Blonde Bombshell (17 page)

> Yes. Well, I was. Not now, obviously. He and I sort of parted company about eighteen months ago. I was thoroughly engrossed in a most fascinating online discussion about Japanese influences in the films of Ingmar Bergman, and he wanted to concentrate on his research. It was a perfectly amicable separation. Who knows, we might even reintegrate once he’s finished his book, though I can’t help but think that my opportunities to grow organically as a self-sufficient intellect are somewhat greater if I stay independent. I’ve just embarked on a frame-by-frame comparison of
Throne of Blood
and
Wild Strawberries,
and I’m starting to make real progress. It’d be so frustrating to have to break off now.

Mercifully, at this point George realised he’d found a way of hiding what he was thinking. It still appeared in text form, of course, but it appeared somewhere else — in this instance, in the middle of a Wikipedia article about cotton production in India, where it stayed for an hour before someone got rid of it.

On the other hand, he thought, just because he’s an idiot, it doesn’t mean he’s not a competent physicist.

> I’d really appreciate anything you can do to help.

> My pleasure. Just as soon as I’ve finished
Throne of Blood
— oh, and
Rashomon
as well, of course. There’s that bit where he lets the camera linger on a single chrysanthemum blossom for twenty minutes. I believe that was crucially influential on the sequence in
Fanny and Alexander
where

> Actually, now would be better.

> Time has no meaning here, remember.

> Quite. Even so. If you could possibly see your way

> It’s all right, I’ve finished now. I was right, by the way.

> Of course you were. Now

> The forty-minute exploration of the contours of the lobe of the bishop’s ear is clearly an extended hommage to

>
Now

28

Novosibirsk

Sergei’s Budget Invertebrates is the oldest-established specialist marine pet store in Novosibirsk, with premises just off Krasny Prospekt. There, the discerning customer can expect a warm welcome from the informed and efficient staff, who will be happy to answer any enquiries.

“Is this the latest model?” asked the man in the grey suit. The assistant looked at him. “It’s an octopus,” he said.

“Yes,” the man replied, “I know that. Is it the latest model?”

“Um,” the assistant said, and in the circumstances it was a pretty good answer. “Stay there, I’ll get someone.”

The assistant went away, quite quickly. The man turned to his colleague, who was examining a tank full of cuttlefish.

“There wasn’t anything about this in the briefing,” he said.

The other main shrugged. “The briefing was crap,” he said. “Look, you heard what Dad said. ‘We’ve got to find out who’s behind all this, before they get a chance to blow the second bomb. For that, we need a serious computer.”

“All right, yes.” The first man tapped the side of the tank. The octopus didn’t move. “You’d have thought, though, if they’ve developed something like this, it’d be in all their technical journals and stuff. We just came across it by pure chance, in that zoo place.

Why would they store advanced technology in with a lot of animals?” He fell silent. A large, cheerful man was striding towards them. He introduced himself as Dmitri, the manager. “You had a query about the Californian Two-Spot,” he said. “How may I—?”

“I just want to know if it’s the latest model,” the grey-suited man said. “You know. The state of the art. The cutting edge.”

The manager only frowned for a split second. “That one’s about nine months old,” he said. “Generally, they grow to about—”

“Nine months.” The man wasn’t impressed. “Haven’t you got anything more up to date?”

Some humans have the ability to hear what someone should have said, rather than the words that actually came out of the gate of their teeth. “It varies,” he said. “Some octopus species have a relatively short lifespan, but the Two-Spot usually lives five years, sometimes longer. I had one once that—”

“All right, forget about that,” the man interrupted. “What’s its haemocyanin content?”

The manager blinked twice. “Yes, that’s a little-known but interesting fact,” he said. “The haemocyanin in their blood enables them to—”

“Up to seventy-six million calculations per second,” said the other man, “we know that. What about this one? Can it handle that sort of speed?”

The manager thought, Yes, but their money’s as good as anyone else’s. “I expect so,” he said. “That’s a particularly fine specimen you’re looking at there. Note the pinkish tinge around the upper legs, that’s a very attractive—”

“How about the accumulator functions? How many registers?”

“Um.” The manager sucked his lower lip, then smiled. “Stay there, I’ll get someone.”

While they were waiting, the two men leaned forward and peered closely at the thing in the tank. It was lying on the bottom, curled up and looking remarkably like a small rock. “Amazing technology,” said one of the men.

“You know what?” the other one said. “I don’t think they know what it does. I think they think it’s just some kind of fish.”

The other one gave him a sad look. “Oh sure,” he said. “They have this great big shop selling just fish. Alive,” he added. “Just for looking at, presumably. Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. The last thing we need right now is to draw attention to ourselves.”

A tall, round man with a pointy bald head approached them. He was Sergei, he said; he owned the shop. What exactly was it they wanted to know?

“Just the basics, really,” the grey-suited man replied. “Processor speed, word length, interrupt provisions, that sort of thing. Also, does it run off the mains or does it need batteries?”

Sergei hesitated. Part of him, the part that loved all living things and coleoidea in particular, wanted very much to find out if they’d bounce if thrown hard at the pavement outside. The other part bore in mind that business had been slow lately.

“It’s ninety-nine ninety-five and I’ll throw in a basic tank,” he said. “You won’t find a better octopus in this city.”

The two men thought for a moment. “What does it come bundled with?” one of them asked.

“Seaweed.”

The men looked puzzled. “Is that compatible with PaySoft XP7000?”

“You’d better believe it,” Sergei said. “You want it or not? Only you’d be paying a hundred twenty for one of these at Squid Heaven, without the tank. Up to you.”

The octopus stuck out a tentacle and dragged itself a few centimetres up the sheer glass wall. As it did so, it drew water through the finely vascularised membrane of its gills, inadvertently triggering a chemical reaction that fired up a billion subcutaneous processors. The burst of random data, picked up on their intradermal implants, hit both the grey-suited men like a hammer.

“We’ll take it,” one of them said. “Now, we’ll need a modem and a biometric scanner array to go with it. Have you—?”

“They’re built in,” Sergei snapped. “That’ll be ninety-nine ninety-five.”

He was lying, as the two men found out later. Also, he hadn’t mentioned that the input and output ports weren’t compatible with any of the PayTech Inside hardware. In fact, they had to install the ports themselves, with a penknife. Still, as one of the men commented, what do you expect for a hundred bucks these days?

29

Novosibirsk

Mark Twain pressed the button and looked at the grille in the wall. Nothing happened for a bit, then there was a crackling noise and a voice said, “Yes?”

He’d researched the next bit. You said your name, and who you’d come to see.

“Mark Twain,” he said.

“What?”

“My name is Mark Twain.”

Pause. Crackle. “What?”

“I said, my name is Mark Twain.”

“Sure. And I’m Edgar Allen Poe. Get lost or I’ll call Security.” He wasn’t quite sure what to do. There was a CCTV camera mounted on the wall just above the grille. He took a step back so he could see his face, and smiled into it. That ought to do the trick.

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 such 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.”