The Empty Warrior (49 page)

But however little human interaction O’Keefe was allowed, the machine entity Seldon was his constant, if ofttimes unwelcome, consort. He had learned that the computer was not only capable of projecting its voice and intrusive surveillance into any part of the house, it could also extend its reach network-style into the house robots, or the cars, or even
Vigilant
. So notwithstanding the fact that he spent so much time alone, he was hardly unsupervised. Seldon constantly watched him, and apparently the captain, or any other person with sufficient authority, could check on him at will. That actuality roiled his mind night and day. With his predisposition to paranoia, never being certain of when he was being watched, and if so by whom, only served to constantly gnaw at the edges of his sanity.

Boredom was also a near perpetual companion. On his first day alone in the house, Seldon had familiarized him with the entertainment system, which was located in the media room. There he was introduced to Akadean music, which for the most part he found to be spiritless, vapid, and devoid of any content that could in any way be defined as edgy. Most of it sounded like New Age instrumentals for insomniacs.

Next he delved into a tremendous assortment of interactive games, but they were all strategy based or involved solving long, convoluted mysteries. There were certainly no shooter sims. He was led to understand that there were flight simulators, but he was forbidden to access them. There was not a flying vehicle on the planet that would grant him access to its interior, but the Akadeans apparently had no inclination to take any chances whatsoever concerning the potential escape of an aberrant. Others of the available games did involve a certain amount of vicarious thrills, but no violence of any sort. He played them, and enjoyed some, but more than only a few hours of any of them grew wearisome.

The spectator entertainments consisted of sports he did not understand, emotional dramas, and news he cared nothing about. Any events of real import were plainly censored from his view anyway, as the system would suddenly shut down from time to time for no discernible reason. There was also an incredible amount of sexually oriented material. The Akadeans had an appetite for sex and pornography that made the Terran internet look virginal by comparison. Anything and everything was readily available for sale, and at prices that Seldon described as being “not overly expensive.” Just the content of the advertising was more lascivious than anything O’Keefe had ever seen. He spent several afternoons viewing impeccably accurate holograms of flawless Akadean bodies splayed across the downstairs carpet engaging in what appeared to be every conceivable sexual act known to humanity. But after the novelty wore off, the pornography left him frustrated and lonelier than before, and he soon tired of it. For though every holographic promotion represented real people selling real services, he had no money of his own and he could not debit the household account without the express permission of the captain. Furthermore O’Keefe was certain that the strumpets of the planet, like all Akadeans, would be forbidden even to speak to him, much less engage in something more intimate, even had his supply of funds been unlimited. He was, for the most part, even restrained from gaining a manual release from his pent up desires for fear of who might be watching him at the time. So after about three weeks in the house he had given up on the media room almost entirely.

Instead, in an attempt to keep the anxiety which constantly prowled at the back of his consciousness at bay, he took to whiling away the evenings in drunkenness and spending the long but slowly shortening afternoons in the woods, exploring the terrain of the captain’s estate or just squandering his time lazing beneath the trees. Autumn was in its infancy on this part of Sefforia, so the temperatures were mild and the forest was only beginning to glow with the vibrant hues of fall, providing a beguiling backdrop to his daily excursions. The outdoor jaunts soon became the only thing that gave him any real relief from the engulfing ennui of his incarceration.

He was free to go outdoors at any time; however Seldon would not consent to unlock the door at the top of the stairwell that led from the garage to the surface until a mechanical escort had been arranged beyond the exit. The usual complement consisted of three of what Seldon called warders. They were identical to the cylindrical machine that never left the room whenever the captain came into his presence. They could hover silently on their internal antigravity generators, or fly weaving through the trees using those same antigravs to push away from or pull toward any physical manifestation around them. Outwardly, they very much resembled the other household robots only they were much smaller and lacked the myriad mechanical arms and connective ports. But inwardly the warders were programmed for only one function: to keep dangerous wildlife away from the human denizens of the property or, in O’Keefe’s case, to keep what the Akadeans considered to be a dangerous human from attempting escape or otherwise making trouble.

The warders clearly were equipped with sensors that could track him at some distance, as O’Keefe rarely caught a glimpse of them once he left the area immediately around the dome. Yet they would invariably converge on his position as he made his way back to the house. They were also armed, perhaps lethally so. Seldon had gently informed him before his initial afternoon foray that there would be no tolerance for his leaving the estate. Exactly what the machines would do to stop him was left ambiguous, but O’Keefe had little doubt that they were eminently capable of enforcing Seldon’s will. That belief was soon shown to be justified.

Late on an afternoon when he was following a small rivulet upstream, one of the warders from his retinue glided up to hover only a few feet from his face, startling him by its sudden appearance. It spoke to him in Seldon’s voice. “Please remain where you are,” it intoned. “A rekkot approaches.” Then the flying chromium canister whizzed away to his left.

O’Keefe’s language implant left him cognizant that a rekkot was a large, ursine predator, brown in color with powerful jaws, flesh-rending teeth, and thick limbs armed with long, retractable claws. The image that coalesced in his mind was terrifying.

Soon a growing dread was born in his chest as he began to hear ponderous footfalls approaching over the dry leaves that covered the forest floor. The sounds came from the far side a small hillock that was only slightly to the right of where the warder had disappeared. The rekkot had evidently picked up his scent and was following it in a direct line toward his position. Presently its head crested the top of the gently sloping knoll and its eyes searched to the left and right. The creature stopped and seemed to look directly at O’Keefe while it sampled the smells of the forest through wet, fist-sized nostrils. Its enormous nose twitched as the beast searched through every smell in the odor-laden air, seeking the one scent that was evidence of its prey. Nevertheless it did not seem aware of O’Keefe’s presence beyond on an olfactory level, and in seconds it resumed its slow plodding up to the crown of the rise.

Despite his artificial awareness of exactly what a rekkot was, no amount of stale encyclopedic information could have prepared O’Keefe for the real-life enormity of the animal. When the creature reached the top of the incline it rose to its haunches to sniff the air once more, and it towered to over fifteen feet in height. It raised its head as if the smell it sought were just out of reach, its nostrils visibly contracting with each urgent inhalation, while malevolent claws nearly half a foot in length slowly extended from the base of each massive, shaggy fore-limb. As quickly as they had appeared the mammalian shanks were pulled back to be hidden once more behind the predator’s bristly pelt, but the brief display had been enough for O’Keefe. He was viscerally certain that a single, casual swipe of those talons across his abdomen would be enough to utterly disembowel him, and his flight reflex engaged in the space of a heartbeat.

He whipped his head around, glancing at the far side of the streambed, gauging his chances of leaping to the other side. They were not good. Here the brook had eaten deeply into the soft floor of the forest, and the scant safety its crossing would have offered lay over a dozen feet away. Worse, the creature, whose eyesight was doubtlessly blunted in comparison to its sense of smell, had finally detected O’Keefe by his movements. There was only some sixty yards between them when his eyes met the beast’s unfocused glare. The rekkot threw back its head and let out a deafening, deep-throated roar that reverberated through the trees and seemed to shake even the ground beneath O’Keefe’s feet. Then the animal dropped to all fours as quickly as its bulk would allow and thundered down the slope directly toward him.

But as the rekkot took its first strides, a flash of shining movement glinted at the periphery of O’Keefe’s vision. It was one of the warders. The robot adeptly sped to a spot that gave it an aiming point between the trees, slowed, and let loose a perfectly defined streak of bluish-white coruscation from its base. The sizzling bolt of power hung hissing in the air for a fraction of a second, seemingly connecting the bright body of the warder to the right side of the rekkot’s ribcage. As the beam vanished the animal faltered and slowed, roaring again, but this time at a higher timbre, at a pitch unmistakably indicating pain rather than aggression.

Even as its bellow lingered in the air, a second warder closed from the rekkot’s left, loosing another scorching blast that caught the beast squarely on the side of its neck. O’Keefe could clearly see a wisp of smoke rise from its pelt at the point of impact. The creature skidded to a halt, snarling and snapping its jaws at the empty air beside the charred spot on its hide. Then, growling and showing its teeth, it slowly backed away before turning and retreating back up the hill. Both robots advanced and fired again, as if for good measure, scorching both sides of the rekkot’s posterior as it fled over the crest of the rise, eliciting another guttural roar of pain from the beast’s throat. One of the machines continued its pursuit, flying a mercurial course through the trees behind the retreating rekkot and quickly disappearing from view. The pungent odor of singed hair drifted by O’Keefe’s nose just as he lost sight of the robot.

“Where the hell’s he going?” O’Keefe wondered aloud.

An answer came from above and behind him where, unbeknownst to him until that moment, the third warder hovered. “The rekkot was untagged,” it explained, again in Seldon’s voice, as O’Keefe, surprised, whirled to face it. “It was not a mature specimen. The animal is new to the estate, and as it is male it probably wandered into this area attempting to carve out a new territory for itself. That is why it was not detected long before it approached. And as it attempted to attack you, it is either too young to have been inculcated to refrain from such behavior or for some reason, the highest probabilities being disease or extreme hunger, it has lost its fear of humans. In either case it must be tagged and monitored.”

“So you keep track of the wildlife around here, too.” O’Keefe said incredulously, his mind still trying to come to grips with the fact that so large a predator had not been a fully grown adult. “I guess in addition to everything else you’re a park ranger. Is there anything you don’t do?”

“No, I am not a park ranger, as you so pithily put it,” the warder intoned as it lazily descended, stopping just at O’Keefe’s eye level. “The rekkot will be tagged with a monitor that uploads information to the Wildlife Bureau Network. A summary of our encounter with it has already been transmitted. For the foreseeable future the network will record the rekkot’s movements and study its behavior, watching for any further attacks or depredations. Should they occur, the appropriate actions will be taken.”

“Is taking ‘appropriate actions’ a euphemism for killing it?” O’Keefe asked. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other whether or not the beast had been hurt, but at the moment extermination seemed rather harsh, especially considering that the big predator’s intention to make him dinner had been thwarted with such ease. But beyond that he was interested to see just how humane the judgmental Akadeans and their hardware actually were when faced with a potential threat to life. Their reactions, as played out by their mechanical servants, might give him some insight into what kind of treatment he could expect to receive over the course of a long lifetime in their care, a lifetime which could conceivably offer nothing more than the benevolent confinement he was now enduring.

“It will not be euthanized unless it is ascertained that the animal is terminally diseased or mentally unbalanced in a way that is beyond our ken,” Seldon answered with all the dispassion that filled her digital heart. “If the rekkot presents further threats to humans, it will first be captured. Then it will be habituated to give humans a wide berth before it is released, at which point it may be relocated as well. Would you be more comfortable if it were to be killed?”

“Excuse me?” O’Keefe asked. The question had caught him off guard. Seldon was a computer; a very sophisticated computer to be sure, but nevertheless a machine that did only what it was programmed to do. Why would anyone with access to Seldon’s programming be interested in his attitude toward an oversized grizzly bear? As quickly as the thought raced across his neurons, understanding flared in his brain like the bloom of flames from a napalm strike. In the same way he had been interested in the Akadean reaction to the attack, Seldon was interested in his own response—an aberrant’s response—to that same attack and for exactly the same reasons. He was not merely being detained and spied on; he was being studied just as surely as if he were a rat in a maze, and Seldon was the entity entrusted with compiling the results. Once again, it seemed clear that the Akadeans, beneath all their hospitality and medical concern, truly saw him merely as they would a chimpanzee in a laboratory—a quasi-human fit for nothing more than experiments overseen by an elephantine electronic calculator. The thought was enough to make him biliously nauseated.