“Military were having a little sell-off of the outdated stuff. Got it for a song.”
“Fast escape vehicles?” he questioned her, wondering what could escape a warhead travelling at five hundred miles an hour.
“Oh, the launchers are only for other machines,” she said. “I don't let them use really advanced tech for targeting people, only the basic stuff: flamethrowers, catapults, shockwave cannons. Can't even use those in urban areas like this. Look—” and she led him through a jungle of coloured hydraulic cabling that made up the intestines of one beast “—I got a sonic disruptor here, telekinetic aiming and everything…” She picked up a pair of sighting goggles and put them to her face, looking at him through them. There was a sudden, high whine of motors and a long neck, so high he hadn't even seen it, swung down with swan grace and aimed the black oval head of a blast speaker at him.
He froze.
Bush took the goggles off and hung them on one of the huge razored projection spikes jutting out of its legs. The neck remained in position.
“Can't hurt you,” she said with deep regret in her voice. “It's got the limiter codebox on it. It can only target other machines or rocks and stuff. No biologics. Shitty, isn't it?”
He tried to nod, didn't quite manage it. Years ago she had been fervent about achieving her then-goal of making machine predators “worthy” of the human race. As keen on crackpot evolutionist theory as Roy had been, she was convinced it was one of the few ways likely to jolt them out of their species' complacency and into a fresh spurt of progress.
“This is the Screamer,” she added, giving one rusty cylindrical leg a pat. He saw it had five-ton jackhammers in each foot, with spatulate steel plates welded to them so it could jump like a spider.
“What happened in Arizona?”
“Oh, we had a great time,” she said, moving along to caress the track of a giant caterpillar with a mass driver unit attached to its back. A long string of fairy lights winked in sequence along the hundred feet of its body, and a tuft of particolour optics covered the head end like a bad disco wig. “The audience were driven around by test pilots in jet-hovers. All the gang here were started off from a central point. We chased around like kids. It was brilliant. Lost a few of the best ones, of course. No casualties because I had the real killers on remote. Could have squashed some of the Americas' finest statesmen, you know…missed my chance…their hover crashed after getting flamed by the Dragon, and Blind Pugh almost got them.” She sighed and Augustine thought he saw real regret in her face. “Had to cold-nuke Pugh, of course, with his own reactor. Shame.”
He was about to ask her something else, admiring the ingenuity of her designs, when over the basso-profundo vibration of the general crew warm-up came a lighter, skittering noise of metal scraping against the concrete floor.
He looked at Bush questioningly.
“One of the Corroders,” she said, and started digging in various pockets of her overalls, producing bits of circuitry and small boxes and laying them out on the tracks of the caterpillar driver. “Their ’ware is a bit shot. I got it from a Far Eastern dealer who trades in aborted defence projects. They were supposed to be part of a robot defence force, with high-speed targeting systems for catching groundhugger missiles in advance of the front line.”
The scratching had abated. Augustine leant against the caterpillar and felt the deep thrumming of the others' engines. He had the urge to get his back against something solid, or to crawl into one of the dark accessways and hide. Instead he made a little show of dusting off his greatcoat and took the chance to rub at his itching ports.
“Got the remote in here somewhere,” Bush said, “or maybe it's back at the desk…look, I'll have to go find it and switch them down until later. They're always running around making a mess. Stay here. I'll be back…” She started walking away. The scratching sounded closer. Just before she vanished around the caterpillar's head, she turned around and walked backwards to shout, “Don't worry. They're all limited. It won't hurt you.”
It was a definite part of the aesthetics of Bush's work that she used systems designed for the destruction of human beings and machines as systems for the destruction of human beings and machines. She had always said the lack of transformation on her part was due to the genuine need fulfilled by the original purpose—people needed something that was out to get them to give them a purpose in life. The artistic part was the naked realization of that, overthrowing the twisted viewpoint that these things were really for defending people. Added to that she was liberating the machines themselves from a slave existence of dull operation into a real life where they were capable of pursuing their own desires.
The scratching had a real-life sound about it. Its almost regular pause and iteration circled him. The optical fur on the caterpillar's head wafted as in a sudden breeze, although he didn't see anything move. He dug his hands into his pockets and tried to shake the sensation of being spooked, but high in the boltgun head of a steam-powered sloth, armoured with aircraft alloy, he could see himself in black and white on a tiny monitor camera. He moved experimentally along towards Bush's discarded detritus and it tracked him.
“Oh, I got it,” Bush said through the headset, and at almost the same moment something light and springy appeared at the end of the caterpillar's aisle.
“Bush?” Augustine said warily, before he'd even realized he had spoken. The Corroder looked a bit like a four-legged chicken. The scratching noise was not its feet because they were rubber car tires mounted under an animalistic leg array. It was the trailing edges of its long wingtips that were dragging along the concrete. Inside a light frame-body he could see three mounted canisters. They were all empty, only a small amount of leftover whatever sloshing around inside them. Beneath those, in a deep breast section, were its solar-powered motor units, inaudible within the general hum of life around it but at full charge beneath the giant lights of the warehouse. The wings themselves were the chargers—big sails of cells, riddled with tears and holes, their outer struts and arms wrapped around with razorwire. Small nailguns protruded from the wing knuckles. Its head, on a low snake neck, was no more than a spray nozzle and a sensor array wired up to a processor box. It was looking at him, moving side to side a little with unmistakable stereoscopic targeting mechanics.
“What's in these things?” he demanded as it engaged its drive and rolled towards him a little. It seemed uncertain, but it was still menacing.
“The tanks are organo-acid, but they're pretty empty. It might drip on you if you get too close.” She didn't sound concerned.
The chicken monster paused halfway down the aisle; it seemed to be thinking. He was close enough to hear its pumps start. The acid bubbled and gargled, but there was nothing in it. A little bit of liquid oozed from its nose and fell onto the concrete, where it steamed and cut two neat holes about three inches deep. The pumps cut, started, cut. Servomotors squealed and it began to raise its wings. Sweat broke out all over his body. His arms and legs suddenly wanted the added weight and protection of Armour, or the ability to escape this situation that Soldier would have given him. He was in a different reality. The empty ports prickled.
“This thing is definitely targeting me,” he said, trying to sound offhand. “What should I do?”
“It can't get you.” She sounded as if she were smiling. “Maybe the headset is confusing it, making it think you're a kind of machine. Hang on, I'll be right there. This battery's gone dead.”
“Hurry up,” he snapped. The wings folded and aimed their guns. It dropped its head and he saw it brace itself against its braking system. He ripped off the headset and flung it away down the aisle.
The whole creature seemed to thrive on the movement. It followed the flight of the small set with smooth accuracy. The nailguns let rip and he saw the tiny bit of electronics explode as it was hit by a pumping stream of metal needles. Fragments hurtled everywhere, and the spare nails punched a trail of neat holes into the camera-bear's flank with a serie
s of violent reports.
It swung back to face him. There was a still moment. The wing guns took a precise aim, yet the thing hesitated again. It engaged its wheels and spun towards him. He knew it was the optics and jack processors inside him that were causing it the trouble, and there was no way past it, no way of knowing how much ammunition it had. He saw microsensors in its head coming into action. He would have run, but he was backed up against the caterpillar's treads, and the chicken closed the distance too fast. Instead he buckled and ducked into the hollow between two of the drive wheels, sheltering under the inch-thick metal plates of the track. His hat fell off. He saw the acid-head track that had then come back to him. It got as close as it could, and the felted homburg he loved suddenly began to vaporize as a fresh runnel of snot hit it. Augustine could only see thin metal legs.
Abruptly the bulbous ball-and-socket joints flexed and it squatted down like an evil version of Baba Yaga's hut. The narrow spout nose appeared, and then he felt a sharp prickling sensation as some kind of scanner was used on him and caused the optics running inside his muscle fibres to vibrate in harmony. There was a sudden and terrible noise. He had his hands over his ears, and then realized it was trying to shoot him through the tread of the caterpillar and the nails were ricocheting from the plates. It struggled to get its wings low enough, but he wriggled backwards, trying to wedge himself between the wheels inside the mechanism. It spat a few droplets of acid and he saw his coat hole, but it missed flesh and ate a chunk out of the track instead. Where his hat had been there was nothing but a stain on the concrete. The wings scraped and clattered overhead and then there was a transmission clunk. The chicken reversed at high speed and began to re-aim from a distance where it could make the trajectory.
He was watching it, pressed against the back of the mechanism, trying to get his head behind the wheel. It stood there. And stood there.
Bush appeared and stuck her hand out to help him out of his hole. “Got it,” she mouthed and waved a small card-sized control.
They sat in the small site office and drank Scotch out of plastic tumblers.
“It thought I was a machine,” Augustine said. He'd said it a few times.
“More likely its ’ware shot the limiter up. Those systems were all worked off of Khan's natural-virus systems. They consume other programmes and try to get them into workable shape. Neat idea, really: adapt other stuff to work for you. I'll have to get my programmer to check it over.” She'd said that before, too, and he didn't believe it then either.
He drank a finger of Scotch and let it do its own minor corrosion job down his throat and into his stomach. Bush didn't know the details of his work and he wasn't about to share it with her, even if he had been allowed to. Her history put him off. She had cut her teeth in Machine Life's terrorist wing. What she was doing here was no more in her eyes than infiltrating the establishment from a new angle, no matter what the critics said. He didn't fancy the idea of her cutting into his technology and trying to make him the first human to be truly “liberated” by his transformation into a meat-metal machine.
“Roy's dead,” he said finally, unable to think of any better way of broaching the subject.
“I heard,” she said, “but if you were thinking of asking me about it, don't bother. I don't know any more than you do.”
“But you've got a theory.”
“Nah. He was into the other side of things—the real virtual virtuoso stuff, not this engineering schlepp like you and me.” She gave him a smile with half her mouth that said they could have been allies if they hadn't been on opposite sides of the fence. “I lost track of him just after I saw you last.”
“But he was still keen on the ideal.”
“You mean he was in the organizations? I don't think so. He resigned his post a long time back. Didn't even do any coding for us. If he was doing anything on our behalf he never told us about it…me, anyway.” She crossed her legs and shuffled, and he got the impression that the silence had cut her up. “History,” she said with one of her hard, tight little shrugs.
He didn't detect much resentment. It was interesting. It didn't seem as though they thought of Roy as a traitor to the cause, even though he had spent all his working life within one of the major corporates which Machine Life opposed. He was wondering what to say next, when she spoke.
“Maybe it's better he's dead.”
“What do you mean?”
She stared out the little cabin window towards the empty arena, her eyes narrow with speculation. “When we used to get together, in meetings, to discuss our policies—in the days when we had policies—Roy always used to take a point too far, or see a vision further than the rest of us really liked to see it. I mean, look—I make these things to give that jolt of fear, and they can do some damage all right, but they couldn't last. They need that fix of gasoline, that hit of ammunition. They run out of stuff very fast and then they're nothing but heaps of crap again. They've got lives—” she pinched one thumb and what used to be a forefinger, but was now a knuckle short, together “—like gnats. And if you want to get all strict on the rules, they don't fit in. I make them. They're artifacts, even now, not really things with futures. If they want to breed, I breed them by welding bits off one and on another. They can't get by alone. No niche. No real environment.”
She knocked back the rest of her Scotch and put the tumbler down. “But Roy had bigger vision. He had some line that there was this particular type of computer that had already been set into being way-back-when, with real evolutionary principles inside it that would let it breed and develop independently. I guess he meant 901. Well, you know there's lots of that around now—Khan's virus things, Bonetti's hives—but…God, he thought they were going to leave us behind and go to the stars. He wanted it more than anything. He wished he was one of them. Resented being flesh and bone, you know?”
Augustine nodded and put back the rest of his own drink. He hadn't liked to be reminded here, but the truth had been staring him in the face from when Roy had bad, self-mutilating days. He could come back to the room in halls and find Roy stretched out in a pool of blood with a silly grin on his face, the solid logic patterning of microprocessors cut into his thighs from knee to groin with absolute precision, not one line crossed or shorted.
“Remember Project Blood?” Bush asked, shaking her head. “Man, he was one of the most fucked-up people I've ever met, including me.”
Project Blood had been Roy's term for a ridiculously stupid stunt he had got together. He had planned to inject himself with a series of steadily strengthening doses of silicon-bearing neurotransmitter drugs until he was mummified by the stuff whilst still alive. He thought he would end up like a kind of metal man, unchanged except for basic chemistry, which would become silicon in nature rather than carbon. Naturally it didn't work, his knowledge of human physiology owing more to his imagination than to any facts. Fortunately he only got a couple of shots in before his money ran out. The only thing that saved him from the wrath of his dealer was the arrival of the OptiNet medics, come to haul him into their facility for some serious psychotherapy. If he hadn't been a genius coder he would have spent his days in an asylum of some sort.
Augustine shivered. He had been hoping that Bush would stir up memories of Roy, but not those particular ones. Now he was only reminded of his crazy side and the bit of himself which had grown to hate Roy. They had been kept in loose alliance by their shared passion for machines, but driven apart by the same thing. Augustine liked mechanicals, the complicated children of basic automata. Roy liked virtuals, things without moving parts which existed only as command strings within cyberspace. They had held one another at a jealously guarded distance, pushed away by scorn, tugged together by respect; Augustine the iron rod, Roy the alternating current.
“Bush,” he said heavily, “do you think Roy's death was a part of something bigger he had in mind? Is there something happening here that you know about? Something going on from the bad old days? All those plans
?”
“Well, now that would be telling,” she said, flicking her glass with her fingers so that it scooted across the table. “Suffice it to say, the organization still feels that Roy has a lot of potential in certain areas.”
Augustine raised his eyebrows. “Still?”
“The manner of his death was no accident, I'll bet.” She was grinning now, teasing him. “He couldn't stop. He's found a way to do more. To finish it.”
“Carlyle!” he snapped, finding himself still shaking. “That demo, these threats to Anjuli, this bloody game of his with the Shoal—just what the hell is happening?”
She smirked and bit her lip girlishly, kicked up her heels in their heavy boots like an imp, and then leant forwards. “Something wonderful,” she said and smiled. He thought he almost saw a tear in her eye start to form, and for a second she looked beyond him into a future he would have very much liked to see, but she wouldn't share the vision.
(Of course, Augustine didn't catch the reference to HAL, having not wasted so much time watching films, but I did. I should have taken more notice of it, but at the time I was too worried about other things.)
He asked her the same things again, but she shook her head and seemed to have become bored with conversation, in the way that people with dangerous secrets often appear to. Only her glances told him he'd find out the truth sometime.
He took the hint and shut up.
“Want a final look-see before you go? I have to finish up.” Bush got to her feet and stretched.
“Yeah, OK.” He was feeling a lot better when he stood. His knees didn't wobble and his mouth wasn't acid with the closeness of death. The day seemed brighter and clearer all around. But he still got the same sense of awe when he stood inside the warehouse and was with the machines, dwarfed by their bodies, deafened by the sound of their breathing, his cyboports singing. He put his hand out and touched the feeler of a waspbot where one narrow tube segment was welded to another. The weld was rippled and silky like scar tissue. The feeler twitched a little in response as the creature ticked over on standby power. He tucked his coat around his shoulders and hunched out into the yard.
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