Blood and Fire (30 page)

Korie looked up. “Is there a problem, HARLIE?”

“No,” said HARLIE. “
Maludder-flunger.
”

Korie pushed his own concerns aside and frowned. “What's going on, HARLIE.”

“Nothing. I'm fine.
Phroomes
.”

“It sounds like you've got Tourette's Syndrome.”

“
Pfehgle
.”

“It's LENNIE, isn't it?”

“I have the LENNIE simulation totally under control. There is no problem.”

“HARLIE, you can discontinue the LENNIE simulation any time now. We have the information we need.”

“Mr. Korie, I discontinued the LENNIE simulation three hours ago.
Briggle-mysa.
”

“What about the robots? Did you discontinue all the LENNIE processing in the robots too?”

“Of course, I did.
You dhoopa-friggler
!”

“I see ... yes, thank you, HARLIE.” Korie sat for a moment, staring at the various displays, not seeing them—seeing instead a nightmare inside his own head. He drummed on the panel in front of him for a moment with his fingertips.

“What are you doing, Mr. Korie?” HARLIE asked.

“Nothing. I'm just thinking.” He shifted his position, stretching in his chair, stretching his arms over his head for a long spine-crackling moment, then let them fall back to the console again. Frowning, he leaned forward, brushed a speck of imaginary dust off a panel. Then, as he pulled his hand back, in one swift movement, he popped the plastic cover off the red panel and quickly pressed the button underneath it.

“What are you
doi-n-n-n-n-ngggggggggg
—” HARLIE shrieked into silence.

Korie pulled on his headset. “Captain Parsons, this is Korie.” He waited for her acknowledgment.

“Go ahead,” she said brusquely.

“I've pulled the plug on HARLIE's higher-brain functions. Request permission to shut down the autonomics as well. Including all the robots.”

“What's going on?”

“Have you sent Isaac over?”

“No. What's this about?”

“I can't tell you until I shut down the other systems. Captain, we don't have time to waste talking about this—”

“Permission granted. As soon as—” Korie was already flipping open a row of plastic covers, turning the red keys underneath them. Each one clicked off with a satisfying finality “—you've finished, I want to see you in the wardroom.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Korie finished shutting down the last of the starship's intelligence modules and sat back quickly in his chair, staring at the now-empty displays before him, breathing hard. He was suddenly very frightened.

“Okay,” said Parsons, slamming angrily into the wardroom. “What is it?”

Korie was standing at the table, cradling a mug of coffee between his two hands, rolling it back and forth as if to warm his palms. He nodded, readying himself to speak, stopped, took a long drink of coffee, then put the mug back down on the table, forgotten. He cleared his throat.

“I know what happened on the
Norway
,” he said. His voice was very soft, very flat.

“Go on.”

“LENNIE went mad.”

“That's redundant. The LENNIEs are already mad. They're built for paranoia.”

“Captain—how much do you know about intelligence engines?”

Parsons frowned at him. “Excuse me?”

“Do you know everything the Navy teaches you? Or have you taken the time to learn more than that?”

“Go on.”

“Captain Lowell, the first captain of the
LS-1187
—from even before she had a name—used to say to me, ‘Don't personalize them, Korie. They're not alive.' But he was wrong. They are alive. In their own way, they're alive. They can hurt—and they can hurt back.”

“What does all this have to do with HARLIE?”

“You can drive an intelligence engine crazy. Give it conflicting information. Give it contradictory instructions. Give it a mission that poses such a moral dilemma it can't complete it. That's what happened to LENNIE.” Korie started pacing as he spoke. “They told it that the purpose of the mission was to build a doomsday weapon against the Morthans—and then they told LENNIE to protect the weapon against destruction.
No matter what
. And remember, a LENNIE is so crazy-paranoid that it invents threats for itself so it can build defenses against them. That's why it's so good for security purposes. But in this situation . . . no. Finding a way to contain bloodworms and infect a planet with them—that was easy. That's what they were originally designed for. Blintze got that part of the job done by applying everything that was already known about plasmacytes. But then he started working on a
cure
. And LENNIE recognized—correctly—that a cure for the bloodworms would destroy their value as a weapon. So he had to destroy the cure. So he took down the containment fields just long enough to infect the ship. LENNIE destroyed the crew of the
Norway
rather than let Blintze complete his work.”

Parsons sat down in her chair at the end of the table. Her face was ashen. “And HARLIE ...?”

“HARLIE simulated a LENNIE. First in his own self, then distributed throughout the brains of the robots. And not just any LENNIE—he copied the
Norway
's LENNIE. Yes, he had firewalls to keep himself from being infected, but somehow LENNIE got through anyway. Do you know that paranoia is a self-fulfilling obsession? Even if the world isn't already against you, if you act crazy enough you can make it so. Well ... that's a LENNIE. That's why the units have to be wiped clean at the beginning of every mission. They drive themselves crazy. So crazy that if left alone for too long they start seeing threats even among their own allies. It's the ultimate self-destructive paradigm. That's what happened here.” Korie went back to the table, picked up his coffee and drank—it was cold and bitter. He made a face and put the cup back down. “I think that we're in trouble. LENNIE planted seeds in the data clusters. Time bombs. Modules that allow LENNIE to reinstall and rebuild himself in HARLIE. We were so eager to get at the information that we pulled it across HARLIE's firewall and HARLIE has been infected with LENNIE's time bombs. HARLIE doesn't even know he's infected.”

“How do you know this?”

“By his language. He's started using some very weird colloquialisms.”

“He's cursing?”

“Like a member of the Black Hole Gang,” Korie confirmed. “You noticed it too?”

Parsons didn't answer. She frowned, thinking about it. Any abnormal behavior from an intelligence engine was a danger signal.

“HARLIE thinks he's clean. But he isn't.” Korie stopped in mid-stride and turned to face Parsons. “Or maybe—maybe he knows he's infected and he can't tell us. Maybe the LENNIE programs aren't letting HARLIE reveal what he knows. Maybe HARLIE is cursing deliberately—as a way of signaling us that he's being held captive in his own brain.”

“Can you disinfect him?”

Korie nodded. “It'll take a week to do a Level-Six reconstruction.”

“We don't have a week. I have to send a robot across to the
Norway
.”

“You can't,” said Korie quietly. “HARLIE built a distributed LENNIE
using the brains of the robots. Almost certainly every single robot has been infected with LENNIE programs. If you send a robot across to rescue Blintze's work ... and if any single one of LENNIE's time bombs finds out about it, what do you think will happen?” Korie answered his own question. “We'll be sabotaged by our own machinery.”

Parsons got up from the table and went to the sideboard. She poured herself a cup of coffee and brought it back to the table. She put the mug down in front of her without drinking from it. It was something to do while she thought about what to say next. Finally, she looked across the room at Korie, studying him calmly. For all of his physical weakness, his mind was still working overtime. Whatever hallucinatory aftereffects he might be feeling from his rescue had not diminished his insight—if anything, he had been pushed into that mental state beyond mere reason where halluci- and ratioci- become part of the same -nation.

“You know,” she said, finally. “You're proving one thing very well. Paranoia is an infectious disease.”

Korie grinned weakly.

“We can't run this ship without intelligence ...” Parsons started to say.

“Actually,” Korie corrected her. “We can. We've already done it once. We had a Morthan assassin aboard, once.”

“Yes, I heard the story.”

“After we killed him, we determined that we were infected by imps.
²
Little Morthan gremlins. We shut down everything and ran the ship by hand. Afterward ... we figured out a dozen other things we also could have done, if we'd had time. Since then, we've added some protections, so if we ever had to run the ship manually again, we could. It's tricky, but not impossible.”

“We still need Blintze's cure,” Parsons said.

Korie nodded thoughtfully. “It's risky. But it's doable.”

“Success,” Parsons said, very much aware of the irony, “comes from having a Plan B.”

They were gathered at the Forward Airlock Reception Bay
again
. The same small robot was still humming quietly to itself.

This time, Shibano and Williger were sitting side by side at a control console, both wearing VR helmets to look out through Isaac's point of view. Isaac's own brain had been disabled; the robot's body was entirely under the control of the VR console.

Korie sat nearby, at a portable work station, watching through his own VR helmet. His job was to monitor the actions of the robot—and pull the plug, if necessary. If it did anything it wasn't supposed to do.

“All right,” said Parsons to Shibano. “That last simulation looked good. Let's go for it.” She turned to Quilla Omega. “Chief Leen, activate the repulsor fields please.”

A moment later, the familiar throb of the fields came up again. The sensation made their skins tingle.

Parsons nodded to Bach, and the security officer turned to a wall panel and opened the hatch manually. Shibano worked at his controls—he had foot pedals to govern the movement of the robot and VR gloves to manage the arms of the machine. Isaac rolled slowly forward into the airlock. Bach sealed the hatch. When the safety light turned green, she operated another control and opened the outer hatch.

“Okay, I'm in the transfer tube,” Shibano reported. Bach sealed the outer hatch. “The repulsor fields are pushing me forward.... We're opening the outer hatch of the
Norway
... We're in the
Norway
's airlock now ... Opening the inner hatch ...” Shibano fell silent then. And for a moment, it looked as if he had stopped operating the robot. The map display on his work station showed that Isaac had halted just inside the
Norway
's Cargo Bay. Beside him, Williger reached out with one hand and laid it on his shoulder. She could see the same view in her own headset.

Standing behind them, Parsons realized what they must be seeing. She held up her own VR goggles to her eyes, then pulled them off just as quickly. “Keep going, Shibano,” she ordered. Turning to Korie, she snapped, “Code and classify this record. I don't want these pictures going any further.”

Korie was already typing out the command. “Done, Captain. Classified to your and my access only.”

Shibano leaned forward again. The schematic view showed Isaac heading into the keel. They watched in silence as the little machine rolled steadily forward, occasionally steering its way around objects that were invisible on the map view. The only sounds were Shibano's quiet reports: “Moving through the machine shop now. Uh-oh ... the hatch here is sealed. Welded shut.”