Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2) (4 page)

Chapter 5

Artemis disappeared into the kitchen
to make another pot of tea. Oliver sat quietly with Jeffrey for a moment. “I
thought things couldn’t get any weirder with you people,” the cat said,
stretching out on Oliver’s lap. “Then a robot from the future shows up and
tries to kill everyone. I can’t even remember what my life was like before I
met you.”

“You were an ordinary cat before you
met me.”

“You say
ordinary
like it’s an
insult.”

“It wasn’t. Anyway, cyborgs aren’t
technically robots; they’re a combination of human and machine. And I don’t
think he was from the future.”

“Where else would he have come from?
I saw a movie once where a robot came from the future and tried to kill this
lady, and the police shot him a bunch of times but he didn’t care, and in the
end he got smashed flat.”

“But that was a movie,” Oliver
pointed out. Artemis entered the office with a fresh teapot. “Movies aren’t
real life.”

“I saw Dracula in a movie and it
turned out he was real life, too. He even wore a stupid cape like he did in the
movie.”

“Was he still wearing that cape?”
Artemis asked, taking her seat. “I told him once it made him look like even more
of a buffoon than he already was. I imagine I’ll have occasion to tell him
again.”

“Um, we
did
kill him,” Oliver
said. “Sally staked him and he turned into ash.”

“And I scattered him all over the
place,” Jeffrey said. “I was going to pee on him just to be sure, but then
everyone wanted to leave all of a sudden.” He looked at Oliver. “See? You
should have let me pee on him.”

“I assure you that would not have
helped,” Artemis said. “That one always comes back. Perhaps in a hundred years.
I would not worry, Mr. Jones. I doubt you will still be around next time.”

Oliver imagined that was supposed to
sound reassuring, but given the night’s events a reminder of his mortality
really wasn’t what he’d needed. “And you
will
be around?”

Artemis sipped her tea. “That seems
very likely, does it not?”

“How old are you, anyway?” Jeffrey
asked. “Are you as old as the hills?” Artemis gave him a cold look. “Ah, never
mind,” the cat said nervously.

“I didn’t teach him that,” Oliver
said. “Your television privileges are revoked,” he told the cat.

“Your sleeping through the night
privileges are revoked,” the cat said.

“If you’re both quite done?” Artemis
asked. Oliver nodded. “Very good. Why don’t you tell me what you already know?
Or what you have surmised?”

“Sally doesn’t talk about it,” Oliver
said. “I’d just be guessing, mostly.”

“You are fairly astute, though.
Enlighten me.”

Oliver took a breath, considering how
to put all of this. “Sally is an alien from another galaxy,” he said. “Her
people fought a war with a race of cyborgs and she used some kind of weapon of
mass destruction against them that destroyed their planet, and then she came
here to live on Earth for some reason.”

“And she’s from the future,” Jeffrey
said.

“She’s not from the future,” Oliver
said.

“But the robots are.”

“Cyborgs,” Oliver corrected him. “And
they’re not from the future, either.”

Artemis shook her head. “I may have
to reconsider what I said before. That was almost entirely wrong.”

“Oh,” Oliver said.

“Are
you
from the future?”
Jeffrey asked Artemis.

“No. Sally is not, in fact, an alien.
She is a human, and she is from Earth. However, she is not from
this
Earth. You are familiar with the concept of parallel dimensions?”

Oliver thought it over. “Only in the
sense that I’ve seen them on
Star Trek
.”

“He watches a lot of
Star Trek
,”
Jeffrey said.

“No, I don’t.”

“You want to be best friends with
Captain Picard,” the cat said.

“I never said that! I said if I had
to choose a captain…”

“Enough,” Artemis cut him off. She
looked at him sternly. “I seem to recall giving you a rather large stack of
files to read, Mr. Jones. At the time I said you might need the information
contained within in the future.”

“Yeah.”

“It would appear that you have
neglected that duty, preferring instead to spend your time watching television.”

“I haven’t read
all
of them,”
Oliver said, realizing he sounded like he was making excuses for not doing his
homework. “There were a lot of them, and we’ve been busy.”

“Plus he has to watch
Star Trek
,”
Jeffrey said.

Artemis rubbed the bridge of her nose
with her fingertips. “Very well. Rather than have you take any further guesses,
I will inform you that Sally led a commando team into our world a little more
than two years ago.”

Oliver nearly gasped. “They were
attacking
us?”

“No. They had discovered a certain
artifact on
their
Earth and were attempting to discern what it did. In
fact, it was a gateway between worlds.”

“The mirror Tyler mentioned before?”

“Indeed. At least you were paying
attention to that much. There were two mirrors. One on their Earth, and the
other on ours. Fortunately, the mirror in our world was locked away in Vault 3,
so their arrival here went unnoticed to most people. We, of course, noticed
immediately.”

“I would think so.” This was
beginning to remind Oliver very much of a plot device he had seen on
Star
Trek
. He decided not to mention that to anyone.

“When we made contact with them,
Sally asked if we could render them assistance. They had been engaged in a war
with the cyborgs for some time, and things were going badly for them.”

“Were the cyborgs from the future?”
Jeffrey asked.

“No,” Artemis said. “They were
largely from Milwaukee.”

Oliver wasn’t sure he had heard that
correctly. “They were from
Milwaukee
?”

“Indeed.”

“I’m
definitely
going to start
reading those files soon,” Oliver said. “Maybe I’ll take some home.”

“You would be wise to educate
yourself, but I will give you the quick version. The outbreak, which is how
they referred to the cyborg problem, grew out of plague research.”

“The
plague
?”

“In their world, the plague killed
more people than cancer. It was a rather unpleasant business.”

“They should have gotten some cats in
there,” Jeffrey noted. Oliver stared at him blankly. “To kill the rats,” the
cat explained. “Rats are bad news.”

“It was not carried by rats,” Artemis
said, “but that is hardly relevant to our discussion. Traditional medical
science having failed them for hundreds of years, they eventually developed an alternative
cure. It lay in nanotechnology.”

“This I know,” Oliver said, perking
up. “Tiny little robots, right?”

“Quite so. Small enough that
thousands could be injected into a human bloodstream, where they could seek out
and destroy plague cells. While I am not a physician, I understood enough of
their science to see that it was quite brilliant.”

“I would think so,” Oliver said.
“I’ve read that we’re doing research on that kind of thing here, but it’s a
long way off.” He thought it over. “You could cure cancer, heart disease…I
mean, if you designed the nanobots right, you could probably have them performing
surgery on a cellular level. So what went wrong?”

“Everything,” Artemis said. “The
nanobots were controlled by an artificial intelligence so that in addition to
seeking out plague cells, they could anticipate future mutations and adapt
without the need for human intervention. While it had a limited scope, the A.I.
was, in a sense, taking the place of a doctor.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, it
was the A.I. that evolved, rather than the plague cells. It determined that in
order to protect itself and its hosts, it needed the power to control the
hosts.”

“Like if your doctor followed you
around telling you what you could eat?” Oliver asked.

“Rather more invasive. The A.I. wrote
itself a new program they called Overlord, which it used to take over the host’s
higher brain functions. And then it determined that in order for the hosts to
prosper, it needed to control more of them. To use your analogy, it was like
your doctor saying that because cheeseburgers are unhealthy, nobody should be
able to eat them at all.”

“Okay,” Oliver said. “I’m not sure
that was the best analogy anymore.”

“It was
your
analogy,” Artemis
said. “In any case, those who carried the nanobots, now under the control of
Overlord, converted others by injecting them with more nanobots, which
replicated themselves and continued the process. There were one hundred test
subjects in the group that received the plague cure. Almost overnight, there
were a thousand cyborgs. And from there, you can imagine what happened.”

“But,” Oliver said, “it would have
taken years for an A.I. to evolve like that. How did they not see it coming?”

“Because it did not take years. It
took just under one second.”

“One
second
?”

“That is a very long time for an
A.I., as I understand it. Regardless of whether it was one second or two, this
led to armed conflict between what were now called the cyborgs and everyone
else. The American Federation was in a full scale war against the cyborgs
within a day.”

“But war doesn’t make sense,” Oliver
said. “Didn’t the cyborgs want to convert people, not kill them?”

“Certainly. They anticipated humanity
would surrender, eventually. Killing was only a means to that end, a matter of
simple calculation. Humans are easily replaceable, after all. You people breed
like…well, humans.”

“Gross,” Jeffrey said.

“Eventually, a cure was developed. A
code transmission. A patch, as Seven would say. It left the nanobots functional
but disabled the Overlord program. The cyborgs were no longer under its
control. War became peace in the time it took the patch to wrap its way around
the globe. A few minutes, in other words.”

“Why leave the nanobots functional at
all?” Oliver asked. “It seems like they were nothing but trouble.”

“By that time they had become so
deeply integrated into their host bodies that shutting them down entirely would
have killed the hosts, as well. I believe you saw the cyborg’s armor. It was
not worn by the cyborgs; it was grown. Their internal organs were converted as
well, which made them very hard to kill. The nanobots were capable of repairing
anything other than massive damage.”

“Why doesn’t this story have a happy
ending?” Jeffrey asked. “It seems like there should have been hugs and kittens
for everyone, at that point. Everyone likes hugs and kittens.”

Artemis nodded. “Indeed. However, the
scientist who developed the cure was killed in a cyborg attack at her research
facility shortly after she transmitted it to Federation Command for analysis
and deployment.”

Oliver had a suspicion he knew where
this was going. “It was someone close to Sally?”

“Her younger sister. Linnea Rain.”
Artemis smiled wistfully. “I liked her very much. She had a brilliant mind, but
it was more than that. She was filled with such…
hope
. It was quite
remarkable given what she had been through. She was a wonder.”

“But Sally couldn’t have just gone
around shooting everyone,” Oliver said. “Well, she’d probably
try
, but
eventually someone would stop her.”

“You are quite correct, Mr. Jones.
During her research, Linnea also developed a virus that
could
disable
the nanobots entirely. She only intended it to be used if everything else
failed, but Sally found the code when she went through her sister’s effects.”
Artemis took a sip of her tea. “In her grief and rage, Sally used her position
at Federation Command to access the equipment she needed to transmit the virus.
I begged her not to release it, but…I failed. The cyborgs were dead an hour
later. All but one, it would appear.”

Oliver took a moment to let that sink
in. “My god,” he said. “She really did kill them all.”

“I always thought that was a figure
of speech,” Jeffrey said. “Like when someone says he’s going to bring home a
really big fish for dinner, but when he gets home the fish is just an average
fish.” He looked at Oliver pointedly.

“It was not just talk,” Artemis said.
“Afterward she was facing trial and almost certainly execution, especially given
that she made no effort at all to hide what she had done. ‘They had it coming’
is not much of a defense, I’m afraid. I convinced Federation Command to let me
bring her here, instead, with the caveat I guarantee she would never return. A
life in exile would be better than death, I thought. In any case, that did not
matter. When we arrived here, Sally smashed our mirror to pieces. She could not
go home even if she wanted to.”