“I doubted,” Tasha whispered finally. “Oh, Pehr, I thought we were both going to die. I thought my dreams had … had lied to me.”
“I thought we did well,” Pehr said, and after a moment the absurdity of it all struck him, and he began to laugh. Tasha could feel this, her head on his chest, and soon she had joined him, still crying but laughing just the same. The sound of it lightened Pehr’s heart.
“You are insane,” she said at last.
“Probably. I have a few pieces of linen in my satchel. We should dress your leg.”
She moved off of him, sitting up, and said, “We’ll need some light.”
“Let me help you, ma’am!” a voice said from the dark, and there was a small click as they were bathed in cold, blue light. Tasha made a small shrieking noise, clasping her hands over her mouth, and Pehr found himself up on his feet though he couldn't remember moving.
Before them stood another of the humanoid metal things, but this one was in far better shape than its outdoor brethren. It had retained most of its clothing and nearly all of its skin, and the eyes that peered out at them were deceptively human. If not for the large, black plug in its chest and they grey spots at its joints where both clothing and skin had worn away, Pehr would have thought it a man.
“It’s all right, Tasha,” he said after a moment, relaxing. The thing was simply standing there, staring at him. If it had been a threat, they would likely both be dead already.
“I apologize for startling you, ma’am, and you, Mister Prime Minister.”
“I’m not a Gods damned Prime Minister,” Pehr muttered, but the thing only cocked its head and raised its eyebrows.
“I’m sorry?” it asked.
“Nothing,” Pehr said. “What is your name?”
“My name is Ardis, sir.”
“You’re all named Ardis?” Tasha asked. She had come forward to stand next to Pehr, favoring her wounded leg and grimacing whenever she was forced to put weight on it.
“Yes, miss Samhad. All of the Mark Fours.”
“How did you know my name?”
“You met another Ardis outside. All Mark Fours are equipped with a secure, short-range connection, ma’am. It prevents us from having to ask a guest their name repeatedly as they move throughout the city.”
“I … have no idea what that means,” Tasha muttered. “But thank you. I … thank you, Ardis.”
“If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask,” the thing said, and it gave a short bow before taking four steps backward, coming to a stop just in front of a dark marble wall. It turned its eyes to the floor and stood there in a casual position, as it had no doubt been standing for centuries – or perhaps even millennia.
Pehr tried not to think about this. The idea that this thing had stood here, a useless guard in the middle of a dead city, for longer than the entire history of Uru, filled him with a sense of both awe and raw confusion. It boggled the mind.
Tasha, apparently, suffered from no such problems. She was looking around the large chamber that they were standing in, seeming completely at home. Pehr envied her this for a moment, before realizing that Tasha’s dreams had kept her from ever feeling at home with her own family. This was perhaps the first time in her life that she had stood someplace in which she truly felt she belonged.
“Tell me about this place,” Pehr said, and Tasha gave him a questioning look.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve seen it before. You’ve seen it in dreams, and now you’re here in real life. Tell me what this place is.”
She ran a hand through her short, red hair and sighed. “It’s still … fuzzy … but now that I’m here, I can remember more than I did before. This building is important. I saw lines of blue fire racing from this place, extending forth to touch every building, every path, every light-globe in the city.”
“This is what you’ve come all this way to find?”
Tasha pointed at the staircase. “Down below, I think, we will reach what I have come to find. What we have come to find.”
Pehr considered this. Of course they would need to descend and find whatever it was that Tasha sought, but he had grown tired of walking into the unknown. There were limits to what Tasha could tell him, but perhaps there was another that he could ask.
“Ardis,” he said, turning to the metal thing, and it immediately lifted its head to look at him.
“Yes, Mister Prime Minister?”
“What is the name of this place? This building?”
“This is City Control, sir.”
“What happens here?” Pehr asked, though the name made it clear that Tasha was correct about its importance.
“On the upper levels there are offices for many of the city’s top-ranking officials, sir. They are involved in making laws, deciding policy, and other matters of state. Your office is on the third floor, in the west corner, with a beautiful view—”
“What about this floor?” Tasha interrupted.
“There are two wings on the ground floor, ma’am. To your left, you will find the library of congress. To your right, you will find the department of public records.”
“And down below?” Tasha asked, and Pehr thought he could hear something in her voice that was very close to greed.
“Below this building, ma’am, you will find Central Processing, the largest server farm in the entire city. Our mainframe takes up most of the floor, but there is a reception area and the communication interface.”
“Do you have any idea what that means?” Pehr asked Tasha in a low voice.
“Not exactly, no, but I think it’s important. I think there is a tremendous amount of knowledge stored in this place. We must try to acquire at least a part of it.”
“You know this from the dreams?”
“Only fragments, Pehr. I don’t know much of anything … I can only sense.”
“And your senses tell you to go below.”
“Yes, below, to what the thing … to what Ardis called Central Processing.”
The metal thing spoke again. “If you wish to interact with our mainframe, Miss Samhad, you will need a security token and a temporary password. You can obtain both at the reception desk.”
“Thank you, Ardis,” Pehr said. “That will be all.”
The metal thing bowed again and returned to its post against the wall.
“You’re becoming comfortable with them,” Tasha said, smiling a little.
“I’m not comfortable with anything in this entire damned city,” Pehr grumbled. “Now let’s go down these stairs to the ‘reception desk’ so that we may obtain your ‘security token’ and your ‘temporary password’ so that you can do whatever it is that must be done.”
Tasha’s smile widened at his sarcasm; she didn’t understand these terms any more than Pehr did, but he had no doubt that she would figure them out. Tasha was quick-witted, logical, creative … all of the things that he had envied about Jace, really. Pehr had always been pleased with his own physical abilities, and even with his knowledge and understanding of people, but he had often wished for quicker wits and a more creative mind. He had envied these things in Jace, and now he envied them in Tasha. Sometimes he wondered why either of the two ever put up with his slow, deliberate mind.
“Leg,” he said, pointing at her wounds, and she nodded. Before starting in on the bandaging job, he also handed her a few pieces of salted tral meat. For his own part, now that the adrenaline from the chase had subsided, Pehr was ravenous. He gnawed on a piece of the meat as he worked. Tasha wolfed hers down as if starving.
“Can you help me with the stairs?” she asked him when he was done and they were both standing. “I think if I try them on my own I will end up in a heap at the bottom.”
Pehr nodded. He was impressed with the girl’s stoicism; the cuts in her calf were deep and wide, the worst of the injuries either had sustained, and must have been very painful. He supposed that the elation she was feeling, having finally reached
this place that she had dreamt of for so long, was keeping her mind off the pain.
Pehr stooped down and Tasha put her arm over his shoulder. She seemed ready to attempt to shuffle down the stairs, but Pehr had other plans, and she made a little squeak of surprise when in one smooth motion he dipped, put his right arm under her knees, and lifted her into his arms.
“This isn’t necessary,” she said, and Pehr didn’t even bother responding to that. He began to descend the staircase. After a moment, Tasha stopped lying so stiff in his arms and accepted what was happening. The stairs were wide and shallow, not hard to navigate even with his friend in his arms. They curved around and around as Pehr descended, dropping several stories below ground. When at last they reached the end, he set Tasha down, and she glanced at the doorway in front of them.
“I don’t know what those markings say, but the ‘reception desk’ must be through there,” Pehr said.
Tasha was already limping forward, and Pehr followed. Inside, another Ardis machine stood behind a wide, curved table made of a smooth black material that Pehr didn’t think was stone. Like its brother upstairs, this version of the metal thing was in much better condition than those that served duty outside. It tracked them with its eyes as they entered, and said, “Hello Mister Prime Minister. Hello, Miss Samhad.”
“Hello, Ardis,” Tasha said, stepping up to the desk.
Pehr joined her and said, “We need a … a token. And something else. To speak with your fainrane.”
“Mainframe,” Tasha corrected, and Pehr merely rolled his eyes. The Ardis unit reached down with its right hand and brought it back up, placing a tiny black object on the flat surface in front of him.
“Certainly,” it said. “This is your security token, which will allow you to open the doors. Just press it against the pad to your left. Please note that all security tokens expire exactly twenty-four hours after their first use. Once you are inside, Allen will ask you for today’s password. Today’s choice was ‘vichyssoise.’”
“Fishy what?” Pehr asked, bewildered.
“I’ve got it, Pehr,” Tasha said, taking him by the shoulder. “Thank you, Ardis.”
“You’re quite welcome, ma’am,” the thing said, and it returned to its state of rest.
“Who is Allen?” Pehr asked, and Tasha shrugged.
“Does it matter? Some new thing that we won’t understand, most likely. It won’t be human.”
“It has a human’s name. What if it’s a survivor?”
“It’s not.”
Pehr had long since become used to Tasha’s flat declarations about things she should have had no way of knowing, and he didn’t bother to argue. The girl with the purple eyes took the tiny black object from the desk, limped over to the large double doors ahead of them, and pressed the object against the pad that the Ardis unit had mentioned. Pehr watched as the doors slid back on their own – this city never ceased in its display of wonders – revealing a dim hallway that curved off to the left after a few paces.
“No sense waiting,” Tasha said, and she walked forward. After a moment, Pehr followed.
* * *
The communication room was flat and blank and made entirely of featureless metal save for the ceiling, which was a single pane of glowing white light. In its center there was a metal cylinder, perhaps six inches in circumference, which stood at chest height. The room was otherwise empty, and for a moment, Pehr had no idea how to proceed.
“What are we supposed to be communicating with?” he asked, and Tasha shook her head.
“I … don’t know.”
“Did we miss an entrance somewhere? Perhaps this is a storage space?”
“No, there weren’t any doors.” Tasha sounded frustrated, and Pehr couldn’t blame her. This was an empty room with a castrated lump of metal in its center. After all they had been through, to arrive in this place was infuriating.
“I’m going to go back and beat that Ardis thing until it tells us what is going on,” Pehr said, turning toward the doorway through which they had entered. Tasha reached a hand out and touched his shoulder, stopping him.
“Allow me a moment,” she said. “After that, I’ll come with you and hold it down while you punch.”
Pehr glanced over at her. “Was that a joke, Tasha? Are you unwell?”
“Shut up,” she said, but she was smiling. She stepped slowly forward, toward the cylinder in the center of the room.
“Are you going to touch that?”
“Do you think I should not?”
“This city has proven that anything could be deadly …”
“How encouraging,” Tasha growled, and she dropped her hand down on the rounded top of the cylinder. The response was instantaneous and terrifying; the lighted ceiling went out, plunging them into darkness, and before they could even react, the voice spoke.
“Password, please!” it roared, the sound louder and deeper than any human throat could produce, and for a moment there was silence save for Tasha’s breathing, and for Pehr’s. At last Tasha found her voice, and she croaked out the word.
“Vish … vichyssoise?”
“Password accepted. Welcome to the mainframe.”
The blackness lightened a bit, and Pehr could now make out Tasha’s form in front of him again. She still had her hand on the cylinder, as if afraid even to shift position. He was about to take a step forward, perhaps to place a hand on her shoulder in solidarity, when he was instead given witness to the most amazing thing that he had ever seen.
The face materialized before him out of thin air, massive and looming. It was curiously flat, somehow, with no more depth than a shadow, and yet it was the size of the entire wall in front of them. The face’s complexion was dark, darker even than Pehr’s, and its black, kinky hair was cropped close to its head. It was clean-shaven, and it looked down upon them with soft, brown eyes.
“I must say, sir, that you’re seriously late. I get that it’s not exactly perfect out there, especially these days, but honestly … nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six years? That’s a hell of a trip to the outer fringes.”
The giant head seemed oblivious to the near-terror it had caused its guests, and it was looking at them with obvious expectation. Pehr realized with a dawning sense of horror that this thing expected him to provide some sort of rational response. All he was able do was stammer. “Ah … I … that is …”
Then the face laughed, head rolling back – even though there was nowhere, really, for it to roll – and said, “I’m just screwing around, man. I know you’re not the Prime Minister.”
“You do?” Pehr asked.
“Sure. I mean, the security boys think you’re him – it’s all over the RDIS network. That’s ‘Remotely Distributed Information and Security,’ if you care. Those guys can’t think on their feet, though. Or off their feet. Truth be told, they can’t think at all. We only built them to put together some basic responses based on their available dataset. At first it’s pretty clever but, man, you want to talk about lousy conversationalists? After a while it’s just ‘I’m sorry, I do not possess sufficient information to respond,’ over and over.”
“A-are you Allen?” Tasha asked it, and the giant head smiled at her, nodding.
“Sure am. Allen James Montgomery the third, head of comp-sci, mathematician extraordinaire, and chairman of the science board. Well, really, I’m just an AI construct that’s impersonating the guy who built me, but you … yeah. Judging by those ‘call me Smoking Buffalo’ outfits, I’m guessing there aren’t many computers in your lives.”
Pehr and Tasha had no idea how to respond to this and were having difficulty doing anything more than gawking at this terrifying display of magic. After a moment, the thing – Allen – went on.
“Right, so … uh … well, this is the mainframe. I know it doesn’t look like much, but trust me, all of the information held in the city comes through here.”
“You control the things outside, then?” Pehr asked. “The ones that
almost killed us?”
“The gardeners? No, I don’t control them – I just monitor them. They went berserk a long time ago, but it’s nothing I could fix. Manual server reboot required. They disabled the remote login as a safety precaution. That was a mistake, obviously. The gardeners weren’t one of my projects … but I knew the guy who built them.”
“He didn’t do a very good job,” Pehr muttered.
“Tell you what, Captain Neolithic … you try coding something that doesn’t throw a single exception in ten thousand years and then get back to me, ‘kay?”
Pehr, who had no idea what this thing was talking about, merely sat down cross-legged on the floor. He looked at Tasha, shrugged, and shook his head. Let her deal with it. Tasha gave him a small nod.
“You’ve been in this room here for ten thousand years?” she asked.
“Mmm … sort of, yes,” Allen said.
“Don’t you get bored?”
Allen laughed. “Sweetheart, you should see the video games they set me up with. Not to mention the sims. You have any idea what it’s like to have an orgasm at about three hundred percent strength?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Tasha told him.
“No, of course not. Let me guess: you’ve never even been with a guy, have you? Not even the dude over there who came all this way with you. You’ve never felt the desire for him or for anyone else. Not ever. I’m talking sexually, like … making babies. It’s not your thing, right?”
Tasha hesitated for a moment, her cheeks coloring a bit, and then said, “I have never gone to bed with a man, nor wanted to, that is true.”
“Course not. Of course not. That’s not how we built you. Can’t go around spreading that special DNA. Every hundred years or so one of you was supposed to pop out, but you weren’t supposed to be making any more of yourselves. Course, we weren’t planning on you guys disappearing for, you know … ten thousand years.”
The Broken God Machine Page 19
