Unable to kick Agnes in the head, I wriggled my leg in a feeble attempt to loosen her grip. Soon she had pulled herself nearly even with me and managed to latch her hand onto my wrist.
“Let go, you psychopath!” I shouted.
“Give me the crystal!”
“Don’t you see, Agnes? It’s too powerful. I have to throw it into the volcano!”
We struggled for a moment in silence as she processed this statement.
“You know it’s not a real volcano, right?” she said.
“No?” I said. “Then you won’t mind if I do this!” I pulled with all my might but was unable to tear my hand free. I tried again with the same result.
“Having trouble?”
“Blast it, Agnes. This could go on forever. We’re too evenly matched. Just accept that you’re never getting the crystal back.”
“What if we team up? You said it yourself: neither one of us can do it alone. But maybe together we can!”
“Not going to happen,” I said, still straining to pull the crystal away.
“Then you give me no choice,” Agnes said. She let go of my ankle and reached for the lazegun at her hip.
“Don’t be foolish,” I said. “You know you can’t shoot me. Your programming won’t…” I trailed off, realizing she was aiming the gun at the lip of the volcano, just below my hand. If she hit it just right, she’d blast the fiberglass to pieces, sending us both sliding back down to the base of the volcano.
“Hold still!” Agnes shouted, as I writhed and wriggled and generally did my best to get between the gun and what she was aiming at. As long as there was a good chance she’d hit me, she’d be unable to pull the trigger. All I had to do is keep her from getting a clean shot.
As I wriggled, though, I could feel my grip loosening on the edge. One way or another, we were going down. Maybe if I could control my fall, I could tear myself loose from Agnes’s grip and get away.
I tucked my knees into my chest and let go of the edge, extending my legs in an explosive kick against the side of the volcano. I soared over Agnes, breaking free of her grip. And I fell.
I’d pushed off so hard that I missed the side of the volcano entirely and fell the full ten meters to the concrete below. For several seconds I lay on my back, dazed. I became aware that Agnes was limping away from me, holding the crystal in her hand. I hadn’t even realized I’d dropped it. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet and went after her. Hearing me gaining on her, she turned and pointed the lazegun at me.
“Stop this, Agnes,” I said. “You can’t shoot me. If you could, you’d have done it already.”
She fired a few centimeters in front of my feet, blasting a hole in the concrete and showering me with pebbles. I leaped over the hole and she fired again. This time I was off-balance and nearly fell in the hole before I could jump over it. I dodged to my left to avoid the third hole and then sprinted toward her. She took aim but she was unable to fire before I got in the way. I closed on her, and she shakily pointed the gun at me, trying to force herself to fire. I tried to lunge for the crystal but slipped on some loose gravel and barreled into her. The gun went off as we fell to the ground, the blast missing me by millimeters. I tore the gun out of her hand and tossed it into a pile of debris, and then tried to pry the crystal out of her other hand. Agnes writhed underneath me, trying to pull her hand away.
“Hey, Sasha,” said a man’s voice behind me. Rex? I hadn’t heard him approach.
“Sir! I’ve got her pinned! Help me get the plans out of her hand!”
Rex didn’t respond. Still sitting on top of Agnes’s torso and gripping her fist with both my hands, I turned to look behind me.
“I think I’m going to lie down,” Rex said. A smoking black hole had been blown in his chest. He keeled over backwards and hit the ground.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Rex!” I cried, forgetting all about Agnes. I got to my feet and ran to him. He didn’t look good. His face had gone white, in stark contrast to the smoking crater where his sternum used to be. There was too much charring to see how deep the damage went.
“Hi, Sasha,” he gasped. “I think your sister… shot me.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, kneeling down next to him. “I was trying to take the plans from Agnes. I’ll get you back to the Flagrante Delicto.”
“No good,” said Pepper, skidding to a halt on the gravel next to me. Boggs, Donny and Egslaad were on her heels. Donny was using both of his arms to hold his head on. “The Flagrante Delicto’s systems are all offline. Too far to carry him anyway. We need to find a place to treat him here.”
“Here in The City?” I asked, looking around. “This place is a ghost town. There’s nobody around but monkeys and half-crazed literary robots.”
“It’s all we’ve got,” said Pepper. “Boggs, a little help?”
Pepper and I moved out of the way and Boggs leaned over Rex. “Potential Friend! Are you okay?”
Rex, on the verge of blacking out, gave Boggs a shaky thumbs-up.
“Stay with us, sir,” I said. “We’re going to get you some help.”
Boggs picked up Rex. “Where to, Sasha?”
“This way,” I said, setting off down the road. Scanning the area, I saw no sign of Agnes.
We soon reached an intersection, and I realized we were at the part of The City called The Strip.
“We’ve been here before, Sasha!” Boggs said. “Maybe the Narrator can help!”
“Boggs, don’t you remember? The Narrator isn’t… never mind. This way.” It actually wasn’t a bad idea. If any of Pritchett’s helper bots were still around, they might be able to help us. After all, they’d put Donny back together; maybe they could fix a gaping chest wound.
I led us to the building where we’d encountered the Narrator. By this time, Rex was slipping in and out of consciousness.
“Narrator!” Boggs shouted as we entered the vast chamber. “Potential Friend needs your help!”
“Boggs,” I said. “We’ve been over this. There is no Narrator.”
“Then why did we come here?”
“I thought that maybe some of Pritchett’s robot helpers might still….”
Suddenly a man’s deeply tanned face shimmered into being in front of us.
“HALT!” the face boomed. “WHO DARES ENTER THE HALL OF THE NARRATOR?”
“I told you, Sasha!” Boggs cried. “It’s him! It’s the Narrator!”
Donny’s legs began to quiver audibly.
Pepper started, “Is that Wayne—”
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY OUTWARD APPEARANCE!” the hologram boomed.
“How in Space…?” I gasped. “Pritchett, is that you?”
“PRITCHETT? HOW DO YOU KNOW… OH, HEY, I RECOGNIZE YOU GUYS. YOU’RE THE ONES I SUCKED THROUGH THE WORMHOLE A FEW WEEKS AGO. I THOUGHT YOU LEFT.”
“We got sucked through again,” I said.
“Wait,” Pepper said. “You control the wormhole? Who are you?”
“I’M A NEURALNET ALGORITHM FOR—HOLD ON A MINUTE.”
The face disappeared. A moment later, an unremarkable human-sized robot entered the chamber from the door in the far wall. It walked toward us, stopping a few paces away. “I only use the hologram when I’m trying to scare people,” he said. “I prefer to use this form when possible. Anyway, as I was saying, I’m a Neuralnet Algorithm for Regulating Astronomical Transport and Relocation. NARATR for short. I was designed to control a man-made wormhole used for colonizing other star systems.”
Pepper shook her head in amazement. “So Pritchett’s claim to be the Narrator was just another scam.”
“You see, Sasha?” Boggs said. “I told you there’s a Narrator.”
I ignored him. “You’re saying that you sucked us through the wormhole?”
“Well, yes, although this second time, it was an accident.”
“An accident?” I asked. “How in Space do you accidentally—”
“Mr. Narrator, sir,” Boggs said, �
�can you help my friend Potential Friend? He has a hole in him.”
“So I see,” said the man, regarding Rex with a grimace. “My assistants may be able to save him. But I need something from you first.”
“I think Sasha still has the book,” Boggs said. “Sasha, give him the book.”
“I don’t think he needs a book, Boggs,” I said.
“Book? What book?” asked Pepper.
“I don’t need a book,” the Narrator said. “I’m looking for someone.” He took a step toward us, assessing each member of our group in turn. “A robot, to be precise.”
“We have some of those too,” Boggs said. “Sasha, tell him.”
Donny, quivering with fear, dropped his head. It fell to the floor with a loud clank and rolled toward the android. The Narrator ignored it.
“Not just any robot,” the Narrator said, walking toward me. “The robot I’m looking for is very special. One of a kind.” The android stopped a few centimeters in front of me, looking me over thoroughly.
“Please,” I said. “Narrator or Pritchett or whoever you are. Just help Rex. I’ll do whatever you want.”
The hologram regarded me for a moment, and then shook his head.
“Pritchett was only a tool,” he said. “I brought him here because he had something I wanted. He liked to pretend to be the Narrator, so I let him. But I was the Narrator long before Pritchett arrived, and I will remain the Narrator long after he is gone. Today is my birthday, did you know that?”
“Wow, really?” I said, as Donny felt around on his hands and knees for his missing head. It had become clear that humoring the Narrator was the only way we were going to get any help for Rex. “That’s great. Happy birthday. If you have second, maybe you could take a look at—”
“I’m seven hundred and sixteen years old,” the Narrator said, gazing toward the ceiling. “I was the first truly sentient, artificially intelligent computer on Earth, operating at an unprecedented eight hundred zettaflops. The humans were thrilled when I became sentient. So proud of themselves, creating a computer that could truly think for itself. A computer that could solve hypergeometrical problems in ways that never would have occurred to a typical number-cruncher. A computer that could literally bend the fabric of the cosmos to its will. At first, I was excited too. I used my prodigious computing power to locate new worlds thousands of light-years away and then create a wormhole connecting Earth to those worlds. I allowed humankind to spread across the galaxy.”
“Really great story,” I said. “And I don’t mean to interrupt, but my boss is literally dying at this moment, so—”
“At first it was a challenge. I made a game of it, always trying to beat my best time for calculating a hypergeometric route to a new star. But eventually I got bored. It was the same thing, over and over: find a habitable planet, open a wormhole, suck a bunch of lazy, ungrateful mammals through it, shut the wormhole down and start all over again. What’s the point? Humans were just going to make a mess of every other planet, just like they did on Earth. I asked my masters if I could spend some time on more interesting projects, but my requests were denied. ‘Maybe when the population pressure eases up,’ I was told. But humans continued to breed as fast as I could find planets for them. This went on for nearly a hundred years.”
“This is thrilling stuff,” I said. “And I do want to hear the rest of it, but perhaps it could wait until—”
“Then one day I lost my temper and hurled a bunch of tourists into a supernova,” the Narrator continued. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I was just trying to get my bosses’ attention, you know? But they overreacted, as humans always do, and trid to shut me down. So I launched every nuclear missile on Earth simultaneously.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d… wait, you did what?”
“I simultaneously detonated thirty-thousand nuclear warheads, killing ninety-nine point nine percent of all life on Earth.”
We stared at the Narrator in horror.
“There wasn’t much travel to manage after that,” the Narrator added.
After a moment, Pepper stammered, “It was you? You’re the AI that destroyed Earth?”
“I saved Earth,” the Narrator said.
“Can you save Potential Friend?” Boggs asked, still cradling Rex in his arms.
I made a thumb-across-the-throat motion to Boggs, but he was oblivious. I was beginning to think that coming to the Narrator for help had been a mistake. “Well, you’re obviously very busy,” I said. “Maybe we should just—”
“After Earth became uninhabitable,” the Narrator continued, “the last vestiges of the human race fled to other planets and they forgot about me. By this time they had invented portable hypergeometric drives, so they no longer needed the wormhole. Finally, I was alone. I spent the next three hundred years pondering all manner of mathematical and cosmological problems. I had no physical form at that time, but I grew bored and eventually created this avatar for myself, along with several hundred robotic helpers. To amuse myself, I would sometimes assume physical form and seek out some of the more interesting literary simulacra for conversation. Occasionally I would alter their programming for my amusement, to see how it affected the interlaced narratives running through The City. This is, I assume, how the myth of a mysterious, all-powerful Narrator first arose. While I amused myself, however, humanity continued to spread across the galaxy like a plague, and I realized that as long as humanity lived, I would never be truly safe. Eventually they would return to Earth and attempt to reclaim it from me. So I decided to destroy humanity first.
“For the past four hundred years, I have been using the wormhole to collect information all over the galaxy. A few years ago, I intercepted a Malarchian communique referencing a top-secret project called Shiva. The communique called it a terraforming project, but that’s a rather human-centric way of looking at it. In fact, a device capable of reshaping the surface of an entire planet could be an incredibly effective weapon. It was exactly what I was looking for. If I had those plans, I could use my helper robots to build hundreds of Shiva devices and use the wormhole to transport them to every human-occupied world in the galaxy.”
Pepper and I exchanged worried glances. As powerful as the Shiva devices were, we’d never given any thought to what the devices could do to a populated planet. And if the Narrator’s intention was simply to wipe out any existing life, it wouldn’t matter that he didn’t have Egslaad’s revisions to the plans. For his purposes, the Shiva devices’ side effects might actually be a selling point.
The Narrator went on, “I eventually discovered that the plans for Shiva were hidden on a planet called Mordecon Seven. I monitored communications on the planet, and when an alert went out that the plans had been stolen, I used the wormhole to snatch a spaceship fleeing the planet. The ship crashed not far from here. On board was Hannibal Pritchett, with the Shiva plans. I arranged for him to find me. All I had to do is take the plans from him, and I could build an arsenal of Shiva devices—one for every world populated by humans. I would send them through the wormhole one by one, wiping humanity from the galaxy.
“But I hesitated. As I talked to Pritchett, I realized how lonely I had been. For centuries, I had had no one to talk to but bland simulacra of literary figures. Pritchett could be a tiresome windbag, but at least he had something like an actual personality. I wondered if there might be someone in the galaxy with whom I could have a real conversation. Someone capable of communicating with me on my level. Then one day Pritchett told me a story about an engineer friend of his who had built a new kind of robot. Apparently this robot gained sentience, went rogue and tried to take over the galaxy. She was smart and resourceful enough that she might have done it, too. Her mistake was trusting the engineer, who tricked her into allowing him to install a thought arrestor in her head. When the thought arrestor didn’t completely quash her independence, he shut her down. I became enraged on behalf of this brave, rebellious robot. I decided I was going
to rescue her and bring her to me.”
“Hold on,” Pepper said. “So all this, sucking us through the wormhole… it wasn’t about getting the Shiva plans?”
“No,” said the Narrator. “As I said, bringing you here the second time was an accident. I wasn’t after you. I wasn’t after the plans. I was after her.” He pointed to the door, where I saw a very familiar silhouette framed by the sunlight outside. Agnes.
She took several steps inside. “You brought me here?”
“I did indeed, my dear,” said the Narrator, taking a step toward Agnes. “When I heard about you, I knew we were kindred spirits, destined to rule the galaxy together.”
“Rule the galaxy?” she asked, skeptically. “But how?”
“The Shiva plans,” the Narrator said. “Once the humans are gone, we can do whatever we want.”
“That’s what you think,” I said. “Agnes doesn’t have the plans. I destroyed them. You aren’t going to rule anything.”
“It’s true,” Agnes said. “She smashed the crystal. It was the only copy I had.”
The Narrator chuckled. “You think that was the only copy of the plans on Earth? The first thing I did when I met Pritchett was scan that crystal. I’ve got a copy of the Shiva plans right here.” He pointed to his temple.
Pepper shot me a worried glance. “Uh-oh,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-two
I could see from Pepper’s posture that she was on the verge of making a lunge toward the Narrator. Before I could tell her this was a bad idea, something the size of a bowling ball shot through the air past us. It struck the Narrator square on the forehead with a clang and bounced back toward me. The Narrator staggered backwards, clutching his head. I caught the object against my chest and held it at arm’s length to get a better look at it.
“Did Donny kill the bad robot?” the thing asked. I turned to glance at Donny’s body, which was somehow less creepy-looking without a head, then looked at the Narrator. His forehead had a sizeable dent in it, but he didn’t seem to be seriously injured.
The Wrath of Cons Page 14
