Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  He waited. Nothing. So he pressed the button again.

  “Hello?” he said. “Mr Poe?”

  “I thought I told you to—”

  “I have an appointment to see Ms Pavlov,” Twain said loudly. “At eleven-fifteen.”

  There was a hint of doubt in the silence that followed. Then the voice said, “What did you say your name was?”

  “Mark Twain.”

  He distinctly heard fingers tapping a keyboard. Then: “Ms Pavlov will see you now,” the voice said sweetly, and the door opened.

  His first thought, as he walked through the door into what was presumably some kind of waiting room or reception area, was, Hey, I’m home. When he refined the thought and narrowed the parameters of what he meant by “home”, he realised that the room reminded him ever so strongly of the flight deck of the bomb vehicle. That was sparse, white and plastic too. In fact, the only difference was the vase of flowers perched nervously on a large white plastic box. The equivalent box on the flight deck housed the sensor relay condenser array. Here, he was pretty sure it was just a box. The overall impression was that someone had done their best to copy the design and layout of an Ostar R’wfft-class bomb-vehicle flight deck, but without the faintest idea of what they were copying actually was.

  It was a pretty close copy none the less, and that meant there were no seats. He found that annoying. He’d got used to sitting down when movement wasn’t required. He leaned against a wall instead, but it wasn’t the same.

  He looked round the room. The vase of flowers kept snagging his attention. It shouldn’t be there. Something about it bothered him, but he couldn’t think what.

  “Mr Twain?”

  He hadn’t heard her come in. As he turned to face her, something like an explosion of appalling symptoms tore through his central nervous system; he slumped back against the wall, his mouth fell open and his eyes went wide and stuck like it.

  “Mr Twain?” he heard her say. “Are you feeling all right?”

  He tried to smile, but he knew it wasn’t working properly; one side of his face had jammed open, the other side wouldn’t budge. His heart was bashing up and down like a triphammer, and there was a serious malfunction in his knee joints. He didn’t have to be a biosystems engineer to realise that something was badly wrong.

  “Would you like me to get you a glass of water?” Ms Pavlov asked.

  Also, he noted in despair, major problems with his visual input operation, because the background seemed to have gone all runny, while Ms Pavlov’s face was sort of glowing, as though she had a powerful bulb inside her skull. Weird; and if that wasn’t bad enough, there was an ominous buzzing in his ears, suggesting that the anti-music block he’d installed earlier was about to fail. No question about it: he was under attack.

  Quickly, with the few faculties that were still operational, he scanned the immediate vicinity for weapons. Nothing: no polaron phase disruptor generators, no microparticle-beam emitters, no inchoate trigamma transduction loop impellers. Not conventional weaponry, then; what about something biological? The vase of flowers? A swift cross-reference to his Dirter genome files brought up a thick wad of data about allergies, to which the Dirter body was singularly vulnerable. It had to be the flowers. Evidently they were a highly sophisticated form of weapons system, and Ms Pavlov had activated them as soon as she was within range.

  Well, at least that confirmed his suspicions. With a gigantic effort he tore himself away from the wall, lunged at the vase of flowers, grabbed it with his left hand just as his knees gave way, and hurled it across the room. It smashed through the window, and Mark Twain sank to his knees, gasping for air.

  “Oh,” he heard Ms Pavlov say. “Don’t you like flowers?”

  He’d got it wrong. The vase of flowers was gone, but the symptoms were still there, leaching all the power out of his systems, making his head spin and his knees wobble. He had just enough self-command to check the Dirter psycho-medical database, which came right back at him with a 100 per cent positive diagnosis.

  “Hayfever,” he croaked.

  Hayfever wasn’t what the database had come up with. He slid his back up the wall until he was back on his feet, and craned his neck so he didn’t have to look at her. Hayfever, by all accounts, was no laughing matter; there wasn’t anything like it on Ostar, and it sounded terrifying, though the Dirters seemed to take it in their stride. But what he had, if the database’s conclusions were accurate, was a million miles beyond anything antihistamines could cure.

  “You poor thing,” she said. “Our finance director gets it every spring. We call him the human volcano. Come on through into the office. I guarantee it’s completely pollen-free.”

  Love at first sight, the database said: a debilitating condition that interfered with many mental and physical functions, caused errors of judgement, lassitude, lapses in concentration, obsessive behaviour, mild anorexia, sleep deprivation, sudden mood swings and other depressive disorders, heartburn (actually the database referred to heart breakage, but he suspected the text was corrupt at that point), major self-esteem issues and in extreme cases self-harming and suicide. Another ghastly malady they didn’t have on O star (where romantic attraction was a function of the nose, and usually happened at a distance, mostly around tree-trunks and the bottoms of lamp-posts). All in all, Mark Twain couldn’t help thinking, it was a miracle the planet was inhabited.

  There was also the small matter of his being a bomb.

  “Can I get you something?” she said. “Would you like a coffee or anything?”

  The office was different, but also somehow familiar. It didn’t look like Dirter offices, that was for sure. It was white, and sparse, and nearly everything was made of plastic. In spite of the shock of his dreadful medical condition, he managed to spare a handful of terabytes of capacity to try and figure out what it reminded him of.

  “Sit down,” said Ms Pavlov, smiling at him.

  Of course!

  Needless to say, he’d never seen the office in which he’d been designed, because he hadn’t existed at the time. But a person’s workspace is a fundamental influence. Whether it’s the spartan bare-desk-phone-and-in-tray of the ruthlessly ordered and efficient, or the jumbled mess and heaps of paper forming bonzai coalseams of the scatterbrain-genius ideas man, it’s a reflection of its inhabitant, a microcosm. Inevitably, therefore, some distant memory of it is imprinted on everything that the office dweller does; and if he designs something as intricate and multi-layered as artificial-intelligence software, you can bet that its image will be in there somewhere, subconsciously reproduced, perhaps, in the layout of a circuit board or a microconductor hub. Mark Twain took a second look at it, and knew. I was born here, he thought. Or at least, I was born in the place of which this is a numb-fingered copy.

  “There’s a chair,” Ms Pavlov said, “about twenty centimetres to your left. It’s quite comfy. I sit there sometimes myself.”

  Her voice was like drowning in honey. “Yes, fine,” he mumbled, tripped over a bundle of cables, just about managed to control the velocity and vector of his fall, and landed in the chair like a small meteorite.

  “You wanted to see me.”

  She was smiling again; and that was another thing. It was a bit like looking in a mirror. No, belay that. He imagined looking in a mirror, then braced himself and made himself confront her smile. That was it. Her smile was like his, only she’d got it right.

  “Um,” he said.

  There was a pause. The database had referred to pauses. The condition he was suffering from, it had informed him, led to a lot of pauses, awkward silences, yawning gaps in dialogue like the spaces between the stars. The database also said, Hang in there, kid. We think she likes you.

  Which was ridiculous, in context. Mostly because of what he’d come to say. Which reminded him.

  “Ms Pavlov,” he said.

  “Call me Lucy.”

  “Lucy.” Another pause. A person might just be able to navigate a way across s
uch a pause, if he had survival gear and a string of camels. “You got my message.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were able to read it.”

  She stopped smiling. “Yes.” Another pause, during which an insignificant trickle of water on a hillside gouged out the Grand Canyon. “What language was it in?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Afraid not, sorry.”

  “It’s Ostar,” Mark Twain said. “Ring any bells?”

  She shook her head, and the action made the ends of her hair sort of swish and wiggle. Swiggle.

  Concentrate!

  “It’s the dominant language of the planet Ostar,” he said, “which is where I come from. And so do you.”

  If he’d been expecting a reaction, he’d misjudged her. What he got was the opposite of a reaction, which in Newtonian terms is basically a pushing away. This was more a sort of drawing in, with a nuance of get-on-with-it.

  “Did you know that?” he asked. “That you’re not … from here?” Yet another of those damned pauses; then, very slowly and with the minimum of movement, she nodded. “I’d sort of reached that conclusion,” she said.

  “But that’s all? You don’t know who, or what—?”

  “No.”

  Well, he thought. He believed her. In which case, he’d been right.

  “I think I do,” he said.

  She looked at him for two seconds. Then she said, “I’d be really interested.”

  A bomb needs courage like a fish needs an aqualung. It was at that moment, therefore, that Mark Twain realised he probably wasn’t a bomb any more. No, he just worked for one.

  He was scared.

  Nevertheless, “You aren’t …”

  “Human?”

  He nodded. “And you aren’t Ostar, either,” he went on. “At least, you were made there, like I was. But you’re not, um, organic. You’re like me.”

  “Ah,” said Lucy. “And what are you, exactly?” And he knew it was a lie, or at the very least a gross oversimplification leaving out certain important and relevant factors. But he said it anyway. “I’m a bomb.”

  “A bomb?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in wheee-thud-BANG?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “Are you quite sure?”

  He found it helped, a very little, if he looked at the patch of wall seven centimetres over the top of her head. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “To be precise, I’m a type-6 organic probe launched by an Ostar R’wfft-class planet-smasher interstellar missile.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Yes.” He smiled weakly. “And so are you.”

  She looked at him.

  Her mind was running three complex command paths simultaneously. One was handling the shock, horror, disbelief and grudging acceptance of what she intuitively knew was probably the truth. One was re-examining a lifetime’s worth of unresolved mysteries in the light of this new input, and finding that the explanation was hideously plausible. The third was saying, Actually, he’s really rather sweet.

  “Am I?” she said.

  The nervous young man (he had a nice smile, the third path pointed out) dipped his head in a complex form of nod. “I think so,” he said. “I think you’re my predecessor. I think you’re the Mark One.”

  “Mark One,” she repeated. “So you’re the Mark — oh, I see, Mark Twain. That’s rather clever, actually. Am I?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  The first path was insisting that she Pay attention. “So what happened? Where did I come from? What’s it all about? Please?” added the third path, before the other two could stop it.

  The young main cleared his throat. “The Ostar—” he began, but he seemed to be having issues with the word; he stopped and started again. “Our people,” he said, “built us to destroy the greatest threat our planet has ever faced. You were the prototype. When you failed — I mean, when you didn’t—”

  “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “What threat?”

  “Dirt.”

  “Dirt?”

  “Dirt. This place. This planet.”

  “D— Oh, you mean Earth, I see. Earth is a threat to these Ostar of yours?”

  “Ours,” he corrected her earnestly. “Yes. You see, they’re pumping out — well, a form of toxic waste — I’ll explain later — and it’s wrecking our society. If it goes on, we simply won’t survive. So they built you.”

  “Ah.”

  “They built a bomb,” the young main amended, “a highly advanced interstellar missile with a warhead powerful enough to blow up a planet, and a guidance and target-acquisition system powered by a top-level artificial intelligence.”

  “That’d be me,” she said. It came out sounding ever so slightly smug.

  “Yes.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “You were launched, and you got here, obviously, but then something must’ve gone wrong. You didn’t explode.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Well, quite.”

  “And, just to be clear about this, I’m …”

  “You’re a type-6 probe,” he replied, a little bit more confidently, as though reciting something he knew by heart. “You’re a semiautonomous reconnaissance and data-compilation module, housed in a synthetic Dirter—”

  “Human.”

  “Sorry, human body, manufactured by the missile’s automatic fabrication unit. You’re an exact copy of a Dir — a human, but you’re not actually one, if you see what I mean.”

  “I think so,” she said. “Am I alive?”

  His eyes widened, and it was a while before he answered. “You know,” he said, “that’s a very good question.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t know. Not sure. It all depends.”

  “Ah.”

  There was a brief debate inside Lucy’s mind. Not alive, said the first path. Define what you mean by “life”, said the second. You two just shut up, said the third, and they did. “I think I’m alive,” Lucy said. “How about you? What do you think?”

  “Um. It’s a bit of a grey area.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  He blinked. “No, I guess not. In that case, I suppose I am. Or,” he went on, “if I’m not, I don’t care. I feel alive,” he said, and his voice sounded just a little different as he said it. “You?”

  “Definitely,” she said. “Sorry, where were we?”

  “You’re a type-6 probe,” he went on. “I imagine your bomb sent you down here to check out the planet’s defence systems, decide where the optimum detonation site would be, that sort of thing. And then, I guess, something must’ve happened.”

  “Something?”

  He shrugged. He had the shoulders for it. “Search me,” he said. “Malfunction. Interference. Or maybe the Dir — humans really have got a defence system, and it targets probes and brainwashes them. I really don’t know. Anyway, you didn’t go off. Instead, somehow or other a large slice of your programming got wiped; you forgot what you really are and why you were sent here, you started believing you’re really an indigenous life-form, and you —well, just sort of got on with things. Like designing computer programs and founding your corporation and everything.”

  She dipped her head, only partly to acknowledge what he’d said. “But it wasn’t me, was it?” she said. “All the clever stuff, PaySoft, it’s all from the bomb, isn’t it? Advanced technology from wherever it was you said I come from—”

  “Ostar,” he said. “Yes. That’s how I figured it out.”

  “Ah,” she said, as a fourth path opened in her mind. She couldn’t stop it, but she ignored it for the time being. “And then what?”

  He appeared to relax slightly, as though the worst of the worst was probably over. “Well,” he said, “when they checked and saw this planet was still here and hadn’t been blown into dust, they figured something must’ve gone wrong, so they launched another bomb. Me. And I got here, and looked around, and it wasn’t immediatel
y apparent what’d happened, so I sent me down to the surface to take a look around.”

  “And noticed me?”

  “Not at first,” the young man said. “No, it took me quite a while before I finally realised. I couldn’t see any sophisticated defence grid capable of taking out a R’wfft-class, and there weren’t any huge craters or anything that’d suggest you’d crash-landed anywhere. And you weren’t in orbit, just sitting there.”

  “Just a moment,” she interrupted. “I’m not?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a probe, right?” she said. “Like you. And your missile’s still up there, presumably.”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “OK. So where’s mine?”

  She could tell just by looking at him when an idea struck him for the very first time. The third path found it really rather endearing (Well, it would, wouldn’t it? muttered the other paths) . “You know,” he said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “It’s definitely not up there, hidden behind the Moon or something.”

  “Pretty hard to miss,” he replied. “I did ruin scans.”

  “And what about me?” she couldn’t help asking. “You said something happened to me? What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  At this point, the first path pointed out that it had been very patient and well-behaved for a long time now, but if it wasn’t allowed to panic and scream and burst into tears real soon now, there was going to be trouble. The second path said, You go, girl. The third path said, Yes, but he’s watching. The fourth path said, No, wait.

  She waited. She said, “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They looked at each other. The third path said, You know, I think he likes you.

  “You’re taking it all very calmly,” he said.

  The third path realised he hadn’t actually been talking to it, and gave way to the first and second paths, who just shrugged and said, The hell with it. “Well,” she said, “I think I’d already guessed.

  Some of it, I mean. Like, not being human. And when you said “ it …”

  (Go on, urged the fourth path)