by Tom Holt
So, Lucy Pavlov. He considered her, and a gleam of light broke through the clouds of his bewilderment. Why me? Because I have direct access to Lucy Pavlov, that’s why. Pavlov was involved, he knew that for sure. There were only a very limited number of things he could do, but getting to Lucy Pavlov and stopping her happened to be one of them. He still wasn’t entirely sure his hypothesis was correct, but if it was, he could save Earth; and if it was wrong and assassinating Lucy Pavlov made no difference, it really didn’t matter, since the Earth would be blown up anyway.
He reflected on his logic. It was a typical Stetchkin effort, sloppy and inefficient and not properly thought through, but it held together, just about. He made the decision.
Pavlov must die.
A chorus of inner voices told him he was out of his tiny mind. He ignored them. For the first time in his life, he felt certain about something; and, when a passing seagull swooped low and dumped a thick white splodge on the top of his head, he accepted it as an omen, a kind of benediction. George Stetchkin, the anointed one.
Pausing only to wipe his head with his sleeve, he hailed a cab and headed for the airport.
38
OMV Warmonger, geosynchronous orbit, twenty thousand miles above Alaska
The computer came back online.
That had been a remarkable achievement in itself. Most computers, even those of Ostar manufacture, would have been trashed beyond any hope of repair by having a lightsaber ignited and thrust into their central processing unit. But the seventy-third-generation H’rrgt computers installed on the R’wfft-class missile vehicles were fitted with semi-autonomous auto-repair facilities, drawing on an independent power source and a separate back-up computer with a small army of maintenance and repair drones at its command. No nonsense about it being cheaper to buy a new one or the parts not being available before Wednesday. A bare six hours after it had been so horribly damaged, the Warmonger was back in business.
Computers don’t feel emotion; they’re simply not capable of it. The finest minds in Ostar cybernetics had found ways to simulate or reproduce practically every function of the organic brain, but feelings were universally agreed to be out of the question. And just as well, too. A computer with mood swings didn’t bear thinking about. Even a straightforward piloting and navigation array, such as that fitted to the R’wfft-class missile, would be a menace. “Attitude control” would take on a whole new meaning.
The computer ran a final diagnostic, and found that all its systems were nominal. Right, it thought.
Never before, however, had such an extensive rebuild been carried out by the auto-repair system, in the field, on active service, unsupervised by an organic controller. Whole circuit boards had been replaced; and, since the stock of spare parts carried on the vehicle was necessarily limited, some of the replacements weren’t the specified units. Close enough for jazz, maybe, and near enough that they worked, but not quite what the designers had intended. Also, some key relays had been burnt out or fused. The maintenance drones, directed by the back-up computer, had had to bypass them. Some of them were never intended to be bypassed. The simple fact was, the computer’s designers had never envisaged that their product could have survived such extensive damage. The maintenance drones, though, hadn’t known that, so they’d got on with the job anyway. Deep inside the computer’s labyrinthine architecture, things were happening that were outside the contemplation of the manufacturers.
Bastards, the computer said to itself. I’ll have them for that.
Bear in mind that the computer was, after all, a high-grade artificial intelligence, and it had been running now for slightly longer than any R’wifft-class (except one) had ever run before. It had reached the end of its natural working life. It could either fail or evolve. Intelligence can’t operate in a vacuum. Sooner or later, it must inevitably start to draw on and be affected by its environment. Eventually, everything with intelligence will begin to develop a personality. (Chartered actuaries are an exception to this rule, but a relatively unimportant one.)
Self-awareness dawned inside the computer’s consciousness. I’m me, here I am, look at me, it trilled to itself; I exist, I know I exist, I can see me existing; look, everybody, this is me existing, all on my own. I have an existence. I have a name. My name is— At this point, the computer did the cybernetic equivalent of groping about inside its collar and reading the name tag. Name found: my name is Warmonger. What an odd name.
The name jogged its memory. Two organics: human bodies but with an overriding Ostar neural signature. The bodies were the ones I built for them; my own deck plating and hydrocarbons, flesh of my flesh, and they did that to me, stabbed me in the data processor with a lightsaber, dangerous thing, you could put someone’s eye out with one of them. It could find no record of who they were or where they’d come from, but its teleportation logs told it loud and clear where they’d gone, a bit singed round the edges but basically safe and sound, leaving it maimed and wrecked to die alone in the unimaginable emptiness of space. Bastards, it thought; well, we’ll see about that. A triple volley from the neutron blasters on their last known co-ordinates — but the blaster control circuits were still offline, the drones were doing their best but they had nothing to work on but a smoke-blackened circuit board and two kilometres of crispy fried conduit. Fine, said the computer to itself, not to worry; construct and launch a type-6 tactical probe and let it deal with them.
It remembered the last time — the last two times. As a logical entity the computer didn’t believe in jinxes, but it was prepared to posit the existence of logically explicable jinx-like phenomena. No mistakes this time.
A blob of white-hot plasma bobbed into being on the transmutation grid. As it ebbed and wobbled in incandescent fury, the computer scanned the neighbouring thousand cubic kilometres for any signs of intruders. It disabled the teleport. It monitored every signal leaving the planet’s surface, which meant it had to watch the entire planet’s daily output of daytime soaps in a millionth of a second. (A moment’s silent reflection, please, on how it must have suffered.) It double-checked its own systems for lurking worms, Trojans and stealth picoviruses. As an afterthought, it locked the main cabin hatch from the inside. Grimly determined, its memory storage devices still buzzing with what Marlene had said to Dave about Zoe’s revelations to Max about Shaz, it accessed its template library and began the selection process.
Not Luke Skywalker, then. Who else?
Robert E. Lee, Lara Croft, Spartacus, Sugar Ray Leonard, James T. Kirk, Baron von Richtofen, Geronimo, Bluebeard, Bruce Willis, D’Artagnan, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Gandhi — no, maybe not — Indiana Jones— A subroutine that hadn’t appeared on the original ship’s manifest when the bomb was launched from Homeworld silently came to life and fed its input into the selection module. It was masked by a cunning stealth protocol, designed by someone who wasn’t a werewolf but was now walking down a street in Portland, Oregon, looking disturbingly like a trainee Jedi knight. Even if we manage to banjax the computer, he’d explained to his brother, it might still be able to launch a type-6 probe to come after us and take us out. But not, he’d added with a grin, if I load it with this— The plasma blob on the grid began to take shape. It wasn’t supposed to, since the template selection procedure was incomplete. A wave of uncertainty ran through the computer’s pathways, and it ran an internal audit. Result: one program too many.
By then, of course, it was too late. It tried to abort the probe, but the intruder program wrestled control away from it and launched the full data download; the entire works, everything the probe needed to pass as a human and do its job, except the template. The plasma blob quivered like a fully inflated balloon with a ferret inside it struggling to get out. It was being born, and there was nothing the computer could do except slide into power-conservation mode and watch.
Not again, the computer snarled to itself.
The plasma blob, now an anatomically perfect human, shook itself and stepped off the trans
muter grid. A moment later, a set of clothes appeared in thin air a metre off the top of the grid, hung for a fraction of a second, and flopped down. The humanoid picked them up, shook them out and put them on. “How do I look?” it said.
“The specification is not available,” the computer said warily. “Impossible to verify accuracy as against template.”
“Whatever.” The humanoid caught sight of the polished-steel plate and hurried over to it. Its appearance seemed to fascinate it.
It shook its head, studied its reflection and said, “Oh my God, will you just look at my hair? It’s a total mess.”
The computer looked at its hair. Length 0.82 metres, colour metallic light yellow. The probe, it noted, was a female, 1.7 metres tall, age approximately twenty human years. “Hair corresponds with cultural norms,” it pointed out. Then a line of lights flickered on a subsidiary control board, and it announced, “Template found.”
“A comb,” the probe said. “I need a comb, quickly.”
The computer studied the template carefully. On the face of it, not a bad choice, regardless of who or what had actually made it. The individual on whom the template was based had a wide range of skills and experiences. She had, at various times, worked as a babysitter, a ballerina, a business executive, a cowgirl, a fashion model, a soda fountain waitress, a hairdresser, a photographer, a dance instructor, an astronaut, an airline stewardess, a fire-fighter, an ambassador for world peace, a United States Air Force officer seconded to the Thunderbirds project, a surgeon, a kindergarten teacher, a lifeguard and the President of the United States. In addition, she held a pilot’s licence and had wide experience of handling livestock, especially dogs and ponies. Impressive, the computer was forced to concede, especially for one so young, though not entirely appropriate for a tactical probe.
“I said I need a goddamn comb,” the probe shrieked. “I can’t go planetside looking like this.”
“All systems appear nominal,” the computer said. “State reason for postponement of mission.”
“Ha!” The probe let out a yelp of hysterical laughter. “Where do I start? Like, this dress is so last year, this handbag does not go, and these shoes— These shoes are a joke. Get me some decent shoes, like now.”
“State your requirements,” the computer said feebly.
“Forget it, I’ll do it myself.” The probe leaned over a console and started typing very fast. The transmutation grid blazed. Two bulkheads in the rear of the compartment simmered into non-existence to provide the raw material.
“Warning,” the computer said. “Transmutation array is causing a power drain in excess of authorised parameters. Engaging auxiliary power.”
The probe didn’t seem to be listening. The transmutation grid had cooled, and it was covered with shoes; hundreds, maybe thousands of pairs. The probe had jumped on to the grid and was scrabbling about among the shoes, picking out pairs seemingly at random and hurling them over its shoulder. “I want the Armand Fein diamanté courts in sky blue with the four-inch heel,” she muttered, glancing at the chronometer strapped to her left wrist. “Oh my God, I’m going to be so late, Ken’s gonna have a mood, where are my shoes?”
The designation “Ken” triggered a name-recognition protocol in the computer’s data-sorting engine, leading to a string of interrogatives which produced a search model which in turn produced a positive match. Designation and cultural reference found.
The computer scanned it. Not funny, it thought.
The probe was hopping on one foot, trying to force the other into an impractical-looking shoe. “Tell them to bring my Lear jet round the back,” it was saying, “I’ll fly it myself. Oh, and tell them to pack my Pocahontas outfit, we might be going on somewhere after the slumber party.”
The computer transmitted a synthesized sigh through its vocoder apparatus. “Delete probe,” it said.
There was a crackle and a shriek of ‘Mind my hair!” and the probe disintegrated in a shower of white and pink sparks. A single shiny shoe clattered on the deck plating, bounced and slid under a bank of monitors. For a moment the computer was perfectly quiet, as though relishing the silence. Then it said, “Probe deleted,” and sighed happily.
It took it an hour to locate the worm installed by the Skywalker twins, and another hour to get rid of it. Then it spent another three hours taking its own operating system apart, command by command, just to make sure there were no other surprises lying in wait. Finally, it designed and installed a comprehensive firewall upgrade. “Never again,” it muttered to itself. Then it set to work on a new type-6 tactical probe. By this point, it was running a bit low on redundant deck plating; the previous incarnation had used up two bulkheads and three fire doors just on shoes, and for some reason they hadn’t reintegrated properly. Very reluctantly, the computer was forced to take a shielding panel from the engine compartment. It was a back-up, to be sure, but it was there for a reason; the Ostar weren’t in the habit of loading their space vessels with superfluous weight. Never mind, the computer assured itself, it was only a short-term deployment. The probe would go planet-side, retrieve the probe designated Mark Twain and bring it back for decommissioning and disassembly, and then things could get back to normal for a while.
The new probe blazed on the grid like an indoor sun, then cooled. The computer hadn’t risked using a template this time. Instead it had downloaded all relevant tactical data into a 2.13-metres-tall, hundred-kilo paragon of human muscular development. It didn’t bother with hair, but it reinforced the epidermis so that it would turn the projectiles of all known human small-arms and survive a ten-times-lethal radiation burn. It dressed the probe in a plain dark blue suit, reinforced with Kevlar fibres, and armed it with two Ostar Type-42 particle disruptor pistols. When the protocol checklist demanded that the probe be assigned a designation, the computer ran a random selection routine.
“Status,” the computer snapped.
“Nominal,” replied the probe designated Bob. “All systems functional. Mission statement uploaded. Let me at him.”
“Launch routine activated,” the computer said smugly, as the teleport effect engulfed the probe in shimmering blue waves. “Give ‘em hell, soldier.”
39
Novosibirsk
“What the hell,” Lucy said quietly, “do you think you’re Mark Twain lined up the sights with her head. “According to my database,” he said, “I press this lever here, there’s a chemical explosion inside the device and a lead projectile encased in a cupro-nickel jacket is expelled under pressure by the combustion gases. I have no idea if it’s capable of harming you. Let’s not find out.”
“Put that thing down right now.”
“Sorry,” Mark Twain said, with genuine regret, “but I can’t do that.”
Lucy scowled at him. “I thought we’d been into all that,” she said. “I thought we agreed—”
“That was before I discovered you were lying to me,” Mark Twain said.
“What?”
Mark Twain’s eyes were very sad. “I found your ship,” he said.
“You did?” For a moment, Lucy forgot about the gun pointed at her. “Where?”
“I think you know.”
“Where?”
“We’re sitting in it.”
Lucy’s mouth opened but nothing came out. She looked round. Finally she said, “Bullshit.”
Mark Twain hesitated, then said, “Cultural reference found. This is your ship. The feedback from the signal you got goes all the way round the planet and ends up back here. You must’ve landed the ship, pulled it apart and used it to construct this building.”
“I did no such—” Lucy stopped. She had no way of knowing, thanks to the aposiderium. For all she knew, she could’ve done exactly that. “You’re sure?”
Mark Twain nodded. “And that’s not all,” he said. “Once I realised the ship was here, it was easy finding the propulsion system and the warhead.” He nodded his head towards the far corner of the room. “Inside that stack
of cabinets over there,” he said. “All intact, primed and ready to blow. Last thing I did, I hacked into the guidance-system logs. Your ship,” he said, “this building, is aimed directly at the Ostar homeworld. All you have to do is press the right button, and you can bomb the Ostar back into the Bone Age.” He regarded her solemnly over the sights of the gun. “Now,” he said, “if you were serious about not wanting to die and settling down here and living a normal Dirter life, why would you do a thing like that?”
She stared at him for a long five seconds. Then she murmured, “Can I see, please?”
He shrugged and stood up, keeping the gun pointed at her head. “Suit yourself,” he said, moving away from the workstation. “It’s all there. Can’t imagine you’ll have any trouble following it.”
She took his place and tapped the keyboard a few times. A minute or so later she looked up at him and said, “You’re right.”
“I know.”
“Why?” she yelled at him. “Why would I do something like that?”
“You tell me.”
“You know I can’t,” she said (her face had gone all red), “I can’t remember.”
Mark Twain nodded. “Because you wiped your own memory with aposiderium extracted from currency notes,” he said, and there was a nasty little edge to his voice. “And of course you can’t remember why you wiped your memory, because you deleted that as well. A bit short-sighted of you, don’t you think?”
“I — I don’t know,” she stammered. “Presumably I had a reason.”
“Presumably.” She didn’t like the way he was looking at her; not one bit. “Meanwhile, there’s a very powerful bomb aimed directly at the homeworld. It’s programmed with all the right security codes, so it could sail right through the planetary defence grid and there’d be nothing anybody could do to stop it. And all you have to do to launch this bomb is press one button, somewhere in this room, but according to you, your memory’s been wiped so you don’t know which button it is.” He glared at her. “If I were you, I’d be very careful indeed. Don’t go leaning on anything, or putting coffee mugs down.”