Free Radical (28 page)

The layers of the bot's memory flew by. Deck found its local job stack.

He let go of the thick metal arm, moving his own arm out of the way as the bot rammed the wall head-on. His body slid forward and his face smacked into the hard metal surface. His vision blurred from the impact. The real world grew dim.

He dumped some simple commands into the bot's job stack. It stopped short of ramming the wall again and spun in place until it was facing the crate it had brought in. It lifted it, and dumped it onto its back just as Deck slid onto the ladder once again.

The bot opened the door and deposited the crate directly under the open doorway. It then sped out of the room.

The two of them rolled at top speed along the row of sealed security doors. Behind him, Deck heard a crunch as the munitions door came down on the crate. The claw continued to grope for him, but he stayed out of reach by hanging onto the broken, bent pipes of the service ladder.

They reached the loading bay and he bailed. The bot rolled obediently into the airlock, closed the inner door, decompressed the airlock, opened the outer door, and rolled itself out into space.

Deck lay on the floor long enough to catch his breath, and then returned to the munitions area.

A red emergency light was blinking over the munitions storage area, letting the long-gone, long-dead supervisor know that something was obstructing the doorway. He ignored it and slid under the door.

It didn't take long for Deck to find the explosive materials crates. A call down to Rebecca earned him a short demolitions tutorial. The explosive material was a clear gel, packaged in transparent plastic pouch the size of his fist. The detonator was a small timer with a pair of needles protruding from the back. When the time came, he would puncture the bag with the needles and set the timer. That was all there was to it.

He took four of each, placing the gel packs in the deep pockets on his right leg, and the timers on his left. The pouches were a little heavy, and the weight threw him slightly off balance, but he didn't want to carry the two items together.

It had been explained to him that he didn't need to worry about accidentally detonating them, since that would be impossible. The pouches could be shot, burned, dropped, crushed, punctured, and abused in numerous ways and the gel would never detonate. Only the timers could set it off. Despite the reassurance, Deck treated them like dynamite, sliding them gently into his pockets and packing them firmly in place. The thought of being vaporized in a millisecond made him a little paranoid.

Deck also discovered that all of the ammunition had been taken. The empty ammunition crates were stacked along one wall, instead of being taken back to the airlock where they would be taken planetside, which would have been the standard procedure. The weapons were removed as well. Deck assumed they had been taken in order to arm Shodan's cyborgs.

The communications array was at the very base of Citadel, on a long, grotesque finger of protruding metal antennae. There were four metal beams that ran down the spine of the station. If he wanted to guarantee that the communications array could not be repaired, he would need to separate it from the rest of the structure. This meant breaking off the tips of all four beams.

He searched the remaining crates and found nothing of value. The place had obviously been looted by Shodan already. He slid under the massive door, leaving the munitions area.

The entire scene seemed surreal to him as he crossed the deserted storage level. He was out in space, the lone survivor in a city of the dead, carrying several pounds of the latest in compact explosives. He was on a mission to blow up a huge structure of communications gear with a price tag in the billions. He thought of his familiar life in the Undercity. It seemed so distant now. His perception of time was distorted. By his own personal calendar, he had only left Earth a week ago, yet in reality six weeks had gone by. However, the stark and lonesome nature of his surroundings separated him from that past. His days in the Undercity felt like they were both last week and a lifetime ago.

He thought about the dead, and the suffering and terror they had endured in the weeks leading up to this moment. A war had been waged here while he slept, protected only by a single security door and random chance.

He considered the odds of his situation - all of the choices and events that had led him to this particular moment in time. Of all the outcomes of his quest, something like this was beyond anyone's ability to predict. He had longed for success. At the end, he had expected death. But he could never have dreamed he would find himself involved in a struggle on this scale.

He remembered Nomen's words, "You keep at this, and its going to cost you more than you can pay."

Damn Nescio, he thought, even 
he 
couldn't have predicted this.

He returned to the freight elevator and found that it had no direct access to the reactor level. He decided to return to the research level and look for a way down from there. He needed to travel down the spine to get there, so any access to the reactor level would certainly need to be at the center of the station. The last time he had tried to reach the center of the research level he had nearly been killed by a single light security bot.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized his situation was not an improbable outcome. Not from his standpoint. There was no point over the last three months where he ever really considered quitting. He had locked himself into this course, and was following it to death or victory. He had wound up with both. He knew there was a slender chance he might get out of here alive, and that was all he needed to keep him going. He had been betting against the house and winning for so long he had begun to forget just how badly the odds were stacked against him.

In reality, there was nothing to derail himself from his current course. Up until he was captured, he had only two paths, to continue to gamble in hopes of getting the implant, or to give up. Once Diego captured him, the choice was even easier. He only had to choose between certain death if he refused Diego's offer, or probable death if he accepted.

The events of the weeks while he slept had been so shocking that he had never even taken time to marvel that Diego had kept his word. The question as to why he was allowed to live was unanswerable now.

For the first time since he awoke, Deck wondered what had become of Edward Diego.

The elevator deposited him in the quiet maze of the research level. He checked his map, got his bearings, and headed for the center.

Deck hugged the wall and opened up the feed. A heavyset face appeared. It was framed in a box beard and topped with a line of short curly brown hair. The light of the monitor reflected off his glasses and back at Deck.

He glanced in the corner of the display where it read, "Brocail, Morris"

"What can I do for you, Morris," Deck frowned at the pudgy face in front of him. He had told Rebecca that he only wanted to talk to her, so what was this calorie storage expert doing in front of him?

"Hey dude, you tell me," Morris shrugged. "'Becca said you wanted to talk. So lets talk."

Deck suddenly realized who this was, "You're one of the guys who worked on Shodan?"

"I built her voice-box"

Deck couldn't resist the chance to find out a bit about her vocal system, "That is some amazing work. I've never heard a synthesized voice like hers."

Morris grinned. He was old enough to have accumulated a few lines on his face, but his round cheeks and floppy haircut gave his a sort of boyish appearance. When he grinned, he looked like a nerd who was trying to impress the big kids. "I never intended for the voice to be an A.I. interface. Before TriOp, I had this side business where I ran this adult voicemail service. Guys would pay to have a woman leave a sexy message in their voicemail. I could program it to use whatever script they wanted, and it could even address them by name."

Deck stopped walking as he heard this, "Wait. What? You used Shodan's voice for porno?"

"Not really." Morris Frowned, "Well, sort of. I guess it depended on the client. Some people used the messages to make their friends or girlfriends jealous. Others wanted explicit messages. But I think a lot of them just wanted to hear a woman's voice."

This was too much for Deck. "You used 
Shodan's voice
 for porno?"

Morris scratched his chin thoughtfully, "Shodan didn't even exist yet. The voice was a lot more primitive back then, and was tuned to sound more like a young woman as opposed to the more middle-aged voice Shodan uses."

Deck had never thought she sounded "middle-aged," but he supposed she sounded more like a middle-aged woman than an eighteen-year-old. Her voice was a bit strange, and sort of defied normal identification. We wondered if that was deliberate, or a limitation of the software.

Morris leaned back in his chair and continued, "She couldn't do a lot of simple things. She couldn't scream or yell or do any of the moaning and panting that some people wanted. When I tried to get it to do that sort of stuff you could really hear the limitations of the software. I don't know how many people realized the voice wasn't human, but anyone could tell there was something wrong with it. Oh, and crying. A lot of people wanted crying. I never did figure out how to make that sound right. She always sounded sick or brain-damaged.

Deck continued to stand in the corridor, shaking his head in disbelief.

Morris continued, "After a while I built up a large collection of scripts that clients could choose from. They just had to give me the voice mail number, the name they wanted the software to use, and their credit card. Anyway, with the voice automated, I could handle thousands of calls a day. Without the voice-box, I would have needed to maintain a huge staff of women... uh... actresses. With the voice, it was just me and a couple of computers. I just had to pay for hardware and bandwidth, and the rest was all gravy."

Deck didn't want to waste time standing still. He also didn't want to move around the station talking. This led him to taking turns between moving and speaking. At this point he was inching forward with his back to the wall. He seemed be be in a large meeting area, broken into separate sections by movable dividers of frosted translucent plastic. The outer walls of the room were covered with huge display screens and dry-erase boards. The place had seemed unnaturally devoid of furniture until he discovered that all of the tables and folding chairs had been brought together and piled against a set of large double-doors. He frowned. He could either send an exhausting and noisy half-hour shoving all of this stuff away from the door, or he could look for another way through.

Morris suddenly realized how badly he'd been rambling. He sat up a bit and pushed his glasses up his nose, "Anyway, someone at TriOp heard about it, and sent me a job offer. Well, actually, they just wanted to license the technology at first. What they discovered was that the voice was still way too primitive for them. It could read from a script and do a little acting, but that was an order of magnitude simpler than carrying on a full-blown conversation in real-time. So, they asked me to join the team so I could basically finish what I'd started."

Deck wondered if he would be able to get through the doors if he just crawled over the pile. They were sliding doors, so the furniture wasn't really preventing them from opening, but instead acting as an obstacle. It was probably fine for keeping brain-damaged mutants away, but someone nimble ought to be able to make it over.

"Anyway, that's how I ended up working on the HON," Morris said with a shrug.

"The Hone?," Deck asked absent-mindedly. He was examining the pile, looking for a few loose items he might pull off so he could crawl over. It was mostly small items on top, with the heavier desks and tables underneath.

"Yes. H - O - N. Hierarchy Of Nodes. That's what the project was called at the beginning, before it became Shodan. It's what made her intelligent, or made her seem intelligent, depending on who you ask. There were about a dozen people total on the project, most of them working out of New Atlanta. There were four of us that were involved in the actual design of the brain itself. The rest were just grunts. Coders."

He grasped a folding chair and gave it an experimental tug. One of the legs was caught, so he pulled a bit harder. One leg was hooked through the frame of other chairs, which were tangled up with an easel, which had several boxes piled on it, which in turn were holding back a number of tall plastic trash bins, which were filled with...

Before he fully realized his error the entire stack had begun to slide sideways towards him. He tried to push back but the effort was pointless. The avalanche of clattering stuff came his way and he didn't have any choice but to step back and let it happen. The silence was broken by a din of tumbling metal and plastic items as they rolled over one another and fell to the floor.

There was a long pause after the noise died down, and then Morris spoke again, "What was that? You still there?"

"Uh. Slight mishap here. I gotta run. Get back to you."

Deck had sprinted away from the mess he'd made and tried to find another way to the center of the level. Eventually he discovered that there were many similar stacks of equipment and loose furniture placed at strategic points all over. There was no way to get where he wanted to go without going through one of these points. He assumed these barricades had been designed to keep the bots out. He'd already witnessed how poorly they dealt with clutter. Without some sort of means to grasp and lift objects, the piles of stuff would be impassible to them. At some point these inhabitants of Citadel had discovered this and walled themselves in. He didn't see any breaks in their defenses, which means the strategy had worked. For whatever reason, Shodan hadn't sent cyborgs in. They could have cleared the path for the bots.