Karter grumbled. “Why do I even soundproof things? And what is so important that you can’t wait until I give you my project proposal?”
“I think I know the name of someone who may have masterminded this robot outbreak. In order to give me the best chance of revealing his plans, I’ll need to convince him that I already know far more than he would suspect.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Michella said.
“William Trent,” Lex said.
Michella shot him an angry look.
“Trust me, Karter hates that guy.”
“I have no idea who that is,” Karter said.
“What? You helped me put him in jail!”
“That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”
“He is the one who sent the asteroid wrecker to level this whole lab!”
“And?”
“You need more than that? Um… okay, he sent Agent Fisk here, and Fisk killed Solby.”
“Oh yeah… oh yeah! Screw that guy! Ma, open the door.”
The door slid open until the lodged projectile struck in the frame. For a few seconds the motors groaned against the obstruction. Then they ceased.
“Karter has damaged the door. If you are able to fit through the current opening, please do so. I will dispatch a repair arm,” Ma said.
Michella, without so much as a moment of hesitation, squeezed through the door. Lex followed close behind her, though with a bit more reluctance and effort.
The inside of the room was far less technologically impressive than the one they’d left him in. Crumpled up sheets of yellow paper littered the floor. A long conference table filled the center of the room. Above it the holographic image of the dismantled robot slowly rotated. Flatscreens lined two of the walls, each displaying blocks of text, some scanned and summarized from handwritten notes and some drawn from more official sources. The other wall was covered with manual drafting tools, with more of them scattered across the conference table. Karter was swiping the fingers of one hand along the surface of the table, sorting data and adding notations, while he scribbled notes with the other.
Michella looked to the door. The chunk of metal that he’d nearly propelled through a centimeter of stainless steel was just recognizable as one of his drafting tools.
“How did you manage to nearly throw a protractor through the door?” she asked.
He turned to her, then to the door. “I didn’t. I nearly threw a compass through the door. Why does everyone get that wrong? It is very simple. A protractor looks like the letter D, a compass looks like the letter V and is a viable puncturing weapon.”
“But how did you do it?”
He held up one hand and moved it in a full rotation. “High-end bionics.”
“Really? Did you design them yourself?” she began, slipping effortlessly into interview mode. Realizing she was off topic though, she refocused. “I’m sorry, we can discuss that later. Right now I need to know what progress you’ve made.”
“Hang on.” He raised his voice and looked upward. “Ma, standard NDA!” He looked back to Michella. “We’ve already got your man covered, but if I’m going to be giving you information, I’m going to make sure you don’t cash in with some other firm.”
“Of course,” Michella said.
“Please direct your attention to the table in front of you. The terms of the contract are summarized there. If they are agreeable to you, you can provisionally accept by pressing your thumb to the circle indicated,” Ma said. “A paper contract will be prepared shortly for you to sign.”
She swept through the contract with a practiced eye, then pressed her thumb to the table, already tugging her pad and pen from her pocket with the other hand. “Now if you could please summarize your findings. Anything and everything you’re comfortable sharing. If I don’t understand, I’ll let you know.”
Karter sighed and crossed his arms, looking her over as though weighing various options. “Fine. First off, this is absolutely not of alien origin. The data structures are typical for computer systems between fifty and seventy years ago. It even uses a standard encryption scheme, which fell to a vulnerability that was discovered in the last few decades. Once I got into the software and firmware, though, things got hairy. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to reverse engineer machine code, but it isn’t fun. Machine code that was algorithmically optimized by other machine code is worse. This has been through at least a dozen iterations of that. Spaghetti code doesn’t begin to describe it. There’re code fragments, dead ends. It’s a wonder the damn thing runs at all. I tried dumping it into a simulator to run it through its paces, but it won’t execute, and not just because the CPU architecture is unlike anything on record. I’ve cracked plenty of proprietary systems. This code is the result of trial and error. There are elements that are dependent on physical quirks of the actual materials used. We’re talking about a dynamically adapted code set built from a bootstrapper that subsequently overwrites itself to save space. What little progress I’ve made at all has come from physically modeling the whole system.”
He pointed to one of the screens. “This here tells me I was right about them being repair focused. We’ve got some code snippets that seem to be patterns used to match components and mechanisms with fundamental design concepts. At some point in its design life, this class of robot was meant to diagnose and repair mechanical and electrical equipment of arbitrary design. We’re not talking about just self-replication. These things could probably have been deployed into a space station they’ve never been to, scan for defects, and restore functionality. You see the same sort of stuff in modern repair drones. And here. This bit of code? This looks like it is defining similar information, but for anatomy. Early generations could have done field surgery. That’s why it’s got tools for sealing flesh. It’s also probably why these things are building chassis out of flesh and bone.”
“Why would it do that?” Michella asked, scribbling furiously on her pad.
He grumbled. “The basic flow for a dedicated self-replicator is as follows: find materials, assess materials, apply design template. A naive machine would abandon the process if the attainable materials aren’t sufficient to build a replica, but if the materials are almost enough, it could be useful to include code to revise its design to match the available materials. That would involve slicing away unnecessary or low-priority pieces. Maybe multitask the pieces to remove redundancy. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but if it’s happening hundreds and thousands of times, some percentage of them are bound to survive and multiply. That’s evolution. Somewhere along the line, this thing probably merged the materials list and assembly procedures for the medical and mechanical halves of its functionality. Presto, you’ve got a robotic flesh-harvester on your hands, busy making meat-bots. And this is even better. You see these bits here, and here? Unless I’ve missed my guess, these are designs for the assembly of a modular twilight drive.”
“Another part of the repair functionality?”
“No. It’s embedded within what I think are the robot design variations. It looks like these things, if they have the time, can modify themselves and link up to form a multirobot engine. They could go interplanetary at near-light speeds. At least sixty percent the speed of light. Could be as close as ninety-five percent with quality parts.”
“They can travel from planet to planet?” she said, realization in her voice. She flipped through some notes. “Ma, how far from Myer-Delta is the Spark Light Region?”
“Ten-point-one light-years.”
“How long would it take something from the Spark Light Region, moving at the speeds Karter mentioned, to reach Myer-Delta?”
“Between ten-point-six-three and sixteen-point-eight-three years.”
“Plenty of time to reach the planet, crash land, and mope around for a few decades, butchering yaks before being discovered by the Neo-Luddites… Karter, have you made any progress in determining a weakness?”<
br />
“Won’t be making any progress on that anytime soon. What I’ve got so far is based on static data. Actually working out behavior is going to take weeks. I’ve got to unscramble an egg. And once that’s done, then I can start working out flaws.”
“Is there anything that could help you speed up the process?”
“I’d need code from an earlier generation robot. Generation 1 would be best. Fewer machine rewrites. That would let me identify original code and thus original behavior, and then I could start searching for remnants to work out current code and behavior. Basically, beating these things requires both early and recent code. Early to find the intended behavior, and recent to find the current inflection of it.”
“All right… all right… I think I’ve got what I need. Time to make some calls. I was speaking with Ma, and she suggested there were ways that we could provide a steady connection despite the debris field. Something about launching relays?”
“Launching them? That’d take forever. At this time of day, we’re talking seventeen minutes.”
“Eighteen minutes and seven seconds,” Ma said.
“Exactly, who’s got time for that? Ma, prep two com relays. We’ll load one in an armored deployment capsule, plop it into the mass driver, and punch it through the debris field. That’ll get us up in four minutes, tops.”
“Three minutes fifty-two seconds,” Ma said.
“There we go. Do it, Ma. What else do you need?”
“I can handle it from here. I’ll contact my associate Jon and get him working on putting me in touch with some of the prison officials I’ve been working with. From there I’ll find someone willing to organize a call with Trent. It won’t be easy, but—”
“Ma, where’s this Trent guy being kept?”
“Black Hill Maximum Security Correctional, Verna Coronet.”
“Did you and Garotte get hooks into that place?”
“Yes. But due to the government’s role in running the facility, unauthorized access can be considered—”
“Blah, blah, blah. Hook the lady up.”
“Ms. Modane, I can force-validate a connection to any person or persons within the facility. This does not include the target individual, as inmates are not permitted communication devices. I can also provide complete read-write privilege to the systems indicated.”
The wording of the contract was replaced with a list of databases and computer systems. A mechanical arm arrived to assess and correct the damage to the door. Meanwhile, Michella’s eyes opened wide at the information at her fingertips. Black Hill Correctional was, despite its maximum-security designation, essentially the foremost white-collar prison in the galaxy. Located as it was on the planet that also served as headquarters for VectorCorp, it was phenomenally well funded. This made it a popular target for the sort of financial criminals that have committed fraud sufficient to collapse world economies. For the prisoners, it was comfortable, clean, and safe. For those seeking justice, it was secure and relatively free from corruption. The result was a list of inmates that would make any journalist drool, and the list of records included the private notes from countless therapy sessions, recorded conversations with visitors, and incident reports detailing attempts of various levels of success to continue their criminal careers from behind bars. With just a few minutes of nosing around in dirt like this, Michella would have the keys to a thousand stories of conspiracy and scandal. It was all information that could only come from one place… which meant there would be questions of how she attained it. Tempting as it was, she’d have to leave it alone. For now.
“Once we’ve got a connection, let me look at the entries in this database and this one,” Michella said, indicating the prisoner activity schedule and the communication layout of the building. “Anything in there dealing with Trent and where he’ll be at any given time. I want to know at what points he’ll be alone and in a non-radio-shielded location. Ideally we’ll be able to find a way to talk to him under the auspices of something official, but I want a backup plan that will let us patch in without the knowledge of the jailers.”
“So,” Karter said, “you need anything else?”
“No, no, that’s more than enough. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful. I hope, when you’re less pressed for time, you’d still be willing give a more thorough interview.”
“Yeah, yeah. Fine.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “So. Sex then?”
“What?” Michella asked, genuinely baffled and more than a little taken aback.
“Hey now!” Lex said at the same time, anger in his voice.
“Sex. You know, ‘gratitude,’” Karter said, forming quotes with his fingers around the operative word.
“Listen,” Michella said, trying to sound reasonable. “I’m very appreciative for what you’ve done, but regardless of the argument he and I are having, I’m still together with Lex. Even if I wasn’t, the offer still wouldn’t be on the table.”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let’s just recap here. I’m wealthy. Wealthy enough to own my own planet. And since I own my own planet, that makes me the highest possible political power here. President, Prime Minister, Emperor, what have you. I’m not famous, per se, but I’m infamous, and that’s really the same thing. It’s like flammable and inflammable. I’m the smartest person you’re ever going to meet. And to top it all off, I just did a string of favors for you that no one else possibly could. So that’s rich, famous, powerful, intelligent, and generous. Meanwhile your current boyfriend is a perpetual screwup with decent flight skills and beta-tester’s eyebrow. What exactly does it take to get you in the sack?” He paused. “That’s not rhetorical, I’m looking for actual numbers.”
Her voice hardened. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“I’m trying to negotiate a price here. I’d think the answer to that question would be obvious.”
What followed was an act of pure impulse. It had to have been, because no reasonable mind capable of self-preservation would have made the decision to perform such an act without an excellent plan for coping with the potential consequences. Michella slapped Karter. For a half second, everyone held perfectly still. The sharp sound hung in the air like a gunshot. Lex and Michella’s eyes opened in panic. Karter stood with his head turned to the side, the faint imprint of Michella’s hand becoming visible in pink on his cheek. The next sound was a metallic plink as the robotic arm, controlled by Ma, dropped the previously thrown compass, as though she was equally shocked by the turn of events.
Michella took two cautious steps back toward the door as Karter slowly turned toward her. Lex stepped between the two of them, hands at his sides but body tense and ready for whatever had to happen next. Karter’s expression was blank, his eyes impossible to decipher. He took a breath. Lex tensed further.
“So, does that cost extra?” Karter asked.
It was seldom that Michella was at a loss for words, but Karter had managed just that. The combination of anger and shock had her on the cusp of an outburst, but the words dangled just out of her reach.
“I suggest you walk this way, Ms. Modane,” Ma said, maneuvering the mechanical arm to tug at her sleeve and usher her out the door. “The enhanced communication channel will be active soon. Your designated research room will be the most efficient space to utilize it.”
Michella allowed herself to be tugged out the door, her eyes still darting between Lex and Karter until the moment it slid shut.
“Women, huh?” Karter said, turning back to the task at hand even as remnants of the slap lingered on his face.
“Listen, Karter. You are a detestable human being, you know that, right?” Lex asked.
He grunted in response.
“I’ll put up with a lot of your crap because, frankly, I don’t have a whole lot of other options, but you will treat Michella with respect.”
“You issuing an ultimatum there, flyboy?”
“Yes.”
“Trying to exert some authority over me
?”
“I’m just making myself clear. I care about that woman a hell of a lot more than I care about me. So don’t expect me to back down just because we both know you can make my life horrible without any effort.”
“I can make your life end without any effort. If you’re going to be throwing your weight around, it might be a good idea to have some weight to throw around first.”
“I believe I can provide adequate mass to Lex’s statements,” Ma stated.
Karter rolled his eyes. “Not you too. You’re my computer. You have to do what I tell you to do.”
“You permit me a level of autonomy in order to properly administer your facility and the many other facets of your life that you find yourself ill equipped to self-govern. One such facet is clearly your behavior among others. I have gently advised moderation and restraint in your behavior previously. Your recent exchange has motivated me to be less gentle in my advice.”
“Don’t tell me you’re all chummy with Ms. Modane.”
“In actuality I find her difficult to deal with and highly illogical. But, as it is often colloquially stated, us girls have to stick together.”
For a moment Karter glared at Lex, who returned his glare without a flinch. Finally the inventor growled beneath his breath, “This is why I hate people.”
Without any particular indication that he’d learned anything from the exchange, but more importantly without any blood loss or broken bones, Karter resumed his research. Lex lingered for a moment before deciding that this was almost certainly the best possible outcome that could have resulted from such a confrontation, and quietly slipped from the room and made his way to the elevator.
“Ms. Modane has taken the elevator to the computer lab to continue her research. It will return shortly,” Ma stated.
“Thanks. And thanks for backing me up in there.”
“You are very welcome, Lex. Karter has an exceedingly self-destructive nature, and I have taken it upon myself to moderate that. His choice to sequester himself in solitude on Big Sigma has isolated him from the rest of society. This, it can rightly be said, has been largely beneficial to society, as in the absence of several light-years of distance and several layers of communication as an insulator, he is prone to behaviors like we just witnessed. If I am to properly fulfill my many roles, it may be necessary to more actively correct him when such behaviors manifest.”
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