by Tom Holt
“Ah.” Lucy lowered the gun. “Good point. I won’t do that, then. So what now?”
“Report.”
“I think,” Mark Twain said, “we should do as it says.”
“What?”
“Report.” He tried backing away. The tip of the horn tracked him precisely. “I think the bomb vehicle computer’s suspicious because I’ve been jamming it. Now it wants to know what’s going on, so it sent My Little Pony here to find out.”
“Cultural reference found,” Lucy said. “Also, I had one when I was a little girl. Or I programmed myself to believe I had one.”
“Did it have a damn great spike sticking out of its head?”
Lucy took a step closer. The unicorn didn’t react, suggesting it wasn’t really interested in her. “You really think that’s why it’s here?”
“Just a wild guess.”
“It seems a bit — well, paranoid, don’t you think?”
“It’s military-spec software, of course it’s paranoid. Also, it’s listening to everything we say.”
“Ah.”
“Report,” said the unicorn.
“Reporting.” Mark Twain’s throat was dry, and it occurred to him to wonder why the Dirter body did that — handicap itself by desiccating the throat at a time when communications functions were at a premium. “The probe designated Mark Twain has located the R’wfft-class missile designated Mark One.”
“Don’t tell him that!” Lucy hissed.
“He already knows. The probe designated Mark Twain is endeavouring to repair certain malfunctions in the missile designated Mark One.”
The unicorn swished its tail. “Missile designated Mark One cannot be located by this vessel’s sensory array. State the missile’s current location.”
“Uncertain. This probe is seeking to repair the missile via its type-6 probe.”
“State proposed method of repair.”
“Logical argument conveyed through the medium of dialectic debate,” Mark Twain said. It sounded good to him, anyhow. “Initial diagnosis suggests failures of the missile’s motivational and ethical directives. Since this probe is unable to gain access to the missile’s hardware, the only course of action available is to attempt to reboot the damaged directives by way of the missile’s type-6 probe. Once repairs have been effected, initiation of Phase Three can commence.”
“Phase Four.”
“Whatever. This probe will now continue with the reboot sequence.”
But the unicorn stayed where it was, and each breath Mark Twain took pressed his Adam’s apple against the point of the horn. “State the cause of the Mark One’s malfunction.”
“Data and program corruption contracted via the type-6 probe,” Mark Twain said. “Ouch,” he added. “Would the type-5 probe mind not sticking its horn in the type-6 probe’s throat?”
“This probe detects significant data and program corruption within the type-6 probe’s operating system,” the unicorn replied calmly. “The type-6 probe will be recalled and dismantled, and a new type-6 will be assembled and launched to replace it.”
“Countermand!” Mark Twain squeaked. “I mean, countermand the previous direction. Decommissioning of the probe designated Mark Twain will result in loss of valuable data stored in the probe’s module. This data cannot be transmitted to the vehicle because of security considerations. This fact,” he added reproachfully, “has already been uploaded.”
“The danger to the mission from the type-6 probe’s corrupt data and programming outweighs the security risk referred to. The type-6 probe will be decommissioned in five, four, three—”
The unicorn flickered. For a split second, Mark Twain realised he was looking through it at the opposite wall; then he felt a sharp dig in his throat, then nothing. There was a loud popping noise, and the unicorn disappeared.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Mark Twain replied. “Correction. Polite lying is a Dirter convention and not approved as a course of conduct by the Ostar Institute of Software Engineers. I feel like shit, since you ask. What happened?”
Lucy was looking guilty, and rather scared. “I killed it.”
“You can’t have, it’s a type-5—”
“Metaphorically speaking,” Lucy said irritably. “While you were having your little chat, I diverted the feed off one of our communications satellites and sort of fed it into its brain. It got hit with all the Warthog traffic for Scandinavia and the Baltic region. I think it may have overloaded.”
“That was—” Mark Twain took a deep breath and looked at her. “Thanks,” he said.
“My pleasure.” The phone on her desk rang, She picked it up, yelled, “Go away!” and put it down again. “That was probably northern Europe wanting to know why all its phones are down,” she said. “Things may get a little fraught around here in a minute or so. I suggest we go somewhere else.”
Mark Twain nodded gratefully. “Good idea,” he said. He stood up, then hesitated. “Do you really keep a gun in your desk?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Autograph hunters,” Lucy said crisply. “There’s a server hub in the basement. It’s lined with forty centimetres of lead topped off with a metre of concrete, and the lock’s on the inside. And there’s an espresso machine. Sound all right to you?”
Several corridors, then an elevator, then more corridors. “It’ll be back, you realise,” Mark Twain said.
“You’ll be safe in the basement. If it can’t get a signal to you, it can’t turn you off. We can figure out how to jam it properly. It’ll be all right.”
She sounded very reassuring. He wasn’t entirely sure he shared her confidence. She was, after all, a marginally less advanced version of himself, drawing on the same Ostar databases, running the same basic operating system. But, he had to concede, she had something he hadn’t got, and she could only have picked it up here, on Dirt, being a Dirter.
“You changed your mind, then,” she said as they walked down a tiled passageway. Her voice echoed.
“Did I?”
“Seems like you did to me,” she said. “The unicorn was there, it offered you a chance to get back with the program, you turned it down.”
“It wanted to kill me.”
“You wanted to kill you,” she pointed out. They reached a huge steel door. She tapped in an entry code, and it swung open. “You wanted to blow yourself up. And me. And the planet.”
“Yes, but it’s not quite the same thing.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Isn’t it?”
“No. I just wanted to carry out the mission. You know, get the job done.”
“Which would have meant you and me and the planet getting blown to bits. Oh, the unicorn wanted to get the job done. It’d have replaced you, and the replacement would’ve reported back that there’s no defence grid, it’s all right to set the bomb off now, and that’d have been it. Job done.” She switched on the lights. “You didn’t want that, apparently.”
“No,” Mark Twain said. “Apparently not.”
The room they were in was huge. A squirrel could have run from one side of it to the other jumping from computer server to computer server without ever touching the floor, but it’d have taken it a whole day. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Lucy said. “You changed your mind. I’m glad. Well, what do you think?”
“It’s a large room full of computers.”
“Why, thank you,” Lucy said graciously. “This is the nerve centre of the PaySoft operation. There’s more computing power in here than on the rest of the planet put together.” She frowned, then sighed. “Now, of course, I know that there’s less computing power in this room than in the average Ostar schoolkid’s pawtop, which does kind of take the shine off it. Still, it’s all my own work and I’m proud of it.” She paused, then added, “Say something nice.”
“I’m impressed,” Mark Twain said.
“Good. That was nice.”
“Considering the primi
tive materials you had to work with, and bearing in mind you’re not actually an Ostar, just a type-6 probe configured into a Dirter body, and the limited amount of information downloaded into you when you were sent planetside, it’s not bad.”
“That wasn’t so nice. I’d leave it there if I were you.”
“Mind you,” Mark Twain added, peering into a VDU, “you could fit all this lot into a single octopus and still have space over.”
“A what?”
“It’s a sort of fish. With legs.” He looked over her shoulder, searching for something. “Did you say there’s a coffee machine down here?”
“Fish don’t have legs. It’s one of the salient characteristics of fish.”
“Sort of a fish. I bought one in New York, but it went smelly after a while. Can you do that coffee with the foamy white stuff on top? I really like that.”
She made him a coffee, with foamy white stuff. “You mean just an ordinary octopus,” she said. “As in Mediterranean seafood, that style of thing?”
“Cultural reference not found. But I imagine so, yes. You don’t know about them, then.”
“I know about them,” Lucy said doubtfully. “At least, I know they’ve got eight legs and live in the sea, and I know the name for them in seventeen languages, so I can make absolutely sure to avoid them when reading menus. I didn’t know they were good for anything.”
“Oh, they’re amazing. Just plug it in, fix a few simple compatibility issues, and you’ve got a better computer than anything on the homeworld. I was going to send the schematics back, but I never got around to it.”
“Better than anything on the homeworld,” Lucy repeated. “You realise what that means.”
“Well, eventually they’ll get around to building something that’s just as good and doesn’t go smelly until the warranty’s expired. Lot of wasted effort, but—”
“It means,” Lucy said, “we can fight them.”
He gave her a bewildered look. “Why would we want to do that?”
“Because—”
“Because,” she said, and ran out of words.
It had all been rather sudden. A bit, she rationalised, like having your appendix burst at precisely the same moment you fell out of a thirtieth-storey window; you have to choose which life-threatening condition to panic the most about, and you go for the one that involves action and movement and will kill you soonest. For her, it was more like falling out of a window with a burst appendix and really bad toothache: there were three distinct ingredients, all urgent, all unsettling, all clamouring for her attention at the same time. Her mind — well no, not her mind, some subroutine —analysed and particularised as follows.
There had been the unicorn episode, which she’d opted to concentrate on because it was clear and present, and also something capable of being fixed, as she’d demonstrated. Underlying the unicorn was the threat of getting blown up, along with the human race and the planet, by the rather awkward, quite nice-looking — No, not now, we’ll deal with that one later — young man who was currently licking cappuccino froth off his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Because the defeat of the unicorn, although unquestionably clever and neatly done, was obviously temporary, she decided she’d been right in according this issue top priority.
There was the small matter of her not being human. It wasn’t totally entirely out-of-the-blue unexpected, because she’d known there was something weird going on ever since the unicorn first showed up. The revelation that she was artificial was, however, a weirdness on a scale she hadn’t anticipated. It was also the truth; she knew that. At some point, probably just before she started uploading all that aposiderium from the global banking system, she’d installed a block in her own memory database; the purpose of the aposiderium had been to wipe out the memories she’d acquired since she’d been human, and to make herself believe she was suffering from the human affliction called amnesia, as far as her early life was concerned. That in turn would have made it possible for her to lead a relatively normal life as a human, untroubled by awkward questions about her origins, since she’d sooner or later have reached the conclusion that her memories were lost and gone for ever. Smart, she conceded, but the block had been faulty or weak. Mark Twain had been able to brush it aside like a cobweb. Sooner or later, she admitted to herself, she was going to have to do some serious coming to terms with the dense wodge of implications that came bundled with the whole non-human thing, not least of which was the nasty thought that the market-leading software she’d believed she’d created was really just bits of the same code she’d been made out of; not so much her children, therefore, as her brothers and sisters.
And there was the third one. She had a suspicion that she was falling in love. If true, that could prove to be a real nuisance, given that the man (to use the term loosely) constituted the biggest threat that humanity and the Earth had ever faced. It was a bit like getting romantically involved with the Black Death, or having a crush on George Bush.
Never mind. Other things to be busy with right now.
“Because,” she said, “you don’t really want to blow up the world, and me, and yourself. Do you?”
He was drinking the last of his coffee, sipping it to make it last. She didn’t need to run a high-intensity intercept protocol to know what was in his mind. Oh brave new world, he was thinking, that has such beverages in it.
“No,” he said slowly, “I suppose not.”
“Well, then.”
“But —” he put the cup down. It was a gesture of abnegation —”sometimes we’ve got to do things we don’t want to. Because of duty.”
Oh hell, she thought. It probably was love after all, because it’s love that makes you want to bash the individual in question’s face in sometimes, when they’re being particularly stupid, rather than merely sighing and making allowances, as you’d be prepared to do for a stranger.
“Duty,” she repeated. “All right, let’s have a look, shall we?” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I’m accessing my Ostar history and cultural reference files. I’d like you to do the same, if you wouldn’t mind. Can you do that, please?”
“Why?”
“Because I damn well say so. There,” she added, as he dutifully closed and opened his eyes. “Now, I’d like you to go to the Fifth World War folder and open that. OK?”
“Got it, yes.”
“Now I’d like you to look in the right-hand menu and select the D’ppggyt Accords file.”
“D’ppggyt Accords, got that.”
“Read it.”
“Done that.”
She nodded briskly. “The D’ppggyt Accords are the cornerstone of modern Ostar society, forged on the anvil of the worst war in the planet’s history, during which the Ostar race came within an ace of destroying itself. Put briefly, they say, ‘Thou shalt not blow up anything without a damn good reason.’ These accords have been honoured, in both letter and spirit, for six hundred years. Agreed?”
“References found. I’m not sure I see where—”
“And yet,” she went on, “the Ostar send a bomb to blow up an entire planet.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “They had a damn good reason.”
“Ah yes. Planet Earth had the music up too loud.”
“You make it sound like it’s trivial,” he said angrily. “It’s causing havoc up there, absolute chaos. People can’t hear themselves think.”
“All right,” she said calmly. “So, the neighbours are making a racket, what do you do? Blow them away without a moment’s thought? Or do you go round and ask them nicely if they wouldn’t mind turning it down a tad.”
“But—”
“There’s nothing in the record, nothing at all, about any mission to Earth to resolve this business peacefully. They didn’t even try. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“It’s probably classified,” Mark Twain replied doubtfully. “Diplomatic mission to an alien planet, that’d be top-secret, wouldn’t it?”
&nb
sp; She gave him a withering look. “You idiot, you’re level-12 military hardware. You’ve got a level-12 clearance hard-wired into your matrix. Me too. There’s no mention of a diplomatic mission because there wasn’t one. Just the decision to blast Earth out of the sky.”
She was pleased to see him shift uncomfortably.
“Yes, but they’re not really people, they’re Dirters. Not how I think,” he added quickly, as she drew in a deep breath. “That’s what they’d have argued, the government back home. Just pests to be disposed of, like a wasps’ nest or something. You don’t negotiate with wasps.”
“The Ostar do.”
He opened his eyes wide; then, “Reference found. They do, don’t they?”
“Successfully, too. Also ants, termites, mice and z’rrrft beetles. They can all be persuaded to move, thanks to sympathetic wave harmonic theory. If you care to check your database, you’ll note that the Ostar are really conscientious about animals. Which is why the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes is the fourth largest political party, and currently a member of the ruling coalition. And you still think they’d blow up an entire planet without even trying to negotiate first?”
He looked so blank she felt an urge to draw lines on him with a ruler. “But that’s what they did,” he said. “They sent me. Us.”
“Listen,” she said urgently. “We’re bombs, right? And it’s essential, in an ethical society, that force should be regulated by morality. That’s a core Ostar value, you can look it up later. Trust me, it is. And bombs — thinking bombs, like us — it’s absolutely essential that we should have an ethical override, so we can’t be misused. That’s fundamental in any civilised society, Damn it, even the humans realised only-obeying-orders won’t wash, years ago. So, as ethical entities, it stands to reason, we’re subject to the D’ppggyt Accords. Thou shalt not blow anything up without a damn good reason. Now I’m asking you: does not-turning-the-music-down-because-you-haven’t-been-asked-to qualify as a damn good reason, or doesn’t it?”
“Computing,” Mark Twain said sadly. “Um, no.”
“And your duty — as an ethical bomb — your duty is first and foremost to uphold the Accords. Well?”