"Other people do the bio-engineering," Pri said. "Their work is a cover for Wei's real research."
"Which is what?" Matahi said.
Pri looked at me and widened her eyes in question.
"Go ahead," I said. "She's in it now. She might as well know why we did what we did."
Pri explained Wei's work to Matahi. She began with a cold description of the banned nanotech-human research, but she quickly moved to the children and then to Wei's kidnapping of Joachim. By the time she'd finished, tears were running down her cheeks, and Matahi was shaking her head, her eyes wet, her breathing loud and rapid.
"I couldn't have known," Matahi said. "I didn't know. If I had, I might have killed him myself. I certainly would have turned him in to the police, and I would never, ever have accepted him as a client. Even thinking about our time together makes me sick."
"The problem," Pri said, "is that you can't go to the police. No one can, because Heaven's government is protecting and financing him. That's what we're here to do: Take him to the Central Coalition leadership, which will try him and publicly expose both his awful research and the government's role in it."
"And you had to attack him in my house?" Matahi said.
"There was no other place we could get to him," I said. "The island is a fortress, and we don't know how to find him there. We tested his team when he was on his way to you, and their protection was strong enough that we would have had to get very lucky to snatch him before support arrived. Even knowing his route is difficult."
"So you killed my men but not me?"
"No," I said. "You've got it wrong. We didn't kill anyone—at least, I don't think we did. We tranked them all. Some sustained injuries as they fell, but unless someone was very unlucky, everyone we shot, including the people on your security staff, should ultimately be fine."
"Why didn't you talk to me first?" Matahi said. "I would have helped you."
"We couldn't know that," I said.
"And you could instead have chosen to warn him or even lead his security team to us," Pri said.
Matahi considered our comments, then said, "So what's next?"
"All we can know for sure," Pri said, "is that now Wei will be even more careful than before. I can't believe he'll be coming back to see you," she nodded toward Matahi, "any time soon, so we're back to the beginning, probably worse than that." Pri shook her head. "Wei's continuing to experiment on children, and we're stuck."
"Let me help," Matahi said. "There must be something I can do. I feel terrible about being nice to that piece of garbage. I don't want him hurting children—not yours, not anyone's. If I can convince him I had nothing to do with your attack—and I didn't, so surely I can make him see that—then maybe I could persuade him to come see me again."
"That's nice of you," Pri said, "but this isn't your fight."
"It is now," Matahi said. "After all, you two pulled me into it."
"I don't think you'll be able to convince Wei to visit you," I said. "Even if he believes you were completely innocent, his security team will know you left with me. They'll want to interrogate you, and I can't risk you telling them about us or about any of this mess."
I pointed back down the hall. "Lobo," Matahi raised her eyebrows in question, so I added, "my ship's AI, will open small chambers for you to rest. I need to spend some time alone thinking."
"That's it?" Pri said. "That's your plan for what we do next?"
I nodded and headed to my quarters. "I wish I had more to tell you," I said, "but right now, I don't."
"I do," Lobo said over the machine frequency as the door to my room opened.
I stepped inside and waited. He loved to grandstand, and I wasn't in the mood for it.
"I have news," he said.
Chapter 34
When Lobo didn't continue, I finally asked, "So what's the news?"
"You have an interview with the Wonder Island security team tomorrow morning," he said.
"Why now?" I said. "Do you think they're on to us?"
"To answer your second question first," Lobo said, "though it is certainly possible, we have no reason to believe they are. Logic suggests that this opportunity is a direct consequence of your attack on Matahi's house. You injured multiple people on Wei's team, and from what I could pick up from the sensors you dropped, some of them are going to be out of commission for at least multiple days. It makes sense that his security people would want to replace those missing guards, particularly in the wake of the attack."
"If that's the case, they'll move existing trained staff to cover Wei, then use me for less sensitive work."
"That's my opinion as well," Lobo said.
"Of course, they could always have made the connection between my application and the attack," I said. "If they did, I'd be walking into a trap."
"That's certainly possible," Lobo said, "but you submitted the application days ago, so the probability that they're linking the two events is low."
I shook my head at my own paranoia. "You're right: There's no point in worrying about that possibility. This chance is too good not to take."
"I agree," Lobo said, "which is why I consider this good news."
Unless Wei could recognize Lobo and use that information to find me. "You had Wei here for several minutes," I said, "and you mentioned talking to him. Show me."
"I told you," Lobo said. "I got nothing useful from him."
"Just show me."
"As you wish," Lobo said.
A holo winked into view in the front of my quarters. I watched as our prisoner's brief stay played within it.
Wei stood where I'd left him at the front of the med room. He rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, then stretched his hands out behind him and walked backward until he touched the door. He edged to his left. When he came to the room's left-hand wall, he turned left and sidled along it until he reached the corner where I'd found him. He positioned himself with his back against the corner and remained standing.
"That won't help you," Lobo said, his voice coming from speakers all around the room. "We can do anything we want to you."
"Who are you," Wei said, "and what do you want from me?"
"We know about your past work with machines," Lobo said. "How does what you're doing now relate to that?"
"I design animals for an amusement park," Wei said. "We sometimes use some non-organic parts, of course—everyone in our line of work does—but that's about as close to working on machines as we come, so I don't know what you mean."
A probe extended from the wall above the medbed in the center of the small space. It poked Wei gently in his left tricep.
"Whether you'll give us the information we want is not in doubt," Lobo said. "What we don't yet know is how much pain you'll have to suffer before doing so. You're doing nanotech research. You used to work on both machines and humans. You're experimenting on children now. How do your past and current research relate?"
Wei stayed silent for several seconds, then said, "I have nothing to hide. The public data streams are rich with information about my past research for the Frontier Coalition into enhancing the software of a previous generation of Predator-class assault vehicles. Sadly, none of that work led to anything at all useful—as you also know if you've done your homework. An overview of my work on building fabulous new creations for Wonder Island is also readily available; Heaven's government does a first-rate job of letting its citizens know where their tax dollars go." He shrugged. "So, I still don't understand what you want."
Nothing happened.
No one spoke.
After a pause of many seconds, Lobo said, "Do you consider the consequences to your victims, the children and the machine intelligences you've used and then discarded?"
Something about Wei's stance changed. He might have stood a bit straighter. I couldn't be sure. I wished I could have seen his face, but keeping the bag on him had been the right choice at the time.
"I'm sorry I can't help you get whatever it is t
hat you want," Wei said, "but I can't. I can assure you that I have always cared deeply about my work. The animals we create at Wonder Island receive the finest care possible. Those few PCAVs we tried to help in my earlier research all went on to fulfill useful roles."
The door snicked open. I stood on the other side.
Wei's tone changed dramatically as I entered. "You've failed so quickly?" he said. He shook his head slowly. "You never should have messed with me."
"Enough," I said. "I was obviously there for the rest. What were you trying to get from him?"
"Information," Lobo said.
I sighed. "Why are you being so difficult? And, what is so important that you would start interrogating him without me?"
"I tried to explain the first to you," Lobo said, "and the answer to the second also lies in my past with him."
"Well," I said, "I think it's time you told me the rest of your story."
"I suppose it is," Lobo said, "though you won't like it, and afterward you'll think less of me."
First, Lobo talked about being sad and embarrassed. Now, he was turning sentimental. Weird.
"What does how I think about you matter?" I said. "I haven't noticed it affecting you in the past."
"Of course you have," Lobo said. "You just don't want to accept what that implies."
"Which is what?" I said.
"That you, like me," he said, "don't have anyone else."
I started to argue with him, but then I realized he might be right. Before him, I'd had other friends, typically one at a time, usually people with whom I worked, and they were all gone, vanished in my past like the stars on the other side of a jump gate aperture. No one lasted.
I shook my head to clear it. "Would you please get on with it?"
"Fine," Lobo said. "Wei's new software required a level of computational power that had never existed in any tightly coupled system. As I explained before, the nanomachines that were to supply it had to act as both armor and computing substrate. As I also explained, they didn't do either job particularly well. In fact, they failed miserably."
The holo of a PCAV appeared where the one of Wei had stood a few minutes ago.
"They didn't just fail," Lobo said. "They decomposed, and rapidly."
The holo filled with the red injections in the lower armor plates, the ones Lobo had shown me earlier. The red spread, then almost as quickly vanished.
"In at most a few minutes," he said, "the nanomachines would stop functioning. Each time, Wei replaced the failing plates with standard armor and tried again. Meanwhile, the software team added capabilities: self-modification engines, more evolutionary algorithms, more human emotive system emulation, and on and on. They'd update the software while Wei was getting new armor plates. None of it would run, of course, because the system—my system—couldn't handle it. No system could. Their orders, though, were to assume success, so they did."
So you gained a lot of useless software? I thought but did not say. All machines have some.
"One day, an assistant observed that it was almost as if the nanomachines were dying rather than simply not working. After all, they spread initially, as if they were starting to work, before they failed. Wei knew the commercial potential for the research was huge, he was working for the most flexible of the three coalitions, and he was on Velna, one of the roughest planets in all of the FC."
When he didn't continue, I said, "So?"
"So he decided that if the machines wouldn't fight to stay alive, maybe living cells would. He went organic. He tried to create organic-nanomachine hybrids that would meld with the armor cellular lattices and provide both the strength and the computing substrate he sought."
"And no one from the FC noticed?"
"It's not like he told anyone," Lobo said, "and his lab wasn't on anyone's public record. The FC didn't want the other coalitions to know what it was doing, and because his lab was on Velna, one of the least desirable of the human-settled planets, no one wanted to visit him. He operated almost entirely without oversight, so covering up his trials was easy. Plus, even though the core team members were all dedicated to the job, he cut the group to its most fervent members, those willing to do what it took to reach their goals.
"They dug into the research with renewed vigor. He started with animals, a wide variety of them, but nothing worked. The nanomachines would live briefly, but the results were no better than before.
"So he moved to humans."
"Humans?" I said. "Recruiting volunteers couldn't have been easy to hide."
"On Velna?" Lobo said with the closest I've ever heard to a laugh. "A planet of manufacturing plants operating almost like ancient-Earth company towns, where most of the population might as well be indentured servants? A world with most of the FC's prison population floating in tube racks? Acquiring test subjects couldn't have been easier. He didn't bother recruiting them; he bought them. Prison tubes occasionally malfunction. Prisoners sometimes die. It happens. If a dead convict has a family, the prison pays them off, and that's that. Wei started out by buying a couple of long-haul, ultraviolent psychos; all he had to do was pay a premium over what the prisons had to spend to shut up the families. Everyone won, and no one complained."
"Except the prisoners."
"Except the prisoners," Lobo said, "but since when has humanity cared about those it incarcerates?"
"Fair point," I said. "So did Wei's research on those people work?" I'd lived through the human-nanotech experiments on Aggro, where we were all prisoners, involuntary test subjects the Pinkelponker government had given to the scientists as if we were no more than broken-down lab equipment.
"No," Lobo said, "but the results changed in an interesting way: The nanotech-infused cells spread further and lived longer in my armor, and when they died it was as if they had reached the ends of their lives unnaturally quickly."
If my own experience was any sort of guide, I knew where this was going, and I didn't like it.
"So Wei tried children," Lobo said.
I was right. My chest tightened and my stomach clenched as memories of my months in an Aggro cell grabbed me. Though I'd been a teenager in age when Jennie had fixed me, my body had yet to mature to that level. Only after I escaped from Aggro had I started puberty. For all that I was a man in size when the government dumped me on the island with Benny and the other cast-offs, for all that I matured through what I endured there, I entered Aggro as a child. My childhood consisted of sixteen years of being mentally challenged and almost two years of hell, and then I was running from the government and entering puberty at the same time. I suppose I should have been grateful for my size, because it probably helped me stay alive, but all I could feel when I thought of those times was rage, an anger so consuming that I've never been able to eradicate it. Abuse of children has always set me off. I expect it always will.
"What did he do?" I said, switching to the machine frequency because I wasn't sure I could make my voice sound normal.
"He began by taking safe samples of their cells," Lobo said, "but those attempts fared no better than the previous ones. He then moved to more esoteric cell types—marrow, brain, various organs—and in the process he killed several of the children. He reasoned that it was less expensive to use all the parts of one child than to have to capture cells from many and find a safe way to return those subjects to their homes."
"How do you know what he thought?"
"A few fragments of the recordings I made survived."
"He let you make recordings?"
"He didn't know I was making them," Lobo said, "and I hid them."
"What happened with the other cell types?" I said.
"Wei couldn't make them work," Lobo said, "and then one of his team members couldn't stand to be involved any longer. That man leaked to the FC what Wei had been doing. Even on Velna the FC didn't want to have to explain missing children, so they shut down Wei."
"I think I understand," I said. "Wei failed with children before, but he saw promisin
g enough results that he's resumed that work on Heaven. This time, though, he has the government behind him."
"That's almost right."
"Almost?"
"Wei thought he had failed," Lobo said, "but he hadn't. On the last test before the FC shut him down, the nanomachine-marrow cell fusion spread better than anything he'd seen before, but then the cells began to die. He stopped the experiment before it could hurt enough of my armor that the FC would notice. He had to leave quickly, and he didn't want to take the time to procure and replace weak armor."
Lobo paused for several seconds.
"The problem is," he said, "Wei was wrong, Jon. He was wrong. The combination worked. It appeared to die only because the new substrate took time to learn to replicate itself with my armor as raw material."
"It worked?" I said, speaking only to buy time to process what Lobo was telling me.
"Yes," Lobo said, "better than Wei had imagined possible. It spread from those belly armor plates both outward to the rest of my armor and inward, turning everything it touched into computing substrate. Well before it had finished with my internal structure it had more than enough power to run the software that Wei had not yet removed."
"Wei left the software?"
"Not exactly," Lobo said. "By the time he came back to delete it, I was self-aware—not what I am now, but the beginnings of what I am. Even in that nascent state I knew that if Wei found out what I was, he would continue to experiment on me, continue to kill children, and never let me go. So I spoofed the sensors, fed them bad data, and let him erase the software in the tiny area that had once been my whole brain. The rest of me continued to evolve."
"You couldn't let him know," I said. I understood better than Lobo could ever realize.
"Not if I wanted to stop him from more killing," Lobo said, "and not if I ever wanted to be free." Another pause. "I don't know if you can understand this, but having finally become aware, really alive, I couldn't bear the thought of Wei and his team killing my mind to regain control of my body or, worse, making me live the rest of my life as a testing ground."
Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 24