“What does it…?”
He shook his head. “They haven’t analyzed it yet. I was hoping … “
She stared at him. Nick was so slender, nonmuscular, almost as willowy as convention would have a poet. This Bernie was a sturdier soul, clearly of an age with her husband and her but thicker in the middle, stronger, more … more masculine. She had only just met him, really, though she knew she had seen him at the expressway and, briefly, the day before. But when he gestured with one of his large, square hands, she imagined his touch on her, on her breasts, her thighs, her … Her skin felt warm. Yet his appeal was not solely physical.
She too shook her head, though more abruptly, and her hair flew around her ears. “I can’t tell you much from a photograph,” she said. “But I can tell you what it might have done, what the possibilities are.”
“Please,” he said, smiling. He sipped his coffee. “That’s all I want.”
She touched a switch and the screen of her own desktop workstation lit up. Her fingers rattled briefly over the keyboard. A schematic diagram appeared. “This is a Hawk,” she said. “Like yours.” She pointed. “There’s the brain, the spinal cord, the motor centers. There’s the passenger pod, the driver’s console, the controller. A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug under the forward lip of the pod. Wires from that to the brain.” She explained how the controller, a computer, translated movements of the tiller or control yoke and the throttle and brake pedals into electrical signals and routed them as appropriate to the jets or the genimal’s motor centers, triggering the genimal’s own nervous system into commanding its muscles to serve its driver. All the necessary programming was built into the hardware, burned into PROM chips like the one pictured in his glossy.
“It’s only a little different,” she added, “in a genimal whose passenger compartment is built in, like a Tortoise. There the controller cable could go directly to the brain, without an interface plug, though there is one to make maintenance easier. A Roachster’s plug is installed beneath the shell-secreting membrane, so molting will not affect it. To get at it, the techs have to cut through the shell.”
He had nodded periodically as she talked, as if he understood it all. Perhaps he did. Now he said, “But the chip?”
She felt her face grow warm. She had forgotten the point. “Anywhere in this pathway,” she said, pointing again at the circuitry of the controller. “Insert it, and it can lock out the driver. Then it can cancel legitimate commands and substitute its own. And its own commands might be very simple. That Sparrow—I think a block on the pilot’s commands, plus a trigger to the jet’s hunger center, might be enough. Especially if there were a timer on the chip, so it turned on only at a specific time, or when a source of food such as the expressway was in view.”
She paused reflectively. “You could try to prevent this sort of hijacking by putting feedback circuits in the controller. They would check that the proper signals were getting through, but a chip could fake those too. There really isn’t any way to block such a thing.”
He leaned forward, so close that she could smell the maleness of his body, studying the screen. “Couldn’t you make the beast smarter?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Intelligence just isn’t that easy to produce. They’ve been trying for a century to produce it in computers, and we haven’t made any better progress with the genimals.”
“But what about transplanting human genes?”
“That’s the other reason why we don’t have smart genimals. There are sixty different humane societies out there, and when they got together, they had very little trouble persuading Washington to ban transplanting human genes to genimals. They said it would be reinventing slavery. So, for that matter, would be gengineering a nonhuman intelligence.” She hesitated before adding, “They’re probably right. At least, if we’re talking human-level intelligence.”
He grunted as if to say he was listening, but his attention had turned back to the computer screen. With one blunt finger, he was tracing the circuitry she had tried to explain to him. Finally, he shook his head. “I can’t picture it.”
“Then I’ll show you.” She sighed, reached out a hand, and pulled him to his feet. As they crossed the lab, she said, “Alan, we’re going out to Ralph’s prototype barn.”
* * * *
Emily and Bernie heard the flat cracks—one, a pause, another, a pause, a third—as they approached the barn. Bernie immediately identified the sounds as gunshots, drew his pistol from beneath his uniform jacket, and ran to the door. Emily followed so closely that she clearly heard him yell “Freeze!” and something clatter as it hit the floor.
When she entered the cavernous room that housed the Armadon, she saw Chowdhury, legs spread, arms above his head, facing into the corrugated, scaly flank of his genimal. He was standing between its two waist-high left wheels, his arms straddling a doorway set into the bulge of the beast’s side and back. Stubby legs twitched beside his shoulders. The genimal’s long snout was bent back toward him, audibly sniffing, eyes blinking, tongue flicking. The long tail switched back and forth, stirring the hay that littered the barn floor. Above Chowdhury’s head, ample windows set into the beast’s side revealed an empty interior. Chowdhury was sweating, and his muscles trembled visibly.
“What were you trying to do?” Bernie’s voice was an outraged bellow, as if he found personally offensive whatever he had seen Chowdhury doing.
“Startle it.” Chowdhury’s voice was weak, but it strengthened as he glared at Emily. “I wanted to see whether I really would have to take the time to grow a new prototype.”
Emily spoke to the policeman’s back. “We warned him that it might kick its legs off.” She briefly described the armadillo’s startle reflex.
Bernie laughed. “Look,” he said, turning toward Emily for the first time since she had entered the room. “It’s just a .22. A popgun.” He retrieved it from the floor near his feet, aimed it at a bale of hay near the wall, and pulled the trigger. The noise was unimpressive. “My magnum, now …” He grasped his pistol in both hands, aimed, and fired.
The Armadon convulsed. Chowdhury flew across the floor to land on his back, spectacles askew, eyes wide. There was a loud crackle, as of breaking wood or bone.
Emily helped Chowdhury to his feet. “I’m sorry.” She did not say, “I told you so.” The point was far too obvious, for now the Armadon rested on its belly, its feet unable to reach the floor. Its tail quivered, its snout twitched, and a soft, panting whine crept from its throat. One of its wheels had rolled across the barn to fetch up against a wall, looking much like a wagon wheel decorating the set of a western movie. The other three splayed from the Armadon’s bulk, still attached by shreds of bone and skin, but useless.
Bernie stared sympathetically at the genimal. It had feelings, he knew, but … When he looked at the people in the room with him, his expression grew sheepish. “You needed something louder,” he said.
The other man straightened his glasses. He stared at the damage. He trembled harder. Then he took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and screamed at them: “What are you doing here?”
Emily laid a hand on his rigid arm as if to calm him. He shook it off. She said, “I wanted to show him how a genimal’s controller works. He’s investigating the Sparrow attack on the expressway.”
Chowdhury spun around to stare at the cop. In a moment, he said, “So show him. Then get out of here.” He turned his back on both of them. The Armadon whined again. He stepped to its side and laid a hand on its flank. After a moment he stalked toward the door into the lab that shared the barn building, leaving them alone with the crippled genimal.
Bernie returned his gun to its holster. “Touchy, isn’t he?”
“Almost always.” Emily patted the still-whining Armadon’s flank, opened its metal door, and waved him in. The door remained
open behind them, and the windows in the genimal’s sides gave them a clear view of the outside room. The cabinet that held the control computer, obviously not fastened down, stood askew. Emily presumed it had been jolted out of position when Bernie had startled the Armadon. A control tiller jutted from the cabinet, and a single seat, a cylindrical hassock, lay on its side nearby.
Emily stood the hassock upright, sat down, and removed the front panel from the computer cabinet. Then she repeated the lesson she had begun indoors. Now he nodded repeatedly, understanding what she said as long as he could see and touch a three-dimensional reality rather than some baffling, lifeless diagram.
Absorbed in their work of instruction and absorption, they nevertheless heard the door to the lab open and close and noticed when Chowdhury came to stand, listening, by the Armadon’s doorway. Emily felt his presence as a weight upon her back. Eventually, she turned to include him in the conversation and noticed the syringe in his hand. It held at least a pint of clear yellow fluid. “Bernie says they found a foreign chip in the Sparrow, Ralph,” she said. “I’ve been showing him how such a thing might work. It probably had some sort of internal timer.”
“It’s like a virus program,” said Bernie. “It sits there in the computer, just waiting for its moment, and then it takes over.”
Chowdhury snorted, scowled, and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work,” he said. “There are too many redundant pathways between the controller and the genimal. No chip could possibly block them all. And anyway, it couldn’t hold a program for anything as complex as what that Sparrow was doing.”
Why, wondered Emily, should redundant pathways make any difference? It should be electronic child’s play to program the chip to intercept them all. She said nothing about that objection, however. “It wouldn’t have to,” she put in. “The controller doesn’t control a genimal move by move anyway. It activates coordinative structures in the nervous system, hierarchies of reflexes and instincts that make it do what we want it to do. So why couldn’t this chip simply activate a different set of instincts? Or even a single drive, such as hunger? Instincts and drives we normally want suppressed?”
Chowdhury opened his mouth and aimed the reflections from his spectacles at her alone, but before he could speak, Bernie said, “A chip like this would be lovely for criminals and terrorists—for hijackings, murders and assassinations, robberies …”
“Bah!” Chowdhury held his syringe up as if to be sure they saw it. His open hand slapped the side of the door. The Armadon twitched beneath them, sensitized to such noises by its recent painful experience. “You are talking nonsense. Criminals don’t have the facilities! And I will thank you to leave my Armadon now. Out! It is suffering.”
Emily waited until he had stepped aside before she descended from the Armadon, Bernie close behind her. While they maneuvered through the doorway, Chowdhury was silent. But as they moved away, she thought she heard him murmur, “And I must destroy it.”
Chapter Seven
As soon as Andy had eaten his breakfast, he had returned to the window to watch the Chickadee. Nick watched him with a smile while he finished his coffee. The gengineered birds were as familiar to the boy as metal airplanes had been to Nick as a child, or as wood and fabric biplanes had been to an earlier generation. Andy had seen the big ones at the airport, on the veedo, flying high overhead. He had one hanging from his bedroom ceiling. But this one was in his own backyard, and it was real.
Nick could hear the voice clearly, so much deeper than a wild chickadee’s that the normal “dee-dee-dee” became a “doo-doo-doo.” He knew Andy could see the details—the scale-covered legs, the chunky, conical beak, the plumage, white below, gray above, the alertly gleaming eye beneath the black skullcap, shaggy instead of velvety as it was on normal, small chickadees. He could hear his son muttering—“Zoom! Whee!”—and knew that he was fantasizing about hopping onto its back and flying off to high adventures. He could be Sinbad, the Little Prince, Aladdin, Superman, any hero, every hero he had ever seen flying on the veedo shows or in books.
Nick left the boy to his dreams. He brushed crumbs from the breakfast table into his cupped hand, washed the breakfast dishes, and checked the refrigerator and freezer to see what he had in stock that might make a decent dinner that night. He added to the grocery list and checked his wallet to be sure he had the cash he needed. Then, with a glance at Andy—he was still absorbed in the Chickadee—he went to the small room he called his office and turned on his word processor.
It had been secondhand, or maybe third, when he had bought it in college. It had already been obsolete for decades, so obsolete in fact that its mouse was a little box, equipped with push-buttons and a roller ball, at the end of a cable that plugged into the back of the computer. But the dealer had made sense when he said that obsolescence was a relative thing. If a computer did what you wanted it to, it did not matter whether it was state-of-the-art technology. And five megabytes of memory, with half a gigabyte of hard disk storage, had been more than enough for a would-be writer with no wish to run scientific or business simulations. It had been cheap too. And in the years he had owned it, it had indeed done all he had wished of it.
He had been reading Hey, Mabel!, Jennie Bone’s recent book on the tabloids and the magazines that followed in their tracks. Bone—years before, in school, she had been one of his professors—had quoted a long-dead tabloid editor to show why those rags never seemed to die: Any story, true or not, that could make a husband cry, “Hey, Mabel! Dja see this?” would sell papers. Nick had appreciated her pungent views of the tabloid-readers’ minds, and he had come in time to the poem now on the screen before him:
You say good wine is fragrant, pure, and clean?
It takes a gritty wine to suit my friend.
He thinks pyramids can sharpen razors
And his wife lusts for exercise machines.
He believes easy chairs can spread the plague,
Living in closets makes the brain leak blood,
Soft water is disaster for the back,
And tabloids never fail to shout the truth.
He is a bubblehead who hopes the grit
Of wine that you reject as cheapest cheat
Will fill up his emptiness with wisdom.
Instead, we think, it only makes him thick.
Now he needed a title, at least, and then he could try to find it a home. “Vintage Wisdom”? “Wine of Wisdom”?
It had taken him a month to get this far. Andy was a distraction, as were all the chores of running a home, but those were by no means all the reason for his slow progress. He sighed. He simply did not have the drive to be a successful writer.
He flicked off the machine. Speaking of chores, and of drive, or driving … He checked the kitchen; Andy was still at the window. “I’ll be in the garage,” he called.
“Sure, Daddy.”
The garage. The Tortoise’s stable. There was the food bin, there the water, there the tools for mucking out. Some families had larger garages, with two—or more—vehicles, and their own litterbugs to keep the floor clean. Someday, he and Emily would have as much. Right now, even if they could afford a litterbug, one Tortoise was not enough to keep it fed. They would have to supplement its diet, and that would cost more money. Emily’s pay was ample, but so much of it went for taxes and insurance and to repay the loans that had put them both through school. He wished he had had the sense to study something more employable.
He replaced his shoes with rubber boots from a wall-mounted cupboard, positioned the wheelbarrow near the pile of gray-streaked paste, and muttered to himself that a reptile’s crap didn’t look much like a mammal’s. Like a bird, the Tortoise had a single exit, a cloaca, for all its wastes, and the product looked it.
He fleered, raising his upper lip and exhaling gustily like an animal confronting some awful stink. Then
he laughed at himself—he was an animal, and the mess did stink—and began his labors. To escape the smell as best he could, he breathed through his mouth.
Thankfully, he reflected that the task was not really so bad. The Hercules of ancient myth, drafted by a king without the sense to hire enough stablehands to do the job, or to tell the ones he had to muck out the barn more often, had had to divert a river to cleanse the Augean stables. His job might feel that great at times, but a Tortoise excreted fairly small amounts of manure. What it did excrete was rich in nitrogen and other nutrients. It would, as always, make excellent fertilizer for their flower beds and shrubbery. If they didn’t have the Tortoise, they would have to buy manure.
When he returned inside, Andy cried, “Daddy! It’s looking right at me!” And indeed it was. He stood behind his son and watched the Chickadee, a foot away, separated only by the glass of the window, twitch its head back and forth, first one eye trained on the boy, then the other. What was it thinking?
“Get away from the window, kiddo.” Window “glass” had been replaced by a harder, tougher polycarbonate plastic in the days of his grandparents, but the word and the image persisted in people’s minds. Besides, the Chickadee’s beak was the size of a kitchen wastebasket. Its tip and edges looked quite sharp enough to smash even plastic “glass,” and then to do far more damage than he could stand to contemplate. He laid a hand on his son’s shoulder and tugged.
Andy looked up at his father with all the scorn a five-year-old can muster for a too-protective parent. “Oh, Daddy! It’s not going to eat me!” To his mind, the incident on the expressway had no bearing on the rest of life. Besides, that incident had not really touched them. Nick, like Emily, felt differently.
“Come on. I’m going to call the airport.” He drew the boy away from the window. As he did so, the Chickadee stepped back itself, as if it could have heard and understood his words. When he picked up the phone, it launched itself heavily into the air, its wings straining. It was clearly, even to Nick’s untrained eye, just about at the limit for unassisted flight.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 22