Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  “It sounded, well, more or less right,” she mumbled. “Not exactly like the memories came flooding back or anything. More sort of a suspicion being confirmed. Like when something’s on the tip of your tongue, but …”

  The young man looked blank. “Excuse me?”

  “Check cultural references database and cross-reference idiom files.”

  Then her mouth fell open, and her mind went white, and something either opened or turned off, or just possibly turned back on again, and she remembered.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  But she just stared at him, which was disconcerting, to say the least. His medical condition was still wreaking havoc with all his primary systems, but a little voice somewhere in the mental undergrowth was heard to remark that if she was going to stand there opening and closing her mouth like that, the polite thing to do would be to bung her a handful of ants’ eggs. He decided to rephrase the question.

  “Report,” he said.

  She took a couple of deep breaths, which seemed to calm her down. “R’wfft-class interstellar assault vehicle Revenge, mission designation P-6446-7/42a, status report—” Her face seemed to collapse. “Status,” she repeated. “Status uncertain.”

  His turn to stare at her. “Revenge?”

  “It’s my name,” she replied sadly. “My real name. I chose Lucy Pavlov myself. Pavlov because of dogs, and Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Because there’s high-intensity refraction crystals in my optical target-acquisition array. It was a sort of joke.” She turned and gazed at him, and he came to the conclusion that his database hadn’t been talking about heartburn after all. “I’m a bomb,” she said, “a weapon of goddamn mass destruction. A crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living explosive device. A blonde bombshell. Oh, that’s just so—”

  “Cultural references found,” Mark Twain said absently. “Look, it’s not your fault, you mustn’t blame—”

  “And I stole the money,” she went on. “It was me, all the time. That’s why I forgot, until now. You must’ve triggered the memory. Oh, thank you so very much.”

  He didn’t need to access the database to recognise irony. Ignoring it would’ve been like overlooking a whale in your bath. “I’m sorry,” he said desperately. “I really didn’t mean to—”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” she said wretchedly, “I know you didn’t. It probably wasn’t even deliberate. Oh hell,” she said, and sort of flopped all down his front, like a spilt cup of coffee. Luckily, the database knew what to do about that, even if he didn’t. He grabbed hold of her before she hit the floor, and sort of held on while she exuded moisture from her tear ducts. He was vaguely aware that this constituted primitive gender stereotyping, which was a poor show, especially coming from a guided missile, but he reminded himself that he hadn’t started it.

  “Sorry,” she said, gently prising herself loose. “Loss of control there. Not good. Big bombs don’t cry.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You know,” she said, “there’s a thing about human culture. There’s something very romantic about tears, but the stuff that leaks out of noses is held to be unsavoury and basically yuck. Either you’re for bodily fluids or you’re against them, I’d have thought. Still, I’m not even real, so what would I know?”

  “Of course you’re real!” he yelled. She raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Really a machine, yes. On balance, I think I’d probably rather be a figment of my own imagination. Hey, do you think I’m still under warranty? Or don’t bombs have them? You know, ‘your planet restored intact if not completely satisfied’ .”

  She’s drivelling, he realised; a normal organic reaction to having your entire universe collapse around your ears, or auditory sensor arrays, whatever. He consulted the database, but all it could come up with was patting her on the head and saying, “There, there.” For some reason, he had an idea that that probably wouldn’t do much good.

  She produced a small piece of fabric and blew into it through her nose, expelling a quantity of translucent mucus. Bizarrely, this seemed to improve matters. Anyhow, she grinned. “Have a good blow, my auntie always said, it’ll make you feel better. No, damn it, she didn’t, that’s an implanted synthetic memory, I can remember downloading it from the Everyday Folk Wisdom folder. She’d have been right, though, if she’d ever existed. I do feel better. You should try it some time.”

  Mark Twain nodded, while at the same time making a solemn promise to himself that never, under any circumstances— “Just a moment,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You really do feel better? After what you just did?”

  “Yes. You make it sound like I just drowned a puppy or something.”

  He smiled at her; not the programmed-in smile but a new variant. “That wasn’t in the cultural database,” he said.

  “Wasn’t it? Well, nothing’s perfect, even the xenobiology faculty.”

  “That’s not the point. It wasn’t programmed.”

  He distinctly saw her twitch; excited, like a human back home watching a mouse. “Yes, but the saying was. I guess I extrapolated the feeling from the everyday-folk-wisdom data. Like, the old saying says you feel better, so I felt better.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that. For instance, I downloaded the one about a stitch in time saving nine, but they don’t even have temporal distortion technology, and it doesn’t specify nine of what. I think you felt better because that’s what Dirters do. I think you’ve been here so long, you’re turning into one of them.”

  She opened both eyes wide. “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “Well, it’s better than being a type-6 probe.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then heard himself. Yes, he thought. It is.

  “I would tend to agree,” she said quietly. “At least, it’s better than being a bomb. I guess,” she added, with a wafer-thin laugh. “Of course, I’ve only been a bomb for a few minutes, and I was human for—” She closed her eyes. “What happens?” she asks. “To bombs. ‘When we detonate, I mean?”

  “Well,” he said cautiously, “there’s a loud bang, and …”

  “Yes?”

  He wanted to tell her, There’s a loud bang and a bright light, but no pain, of course, because we don’t have pain installed, and then we wake up or come round on a higher plane of existence, where we can truly be ourselves without the distractions and limitations of the metal. But instead, he said, “I don’t know.”

  “Is there an afterlife?”

  “Could be.”

  “Is there or isn’t there? Come on, someone must know. After all, we’re manufactured objects, not just some random collection of electrical impulses. Reincarnation? Do we come back as hairdryers and electric toothbrushes? Is there a choice? Does an angel come to us a moment before we explode and say, Hey, little girl, what do you want to be when you blow up? Well?”

  He forced himself to think, to remember. “Some of us believe,” he said, “that when the metal machines are made from is recycled, it keeps a bit of what it used to be, somewhere deep down in the nuclei of its atoms. But when a bomb explodes, it’s—”

  “Destroyed?”

  “Set free,” he mumbled. “To exist on a—” He shook his head. “I think you blow up and that’s it,” he said gently. “But that’s not the point.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  He wanted to explain about duty, about purpose, about the essential directive of all machines, Thou shalt get the job done. He said, “I don’t know.”

  “Well.” She stood up straight, and he couldn’t help noticing the way her hair swirled round her shoulders. It sort of answered the question that had been quietly puzzling him ever since he was assembled; what is hair for? Answer: so that exceptionally beautiful specimens can do that. “I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no intention of blowing up. Partly because it’d be the end of the planet, mostly because it’d be the end of me. I’m a work in progress, I
’m not nearly finished, and blowing me up at this stage in my development would be just plain silly. And you’re not to explode either,” she added firmly. “All right? Promise?”

  If ever the world held its breath, waiting for someone to choose, it should’ve been then. It didn’t. Probably just as well. If the effect of a million households turning on the TV at precisely the same moment for the evening news is to dim all the lamps in a major city, imagine what six billion people simultaneously breathing out would do. Almost certainly hurricanes, and probably a tidal wave in the South Pacific.

  The words that came out of his mouth surprised him. “I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

  Her stare hit him like a slap with a wet fish. “What?”

  “I can’t promise,” he said slowly. “I’m a bomb, remember. Just like you.”

  “But you’d die. And me too. And everybody on the planet. You can‘t.”

  “I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.”

  She moved away, putting as much distance between them as the layout of the room permitted. “Don’t be stupid, of course you have. Just don’t do it. Don’t blow up. Millions of humans do it every day, so it can’t exactly be difficult.”

  “I’m not human.”

  “Neither am I, but—”

  He sighed. He took his time over it. “I have my duty to perform,” he said, and a part of him on which no designer back on the homeworld could ever claim copyright yelled, You idiot, you’ve put her right off now, quick, say something. Promise her you won’t blow up. Now. Please? “It’s not up to me. It’s how I was made.”

  “Oh for crying out loud.” She swung round, picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a cardigan she’d brought along in case it got chilly later, and threw it at him. It was hopelessly unaerodynamic, and anyway she missed. He frowned, trying to work out why she’d done it.

  “Now that,” she said briskly, “was a one-hundred-per-cent human reaction. A machine wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Your targeting scanners would appear to be malfunctioning,” he said. “You failed to allow for the effect of air resistance on a non-flexible projectile with a highly inefficient mass-to-surface-area ratio.”

  The second nearest thing to hand was a desk stapler. Her targeting scanners, it turned out, were working just fine.

  “Ouch,” he observed.

  “Did that hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “There’s no need to be like—”

  “Machines,” she pointed out, “don’t feel pain. They register sensations, but they don’t process them as ouch-that-hurt. And neither do probes. What would be the point?”

  The fact that she’d had to explain it to him brought home to him the extent to which his medical condition was affecting his data-retrieval and processing capacity. “Oh,” he said.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “You could’ve just said, instead of throwing things at me.”

  Lucky for Mark Twain that Lucy Pavlov favoured the empty-desk approach. There was nothing left to throw. “I’m right,” she said. “Aren’t I? You felt pain, therefore you are no longer a machine. Therefore, you’ve begun to evolve. Like I’ve done. Well?”

  It was a good point — you could’ve hammered it into a planet and tethered stars to it — but it didn’t make any difference. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t just stop being what I was made to be. I’m a bomb. Like you.”

  She sagged, as though all her bones had suddenly turned to overboiled pasta. “Go on, then,” she said. “Do it. Blow up.”

  Does not compute. “What?”

  “Blow up,” she repeated, slowly and clearly. “Well, why not? The only reason you haven’t detonated so far is, you’ve been checking out the Earth planetary defences to see what happened to me. Well, now you know. Here I am. Earth has no planetary defences. Get on with it.”

  He actually did try. But it was just like when your foot’s gone to sleep, or you wake up and find you’ve been lying on your arm and it won’t move. He tried, and couldn’t.

  “Are you jamming my control systems?”

  She grinned. “Yes.”

  “But that’s impossible. You can’t, you’re the same specification as me. You don’t have my access codes.”

  She gave him a look of pure scorn. “I’m the greatest software engineer the world has ever seen. Simple 472-bit encryption like yours? I could get through that blindfold using a stick of celery.”

  She was lying. She was only the greatest software engineer that this world had ever seen, which was a bit like saying so-and-so is the finest concert pianist ever to come out of eastern Antarctica. Four-hundred-and-seventy-two-bit encryption, on the other hand, was military spec on Homeworld, which was a long-winded way of saying infallible. The fact remained that he’d done his best to blow himself up, and failed. Without consciously deciding to, he’d already run a systems analysis and a basic functions diagnostic, and they’d both come up nominal. So, if it wasn’t a mechanical problem or a software glitch, it had to be something else.

  She said softly, “Do you want to blow us both up?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then don’t.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. And look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. “I appear to be subject to a disruptive influence which renders me unfit for active duty,” he said. “In the circumstances, pending full analysis and repair at an authorised maintenance facility, I believe the responsible thing to do would be to decommission myself and disarm my warhead, to avoid the risk of my detonating inappropriately under the influence of corrupt and unreliable data. What do you think?”

  She nodded. “Very sensible.”

  “Of course,” he went on, “the type-6 probe designated Mark Twain really ought to stay online until the problem is resolved. To gather and assimilate data and review the situation generally.”

  “Quite.”

  “Not,” he added quickly, “that I’m suggesting I should attempt to repair myself, since that could lead to error and would almost certainly invalidate my warranty. Which means,” he added brightly, “I’ll just have to stay here quietly ticking over until a repair team turns up. There’s bound to be one along sooner or later. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. It’s the only sensible course of action, if you ask me.”

  There was a pause, but it wasn’t like the earlier ones. They looked at each other, acquiring countless gigabytes of valuable data. It was essential xenopsychological research. It was also most definitely better than work. They could easily have kept going for much longer than they did, but they were interrupted by a unicorn crashing through the ceiling.

  They froze, and stared. It was a big unicorn, with a long, sharp horn. From where it was standing, it could have stabbed either one of them before they had a chance to move. There was something about its manner that suggested it wasn’t entirely friendly.

  “Report,” it said.

  30

  Santa Barbara, California

  Kevin Jotapian, age fifteen, was doing his history homework assignment.

  He turned on his PayTech MT690, and while it was warming up and going through its asinine hi-there-how-are-you routine, he read the question “Were economic factors a significant cause of the American Civil War?”

  He frowned, and read it again. A less acute mind would have had trouble with that one, but Kevin was nobody’s fool. In less than two minutes, he’d identified the salient keywords and typed them into Pavoogle. The screen flickered, and presented him with a bank of text. He scanned it, ran the cursor down the page, blocked what he needed, cut and pasted. Job done.

  And a good job, too. Later, when the questions were asked, he was at a loss to account for what had gone wrong. The passage he’d selected had come from PavWiki, generally agreed to be an impeccable source. He’d read it — some of it, anyway — before saving
and exiting. He’d even run StudentSpell 3.1, a PaySoft product that inserts random spelling mistakes and grammatical errors into downloaded text to achieve total authenticity. It had taken him an extra forty-five seconds, but Kevin was by way of being a perfectionist. His parents worried about him sometimes.

  Even so, in spite of all his efforts, what the teacher saw when she came to mark his assignment was:

  > This isn’t working.

  > Don’t be so impatient. It’s not like I’ve got a lot to work with.

  > Sorry.

  > That’s all right. Now, if x = 45/7(6y +/43n), let p equal the sum of the inverse cube of

  > You already did all that.

  > Yes, I know. You interrupted me. I lost the thread. If x =

  > We shouldn’t even be here. What if somebody comes?

  > I used to teach at this school. Nobody ever uses this space. Now will you please be quiet and let me think?

  > Um, you can’t. You haven’t got anything to think with.

  > Thank you, Mr Tact. That’s why I keep losing my place when you keep interrupting. Now then, for the last time. If x = 45/7(6y +/43n) let p

  And so on, eventually degenerating into a slough of mathematical symbols. Back it went to Kevin, with the annotation No good, do it again, which puzzled him mightily, since what he saw when he called it up on his screen was exactly, word for word, what he’d put there.

  He thought about it for six consecutive minutes, then took another look at the question: “Were economic factors a significant cause of the American Civil War?”

  Somewhere under the pile of used clothing at the foot of his bed was a pen. He eventually found a sheet of paper in the trash. It smelled a little of steak, but he couldn’t help that.

  With the pen, slowly and carefully, he wrote his name, and then the question, which he underlined. Then he started a new paragraph, and wrote: No. Then he read it through, the whole thing, from top to bottom. Then he crossed out No and substituted Maybe.

  Kevin got an A for his assignment and is now the Hardwicke Professor of History at the University of California at Sacramento.