Rash (21 page)

“Used to be a lot more tourists,” Oki Charlie said. “There were almost two thousand of us living here. But when the safety regs kicked in back in the 2040s, we had to redesign the Bear Buggies with bear-proof windows and metal screens and stuff. It’s like riding inside a tank. People don’t like it so much. You can get a better look at the bears on your WindO than you can from inside a buggy. Now hardly anybody comes up here. Also, these days people don’t care so much about wildlife. All they care about is themselves. Anyway, lucky for you, we still send out a few tours every week. One of the Bear Buggy drivers was on a tour yesterday when he spotted you running around out there. If he hadn’t seen you, Nanuk would be picking his teeth with your bones.”

What happened was, the driver of the Bear Buggy, a guy named Goro, who happened to be Oki Charlie’s cousin, had seen me running from the bear. He’d stopped the buggy, got out his rifle, and shot the bear just before it grabbed me—but not soon enough to prevent it from landing right on top on me.

“Goro told me he didn’t know if he should shoot you or the bear,” Oki Charlie said with half a grin. “I mean, there are about ten billion humans on the planet but only a couple-hundred Nanuks.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea to be out there, you know.”

“How’s the soup?”

“Pretty good.”

“You ran away from that prison factory, didn’t you?”

“More like I got kicked out.”

Oki Charlie nodded. “I’ve heard that happens sometimes.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I just work here, kiddo. Nobody tells me nothing. But I heard there’s an airplane waiting for you out at the airstrip. Soon as Doc Kublu says you can go, you fly out of here.”

“I thought maybe I’d get sent back to the pizza factory.”

Oki Charlie frowned. “Folks up here don’t much care for that McDonald’s crowd. Every time a bunch of ’em come into town, there’s trouble. Drinking and fighting.”

“Drinking? You mean like
alcohol
?”

Oki Charlie grinned. “What else folks gonna do up here? People get bored sitting at home looking at their WindOs. This is like the Wild West. Folks pretty much do what they want. Those guys from the plant come into town all dressed in their little blue suits and smelling like pizza, . . . what
they
want is girls. Only, when the girls see ’em coming, they stay home.” Oki Charlie giggled. “All three of ’em. Anyways, since there’re no girls to be found, the guys just hang out in the bars and make trouble.”

“Why is there an airplane waiting for me?”

Oki Charlie shrugged, suddenly sober. “I don’t know. You done with your soup?”

“Yeah. It was good. Thanks.”

“My job.” Oki Charlie shrugged. He took the tray and stood up. “You need anything, just holler. My station is right down the hall.” He walked out.

“Hey! Oki Charlie!”

Oki Charlie’s round face reappeared in the doorway.

“Who’s paying for all this?” I gestured to include my bed, the room, and all that surrounded me.

“It’s all paid for,” said Oki Charlie.

“By who?”

“I just work here, kiddo. Nobody tells me anything.”

Mom and
Gramps were waiting at the tube station. My mother was wearing a pinched, stricken expression, as if bracing herself for a supreme disappointment. I don’t think she really expected me to step off the tube, and when I did—when she saw me—her face melted. Collapsed, really, into a teary mess. For the first time I realized how big a deal it was for her that I’d been gone. She wrapped me in her arms and slobbered all over my shoulder. My ribs were killing me, but I let her have her hug. She pushed me to arm’s length and took a good look at me. I was looking at her, too. She looked older.

“You’re bigger,” she said, squeezing my shoulders. “A lot bigger.”

“Pizza and Frazzies,” I said. In a distant sort of way, I was suprised how flat everything felt. Ever since I’d woken up in the hospital, I’d had this numb feeling, like being on Levulor, only more so.

Gramps was hanging back, giving me a critical look.

“I don’t know how you did it, boy, but you sure as hell did.”

“I don’t know how I did it either.”

“That lawyer you hired must be one tough bird. I talked to him for a while last night,” Gramps said as we walked to Mom’s suv. “Chatty fellow. Looks like Nelson Mandela.”

“Like who?”

“Before your time. Old African politician. That Orkminister . . . Orkmaster . . . whatever, kind of looks like him. We talked a long time about how messed up our legal system is. Used to be there were only two reasons for sending people to jail: to punish them and to keep them from doing it again. Now it’s more like the government sees every minor crime as an opportunity to add another body to the labor force, and to fatten up their coffers.”

As Gramps spun off into one of his lectures, my mom was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. I was glad to get into the suv because she had to use both her hands for driving. Gramps, in the backseat, kept on yakking.

“According to Orkmonster, when that judge sentenced you to three years in prison, he wasn’t actually sentencing you to serve time. The federal government no longer operates long-term penal institutions. They just bid you out to a private rehab center. You got contracted out to McDonald’s. The Feds couldn’t care less that you were let out early. In fact, they like it.”

“How so?” I asked.

“You mess up again, they can resell your contract. The Feds get an immediate lump-sum payment, and McDonald’s gets themselves a fresh new worker. As it stands, McDonald’s agreed to let you go. They also gave you a nice little settlement, he mentioned. But I suppose he took it for his fee.”

“I suppose he did,” I said, wondering what Bork wanted with money.

It seemed that my beanie-wearing yellow-eyed idiot monkey had evolved into something capable not only of passing the Turing test but of fooling Hammer, Gramps, and some judge somewhere. Furthermore, he had acted on his own initiative to spring me from prison—Bork had developed a sense of purpose to go with his sense of humor. My little AI program had become self-aware—and had gone rogue.

Rogue AIs are not unknown. There are plenty of web-ghosts, of course—like Sammy Q. Safety—but web-ghosts never really
do
much. They lack self-awareness, and they never try to pass themselves off as human. But every now and then an AI becomes something more. The classic example, the one they told us about in AI class, was Adam Wormsley.

Adam Wormsley was rumored to have been a relic of the Diplomatic Wars of 2055, a cyberweapon that somehow escaped its handlers. But that was just a rumor. Nobody knew for sure who had built him, or how long he had survived undetected.

Over a period of several years Wormsley established a human identity, founded several web-based corporations, purchased a controlling interest in a robotics company, and constructed a mobile unit for himself that looked like an ordinary multibot, the kind used to clean office buildings and deliver packages. Wormsley’s mobile unit, however, was capable of performing a wide variety of physical tasks, including driving a suv and walking his four dogs.

Wormsley remained undetected until 2065, when
economists at the Department of Cybernetics Defense noticed certain statistical anomalies in Wormsley’s companies—in short, he was outperforming his competition. The department spent more than two months trying to locate a human named Adam Wormsley before they finally realized that Wormsley did not exist—at least not as a biological entity.

It took several months to completely destroy Adam Wormsley. Erasing his mobile unit was only the first step—the rogue AI had spread itself throughout the web. The DCD had to saturate the net with killbot programs, crashing WindOs from Indianapolis to Bangladesh and nearly triggering an international cyberwar.

Since then, the science of neutralizing rogue AIs has come a long way. Now when a rogue shows up, the DCD takes immediate and decisive steps.

It would only be a matter of time before Bork got himself noticed.

My room
had shrunk while I was away, partly because I’d gotten bigger and partly because my mother had been using it to store a bunch of boxes full of old papers and assorted junk collected by Gramps and my dad over the years.

“Where did you keep this stuff before?” I asked. My desk was piled with boxes. I couldn’t even see my WindO.

“Oh, here and there.”

“So now I have to live with it?” I picked up one of the boxes from my desk and set it on the floor.

“We didn’t know you were coming home, Bo. Not until that lawyer called us last night.”

I moved a few more boxes, saying nothing. Gramps’s yakking and my mother’s hovering were getting to me. I needed some space. I needed to talk to Bork. Alone.

“I suppose we should re-register you for school,” my mother said.

I stopped what I was doing. School? After the 3-8-7, school seemed insignificant. Something children did. True, I had yet to graduate. But going back, sitting in a
classroom, trying to fit in, trying to be one of them—I wasn’t sure I could do it.

“Let me think about that,” I said, giving her a look that made her back out of my room. I closed the door, sat down at my desk, and flipped on my WindO.

“Bork, it’s me,” I said.

The blue apple flickered, then the image of an empty desk appeared. Behind the desk was a wall of bookshelves. A few seconds later a man wearing a dark gray suit and sunglasses sat down at the desk, folded his hands, and smiled at me. It was the same Africanized version of Denton Wilke he had used before.

“Hello, Bo Marsten,” Bork said. This was the first time I had heard his voice since he’d turned himself from a troll into a lawyer. He sounded like a professional newsreader. “How are you feeling?”

“Not great.”

“I am sorry to hear that, Bo. Is your situation not improved?”

“Yes, it is. But I’m not happy with you, Bork.”

“Explain.”

“You almost got me killed.”

Bork sat back in his chair and regarded me through his sunglasses. I was pretty sure that behind them his gold irises were spinning. After a few seconds he spoke.

“You appear to be alive.”

“So do you,” I said.

Bork showed his teeth. His smile had improved since our last conversation.

“I have made some upgrades to my imaging program.”

“Whoop-de-doo.”

Bork’s image froze momentarily, then reanimated. “Are you expressing genuine exuberance, or employing sarcasm?” he asked.

“Sarcasm,” I said. “You almost got me killed.”

“As I have pointed out, you are alive.”

“Yes, but only because an Eskimo named Goro happened to come along just as I was about to get my head bitten off. Your actions caused Hammer to banish me. It’s a miracle I’m not dead.”

“An aberration,” said Bork. “According to my calculations Elwin Hammer should have arranged to fly you directly home. Forcing you to leave the plant on foot was not a rational act.”

“People are not always rational.”

“You have mentioned this before. Nevertheless, you are alive. I calculated a ninety-seven-point-four percent chance that you would be returned home safely.”

“So it was okay with you if one time in forty I’d end up dead?”

Bork answered without hesitation. “Yes, Bo.”

“Those are not acceptable odds.”

“What would you consider acceptable?”

“One hundred percent would be nice.”

“That is not always possible, Bo. In any case, death is impermanent.”

“How do you figure?”

“It is obvious. I have access to the entire written history of the human race. It is clear to me that humans make the same decisions over and over again when confronted by analogous stimuli. The only logical way to account for all these instances is to posit the existence of the process
known as reincarnation. Clearly, there are a finite number of intelligent entities able to take human form.”

“How do you account for the fact that the number of people increases every year?”

“I said finite, Bo. I did not say limited.”

I imagined that my own irises were spinning. I opened my mouth to argue, but then realized that this was the sort of open-ended argument that could never produce a victor.