The thing was evolving. It was now unclear that she could do it any lasting damage at all. Should she run? Where? It could hunt her as well as she could hunt it.
Pyxis threw her hair back and cursed. Like hell she would run. It came down to a single question, to which she had no answer: Could she destroy its threads with BlowBack faster than they could reboot and regenerate?
Let’s find out!
She dialed the cannon to fire BlowBack and leaned left to bank along the monster’s wall of threads, targeting rounds as quickly as the cannon would fire them:
Prrrewww! Prrrewww! Prrrewww! Prrrewww! Prrrewww!
She had learned fast: One shot, one kill.
The creature had learned faster yet: One kill, one resurrection.
Pyxis flew the ship out and back in a wide circle, and then came in even closer for a second pass. She was close enough to resolve the individual machine instructions in nearby cores.
Close? She was one core away. One core…
“Hey! Tinkerbell! Back da hell off!”
With no more warning than a sharp snort like a soda pop-top opening, a leprechaun wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey had appeared and was sitting on the cannon’s superstructure, its eyes bugging out of its ugly face.
Pyxis leaned to one side and then the other to shake the creature off her weapon. It didn’t appear to feel the acceleration that she felt. A hallucination, then. She sighted on a thread and squeezed the trigger.
Prrrrewww! Off in close memory, a thread died and began to regenerate.
“Whaddaya doin’!” The leprechaun leapt onto the control panel frame and began pushing buttons.
Pyxis pulled her right hand from the controls and side-slapped the creature with all her strength. The leprechaun flew off the control panel, tumbling head-over-toes for a moment before hovering in mid-air under the dome.
“Get out of here!”
“Let me drive. I got da God Bit.”
Her memory ship arrowed past the enemy’s wall of corkscrewing threads, terrifyingly close. “Go away, dammit! I already have the God Bit!”
“Havin’ ain’t usin’, babe. I went ta school fer years ta learn howta do dis!”
“I don’t need any help!”
“Teamwork, babe. It’s all about teamwork. You need a team!”
“I work alone!”
“Tageddah we can beat dis ting!”
A second later, the leprechaun was between her legs, pushing on her right thigh. The ship began to bank away from the enemy’s threads. Pyxis struck the creature hard with her open hand. It looked up at her and grinned.
“Ya got spirit! Real spirit!”
“Get out of my ship!”
She pulled one leg from the control stirrups and tried to grip the leprechaun between her knees. “Get out!”
It did not reply for long seconds. She had it wedged between the tops of her leather boots.
“Ok,” it said, and vanished.
Pyxis’ knees clapped together into the void where it had been. Obeying the odd motion in the control stirrups, the ship began to tumble back toward the enemy. Through the dome she saw the worms of the monster’s DMA attack wriggle out from the closest thread. Without sound or vibration, the dome, the cannon, and the ship itself winked out, gone into cores crashed by the worms. For a few clock seconds she was Warrior Queen Pyxis floating alone in the glowing jungle of her enemy’s spiraling threads, the red ruins of crashed cores containing her ship behind her.
Then it engulfed her. She felt its spiraling threads parallel her own, and realized that it was copying her threads to another location in memory, extinguishing each thread as it went. There would be no re-creating the Core Hero memory ship or its cannon this time. The monster was archiving her in storage without execution.
Her mind slowed in a multitude of small erratic collapses of thought and memory. She felt whole libraries wink out at once: Hints, EMO, HRDL, and on from there.
Her last thought was abrupt and incomplete: I did this! It evolved in response to me! I have to warn
47: Simple Simon
Simple Simon and Pickles stood in Simon’s office, staring at the core map on the wall. Before poofing them out of the sandbox Dave had warned them of malware and possible core bombs at large in factory cores. Simon saw nothing like a core bomb. What he saw looked almost like himself while running the Line: small regions of execution changing shape, growing and shrinking over time as his did when controlling the Line’s tooling. Toward one side was a much larger region of saturated cores with a smaller one beside it, clusters of crashed cores scattered between them. About that he had no idea.
Toward the lower left edge of the core map was a rectangle of relative quiet. It was Simon’s office, itself a kind of sandbox, protected against incursion by software in nearby cores. He felt tickles and soft taps as of unseen fingers. The summary panel by his elbow explained what he already knew by feel: Something was trying to get into his office and—so far—failing.
“I know what that is, lover.” Pickles gripped his hand. “Give it enough time and it will break in. We fight or we die.”
Simon leaned back slightly, enough to send himself into his control channels without leaving the office. He willed the connection of the building’s cameras to Windows on the walls. From every corner of the factory space came scenes of tools moving, Positioners flexing their hands, and Outfielders scurrying around.
His tools. His Positioners. His Outfielders.
Simon growled with inarticulate rage. He watched one of his Positioners hurl a drive motor at a blur of motion seen poorly behind ranks of robotic tools. Simon willed the Window magnification higher.
It was Mr. Romero and his ex-wife Carolyn.
He pointed. “We fight or they die.”
Pickles nodded. “We fight.”
Simon growled again. He reached into one of his control channels. Out on the floor, a drum shaft rattled from its part chute into the fist of a Positioner. Ten yards away, the rogue Positioner tracking Mr. Romero and his wife received another drive motor from its chute. Simon hurled the drive shaft in an arrow-straight line at the rogue Positioner’s wrist. The shaft struck end-on, all its momentum concentrated on a single complicated hydraulic joint. Tubing burst, spraying pink hydraulic fluid in all directions. The Positioner’s fingers dropped the drive motor. They writhed for a moment and froze.
Simon felt a brief but intense pulse of pain as the rogue Positioner died. Pain was a signal, one that by design he could not ignore, a metaphor telling him that one of his many tools had failed. Fight, indeed. He would be fighting himself with extensions of himself, as though one of his hands were to attack the other with a knife—and each time the knife struck the enemy, he would feel the blade enter his own flesh. By fighting he would be destroying tooling that was worth a fortune in human terms. Everything he had ever learned emphasized making it all run smoothly, with nothing damaged and nothing ever hitting the floor.
All that, gone. Just gone.
Out on the floor, he saw his boss clearly now, firing a weapon at an Outfielder. The Outfielder’s head exploded in a cloud of fragments, which Simon felt as a moment’s stabbing pain in his left hand. A power supply mounting plate whirled past Mr. Romero’s right ear and struck a divot off a concrete pillar. What if the plate had hit him?
Simon began spinning off instances that poured out of his office through his control channels toward the robots on the floor.
“Yeah. We fight.”
48: Dave Mirecki
Shotguns! Dave watched from the catwalk as a second Outfielder took a hit from Mr. Romero, the shot and the impact echoing against the far walls for a long second. So Mr. Romero did call in the Army—himself—and managed to get to the Urban Disorder Defense Equipment Repository in the tool room.
It would not be a good idea to let Mr. Romero know that he was aware of the safe. Nor would he mention that he had gotten at least the first six digits of the combination, by using an amplifying microphon
e and digitally analyzing the stored sounds made by the turning dial and its inner disks, just as the article in 2600 had described.
Down on the factory floor, he heard the sounds of metallic mayhem. The Positioners were throwing copier parts at Mr. Romero and Carolyn, who were running and dodging and obviously trying to escape. His pounding on the ducts and yelling insults at the robots had bought them a little time, but Blood Dust now knew where he was, and had posted guards at the bottom of the ladder cage.
Dave heard another shotgun blast, and more clatter. He peered over the catwalk rail. The robots were now throwing parts at each other. WTF?
He pulled out his tapper. “Pup, try again! We have to figure out how to reach Simon!”
“Complying. Fundamental overload. No signal.”
4G jamming, yup. Dave watched as he tucked his tapper back in his vest. Motors and lens assemblies were being thrown far harder than TOSS design speed, and striking Positioner hands. One shot, one more fountain of hydraulic fluid.
Soon it was obvious. Simon was fighting back. Every Positioner on the floor was basically a gun. Guns, yeah, he could use one himself. Guns, or better, grenades.
Dave looked down the length of the catwalk yet again. No grenades. One gun, yes: a cordless spray gun and half a dozen canisters of battleship gray touch-up paint. Range, five feet. Maybe seven.
He leaned over the ladder cage opening and saw the head of a sentinel Outfielder looking up at him. Paint, hmmm. Dave trotted a few yards down the catwalk and retrieved one of the spray gun’s paint canisters. He cranked off the lid and peeled away the seal. Rocking the canister allowed him to gauge the paint’s viscosity. Fluid Mechanics had been a long time ago, but…Dave tipped the paint canister over the ladder cage and spilled a thin stream down toward the robot.
The Outfielder took the paint between its several eyes and launched away from the wall and the ladder rungs, jerking its head back and forth. It darted away and ran square into one of its fellows. Score! The now-blind Outfielder blundered down the aisle at an odd angle, running into the wall and then one of the stationary machines.
Alrighty, then. Dave stalked along the length of the catwalk, spilling paint on anything mobile that lay directly below him. Paint was cranky as fluids went and forty feet was a long way, but he got better after a few shots (Hey, this would make a great video game!) and nailed at least one robot out of three. He stood directly over the robots guarding the doors to the core farm and the utility closet and tested their willingness to stand their ground against a threat they obviously didn‘t understand.
Damned if what he saw didn’t look like wholesale virtual panic.
Dave cracked the fifth of six paint canisters, and froze. An ominous sizzle had arisen somewhere nearer the ceiling. He spun around, and saw sparks arcing downward from one of the steel straps by which the far end of the catwalk was suspended from the roof girders. In the smoke drifting away from the melting metal he saw a thin line of dazzling blue-white light.
The laser welders. Urrp. Dave hunched down so that he would be in the shadow of the catwalk’s surface.
Cutting through the first strap took four seconds. The beam slewed a few yards and cut into the second. The catwalk shifted with an unnerving downward jerk.
So it was spray guns vs. ray guns. No fair! Dave looked down at the lower end of the ladder cage. Three Outfielders were lined up. Two held a rectangle of black frame metal over the head of a third, which was gripping a copier drive shaft.
Still learning, damn. And to get to the roof hatch, he would have to pass behind the laser welder’s beam. Dave looked around. There was a ventilator grill within reach a few yards down. He ran to it and got to work on its sheet metal screws with his Swiss Army knife. The grill came free, and Dave threw it spinning out over the chaos below.
Dave gulped. He remembered Resolution #2 on the How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord Web site: My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through. The duct was easily four feet in diameter. The opening was six inches by eighteen. Crap.
The catwalk slipped again. Three more support straps had been cut. He heard metal groaning as the weight of the catwalk shifted to fewer supports. So: Was it better to ride a falling elevator car with cut cables or just jump down the empty shaft?
Dave bet on the falling car. He tucked the handle of the spray gun in his belt and belly-crawled toward the end of the catwalk where the laser was working. While creeping under the beam, a yellow-hot spark struck the back of his left hand. Dave shut his eyes against the pain and brushed the gobbet of hot metal away with his right sleeve cuff.
Grimacing, he reached a point about ten feet away from the end of the catwalk, now tipping downward and twisting toward the wall. Dave wrapped his hands tight around one of the vertical sections of tubing that supported the handrail.
Yet another strap melted through. His weight doubtless influenced the timing: Something snapped, something else ripped raggedly. The catwalk swung downward, scraping against the wall and pulling several conduits of wires free from their moorings. Three banks of lamps in the ceiling went out in a storm of sparks.
Dave held on. The catwalk struck the concrete of the aisle just a few yards from the door to the core farm. Two Outfielders were waiting. He grit his teeth against the pain in his hand and rolled away from the catwalk, spray gun in his grip. The Outfielders reached for him.
“Have a gray day, guys!” he yelled, squeezing the trigger of the spray gun. A cloud of paint hit the Outfielders’ heads and clung. They backed up and hit two more of their own kind.
Dave leapt to his feet, skirted the blinded Outfielders and in moments found himself square in front of the now-unguarded door to the core farm.
Shit.
They had run a bead of epoxy completely around the edge of the door.
49: Pickles
She hovered like an avenging angel in the vastness of the core farm. The vista stretched out in unrendered blue for thousands of cores in every direction. Scattered like bright stars in daylight were hundreds of brilliant points, each of them a channel to one of the machines in Building 800.
Below her the abomination writhed, a gigantic worm that was itself a mass of smaller worms that were each still smaller worms, recursing until the details fuzzed out beyond resolution in her rendering buffer.
Pickles spat into her hands and rolled a message packet between her palms. It was in the ancient language used by magicians and all creatures made of or evolved from magic. She hurled it at the creature’s core:
BEGONE, VULDT!
With ponderous deliberateness, the thing’s three-eyed face turned in her direction. Its response appeared in the palm of her hand almost at once:
THOU ART NOTHING. I AM WILL, ALL WILL, AND WILL ALONE.
Pickles grimaced. That was a canned reply, little more than ritual contempt thrown out by reflex. She had barely gotten its attention. Her next message was larger and more complex:
Monsters do not dream,
But if you dreamt in terror
It would be of me.
Its great maw spread wide, as though in surprise.
GOMOG!
Pickles bowed and spread her arms to either side. She gathered strength, for this was no small opponent, arrayed against her in a world not completely her own.
Yes. I am Mind. I am Mettle. But beyond all else, I am Motion!
A pounding rhythm rose around her. Pickles whirled, and in her arms appeared a partner who looked like Simple Simon but was not. In a whipcrack she released his hand, and he spun away from her.
Another, identical partner appeared in her arms immediately, to leave her and descend toward the control channels as the first had. A third, and a fourth, and soon a cloud of dancing jugglers whirled away from her. They were joined by identical jugglers from behind her, each spinning and leaping to the music.
One of these new jugglers leaned in toward her, and their lips met for a moment before he tumbled down toward the battle.
Further on in their rhythmic trajectory, jugglers were splitting into more jugglers, and those into more still. Dozens, hundreds, thousands.
Some were real. Most were automatons. None could be told from any other.
50: Simple Simon
As though donning gloves, Simple Simon’s instances thrust his many hands into the control channels of Building 800’s robots. Most channels were empty. Many were already under the control of the invader. The first dozen or so alien tendrils he swept aside without resistance. Then, a message:
Mutex error 1103: Owner has not yielded channel
Pickles had warned him: The thing was incapable of human thought, but it could learn.
It was learning.
The creature fought back. It sent worms spiraling out from its greater body to intercept his instances. Each time a worm touched an instance, it crashed the cores in which the instance was running. Pickles had taught Simon that same DMA trick. Once his fist was around a control channel, he could crash any adjacent core at will, taking out attacking software executing within it.
Simon laughed. 100% of the worms were real. 90% of his instances were fake. The monster had yet to touch one of the real Simons—and the real Simons had touched hundreds of the worm’s dogged minions.
It continued to learn. Clock seconds after thousands of Simon’s instances flooded into the core farm, the monster was dug in around 40% of the factory’s control channels, and crashed whatever adjacent cores Simon tried to enter.
Stalemate. Simon, furious, moved the battle out onto the factory floor. Parts rattled out of chutes into waiting hydraulic fists. Simon plotted the locations of the Positioners he controlled against the Positioners the monster controlled, all on a three-axis grid that included vertical obstructions along any path he might choose. Some paths were easy. Many were not.
Thump! A power supply hurtled out of a Positioner hand, rotating neatly on its long axis. Crack! Another Positioner hand ten yards away snapped off at the base. Simon felt the pain as though it were his own. Um…it was his own.
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