitted, one woman) who forced mankind toward greatness and conquest.
He dreamed of the mists of prehistory when some tribal chieftain, armed with no more than a spear and his strength, began to conquer all other tribes in the region. From there he dreamed onward through history, until the invention of writing made the names and origins known to posterity.
The Greek-Macedonian Alexander the Great , the Roman-Italian Julius Caesar , the Mongolian Genghis Khan , a long line of Aztec rulers whose names were lost when their alphabet went extinct, the Crusader kings of Medieval Europe, the French Charlemagne , the British Henry V , the Spanish Fernando Cortez and the Conquistadors, the Russian Ivan the Terrible , the French-Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte , the Austrian-German Adolf Hitler , the Georgian-Russian Josef Stalin , the Japanese Emperor Hirohito , the Belo-Russian Vlad Drakovin , the Pan-European Wings Mason , the Pan-American Rosario Mortales , the Pan-African Papa Shaka , the Pan-Asian Pol-Khan - and the Terran Kansler , last and greatest of them all.
It seemed to him almost as if conquerors were a special breed, apart from Homo Sapiens - or they were all the same mind, jumping from body to body, from century to century.
Soon, he mused, he could put his personal past behind him, and become what he had always wanted to be - a god. He would erase historical records, so that history began and ended with him.
Of course, sacrifices had to be made on the path to godhood, but hadn't things always been that way? A few million, or billion, subjects lost here and there meant little in the greater scheme of things.
And then he intended to reshape and guide humanity to the stars and even greater conquest. Maybe there were other life forms out there, with similar ambitions? Then the great challenge to defeat and eliminate them would be so much more delightful... a conquest infinite and eternal , enough to sate the Kansler's appetite.
The robot finished his boots, and he leaned forward to catch his reflection in the polished leather.
He saw - a middle-aged man with acne-scars on his chin, bags under his eyes that the facial paint did little to hide... and a mouth stretched so habitually into a charming smile, it seemed a foreign organism merely living on his face. The left eyeball was more bloodshot than the right one, from overexposure to laser-projections and the miniscreen-patch.
He found it difficult to keep both eyes in focus. Oh well - the broadcast controlroom would edit out the veins from his left eye, as usual...
A headache flared up from his shifting eye-focus, and an unfamiliar insight occurred to him. Even through all this imagined endless conquest, and the dream of his transformed immortal body, one thing remained the same: he himself.
His limitless drive to dominate was all-consuming, pushing aside any consideration of an average life. Family, love, simple pleasures, friendship, looking back on memories in the autumn years, seeing one's offspring find its own way... none of these mundane things were allowed to interfere with the Kansler's dream.
I had a wife and child at some point in time... what did they look like again?
Unchanging, he would keep looking forward, chasing some dreamed-of absolute victory in a future always out of reach... never able to stop and declare: Enough. I can rest. His dream that pushed him always onward might be a kind of...
But the threatening insight was pushed away by the stronger, dominating will to power. He willfully forgot what he had just been thinking. No more did he question the meaning of his ambition: it existed, and must therefore be obeyed.
The Kansler stood up and adjusted his old uniform cap. Another small robot, hanging from the padded ceiling, coated the cap with white paint to match the uniform.
"I am ready," he told the staff. "Call for a general assembly. Argus is to arrive last."
***
The assembly hall filled up with crew and officers, the brass band played One Earth, roving cameras flew back and forth, the best mood drugs were taken on strict orders from the Kansler himself.
No one would be able to step out of line. After a slight delay entered the Kansler, accompanied by his personal guard droids.
The doors shut behind him, and a minute later reopened to let in Argus. He walked in with regular, calm steps, also flanked by guard droids.
The Kansler studied the row of crewmen, drugged into bliss, and made a speech to the cameras. It was fifteen minutes long, full of clichés about honor, patriotism and sacrifice. Argus wanted to shut him up, but he waited.
Finally, the Kansler walked up to Argus, and presented the medal. A fanfare played; a floating screen-prompt hovered in a far corner, showing him his scripted lines and movements.
Argus opened his mouth to shout -
42: Famous Last Words
Argus opened his mouth to shout - and his mouth refused to open more than four millimeters. His voice-generator remained as quiet as the vacuum of space outside the panoramic window.
He tried to move his arms and feet to crush the Kansler's loathsome, pasty face - and just stood still. From the neck and down, his limbs and skeleton had shut down, knees and feet locked in a standing pose.
He raged within, like a ghost trapped in the machine. Fooled again! It dawned on him: the neutrino receptor on his spine didn't need to be filled with water in order to function - for it a larger source to detect the impulses.
The miniscule container might have been an emergency receptor, in case his cyborg structure was emptied of the combined coolant and lubrication liquid that flowed between his composite metal-and-plastic muscles.
That blue liquid, a complex water substitute, was the actual receptor medium that converted neutrinos into command signals for the Direct Control system. Venix had failed. He had failed. Boulder had failed. Argus wanted to rip off the Kansler's body parts one by one, make him suffer for every Jovian he'd had killed.
He could have punched a hole in his leg and drained himself of the liquid earlier - but without it, his internal workings would overheat and grind to a halt. The Kansler was again in Direct Control, except this time without the dreaded words "DIRECT CONTROL"
flashing before Argus's eyes. Which made it all the worse for Argus: he just might go insane soon...
Before his reason slipped away, he had to learn how the Kansler transmitted his personal commands to the neutrino emitter. Argus switched to infrared vision and scanned the Kansler's body for hidden transmitters. The pacemaker? No, it only supported the Kansler's heart and ensured a long life span.
Something else was visible on a deeper level, so thin it hardly registered... a wire or cable which ran from inside the Kansler's hands, along the bones of his arms, up his neck bones, then straight into his head which lay hidden under the cap.
Still, nothing metal registered in Argus's heat vision when he tried to look inside the Kansler's skull.
Then, with a shock, Argus thought: I'm the fool of all fools. The Kansler could only pull this off because he's smarter. He never takes off his cap... because it's a decoy, radiating a false thermal image. He's been wearing that thing for almost thirty years, and no one has read his brain!
I can't move my hands, and the voice is blocked... but... how weird... most of my chest and head are still free! Must be to allow me to look like I'm breathing. Kansler... can you see my rage? Can you understand my anger? Could you predict what I might do to you, if you made me hate you this much?
The Kansler moved forward to hang a medal - a meaningless piece of metal with lies and arcane symbols engraved on it, and a plastic blue ribbon - around the cyborg's neck. The brass band blared a crescendo of Wagnerian trumpets and drumbeats. He gave the paralyzed cyborg a smirk so subtle, perhaps only Argus noticed it.
He knew.
Yes, the Kansler had figured out from the surveillance records that Argus had damaged the emergency-shutdown device on his spine. He had received a report from Fleetcom about the suspect neutrino transmission from Mars, while preparing for the award ceremony.
And it all made no difference to the Kansler, none at all. For he had outwitted Boulder Pi from the very start, arranging that he was kept in partial ignorance, never seeing the whole picture of the lunar lab's complex production line.
Unwittingly, when designing and building Argus-A, Boulder used materials which, when combined, formed the working Direct Control receptor and neural override. Argus was, so to speak, in it up to his ears.
The Kansler reached up and around Argus's neck to hang the ribbon and medal.
As if he were in a bad dream where disaster approached in slow-motion, he became aware of how Argus's chest was swelling, and noticed the shrill, short whistle from the cyborg's plastic lips as he sucked in and compressed a large amount of air.
Abruptly, the air temperature around the cyborg rose several degrees. Argus was using his internal cooling system as a thermostat, willing himself colder.
The Kansler put two and two together - this took him two seconds, not quite fast enough to make the mental decision, to activate the total shutdown of Argus's body in time.
He had allowed himself to get within arm's length of his nemesis, just to put on a worthless medal.
Argus blew out a pointed blast of frigid air, with his chest producing several tons of pressure - and knocked the cap off the Kansler's head. The middle-aged man's hair was swept back, revealing a small silvery transmitting plate on the very top of his balding head.
Argus drew a second ultra-fast breath, making a high-pitched whistling noise.
Again, with greater speed and force, Argus lowered his abdominal temperature, to -50 degrees Centigrade - and blew directly at the Kansler's head. He had to set his foot grip to maximum strength, to avoid toppling himself over. The second blast sucked body heat off the metal disc on the Kansler's scalp to below the freezing point.
With a panicked wail, similar to a frightened baby, the Kansler grasped his head and fainted. His body crumpled quietly against the red carpet. The sudden cooling of the metal implant had sent the freeze straight into his brain and bloodstream, knocking him out as efficiently as a blow on the chin.
The neutrino emitter, in orbit far from the flagship, waited. How far away? Argus had no idea. It had to be close, real close, or the delay would make the Kansler's Direct Control inadequate.
But the machine had to be in constant communication with the Kansler. It had to. Or this rebellion would be a short one.
***
Argus, standing paralyzed, waited for the Direct Control mode to cease. Had he been able to sweat, it would have poured down his brow.
Accounting for the speed of light in a vacuum, he simply had to wait. Argus witnessed the movements around him, perceived in the usual slow-motion pace, now heightened further by his own tension.
The Kansler lay stunned; the guards, ridiculously slow and awkward, rushed to help him. The guard robots began to aim their many weapons at Argus. Knowing that he could never defeat them with mere cold blasts, he raised his body temperature in preparation for the fight.
He began to grow afraid as he saw the first electrically charged stun-bullet leave a robot's gun-arm, and hurtle toward his head...
Time is a subjective thing. What seemed to him an endless wait lasted 2.4 seconds. The neutrino signal shut down automatically, while waiting for the Kansler's command signal to return.
The Direct Control signal was shut down. The neural override, not getting its command signals in turn, also shut down.
Argus moved, and it hurt him to feel all that energy surge into his cooled-off muscles. He ducked down and the stun-bullet missed his head.
All guard robots began to fire at the spot where he stood - a millisecond after he started rushing away from it. With his foot grip set to the max, the carpet was ripped into a red cloud as he darted off.
Two robots were smashed in the next second. A third robot, shooting darts and electric stun-bullets in all directions, was tossed up into the ceiling and jammed into a broken circuit-panel, where it short-circuited in a shower of sparks.
The fire alarm went off, and every human member of the crew ran out in panic. Fires on spaceships were a source of terror - rapid, toxic and extremely tough to stop. Chemical foam sprayed about everywhere, from walls and robots.
The fourth guard robot, apparently paralyzed with indecision, hardly tried to escape as Argus smashed it into the wide panorama window. The window cracked into several sections. Air leaked out in a choir of sharp, whistling hisses and howls.
An emergency screen began to roll down over the damaged window - but a wrecked robot was in the way, and blocked the screen from coming down.
The central strategic computer's voice shouted throughout the entire ship. Marketing's designers had made the synthetic voice a rather accurate imitation of a legendary 20th-century actor:
"WARNING, PILGRIM! HULL BREACH IN GREAT HALL, SECTION THREE. WE HAVE A SEVERE ATMOSPHERIC LEAK. ALERT ALL MAINTENANCE. SECURE THE KANSLER AND ARREST COLONEL CLARKE IMMEDIATELY. THE HALL CANNOT BE SEALED UNTIL THE KANSLER IS SECURED. YOU WANT ME TO DRAW YOU A PICTURE?"
In the midst of the smoke and the roaring draft from the leaking window, the Kansler came to. Groggy like a punch-drunk old boxer, he rose on wobbly legs and focused his eyes. Fear made them widen. He saw an ink-black, large human shape rush toward him with uncannily firm steps.
"V... Venix is here, Argus. I swear. Venix! Come here, and talk to him! Tell him to stop!"
Argus snatched the Kansler's cap from the shredded carpet, before the dazed politician could reach it, and his hands moved like a blur. In a moment, the cap turned into a smoldering bundle of tinfoil, crushed circuits and scorched fabric.
He grabbed the Kansler's wrists with one hand, stabbed with his fingers into the Kansler's arms - cutting off the cable implants - and as a side effect, broke the man's arms below the elbows.
Even as the Kansler was still screaming, Argus took a loose shard of metal, and rubbed it against the transmitter implant on the Kansler's scalp.
In a few seconds, he had scraped up the little disc and ruined it permanently. The Kansler screamed harder, and nearly passed out again.
<
br /> "She's not here," Argus said. "You can't threaten her anymore."
The Kansler managed to croak a coherent reply: "I never - meant to hurt - her. Look..."
A smaller doorway opened in a corner of the wide room, and a female figure hastily entered. She had Venix' face and eyes, just like Argus remembered her, down to the minutest details.
The body was the same matt white with the thick black stripe running down her back and front. The hair had the same coppery sheen. The eyes were just as dazzlingly blue as the ones he had looked into the first time they met.
She seemed afraid, but ran into his arms as if she had known him for a long time. She spoke in the same voice. But her words...
"Gus, stop this! I love you. Please don't kill the Kansler."
Argus immediately relaxed... yet not completely. He really wanted this to be the reunion he had longed for. She embraced him, and he felt his anger fade away as her warmth and strength pressed against him.
But she felt different in his arms - her muscles and chest moved against him in an unfamiliar, crude fashion.
"We'll never be apart again, Gus. I love you."
"Venix... when and how did you get here?"
"I'll tell you later. Let's get out of here. We can go anywhere now. They can't stop us. Then we can connect again, and everything will be all right."
She held out the palm of her hand, and her serial port opened, holding the promise of mutual cybernetic bliss.
At once he turned suspicious. Exposing that serial port was, to him, a personal and intimate act... and she was showing it while the Kansler and the cameras of the Solar System were watching. He forcefully removed her arms from his body. She looked up at him in what seemed like hurt and confusion.
"What did you call your allergic little brother, Venix? The memory we shared when we connected, remember?"
"Gus, don't talk like that. You know who I am. We're -"
"WHAT DID YOU CALL HIM?"
"Kansler! Direct -"
Even if the Kansler had been able to, he would have been too slow. Argus grabbed the Venix duplicate - for it was an android, with a computer for a brain - by one arm, and hurled it into the nearest steel wall.
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 27