Blonde Bombshell (9 page)

12

Novosibirsk

In her dream, Lucy was walking in the forest when she met a unicorn. Hello, she said, and the unicorn said, Hello. Aren’t you supposed to by mythical, Lucy asked. I don’t think so, the unicorn replied, I’m characteristic Terran woodland fauna, it says so in the book. Lucy asked, What book? Well, this one, for a start, the unicorn said, producing a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript, loads of me in here, and there’s this one [it waved
My Very Best Fairy Tale Book
under her nose] and this one
[The Unicorns of the Bronx,
a minor classic of the urban fantasy subgenre, of which Lucy had once read two pages before giving it to a charity shop], and there’s loads of others. I’m being unobtrusive, see? I’m blending in. Ah, Lucy said.

And then a green light glowed in the unicorn’s eyes, and it said, “Report.”

Lucy looked at it, and she was amazed and astonished, because that was what she’d been expecting it to say.

“Oh-three-one-one-three-six-oh-nine,” the unicorn said. “Report.”

And Lucy took a deep breath, and she was about to start when something tickled her nose and she sneezed, which made her wake up.

She opened her eyes. It was dark (Well of course it’s dark, it’s the middle of the night), and all she could see was the red glow of her bedside terminal, whose clock read 03:14:43.

Lucy stared at it for a second or two, then said, “Lights.” The overhead light flicked on. She sat up and looked around. Nobody there. Well of course there isn’t, silly.

And then it occurred to Lucy Pavlov that she’d never been awake at 3 a.m. before; not ever, in all her twenty-seven years. She was, by nature and inclination, an early-to-rise-early-to-bed type. Very occasionally, with the help of scintillating company and strong coffee, she’d managed to prop her eyes open till just after midnight. Once, the day after she’d finished work on PaySoft 1.1, she was so exhausted she’d had a really good long lie-in and hadn’t got up till 9 a.m. Once she closed her eyes and her head hit the pillow, however, that was it. Dead to the world. You could stage a Lizard-Headed Women gig in the next room, complete with fire engines and a controlled nuclear explosion, and she’d sleep right through it.

The room looked the same as when she’d last seen it, but she had a curious feeling of being in a strange place, almost like a different dimension. She yawned. So this is 3 a.m., she thought; hello. You’ve been going on around me all these years, and I never knew what you look like. Well, she thought, and ordered the lights off. They dwindled out, and she lay back on her pillow, staring at where she knew the ceiling to be. Trouble was, she was wide awake now. Usually, as soon as her head went horizontal her consciousness switched off until she woke up, not knowing who or where or what she was. A useful gift, which didn’t appear to be working. She felt as though she’d just stepped off a train in the middle of nowhere, to stretch her legs and get a breath of air, and it had gone on without her and left her stranded. Worse than that: you can’t walk home from 3 a.m.

Go to sleep, she ordered herself. That didn’t work either.

She closed her eyes and thought about the dream. It wasn’t hard to analyse. The business with the unicorn (or whatever it really was) had bothered her all day; well, fair enough. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the unicorn should’ve come back in her sleep and asked her an unintelligible question, presumably signifying the baffling mystery its real-life counterpart represented. The frustration of it all had been preying on her mind so much that it had woken her up. You didn’t need a psychology doctorate to figure that one out.

Report. Wasn’t that what soldiers said? At least, they said it in movies, when someone had been sent on a mission, or when the starship had been hit by polaron torpedoes. In her dream, the mystery was demanding of her that she solve it; so, report. She couldn’t, so she’d woken up.

Three in the morning; the undiscovered country. And, from what she’d seen of it so far, you could have it. A bit like watching TV with the sound muted out.

She lay perfectly still, hoping sleep would come back and rescue her, but all that happened was that her feet started to itch. She considered getting up, making a cup of coffee, reading something, doing some work, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Getting out of bed was, for some reason, not an option. Why not? Because it’s not getting-out-of-bed time yet, of course. Stupid question.

She thought, There’s a thing. I just woke up, and I didn’t have all that who-am-I-where-am-I stuff; I knew straight away that I’m me and I’m here and it’s now. Why was that? The dream; it had made her surface at an unaccustomed point in her REM cycle, or something like that. She felt like a computer that’s had its plug yanked out of the wall before it’s been closed down with all the ordained rituals. Her files were fragmented, her disks were probably corrupted to hell, she was basically a mess. But awake. An awake mess. The worst sort, really.

She tried relaxing exercises. She’d read about them somewhere, never needed them because she’d never not been perfectly relaxed. She started with her toes and worked gradually upward, with the result that thirty seconds later she was as tense as the strings of a well-tuned guitar and one small step away from biting chunks out of her own arm. Get a grip, she ordered herself, and reluctantly obeyed.

Sleep; that was what she needed. She closed her eyes and tried counting sheep. She counted fifty-seven, but the fifty-eighth was a unicorn with a huge golden spike between its eyes, so she gave that up in a hurry. No good, she said to herself, it’s no use. The sandman has run away and left me here all alone, so the hell with him. My fault for employing a sandman who’s afraid of the dark.

She got up and went over to the desk; not the longest commute in the history of work. Nobody really knew how rich Lucy Pavlov was, though there were stories about her accountants endowing a chair of advanced pure mathematics at Princeton so as to train up brilliant young minds who’d be able to discover a way of finding out. But she lived in one room, and that room was just large enough for a bed, a desk and a chair. She logged on to PavNet, called up her Things to Do menu and selected Way Too Difficult. It wasn’t a big file. By the same token, a scorpion isn’t a big insect.

PaySpeak: her one significant failure. The idea was quite old and quite simple. You dictate your stuff to the computer, and it writes it on the screen. Like all its many predecessors, PaySpeak worked, up to a point; usually the point where the enraged user threw the computer out of a high window. It nearly worked, which was far worse than not working at all. She’d spent hours fiddling with it, fine-tuning it, isolating problems and working out cunning fixes and bypasses, and every time she solved something, something else went wrong; it’d suddenly refuse to recognise the existence of the letter B, or instantaneously translate every ninth word into Finnish. After a year of brutal struggle, she’d finally arrived at the stage where there was nothing for it but to pull the whole thing apart and rewrite the base code; definitely a job for a rainy day, as in Noah’s Ark. She called it up on the screen and went to work. Twenty minutes later, she felt her eyelids droop. Five minutes after that, her head lolled forwards and she was fast asleep.

Which was a pity, because the last correction she’d made, a tiny tweak to an outlying minor subsystem controlling a trivial auxiliary function, had finally done the job and fixed it. On the screen, therefore, appeared the words Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee, repeated over and over again.

The screen filled up. So perfectly was PaySpeak running now that it put a full stop after each repetition, with a capital letter for each initial N. After half a page, the PaySoft elf turned up, asked, Are you sure you don’t mean necromantic wheel?, gave up and wandered away. Three pages. Four.

Lucy woke up. She had no idea where or who or what she was. Ah yes. Oh. Oh wow!

She opened her eyes and found she was looking at her terminal. She saw:

Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Reporting. B’r df yggli’tthp dooplef dwwee’ep ev’sofew weeeem q’opoplds coo bepleem efwefgw 669756 qoqoq 99335 qoqoq 64546997 feptip weeem 53. Eftip? Sqeee! 94353. Oopl. Report ends. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Urgh.

She blinked.

Her first thought was, Oh boy, it’s really lost it this time. She scrolled up — five pages, six — then frowned, scrolled back to the end and tried a synthesized snore. It came out as Nicnicnicnicnicnic-weeeeeee; close enough for jazz. She grinned. Then her grin froze. “Reporting”? “Report ends”?

Of course, the dream. Obviously she’d had a reprise: the unicorn had come back, and this time, when ordered to report, she’d complied. Her report was in gibberish because, well, it was just a dream, and she’d been burbling. Presumably her subconscious mind believed she was making perfect sense, but really she was just making funny noises, which faithful, unimaginative PaySpeak had transliterated as
dooplef dwwee’ep
and
bepleem.
Not the most auspicious start, perhaps, but—

Hey! It
works!

“You work,” she said aloud. The screen started a new paragraph. You work. “Yippee!” she said. Yippee! She beamed, cleared the screen and set about saving her changes.

Bepleem,
said a little voice in her head. Means “north”.

Her fingertips hovering a millimetre above the keys, she froze. What was that I just thought?
Bepleem.
As in
bepleem nozdfwthghg foodoop;
north, south, east, west, the four cardinal points. Ah yes, of course.

What?

Her head snapped up and she stared at the screen, which she’d just wiped clean.
Bepleem;
the normal, everyday word for north in, in, in, in some language that she
knew,
or used to know, only she’d forgotten it completely. The same language, in fact, in which
dooplef dwwee’ep
meant “with-a-bone-on-its-forehead quadruped”.

Report.

She remembered reading somewhere that in the early hours of the morning the human brain is at its most vulnerable to worry, stress, things-getting-out-of-proportion. Never having been here before, she wouldn’t know about that. In daylight, which ought to be along any time now (please!), it’d all make sense and she’d laugh at herself for being so stupid. In the warm, friendly sunlight she’d realise that the illusion of understanding some of the gibberish-words was just leftovers from her anxiety dream, and the whole report business was simply her talking in her sleep, in her dream. Any alternative explanations she cared to concoct would be nothing more than wee-small-hours angst forming an unholy alliance with an agile and imaginative brain. In which case, roll on daylight; old Mr Sun, where are you when I need you? Meanwhile-Meanwhile, she’d fixed PaySpeak, which was amazing and a fantastic achievement, and it was really rather sad that she’d contrived to spoil the moment for herself. Also, she’d just proved beyond reasonable doubt that she snored. Damn.

She yawned. Well, so much for the early hours of the morning. She’d given them a fair trial, and as far as she was concerned they were only fit for sleeping in. In fact, if she had her way, she’d have them taken away somewhere and shot. There really wasn’t any— A thought struck her. She called up the toolbar and clicked on Log Incoming Calls. She saw 03:36:21 Caller ID withheld.

She shivered from head to toe. Oh, she thought.

13

New York

Once upon a time, K76 had been the cutting edge. It had cost the taxpayers of its parent country far more than they could afford, but nobody questioned the expense, because it was a matter of national survival. Into K76 they’d installed the very latest in laser weaponry, along with communications and target recognition/acquisition equipment nobody knew had been invented yet. Its purpose was to recognise and shoot down missiles launched by one now bankrupt and highly embarrassed country against another similarly bust and bashful country. It had been the last, best hope.

Then, somehow or other, peace sort of happened, and K76’s owners had had other things on their minds, such as shame and economic ruin. Fortuitously, someone remembered to switch off the communications link before the control centre was mothballed. A lot of little red and green lights on K76’s interface console went dark, and that was supposed to be that. If anybody gave it any thought, they assumed that the last, best hope would just sort of stay put for ever, an inert chunk of metal floating weightless and irrelevant in the black velvet sky. And, for a long time, it did.

But then a big thing drew up and assumed a parking orbit right next to it, and K76 suddenly woke up. Maybe the big thing was leaking so much power from its monstrous engines that the tiny weapons platform was able to feed off it, like one of those fish that live by clinging to sharks. Maybe it had been programmed with a super-super-super-secret back-up failsafe system that nobody in government needed to know about, designed to activate an auxiliary power source if a potentially hostile object came within a certain distance. K76 didn’t know. All it knew was that it was back in business, and something wasn’t right.

It activated its crude twentieth-century sensors and scanned the big thing. Threat? it asked itself. It noted the big thing’s primary systems — it couldn’t understand them, of course, just as a frog couldn’t understand a steamroller, but it recognised them as weapons. It had a simple binary decision-making process: yes/no. The big thing, it decided, was a definite yes.

K76 charged its capacitors to bursting point, took aim and fired. A millisecond later, the blast from its twelve laser cannon bounced off the big thing’s shields right back at it and melted it into tiny droplets of molten titanium, which quickly lost their energy and hung in emptiness like a freeze-frame photograph of a shower of rain— Mark Twain jumped, and spilt his coffee.

“Are you all right?” a fellow-worker asked.

“‘What? Oh, I’m fine,” Twain replied. “Just a twinge in my leg. Cramp.”

The fellow-worker nodded sympathetically. “It’s the chairs,” she said. “They give you backache. You can adjust them, but they don’t stay adjusted.”

Twain scanned the nearest chair, noted seventeen obvious design flaws, wondered why nobody had bothered to put them right. “Yes,” he said. “Ah well, back to work.”

He put the coffee cup, now half empty, down on the desk beside him. He had no intention of drinking the stuff. His scans had revealed that the fluid had no nutritional value and was mildly poisonous. But everybody else in the room had drunk at least one cup that morning, and he didn’t want to make himself conspicuous.

He reopened his screen and called up the program he’d been studying. On the face of it, just another primitive Dirter artefact, a seriously inefficient tool for doing an unnecessary job. But there was something about it that reminded him, in a way he couldn’t quite place, of home.

He ran through it as quickly as the workstation’s primeval scrolling facility would allow. Then he did it again, and again. On the fourth run-through, he stopped and stared.

There it was; obvious, now he’d noticed it. As blatant and out-of-place as a plastic handle on a flint axe. It was only a tiny step, a trivial conjunction joining two monolithic blocks of barbaric Dirter code, but it was unmistakably, definitively Ostar. The reason he’d overlooked it earlier was because it was so drearily familiar. In an Ostar program there’d be a million such tacking-together bits, the everyday punctuation of low-grade industrial software. In this context, it was like finding a bottle-top enveloped in a chunk of prehistoric amber.

He examined it carefully. It was just possible that it was the result of inadvertent contamination from his own systems, a shortcut he’d absent-mindedly put in himself, to speed up the scanning process. He double-checked. The program’s tamper seals were intact.

Look at you, he thought. You shouldn’t be here. The question is, where did you come from?

He assessed the possibilities. Why would someone with access to Ostar technology write Dirter programs using Dirter tools, but slip in a tiny bit of Ostar punctuation? Didn’t make sense. Unless, he rationalised, the hypothetical someone was — like himself —trying to pass himself off as a Dirter. He considered the program as a whole: PaySoft XJ5567, a basic commercial operating system that had, in its day (about five months ago), been revolutionary and state-of-the-art. True, it was a flint axe; but it was a much, much better flint axe than the even cruder type the tribe had been using hitherto. It was the sort of flint axe someone who was used to steel axes would make, in order to corner the palaeolithic axe market. But the steel-axe-trained flint-knapper had, at some point, grown tired, or lazy. Couldn’t be bothered with a great big galumphing Dirter conjunction at this point, so he’d slipped in an Ostar one, to save time and effort. Because it was, comparatively speaking, so elegant and sophisticated, so microscopically
small
compared to the native product, the Dirters hadn’t even noticed it was there; and the function it performed was so mundane and trivial, it hadn’t occurred to them to wonder how it had got itself done. A caveman wouldn’t necessarily notice that the axehead was bonded to the handle by cyanoacrylate adhesive rather than boiled-up sinew glue.

Twain leaned back in his seat (his fellow-worker had been right; these chairs were murder) and tried not to let the flood of implications drown him. Now, then. He had to assume that, previous to his arrival, the only contact between Dirt and the Ostar had been the Mark One— “Hi there.”

He looked up, and saw the Dirter female he’d nearly spilt coffee on. She was standing beside his chair, a little bit further than arm’s reach away from him, and her body language was a thesaurusful of synonyms for nervous, tentative and embarrassed. He ran a recognition/interpretation routine in DirtBrain and identified the symptoms.

Oh, he thought.

He’d specified his human body as a Dish because, according to the cultural database, good-looking Dirters had an advantage over their aesthetically challenged fellows. They were more likely to succeed. Other Dirters instinctively wanted to please them, to be their friend. It was something to do with mating selection criteria and basically rather yucky, but Twain (or rather Mark Two) had reckoned he could use all the advantages he could get. He hadn’t thought it through properly, he realised, or he’d have considered the possible complications.

Etiquette protocols, he screamed at his data server. Get me the etiquette protocols
now.

“Hi,” he said, and he noted that his voice sounded atypically high and strained; a physiological reaction built into the flesh and bone, triggered by the female’s behavioural signals.

“It’s your first day, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

The female smiled. It wasn’t nearly as good as his smile. “My name’s Katya.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the etiquette protocols prompted him. “I’m Mark.”

There was an awkward silence. But according to the behavioural database there was supposed to be an awkward silence at this point, followed by an artificially superficial exchange of small-talk, during which both parties did their best to conceal their true feelings. It occurred to Twain to wonder how the Dirters had managed to survive as a species for so long.

You don’t need this, his inner control centre told him. Say something offputting, and she’ll leave you alone. His dialogue composition matrix suggested various suitable lines:
Gosh, you remind me a lot of my wife; Say, why don’t we head for the fire extinguisher locker and do it right now?; I just love mid-twentieth-century musical comedies, don’t you?
The commands passed to his speech centres, but he didn’t say any of them. Something was overriding his control commands, and it didn’t seem to be a hostile mil-spec jamming signal. Something else.

“So,” said the Katya female. “Do you think you’re going to like it here?”

His control centre was demanding to know what was going on, but all it got was Program not responding, please wait. Meanwhile, Twain’s mouth replied, “Yeah, it’s great. The work seems very interesting, and everybody’s been so friendly.” Then the mouth stretched into a big, big smile, and Central Control flipped into panic mode. High above the clouds, a whole bank of consoles came alive, a red light started flashing and a siren began to whoop — none of which was particularly helpful, of course.

Central Control said, Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. The fate of the entire Ostar species rests with you. It’s just a bug in the warmware. Ignore it, and execute the most recent command sequence.

Twain’s mind replied, Hmm?

It was a difficult decision, made harder by the fact that the primary decision-making subroutines for his autonomous functions had been downloaded into the Twain module, leaving only backups and auxiliaries aboard the flying bomb in geosynchronous orbit. In an emergency, however, the failsafe back-up had the authority to override the primaries. It resolved on the only course of action it could think of.

It said, Download and run musical sequence diddle-um-diddle-um-diddle-dum-dum.

In spite of the override facility, Central Control couldn’t access the Twain module’s cerebral nodes; but it could, and did, pass a command sequence direct to the fingers. They started to drum on the desktop. Then the left foot joined in, building a rhythm that the brain couldn’t ignore. Quietly, through clenched teeth, Twain began to hum.

“They’re pretty nice people to work for,” the Katya female was saying. She’d noticed the humming, but was pretending she hadn’t. It was bad manners, according to the database, to hum while someone was talking to you. “I’ve been here three years, and—”

“Three years. Gosh.” To counteract the rudeness of the humming, Twain put on his biggest smile and held it there. “Is that a long time?”

The Katya female looked at him. “Well,” she said, “it’s kind of like, three years. Before that, I was with the Edmonton Credit Union. It was all right there, I guess, but I like it more at CredMay.”

“Like what more?”

Her eyes widened just a bit. Too late, his idiom subfunction explained that, in this context, “to like it” means “to be happy”, intransitive. “Well,” she said (she was persuading herself that she’d heard him say something else, something that made sense; resourceful creatures, these Dirters, with a genuine flair for self-deception), “I guess it’s the buzz. The atmosphere.”

By now, what with the hum, he was lucky if he was hearing one word in three. “The atmosphere,” he said. “Oxygen 21 per cent; nitrogen 78 per cent, tum-ti-tum; carbon dioxide—”

She laughed. He analysed, and concluded that she was interpreting his data as some kind of joke. It was a nervous, propitiatory laugh, and she was deliberately maintaining eye contact, the way
ehhrt
hunters did back home when confronting a cornered, wounded female. It must, he reflected, have been something-wom-ething-umthing he’d said. Unfortunately, his system was now so clogged up with minims, quavers and their consequential vapour trails of mathematical calculation that he couldn’t remember what he’d said, let alone pull it to bits and see what was wrong with it. Never mind; at least he still had the smile. He managed to retract his lips an extra five millimetres each side (that simply wouldn’t have been possible with organic skin, but his synthesized replica had the tensile strength of carbon fibre) and said, “I just made a joke.”

She laughed again, but her eyes were very round and wide, and she was starting to back away. Other members of staff had turned round in their chairs and were staring, too. He realised he was humming out loud, and beating time on the desktop with his clenched fist. The cultural database could offer no specifics, but he was inclined to think that this probably wasn’t orthodox behaviour. Not good. He managed to blurt out, “Excuse me, which way’s the toilet?” without actually singing it. Someone pointed. He jumped to his feet and fled.

Once the toilet door had slammed behind him, there was a profound silence on the seventh floor. Katya groped her way back to her seat and began sobbing quietly. Someone said, “That the new software engineer?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”