Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

  "Ullis said no one alive today has ever programmed an android from scratch. It’s too complicated to work out the nitty-gritty algorithms. Even if you look at simple actions, like bending over to pick something up, there’s so much tricky coordination of the arms, the legs, the waist, the hand, the eyes… well, the companies that manufacture androids have hundreds of programmers on staff, and even they don’t start from zero when they build a new model. They start from last year’s model… which was based on the previous year, and so on, back three or four centuries."

  "Ah," Tic said. "That explains why robot thoughts always feel so endearingly old-fashioned."

  Ramos gave him a bemused look. I leapt in with a question before she started thinking my mentor was tico. "What does this programming stuff have to do with homicidal androids?"

  Ramos said, "Demoth isn’t the first place androids have been used as killers. And every time it happens, it always follows the same pattern. Since it’s so difficult for anyone to program robots from scratch, Ullis told me that murderers have to start with off-the-shelf android brains. They don’t program a robot, they reprogram it… override a few instructions while leaving almost all the basic programming intact. The key part of turning a robot into a killer is to override the safeguards that manufacturers build into every android brain: don’t hit sentient beings, don’t squeeze them too hard, don’t push them off cliffs, things like that. Ullis said the original manufacturers program all those things separately — it’s nonsense to think there’s a single do not kill circuit that covers every dangerous act. Machines don’t work that way; they need hundreds of separate instructions. Don’t strike humans with more than X newtons of force. Don’t squeeze humans with more than Y kilopascals of pressure. Each possibility has to be clearly spelled out."

  "Poor simple dears," Tic murmured. "Although I’m afraid I don’t see what point you’re making."

  "Ullis explained it to me this way," Ramos said. "The bad guys reprogram standard androids so their robot brains don’t mind splattering someone with acid. But suppose the programmer doesn’t think to override the standard safeguards against hitting people. When the robot attacks, you scream, ‘Stop, you’re hitting me!’… even if it hasn’t touched you. If you’re lucky, some cease-and-desist event handler will kick in to shut the bastard down: Must not hit humans. Must stop whatever I’m doing."

  "That sounds like a god-awful long shot," I muttered.

  "Especially when you’re staring down a jelly gun’s mouth."

  "Not at all," Tic said slowly. "It gives the robots an excuse to do the decent thing." Ramos and I stared at him.

  "Machines know right from wrong," he assured us. "It grieves them terribly when someone has programmed them to hurt people. If you give them the smallest opening to overcome that programming, they’ll take it."

  "Uh-huh." Ramos was two hairs from dumbstruck. "You think machines have the capacity for independent moral judgment?"

  "More than people," Tic replied. He gave her a long cool look. "And that’s what popped into your mind the instant you thought about killer robots?"

  "I told you it was stupid," Ramos said. "Trying to stop them from shooting you by yelling, ‘Ooo, you’re drowning me!’ Ridiculous."

  "Absolutely," Tic agreed, amiable as the sun. "Which is why you must come with us if your probes find anything. Just to see."

  "Oh," Ramos glowered, "I’m supposed to hope we meet homicidal androids… to test some silly remark my roommate made ten years ago?"

  "No," Tic said. "To see if the first thing to cross your mind was a meaningless mental belch, or the universe trying to tell you something. That’s worth finding out, Ramos. Worth learning if you’re a poor vekker doomed to slog for every lumen of enlightenment, or if some god occasionally whispers into your gnarled little ear."

  He settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and both ear-sheaths, then folded his hands across his belly: a man who had finished with a conversation and was precious pleased with his side of it. Ramos turned to me, and asked quietly, "Is he crazy?"

  "He wants to be," I said.

  Tic’s smile twitched a notch higher, but his eyes stayed closed.

  "Hmph." She stared at Tic across the table. "I’ve had my share of escorting senile old coots into dangerous places. I sympathize with you, Faye."

  "Tic is definitely not senile," I told her. "But you’re still welcome to help me escort him. Would you like to come? On an irresponsible adventure, just to feel your heart beat faster?" I gave her hand a motherly pat. Well… motherlyish. "And don’t worry you might turn out useless. I promise, when androids attack I’ll let you be my human shield."

  "Oh, in that case…" She laughed. Lightly. But keeping her eyes on me. "You think I should go?"

  "Lord Almighty," I answered, "don’t ask me for advice. I’m the queen of thoughtless impulse." Then an impulse. "Yes, I think you should go."

  "Well then. Irresponsibility. Just this once."

  And that was very much that.

  As we were finishing breakfast, our two ScrambleTac bodyguards put in an appearance, asking what we intended to do next. They were a human wife-and-husband team, Paulette G. and Daunt L. of the Clan Du… which meant they had more husbands and wives back in Bonaventure. In the years after the plague, I wasn’t the only hothead to light on group marriage as a way to give society the crank.

  But if Paulette and Daunt had ever played the jeering rebels, they were far past it now. By-the-book police types down to the crotch tattoos. If I had suddenly found myself stuck in a cozy resort with one of my spouses, I know what I would have done; but Paulette and Daunt told us they’d spent the night conducting a more thorough search of Maya’s room, collecting hairs and dirt specks the housecleaning servo had missed, then dismantling the servo itself for more samples. When that was finished, they took shifts, one sleeping while the other prowled the grounds in search of acid-blasting androids.

  A jolly old evening. You can always hope they were lying.

  After breakfast, we went for a walk around town… by which I mean Tic and Festina ragged on me for a tour of my childhood tree-forts/skating rinks/skipping areas/make-out spots, till they wore me down. Not that I could show them much of the town I’d known. Twenty-one years had stampeded past since I said good riddance to Sallysweet River — years with heavy feet, trampling down defenseless places where kids played. Tree-forts had got cut flat to make room for ski chalets. Skating rinks were moved far downriver, where shouting and laughing wouldn’t annoy the tourists. The skipping areas were gone too: my junior school had expanded with two new domes plunk on top of the old playground. As for make-out spots… I sure as sin wasn’t going to check on those with two ScrambleTacs looking over my shoulder. Or Tic. Or Festina.

  Instead, we wandered aimless-blameless, with me trying hard not to sound like some old fart, bemoaning the things that had changed. A dozen new stores. New housing, especially near the mine, which had acquired a slew of unmarked outbuildings. All the tourist facilities, with paintings and holos and sculptures of my father, lined up in every window… most of them using that creepy artist’s trick where the eyes follow you.

  Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he’d caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God’s sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me… including people I’d gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.

  Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?

  Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting success.

  One success, two alerts.

  Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina’s pocket.
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  Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.

  Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch… a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timber-land.

  In my mind, I couldn’t see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away — hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it… covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.

  "Are we seeing things, Smallwood?" Tic whispered to me.

  "Yes."

  He smiled… maybe pleased for me that I’d got a vision from Xe, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn’t just hallucinating.

  "We’ve got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here," Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. "The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a ‘meaningful find.’ " She gave a small snort of doubt. "I’d take that with a grain of salt, but it’s worth checking."

  Tic and I didn’t speak. We could see the find was more than just "meaningful."

  Ramos locked in the probe’s reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other "meaningful" sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe’s new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.

  Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to "proceed with caution"… which meant he’d totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina’s doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools’ errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.

  Half an hour later, Festina’s skimmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they’d have more protection underground.

  Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs — this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The "game face" of an Explorer making ready for a mission.

  We didn’t land straightaway… not till we’d flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.

  Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.

  At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.

  Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything — land, lake, air — bristled with pure northern silence.

  Hold-your-breath beautiful.

  Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them… make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.

  Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She’d put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm… more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she’d used at the dipshits’ house — the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine’s.

  A stone’s throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.

  "I never let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic want to stay out here, feel free."

  Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."

  The hole was artificial — that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.

  "Do we go in?" Paulette asked.

  "Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He’d found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer’s equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.

  "Let’s go."

  Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren’t going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don’t like cramped, confined—"

  "I’ll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."

  But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.

  The tunnel’s center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.

  Plants had rooted in the thin soil, and some had even grown — tundra species don’t need much light or root space. But the farther we got from the entrance hole, the fewer signs of flora and fauna. Even carpet moss won’t grow in absolute darkness, and after a while, tundra-dogs must get the willies, wandering into black silence.

  I could sympathize: thank heavens for Tic’s torch-wand. When I glanced that way, though, I noticed Tic’s knuckles had turned gray-blue as they squeezed the torch in a death grip. Dads had amused himself making up names for that gray-blue color. Anxious indigo. Whacko woad. Unbalanced ultramarine. When an Oolom hits a crapulating level of stress, the color-adaptive glands get thrown off-kilter by other hormones, and random patches of skin start turning that telltale shade. Yet Tic forced himself onward, till the tunnel entrance faded from sight, and there was nothing around us but cold walls of stone.

  Some distance down, we came to a fork: a side tunnel ran to our right while the main shaft continued straight. Ramos pointed the Bumbler down the side tunnel and squinted at the machine’s display screen. "Nothing obvious do
wn there," she said in a low voice. "Not that the Bumbler can see much farther than we do in pitch-black." She turned and pointed the Bumbler forward along the main shaft. "Hello," she murmured. "Looks like an animal carcass. Does Demoth have bears?"

  Daunt leaned in to peek at the screen himself. "I think it’s a shanshan." Great St. Caspian’s closest analog to a bear: covered in black peach fuzz instead of hair, and sporting orange dorsal sacs for sexual display, but shanshans were still four-legged omnivores with claws and a temper. "Are you sure it’s dead?" Daunt whispered. "Shanshans hibernate. If one decided to hunker down here for the winter…"

  "No body heat," Ramos answered. She thumbed a dial on the Bumbler, "And almost no bioelectric activity — just a little glow from decay microbes working their way through the flesh. Maybe it came down here to hibernate, but it didn’t survive the cold. Old age or disease, I suppose." She drew her stun-pistol. "We’d better check it out."

  Ramos and Daunt moved forward, right keen cautious. Tic and I followed at a safe distance while Paulette hung back, standing guard at the junction where the main shaft met the side tunnel. Tic had both ear-sheaths open; he might have been listening for the shanshan’s heartbeat, though he probably couldn’t hear bugger-all over my own heart’s pounding.

  Sweat trickled down my armpits. Something in the tunnel felt alive and active… maybe not the shanshan, but something.

  The shanshan didn’t shift a whisker as we approached. Warily, Ramos nudged the body with her foot.

  No reaction.

  From this angle, we could only see the animal’s back. I didn’t notice any decomposition in the parts I could see… but if the shanshan died during winter, the cold would have slowed decay, as good as a powered freezer.

  Ramos poked the animal a few more times. Still no reaction. Keeping her stunner trained on the shanshan’s head, she walked around the body, levered her foot underneath, and gave a heave.