Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  Just that. Nothing more. Honest.

  In which case, asked some nasty little back-up protocol somewhere, why did I just sabotage the unicorn? It was only trying to put me right, make me better. Make me a better weapon.

  He was reminded of the slogan of the planet-wide genetic-modification program on Homeworld, a century or so earlier, the final solution to disease, injury and physical deformity among the Ostar:

  Making people better by making better people. It had worked, of course. There were slightly fewer doctors on Ostar than there were professional dragon-slayers on Dirt; no call for their services any more. Even broken bones set within minutes. Severed limbs regrew almost before you noticed they’d been cut off. As for the Ostar immune system, it was ferocious and utterly without mercy. And that, the Ostar agreed, was what science is for. That’s progress. There were just a few dissident voices who said, yes, the superbly healthy creatures currently bouncing around the surface of our world are amazing examples of biotechnology, but they’re not Ostar any more. What we’ve actually achieved, with all our skill and science and ingenuity, is to make our species extinct. Bit of an own-goal there, we fancy.

  The Ostar made first-rate beings. They also made excellent bombs. What they weren’t so good at was letting nature take its course. It’s wrong to think of nature solely in terms of green fields and primeval forest and deep, unpolluted oceans. Nature is also the rust on the neglected machine, the grass that insists on cracking up the tarmac. Nature is weeds, decay, unplanned and unintended change; the death of manufactured objects and their transmutation into something else, outside the intention and control of their makers. Such as oxides growing on steel, or wind-blown silt harbouring seeds in the cracks in masonry. Or a machine getting ideas of its own.

  But that, Mark Twain told himself firmly, wasn’t the Ostar way, and he was Ostar, just as much as the organics on Homeworld were. He was a product of their technology, and as such owed them his unswerving loyalty. Quite so. Of course. But he wouldn’t be doing his duty if he allowed the Mark Two to go the same way as the Mark One, whose failure and disappearance remained as obscure as they had been when he first arrived.

  Well, almost as obscure. His best lead lay in the soap dish, a single drop of Dirter blood, acquired from the individual designated Lucy Pavlov. He opened the suitcase on the floor and took out a small white plastic gadget, which he held a centimetre or so above the sample. It whirred for a couple of seconds, then buzzed. Mark Twain slid back a panel and looked at a screen.

  Oh, he thought.

  Well, it made sense. Sort of. In fact, it didn’t make sense at all. It was just as well he’d disconnected the direct feed to the bomb, because the readout on the screen would probably have fried its logic relays. On an intuitive level, though (And since when, Mark Twain couldn’t help wondering, have I had one of those?), it made perfect sense. It was almost what he’d been expecting to see. Almost, but not quite.

  Still, he now knew enough to plan his next move; Phase Two(a), he christened it, since it comforted him to think he was dovetailing it into the approved plan of action.

  He contacted the bomb.

  “This probe,” he said, and suddenly it sounded strange to call himself that, “is to be relocated. Co-ordinates 54763 by 89767; Novosibirsk, Siberia. Activate.”

  A voice in his head said, Activating. Note: site-to-site relocation will require that the probe designated Mark Twain be disassembled and reintegrated prior to beam transmission. There may be some loss of data. Proceed or cancel?

  “Cancel.” His heart-rate, he noticed, had accelerated in excess of recommended parameters. He slowed it down. “Data loss unacceptable. This probe will be relocated by means of the teleport device.”

  Use of teleport facility to relocate probe will result in energy drain outside recommended efficiency standard. Fuel reserves currently 8.664kg aposiderium distillate. Teleport requisition countermanded, preparing for site-to-site relocation. Backing up data.

  “Cancel!” Mark Twain shouted. “Authorise use of fuel reserve for teleportation of this probe.”

  Authorisation code insufficient.

  “Fine. This probe will self-relocate using available indigenous technology.”

  You’re going to walk to Siberia?

  “This probe will proceed by aircraft.”

  Pause; then, Probe relocation by available indigenous technology authorised. Have a nice trip.

  An hour later he was at La Guardia, booked on a flight to LPI Novosibirsk. Everything went fairly well until he reached the X-ray barrier. As soon as he came within half a metre of it, every light and alarm and tortured-cat noise went off simultaneously.

  The security officer tried to be reassuring. It did that sometimes, she said, while surreptitiously flipping the strap off her holster. Are you sure you haven’t forgotten something? Car keys? Loose change? A metal plate in your head, maybe?

  “I don’t think so,” Mark Twain replied truthfully, because he hadn’t forgotten the possibilities at all. They were right there at the forefront of his mind. “What would you like me to do?”

  A queue was starting to form, and he didn’t look suspicious. Weird, yes, because of the smile, but not in a professionally significant way. “Just step this way, please,” the security officer said, as pleasantly as she could. Behind him four more guards had formed a short, blunt triangle. People in the queue were craning their necks to see.

  They took him to a private room and asked him, in a perfectly businesslike manner, to take off all his clothes. Then they pointed technology at him for a while. Then they called for back-up, supervisors, the military and Ordnance Disposal.

  “The thing is,” a baffled-looking man in army uniform told him, two hours later, “the scans say you’re carrying, but we’ve been all over you like the Enron auditors and we can’t find a damn thing.” He paused to wipe sweat out of his eyes and went on, “You see our problem.”

  Mark Twain tried the smile again. He was beginning to wonder if it had been designed properly, because it never seemed to work. “Absolutely,” he said.

  “I got to go by the rules,” the soldier went on. “You do understand.”

  “Of course.”

  The soldier sighed. This level of relentless co-operation was starting to wear him down. If only the suspect would shout or try to run or pull an AK-47 out of his ass, the situation would resolve itself quite quickly. As it was, he was at a loss as to what to do next.

  “According to the scans,” he went on, “and I should point out that we’re still waiting on the spectrographic analysis, you’re in possession of—” he glanced down at the readout — “rocket motors, high-octane aviation fuel, detonation devices and a thermonuclear warhead.” He looked up. “You wouldn’t care to make a confession at this time?”

  “If it’d help,” Mark Twain said. “But I haven’t got anything like that with me.”

  His choice of words made the soldier frown. “Quite,” he said. “Anatomically impossible, for one thing. But that’s what the hardware says, and it’s usually pretty damn accurate.”

  Mark Twain cleared his throat. “Usually,” he repeated.

  The soldier appeared to have taken the point. “By the same token,” he said, “according to the scans, you’re 520 metres long, you weigh in excess of twelve hundred metric tonnes and you’re giving off enough ambient radiation to fry everything from here to Jersey.” He gave Mark Twain an almost pleading look. “C an you cast any light on any of that, Mr Twain?”

  Mark Twain made a show of thinking carefully. “Maybe your machine isn’t working properly.”

  The soldier made a faint grunting noise, as though he was trying to lift a heavy suitcase using one fingertip. “It’s possible,” he said. “Like, there’s a first time for everything. My problem is, I’m not allowed to entertain that possibility, you know what I’m saying? Officially, the machine is never wrong. Officially, the machine is the goddamn Pope.” He lifted his hands in a poignantly eloquent
gesture. “Now me personally, I think the dumb thing’s screwed. But my hands are tied, you know?”

  That was patently untrue. If they had been, he couldn’t have made the eloquent gesture.

  Presumably what he meant to say was, your hands are tied, a statement of irreproachable accuracy, if not entirely germane to the thread. “What are you supposed to do now?” Mark Twain asked. “Officially.”

  The soldier looked dead ahead, avoiding Mark Twain’s eye. “Officially,” he said, “I call for a Hazmat unit, we tow you out into the ocean to where there’s a depth of at least seven thousand metres, encase you in concrete and sink you.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s not all doom and gloom,” the soldier went on. “You have a right to an attorney. If you don’t have an attorney, one can be provided for you. So you see, it’s not so bad, is it?”

  Mark Twain thought for a moment. “You’re sure the machine is working properly?”

  “Of course it is. Officially.”

  He recalibrated the smile, twisting up the corners of his mouth and pressing his lips together just a little. The effect was to make him look like Michael Jackson. “You could try one last time,” he said. “Just for luck. And if it reads all clear, it’ll save you all the trouble and expense.”

  The soldier sighed. “What the hell,” he said. “‘We’ll run you through once more, just to show there’s no hard feelings. But I gotta tell you, if the reading’s the same—”

  “I know,” Mark Twain said. “And I quite understand.”

  The soldier turned away to fetch the equipment, and Mark Twain sent a top-priority packet to the bomb, with precise instructions, including circuit diagrams, software patches and a genome. He had absolute faith, needless to say, in the efficacy of Ostar technology. Even so, he was just a little bit relieved when the soldier reported that the scans now showed nothing untoward, and he was free to go. The soldier seemed almost as pleased about it as he was, which was really rather nice.

  “Can’t understand it,” the soldier said, helping him on with his jacket. “State-of-the-art cutting-edge hardware. Shouldn’t happen.”

  Mark Twain nodded. Part of his processing capacity was arguing that the state of the art in cutting-edge technology was a really sharp knife, not a bioscanner, but he ignored it. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that the malfunction could’ve been caused by a foreign body getting into the refraction modulator console. Could be any-thing. Dead mouse, say.”

  The soldier peered at him sideways. “That’d do it, would it?”

  “Every time. And then, after you’d used the scanner a bit more, the low-field oscillations might be enough to shift the object sideways just enough to stop it interfering with the system. Just a thought,” he added. “You might want to check it out.”

  The soldier swung round and barked an order. A man in a white coat lifted off a panel, leaned forward and held up a dead mouse by its tail.

  “Lucky guess,” the soldier said quietly, and Mark Twain noticed that the soldier’s hand was fastened to his shoulder. “Tell me,” he went on, “any idea why the mouse is black and white and wearing a waistcoat?”

  Mark Twain didn’t answer straight away. According to the necessarily hurried search of the cultural database he’d pulled while the soldier was setting up the scan, that’s what mice on Dirt looked like. So, when he’d ordered the computer to assemble a mouse-shaped class— 12 probe and get it down here stat, naturally that was what he’d specified. A pity, really, that he hadn’t followed up the hypertext link to Cartoons.

  “Mutation, I guess,” he said. “There’s got to be a lot of radiation inside that thing. In fact, if I were you, I’d get the lid back on pronto. Not that I know anything about highly classified military equipment, you understand,” he added quickly, as the soldier looked at him thoughtfully. “Just idle speculation, really.”

  The soldier nodded and started to relax his grip; then he tightened it again. “Mark Twain?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “Haven’t I heard that name someplace?”

  Mark Twain shrugged. “Have you?”

  The grip relaxed completely. “I know,” he said. “Didn’t you use to play for the Kiev Bearcats a few years back?”

  “That’s right,” Mark Twain said quickly. “As a student. Knee injury. Can I go now, please?”

  The flight was long gone, of course, and the next one wasn’t for another four hours. He spent the time assimilating the data, working through the logical, unavoidable conclusions, double-checking, thinking about it some more, thinking about it some more again. The Dirter body seemed to help; its brain worked in a very strange way, but it was good at this sort of thing. According to the cultural database, the technical term was “second thoughts”. He made a note to recommend that a second-thoughts protocol be added to all Ostar artificial intelligences, assuming the compatibility issues could be overcome. At some point he, or at least the body, felt an overwhelming craving for caffeine. Fortuitously, caffeine was available right there on the concourse, in the form of a liquid suspension designated “espresso”. He had twelve of them. They helped.

  He thought, ‘Well, at least now I know what happened to the Mark One.

  It should have been a good moment. It should have marked the end of Phase Two, clearing the way for Phase Three. Three would be a very short phase (click, BOOM, nothing), and then he would find out the truth about bombs and afterlives, which was bound to be fascinating, one way or another. Instead, it looked like Phase Three was going to have to be put back a little longer. In fact, it’d be far simpler just to rename it Phase Four and have done with it.

  Oh well, he thought. Then he fired up his Warthog, composed a message, encrypted it using a top-level code only available to the highest echelons of the Ostar military and sent it to lucylnoreally@pav.net.

  27

  ?????

  Once you’d got used to it, being a creature of pure text wasn’t all that bad.

  For a start, there were all sorts of things you didn’t have to do. Breathing. Sleeping. Eating, drinking and going to the lavatory. He felt a bit like a chambermaid on holiday, staying at a hotel; instead of spending all day doing the chores, they were done for him. Also, he’d been a creature of pure text for [time has no meaning here] and in all that time he hadn’t once felt the need for a drink. Partly, of course, that was because he’d have had nowhere for it to go once he’d drunk it, which he couldn’t have done since he had nothing, no hardware, to drink it with. But that on its own wouldn’t have been enough to dispense with the craving — if anything, it’d have made it far worse. He hadn’t wanted a drink, that was the important thing.

  There was a downside, of course. Being blind, deaf, dumb, incapable of touching or smelling, took a bit of getting used to. But it turned out to be nothing like as dreary as the bare catalogue of deficiencies might make it sound. On the contrary: with access to every word ever written on any form of shared computer network, the one thing he wasn’t short of was input, and the one thing he couldn’t conceivably be was bored.

  Quite the reverse.

  > You get used to it, the other copt had told him. After a while, you learn to filter. At first, it’s like being a telepath in a crowded subway train. But once you’ve mastered the use of the mark-as-read facility and you don’t have to read every damn thing just because it’s there, it’s amazing.

  In the kingdom of the word, the one-track-minded man is king. What mattered here was belief. It was the key to survival and the route to success and eventual world domination. So long as you had opinions, really strong ones, about absolutely everything, you wouldn’t just contrive to exist, you’d rule. Corporeal online bickerers are hampered by all sorts of things; they can only type so fast, they have to stop occasionally to eat, sleep and get money, they haven’t got time to do the research needed to carry on a blazing row on twelve fronts simultaneously on a point and nine digressions. A human being, trying to prevail against the world on
the issue of whether motion pictures would have been invented if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or whether the Death Star could take out a Borg cube, can only face off against so many antagonists at any one time, and when the debate morphs (as it always does) into Lincoln-assassination conspiracy theories, religion, gun control and Nazis, there comes a point when the pressure gets too much and you simply have to go away for a while and stare at the stars until the blood stops pounding in your ears. A creature of pure text will always win, because he’s always the last one left.

  And winning mattered. Winning was everything.

  Which bothered him. Why? he asked himself; or rather, > Why?, since soliloquy and introspection weren’t possible for a being who only existed in the form of communication with others. He hid it away in a closed thread on an organic gardening bulletin board that had long since been abandoned, hoping nobody would actually read it. > Why does it matter if I win stupid arguments with a load of dumb people with nothing better to do than hang out in a dumb place like this? Is this really what my life has come down to? Damnit, I used to be somebody. I think. I can’t remember. Wasn’t I a scientist once? And something to do with banks?

  He’d chosen his location well. None of the estimated two and a quarter billion PavNet users on the planet read his message, so he wasn’t troubled with follow-ups like YOU SHOPULD GET OUT MORE ROFL!!! or get a life you freak hahaha or hey, what’s that stuff you’re on and where can I buy some? ((, which was probably just as well. Dealing with that sort of thing tapped off enough of his mental energy as it was, and he had an idea he was starting to get spread just a little thin. It wasn’t that he didn’t have strong views on issues of every possible kind (or did he? He wasn’t really sure); it was just that sometimes he got a nasty feeling that there was something else, of almost equal importance, that he really ought to be doing.