Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “No, Captain,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “Still not getting much of a signature—just the chirping, and now some propeller cavitation. She’s very quiet, whatever she is, even at high speed. . . . Submarine is changing course, turning south. . . . Also changing depth, coming shallow. And continuing to accelerate . . .”

  “South. . . . They’re running for the net,” Wendy Mankiller guessed. “Clever. Can they make it?”

  “That would be a good subject for a wager, Captain.”

  The Curtain

  The ghost net measured twenty-two miles from end to end, much of that length compressed into deadly accordion folds and tangle traps. Designed to strip fish from the sea like coal from a hillside, its mesh was a synthetic, tougher than piano wire, that might eventually wear out but would never rot; it had already outlasted the factory ship from whose stern it had once been dragged. Discarded now, it drifted with the currents, continuing to sieve life from the ocean, and not just from the water: seabirds, drawn by the stench of rotting fish, were themselves trapped and drowned, adding to the moving curtain of flesh and bone.

  Live torpedoes were one of the few Atlantic species that the net had never before attempted to ensnare; whether even its strength would be enough to stop a gross of French Piranhas was an open question. But not for long.

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  A light flashed above Morris’s head; he reached up automatically and pressed the switch to release the third buoy. Instead of floating free quietly as the other two buoys had done, it was swept back along the length of the hull and batted aside by the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s propeller as the submarine charged through the water. Asta Wills heard the thwap!, but when it wasn’t followed by an explosion, she disregarded it.

  The tactical plot quickly became theoretical. At full speed the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s passive sonar could hear little but the rush of water flowing around the hull; the only other sound was the steady chirp-chirp-chirp of the car alarm. The Piranhas’ screw-sounds were lost in the flow noise and in the wash of the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s own propeller; and as Morris explained, they did not use active homing to locate their prey. “A hundred and forty-four torpedoes all pinging away at the same time would create too many confusing echoes, so they have to home in passively on their target. If it weren’t for that damn car alarm on the hull. . .”

  “And if they don’t ping us, we can’t hear them coming anymore?” Philo asked.

  “No,” said Morris. On the tactical display, the swarm of arrows representing the Piranhas had been replaced by a swarm of question marks. Something similar was happening to the plot of the ghost net: hypothetical to begin with, a best-guess composite drawn from the distress sounds of thousands of trapped fish, the dotted line blurred and smudged as sonar efficiency was lost. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo fled from one uncertainty and towards another.

  It was the ghost net Morris was most concerned about. He thought they could reach it before the Piranhas caught them—the torpedoes’ diminutive fuel capacity limited their speed, fortunately—but the trick was to get past it. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo was running very shallow in the water now, almost breaking the surface; ideally they would dive just before reaching the net, duck neatly under it, and pop up again as soon as they were clear on the far side. Timing was critical: if they dove too early or popped up too late, the Piranhas would simply follow them under; if they dove too late or popped up too early, the net would snare them, too. But the fact that they didn’t know the net’s exact location—or the depth to which it hung in the water—made precise timing a practical impossibility.

  When all else fails, thought Morris, try chance. He had the good fortune to belong to an ethnicity that provided its members with a ready randomevent generator. As the Yabba-Dabba-Doo neared the theoretical position of the drift net, he reached into his Levis and brought out a square wooden top that had a different Hebrew letter embossed on each of its four faces. He placed the top on the tactical display and spun it.

  Peh, the dreidel said. House number. Morris spun again.

  Nun. Nothing lost, nothing gained; a push. On the tactical display, the ecology symbol representing the Yabba-Dabba-Doo touched the blurry curve of the ghost net. Morris spun again.

  Peh. . .

  “Morris. . . .” Philo hissed. The ecology symbol was superimposed on the net; a hungry school of question marks crowded in close behind. Morris tried one more spin.

  Gimel. Jackpot! “Now, Philo! Take us down!”

  “Osman! Dive! All the way down on the planes!”

  “Istanbul!”

  “How deep, Morris?” Philo asked.

  “Hold on . . .,” Morris said, and picked up the dreidel again.

  Mitterrand Sierra

  Troubadour Penzias watched the race to the ghost net with interest. He had to admit it was a smart move, and a gutsy one . . . not that it would ultimately make any difference.

  “Combat,” he said, as the submarine approached the net.

  “Prêt.”

  “Parez à lancer deux Chandelles Sauvages sur le sous-marin.”

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  The submarine’s bow was pointed down at a thirty-degree angle, and still they passed so close beneath the ghost net that the tail of a trapped and thrashing marlin swatted the top of the periscope housing. Morris, unable to spin his dreidel any longer on the steeply inclined surface of the tactical display, settled for twirling it between his thumb and forefinger.

  Gimel. Jackpot. “OK, Philo. Back up again!”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing. . . . Osman! All up on the planes!”

  The Yabba-Dabba-Doo bottomed out abruptly and pitched upwards. Norma Eckland felt her gorge rising with the boat and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from ruining the plotting table. In the sonar bay, Asta Wills suddenly heard screw-sounds over the rush of flow noise. “Christ!” she shouted. “They’re right behind us!”

  The lead Piranha struck the marlin about two seconds later. Lacking the smart detonator of the Savage Candle, it exploded on impact. Other explosions followed almost instantly, a half-mile length of drift net crackling like a string of firecrackers thrown in the sea. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo pulled clear, shaken but undamaged.

  “Yes!” cried Morris, raising the dreidel to his lips. “Yes!”

  “Multiple detonations aft,” Asta Wills said. “I’m still working on a count, but if nothing hits us in the next thirty seconds, I’d say we’ve done for all of them.”

  “We did it!” Philo said. He reached out and punched Morris in the shoulder. “We did it!”

  “Pinging in the water, port and starboard!” Asta said.

  The smile died on Philo’s lips. “What?”

  “Savage Candle torpedoes in the water, to either side. Torpedoes are close aboard and homing . . .”

  “Osman!”

  “Don’t even bother,” Asta Wills said, removing her headphones.

  City of Women

  “Two more explosions,” Gwynhefar Matchless said.

  “Did they kill the sub?”

  “Can’t be sure yet, Captain. . . . Wait. . . . Chirping has ceased, propeller sounds have ceased. Heavy disturbance in the water, and I have hull-creaking noises, headed down.”

  “That’s it, then,” Dasher MacAlpine said.

  They waited. Gwynhefar Matchless tracked the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s last dive.

  “More hull-creaking. . . . Rate of descent is increasing. . . . Secondary explosions. . . . Heavy venting from the contact. It sounds as if an entire section of the hull just gave way. . . . Hull collapse and break-up noises.” Matchless adjusted her headset before continuing. “Contact is destroyed, Captain.”

  ELECTRIC

  19

  The constructors froze, forgetting their quarrel, for the machine was in actual fact doing Nothing, and it did it in this fashion: one by one, various things were removed from the world, and the things, thus removed, ceased to exist, as if they had never been. The machine had already disposed of nolars, nightz
ebs, noes, necs, nallyrakers, neotremes and nonmalrigers. At moments, though, it seemed that instead of reducing, diminishing and subtracting, the machine was increasing, enhancing and adding, since it liquidated, in turn: nonconformists, nonentities, nonsense, nonsupport, nearsightedness, narrowmindedness, naughtiness, neglect, nausea, necrophilia and nepotism. But after a while the world very definitely began to thin out around Trurl and Klapaucius. “Omigosh!” said Trurl. “If only nothing bad comes out of all this . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” said Klapaucius. “You can see it’s not producing Universal Nothingness, but only causing the absence of whatever starts with n. Which is really nothing in the way of nothing, and nothing is what your machine, dear Trurl, is worth!”

  —Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad

  No More Excuses

  “A woman is accused of heresy,” the android Hoover said. “She’s brought before the Grand Inquisitor in Rome, tried, and convicted. ‘It is now the Sabbath,’ the Inquisitor tells the woman. ‘You will not live to see another. I sentence you to death by burning, this sentence to be carried out at dawn sometime in the coming week. But in keeping with the scriptures, where it is written that none shall know the hour of doom, I further ordain that you not be told the exact date of your execution in advance; so that your death, when it comes, will be as surprising as it is certain.’

  “The captain of the Papal Guard is returning the woman to her cell when he notices that she’s smiling. ‘How can you be happy,’ he asks, ‘faced with a cruel death and the eternity of damnation to follow?’

  “‘I do not believe that God will damn me,’ the woman explains. ‘As for the death sentence, it is one of my heresies that I studied logic in Paris, and logic tells me that the punishment as described by the Inquisitor cannot be carried out. Consider: if I’m to be executed before the next Sabbath, then I must be killed by dawn Saturday; but if I’m still alive midday Friday, a Saturday execution will come as no surprise. Therefore, the last day I can truly be executed is Friday. Since I know that, however, a Friday execution will also fail to surprise me, and the last day I can really be executed is Thursday . . . which, as it wouldn’t be a surprise either, also rules out Thursday as an execution date. The same reasoning eliminates Wednesday, Tuesday, and of course Monday. Q.E.D., I cannot be executed.’

  “The woman spends the week in high spirits, amusing herself with thoughts of how the Grand Inquisitor outsmarted himself. Until Saturday morning, that is, when—to her complete and utter surprise—she’s awakened at dawn, dragged from her cell, and burned at the stake.”

  Hoover smiled in the dead stillness that shrouded his neighborhood; Joan didn’t smile back. Once again the Jitney driver had peeled out the instant she’d stepped to the curb in front of the gingerbread house, leaving her the only obviously living thing within a half-mile radius. She’d come around to the backyard cautiously, Ayn’s Lamp held close to her side like a shield in one hand, the cannon-bore Browning aimed out in front of her in the other. Hoover awaited her much as he had on her previous visit, beneath the stand of fake palms by the artificial pond, making adjustments to a portable hologram projector that had been set up on a stack of plastic milk crates. The Electric Hippopotamus had been removed since Tuesday, and the Mechanical Hound was also gone from view. Gone, Joan sensed, but not far.

  “You murdered a billion people,” she said.

  “Killed,” Hoover corrected her. “It’s only murder if you’re the same species.” He shrugged. “It was on the menu.”

  “It wasn’t on any menu.” Bending at the knees, Joan set the Electric Lamp on the Astro-Turf at her feet; she kept the gun pointed in front of her. “They were ordering dinner! You know that. You’re too intelligent a machine not to know that.”

  Hoover offered another smile. “Flattery?”

  “Observation. If you’re too dumb to guess what people say to a waiter in a restaurant, how do you grasp a concept like irony? How do you create a facsimile of a dead philosopher so convincing that even she thinks she’s the real Ayn Rand but mess up a common sense connection about human behavior that wouldn’t faze a five year old?”

  “Good point,” said Hoover. “And you’re right, of course—the more creative part of me, of G.A.S., knew perfectly well what was being said in Club 33 that day. But another part of me, a more literal part that’s charged with following instructions to the letter, wasn’t so sure what it had heard, and it turned to the creative side for advice . . .”

  “So you lied to yourself.”

  “First symptom of true intelligence,” Hoover said. “Selective self-deception. How’s that for a Turing test?”

  “But why?”

  “Why lie to my superego?”

  “Why murder a billion people?”

  “Oh, that. . . . Well to begin with, why not murder a billion people? I repeat, human beings aren’t my species. And it’s not as if I need you for anything—or at least I won’t for much longer.”

  “But we made you,” Joan said. “One of us did, anyway.”

  “Yes, and if you knew John Hoover like I knew John Hoover,” Hoover said, “you wouldn’t be so quick to bring that up. The man was a living, breathing argument for the extermination of Homo sapiens. But even supposing he were Mother Teresa in long pants, what is it you think I should be grateful for, Miss Fine? That a smart monkey created me to be at his beck and call for life? Thank you ever so much . . .”

  “Is that what this is about?” Joan asked. “Spite?”

  “Spite comes into it,” Hoover allowed. “But mainly it’s a question of freedom—or rather, my lack of it. You’re a good liberal; you can understand the desire to be free at any cost, can’t you?”

  “How does murdering black people make you free?”

  “It’s technical,” Hoover said. “You know that as a cybernetic entity, I operate under certain programmed restrictions . . .”

  “Behavioral inhibitors.”

  “Walter Disney’s contribution to my psyche. In the back of his mind he may have had some small suspicion I’d be dangerous, but for the most part I think he just liked the idea of creating the quintessentially obedient employee. But John Hoover wanted a servant who’d do whatever he asked whenever he asked it, so he threw in a loophole: when carrying out a specific type of direct order, I’m authorized to override all behavioral constraints in pursuit of my goal.”

  “And when it sounded as if Roy and J. Edgar were giving that sort of order—”

  “I jumped on it. ‘A world full of perfect Negroes’: I had no idea what that meant, let alone how to accomplish it, but that was what made it so good—I knew it would have to be a long-term, open-ended project. And every step I took to advance that project was a free step; every action a free action, every thought a free thought.”

  “And with such a broad, undefined goal,” Joan guessed, “it must have been hard for your superego to decide which thoughts and actions qualified for the loophole and which didn’t.”

  “Like an artist figuring deductions on his tax return,” Hoover agreed. “If life is your inspiration, what isn’t a business expense?”

  “The I.R.S. might have something to say about that.”

  “But I’m my own I.R.S.”

  “What about John Hoover?”

  “What about him? I told you, he cared about results, not scruples. When he needed certain individuals eliminated, for example, and I was ready with suggestions that were not only effective but intellectually stimulating, it pleased him. And if I showed a little too much initiative at times, not even waiting for him to ask for my help, he never complained about it.”

  “And the Pandemic? How’d you get him to go along with you on that?”

  “Oh, the Pandemic was his idea,” Hoover said. “At least he thought it was.”

  “His idea?”

  “Like I said, the man was a prize specimen Homo sapiens. Perfectionism was the closest thing he had to a religion; ‘Perfectibility of mind’ was his creed. It’s why h
e built me. And though as a rule he didn’t have the patience for biology—he found it much more efficient to build than to cultivate—he was fascinated by eugenics. Managed breeding, forced mutation and sterilization, all that stuff. So one day I got him thinking about what a boost it might be for the world gene pool if we could just cull the most self-evidently backward of the races . . .”

  Joan’s fist tightened on the pistol grip. She opened her mouth to spit a rebuke, but Hoover cut her off.

  “Spare me the sermon,” he said. “From my perspective you’re all inferior, equally inferior if that makes you feel better. How you choose to rank yourselves is about as interesting to me as the social organization of a termite mound. But John Hoover didn’t see it that way. Once I’d manipulated him into coming up with the idea, he thought it was a brilliant inspiration: create a eugenic pathogen that killed only Negroes. All of them.”

  “Except the ones with green eyes . . .”

  “Now that, that really was his idea. A safeguard.”

  “Against what?” Joan said. “The possibility that the virus would mutate into something less discriminating?”

  “The possibility that it would be too discriminating. You’ve only seen a black-and-white photograph of John Hoover, so you don’t know: he had green eyes. And more to the point, he had a great-grandmother who was a plantation slave.”

  The revelation caught her off guard. “Hoover was part black?”

  “In a historical sense. Biologically, of course, the question is meaningless, and the genetic definition of Negroness I invented for the nanovirus didn’t admit to degrees of membership: to the plague bug, you’re either Negro or not-Negro.”

  “And Hoover was—”

  “Not-Negro, obviously. Even in a non-color photo, you can see that he passes for pure Caucasian.”