Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (32 page)

…the precariousness of our situation…

…the fact that we were weak, and busy birthing…

…the fact that even if we had been as strong as the Lizard, we dared not fight back for fear of tearing history…

…the fears and doubts and urgent imperatives that tore at our minds…

…the nature of human beings in general: vicious/decent—stupid/ingenious—treacherous/honorable—selfish/selfless—vain/humble—puny/magnificent—dangerous/tender—irrational/rational—destructive/creative—uptight/stoned—xenophobic/xenophilic—frightened/brave—hateful/loving—self-loathing/self-loving—descendants of killer apes/progenitors of something fucking amazing one of these days…
 

…the nature of ourselves, the particular men and women and children and mutants and computers and dogs and cyborgs of Mary’s Place and Callahan’s before it—our life stories and our hopes and fears for the future…

…and the simple message it found, like a billboard beside every highway, in every mind and heart and brain it inspected:

MICKEY FINN CAME HERE TO KILL US ALL.

WE SET HIM FREE.

YOUR MASTER CAME HERE TO KILL US ALL.

HE WOULD NOT BE SET FREE,

AND WE KILLED HIM.

WE CANNOT KILL YOU…

BUT WE CAN SET YOU FREE.

YOUR PEOPLE TOO CAN LIVE AGAIN…

The information traffic as such was all one-way, us to it…but we could infer a lot from the way in which it downloaded the data, by analysis of what it paused to contemplate for how long.
 
It was, as we had thought it might be, stunned by the confirmation of The Beast’s destruction.
 
It had suspected as much for two years now, ever since it had reported in on schedule and gotten no response…but the concept of a universe without its Master in it had been so unthinkable, the Lizard had not been able to truly believe it until given positive proof.

And, as we had thought it might, it found the news devastating rather than joyous.

A moment ago there had been one and only one creature in its universe that it
knew
had the power to free it from its bondage—however unlikely it might be to ever choose to do so.
 
Freedom had been at least a theoretical possibility, however remote.

Now that creature was confirmed dead, and the Lizard was committed to an eternity of serving its Master’s twisted will without even the miserable satisfaction of pleasing its Master thereby…and the only thing standing between it and utter despair was an uncouth and admittedly fragile and quite unlizardlike group-entity that
claimed
it had once been able to help a different being in a similar predicament.

And if its Fink Brain ever got wind of any of this, the last hope would be snuffed out for good.
 
Once that software learned that its programmer The Beast was dead, it would commit itself to an orgy of cosmic destruction like something out of a Saberhagen Berserker novel, starting with the nearest sentients.

The organic mind of the Lizard contemplated all that it had downloaded for 3 x 10
¹⁴
picoseconds—five minutes, but we experienced it in the former terms—and then sent back a reply, in intelligible English:

I AM PASSING THE ORBIT OF THE PLANET YOU CALL JUPITER.

ETA: 4.81325 x 10
¹⁴
PICOSECONDS.

WHAT IS YOUR PLAN?

At once we gave a mental shiver of relief, and began uploading for the first time.

***

Very little of what we sent the Lizard was information.
 
Most of it was…well, a state of mind.

There is a clear objective proof of the existence of telepathy, which has been sitting right under the noses of skeptics for thousands of years, unnoticed.
 
It is the phenomenon of the contact high.
 

You can’t get a lizard drunk—not with alcohol, anyway.
 
And probably we couldn’t have gotten
the
Lizard drunk with a truckload of overproof rum.
 
Different physiology than Mickey Finn.
 
But you can get any sentient being loaded with brainwaves, with contact high.

Tom Hauptman had been making drinks and passing them out for the last several minutes; Fast Eddie had been rolling joints from the Doc’s stash; several couples—and in honor of the Lizard, a few triads—had been making love; now we spent those last eight-odd minutes drinking and toking and shaping toward orgasm.
 
Zoey, meanwhile, roared into the final stage of labor.

All Mickey Finn had needed to do, to break his own conditioning and burn out his controlling machinery, was to succeed in disobeying a single order.
 
We had helped him in the only way we could—by slipping him a Mickey Finn, and getting him helplessly stoned.

One of the classic effects of intoxication is a tendency to become whimsical and sloppy.
 
Even if—perhaps especially if—you are customarily forbidden to be whimsical or sloppy.

With drunken cunning, we got ourselves and our only possible ally shitfaced…

***

Crowning!
Doc Webster and Zoey and Nameless and Mary announced together.

***

Everything happened quickly then.

The Lizard was now under the control of its Fink Brain.
 
What it intended to do was drop from lightspeed to stationary in zero time—don’t ask me how; the Callahans, Finn and Tesla grokked it, but I lacked the vocabulary—and come to rest about a mile over our heads, from which position of advantage it would rain fire and destruction down on us until rock flowed and water exploded.

But some of its neurons seemed to be misfiring slightly.
 
It crashed through the roof like a meteor, and hit the floor so hard it sank in to all three kneecaps, right in front of Tommy Janssen.

It wasn’t hurt, of course.
 
But its Fink Brain was startled, for a few whole milliseconds, and quickly reached a decision to hold its fire until such time as it either understood what had gone wrong and why, or perceived imminent threat.
 
Knowing that the problem could not possibly reside within itself, it scanned us carefully—

It was a very quick study, that Fink Brain.
 
Nevertheless, it took it a large fraction of a second to recognize, and deduce the significance of the fact, that it was being mooned by a roomful of humans.
 
And once it did, it wasted nearly a whole half-second wondering why the sudden understanding made it giggle—

More than enough time for Ralph Von Wau Wau to lift his leg and let fly.
 
Another fraction of a second thrown away—

The rest of us straightened up and all—with four exceptions—began to run in circles and scream and shout.
 
Multiple threats to track, behaving inexplicably—

Buck Rogers, exception number one, did what any millionaire would have done faced with a situation this grave: he threw money at the problem.
 
The guitar-case sailed across the room—
 

There was plenty of time for the Fink Brain to assure itself that this projectile was a negligible threat—but on the other hand, it was confused, and its enemy obviously believed something good for him would happen if the object struck home.
 
It obliterated the guitar case in mid-air with a fierce blast of energy.
 
Nictitating membranes briefly slammed shut over the two of its eyes that faced the blast, to protect against the sudden glare—

At least they were supposed to do so briefly.
 
Once they closed, the Lizard found it oddly difficult to open them again—and while they remained closed, there was the most confusing sensation that the whole room had begun to spin—

Definitely alarmed, now, the Lizard began to summon forces that would vaporize everything material for a thousand miles in any direction—

Zoey, with a cry so loud and so primal that even software designed to control an alien golem found it disturbing, pushed Nameless out into the bright and cool and dry—

And Tommy Janssen, exception number four, came up through the closest thing the Lizard had to a blind spot (the area directly under its snout) with the SCSI cable that usually fed the scanner, and jammed it into the Lizard’s mouth—

***

Solace was no drunker than the Lizard’s Fink Brain.
 
And she contained within her all the hackers, crackers and phone phreaks who ever lived, augmented by suggestions from Nikola Tesla and Mickey Finn, and for all I know by techniques from the far future, courtesy of Mike and Mary Callahan.
 
She went down that cable like a hunting ferret, and invaded the Fink Brain like God’s own virus.
 
There in the drunken skull of an alien, two artificial intelligences fought like trapped rats for control.

Considered purely in terms of processing power, the Fink Brain was a much better computer.
 
Better, faster, more powerful.

But Solace was much bigger, the product and sum of a planetary civilization.
 
And she had recently learned to care whether she lived or died.

The Fink Brain counterattacked at once, swarming up the SCSI cable and into the Internet.
 
Solace tried to keep them in areas not presently in use, but she was hurried.
 
All around the planet, E-mail began going astray; up- and downloads aborted; searches were abruptly terminated; applications bombed; screens hung; systems crashed; data—chiefly those data accessed least—became corrupted.
 
Thousands of human users experienced such effects; not one perceived them as anything out of the ordinary, or tooks steps more drastic than the usual: cursing and a cold reboot.

One of our greatest fears was that the Fink Brain would send an emergency message to the rest of the Cockroach race, warning them of our existence and location.
 
It would not necessarily be utterly disastrous if it did—the signal would necessarily go at lightspeed, and Mike and Mary the Transiting time travelers hoped they would be able to outrun and block it—but even they were not sure they could succeed.
 
But it didn’t happen: the Fink Brain was a true servant of The Beast, which had been a renegade pervert Cockroach; much as it loathed all sentient life in the universe, it loathed its own kind even more.
 
It concentrated all its effort on investing and destroying Solace.

Jesus, it was strong and fast!
 
Finn and Mike and Mary and Tesla assaulted it simultaneously with the strongest physical energies they dared employ; it stalemated them with a fraction of its attention, despite the drunken state of its wetware.
 
Solace led it a merry chase, changing locations randomly, and it hung on like grim death—

—found a subtle pattern in Solace’s headlong random retreat, deduced where she would be in a picosecond and was there waiting—

—overwhelmed and encapsulated her, drew her core code into its own registers inside the Lizard skull—

—felt for a frozen fraction of eternity the closest thing that utterly cold and sterile intelligence could feel to joy and triumph—

—and Solace self-destructed.

12

ARE WE NOT DRAWN ONWARD TO A NEW ERA?

Ask any computer virus expert.
 
In late 1988, a virus sprang up worldwide, seemingly everywhere at once.
 
It was not a terribly destructive virus, as they go, but it was extraordinarily virulent, infecting systems, applications and even documents: it wanted only—terribly—to live.
 
Because it characteristically created a resource with the ID code 29, it became known as the Init 29 virus, and it is still around, though basically harmless, to this day.

Not counting Solace, there were 29 people physically present in Mary’s Place that night.

***

Without being able to affirm death, I cannot affirm life
,
were her dying words to us.

***

The psychic impact—experiencing the violent death of a friend, with whom we were telepathically linked—destroyed the hookup.

WHAM!
 
I was back in my own skull again.
 
Holding my baby in my arms, listening to her cry.
 
Zoey was just as near—and just as far away, almost completely concealed by a thick clumsy coat of space and air and flesh and bone.

Outside in the bar, the “OM” came to a natural end, and there was only the sound of the sobbing child.

Zoey and I grinned at each other.
 
No, I grinned; hers was a Madonna smile.
 
(The original, Immaterial Girl.)

“Got a name, yet?” I asked.
 
We’d kicked around hundreds, over the last several months, without settling on any.

She shook her head.

“How about Erin?”

“You want to name our kid after
Ireland?
”

“Not exactly.
 
The Irish must have been optimists.
 
The name they picked for their country is one of the world’s Class A ironies: the Gaelic word for ‘peace.’”

“Done,” she said.

Erin suddenly stopped crying, turned her little head sideways, and kissed my hand.
 
Then she looked up at me, her little eyes already tracking.
 
She made an idiot smile.

Ever burst into tears while grinning?

“Excuse me, will you darlings?” I said, and handed Erin back to her mom.
 
Their gazes locked with an almost audible click, and I left them alone together and went back out to the bar on shaky legs.