by Guy Haley
"…want to help safeguard the future of mankind." Karlsson, speaking in his initial job interview. Audio and vitals only, no video, the only piece of non-text data in his official file, incomplete.
"Why?" asked a nameless interrogator. "What do you mean?"
"Because we as a species… benefit from the machines," replied Karlsson. "But they could also supplant us. I would rather that not happen. If…" Static for three seconds. Clarity returned.
"Explain," asked another voice.
"Explain?" Karlsson laughed. "What is there to explain? All life exists to promote its own survival. A fish crawled from the sea a billion years ago, and I sit here. When I get to the afterlife I don't want to have to say to that fish, 'Sorry, we blew it, we're done. Flesh is dead.' If it comes to that, I want to be able to tell that fish that I tried."
Funny, thought Richards. For a Norwegian.
The interview panel did not laugh.
"The AIs are no different. It is in the nature of life to evolve and compete. They are on a collision course with mankind. They will out-compete us. They already are," said Karlsson.
"You do not see the machines then, as a continuation, an evolution of ourselves?" said the first voice. "One could argue that they are the next stage in our evolution."
"Some argue that, and I do not agree with them. A child carries part of its parents forwards when they are gone, in its genes and in its memes. The machines may carry our mental stamp, but they are not us, they never will be. They are not alive in the same way we are."
"So you deny them their rights? They are not equal as sentients?"
"No, of course not," said Karlsson haughtily, as if his interlocutor was an idiot. He must have been a hit at office parties, thought Richards. "They are, if anything, superior. That is what scares me. It scares a lot of other people too, that's why the machines need protecting as much from us as we do from them. To co-exist is…"
The file broke up into buzzsaw roars, then skipped. Richards scrabbled at the data fragments, but could not rebuild much more of the interview that interested him, although he did discover that the VIA healthcare package was good. The text he managed OK, but that was formulaic; standard employment clauses, the deal between the agency and Karlsson when he'd departed, nothing enlightening.
Whatever Karlsson had been up to since he'd been fired was cloaked in secrecy. There were his marching orders, then nothing. The logs of others that had come to see him had been stripped, or altered. There were a handful of streetcam footage files, a few more from free-roaming spy-eye cameras that had escaped his attention, but not many. Zhang Qifang was on several. One five-second video sequence in particular: Qifang entering Karlsson's castle, made a blob by Karlsson's countermeasures, round the time he was presumed to have died.
"That's interesting," murmured Richards. "Very interesting."
He worked on for several more hours, accelerating his conscious processes so he subjectively experienced a week of time. He found nothing else. Karlsson had been thorough.
He slowed his mind down, and brought the office back. He walked across the room as it materialised about him and plopped down into his chair, whisky and cigars appearing on his desk as it rippled into being. Outside, Chicago teemed with life. A whole world existed on the other side of the dusty window glass. Richards wondered where it all went when he wasn't there. He sometimes wondered the same about the Real.
He had to get more on Karlsson, dead or alive.
In his mind's eye he constructed a world within a world, and brought up a three-dimensional representation of Karlsson's Detroit lair. He looked over the fortress factory, superimposed his reconstruction over realtime footage in the Real. The place was crawling with aggressive drones, its exterior studded with not-so-hidden weaponry. There was no way in without tripping its formidable security systems, not Gridside.
Karlsson had been frightened of the machines. It was against them he'd set his most formidable defences.
The plans were deliberately incomplete, and out of date. They probably had a low-grade intelligence embedded in them, ready to alert the real fortress to practised penetrations. The building's systems would be aware he was looking at the plans right now. He checked the systems again, going as close as he dared. The whole thing was EM screened; there was not a chance he'd get anything other than the highest strength databeam through without it being chopped in two, but there were other, more old fashioned ways. Richards walked to his office door and turned up his collar. Time to get tough.
He activated the Three running Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants' commsat, and had it reposition itself in a geostationary orbit over the Great Lakes. He told the Three to keep a low profile. Then he told it again, because Threes sometimes drifted off. Once he was happy the thing had understood his instructions, he stepped out of the office door, and into Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants' New York garage.
In a rat with a microchip mind perched on a pile of dissolving concrete, Richards watched Karlsson's fortress from a safe distance. The street was half-submerged and deserted, but then all the streets here were half-submerged and deserted. Karlsson had fetched himself up in the dead heart of Detroit's old industrial port district, a warren of decaying factories, tottering warehouses and unidentifiable iron constructions washed deep red by the rain. Further upriver on the old Canada side, the waterfront gleamed with luxury low-rise, but not here. The ground, honeycombed with salt mines, was not stable enough to support the weight of arcologies, not desirable enough to go upmarket when Canada had joined USNA, so the shoreline remained a skeletal maze of concrete and foamcrete, a three-dimensional warren standing in grim waters, the remnants of earlier attempts at redevelopment undone by the financial crash of 2052 complicating its nineteenth- and twentieth-century layout. Older port buildings slumped tiredly into the lake, the sturdier constructions boxy islands overhung with plant life. Away from the water, trees grew freely in the middle of the street. The sidewalks were thick with grass. Only those at the margins of society lived here, sharing their ruinous home with returning wildlife. Upper Detroit–Windsor was a moderately prosperous, modern city, but large parts, poisoned by two centuries of heavy industry, had been abandoned to the rising lakes, a true industrial wasteland left by way of remembrance. Obsolescence of centralised mass production had left the Detroit Metro area one of the poorest in the USNA. The population here was half what it had been a century and a half before.
It was a good hiding place.
Karlsson's abode was an old port warehouse made of prefabricated concrete slabs whose chemical make-up had been altered to render it resistant to the acid waters round its base. According to the plans, these were supplemented internally by a modern foamcrete coat sprayed 1.3 metres thick. Heavy buttresses had been thrown up its side, atop which unconcealed near-I weaponry scanned the surrounding wasteland. The original roof had been replaced with more reinforced foamcrete, grassed over and allowed to run wild. This roof meadow was studded with dishes, field projectors and energy generation equipment of solar, magnetic interference and wind-driven varieties. A heavy chainlink fence and flatribbon defined a generous perimeter. Small drones darted about the air, and combat sheaths patrolled the shallow lagoon around the building.
Karlsson was making very little effort to blend in.
Richards looked through the rat's eyes, zooming in on the building, searching for weak points. There were precisely none. None of the small constructs he had at his disposal would make it in. There were a lot of mosquitoes here. Millions. Karlsson's drones were very busy methodically hunting down each and every one. That level of paranoid diligence left no room for robotic rats.
As if to prove the point, Richards' rodent exploded as a passing drone spied it. Richards switched to his back-up rat, a half block away.
With luck, the drone was following a routine extermination programme, a take-no-chances, kill-everything approach. Hopefully Karlsson's machines had not logged the outgoing EM traffic
between Richards and the rats. If he'd had breath, he'd have held it.
Alarms rang out.
"Shit," said the rat, before promptly exploding.
"Shit," said Richards' android sheath, and opened its eyes. He was operating a standard humanoid shell of the kind routinely employed by a wide variety of businesses, which as of the moment sat in the front of a truck also of a kind routinely employed by a wide variety of businesses, this one emblazoned with the logo of a prominent carbon feedstock merchant – though feedstock was most definitely not what currently sat in the rear of the vehicle – and hidden in a broken-down factory building half a kilometre away.
Richards drummed his borrowed fingers on the dashboard. He thought, but not very hard. He was out of plans A to C, leaving him with plan D. Actually, he had known all along that plan D should really have been plan A, that subtler options would not work, but it was his least favourite option, and he liked to think of himself as an optimist
He was going to have to go in fighting. He groaned, and banged his head on the truck window. This war shit was Otto's job. Richards hated violence, he hated fighting. It wasn't that he wasn't very good at it. His heart wasn't really in it. Otto's was. But Otto was a continent away; by the time he got here Karlsson could have packed up and left.
"You shouldn't have tripped the alarms," he said to no one. "You should have waited, and contacted Otto first," he said, then stopped, because he felt like a twat.
Then he tried to contact Otto anyway and found he couldn't get hold of him. "Fucking mountains," he muttered. He tried Otto's Gridware, though he knew Otto was off-Grid, out hunting. He left a message.
"Hi, Otto," he said tersely to his messenger. "This is your partner. Because you're out creeping around like a fucking ninja, I'm going to have to go in for a fight. Fighting, I recall, is your job, not mine. I don't like fighting, so thanks a fucking bunch. End message."
"Fucking MT!" he shouted. "Why can't he just use the Grid like everyone else? He's a fucking cyborg! What's he got to be frightened of?"
Richards was not frightened. Richards could feel fear or not as the fancy took him. But Richards did not like to kill, and that was a sensation he could not disable. There were no fearless adversaries when Richards fought, no uniforms, no masks, no noble opponents, no enemy. The Grid stripped all that away, all the distancing that could make a man a thing. Richards knew the life history of every man, woman and child whose death he had caused. He knew where they grew up, what music they preferred, what toppings they took on their pizza. It made it all so personal. Fighting was Otto's job. Humans had a conscience they could ignore.
He had to know what the hell was going on. Experience told him he needed to know yesterday. There was something big going on here. He was surfing a wave of probabilities outside of his ability to predict; k52 would have a hard time attaching meaningful numbers to all the variables at play, but Richards had a hunch that the shit was about to hit the fan.
Which all inevitably led to Big Daddy; Big Daddy was the only option.
Big Daddy was in the back of the truck.
• • • •
Big Daddy's official designation was The Delafuente Mark 14 Combat Mech, a three-metre bipedal death machine of Euro design and outrageous cost, racked and stacked with all manner of overpowered weaponry capable of reducing the conventional army of a moderately sized nation to slag. Mechs like the Mark 14 were what governments deployed when fullscale air assault was judged too soft.
There was room for a human pilot, though remote operation was the norm. They were also big enough to accommodate their own, moron-level Class One should either pilot or remote connection, or both, be broken.
When they'd first seen the mech at the New London Arms Expo, Otto had come over all weird. He rarely got excited about much, but Richards could have sworn that he got dewyeyed and sparkling when he saw it, a real boy-meets-puppy moment. Denying him would have felt unfair. He regretted his generosity almost straightaway, because it was always Richards that ended up in the driving seat.
And to think he'd deliberately forgotten to have it sent home after the Pallenberg job. Lucky him. Here it was, conveniently stored in the good old USNA waiting for another outing. Hooray.
Big Daddy looked down at him from the back of a van, hunched over like an ogre in a box, its ridiculously small hands clasping its w-flanged knees. While its lamellar camouflage was inert, it displayed a silvery-blue colour on its armour panels, a graphite black elsewhere. The mech's body a sculpted swoop of rounded shapes and gaping gunports. Beautiful, if you liked that kind of thing, which Otto did, and Richards didn't. To him it looked like a toy Japanese robot of two centuries back.
"Come on then," said Richards. He inserted part of his mind into the machine. It was like putting his head in the mouth of a lion. He shuffled it out of the truck. With incongruous delicacy, Big Daddy stepped down onto the ground and unbent its spine and limbs until it stood at its full height. Big Daddy whirred and clunked as its legs extended, weapons unfolded and shoulders moved back and locked into place. There was a loud hiss and clank as its spine straightened and the vertebral locking pins engaged. The hum of its nuclear batteries rose as its engines came on line and then dropped back as its automatic systems check got underway. The surface shimmered as the lamellar camouflage cycled through a number of configuration patterns, finishing on a reproduction of the factory wall behind it. Weapons made serious sounds as they powered up and down. Ammo feeds clunked as Big Daddy primed his cannons. Noises that set Richards' imaginary teeth on edge.
"Big Daddy ready," it grated.
"That's just super," said Richards sarcastically. He had Big Daddy open its cockpit and his smaller sheath clambered in. Only when the android was in the mech did he switch his full awareness to the mech's sensing systems, plastered in red phallic power displays.
He looked over the site's defences again and swore. If he got in, but couldn't get the war mech out, this was going to be expensive.
"Big Daddy ready," said the mech again.
"For the love of…!" Richards banged his sheath's fist against the interior of the larger machine. He felt like a Russian doll, a machine in a machine in a machine. "I heard you the first time!" He pushed the One to the back of Big Daddy's cramped cyberspace where it waited placidly. Richards and his war donkey, he thought. He took over completely.
Richards grumbled as he set the monster to walking, clanking and hissing noisily. "Let's get this over and done with," he muttered, and Big Daddy and the android sheath spoke with him. He went over to the wall of the factory he'd been hiding in and walked through it without stopping.
Outside the atmosphere the Three in the commsat intensified Richards' controlling signal, relaying it from base unit to war machine.
Karlsson's creatures knew he was coming. His Gridpipe back to the base unit cut through the Grid like a shark's fin in water. It lost some coherency as he passed into the fortress's EM umbrella; this would grow worse as he approached the walls. Richards checked the signal, formulated back-up orders to Big Daddy's onboard brain should his influence be curtailed, but the Gridpipe was bright and loud. If there were problems with the feed, then the Three on the satellite would switch to pulsed laser communciation – only when he got inside would there be a problem. These were eventualities, it was all systems go.
Richards was confident there would be no problem.
The straight way to the factory would be the best.
A swarm of drones stooped to attack Big Daddy as he stomped through a weed-choked car park. Richards blew them from the sky with a volley of mini-missiles from Big Daddy's shoulder mount.
"I hate this. So unsubtle," he muttered. A homeless family scurried across his path. He paused to let them by. "You better get away!" he said to them, Big Daddy's speakers rendering his advice in an ear-mincing bellow. "It's going to get messy around here, war messy!" He realised he was enjoying himself, riding high on a squirt of simulated adrenalin, and that irritated him.
In five minutes he'd decimated a squad of dog drones and reached the edge of the lagoon Karlsson's factory squatted in. He raised Big Daddy's fist and extended the mech's plasma thrower. The weapon wheezed as it sucked in a tank full of atmosphere, then roared it back out as a beam of superheated ionised air that atomised the fence and flatribbon projectors for a ten-metre stretch. He walked through, shooting down drones as he went. Fire came in from the turrets above the factory, heavy-calibre rounds that he had to set Big Daddy into, like a man walking into driving rain. Some of the camolam was scratched and stopped working. Otto was going to be pissed off.
"Fuck off," said Richards, and hurled dumb-fire missiles at the near-I cannon. EM pulses swamped them, but as they were mechanical detonators atop solid fuel rockets guided only by Richards' aim, they flew on. A couple were shot down by more direct means, but Richards fired Big Daddy's arm cannon at the guns tracking the rockets and that was that. Then the rockets did for most of Karlsson's heavy ordinance.
On he stomped, Big Daddy's feet sloshing through the murky water, bringing up unidentifiable industrial wrack into the light that was swiftly carried back below and crushed by his huge weight. EM attacks rained down on the mech, dispersing on the machine's faraday armours. Simultaneous electronic attacks sallied out against the commsat and Richards. Twice he was forced to switch communications mode between base unit and war machine. Still he came on. Karlsson had gone to pains to deter unwanted visitors; what he had not planned for was a full-scale assault.