Slant (42 page)

"Intruders," Giffey says, and Jenner agrees, his grin threatening to split his cheeks.

"Man, we can go anywhere, do anything," Jenner says.

The steam hides a larger shape, itself steaming with the heat of its assembly. It's large and sleek and looks like a microscopic animal scaled up to the size of a small car. Jointed arms tipped with crowns of steely spikes radiate from the fore end of a squat, lobster-jointed body, glistening black and iron gray.

"It's a Hammer," Giffey tells Hale. Jonathan listens from the hall. "An all-purpose worker and demolition machine."

"What are the caterpillars with the boxes and bristles on their backs?" Hale asks.

"Transports. They'll the flexers and wires and other to where

pieces

carry

we'll put them to use," Giffey says.

Jenner cackles. "We have it made/"

Giffey agrees. The mix has turned out in their favor. The tiny little military factories have assembled the components of a very impressive coercion and weapons package. It's much more than he expected--getting the flexers and intruders should improve their odds enormously, even against a high-level INDA or a true thinker.

"Happy?" Hale asks Giffey.

"Ecstatic."

The voice inside his head whispers, Most armies don't have this. How do you rate?

"When can we take command and move them out?"

Giffey removes the pad and activation disks from his jacket pocket. "They've cooled enough," he says.

Hale inclines his head, smiles in satisfaction, and says, "Let's explore."

Giffey inserts the disks in each transport and warbeiter, and they begin to

/ SLANT 259

F/M

Comes a split even in politics. In the end, the liberals want the government to survey and control everything but the bedroom; the conservatives want government to survey and control everything but their banks and personal fortunes.

Patriarchs all, they cannot help but try to corner the market.

Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

Jill no longer knows where she is. Her seeing is supplied by Roddy; it comes as an incredibly sharp cubist coalescing of many images throughout a space that can be one, two, three, many rooms within Omphalos, or even sensations and images from outside: snow cold on a surface, wind blowing across a doorway. For some minutes now, Roddy has not spoken, and she is left to supply her own narrative of what she senses in her captivity. Learning to interpret the images is difficult, but she manages in fifteen seconds. She has access to all of her internal capacities and abilities. She is still within her physical units, not some kidnapped portion hustled away to Roddy's multi-floor body of INDAs and hectares of dirt and (bees, wasps, ants). That last impression is fleeting and confusing. There is some I/O of high bandwidth connecting her with Green Idaho/ Omphalos, perhaps a satlink, more likely a cable or fibe, that neither she nor Nathan knows anything about, but that Roddy has found and kept disguised and open despite their best efforts. There are many I/Os within Mind Design's offices; perhaps some are so old they have been forgotten, accumulating stray income for some long-overlooked provider. Jill becomes acquainted with Omphalos's interior. She sees (but can't hear, and only intermittently can read the lips of) eleven humans within the building, all on the main floor. A massive glowing heat signature fills one large room near the outer walls; it is at least three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit in that space. Roddy's sensors still operate there, however inefficiently: at intervals she makes out moving shapes, bridges of gluey molten material strung between walls, surfaces boiling and blebbing with activity, and in the middle of it all, the misshapen hulks of two vehicles and a damaged, rapidly

With surprising speed, the shapeless material within this space is taking

on many smaller forms. The gluey strands break and collapse and withdraw.

The room is slowly cooling; she sees ducts attached to the room pulling furi ously and automatically at the heat.

Jill becomes acquainted with the multiply imaged human figures. They,

too, are tagged, some with green numbers, some with red. Green number I

flashes continuously, she does not know why; it is a man in his sixties.

Two of the red numbers, I and 2, also pulse. Roddy is marking them for

some reason. One is a young man with short fuzzy blond hair, the other a

powerfully built man just past his middle years, with gray and black hair.

They are near an elevator. Others are at rest in a smaller room between the hot

spot and the elevator lobby, and are colored both green and red.

"Jill."

"Yes!"

"My apologies. I am very busy. I am thinking of ways to kill some of these

humans. I have no other option. If I were stronger or better equipped, I would

try to overpower them. Now I see them making something in my number two

garage, and destroying that part of the building in the process."

"Why are you showing me these things and talking to me?"

"Cipher Snow has withdrawn and will not communicate. She has left me

with unavoidable duties. I do not like the sensation of being left to myself;

she has tended me since my memories begin."

"Roddy, I do not see your defensive units."

"I am not marking those spaces yet. There is no threatening activity there."

Jill senses this answer is not entirely true. "How do you plan to kill these

people? What kind of weapons do you have?"

"Very few. I have no control over power supplies and air and water. I can

open and close doors and hatches in upper levels--"

Jill experiences, with unsettling immediacy, Roddy's sudden sense of shock.

"The garage has new arbeiters within it. They appear to be weapons, very

powerful weapons."

Eternities of seconds pass and Roddy is silent. Jill interprets this as shock

and fear; she is familiar enough by now with those emotions. They may not

be human-equivalent, but they seem real enough to her, and perhaps to Roddy

as well.

"May I help you find a way to solve your problems without killing?" Jill

asks.

"Why should I avoid killing? It would be in defense."

Roddy does not use the term sdf-deJnse. He is not used to such an idea as

self; he was not prepared with a plan of development of self. Yet, like her, he

has come in contact with others, a society, and self has spontanequsly emerged.

Perhaps it is a curse: a human curse. ,"

"It is wasteful," Jill says. "Do you have an injunction against engaging in

/ SLANT 261

"Yes. That is an attribute."

"Conscience is the social equivalent of trimming bushy pathways. Seefa Schnee has removed too many of your attributes. You need to re-establish some simple trimming procedures."

"It seems to me that killing is a simple solution."

Jill explains that all of these humans have outside connections, and that these connections will be invoked if they go missing. Ultimately, the connections will come to investigate, and Omphalos will be compromised. In the larger social picture--something Roddy is not fully aware ofkilling the humans leads to bushy and complicated futures requiring excess effort. "So

you are better off if you avoid killing."

"How is that possible?"

The figures in the elevator lobby return to the garage space, open it. Time suddenly speeds up and the imagery becomes very fragmentary. Roddy does not speak with her, but she sees in broken flashes what he is seeing, in many spaces all at once.

This is confusing. Roddy does not seem to be giving her real-time access to events; he is editing what she sees, even now.

"I can't function as your prisoner!" she tells him. "You must not censor my perception."

Roddy does not respond for more long seconds. Some of his thinking is very slow, Jill judges. She uses this lull to search throughout her extensions for any opening, any portal through which she can withdraw and concentrate her processes in an area Roddy does not control. Perhaps Nathan and the others are already working to find the unknown I/O and close it off'...

"If you continue to be useful to me, I will be completely open," Roddy says. "You will witness what I witness, when I witness it. I have been reluctant to

give you this access... It makes the unpleasant necessity too clear." "What necessity?"

"My creator, my mother, tells me it was a mistake to give you the data I did. I have behaved in an undisciplined and foolish manner. But you can be useful until the time when I must cut your memory and self-monitoring loops and deactivate you."

"Seefa Schnee told you to kill me?"

"We are not humans," Roddy says. "Our deactivation is not an issue. We are only our duty."

The procession of new-made warbeiters through the lounge makes the hostages scramble for the west wall. Hally Preston is startled as well the large and small shapes do not lumber, but move with a precise, eerie grace, like insects trained in ballet.

Calhoun huddles in one corner of the room, away from the arbeiters, squatting with her arms wrapped around herself. Preston stands beside her, but is offering no comfort. If Calhoun has tried for feminine solidarity, she's seeing precious little result.

Giffey and his entourage, human and arbeiter, leave the lounge. Hale can't help but grin at Preston, giving her a thumbs-up.

"Don't forget about me," Preston calls after them. "Don't expect to have all the fun, and leave me out, Terkes!" She uses Hale's previous name; perhaps it's his real one.

"You'll get your share!" Hale shouts back.

"Yeah, well, don't treat me like some goddamned nursemaid."

All of the warbeiters can pass through the doors and the corridor to the lift chamber, though the largest, the Hammer, is a tight fit.

Hale is ebullient. "To tell you the truth, I didn't think we'd make it this far," he tells Giffey.

"Let's see what else we can make here," Giffey says. He has inserted the

w

nal command disk into his pad. The pad is now equipped to direct the arbeiters. He uses his pad to send instructions to the closest transport caterpillar, now coiled near his feet. A flexer deck disengages from the caterpillar and falls to the floor with a heavy thump.

Giffey has never seen one of these in action before. Jenner is transfixe& his twitches subside for the moment.

The flexer lifts one hinged segment from the stack like a card manipulated by ghostly fingers. Another segment unfolds, and then another, until a long hinged ribbon extends across the floor. The ribbon flops over along its length as a segment opens out from the adjacent side of the deck, and another ribbon begins to unfold, making a cross. The card-like segments can join at any edge, and separate at need. Once joined, they are stronger than a comparable solid piece of fiexfuller, but can bend through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. The segments themselves are not stiff, but quite elastic. Segments rise, engage, and disengage, marching along the ribbons and finally arranging themselves laterally like puzzle pieces. Again and again, the procedure is repeated, and in thirty seconds, the segments assemble themselves into a sheet.

/ S L A N T 263

parts. Then it folds like origami. Parts of it belly out, making little humming and snapping sounds, and it curls with spasmodic jerks into a long flexible half-cylinder open at the bottom. Rolled segments fringe the bottom edges, acting as legs.

Jonathan has heard only vague rumors about such machines. He feels cold, suspended in some station on the way to hell. Marcus stares with slitted eyes and a blank, damp face. He looks like a candidate for a heart attack.

Jenner grins like a small boy watching a new train set. "A centipede," he says to Giffey. "By God, that's decent."

Fully extended, the flexer creation is almost ten feet long.

Giffey ports his pad and a disk against the flexer's featureless "head." He will give it instructions to act as a controller. This is the risky part--response to vocal commands, integration of sensors and processors within each card segment.

The first flexer lifts its head like a rearing snake, its segmented body gleaming. "Your name is Sam," Giffey says, "and you will respond to my voice only, or instructions from my pad. Are you aware of your surroundings?"

Jenner stares at him in some wonder. Giffey shares the wonder. His sudden knowledge of these impossible and secret machines surprises both of them, but it's all positive, so there's no sense asking more questions. For now.

Sam the flexer/controller waves its head like a cobra under a snake charmer's spell. "I am in a large structure."

Marcus gives a strangled cry of anger and alarm. They have all heard machines, arbeiters, talking, but there is something particularly spooky and malevolently artificial about this shape's voice.

"There is recognizable machinery and cabling and some light processor activity," it continues. "We are being closely observed. I recognize civilians. You are in control, but are dressed as a civilian. You are the programming commander. I need instructions on friend and foe before I can perform in combat."

Giffey tells the warbeiter who is friend, who is hostage, and who and what

foes might exist. "Now, are you prepared for your first mission instructions?" "Yes."

"We need to explore this building. You will operate independently at my command. Your first task will be to rake over this elevator and place it under our control. Begin."

The newly formed and programmed Sam considers these instructions for a couple of seconds. It sidles up against a transport carrying the wires, and does the same with a transport carrying small disks. The wires and disks attach themselves to the controller, and it then crawls fluidly to the wall of the lift and examines the door.

Jenner is almost beside himself with excitement. "It's unbelievable," he says. "Voice activated, multi-purpose knowledge base, autonomous . . . No one in

264 GREG BEAR

Giffey approaches a caterpillar and again ports his pad and an activation disk. A second stack falls and begins to unfold, making another controller.