Buck Roger XXVC #00.5 Arrival

by M S Murdock

  The blinking light suddenly became just a blinking light. Whatever mysterious attraction it had held for him ended as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown. It continued to blink, but Holzerhein was no longer interested.

  He looked down to the board table, to the eight people arranged around it, and said, “As for free trade, your little argument demonstrates the inefficiency inherent in free anything. Eventually it ceases to be amusing.” He let his statement hang like a bomb in the air while he looked back out the window. Terendon evidently had to catch his breath. It took a moment before he said, “Thank you for your input, Slr.”

  Holzerhein ignored him. Something else had drawn his attention, a sensation he hadn’t felt since he’d been downloaded. Since before that, really, because he’d been hooked to life-support and catheterized for years before his body had finally died. It was the sensation of having a full bladder.

  Which was absolutely ridiculous. He didn’t even have a bladder anymore, much less a full one. The only organic part left was his brain, and he had left that switched out.

  Okay, it wasn’t a bladder, then, but something needed emptying. Evidently he was just interpreting it in familiar terms.

  Holzerhein turned his attention back into the matrix, not bothering to build up a phantom reality this time but simply tracing the sensation along the channels and addresses of his various peripheral devices until he found its source. It was a little like typing at a keyboard; an experienced operator could do it with eyes open or closed; it didn’t really matter, as long as one knew what one was doing.

  Holzerhein knew what he was doing. He found the source of irritation in microseconds: It was an overflowing information buffer, one he used for storing data going to and from his brain. That made sense; there was always some information flow into and out of it, no matter how little he actually used the thing. When he’d switched it out of the matrix, the flow had stopped, and the data had begun to stack up in the buffer until it couldn’t hold any more.

  That was easy enough to fix. He could simply open the link again. He was about to do just that when he noticed the other peculiarity about the way the overflow felt.

  It felt just like the access attempts he’d been making earlier in the day, when he’d been trying to drag those childhood memories out of permanent storage.

  Whatever was in the buffer was trying to load directly into the same area.

  The human brain was a lousy piece of architecture for the function of thinking, but it did at least have a hierarchy of input levels, and Holzerhein had used his often enough to know that information going into the brain usually went through a temporary storage cycle in the conscious mind before getting tucked away into permanent memory. Pulling something directly out of permanent memory without going through the conscious level was rare enough, but putting something in that way was even rarer. One could do it under hypnosis, or in moments of shock, but not while sitting at a board meeting and lecturing idiots about the follies of freedom.

  Oh, yes, the board meeting. He’d been gone nearly a quarter of a second already; if he spent much longer away, the others would notice that his holographic image had frozen. Not a big deal, usually, but he had just made a point and they would be watching him even more closely now than usual.

  Easy to fix. He pushed out into the matrix, clearing room for himself, then took a turn back toward the meeting room while at the same time turning once again toward the overflowing buffer. The two copies went their separate ways.

  The Holzerhein in the matrix began sifting through the buffer, and the deeper he got into it the stranger its contents became. It wasn’t a memory at all. It was more like a program, as if Rodney, the butler, had stumbled down a wrong pathway and wound up in Holzerhein’s brain, instead of in his own little niche in the matrix.

  A program. Running there in a memory buffer, trying to get into his brain. If Holzerhein had had sweat glands, he would have broken into a sweat. The thing was a virus program! It had to be.

  Carefully, with the finesse of a person disarming a bomb, he scanned along the code, discerning its major modules as he went along. There, in the first section, was the loader, the part that was even now trying to burrow its way into his subconscious mind, pulling along the rest of the program where it would lie, unnoticed, in wait for the proper moment to--what?

  A long module, self-replicating. The virus section. Designed to copy itself over and over again in the host brain until it overwhelmed every last neuron.

  Another module, essentially the same, but set to spread throughout the matrix.

  Another module, small, little more than a timing tick to set the moment when every neuron in the brain and every bit in the matrix would fire or flip simultaneously.

  And the last module, a trigger, keyed to the code word “Holzheimer.”

  Holzerhein chuckled a tight little electronic chuckle when he found that. Someone wanted him very dead, and the entire RAM matrix along with him, but even that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted him to go out with an insult.

  Who would want such a thing? No, tackle that one the easy way: who wouldn’t want it?

  He chuckled again, there in the matrix. He couldn’t think of a single person.

  How had they sent it? That was harder to answer. The matrix was heavily guarded against viral infection; it wasn’t a simple matter of coming it in and setting it loose. Whoever had sent it had had to have found an unguarded pathway, and that was supposed to be impossible.

  Someone had found one. And Holzerhein would have to find it, too, if only to set a guard on it in the future.

  It was simple enough to wipe out the virus, but first he copied it into safe storage, cutting it into pieces as he copied it and walling it off behind layer upon layer of security. He would take a closer look at it later and See if he could determine its author, but now he had other things to do.

  He moved back up the line to the board meeting, merged with his other self, and remembered what had gone on in his absence. Not a whole lot; he had been gone less than ten seconds. Terendon had meekly called for more discussion of the Earth project, and Price had begun speaking about overcoming the technical difficulties involved in deploying the satellite in a crowded and hostile Earth orbit.

  Outside the window the light still winked seductively atop its tower. Holzerhein felt himself drawn toward it once more, focusing, as if it were a hypnotist’ s metronome and he about to go under. What was it about that light?

  It was blinking in code, that was what. And the pattern looked very familiar.

  With that, he realized that he had found his unguarded pathway into the matrix. His own senses, feeding directly into his electronic consciousness and also into his brain, were completely uncensored. An optically loaded program could grab his attention with a hypnotic hook, then feed directly into his mind, and from there to any part of the matrix it wanted.

  Except those parts that were shut off.

  It was a trick that could only work once. The program’s hypnotic loader wouldn’t let him look away from the light, but he could and did set up a filter between senses and mind to strip out the program code from his visual input, then he split again and went to see if the sender had left any traces of his identity with the light. It had to be a board member-who else would know that he spent most of his time at the meetings staring out the window?--but which one was it?

  He didn’t expect to find any clues, and he didn’t. When he entered the tower and projected himself into the room that the light was coming from, he found it empty save for the table before the window upon which sat a simple message laser aimed at the RAM corporation board room. The laser was connected to a hand-held dumb computer that blindly spat out the contents of a single data chip, over and over. It was about as sophisticated a murder weapon as a club, and even less traceable to its owner.

  No matter; he would know who it was soon enough. The first person to call him “Holzheimer” would be in for a nasty surprise. He didn’t kno
w quite what, yet, but he was sure he could think of something.

  00000

  The meeting continued, seven of the eight other members unaware that anything untoward was going on at all. Unless it was a conspiracy, of course. There was always that possibility.

  Holzerhein felt his traveling half join back again, and as a single entity he watched each of the board members as the meeting progressed. Damn, why had he had to make that unsubtle threat about freedom? They were all acting as if they’d gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Jander and Terendon were especially nervous, but that could be either guilt or simple terror at having Holzerhein disagree with them. Nervousness alone wasn’t enough to finger either of them.

  Price was babbling on with her report on the satellite. “There’s still a lot of junk to clean out of our chosen orbit, but we’ll have it clear by the time we need it. One of the crews did make an interesting find, when they scanned for debris in high-inclination elliptical orbits tangential to ours: an ancient atmospheric satellite. It’s a real museum piece, nearly five hundred years old, but the real find was the program it held. It’s evidently some kind of primitive artificial intelligence. They don’t have the facilities to access; it, but apparently it’s still conscious.”

  Holzerhein hadn’t been paying attention to the words as much as the other board members’ reactions to them, but at the mention of the artificial intelligence he felt a stirring of interest. He asked, “Still awake, after five hundred years?”

  Price looked startled. Was Holzerhein going to turn on her now? She licked her lips hesitantly, then said, “Uh, yes, sir. There is evidence of electro-neural activity, at any rate.”

  A five-hundred-year-old artificial intelligence. To Holzerhein, who had spent the last fifty years trying to adapt to being an A.I., the implications were staggering. Computers had still been completely digital back then; they’d had no holographic memory, no superconducting junctions, and no organic interfaces at all. The entire thing would have to have been hardwired and digitally programmed. What kind of intelligence would you get under those conditions? Did the ancient programmers know anything about the nature of intelligence that modern cyber-psychologists had forgotten? What kind of subjective universe would such an A.I. inhabit? And after living in it all this time, what kind of improvements would it have discovered?

  It might have evolved a better subjective universe than the RAM matrix.

  That thought was both exciting and intolerable. Nobody had a better anything than Simund Holzerhein. And if by chance someone-or-something discovered one, then it was Holzerhein’s duty to make it his own.

  “Bring it to me when the downloaded personality is ready,” he said aloud.

  “Sir?”

  “Have the artificial intelligence brought to me. There might be some important clues to be uncovered in it.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask-”

  “No, you may not. And now, if we’re quite through with our little afternoon chat, I think it’s time we all got back to work. Any objections to that? No Meeting adjourned, then.”

  00000

  Back in the matrix, Holzerhein was about to reconstruct his study when he remembered that he had left his brain disconnected. He was tempted to leave it that way, but he supposed he might as well hook it up while he was thinking about it. And . . . hmm . . . yes, maybe the deep-storage routine in that virus program could provide a hint for pulling those reluctant childhood memories back out. It would be worth a try.

  His brain access address was one of the most familiar of all the matrix addresses. Holzerhein’s wish to reconnect it was enough to move his focus of consciousness there and accomplish the deed. The connection joined, and—

  --and he was neck-deep in stinging ants and earwigs and spiders and centipedes, struggling feebly with arms of lead to keep his head afloat in the sea of insects. He couldn’t scream for fear of opening his mouth to the bugs-can’t let them inside, the inner body hasn’t yet been violated-but he soon discovered when the slithering and the stinging pain became too great to endure that he couldn’t scream anyway. His vocal apparatus was as sluggish as his arms.

  It didn’t matter; the ants had found his nose and had already worked their way into his head, now empty and echoing where his brain should have been. Holzerhein could hear them rattling around in there, crawling randomly in the dark recesses, working deeper, and spreading out into his body, a body larger inside than out, infinite in scope, with unlimited breeding space for more and more and more bugs—

  If it had been a door he slammed, he would have torn it off its hinges. Electra-neural switches weren’t as satisfying in their solidity, but they were more certain than doors; with the brain once again out of the circuit, it was out, completely. Phantom insects, their sustaining power gone, skittered away to die in the matrix, while Holzerhein’s consciousness slowly recovered from the blow.

  Stupid, he thought. It was obvious what had happened. Every brain had a nightmare generator built into it, and his was no exception. In the controlled environment of the matrix, that aspect of his organic origin had seldom made its presence known, and never with more than a twinge of anxiety before protective circuitry damped the signals, but never before had he left his brain cut off entirely from outside stimuli, either. Left in sensory deprivation, its nightmares had gone into positive feedback and strengthened until they were the only thoughts remaining.

  He was going to need help. Those were not the sort of nightmares that would flee with the turning on of a light. But where would he find the kind of help he needed? He hadn’t used a doctor in decades.

  Well, he knew where doctors were kept; he supposed it would be logical to start there. That decided, Holzerhein flipped to the medical complex, dropped back into holographic form, and planted himself in front of the first white-smocked, warm body he saw.

  “I have a neurological emergency. Tell me---”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but artificial constructs are serviced through data processing, not medical-”

  “Artificial, hell! I am Simund Holzerhein, I’ve got an organic brain that’s hallucinating, and you’ve got about five seconds to do something about it before I burn you down where you stand! Is that clear?” Just in case it wasn’t, Holzerhein narrowed the focus on the projector generating his image until it became a beam centered on the woman’s forehead (1.27 meters distant, increasing as she backed away). It wasn’t focused tightly enough to burn, nor did it have enough power to do more than blister the skin if it had been, but it would be warm enough to give her a scare.

  Holzerhein watched her get the message, then watched her realize who he was. “I-of course, sir. At once.” She spoke into her pager: “Code zero, code zero neurological. Head tech away team to the departure area immediately.” To Holzerhein she said, “They’ll be waiting for you there, sir.”

  “They’d better be.’ ’ He killed the holo projectors, effectively winking out of existence for her, and, after a millisecond’s stop in the mediplex’s directory, appeared in the emergency departure room. The away team wasn’t waiting, but within seconds they began assembling, and in only a minute or so more, half a dozen techs were in transit to the palace. For meat bodies, Holzerhein had to admit that they were good.

  He split again, briefing them on the situation from the skimmer’s control panel monitor while he went ahead to arrange their passage through palace security. In minutes, he was merged again and ushering them through the massive doors into the chamber that housed his brain.

  The first one through the door paused when he saw what awaited him, and the rest piled into him and into each other like coils of a compressed spring. In a less frantic moment Holzerhein would have been pleased at their reaction, but just this once he regretted all the gold and jewel-studded fixtures that made the place look like a treasure chamber.

  “Move it!” he shouted. His amplified voice shook the room, and shook the techs into action. They rushed inside to the ornate case housing Holzer
hein’s brain, quickly found the standard access jacks amid all the finery, and plugged in their diagnostic instruments. Monitors began howling their warning sirens, then quieted one by one as the techs made adjustments to the hallucinating brain. When all was silent again, one of the techs summoned the courage to face Holzerhein and say, “We’ve got it--uh, you--stabilized, sir. You can access again.”

  Holzerhein did. His, perception might have changed slightly, might have become a bit more indistinct, but otherwise nothing seemed different with the brain on line again.

  “Any permanent damage?”

  The tech took a deep breath. “No, sir. You’ re liable to be a little Jumpy for a while, until the weight of everyday events pushes the experience back into deeper memory, but nothing seems damaged. My advice is to use it as much as you can for the next few days, give it plenty of sensory input, and keep a close watch over it when you put it to sleep.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good. I think we’ve done all we need to do here, then. Give us a call if anything more comes up.”

  “I will.”

  Holzerhein watched them pack up and go, somehow amused. He liked that tech. The guy had decided not to be intimidated anymore, and from then on he hadn’t been. A person like that could be useful.

  He activated the security alarms behind the departing techs, then returned to the matrix. He remembered that he had intended to examine the virus program before all that business with the ants, so rather than recreate the palace around him, he went straight to where he had stored the program and began searching through the pieces.

  The first thing he discovered about it was the author. She hadn’t signed it, but she might as well have; it had Ardala’s deviousness written all over it. That puzzled Holzerhein more than any other finding would have. Of all the people who could benefit by killing him, Ardala would benefit least. She was a Valmar, child of the clan that had intermarried with the Holzerhein since the corporation’s beginnings on Earth, and as such, she had a vested interest in the status quo. Could old Roando have put her up to it? Not a chance. If Holzerhein died, then Terendon, not Roan do, would inherit the chairmanship of the board, and those two had never gotten along. So Roando had a stake in the status quo as well.