Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  Begum/private “You just made that up? It is crazy enough to work and ties up several loose ends. I will clean up the details and get things moving. Right now, go with Surgeon MacFinn and I will ensure that Alexander finds you before you have to leave.”

  The orderly leapt out the door and raced up the hall. My helmet was pushed back over my head and clipped tight as the sailor guard set the armour to display sailor whites. Sergei managed a quick goodbye as he was carried out, also dressed in whites. Toyami, looking like an elfin marine, started a loud discussion with Surgeon MacFinn over who was moving in to replace the two of us now that the room was vacant. Then I set my suit to be rigid and was carried through the hallways and elevators to a tiny room with just enough space for an acceleration bed and one extra person.

  2357-03-13 01:00

  Pantocrator

  The female surgeon and orderly were setting up a medical field station, clipped against the nominal ceiling. I had used smaller and simpler versions of the field stations on Mars and lusted after the sophistication before me. They were just finishing the connections between the field station and my armour when Alexander showed up. “I have a patch for the Censor. I am going to have the surgeon put you to sleep while I do the installation in case I accidentally trigger the beast, which is unfortunately quite likely. It is not as complete as I had intended, but probably good enough. The Censor will still reset you to be the persona they installed, because I could not find a way to change that without killing you. Maybe if I have more time on the Moon we can look at it again. However, instead of screaming it will just ring an alarm as though a message had arrived. Do you have a suggestion for suitable music?”

  He looked serious, so I randomly suggested a bar or two from “The Ride of the Valkyries”. I guess Valhalla was inspiring me.

  He laughed out loud, “I remember that piece! Done! Someday you will have to tell me why you made that choice. Surgeon, I would like him to sleep for about an hour. Is he strong enough to survive that long?”

  I was just thinking how nice it was that he asked that question before the operation rather than after, when everything winked out.

  When I woke up, Alexander and MacFinn were there, MacFinn in the room and Alexander leaning in the door. Alexander said, “Make yourself rational.”

  I made sure I was the Ghost.

  Alexander, “You have been captured and are about to be interrogated.”

  I was the Cripple and the Ride was playing: Da ta da DA da.

  Alexander, “Be rational again”

  I set myself back to being the Ghost.

  Alexander, “Your lady love is fornicating with everyone on the ship.”

  We were both spacers, so that did nothing.

  Alexander, “Interesting. She hates you and everything you represent and is leaving you for...”

  Da ta da DA da.

  Alexander, “I cannot say I understand your motives, but it seems to work. I will be back soon with the other patches. Surgeon, you had better dial back on the gullibility and agreeability. Those are socially dangerous levels.”

  And he vanished back down the hall.

  MacFinn was scrunched on the ceiling tuning things on the field station. “Batty as ever, but sure does good work. He says ye’re even battier than im, which is hard t’credit. I ha na seen im for a couple a months. Says you busted im outa Valhalla, which is also hard t‘figure. Why’d they keep a guy as harmless as im locked up? He used t’ride all the TDF ships, fixin things here an there. Only interested in code though. No use talkin about food or fun or anything that could na be coded.

  “I once challenged im on a long trip t’find the right amount of capsicum t’put in our food to please everyone on the ship, and he wasted a whole day testin our reactions to capsicum by measurin our brainwaves. Never occurred to im to ask if we liked the stuff.”

  I found MacFinn stimulating, as much as anything because I had only visited Tycho Hebrides once and had never really explored its unique linguistic heritage. We spent an hour discussing the field station, so much more practical and effective than the clunky units I had used on Mars. Yet he told me it had been in production for fifty years, with several upgrades but mostly the same core capabilities. It was delightful to hear his language that sounded so unsophisticated being used to discuss advanced medical issues.

  Now that I understood what they were about, I remembered a few applications to export similar field stations to the main hospitals on Mars, rejected by Extraterrestrial Affairs with the excuse that the Martians would use them to prolong the misery of their victims during gruesome executions.

  I expressed the opinion that they would not have to make so many gruesome executions if they had better medicine, honest courts, and responsible government. MacFinn agreed and expressed some concern that the Imperium would bring their executions to the Earth and Moon. Even to myself, I could not dispute that concern, given that my own plans depended upon it being true.

  The tiny room was too tight to hold both of us for long, but there was a similar room across the hall. He finally told me sternly not to move, showed me how to run the entertainment system, and gave me another stern warning not to look at any recent news in case it triggered some uncontrolled medical event. He then promised to be right next door if I needed anything.

  I ignored his advice about appropriate entertainment, but this far from the Earth the ship was receiving only the official news feeds that rarely had anything of interest to the Ghost, or any of the rest of me for that matter. The pirate attack on LUVN was announced as an accident that had required the evacuation of the facility, with thanks expressed by the company to both the TDF and Lunar Recovery for their prompt assistance.

  I wasted some time wishing I could do exercise, then switched to lighter entertainment for my different parts. This was a quirky form of fun; I could watch cartoons and enjoy them by combining the Ghost with the Kid, watch some mild Terran porn with the Student (no parents looking over our shoulder), or watch a documentary on the latest findings about the dimensionality of time near black holes, which might even have some implications for the construction of ultra-precise clocks. The Ghost, the Cap and the Cripple all enjoyed the last one, except for the usual logical bloopers that always creep into technical discussions dumbed down for the public.

  One virtue of being bored is that it gives you both time and motivation to think of alternate ways of doing things. I really wanted to investigate the company that owned LUVN but had no live access to any of my usual resources, just the few live news feeds strong enough to be received this far from the Earth, plus archives of older feeds.

  Poking around in the archives, I discovered there was a short-lived feed devoted to nothing but pharmaceutical farms and factories. There were thousands of these single-issue feeds at any moment, popping in and out of existence constantly. Some were blatant advertising, many were just some crank’s opinions, but a few would shine real light into current events. Those were usually shut down when the big, bad whatevers who were being criticized sent their lawyers for a visit.

  As I read through this one, however, I realized it was different. For a start, it slagged every single company producing meds in space, except one. I had been chasing drugs and weapons for ten years and knew all the suppliers. Langara Unitary had a couple of factories on the Earth, whose officers were slandered mercilessly. They had medical equipment factories on the Moon that got similar treatments because they supplied parts to other farms and factories in the business. There were other farms under construction that were belittled as useless and wasteful, even before they were officially brought into production. The sole supplier missing from the vitriol was the Langara Unitary Viticulture Nursery. LUVN was never even mentioned.

  The feed had lasted about a year, with reports and articles appearing every week, sometimes several times a week. It was hard to know who would have objected to it, since it slandered every other pharmaceutical company equally. To anyone but me, it must have seemed
the product of a crank with a hate for the entire industry.

  I noted that the feed had shut down about the same time the Fairy Dust and Outer Tramp had exchanged their identities, which was a disturbing coincidence. But what really caught my attention were the data tables in some of the articles, big tables of data that would have been better formatted as simple graphics. I flagged half a dozen examples and sent the links to Raul with a suggestion that they looked suspicious, mentioning that LUVN was the only producer not mentioned in the feed.

  Looking more deeply, I found live interviews that sounded like complete gibberish with experts I did not recognize. Of course, even with a photographic memory, I could only have recognized the names of a tiny percentage of the real experts in the industry, but I was worried about one who looked suspiciously like an actor in a play that I had watched on the Moon a few years before. Gibberish was bad. Fake experts, who were really actors reading gibberish, sounded too much like the phoney economic reports coming from Mars. Alerted to the possibility, I flagged a few more examples and sent them to Raul.

  I was just starting to enjoy the quest when Alexander asked me to open the door. He had a piece of bad news. The patch he had installed earlier to ensure that the Censor did not disable me would only work on the issues I had added to its repertoire. If I tried to kill myself it would still trigger the screaming and a personality meltdown, just as it had before. He was baffled about what that piece of code was even doing.

  On the one hand, that was acceptable because I did not want to kill myself, but on the other hand I was uncertain what would happen if I risked surrendering for trial to an uncertain contact. I would have to do that surrender carefully, but that would just become another detail to be worked through at the time. Of course, I made no mention of the problem to Alexander.

  Better news was that he was ready to edit the code that threatened to activate me as a weapon against Mars. He also had a copyright-free image of the gun that waved a sign. It was beautiful, with a gold and green handle attached to a very fat, candy-striped barrel in blue, silver and pink that spun when the trigger was pulled and popped out a banner saying “Gotcha!”.

  He had also found the big blocks of encrypted code that were probably my targeting instructions, and the routine that decoded them when a key was supplied. It was that routine that he proposed changing. He explained that an embedded editor would normally handle most of the complexity, but the original editor had been deleted and my copy was in one of the sections he could not address, so he had prepared a short tutorial on how to run the editor without making the kinds of mistakes he had found in my earlier efforts. We worked through the tutorial on self-editing a hidden comm unit, then fitted me with the external devices needed to start editing and talked me through making the changes to display the gun instead of running the suspect code.

  As Alexander put it, “Damn shame we cannot test that we got the right code and the right solution without trying to trigger the attack, and we cannot do that without the keys. There is nothing in the code that I can read that calls this routine, but there is another block of encrypted code. I suspect they hid a check on the validity of the keys in there and that code calls this routine. It is entirely typical of the inconsistent, rule-bound style I expect from those popping heads. Conceptual genius welded to coding hard-liners from a dozen different schools of programing standards. I just hope they did not hide something in that final encrypted block.”

  Me/local, “I am curious about your phrase ‘popping heads’. Is that a regional expression?”

  Alexander/local, “Naw, that is mine. When I was a little bug, we used to have campfires in the summer where we would roast popcorn. Dump a bunch of kernels into a metal basket with a lid, sit the basket beside the fire, and watch the kernels bounce around inside the basket as they exploded. It seems a good image for all the opinionated, bad tempered, manipulative, high strung alphas that push their way into power. Stick a dozen of them in a room to discuss the latest hot issue and sit back to watch the heads pop.

  “The ones that broke you were typical of the breed, all certain that they alone knew the perfect truth on every matter. Absolutely unwilling to compromise, but always willing to have a shouting match to get their own way. They wanted to exterminate everyone on Mars so we could start again with a new population, and they were greatly annoyed that the Counterstrike failed to do that. Without official support from either the political or military leaders, they were trying to provoke an incident so severe that the extermination would be on again.

  “I greatly admired their genius as psychological technicians and can only wish that my repartee was as clever as theirs, but as politicians and sociologists they were spear-carriers who imagined they were kings. They could have produced an army of guys like you if they had ever been willing to compromise on just one goal. I suspect that is why you have ten different encrypted blocks linked off that one routine – ten different missions that would be available if they could ever decide which one to execute.

  “Funny thing is half of them disappeared about a decade ago and the rest were reassigned. Only one I still see these days is old Father Paul, and I am not sure whether he is really one of them or just their messenger. I never bothered to track them down – not my kind of work – but I expect they are still locked in a room somewhere, at each other’s throats about how to use you. If they even realize that you survived, of course, because I had thought every one of you super-agents died on suicide missions at that time. That is probably why they cancelled the project and dispersed. Just like them to get so caught in their new assignments that they did not notice. Popping heads!”

  Me/local, “Father Paul? Was he the old Jesuit?”

  Alexander/local, “Former. Used to be a Jesuit, then joined a monastery briefly, and finally left to join the exterminators. I do not believe even he knows why he did it. Kind of a sad old man with no floor beneath his feet if you ask me.”

  Me/local, “He was the only one who told me the truth, that I was a weapon aimed at Mars, but he could not tell me how I was to be deployed or what I was intended to do. I guess we know part of the reason he could not tell me. I was gifted with ten different encrypted options. He tried to tell me that there was still hope, that even my crimes could be forgiven, but I suspect that was just the old Jesuit talking. I was not forgiven, just broken into pieces.”

  Alexander/local, “Speaking of pieces, how stable is your personality now?”

  Me/local, “Pretty good. I have played with it a bit, enabling several different pairs of my parts at once to see how well they cooperate, and so far, it seems quite solid. Watching cartoons is way more fun when the Kid is part of the mix.”

  Alexander/local, “That is something I would like to discuss, but we still have to fix the torture code. Are you certain you want that to be permanent? It does not reduce the pain you will feel at all. It just dampens the shock response and prevents permanent psychological damage. I gather you have a lot of enemies. If any of them try to torture you for information, it would shorten your expected life considerably.”

  I paused before answering. I was the Ghost, enhanced by Alexander’s changes. As the Assassin, I had become a master of plausible lies. As the Ghost, I had polished that to a high art. I would be even better now that I had a hidden med monitor to manage my biochemical responses. When questioned under torture, my answers were always tailored to give me the best possible outcome, not my tormenters. I told them what they wanted to believe, and what would get them into the most trouble, leavened with just the right amount of truth to distract them from the trap. Since I had joined CI, very few torturers had retained their freedom long enough to appreciate the difference, and on Mars our acquaintance had usually been even briefer. Alexander did not have to know that.

  Unfortunately, on Mars I had been in superb physical condition and armed with the best weapons that the Governor could provide, whereas I was now forbidden to walk and did not carry anything more dangerous than a few
comm tokens and the Plan for my Mission. That would change the calculation considerably. I was going to have to take his warning more seriously than usual.

  Still, I did not want to discuss it. Easy. I would tell the truth, just not all of it.

  Me/local, “Dying prematurely would be very bad for me, so I solemnly promise to be careful. Besides, I know about the pain issues. I have been shot a couple of times, sliced up a bit, and captured by some very desperate gangs. I would still prefer to live though those episodes without permanent mental scarring. I have often found it more effective to tell them what they want to know without waiting to be tortured. It is only the dumb ones who still bother.”

  Alexander/local, “You actually had to think about that? Well, let me give you something more to think about. I have spent some time reviewing the code that selects your personae. Your personae and your memories are closely related but different. They are both forms of memory but stored in separate locations and connect to different parts of your brain. For example, the first time you kiss someone and mean it, that changes your personality, but the memory of the kiss and the personality changes that result from it are separate and can be affected differently by what happens later. If the kiss causes outrage, you might still remember the kiss itself fondly, but become more cautious about kissing people in the future. Or vice versa. Separate, you see?

  “The personae do not directly affect the memories of events, so whichever one is currently in control, you will probably remember what you had for breakfast this morning. We can suppress or enhance your conscious memory of events, but that has nothing to do with the personae enforced by the monitor and is just a memory trick that anyone can learn to do with a little training.