Slant

by Greg Bear

  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 furiously 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 1 flashes continuously, she does not know why; it is a man in his sixties.

  Two of the red numbers, 1 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  “Cipher Snow has withdrawn and will not communicate.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 self-defense. 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 spontaneously emerged. Perhaps it is a curses a human curse.

  “It is wasteful,” Jill says. “Do you have an injunction against engaging in excessively bushy pathways to find solutions?”

  “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 of—killing 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.”

  12

  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, arid 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 final command disk into his pad. The pad is now equipped to direct the warbeiters. 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 transfixed; 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 cardlike segments can join at any edge, and separate at need. Once joined, they are stronger than a comparable solid piece of flexfuller, 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.

  The sheet separates again into ribbons which rise and redistribute their 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 Go
d, 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 take 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 Green Idaho has ever used anything like this!”

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

  Pickwenn and Pent return from their reconnaissance, Burdick between them. Burdick, pale and resentful, gapes at the new machines; Pickwenn and Pent regard them with stony calm.

  “We found the emergency elevators,” Pent says, rubbing his bull neck. “They’re blocked, but we can blow the locks easily. Nothing tried to stop us. The place is empty no more Ferrets. There is something else… Just a suggestion. There are access points where we can put a current into the internal armor. Cables behind walls that we can re-route, and bare carbon nanotube surfaces.”

  Pickwenn shows Giffey a sketch on his pad. He can’t seem to hold the pad steady. “If the building is using the armor and frame for memory or as an extended processor,” Pickwenn says, “and if it decides to get upset with us, Mr. Pent and I have made arrangements to shunt a power cable, into the frame.”

  Giffey smiles appreciatively. “Good thinking.”

  He looks at Burdick and then at Pickwenn. The thin, spectral structures expert gets his meaning and returns Burdick to the lounge and Preston’s care. He rejoins them a few minutes later.

  The Hammer shivers for several seconds. Giffey looks to Jenner, who shrugs and says, “Integrating, I guess.” The shiver stops and the Hammer is still again.

  Marcus and Jonathan stand well away from the new warbeiters. Pent and Pickwenn keep close to them, muttering to each other. Pickwenn’s hands and one arm jerk slightly and he lifts his head as if hearing someone speak, but nobody has spoken.

  Giffey ports the Hammer and activates it. “Your name is Charlie,” Giffey says. The Hammer gives no outside appearance of having heard. As Giffey finishes his first instructions to the new warbeiter, however, it moves its sensor-studded head and says, “I am Charlie. I am integrated and prepared for duty.”

  Giffey nods. He instructs the Hammer to coordinate with Sam, the first flexer/controller, and prepare for action.

  “Provide access to this lift shaft for Sam.”

  “Where in hell do you all come from?” Marcus asks Giffey. Giffey ignores him.

  The Hammer walks forward on its massive jointed legs, braces itself, drills two holes into the floor with its rear stabilizers, bolts itself down, and sprays a series of powdery white dots on the lift wall. Jonathan looks for and sees the container where the military complete paste’s explosive materials have now been concentrated, beneath armor on the hammer’s back. The sprayed white dots come from this container.

  “Stand back or leave the area,” Charlie the Hammer advises them in a simple neuter voice. “You must be at least ten meters from the explosion to avoid injury.”

  The lobby space gives them that much distance and more. Giffey steps back seven paces and adds, “Cover your ears and keep your eyes and mouth closed.”

  Marcus gapes. Jonathan nudges him and they both shut their eyes and cover their ears.

  The blast is sharp and intense. Jonathan’s ears ring despite his hands. The hole in the elevator shaft wall is a foot wide, with precise melted edges. Smoke is minimal, but the air is filled with a fine, descending shower of concrete and flexfuller dust. It smells like burnt rubber. Charlie stands in the middle of the smoke, undamaged and unperturbed.

  “Charlie, get out of the way. Sam, get to work.”

  Charlie the Hammer uproots its stabilizers, inspects the hole, and steps aside. Sam slithers in with clicking feet, rises, and clambers into the hole. Giffey ports the second flexer/controller as the first disappears, and names it Baker.

  “When are the defenses going to kick in?” Hale asks Giffey.

  “Any minute now, I expect. Keep close to one of our tourist friends.”

  Hale approaches Marcus and Jonathan. “You’ll be coming with us to the upper level.”

  “Of course,” Marcus says acidly.

  “You’re the senior in charge,” Hale says to Marcus. “I’ve taken enough sociology and management to know the type. You two seem pretty much a pair.” Hale focuses on Jonathan. “He knows a lot about this building, doesn’t he?”

  Jonathan looks away. He does not feel brave, but there is simply nothing to be said to such questions.

  “How much money do you let your people take with them? Securities? Jewelry? Investment account sigs?”

  “You don’t understand a thing about us, or this place,” Marcus says dryly. “I hope you’ve settled your own accounts back home.”

  Hale grins at Giffey to show he was just passing time. Giffey is not impressed. Small clinking and whining sounds come from the elevator shaft. Sam will deposit parts of itself along its path, where they will integrate into new circuitry and cables, if necessary. Sam’s parts will also attempt to disarm security sensors and search for self-sabotage mechanisms. If sabotage has already been performed, the parts won’t have much to do. They will reassemble in a few minutes and crawl out of the shaft, to be reassigned to other duties.

  Pent turns to Giffey. “We should fry the building’s data stores now. In the frame and walls.”

  “In good time,” Giffey says. Too easy. Have to be fair, let the thinker have its moment and show its stuff.

  Pent steps back and looks at Pickwenn, who gives a slow, languid blink with his lemur eyes. They don’t understand.

  The elevator door opens. Marcus’s shoulders slump.

  “Let’s go,” Giffey says.

  “Stay here,” Hale tells Pent. “Tell the others we’re in the shaft and we’re going to look around.”

  Pent looks disappointed and gives his colleague a sharp jab in the arm as he passes. Pickwenn pushes Marcus and Jonathan into the shaft. Giffey instructs Charlie, Bak
er, and the transports to enter the elevator. The machines crowd them against the wall.

  “What are we going to do with the little fellas?” Jenner asks Giffey. “The beetles.”

  “They’ll be in reserve.”

  “We could spread them around us as pickets,” Jenner says.

  “I’m not sure that’s going to be necessary.”

  “Jesus, this is going so smoothly,” Jenner says, and his lips and scalp twitch. His shakes his head, suddenly anxious. “Do you see what I’m getting at, Mr. Giffey?”

  “Yeah,” Giffey says, but he’s not going to think about such things for now.

  Marcus does not look at all well. He’s sweating profusely and his clothing is soaked. He smells sour. Jonathan wonders if he’s wearing a complete monitor kit for medical emergencies. He hopes so; he doubts a heart attack will evoke much sympathy in these people.

  Giffey frowns at the control board and display. The display shows that the elevator goes up forty floors, to an observation deck near the top. But it also shows a ten-floor drop, at least a hundred feet below ground level.

  “What’s down here?” Giffey asks Marcus, pointing to the lower levels.

  “Infrastructure,” Marcus says huskily. “Medical Food. Plant. Air, water, power.”

  “Too big a drop for a building this size,” Giffey says. “Even with fuel cells and hydrogen storage. Where’s the security center?”

  Marcus closes his eyes as if expecting to be struck. He says nothing. Nobody strikes him. He opens his eyes and seems almost disappointed.

  Giffey rubs his chin, scraping stubble. “Defenses and security below, but I’ll bet they have machine tubes, tracks, whatever. Between floors. Pop-up gates on every floor. How many and how large? More Ferrets?”

  With a look at the others, Giffey smiles and shakes his head. “Just thinking out loud. Let’s go up and see what there is to see.”

  “Think we can take out the security?” Jenner asks. Charlie is crowding him. He has both his arms extended and resting on the Hammer’s shiny skin.