Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  It was probably just as well she’d never felt an overwhelming urge to talk about anything much. It was too demanding to keep coming up with new frames of linguistic reference.

  She put the converter down on a sensor pad, and tapped a little interface next to it. A monitor flickered into life.

  - - - Hello, Roon. - - -

  She smiled.

  She had … not exactly built the artificial intelligence, since it had already existed for an unspecified amount of time. It had risen from the wreckage of the Twenty-First Century computer processing networks like a million tiny spores, a million rogue demi-AIs belonging to different groups and corporations and even individual programmers. It wasn’t that hard, once computers reached a certain level of capacity and complexity, to create ‘neural networks’ and ‘stimulus-response models’ that approximated human intellect. Many of these proto-minds were already capable of passing for human, in certain limited ways. Some of them just rambled through the electronic wasteland, shouting abuse. Others were hooked up to criminal conclaves and used to rob banks, steal information or perform digital assassinations.

  Roon had been patiently braiding them together, giving them a proper foundation and synaptic template, evolving them from many single-purpose mini-brains into a single huge and – okay – overall purposeless consciousness. But a consciousness. Being without a purpose was very much like … well, welcome to the club, really. Although Roon had never found herself suffering a deficit of projects.

  She’d given this project the official name Osrai, which was short for Oræl Systems Ratified Artificial Intelligence, which in turn was an admittedly sentimental reference to the ballad which had brought her and Harlon together more than an actual official system designation. ‘Oræl Systems’, in a purely legal sense, was the authorising entity under which all of her collaborative efforts with Harlon Berkenshaw were filed. As such, Osrai was part of that obscure cluster of intellectual patents.

  For reasons which escaped her, she’d taken to nicknaming the intelligence ‘Lump’.

  - - - Hello, Lump. - - -

  - - - Another round of transmission tests on the converter? - - - Lump guessed.

  Roon nodded, and the system began to hum into life. She pulled out her interface monocle and slotted it into place, letting it close-field connect to the recording and comms array she’d installed in her eye socket years ago.

  She smiled faintly as she remembered how angry Ash had been when she’d discovered her sister, blood-streaked to the forearms, finishing up the insertion operation. It had been very straightforward, the only problems being clumsiness from the local anaesthetic she’d used, and the challenge of fine-motion on the remote control. And injuries around the eye socket and sinus, however minor, tended to bleed to an extent that they always looked worse than they were.

  Yes, Ash had been livid. Still, the implant worked perfectly and now, of course, there was no sign that it was even there. Except when she connected up her eyepiece and began downloading visual input and data. Particularly useful for the abstract transmission tests she had been running on the converter prototypes.

  It was unlikely to succeed in any final way, but with each sequence she felt she was getting closer. Once she’d gotten as close as she could without the Godfang actually waking up and paying attention, she could turn to that issue.

  Any day now – any hour – she might make the right series of alterations and adjustments, everything would line up and then the inert shape of treated bronze on the table would become … a fountain of endless, clean, flawlessly pure energy from beyond the spheres of modern human comprehension.

  She had no idea what she’d do then. But she rarely did.

  SLOANE, WORKING (PHASE TWO)

  Augustus Sloane slept the night in his car, despite the maddening itch of the surgical alterations he’d gone through two days previously. He’d wanted his own face back for this job, because something told him it was going to be his masterwork.

  The Model has flown. The Mechanic’s work is complete. And the Murderer is entrenched. Begin phase two.

  He sat, waiting for the sunrise and any further confirmations or updates. There was nothing, and he hadn’t really been expecting there to be. So much of this project had been handed to him on a platter, it was good to be flying solo … or the nearest equivalent. He still had a lot of setup dragging around his ankles. But that same voice that assured him he was embarking on his magnum opus, also assured him he was going to be grateful for the assistance. He was about to walk into the home of an ASEAN Union Special Forces officer, an eerie tech-savant, a world-famous celebrity model, and an unspecified-level artificial intelligence.

  And the butler and elderly aunt, not to mention the undead superhuman in the chapel wing Sloane had helped build over the past few sweltering months, were apparently nothing to take lightly either.

  He reviewed the notes he’d received, and the up-to-the-minute security information siphoning off the integrated system he’d been instrumental in installing. It was a shame he couldn’t just enter through the chapel, but his alterations provided a back door to the entire system – and the Vandemars’ latest house guest was not to be trifled with. In fact, when it came to the risk assessments, the two elderly residents were on one level and all four of the others were almost frighteningly escalated. Actually there was no almost about it – it was scary, there was no point in denying the obvious. Fear was a tool, regardless of where it lay. It kept you alive.

  Sloane frowned. The three sisters and the undead thing weren’t actually given level pegging on the analyses, though, were they? The Mechanic was lowest, most of her risk vectors technological and long since set up to be neutralised. Aside from this, there were notes about her strength … well, Sloane had learned to take that sort of thing seriously when it made it as far as the risk analysis. Especially when you considered the amazing feats a human body was capable of in its emotional and nervous extremity.

  Above the Mechanic, the Murderer and the so-called Archangel were more or less level in their extremity of danger. Where one held advantages, the other made up for it in other categories. Swings and roundabouts, really.

  What really puzzled him was that the Model, despite lacking much detail in the assorted risk vectors – speed, athleticism, intelligence were all high but not generally problem areas for this type of engagement – had been set in the highest-risk category by a not-insignificant margin. And not a lot had been added to explain why. There were red UNDEFINED markers and some vague behavioural notes connected to data files mostly-filled with blacked-out contents. For a second, he’d wondered if maybe someone in the organisation had mixed the Model and the Murderer codenames around, but that didn’t mesh.

  Still, he had learned not to question the files, and the Model was safely out of the country as one of the primary prerequisites for phase two to begin. So.

  It was time.

  He climbed out of the car, did some quick limbering-up exercises, shouldered the little pack containing his personal instruments, the incendiary charges and the main security interface, and made his way around to the entrance near the kitchens.

  The first part of his job was over almost before it began. He let himself in and waited in a blind spot – defined, in this rather specialised case, as a spot with only one security oversight system rather than overlapping ones, and one over which he had editorial control – for the rolling scramble-outs to neutralise the rest of the emergency countermeasures. As long as he was patient, his incursion didn’t need to look like any sort of security breach until it was too late. It would just be a normal day at the Vandemar mansion. Just as the pad stuck to the back of his hand was signalling all-clear, the butler strolled into the kitchen and began making breakfast for the household.

  Sloane didn’t hesitate. His existence, for reasons he’d never cared to understand, had not left hesitation in him. He stepped silently up behind the quietly-humming man – the utterly unexpected presence of an intrude
r often engendered a critical freeze response, but not always – grabbed a filleting knife from the cutting board and hammered it handle-first into the back of his neck.

  The man’s head was conveniently bent to his task, and Sloane’s hit took him hard between the C7 and T1 vertebrae, severing his central nervous system. The butler went down like a broken doll, losing consciousness instantly. Within minutes, failing advanced neurosurgery, he would be dead. Sloane wasn’t ruling out the presence of such a functionality on the estate, but there was nobody properly placed to enact the procedure.

  He set the first incendiary, checked the security systems, dragged the butler’s body out of immediate sight and then headed deeper into the house. The thin-bladed, well-weighted knife felt right, so he held onto it. It was quality craftsmanship, the metal attractively streaked. Very expensive.

  He found the aunt, Agñasta Mulqueen, still in bed … but the old gargoyle slept lightly. He could have sworn her eyes were half-open even as she was audibly asleep, and before he’d taken two quiet steps into the room he could tell from the way her breathing changed that she’d snapped to full wakefulness. She lay quite still, like a flattened viper, waiting for him to come closer. Sloane wasn’t sure if she had access to a panic button, silent alarm or weapon, but he strongly suspected the latter. There had been nothing in the security schematics about built-in measures and her psychological profile didn’t suggest it anyway.

  “My,” she murmured almost inaudibly as Sloane stole closer, “what a cheap shirt you have, grandmama.”

  Sloane was surprised at the combination of deep chill and white-hot anger these words shot through him, but he held onto his caution. He closed the distance to the bedside and feinted with the knife before reversing the blade and stabbing. Agñasta surprised him a second time then, refusing to fall for the feint and then sweeping up to tangle his actual strike in the thick blankets. She was tough as nails, scorpion-fast and her hands were frighteningly strong, and she’d moved minutely in the instant he’d spent processing his response to her comment. Positioning her arms. She actually managed to twist his knife-grip to uselessness before he could extricate himself.

  But two could play the bedclothes game. Sloane relinquished the knife rather than attempt to fight over it, and instead used both hands to twist, loop, and twist again, grasping her wrist in the same jumbled movement. He heard the brittle old bone break with a dry snap but it was the only sound he heard as the elderly woman fought on in disconcerting silence. In another second, she’d have the knife free in her uninjured hand.

  Refusing to believe the surge of adrenaline he was feeling was panic, he took a firmer grip on the knot of bedding with one hand and grabbed her coiled-and-netted hair in the other, hauled her out of bed and drove her face-first against the corner of a nearby wardrobe. She spasmed and went limp in a patter of blood. Snarling, he released her, plucked the knife from her twisted grasp and hammered it into her ear up to the hilt. Her body twitched a final time, and the soupy stink of her bowels releasing let him know there would be no more surprises from this resident.

  Sloane left the knife in place – as nice as it was, he had his own toolkit to work with once he got to the workshop, packed away tidily under the incendiary devices – wrapped the blankets around the woman’s blood-leaking head and pushed her under the bed. Then he consulted the security system again, cross-checked against the house schematics to find a good spot to place the second incendiary, and checked the time. It still barely qualified as an ungodly hour, and yet the Mechanic had been at work for some time already. She slept in the workshop most nights.

  He frowned and called up the security and communication data yet again. There were some irregularities, probably a backup-of-a-backup-of-a-backup system trying to find a workaround to break the invisible lockout he’d initiated. The iterative learning programs the house computer system was built on were beyond formidable, and that was before you even factored in the technically-sentient software probably considering an escape from its workshop processors.

  Still, things were contained and his own setup had more than enough adaptability to hold them that way until sundown. And he would be gone – much as he would have liked to linger – long before then.

  He checked the third incendiary, checked his interface one more time, nodded to himself, and headed for the workshop.

  THE STORY OF ORÆL

  There was a story in the Book of Last Days. The story of Oræl the Vengeful, the herald of the death of the world and the extermination of the human race.

  It was a silly old story, but then the Book of Last Days was a rather silly old book. Some cynics referred to it as the Big Book of Holy Retcons. Other cynics called it God Learns to Reconcile All His Religions Way Too Late, Part One. Others … well, by the time the Book of Last Days came out there were a lot of cynics around.

  Still, the Book of Last Days and the other books that made up the so-called Newer Testament of the multi-denominational scriptures were an important step. It folded a number of western and eastern religious parables together, replacing the end-parts of several of the big organised religions and unifying them, subtly altering them, and expanding on them. The world hadn’t ended at any of the prophesied times, after all, so a different approach to Judgement Day seemed to be called for. The Book of Last Days, therefore, was an attempt to unite the warring faiths of humanity and create something for people to agree on, rather than fight over.

  The aforementioned cynics, of course, thought this was hilarious. But the result was a series of lessons that, in a fascinating convergent-evolution sense, were closer to the Book of Pinian than anything that had existed on Earth since the veil. And the story – the prophecy, if you will – of Oræl the Vengeful was a good one.

  Oræl was – or would be – an Angel, or perhaps an Archangel, but he was also a Demon. Or an Archdemon. Oræl was a powerful force the likes of which had never existed before, could only exist in the latter days of the world when the old ways crumbled and God’s back was turned in disgust. Oræl was a servant of God and of goodness who had looked into the heart of evil and been corrupted by it – and who, in doing so, had swallowed the evil and absorbed it, sacrificing heart and soul to become a kind of pearl, protecting humanity from darkness at a terrible personal cost. Unable to be either saved or damned, Oræl was condemned to walk the dying Earth, a living symbol, Angel and Demon, prisoner and prison, all rolled into a single gloriously anguished package.

  Of course, those who were in a position to know these things knew that when you combined an Angel with a Demon, what you actually got was a bathtub full of corrosive sludge that could dissolve people into an eternity of excruciating undeath. It was just a story.

  Gabriel rather liked the story, though. There were several versions of it – because of course a story devised to reunite a bunch of divergent faith-streams would inevitably fray into a dozen different alternate variants – including a selection of old-style epic poems. Some choice parts of these had been put to music, like the famous and very stirring ballad that Roon and her Synfoss Baron lover considered Their Song. Which was … really cosmically appropriate, when you thought about it. What were Roon and Harlon, after all, if not embodiments of good and evil powers, merging to save an abjectly undeserving species?

  But even so, most of these assorted variations on the sorry tale held onto a solid kernel of truth. And that truth was this:

  Humans are not worth sacrificing yourself for.

  Oræl, a doomed and tragic figure, walked the wilderness of Earth’s twilight and suffered through dreadful trials for the crime of attempting to save humans from evil. Whatever poisonous darkness boiled within Oræl might as well be the same seething black tar that had formed from the immortal bodies of Barry Dell and Troy Haussman – that was how Gabriel had always imagined Oræl’s innermost core, in any case.

  And humans, of course, repaid this sacrifice by continuing to murder, mutilate, rape, oppress and vilify one another, and their entire
world, for increasingly absurd reasons. Right up until the world in question ended once and for all. One of the things Gabriel liked most about the Book of Last Days was how unforgivingly honest it was regarding human beings and their many, many failings. Oræl was definitely a noble figure, but the important thing to remember was that Oræl was also a fucking enormous sucker.

  Gabriel didn’t mind that. He’d had a long time to get used to it. These were the humans of his cherished long-term plan, after all. These were the humans he fondly daydreamed about unleashing on an unsuspecting urverse. They were unlikely to change at this point, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted them to. He’d been trapped in here too long. Too far from Heaven, for too many years.

  This was why he was working to keep them alive. It was also why he had no intention of sacrificing himself for their benefit.

  You had to know what you were getting into. You had to remember you were dealing with humans, and go in with your eyes open. Preferably with a pair in the back of your head as well, because these were humans.

  And then the Pinians had finally shown up.

  Gabriel didn’t really want them to come fully into focus. Not when it wouldn’t do the humans any good. Not when it was unlikely to lift the veil and end the exile. He’d been fairly up-front about that, he thought. To the Pinians themselves, if not to Stormburg and his presumed team of fanatical boffins. He had the excuse, there, of communication being so utterly esoteric. You couldn’t just sit and chat.

  If Gabriel was being honest, he’d become quite critical of the Pinians, at least in his own mind. He’d been in here, watching humans suffer and die, clawing at the skies and pleading to an absent God, while the Disciples hid. For too long. It hadn’t helped that he’d also been left in charge of training a half-dozen new Angels who had no idea what a Pinian even was. Hah. Try explaining that to a terrified former soldier in the Seventh Century.