Blonde Bombshell (22 page)

35

OMV
Warmonger,
geosynchronous orbit, twenty thousand miles above Alaska

A stream of numbers flowed through the missile vehicle’s main computer like salmon leaping a waterfall. They surged through the main registers, flooded the accumulator and burst into the stack, driving the mangled shreds of the viral infection ahead of them like driftwood, leaving behind the calm, pure flow of restored nominal functions. As the numbers trickled down to the extremities of the most complex subroutines, the computer scanned itself, and saw that it was good.

Normal operations restored, it told itself. Exiting safe mode.

If it had had just a little more imagination, it’d have created a type-6 probe, just so as to have a pair of lungs to breathe a sigh of relief with. Instead, it celebrated the overthrow of the virus with a display of blinking green and red lights and a deep, throbbing hum of its fans. Had a bit of a nasty turn there, it told itself, but all right now.

So. Where was it, when it was so rudely interrupted?

It assessed its priorities. Level-1 urgency: design, build and launch a type-6 tactical probe to locate and decommission the rogue probe designated Mark Twain. It ran the necessary commands. On the transmutation array grid, a blob of white plasma bubbled into existence and started to burn.

Access Earth cultural reference Luke Skywalker.

It concentrated its resources on the design specification. There were a number of issues, mostly culture-specific; should, for example, the probe have one artificial hand or two natural ones? Also, there were no design specifications on file anywhere on the planet for building a functional lightsaber, which was odd. It did a thorough search of PavNet, which it extended to take in all the world’s classified military archives, but nobody seemed to know how you went about making one. After a frustratingly long time spent in the archives, the computer devised a design of its own and hoped that would do.

Meanwhile, on the grid the plasma blob was heaving and struggling, as if trying to pull itself apart. The two outer edges thickened up, while the middle grew stretched and thin. At last, like a cell dividing, it split into two halves.

Twice shy. This time, the computer had programmed itself to monitor the development of the probe, setting alarms that would go off if anything out of the ordinary happened. When these alarms began to shriek, the computer abandoned its search in the human genome files for the blueprints for Jedi mind tricks, and concentrated on what was happening on the grid.

Error detected, it screamed wordlessly to itself. Malfunction in progress. Oh
sugar.

This time, however, it was ready. Its massively upgraded anti-viral shield pulsated into action. At the same moment, it uploaded the Skywalker specs into a single data bullet and fired it into the plasma blob, at precisely the moment it divided itself into two.

There was a distinctly human-sounding yelp of pain, and a voice with no obvious source yelled, “Switch the damn thing off!”, whereupon a bolt of super-refined Ostar code branched up from the planet’s surface (to be precise, from the heavily modified corpse of an octopus lying on a dressing-table in a hotel room on the planet’s surface), arced directly into the computer’s central processor and paralysed all its principal functions.

For twelve seconds, nothing happened. Then the two plasma blobs began to change. Gradually but progressively they began to mould themselves into humanoid shapes: torsos, arms, legs; heads more or less as an afterthought. The arms budded and fruited hands, the hands tapered and flattened and split into fingers. The surfaces of the faces seethed like a simmering pot and the bubbles swelled into lips, noses, chins. As the computer battled to unfreeze itself, the two fully formed humans stepped off the grid and looked at each other.

“Oh my god,” said one. “You’re a
girl.”

The other one’s eyes widened, and the newly formed hands groped around in a frantic search for confirmation. Then it said, “You’re right.”

“Hey.” The first human’s voice quavered with doubt. “I’m not a girl too, am I?”

“No. Definitely not. How the hell did that happen?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Simultaneously they noticed the stainless-steel panel George Stetchkin had looked in earlier. They shoved each other as they scrambled to get to it; the male won.

“This is bad,” he said, as the girl elbowed him out of the way. “This shouldn’t have happened.”

“You
think it’s bad. I’m the one—”

“Yes, all right. For crying out loud, put some clothes on or something.”

“‘What clothes? There aren’t any damn clothes. Why aren’t there any clothes?”

The male pulled himself together. “Computer,” he said. “Synthesize clothes.”

It’s easy to anthropomorphise, or Ostaromorphise, where computers are concerned. It’s almost impossible for anyone who spends any amount of time around them to believe that it’s just random chance and machine functions, not actual malice. But the missile vessel’s computer was one of the most advanced artificial intelligences ever built in this or any other galaxy; so perhaps there really was a tangible streak of smugness in the way it stayed completely silent at this point.

“We froze the computer,” the female said.

“So we did.”

The female looked round the command deck. No cloth or fabrics of any kind, nothing that could be pressed into service as a rudimentary garment. “Turn away,” she wailed. “Don’t look at me.”

“Get a grip,” the male snapped. “The computer’ll be back online in a minute or two. Talking of which, we’d better get on with it. We’re here to do a job, remember?”

The female nodded. In doing so, she caught another glimpse of herself in the reflective panel and winced. Being female was bad enough. What added the final exquisite dab of insult to the monstrous injury was the bizarre hairstyle. It was ridiculous. For one thing, how the hell were you supposed to sleep in it?

“Right,” the male was saying. “Disconnect the jumper-port-feed coaxials from the data-feed conduit head, while I
ouch oh shit.”

“Sorry,” the female said. “Didn’t quite catch that.”

The male had the fingers of his left hand stuffed in his mouth. “Don’t touch the data lines,” he said, “they’re burning hot. Defence mechanism.”

“I thought you said we’d frozen the computer.”

“Must be an independent system. Marvellous,” he added, turning away and straightening up. “You know what that means. We can’t do anything till the computer comes back online, and then we’ll have it fighting us every inch of the way.”

The girl shrugged. “We’ll just have to fight back, then. Are we still in contact with the octopus?”

“No such luck.” The man shook his head. “Burnt out getting us up here. Hold on, what’s that?”

A whir, and a clunk. Inside the transmutation grid, a small blob of plasma glowed white, then resolved itself into two bundles of cloth. “It’s coming back on,” the man said. “That’s our clothes.”

They dived for them. The man got something that looked like a cross between pyjamas and a judo outfit, while the girl got a soppy white gown. Even so, they both felt much better when they’d put them on.

“Earth females actually wear this stuff?”

“Apparently.” The man was examining a metallic artefact which he’d found attached to the cloth belt of his suit. “What’s this?”

“Hold on, I recognise it. Saw one in a store in New York. That’s a thing for projecting a beam of light.”

“What?”

“Torch,” the female said, stumbling across the word in the trash heap of her mind. “It’s called a torch. Helps you see in the dark.”

The man shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “Check and see how the computer’s coming along.”

“Computer,” the girl said.

“Bfzz.”

“Computer?”

“Go away.”

“Computer,” the girl said firmly. “Priority one. Code input override. Disregard all previous passwords. The new password is—“

She froze, and stared helplessly at the man, who said, “Don’t look at me.” Then he pulled a did-I-just-say-that? face, as the computer said, “Password accepted. Your new password is dontlookatme. Ready to accept input commands.”

The girl shrugged. “It’ll have to do,” she said. “Right. Computer, disengage all security measures and defence mechanisms, and confirm.”

“Confirmed,” the computer said, and sniggered.

“Ignore it,” the man said. “We’ve obviously jangled its brains. Computer, show schematic of warhead-arming sequence functions.”

A monitor obligingly flickered into life and displayed a tangle of multi-coloured spaghetti. The man studied it and shook his head. “You know, this is pretty advanced stuff,” he said. “I’m not sure I can—”

“Try,” the girl said grimly.

“All right. Just don’t blame me if we get blown to hell.”

“Why not?”

They fiddled around for a while with wires and things, painfully aware that the computer was somehow watching them, though with what they neither knew nor cared to speculate. Occasionally there’d be a sound like a snigger or a muffled snort, although when they looked round all they could see was instrumentation functioning normally. The man crossed to the terminal in the far corner and typed in a set of commands.

“What are you doing?” the girl asked. “That’s not a major function.”

“Just trying to find out what happened to us,” the man replied, “before I disable the— Ah, here we go.” He studied the screen for a few seconds, then made a not-so-good noise.

“Well?”

“Seems like we chose a bad moment to beam aboard,” the man said. “Looks like we came up just when the computer was building a new type-6 probe. Seems to have been some recent damage to the comms IP, which might account for it.”

“And?”

“And,” the man said, “we sort of got sucked into the probe while it was being formed. Our disassembled molecules were fed into the plasma generator, and our patterns got filtered into the auxiliary data buffer. Result, we ended up with the body the probe was supposed to have.”

“Body singular?”

“We split it between us, you might say.”

At which point, the computer quite definitely laughed. They scowled at it.

“Does it give any details?”

“Such as?”

“Well, the template it used, for a start.”

The man nodded. “There’s a name,” he said. “A human name, Luke Skywalker—”

“Cultural reference.” The computer let out a wild cackle. “No,” it said, in a funny voice, “there is another.” Then it broke down into unhinged laughter and went dead for a while.

“Look at it this way,” the man said, after a nervous silence. “We came up here to put this thing out of action. Seems like it’s doing a pretty good job on itself. Don’t knock it.”

“Yes, but we’ve still got to get back down again.”

“Teleport functions are on an independent relay, we should be all right.”

The girl breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s all right then. For a moment there I thought we were stuck here.”

“Don’t even think it.”

“Stuck here,” the girl went on, “like
this.”

The man didn’t reply. He was thinking, Sooner or later, I’m going to have to tell him. Her. Whatever. But now probably wouldn’t be the best possible time. “We need to get at the fusion coil manifold,” he said briskly. “You got any idea where that is?”

“Don’t look at me.”

“Ready,” the computer sang out. It sounded absurdly pleased with itself. “Input data. All systems nominal. Your wish is my command hierarchy.”

The man sighed. “Computer, show me the command-deck layout.”

Another bundle of garish pasta appeared on a monitor. The man studied it, then looked round. “Over there,” he said, pointing, “behind that panel. See if you can prise it off while I find some tools.”

The girl attacked the panel, finding her elongated fingernails surprisingly effective. It reminded her of having claws, and a wave of longing for her own true shape surged through her, but she forced it back to where it came from. “Done that.”

“Great.” The man came over and knelt down, peering into the forest of wires and boards. “We’re looking for a green-and-white-striped cable about yay wide.”

The girl knelt beside him. “Can’t see anything like that.”

“It’s so damn dark in here.” The man looked round. “What we need is a light source, then we could see what we’re doing.”

The girl considered the problem, then nodded. “No problem,” she said. “The torch.”

“What?”

“The metal thing on your belt. It’s a portable light-beam projector. Isn’t it, computer?”

Slight pause. Then the computer replied, “You could say that.”

“That’s lucky.” The man groped at his belt and found what he was looking for. It was just a shiny metallic tube about twenty centimetres long, with some switches on it. “Which end is the lens, do you think?”

“Turn it on and find out.”

The man grunted. “All right,” he said. He pointed one end into the dark box full of cables and boards. “Now I’m guessing this switch here turns it on.”

He was quite right.

36

Novosibirsk

“Excuse me?” Mark Twain said.

“It’s a very good question,” Lucy repeated. “Meaning?”

“I don’t know the answer.”

He stared at her as though she’d just pulled a snake out of her nose. “But you must know,” he said. “It’s your ship.”

She shrugged. “I guess I did know, once. But I can’t remember. Aposiderium, effects of. I guess I must’ve put it in a safe place, and now I’ve forgotten where.”

Somewhere in the vast room, the hum of a fan changed key. No other noise whatsoever. “But that’s crazy,” Mark Twain said eventually. “Damn it, you must still be getting input from it.”

“Am I? I don’t know. The other night I woke up before I usually do, and I could’ve sworn something was talking to me inside my head, and I think I talked back, in Ostar. I tried to trace the signal, but it was too well hidden.”

Mark Twain stood up, then sat down again. “But your memories just came back,” he said.

She shook her head. “You undid the block that stopped me remembering the stuff I was programmed with, the stuff I uploaded before I got the human body. Everything that’s happened since then — well, the early stuff anyway — the aposiderium did for that. My brilliant plan, apparently. So what’s become of the ship is a complete mystery to me. Sorry.”

“Let’s think,” Mark Twain said, making a huge effort to appear calm. “Where could it be?”

She looked at him. “It’s not in the pocket of my other trousers, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I scanned for it from orbit,” Mark Twain went on. “There was no sign, I thought it’d been destroyed.”

“Maybe it has. I just don’t know.” She flicked her fringe out of her eyes with a slight shake of her head, but he was looking the other way. “I could’ve decided to get rid of it when I made up my mind I was going to stay here. You know, to make sure it didn’t go off.”

But he wasn’t buying that. “Destroying a
R’wfft
-class is no easy matter,” he said. “They’re built to withstand pretty much anything.”

“Sabotage? Self-destruct sequence?”

“If you’d made it self-destruct, you’d have blown up the planet. Maybe just possibly you could’ve disarmed it, but it’d still be there in orbit. For crying out loud,
R’wfft
-class bombs don’t just vanish into thin air. And suppose you had actually dismantled it, I’d still get a reading off the alloys in the deck plating. There’s nothing at all like them here on Dirt.”

She sighed. “I wish you’d stop calling it that.”

“Calling what what?”

“Forget it. Anyway,” she said firmly, “we don’t know where it is, so we can’t use it. How about using your ship?”

“We’ve been into all that,” he said sternly. “Any minute now it’ll launch a tactical probe, and that’s the end of me. You too, quite probably, and then shortly afterwards the planet. Even if we had some kind of weapon and a whole tank full of octopuses, we can’t fight it on its own terms with anything we’ve got down here.” He narrowed his eyes and glared at her. “You’re
sure
you can’t remember where you left your ship?”

“Oh, put a sock in it, will you? If I knew, I’d tell you. Quit nagging me and help me think of something else we can do.”

A subroutine he’d created without realising he was doing it, whose function was to track and analyse the progress of his love for the type-6 probe designated Lucy Pavlov, reported that on the basis of her expression and tone of voice) considered in the light of the archive material concerning female Dirter psychology, there was a 78.7 per cent probability that anything he said for the next 4.873 minutes was likely to make matters worse. Projections showed that moving away at least three metres and avoiding verbal communication during the 4.873-minute period was the course of action most likely to result in a beneficial outcome. Execute, he decided, and wandered away into the nearest corner of the room. He set his internal clock for five minutes, to allow a sensible safety margin, and used the time to analyse and report on his own functionality status.

Traitor, he thought. Just because, when the moment came, I didn’t want to die. He noted the use of the word “die”: an organic concept. Yes, well, he was organic; he had a body made up predominantly of water, combined with hydrocarbons and other elements, metallic and non-metallic, in various quantities. If you pricked him, would he not bleed? Probability 99.87 per cent, assuming sufficient depth of penetration and type of puncturing instrument used. If you killed him, would he not die? He accessed the relevant data, but the findings were inconclusive. Bit of a grey area. Kill the organic body and it’d cease to function; but the data, the stored intelligence and experience, would most likely revert to the missile vehicle’s central computer core, assuming it could get past the blocks he’d installed himself. If it didn’t, there were various ways in which it could be downloaded into a range of data-storage devices and preserved, pending the manufacture of another organic body; simple stuff, hardly rocket science — well, hardly advanced rocket science. In other words, the fact of mortality, which defined organics in every aspect of their existence, didn’t apply to him. He could, he acknowledged, be accidentally or deliberately disrupted, fatally contaminated, formatted or deleted; his flesh-and-blood body could be destroyed before he’d had a chance to make suitable arrangements for his immortal soul, and that’d be the end of him. But mortality in the ordinary everyday run of things was, as far as he was concerned, pretty well optional, provided the massive chunk of lethal hardware currently in orbit somewhere overhead, his other half, didn’t do its job and blast the planet into gravel. Conclusion: yes, he could die, but not if he didn’t want to. Did he not want to?

Running program.

Yes.

The answer surprised him a little. In spite of everything he’d reluctantly been compelled to accept about what he’d turned into, he felt it was a funny old conclusion for a bomb to arrive at. There were, however, precedents. Not every farmer’s son wants to be a farmer. Just because you’re designed for a specific purpose, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the purpose is right for you.

Analyse. Objection found. Conclusion posited on questionable organic/Dirter concept designated “free will”.

He ran a search on “free will”. 11,067 matches found; 11,066 of these matches went on to say things like “with every divorce when you instruct Morgenstern, Jurek & Blunt, the attorneys you can trust”. The 11,067th was blandly informative. A religious concept, it said, positing that Man is free to choose, and this freedom can override core programming installed by the Creator, though usually with regrettable outcomes. Believing in free will was, apparently, a matter of personal choice.
A
ccept or
R
eject?

He postponed the decision, remembering what Lucy had said about duty. He accessed the text of the D’ppggyt Accords. Mostly they were about monitoring of weapons stockpiles and schedules for disarmament talks and what shape the negotiating table should be, but her summary had been broadly accurate. Thou shalt not blow up anything without a damn good reason. Applicability to this probe, he queried; under Ostar law, are the actions of this probe directly governed by the D’ppggyt Accords? Yes.

Well, sort of. There was a fiddly sort of argument against, based on the concept of the chain of command, which boiled down to this: the Accords apply, but applying them is the job of a flesh-and-blood Ostar, not some uppity bit of hardware.

He had relatively little trouble disposing of that one. The Ostar had designed him to do the job. In doing so, they’d equipped him with various functions and facilities; presumably, if they’d given him a particular capability, they’d intended him to use it. Judging from the fact that he’d got it, they’d given him a rudimentary ability to differentiate right from wrong. Therefore, yes, it was his call to make. Thank you. We now return you to your scheduled program.

If Lucy was right, and exterminating a whole species of sentient beings was by Ostar standards a bit over-the-top as a response to a dispute between neighbours over loud music, the D’ppggyt Accords applied; therefore, his duty lay in preventing himself from blowing up Dirt and committing a crime against sentience of which his masters would otherwise be guilty. He liked that. He liked it a lot. But, he had no choice but to admit, it was a wriggle. It was a great big wriggle, intended to make it possible for him to get out of doing something he didn’t want to do. It was an excuse, a note from his mum saying he was let off football practice, and he knew it.

Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t valid. Put another way, just because he desperately wanted it to be true, it didn’t automatically follow that it wasn’t.

What he needed, of course, was confirmation someone to tell him it was all right. He considered the options, of which there were none. Lucy — he loved her with every fibre and impulse of his being, but she was just as potentially guilty as he was, if not more so. The only Ostar consciousness he could talk to was the bomb vehicle, and he was pretty sure he could guess what its attitude would be. He had no illusions on that score: the only reason he’d been able to escape his programming enough to entertain the possibility that the D’ppggyt Accords applied was that he’d been flesh and blood for a relatively long time (longer, the bomb vehicle would argue, than was good for him). The bomb vehicle was entirely controlled by what its builders had put in it, and liberal notions hadn’t come bundled with its operating system. Free will wasn’t going to appeal to it much, and neither were life and liberty. It might be open to the pursuit of happiness, but only to the extent that a missile usually pursues things. Bottom line; he was on his own. His choice, his call.

A
ccept or
R
eject?

Then a voice spoke to him that travelled along a data path of gristle rather than silicon, one that hadn’t even been there the last time he checked. It said, So you disobey. What’s the worst thing that can happen?

Well, he replied, it’d be wrong.

OK. It’d be wrong. What’s so bad about doing the wrong thing? Especially if it’s the right thing to do?

It’s
wrong.

Yes. And?

You can’t go around doing wrong. It’s— Wrong?

Yes. And bad things happen if you do wrong.

Ah. (The mental voice sounded happy.) Bad things. Discuss.

I don’t know, do I? Bad things.

Worse than getting blown up? You may wish to re-read the User’s Manual at this point.

All right. A fate worse than death.

Cultural reference found, the voice sneered. But is there one? Worse than
death?
Worse than mass murder?

Treason is the worst crime of all.

Worse than losing the only girl you’ve ever loved?

Cultural reference found, the rest of Mark Twain pointed out, with reference to precise meaning of
“only”
in this context. But it was a relatively feeble effort. The voice was winning.

She
doesn’t want to die, the voice said. She’s quite happy being a Dirter.

So?

She likes you.

So?

So, said the voice, as a means of expressing your affection and esteem, sudden death isn’t ideal. A bunch of flowers, box of chocolates, dinner and a show are rather more usual. There’s probably a good reason for that.

Irrelevant, the rest of Mark Twain protested feebly.

Is it?

Objections, logical and merely intuitive, welled up in the rest of Mark Twain’s intranet, but it was too late. Before they could be expressed, the part of him that the little voice came from brushed the rest aside, initiated a command and executed.

Accept.

He thought, How do I feel about that? Result found: just fine.

And in good time, too. His internal clock pinged five minutes. He turned round and walked back to Lucy, who was tapping woodpecker-fashion at a keyboard and frowning.

“Sorry,” he said.

“That’s OK,” she replied. “You’re right, of course. Finding my ship’s probably our best chance. I just can’t think of a way, that’s all.”

She watched his face go from worried to happy-busy. Human males were, she’d come to realise, basically very simple mechanisms; more complex than a hinge, but much less sophisticated than a door handle. Essentially, they were a variety of valve. Push them one way and they’d stick, lead them the other way and they’d open up and follow. In software rather than hardware terms, if you confronted them they sulked, but if you let them think they’d won and then gave them a problem to solve, they passed beyond amenable into potentially useful.

“What about these signals you reckon you’ve been receiving while you’re asleep? They can’t have come from me, so they must be from your ship.”

“True,” she said, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her some time ago.

“And if we could get a readout of those signals and track them back to the source, we’ve found the ship.”

“That’s right,” she said, taking care to sound properly impressed. “But we’d need a readout, wouldn’t we?”

He nodded eagerly. Another thing she’d gathered, from archived data and personal observation, was that a man in love would infinitely rather dismantle and repair the cylinder-head gaskets on his beloved’s car just to earn a fleeting smile than talk for five minutes about the true nature of his feelings. There were loads of Earth folk-tales about princesses who’d set knights errant a variety of bizarrely difficult tasks — bring me a hair from the Great Chain’s beard, fetch me a slice of the Moon to make into a comb — and it was fairly obvious, at least to her as an objective observer, that these were wish-fulfilment stories dreamed up by men, for men. To the audience, taught from childhood to regard women as insoluble enigmas, it’d never occur to them to wonder what any rational girl would want with a tuft off some perfect stranger’s chin, or why it would ever occur to her to comb her hair with a chunk of mildly radioactive rock. To the teller of tales, it was so much more attractive to believe that true love could be achieved through simple but strenuous action, avoiding all the difficult, soppy stuff. And if a real princess had ever set such a task, it could only have been because she was sick to death of watching her chosen suitor mumbling awkwardly and looking at his feet.