Berserker Kill

by Fred Saberhagen

  Hawksmoor acknowledged the declaration with a slight smile.

  But it was evident that he was mainly interested in talking to Frank, for his eyes turned in that direction. “Perhaps you are aware that I myself am an electronic person, Colonel?”

  Frank was already looking at the Hawksmoor image through two of his front-box lenses. A third now swiveled around that way, as if he wanted a better look. “Are you, now?” he commented.

  Kensing, listened, was struck by the fact that the voice of the fragmented, augmented man in boxes sounded less human than Nick’s, though both of course were being generated by mechanical speakers.

  “Indeed I am.”

  Marcus made no further comment.

  Nick pressed on, sounding both curious and somehow determined. “Does my revelation make you angry? Do you consider that you have been deceived?”

  A metal forelimb gestured lightly. “I admit you took me a little by surprise. Maybe I would be angry if I thought a human had been deceiving me. But getting mad at a tool doesn’t make a lot of sense. Are you a good tool, Nick?”

  “I work at being a good tool, usually to the best of my ability. If you are not offended, Colonel, and if you have a little time to spare, let me pursue the subject a little further.”

  “Go ahead. Shoot.”

  “You will probably not be surprised to hear that I find the topic deeply interesting. Actually I had not expected you to accept my revelation so quickly, without discussion. Without at least some faint suspicion that I was joking.”

  All three of Frank’s boxes moved, slightly adjusting their relative positions; Kensing got the impression that their occupant was somehow making himself comfortable. Marcus said: “I said you took me a little by surprise. But maybe not entirely.”

  “Indeed. Not entirely? I would like to know what it was about me-about my persona on the holostage, which you have encountered several times-that suggested to you that I lack flesh.”

  “Maybe we can go into it sometime. Right now I’ve got other things to do.” End of conversation.

  Kensing, at his next opportunity to talk with Premier Dirac, said something about how realistic Nick Hawksmoor appeared to be, what a good job the programmers had done in putting him together. “He’s a relatively new version, I presume?”

  Dirac nodded. “Yes, only about a year old. They did do a good job, didn’t they? It took them several months. The truth is I was growing less and less happy with the product I was getting from human architects-that biostation, for example. So I decided to try what a state-of-the-art optelectronic mind could do.”

  “I’d say a matter of only months is quick work for a program of such complexity, Premier. I’d have thought years. How was his name chosen, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “My engineers had certain building blocks of programming ready,” Dirac explained vaguely. “That speeded things up. As for his name, Nick picked it himself. Adopted it from some eighteenth-century builder-I’ll tell you the story sometime. Did you get a good look at the station model?”

  It seemed to Kensing, who had the chance to observe some of the interactions between Premier Dirac and Hawksmoor, that normally the organic creator got along well enough with his artificial creation.

  But the Premier’s feelings toward any optelectronic personalities he encountered tended to be complex and intense.

  Once Kensing heard Dirac declaim: “Those transcribed spirits who have retired from flesh into electronic modality generally enjoy a higher social status, if one can put it in those terms, than those who have never possessed a red blood cell in their lives.”

  Kensing was unsurprised to hear that he was not the only one who had been fooled for some time by Nick. Others were more upset, on discovering the truth, than he had been. Some of the crew members, like a great many people elsewhere, voiced or at least had some objection to or felt some uneasiness about a computer artifact that looked and sounded so much like a person.

  It was not of course Hawksmoor’s calculating power-or call it intellect-to which most objected; it was the semblance of humanity possessed by this thing with which (or whom) the Premier consulted, argued (sometimes joyfully), and upon whom (or which) he seemed to depend so heavily.

  Now that the squadron was ready to pull out from Imatra, Nick was being forced to leave behind his Wren-he thought of the little ship as his. The place on the hangar deck usually occupied by that often useful but unarmed vessel had been taken by an armed military scoutship, the last fighting craft of any kind left in the Imatran system. The recent fighting had ended before the scoutship was able to reach the scene. Dirac had overawed the overmatched local authorities and simply taken it away from them.

  But abandoning the Wren posed more problems for Nick than his creator/employer realized. Now, with the squadron on the verge of departure, Hawksmoor had been supervising, among his other duties, the robot workers busy removing certain equipment from the Wren and reinstalling it on the newly acquired scout.

  During this operation Nick moved himself about, aboard ship or in space, in spacesuit mode. His chief job was supervising the robots that did most of the physical work-these were mostly dog-sized metal creatures with nothing organic in their physical appearance and nothing outstanding in their brains.

  While conducting this work openly, Hawksmoor had a desperate need to see that another task was performed also, and in the strictest secrecy-he had to arrange the transfer, from his own small craft to somewhere aboard the yacht, not only of the physical storage units in which he himself resided most of the time, when he was not working in suit-mode, but also of those containing Jenny.

  It had turned out, as he had more or less expected, that the physical volume needed to store the recording of a once-organic person-in this case, the Lady Genevieve-under current technology (which incorporated, in solid lumps of heavy metals and composite materials, the latest subquantal storage systems) was just about the same as that required to house Nick himself: about four thousand cubic centimeters, a capacity approximately equivalent to that of three adult human skulls.

  The suit Nick had chosen to animate for this particular transfer job happened to be the same one he’d used to rescue Lady Genevieve from the doomed courier. It had sustained some minor damage at that time, damage he was going to be hard put to explain if anyone ever noticed it and queried him about it. He had what he thought were several good explanations ready, and intended to choose what seemed the best one when the moment of truth arrived.

  On one of Nick’s suited passages across the hangar deck of the Eidolon he encountered Kensing, himself spacesuited at the moment. The fleshly man was taking an inventory, and making a hands-on inspection of the small craft aboard, upon which it would be necessary to depend if boarding operations were contemplated.

  Nick felt somewhat amused at Kensing’s reaction to the appearance of Nick’s physically empty suit. For some reason this struck the young systems engineer, as it did many other people, as particularly creepy and disturbing.

  After meeting Kensing, Hawksmoor considered snatching a few moments from his assigned duties-he had no authorized time for rest, since he was not supposed to need any-to visit Jenny, to make sure she had come through the physical transfer without any problems. Actually there was no reason to think she had even been aware that it was going on, but he wanted to make sure.

  In the privacy of his own thought, Hawksmoor had by now begun to ponder very seriously several important questions raised by his new relationship with the Lady Genevieve.

  One of the first tasks he had undertaken in these latest intervals of secret work had been to adjust (very tentatively and cautiously!) some of the lady’s peripheral programming, hoping thus to help her recover from the shock of realization of her new state of existence. He had been careful not to overdo the adjustment, and soon as he had awakened the Lady Genevieve again, she had begun at once to implore, to demand, that he tell her exactly what had happened to her.

  On rev
isiting Jenny as soon as possible after her transfer to the yacht, Hawksmoor resumed his efforts to explain the new situation to the lady, as gently as he could.

  Within a few minutes after he’d rescued the Lady Genevieve (whose spirit at the time had still maintained a tenuous hold upon her native flesh) from the doomed courier and succeeded in carrying her aboard his little ship, the Wren’s own medirobot had diagnosed her injuries as certainly fatal. Even with deep-freezing until the best in medical help could be obtained, the prognosis was abysmally poor.

  At that point he, Nick, as he recounted now, had had no choice. Regardless of what heroic measures he and the medirobot might have taken, the lady’s brain was soon going to be dead-and once that happened, no physician or surgeon, human or robotic, would be able to restore her personality.

  As Nicholas-or his image in virtual reality-told this story now, Jenny-or her image-stood staring at him helplessly, her small mouth open on white teeth. At the moment they were, to Jenny’s best awareness, near the very center of the Abbey, halfway down the football-field length of the west nave and strolling east, enjoying the pastel glories painted on stone and wood by an afternoon sun coming in behind them through the stained glass of the great west window. Not as glorious a rose window, Nick thought to himself, as that of Chartres was said to have been-but still impressive.

  “Therefore, my lady,” Hawksmoor concluded, “as I have been trying to explain, I did the only thing I could. I recorded you. I saved the patterns of your consciousness, the essence of your personality, practically your entire memory.”

  Thanks to the subtle adjustments Nick had very recently made in her peripheral programming, the lady was soon able to calm down enough to reply. Her next words, spoken with the politeness ladyship demanded, were to thank Nick once more for saving her; her next words after those comprised an urgent plea, demand, for a more thorough explanation of her situation.

  Grateful at seeming to have got past the key point of the explanation without disaster, Hawksmoor went on, as delicately as possible, into the details. How he had reformed and reclothed the image of her body, plucking the vast quantities of necessary data out of the many video recordings of the lovely Lady Genevieve he happened to have on hand. Not just happened. His burgeoning worship of the lady had months ago caused him to begin to accumulate images of her-and the nearer the date of the wedding came, the more such images had been available.

  Nick might have related more details of the process by which he had created her image as it was today, a staggering number of details in fact. But already the lady had had enough. Briskly she interrupted his recital with an imperious demand that he at once start arranging for her return to an organic, fleshly body.

  “Nick, I understand, really I do, that your purpose in doing…

  what you have done was to save my life. And it worked, and I’m grateful, never think I’m not.”

  “My lady, it was the least that I-”

  “But I cannot go on living indefinitely like this, without a real body. How long is the restoration going to take?”

  Hawksmoor had been afraid of the moment when he had to face this question. “My lady, I am more sorry than I can say. But what you are asking can’t… Well, I just haven’t been able to discover any way in which it can be done.”

  As these words were spoken, the couple had rounded a columned corner and were, in terms of the virtual reality they shared, standing in the south transept of the Abbey, near the place Hawksmoor had learned ought to be called Poets’ Corner, because of the masters of the art who had been entombed or memorialized there. But the Lady Genevieve was not currently interested in poetry, or architecture either. She raised her eyes and looked around her, as if her imaged eyes could see through, beyond, the virtual world of stones and glass to whatever harsher, deeper fabric of realworld hardware was maintaining it.

  “Where are we, really?” she demanded.

  “In those terms, Jenny-if I may still call you that-we are now, as I have been trying to explain, aboard your husband’s yacht, the Eidolon-and no, he has not the faintest suspicion that you are here.”

  “He doesn’t even suspect?” Her tone was shocked, surprised, but-yes, he dared to think that her reaction was also one of hope.

  “I thought perhaps you were doing this at his orders.”

  That she might entertain such a suspicion had never occurred to Nick. He said: “I shall explain presently. But be assured that Premier Dirac has not the slightest inkling that you have survived in any form. He simply believes that you are dead, killed with the others who were aboard that courier when it exploded.”

  “So you haven’t told him.”

  To Nick’s immense relief, there had been more calculation than accusation in those words.

  He reassured her. “I have not told him or anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why have I not told your husband?” Suddenly he felt nervous and uncertain. “There are reasons. I am not going to apologize for my behavior, but you certainly deserve an explanation.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes. The first time we met, Jenny… I mean the first time you were able to look at me and respond to me… there in that great laboratory room aboard the bioresearch station-even before there was any hint of a berserker attack-I received the impression that you were deeply Unhappy. Was I wrong?”

  She hesitated.

  “Was I wrong?”

  She was looking at some kind of marble monument encased in wooden cabinetry, with antique letters spelling Chaucer carved into the stone. He could tell her the fascinating history of that memorial if she was interested. But right now she was just staring. At last she said: “No. No, Nick, I don’t suppose that you were wrong.”

  “I knew it! And now you have admitted that you fear your husband. I too have been living with him in a sense, you see, if only briefly. I know, as you know, that our Premier is not the easiest person in the Galaxy to get along with.”

  At that the lady smiled wanly.

  Hawksmoor went on: “The Premier and I, sometimes… well, all is not always well between us, my creator and me.

  “You see, Jenny, at first, when I was getting you out of the courier, transporting you to my medirobot, deciding that recording your mind was the only way to save it-all that time I had no idea of keeping your rescue a secret. No conscious plan.

  But then, I remember thinking, before telling the world that you were saved, I had better make sure that you had come through the recording process in good shape-which, let me hasten to assure you, you have done.”

  “And then?” the lady prompted.

  “Well, I determined that I was going to make sure you had the right to choose,” Nick burst out. “I mean, the right to choose whether you wanted to go back to him or not.”

  “Go back to him?” Jenny was stunned, uncomprehending. Then wild hope leaped up in her eyes. “You mean that after all you can restore me to my body?”

  “I-no, I thought I had explained, I cannot do that. No one can.

  Your body has been totally destroyed.”

  “But then how could I go back to him? What do you mean by such a question? How can I go back to anyone when I’m in this condition?”

  “I suppose the only real way in which you could go back to him

  ,” said Nick in measured tones, “would be to visit him, to talk to him from a holostage. Perhaps to meet him in some virtual space, as we are meeting now.”

  “To meet him in some imaginary world, like this? Or to gaze at him from a holostage? What good is that to anyone?” The lady was starting to grow frantic once again. “What good is it to Dirac, especially? To a man who married me to start a dynasty? In his world of politics, being married to an electronic phantom will mean nothing, nothing at all. No, my husband must never know what has happened to me, at least not until you have brought me back to real life. He must never see me this way! He might-” She let the sentence die there, as if she were afraid to complete it.
>
  “There are alternatives, of course,” said Nick after a short interval. His own desperation was growing. “I think they are excellent alternatives. The fact is that you and I-that there are ways in which we might have a life together. Eventually, with others like ourselves-”

  “Like ourselves? You mean unreal? Only programs, images?”

  “It is a different form of life, I admit. But we-”

  “Life? Is this a life? I tell you, I must have a body.” The lady, interrupting, almost screaming, waved her imaged arms. “Skin and blood and bones and sex and muscles-can you give me those?”

  Hawksmoor exerted his best efforts to explain. But she wasn’t particularly interested in the technical details. She wanted him to cease his protests that getting her a body was impossible, and to get on with the task of doing it, somehow, at any cost.

  But at the same time-this was a new development, and it certainly gave Nick new hope-she didn’t want him to leave her alone. It was painfully lonely in the Abbey, Genevieve complained, when he was absent.

  Hawksmoor experienced great joy at the discovery that the lady missed him. Still, he was going to have to leave her sometime. “I could provide people,” he suggested.

  “Real people?”

  “Well, at the moment, no. Currently your companionship would be limited to somewhat distant figures, like the verger.

  Maybe a small crowd having a party in the next room or around the pool, the sounds, the distant images of people singing, dancing?”

  “And I could never join them. No thanks, Nick. Just come and see me when you have the time. And you must, you really must, try to bring me some good news.”

  “I’ll do that.” And he went away, projected his awareness elsewhere, fled down the pathway of an exit circuit, returning to duty fired with a new resolve, because she hadn’t wanted him to leave.

  Before he left, a small thing but about all that he could do, Nick had shown her how to put herself to sleep.