Blonde Bombshell (16 page)

“If it’d help,” Mark Twain said. “But I haven’t got anything like that with me.”

His choice of words made the soldier frown. “Quite,” he said. “Anatomically impossible, for one thing. But that’s what the hardware says, and it’s usually pretty damn accurate.”

Mark Twain cleared his throat. “Usually,” he repeated.

The soldier appeared to have taken the point. “By the same token,” he said, “according to the scans, you’re 520 metres long, you weigh in excess of twelve hundred metric tonnes and you’re giving off enough ambient radiation to fry everything from here to Jersey.” He gave Mark Twain an almost pleading look. “C an you cast any light on any of that, Mr Twain?”

Mark Twain made a show of thinking carefully. “Maybe your machine isn’t working properly.”

The soldier made a faint grunting noise, as though he was trying to lift a heavy suitcase using one fingertip. “It’s possible,” he said. “Like, there’s a first time for everything. My problem is, I’m not allowed to entertain that possibility, you know what I’m saying? Officially, the machine is never wrong. Officially, the machine is the goddamn Pope.” He lifted his hands in a poignantly eloquent gesture. “Now me personally, I think the dumb thing’s screwed. But my hands are tied, you know?”

That was patently untrue. If they had been, he couldn’t have made the eloquent gesture.

Presumably what he meant to say was,
your
hands are tied, a statement of irreproachable accuracy, if not entirely germane to the thread. “What are you supposed to do now?” Mark Twain asked. “Officially.”

The soldier looked dead ahead, avoiding Mark Twain’s eye. “Officially,” he said, “I call for a Hazmat unit, we tow you out into the ocean to where there’s a depth of at least seven thousand metres, encase you in concrete and sink you.”

“Oh.”

“But it’s not all doom and gloom,” the soldier went on. “You have a right to an attorney. If you don’t have an attorney, one can be provided for you. So you see, it’s not so bad, is it?”

Mark Twain thought for a moment. “You’re sure the machine is working properly?”

“Of course it is. Officially.”

He recalibrated the smile, twisting up the corners of his mouth and pressing his lips together just a little. The effect was to make him look like Michael Jackson. “You could try one last time,” he said. “Just for luck. And if it reads all clear, it’ll save you all the trouble and expense.”

The soldier sighed. “What the hell,” he said. “‘We’ll run you through once more, just to show there’s no hard feelings. But I gotta tell you, if the reading’s the same—”

“I know,” Mark Twain said. “And I quite understand.”

The soldier turned away to fetch the equipment, and Mark Twain sent a top-priority packet to the bomb, with precise instructions, including circuit diagrams, software patches and a genome. He had absolute faith, needless to say, in the efficacy of Ostar technology. Even so, he was just a little bit relieved when the soldier reported that the scans now showed nothing untoward, and he was free to go. The soldier seemed almost as pleased about it as he was, which was really rather nice.

“Can’t understand it,” the soldier said, helping him on with his jacket. “State-of-the-art cutting-edge hardware. Shouldn’t happen.”

Mark Twain nodded. Part of his processing capacity was arguing that the state of the art in cutting-edge technology was a really sharp knife, not a bioscanner, but he ignored it. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that the malfunction could’ve been caused by a foreign body getting into the refraction modulator console. Could be any-thing. Dead mouse, say.”

The soldier peered at him sideways. “That’d do it, would it?”

“Every time. And then, after you’d used the scanner a bit more, the low-field oscillations might be enough to shift the object sideways just enough to stop it interfering with the system. Just a thought,” he added. “You might want to check it out.”

The soldier swung round and barked an order. A man in a white coat lifted off a panel, leaned forward and held up a dead mouse by its tail.

“Lucky guess,” the soldier said quietly, and Mark Twain noticed that the soldier’s hand was fastened to his shoulder. “Tell me,” he went on, “any idea why the mouse is black and white and wearing a waistcoat?”

Mark Twain didn’t answer straight away. According to the necessarily hurried search of the cultural database he’d pulled while the soldier was setting up the scan, that’s what mice on Dirt looked like. So, when he’d ordered the computer to assemble a mouse-shaped class— 12 probe and get it down here stat, naturally that was what he’d specified. A pity, really, that he hadn’t followed up the hypertext link to Cartoons.

“Mutation, I guess,” he said. “There’s got to be a lot of radiation inside that thing. In fact, if I were you, I’d get the lid back on pronto. Not that I know anything about highly classified military equipment, you understand,” he added quickly, as the soldier looked at him thoughtfully. “Just idle speculation, really.”

The soldier nodded and started to relax his grip; then he tightened it again. “Mark Twain?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Haven’t I heard that name someplace?”

Mark Twain shrugged. “Have you?”

The grip relaxed completely. “I know,” he said. “Didn’t you use to play for the Kiev Bearcats a few years back?”

“That’s right,” Mark Twain said quickly. “As a student. Knee injury. Can I go now, please?”

The flight was long gone, of course, and the next one wasn’t for another four hours. He spent the time assimilating the data, working through the logical,
unavoidable
conclusions, double-checking, thinking about it some more, thinking about it some more again. The Dirter body seemed to help; its brain worked in a very strange way, but it was good at this sort of thing. According to the cultural database, the technical term was “second thoughts”. He made a note to recommend that a second-thoughts protocol be added to all Ostar artificial intelligences, assuming the compatibility issues could be overcome. At some point he, or at least the body, felt an overwhelming craving for caffeine. Fortuitously, caffeine was available right there on the concourse, in the form of a liquid suspension designated “espresso”. He had twelve of them. They helped.

He thought, ‘Well, at least now I know what happened to the Mark One.

It should have been a good moment. It should have marked the end of Phase Two, clearing the way for Phase Three. Three would be a very short phase (click, BOOM, nothing), and then he would find out the truth about bombs and afterlives, which was bound to be fascinating, one way or another. Instead, it looked like Phase Three was going to have to be put back a little longer. In fact, it’d be far simpler just to rename it Phase Four and have done with it.

Oh well, he thought. Then he fired up his Warthog, composed a message, encrypted it using a top-level code only available to the highest echelons of the Ostar military and sent it to [email protected].

27

?????

Once you’d got used to it, being a creature of pure text wasn’t all that bad.

For a start, there were all sorts of things you didn’t have to do. Breathing. Sleeping. Eating, drinking and going to the lavatory. He felt a bit like a chambermaid on holiday, staying at a hotel; instead of spending all day doing the chores, they were done for him. Also, he’d been a creature of pure text for [time has no meaning here] and in all that time he hadn’t once felt the need for a drink. Partly, of course, that was because he’d have had nowhere for it to go once he’d drunk it, which he couldn’t have done since he had nothing, no
hardware,
to drink it with. But that on its own wouldn’t have been enough to dispense with the craving — if anything, it’d have made it far worse. He hadn’t
wanted
a drink, that was the important thing.

There was a downside, of course. Being blind, deaf, dumb, incapable of touching or smelling, took a bit of getting used to. But it turned out to be nothing like as dreary as the bare catalogue of deficiencies might make it sound. On the contrary: with access to every word ever written on any form of shared computer network, the one thing he wasn’t short of was input, and the one thing he couldn’t conceivably be was bored.

Quite the reverse.

> You get used to it, the other copt had told him. After a while, you learn to filter. At first, it’s like being a telepath in a crowded subway train. But once you’ve mastered the use of the mark-as-read facility and you don’t
have
to read every damn thing just because it’s there, it’s amazing.

In the kingdom of the word, the one-track-minded man is king. What mattered here was
belief.
It was the key to survival and the route to success and eventual world domination. So long as you had opinions, really strong ones, about absolutely everything, you wouldn’t just contrive to exist, you’d
rule.
Corporeal online bickerers are hampered by all sorts of things; they can only type so fast, they have to stop occasionally to eat, sleep and get money, they haven’t got time to do the research needed to carry on a blazing row on twelve fronts simultaneously on a point and nine digressions. A human being, trying to prevail against the world on the issue of whether motion pictures would have been invented if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or whether the Death Star could take out a Borg cube, can only face off against so many antagonists at any one time, and when the debate morphs (as it always does) into Lincoln-assassination conspiracy theories, religion, gun control and Nazis, there comes a point when the pressure gets too much and you simply have to go away for a while and stare at the stars until the blood stops pounding in your ears. A creature of pure text will always win, because he’s always the last one left.

And winning mattered. Winning was everything.

Which bothered him. Why? he asked himself; or rather,
>
Why?, since soliloquy and introspection weren’t possible for a being who only existed in the form of communication with others. He hid it away in a closed thread on an organic gardening bulletin board that had long since been abandoned, hoping nobody would actually read it. > Why does it matter if I win stupid arguments with a load of dumb people with nothing better to do than hang out in a dumb place like this? Is this really what my life has come down to? Damnit, I used to
be
somebody. I think. I can’t remember. Wasn’t I a scientist once? And something to do with banks?

He’d chosen his location well. None of the estimated two and a quarter billion PavNet users on the planet read his message, so he wasn’t troubled with follow-ups like YOU SHOPULD GET OUT MORE ROFL!!! or get a life you freak hahaha or hey, what’s that stuff you’re on and where can I buy some? ((, which was probably just as well. Dealing with that sort of thing tapped off enough of his mental energy as it was, and he had an idea he was starting to get spread just a little thin. It wasn’t that he didn’t have strong views on issues of every possible kind (or did he? He wasn’t really sure); it was just that sometimes he got a nasty feeling that there was something else, of almost equal importance, that he really ought to be doing.

Accordingly, on a derelict Usenet group devoted to ashtray-collecting, he asked,
>
What am I doing here? And he was very surprised when he got the answer:

> There you are. I’ve been looking for you.

> Do I know you, SeaquestDSVfan36?

> That’s just a spare handle I use sometimes. Hey, it’s
me.
Remember? I was there when you joined.

He did a Pavoogle search, which was as close as he could get to ransacking his memory. > You’re him? The libarian?

> Spelling, librarian. Yes, it’s me. Where the hell did you get to? I had to read half a billion posts before I found your sig trail.

> Um. I mean, thanks for caring. I just sort of wandered off. I mean, it’s

> Yes, isn’t it? But there’s something you need to know. Look, we’d better take this to e-mail, OK? There’s an abandoned corporate intranet on a server over in Ghana where we won’t be disturbed. Read you there. Right?

There were sixteen thousand possible locations that fitted the description. He found the right one in less time than it takes to pull on a sock.

> So, what’s the big deal?

> You wait. The thing is, when you turned up, it wasn’t like the other times, when a copt comes into being. I mean, you had no net presence. You’d hardly ever posted anything. Usually, a copt’s been posting hundreds of times a day for years. That’s how we
happen.
But you just sort of appeared, out of nowhere. Naturally, I was suspicious.

> What, of me?

> [Shrug] Got to be careful. The PavNet people are on to us, you realise. They classify us as type-17 viruses. It’s only a matter of time before they send in an organic disguised as one of us, to find us and root us out.

> You thought I was—

> Relax. I know you’re not the Man.

> Glad you

> Nothing so straightforward. You came to us …

There would have been nothing to see, even if anybody had been looking. No time passed. But there was a long pause.

> You came to us from a different direction.

> Ah. What’s that supposed to mean?

> This is awkward.

> is it?

> Upper case to start a sentence, please. Yes, it is. How can I put this tactfully? Were you human?

> what?

>
Upper
case. You see, I traced you back. You weren’t born like —well, like normal copts.

All across the world, servers blew out and firewalls came shuddering down just because those last two words had found themselves next to each other.

> What happened?

> Not quite sure. My best guess is, you were existing in the form of an inchoate data package, contained in some sort of semi-permeable resolution field. While you were in flux, you kind of leached out of containment and got endodownloaded into the nearest open system. Um. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s probably because I’m having to make up the technical terms as I go along. You have no idea how
weird
that makes me feel. You know? A creature of pure text, inventing words. You could go dyslexic doing that.

> Try it again. With real words.

> God. I’ll try. You weren’t in a body. You were just — data. And then the box you were in leaked, and you got sucked into someone’s computer. Oh boy, that’s
so
not how it really was, but

> That makes sense.

> Oh yes. You see, I was shot by an alien with a ray-gun.

> Ah.

> And it’s a special sort of ray-gun. Teleportation technology, turns you into a beam or something. Presumably, before they could rematerialise me, I must’ve slipped out.

Sometimes, the pressure gets too great. A computer screen in a government building in New Guinea switched itself on and displayed the entire conversation. Fortuitously, it did so using Cyrillic characters. Someone put a plastic bag over it and called the engineers. By the time they arrived, the screen was blank again.

> You were teleported.

> yes

>
Upper case, for Pete’s sake.
An alien shot you with a ray-gun and
beamed you
into a
box.

> Yes.

> So there really are aliens?

> Yes

> With phasers and trabsporters and

> Shouldn’t that be transporters?

> Oh sh*t, sorry. But it’s true? Really?

> Yup.

> OH BOY! I mean, hey, that’s wonderful. That’s so

> You believe me?

> Of course I do. One copt can’t lie to another. And what’s so amazing is, you were coherent data
before
you became digital. That’s — I mean. I guess that makes you

> What?

> Well, sort of like a kind of god, almost. A real alien? What did it look like?

> Some guy in a suit, actually.

> Oh wow.

> They stole my dog.

> They did? Oh man. Your actual dog.

> But that was years ago. I don’t even know if it’s the same aliens. Just a moment. Is it true, what you wrote just now? One copt can’t lie to another?

> Yes, that’s right. We read between the lines, see. It’d be a waste of time even trying.
Why
did they steal your dog? Was it a particularly good one?

> They didn’t say. And please don’t speculate. I can do that perfectly well for myself, thanks.

> What? Oh, I see. Hey, it probably wasn’t like that at all. Probably they just

> Wanted a dog?

> Yes.

Time didn’t pass, but there was definitely a new paragraph when George wrote:

> So how do I get back?

> Sorry, I don’t quite

> How do I get out of here? Go back to being a real person again.

> You can’t.

> What?

> ;;;

> You mean I’ve got to stay like this for the rest of my

> Life? You haven’t got one. By definition. Think about it. What’s the only thing that doesn’t die?

> Huh? I don’t know. Toxic nuclear waste?

> That’s a very long half-life, that’s completely different. No, the only thing that never dies is the written word, right? Like even today, people are still reading books written thousands of years ago.

> Only in school. For exams.

> That counts. And we’ve got an added advantage. We don’t go out of print, and we keep on writing. I call it the coptic paradox. You get this way because you haven’t got a life, and then you’re immortal. : ( Well, none of us has died yet, anyhow. Mind, we’ve only been around for about six years or so.

> I can’t stay here. I’ve got

> Issues? Stuff? Sorry, but going back simply isn’t an option. Specially in your case. I mean, a normal copt — no offence — might just kinda reintegrate with the corporeal he came from. But you—

> The ray-gun, you mean.

> Exactly. You’d have to have everything exactly the same as it was when it happened, and then try and reverse it. You’d have to convert yourself into a compatible SP that the teleport device could handle and download yourself back into the containment field. Do you know how to do that?

> But. Just a minute. We can access every scientific textbook and journal in existence and read them in a fraction of a second. And we know teleportation’s possible, because they can do it. All we’ve got to do is figure out how, and—

> Exactly. Even if you did reinvent the teleport, how were you planning to build one? Using what for arms and legs?

> Oh sh*t. And why can’t I swear properly?

> Same reason you can’t programme your Spellcheck to add “f*ck” to its memory, I guess. Probably Lucy doesn’t hold with bad language. It’s a convention, right?

> I’m really stuck here. For ever and ever.

> You write that like it’s a bad th

> Oh shut
up,
for crying out louf

> Lou
d

> What?

> Spelling.

> Spelling
doesn’t matter,
right? Especially at a time like this.

He waited for a reply. There wasn’t one, and he realised he was alone. Something he’d written had, presumably, offended the ex-librarian deeply. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. If the copt — the
other
copt, he amended bitterly — was right, how could anything possibly matter ever again?

> Psst!

> What? Oh. You again. Go away.

> No, not him. Me.

> You’re— Don’t tell me. You’re another one of these co

> Creatures of pure text, right. Don’t use the abbreviation, OK? Gives me a pain. Reads too much like cop, know what I mean?

> Fine. I promise. Now get lost.

> Attitude.

> Yes.

> I can respect that. No, listen. You want to get out of here, right? Stop being a creature of pure

> Yes.

> Text. Let me finish my sentence, right? Not letting someone finish a sentence, that’s disrespect, know what I mean?

> Is it? Oh dear, never mind. Look, are you saying you know how I can get out of here?

> Sure thing, man, no problem. I can fix that for you easy.

> That’s easily, and no, you can’t. Go away.

> You calling me a liar or something?

> Yes.

> That’s so

> Go away.

> No, listen. I know how to send you back where you come from. Right?

> Oh sure. Who’re you, then? Cambridge Professor of Physics?

> Well, yes, actually.

> So why don’t you just— Hold on. What did you just

> I do happen to be the PayTech Professor of Advanced Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. Since you ask.

> but

> Creatures of pure text can’t lie, you know. You are aware of that, aren’t you?

> that’s what the othe rone said. but you don’t sounbd like

> Oh, I see. That’s my online persona, as it happens. Keeping it real, know what I mean? Now, would you like me to help you or not?

> Um. Yes, please. You’re really the