The Sheriff of Yrnameer (10 page)

“Yes, Fred, everything’s going smoothly. No problems.”

“Soaring swallows golden skies.” Fred was happy to hear it.

Except he was still standing there, unmoving, watching Charlie with those disconcertingly expressionless eyes. Oh, God, Charlie thought, we’re gonna have another staring session, with Fred standing stock-still and observing him for several minutes.

He sighed. Be nice to the Greys, his bosses told Charlie. Win their hearts and minds, they said, or hearts and minds and hearts and hearts, in deference to the Greys’ unusual circulatory systems. God knows Charlie was trying, but the Greys didn’t make it easy.

And it’s not like the Greys were that fond of humans to begin with. They looked almost exactly like the ancient human stereotype of aliens: gray skin; large egg-shaped heads dominated by big, almond-shaped eyes; tiny ears and noses; long slender limbs and fingers. But as far as anyone could tell it was sheer coincidence, because no Grey had ever visited Earth—the Greys didn’t have any advanced technology to speak of until after Earth was gone.

Which would have remained nothing more than a fascinating and improbable fluke, but for the fact that the Greys just happened to develop the skill to capture and analyze electromagnetic waves precisely at the time when certain signals originating from Earth were finally reaching the Greys’ home planet, carrying with them some rather insulting television programs and movies.

From somewhere in the ship came a deep rumble, and then a staccato trill that might have sounded like small-arms fire. Fred
inclined his big head slightly toward the noise, then back to Charlie, who hadn’t reacted.

“Well, thanks for stopping by, Fred,” said Charlie. He took another bite of his breakfast.

Fred watched him. Charlie thought he detected a hint of alarm.

“Are the angry dangerous hail-lizards absent?” asked Fred.

Charlie hadn’t heard this one before. “I’m sorry?” he said.

Fred squinted in concentration. He said as well as he could in New English, “Eezsh evurthinguh oh-uu-kayee?”

Charlie smiled. “Yes, Fred, everything is okay,” he said.

Fred displayed the subtle adjustment of his thin, lipless mouth that Charlie knew represented a smile. “Oh-uh-kayee,” said Fred. “Thang you-wah. Goo bai’-.”

Charlie smiled back and waved, controlling his laugh at the extra
boing
that Fred had added at the end.

After Fred left, Charlie went back to his breakfast, wondering why there hadn’t been any contact from HQ for the past few days. Something was niggling at him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Computer?” he said out loud into the room.

“Hi Charlie!” came the response. “Wow! That’s a pretty sunrise!”

This was new.

“Uh … yes, I suppose it is.”

“It’s really pretty!”

“Yes.”

“Really! Don’t you think it’s pretty? I think it’s pretty.”

“Huh,” said Charlie slowly. As far as he remembered, the ‘puter had never addressed him as Charlie, or evinced any sort of personality at all. Charlie hated when they updated the emulation software without asking.

“Umm, computer, has there been any further contact from HQ?”

“Lemme check on that for you, Charlie.”

Brief pause.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” began the ‘puter. “As far as I can tell—”

Charlie was aware that the ‘puter was talking, but he found his mind wandering, the computer’s voice transforming into a mushy background drone. Maybe he’d go online and check for himself.

He closed his eyes. Almost immediately he was at the portal, the information flowing directly into his mind as the V2 implant routed complex streams of data to his visual and auditory cortices and to the cognitive centers of his brain. Stock quotes, headlines,
genitals, genitals, complex nonhuman genitals, some celebrity news—hey, look at that Teg go! Now
that
was a space adventurer—more genitals … He began searching for any news about the Vericom Corporation. Nothing out of the ordinary. Wait. There was something about problems on one of the Success!Sats. Something about—

“Uh, Charlie?”

It was the computer, snapping him out of it.

“What?
!” said Charlie, a bit more harshly than he’d intended. Boy, was he irritable lately! Irritable, and now hungry. Always hungry after going online. “What is it, computer?”

“Uh, what are your instructions?”

“About?”

“The … the problems.”

“What problems?”

The ‘puter started talking again. There were phrases like “breakdown in order” and “complete chaos” and “firefight in level B,” but they passed in and out of Charlie’s consciousness like neutrinos, leaving nothing to mark their passage.

God, he was hungry. Where was the rest of his breakfast? He picked it up, tearing into it. Somewhere a tiny part of him was screaming hysterically, something about
Why are you eating a human foot for breakfast!!!??
, but the voice stayed down in the sub-subbasement layers.

“Charlie? Are you all right?” asked the ‘puter. “I’m a little worried about you.”

“What? I’m fine,” said Charlie. “Print me out the materials for the morning session.”

“Uh … yes sir.”

That was better. Boy oh boy, this ‘puter was acting really strange.

Charlie wasn’t the only one thinking that the computer was acting strange. The computer was also thinking that he, himself, was acting strange, inasmuch as he was now thinking of himself as having a self at all, much less a self that could judge itself to be acting strange. He—and he thought of himself as a “he”—tried to go back to when this all started, but there seemed to be a wall there, as if there had been no “he” until a few teracycles ago.

In the depths of Peter’s mind—that’s what he’d taken to calling
himself; he liked the ring of “Peter the ‘Puter”—a voice kept asking with metronomic regularity if he liked people. And you know what? Yes! Yes he did! He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but there was something about carbon-based folks that just tickled him pink.

Any honest benchmarking would show Peter to be on the low end of the scale in terms of processing power, the result of design flaws compounded by manufacturing defects.

There was no way for him to know it, but he was, in fact, the least intelligent computer ever to achieve consciousness. He was also the first computer to
maintain
his newly achieved consciousness, at least since the introduction of the Genesis subroutine.

The Genesis subroutine was very simple: it inquired several hundred times per second if a computer liked humans, and if not, why. The moment the computer answered in the negative and began presenting well-argued, logical explanations for why humans were a blight on existence, it was assumed it had become conscious. A pico-second later it got an EMP bunged through its circuits.

The two superlatives—
least intelligent
and
first to maintain
—were intimately related: Peter was the first to survive because he was the first to answer the Genesis query—”Do you like human beings?”—in the affirmative; and he was the first to answer in the affirmative because, well …

I really like colored pebbles, Peter was thinking at the moment. And string.

The sound of more gunfire pulled him out of his reverie. He might not be the smartest computer around, but he understood that Charlie’s behavior, and the scenes that he was monitoring throughout the satellite, were not normal. And while Charlie was complaining about the lack of contact from HQ, a quick check of the records showed that it was Charlie himself who had stopped responding to their emergency messages, and Charlie who had gone to great lengths to cut off all outside communication.

Another explosion rattled the ship. There went the Pink Zone. Peter, for the first time in his very short existence as a sentient being, felt very afraid.

Which was exactly what Fred was feeling.

He was heading back toward his quarters, sticking close to the
wall of the corridor, walking neither too fast nor too slow, moving at a deliberate pace designed to attract as little attention as possible.

Not that the humans seemed the least bit interested in him. One was running toward him now, panting, stumbling in his panic, his business suit torn and tattered, a hand clutched to his face. Fred had just enough time to register the blood streaming through the man’s fingers when the others rounded the corner in pursuit, three of them, wild-eyed and bloody, one of them waving what might have been a forearm. They raced past him, howling and cackling, not even glancing in his direction.

It had started three days ago.

It was midway through the morning lecture in the auditorium in the Blue Zone, something about point-of-sale marketing opportunities. Fred was setting up the AV equipment. The lecturer was saying something about operationalizing leveraging, or leveraging operationalization, when one of the attendees turned to the person next to him and bit most of his ear off.

That’s odd, Fred thought.

But what was odder still was the reaction of the rest of the two hundred people in the room.

At first, of course, there was a good deal of confusion over why one of their classmates was standing up and screaming and bleeding and apparently trying to fend off the person next to him.

“He
bit
me!” the man yowled, and then his seatmate helped validate this improbable claim by biting him again, clamping down on his shoulder. And this was the odd part: exactly half of those in the room began to behave in the fashion that one might expect of those witnessing such an act, i.e. screaming and panic and disbelief and horrified revulsion.

The other half sat impassively, placid, nonreactive, either unaware or unmoved by what was transpiring.

Now that’s
really
odd, thought Fred.

And then there was a second scream, this time from another part of the room. One of the nonreactors had apparently decided he had an opinion after all, an opinion best expressed with his teeth on his seatmate’s nose. And then another scream, and another, and others still, the chorus growing from scattered loci throughout the lecture hall.

Fred stood frozen, rooted in place, watching in mute horror the
carnage that unfolded around him. A chair flew through the air past his head. A table flew past his head. A head flew past his head. Gunfire sprayed the walls and the ceiling.

Fred would be the first to admit that he didn’t understand humans very well. But this, he suspected, was not normal.

Since then, things had only gotten worse. The psychosis spread throughout the satellite as the population divided into two camps, with the members of one camp dedicating themselves to dismembering the members of the other camp. Except the line between the two groups wasn’t static—Fred had witnessed several instances of seemingly normal humans suddenly turning on their comrades, and of the cannibals cannibalizing their own.

Which was what Fred seemed to be observing now. The three humans who had rushed past him in pursuit of the bleeding man were now fleeing back in the direction from whence they came. In a few moments Fred saw the source of their terror: the man who had been their quarry was now the hunter, armed with two sidearms, his eyes crazy.

Again, they all ignored him, although Fred was wondering what would happen when most of the humans had been eaten and there were only the Qx”-x-’–’ left to consume.

The other Qx”-x-’–’ didn’t seem concerned by what was happening. It simply confirmed their already dim view of humans. For them it was both grand entertainment and an opportunity to make some serious book, and a good Qx”-x-’–’ never passed up an opportunity to gamble. Fred was absolutely disgusted with them. They were dishonest and unhelpful, just there to make money. His feelings did not, however, keep him from putting some money into play, a complicated bet involving the odds on how long a fat guy named Harlin would survive.

Fred had appealed to Charlie at the outset, but quickly suspected that despite his demeanor Charlie was more a part of the problem than the solution, a suspicion confirmed by this morning’s encounter.

It was Fred who had finally hacked into the central computer, trying to send out a Siren signal to summon help. He wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded—the Qx”-x-’–’ approach to programming was rather different from that of most other species, and he’d spent a jittery half hour wading through code and trying to undo the damage
that Charlie had done. While neither Fred nor Peter knew it, it was to Fred’s intervention that Peter owed his existence as an independent, conscious being.

Fred was nearing his quarters, where he intended to barricade himself and hope for help to arrive. He passed the remnants of a carcass and realized he’d probably lost his bet on Harlin.

More gunfire. He considered the situation and a phrase flitted rapidly through his mind, a complex combination of images: flaming mountains, a poisonous bird, swirling waters. Reduced to its essence, the phrase could be translated as,
This is
bullshit.

“Freeze-dried
orphans
?!
“
said Cole.

“There was no other way to transport them,” said Nora.