Guy Haley

by Reality 36

  An EMP blast knocked Otto to the floor. His vision dimmed and he could not move. The world was aslant, ground at ninety degrees to the usual, the sky perpendicular. Chures’ snakeskin shoes paced over the leaves and brown pine needles and dirt. They stopped centimetres from his face. They filled his vision, the scales red with the cydroid’s blood. Chures squatted.

  Otto’s viewpoint moved as Chures cradled his head in his hands and moved Otto’s face to look at him. The agent’s torso was a ruin. A rope of bloody slime hung down from his mouth.

  “We would not have harmed you,” said the false Chures in a broken digital burr, its voice crackling and popping. “We would not harm any human, except of necessity, and you have made it necessary for us to kill you and now these men of the VIA who have seen what we are, those who work so tirelessly to protect us. It is an irony, do you not think? Thanks to you, they will not see the wonderful world we are planning.”

  The fake Chures looked up into the light, bloodied hair whipping about his head. He turned back, ruined face sorrowful. “Let their deaths be on your conscience.”

  The cydroid kicked Otto onto his back, knelt on his chest and squeezed his head between both hands, grip increasing, the pressure unbearable. Otto felt his reinforced cranium begin to give. He grunted in pain. Warning icons danced over the flickering display of his iHUD. His near-I adjutant was frantic, smelling death. Spots whirled round Otto’s vision, a kaleidoscope of failing digital imaging systems.

  A report sounded. Half of Chures’ face disappeared. His skull hinged open like a novelty egg to allow a thick spray of something that was not of human origin to exit, then slipped back to close with a wet clack. The cydroid froze rigid. Otto fought with weak hands to peel its crushing claws from his face. The airship opened up, round after round pounding into the cydroid. One smashed into Otto’s leg, badly damaging it. The firing stopped as abruptly as it started.

  The cydroid hands came free, and Otto rolled over to pant in the dirt. His near-I ran a diagnostic. He was badly injured. His healthtech would stop him bleeding out, but he needed medical attention fast. He pulled himself on to his good knee and grimaced at the pain in his shattered left leg. To look at it would be a mistake. His shoulder was on fire. Across the overgrown yard stood the other Chures, the real Chures. He had his gun in his hand, arm out, smoke issuing from the barrel.

  Chloe was clutched in Chures’ other hand. He brought the phone up to his mouth and spoke rapidly into it as he walked forward. The searchlights abruptly stilled; the airship’s engines calmed as it came into a parking pattern, and slowed to a hover.

  Chures stopped where Otto crouched. Otto tried to stand, but could not.

  “You are not as good as they say, Otto Klein. I took this weapon from you and you did not notice.”

  “I am old, and obsolete,” grunted Otto. “Take it up with my designers.”

  “You are brave,” Chures said. “There are facilities on the heavy lifter. We will see to your wounds. I have cleared up our… misunderstanding. They are aware of who the real Santiago Chures is once again. They will not fire upon us.” Chures bent down to his doppelganger, rolled it over and examined it with distaste. He retrieved the two augmatics attached behind its ears. He wiped the blood off them and clipped them back onto his head. “I was betrayed,” Chures explained, unprompted. “My bonded AI.” He toed the corpse, saw his boots on the feet of the fraud, muttered something sharp under his breath and began to retrieve these also. “I read your file. It said you were formidable in combat. Your observational abilities may be lacking but the report was not… emphatic enough on this point. I thank you for not killing my men.”

  “They were doing their job, I was doing mine,” croaked Otto. He felt like hammered shit. Everything hurt, nothing so much as his head. He placed his hands knuckles down on the ground and leaned forward, close to passing out.

  Chures cleaned off his boots with a rag torn from the cydroid’s clothes and put them on. He stood up, examined them critically, nodded and looked down at Otto. “You will remain in my custody until we are sure you are not involved in either the violation of the Reality Realm RealWorlds or the production of these machine doubles. You have my apologies for your injuries. Treasure them. I do not apologise often.” With that he walked away to arrest Valdaire.

  The area turned busy with the heavy lifter’s personnel. Aircars arrived, and the cabin became a crime scene. As Otto was hoisted onto a stretcher he saw a group of techs and medics bag up the remains of the cydroid Chures and take them away gingerly, uncertain how to treat them. Valdaire stood deep in conversation with Chures as another medic re-dressed his wounds. She was gesticulating angrily; Chures was impassive. Otto could not hear what they said over the damn static in his ears. All his senses were compromised. He was going to protest as hyposprays were pressed against his arm, then thought better of it and tried to relax as a needle-like lead was inserted into his neck interface. Quickly, his pain dulled.

  He lay on the stretcher unmoving. He fought sleep for a while, only allowing himself to succumb to anaesthetic and injury when they were on board the heavy lifter and in the hands of the VIA.

  Chapter 26

  Richards

  What I really want is some root beer, thought Richards. He was amazed at how much he hankered for it.

  Hang on…

  Don’t fight it, said a voice, maddeningly familiar. Root beer. Yummy!

  This is not right, Richards replied. A) It’s horrible and tastes of Germolene, b) I am a machine and don’t get cravings, and c) the last I remember, I was dead.

  Spoilsport, said the voice, which was his. Kind of.

  A wash of unconnected data, jumbled states of being if you looked at it in the meat sense, roared through his mind, rapidly eroding consciousness.

  Everything went away.

  The next time Richards came to, Hughie was there.

  “Welcome back, Richards. How are you feeling?” said Hughie. He stood to one side of the workbench Richards’ sheath sat upon. Hughie was in a sheath that had been tooled to resemble his godlike online guise, clad in a very pricey Italian suit. He sounded almost solicitous.

  Richards had the horrible idea that Hughie might have put him in a shiny god model too. He was relieved to see that his own body was one of the usual Zwollen-Hampton models he favoured, though it wasn’t one of his. It had even been dressed in Richards’ preferred attire of hat, trenchcoat and suit – much cheaper than Hughie’s, but then Hughie always had been a cheap bastard.

  “I have, to tell you the absolute truth, felt better,” said Richards. “But then I was just blown up by an atomic bomb, so I am sure you can find it in your tiny heart to forgive any lapses of decorum on my part.”

  “Grateful as always, Richards,” snorted Hughie, his bonhomie evaporating. He waved a trio of techs round the bench away. “I see you are your usual insolent self. I rather hoped death might have mellowed you.”

  “No such luck.”

  Richards was in a large android repair shop full of similar benches whereupon lay multiple sheaths of many different models. Sheathed humans and AIs moved swiftly between them in a measured, professional bustle, as did meat people of various professions. Fat cables snaked across the floors, which were the same grey concrete as the walls, which was to say, the same grey concrete as that in Hughie’s hall. He had to be in Geneva, deep underground near to Hughie’s post-neo-postpost-modernist monument to himself. “I suppose I should say thank you. How did you save me? I mean, you did save me, didn’t you? This isn’t a copy of me, is it?” The thought of that, once it sparkled across his mind, alarmed him even more than the idea of riding one of Hughie’s Apollonian bodies.

  “That’s against the law, Richards,” admonished Hughie. “I don’t break the law, even in a crisis.”

  “Crisis? Heh, and I thought you were posting me on a routine murder investigation. Actually,” Richards reflected, “I didn’t think that, because I don’t trust you. But you said you were p
utting me on a routine murder investigation.”

  “I said nothing of the sort. The murder of one of the world’s greatest thinkers and pioneer of Neukind rights is hardly routine, Richards,” said Hughie with a sniff.

  “The word ‘simple’ was used.”

  “I really had no idea this would get quite so complicated,” said Hughie. “Come! Walk with me.”

  “Cock,” muttered Richards as Hughie strode off, leaving Richards little choice but to follow after him, because Hughie liked to do the talky stuff the old analogue way with vibrating air molecules and all that when an info-swap would have been so much faster. Mind-to-mind offered less opportunity for theatricality, thought Richards, and he had to restrain himself from thinking bad things about the other Five. For all Richards knew, Hughie had a front row seat right there in the theatre of his head.

  “You can thank Lincolnshire Flats for your continued existence,” said Hughie as they left the workshop. “Your base unit was very badly damaged, but somehow he managed to extract your core personality from the wreck, then it was a matter of running that on a new base unit, and linking it in to your back-up memory banks. The existence of which, while following the letter of the law on splitting and duplicating, hardly adheres to its spirit.” Hughie turned and gave Richards his best schoolmaster’s stare.

  “You drafted it, you should have been more specific. Anyway, the back-up’s just memories and stuff, no governing conscience,” said Richards, trying to shake the uncomfortable image of his blackened base unit being airlifted into the coroner’s disassembly room, Flats whooping and clicking as he sawed it apart. “You only have yourself to blame. I like to think of it as a bequest to my biographers,” he said with a smirk, then he became serious. “And don’t tell me that you don’t back up your own non-core attributes.”

  “Well, right or wrong, it saved you,” said Hughie, avoiding the question. “You’re running on the base unit of one of my subsidiaries right now. We’ll have to get you a new one, I’m afraid – yours was terminally compromised.”

  “You killed one of your minions off for me? That’s cold even for you, Hughie.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic, please. His name is Belvedere, and he is in storage for the time being. You don’t think I’d delete one of my own associates to save you? Do you? Do you really?”

  “Then why did you bring me back at all?”

  Hughie stopped and turned to face the other android. “Because you are a Five, and there are precious few of us left. And because you are, after a fashion, my brother.”

  Richards grinned. Hughie looked pained. “And I didn’t know you cared.”

  “Don’t think that I do. I need to know what you know, and the law says that I can’t just pillage your memory banks if there is the remotest chance of actually rebuilding you.”

  “Damn those human rights, eh? You wrote that one too.”

  “I did,” he admitted. “This way.” They turned down a long corridor, passing numerous branching ways and heavy steel doors. Richards had no idea that Hughie’s lair was so expansive. He said as much.

  “This isn’t for me,” said Hughie tersely, a manner that suggested he wished it were. “This is the main governmental back-up complex for the Union Government, deep under the Alps. It is a fairly impressive construction, the size of a small town, with independent food, water and energy facilities, enough to sustain several thousand human lives, as well as myself and my associates.” Hughie seemed proud.

  “And you squat at the heart of it like a big fat spider. You must like that.”

  “Charming,” said Hughie. “I needn’t tell you that its true extent is a secret, and that you will not be telling anyone at all about it.”

  Richards grunted non-committally. Hughie took it for a yes. “Good,” he said.

  As Richards’ sheath was not one of his own, it did not sport the modifications he made to his robot bodies, but he could tell even without his more advanced abilities that the place was built to last Ragnarok out. “Someone expecting a war?” he said, taking in the twenty-centimetre thickness of one of the doors as it opened, lock-wheel spinning. Beyond lay a huge cavern, of which he got but a glimpse, but he heard the sound of engines, and the echoes allowed him to calculate the volume at four cubic kilometres.

  “One should always expect war, Richards, always,” declaimed Hughie, waving his finger in the air. “Read your Sun Tzu: preparedness is the key to all victories, indeed, true victory is won without battle. You, with your back-up, appear to be well aware of that already.”

  They walked past a long window, a slot reminiscent of a bunker’s firing slit, glazed with clear diamond-weave glass. Another enormous space lay beyond. Richards saw piping and house-sized turbines, bright yellow hazard paint against concrete and raw rock.

  “This way,” said Hughie and turned left down another corridor. A near-I delivery cart trundled past, beacon flashing. They turned right, up some stairs and then through a sliding door. Beyond, accommodations sized for humans, cramped in comparison to the machine halls. The corridor walls were painted, the floors were carpeted. The air was full of muted office buzz. It was comfortable in a banal way.

  They stopped at a door which duly opened in front of them once it realised who Hughie was. The door led into a small, dark room occupied by a stern-faced special forces cyborg trooper. Like Otto, thought Richards, only younger and better specced. His modern augmentations were hardly visible, but Richards did not doubt that he could crush rocks with his bare hands. The cyborg stood at attention, and did not so much as blink as they walked in. Much of the wall facing the door was one-way diamond-weave glass, on the other side of which was situated a comfortably appointed interview room. Seated in the room at a glass table was a small, haggard, confused-looking, but very much alive, oriental man.

  “He came looking for you,” said Hughie, pointing. “Professor Zhang Qifang, he presumes,” he whispered, in a rare moment of levity. “It’s a rather poor copy.”

  “He presumes right and you wrong,” said Richards. “That is not a copy. It is Zhang Qifang, but it’s only part of him.”

  “Explain,” said Hughie.

  Richards looked at Hughie. He was smiling. Right, he was playing. He knew everything. Richards wasn’t in the mood. “Get the London coroner’s office on the phone,” said Richards. “We need to speak to Lincolnshire Flats.”

  “No need for that, he’s here already,” said Hughie. “He helped retrieve you in New London, and then insisted he come here to reassemble you. I think he is rather fond of you.”

  Having Flats as a fan sent a shiver down Richards’ spine. “And the other Qifangs?” he said. “Are they here too?”

  “Naturally.”

  “In that case, free up another base unit. If you can do it for me you can do it for Qifang. It’s time we spoke to the professor and found out just what the hell he thinks he’s been up to.”

  Hughie had another of his digital flunkies take a trip into storage, a Six. The thing’s oily protestations of loyalty made Richards feel queasy. Presently Hughie’s small army of human and sheathed AI flunkies set up the Six’s vacated base unit in the workshop Richards had been in. Flats understood what Richards was attempting and had the two inert Qifang cydroids wired up to it; a third cable snaked out of the room, across the corridor to another. Richards had insisted that they screen the active Qifang off from the two defunct cydroids. The tableau Smith and Flats had shown him of the screaming machine, broken beyond repair and fettered in a sinister weave of fibre optics, was still raw on his memory. There was no need to make this any more traumatic than it needed to be for the remaining cydroid. It was still sure that it was Professor Zhang Qifang, and Richards intended to disappoint it gently.

  “Well, this is an interesting conundrum,” said Hughie, stroking his silver chin. “The third unit believes itself to be an autonomous creation. I rather suspect that for all its woollyheadedness, it would pass the UN’s marker for strong AI classification. That
would mean it constitutes a sentient in its own right. Therefore, removing its programming from this carriage would constitute a direct violation of its civil rights. You will be taking it apart and making something new, which will destroy it as an individual. You are about to commit murder, Richards.”

  “Shut up, Hughie,” said Richards, who was busy watching Flats watch the tech staff position the cabling linking the three Qifangs and the base unit. “We’d be guilty of a greater moral crime by not reconstituting the original as he intended. I knew that as soon as I saw Karlsson’s set-up.”

  “Ah, the great detective.”

  “Hughie, any idiot could tell that Qifang was trying to save himself and warn the world. Qifang found something out, something that put him in great danger from one of our kind, and what he discovered must have been pretty damn awful if one of us wanted to off him. My guess is that he became alarmed and went to Karlsson because he felt he couldn’t trust anyone connected with the system, and that is just about everybody else. Or maybe Karlsson was in on it from the start – he left the VIA quickly. What they did together, I don’t know, but it’s obvious Karlsson had appropriated some of the research going on in the VIA facilities at the Realm house, and set out to replicate it and use it to expose whatever it is that Qifang has been trying so hard to let us know about..”