Blonde Bombshell (24 page)

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 transmuter 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.”

She looked at him. “You don’t believe me.”

“Running logic analysis,” he said. “No, I don’t think I do. Sorry.”

The hole in the end of the gun barrel was staring at her like an eye. “Think about it,” she said. “I told you about the transmission. I told you where to find it. I could’ve just kept quiet and not mentioned it. Also, if I’m hell bent on blowing up the Ostar homeworld, why am I also sending myself coded messages?”

“Ah,” said Mark Twain, “I’ve got a theory about that.”

“Have you really.”

“Oh yes. I think you genuinely did wipe your memory with aposiderium, presumably so that as and when Homeworld sent someone to find out why you haven’t exploded yet, if they were to catch you and try and download your brain, there’d be nothing there for them to see. But the coded messages are the ship talking to you. My guess is, it’s telling you what to do, getting ready to launch the bomb.”

She stared at him, opened her mouth, shut it again, made a vague sort of gesture with her hands and, finally, a little choking noise. He just went on looking at her. “Well?” he said.

“I
don’t know, do I? Even if your stupid theory’s right, I don’t
know.”

He frowned; she had a point. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whether you’re aware of it right now this minute or not, you set all this up intending to blow up Homeworld. There’s a word for that.”

She nodded eagerly. “Yes,” she said, “bomb. It’s no different from what you were all set to do when you first walked in through my door.”

“Of course it’s different,” he snapped. “I was going to blow up the
right planet.”

There was a silence. Both of them were thinking about what he’d just said.

“Define ‘right’,” Lucy murmured.

“The planet I’m supposed to blow up,” Mark Twain replied, and he said it like a small child making an excuse. “Anyway, you’re in no position to get all self-righteous with me. All that stuff you came out with about the Accords and not blowing things up, and all the time—”

“Yes, but I didn’t
know,”
she yelled. “It happens to be what I believe, all right? And yes, maybe that’s what I believe after I doctored my own brain, but so what? This is the real me talking. I
do not want
to blow up Homeworld, all right?”

The gun stayed where it was. “Maybe,” he said grudgingly. “But there’s a very good chance you’re not the only one of you in there. If the voice in your sleep’s been giving you subliminal messages, if I stop pointing this weapon at you, for all I know you’ll press that button right now.”

But she shook her head. “Don’t think so,” she said. “Like, if I blow us both up, I’ll be just as dead as if you shoot me. Just believe me, can’t you? I’m not going to blow up
anything.”

“I don’t know that,” Mark Twain said. “And neither do you. Look,” he went on, almost pleading with her, “you may be perfectly sincere, in your own mind. But I can’t take the chance that you won’t press the button the second I put this thing down. You may not want to, but a subliminal encode wouldn’t leave you any choice. Not even if you were a real Dirter rather than a computer program.”

Lucy sighed. Suddenly she felt tired. “All right,” she said. “Fine. So what’re you going to do?”

Mark Twain lowered the gun just a little; not enough to take it off aim, but sufficient to take the strain off his shoulder and elbow. “I ought to shoot you,” he said. “Just to be safe.”

She laughed. “What if it’s all rigged to go off if I die? It’s what I’d do. Which means,” she added with a smile, “it could well be what I’ve done. You’d feel ever such a fool if that happened —though not,” she added kindly, “for very long.”

“Yes, well, I’m not going to,” Mark Twain said with a hint of embarrassment. “Not unless you make me. I now have ethical issues with taking life in cold blood, thanks to you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Yes, but
you
don’t, apparently,” Mark Twain shouted.
“You’re
plotting to blow up the Ostar homeworld, in direct contravention of the D’ppggyt Accords. Remember them? ‘Thou shalt not blow up anything without a damn good reason’?”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Lucy said. “I’m right behind that, 110 per cent.”

Mark Twain sighed. “This is all a bit much for me,” he said. “I’m a fairly straightforward kind of entity really. I was designed to gather information and transmit it to my command computer, not tackle complex moral issues.”

“Tough,” Lucy said. “Complex moral issues go with the organic brain and the monkey-suit; you can’t have one without the other. You might spare a thought for me,” she added. “I’ve got complex moral issues like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, it’s all right for you, at least you know what you’re doing. You’ve got your orders, you’re a good little soldier, and if you’ve got a problem all you’ve got to do is send an e-mail to your ship and it’ll tell you what to do. It’s all nice and clear for you, isn’t it? You’re fighting for truth, justice and the Ostar way—”

“Cultural ref—”

“Doing your bit,” she went on, ignoring him, “for mothership and apple pie. Now I’ve just found out, in the last few hours, that I’m not human, that I’m not organic, and that I’ve got a bomb pointed at my planet of origin and ready to fire. Also, as far as I’m aware I’m a sincere pacifist, supporter of the D’ppggyt Accords, and utterly opposed to violence in any form.”

“You threw a cardigan at me,” Mark Twain pointed out.

“Only a little one.”

“And you keep a projectile weapon in your desk to shoot autograph hunters.”

“Oh, it’s not loaded.”

They looked at each other. Then, slowly and deliberately, Mark Twain put the gun down. “You might have told me earlier,” he said. “Before I made all those threats.”

“Sorry,” Lucy said, “it sort of slipped my mind.”

He looked at her. “Well?” he said. “Are you going to launch the bomb?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” she replied. “I think I’d have done it by now.”

She sagged, as if she was made of chocolate and someone had left her on a radiator. “It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” she said.

Mark Twain leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “That stuff you said,” he said, “about me being a good little soldier. Actually, I sort of wish it was true, it’d be so much easier. But it’s not, not any more. I don’t want to blow up
anything.
Especially me,” he added. “Well, us, actually.”

“Nor me.” She looked round the room. “Which means we’ve got a bit of a problem, really. I mean, what if you’re right and there’s another computer somewhere sending me messages and telling me what to do?”

Mark Twain was frowning. “A good question,” he said quietly, “would be
why?”

She didn’t appear to have heard him. “In which case,” she went on, “any minute now I could get a signal, just press this button here, why don’t you, and—” She shivered all over. “And we don’t even know which button it is. There must be thousands of them in here.”

Mark Twain stood up. “We can disarm the launch function,” he said. “I can find that, no trouble. We’re both
R’wfft
-class, so the layout ought to be the same.”

“That’s true,” she said. “What do we— No, I know this. We want the wave collimator module, which is inside the—”

“Propulsion generator control manifold, which is part of the central functions array, which is located directly above the HST assembly. Look for a big white box with wires coming out the back.”

They looked round.

Mark Twain shook himself like a dog. “Not to worry,” he said, “I can scan for the manifold’s lambda-wave signature, and we can trace it back from there.” He slid behind a workstation and started calling up screens. “Ah,” he said, as the monitor filled with numbers, “this looks promising. Now, if I can just access the subsidiary internal sensor bar—”

“That’s last year’s quarterly sales figures,” Lucy pointed out. “And maybe you should be a bit careful about what you touch. The button, remember.”

Mark Twain lifted his fingers off the keyboard as though the keys were red-hot. “Maybe you’d better do it,” he said. “You know your way round this system, after all.”

“Yes, but what if I get the command? I’m not pressing anything unless I know precisely where it’s been.”

Mark Twain nodded slowly. “Is there a plug we could pull out of a wall or something?”

“It’s got twenty-five back-up power sources,” Lucy said sadly. “I run the whole of PavNet from here, remember? Can’t afford a power outage.”

“All right.” Mark Twain stood up, taking great care not to brush against any keys accidentally. “How’d it be if we both left this room and locked the door, and you give me the key?”

“No key. Access codes. Still,” she went on, “I can’t press any buttons if I’m not here, can I?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’d have a way of triggering the firing sequence remotely. Probably a—”

“Let’s get out of here,” Lucy said. “Let’s go and eat.”

Mark Twain was shocked. “We can’t just forget about it and wander off,” he said. “For one thing, my ship’ll be launching a new probe any moment now. What if—?”

“I’m hungry,” Lucy said firmly. “Let’s eat.”