The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  I hadn’t expected that question, either, though I knew that the appearance I had assumed was modeled after some reasonably successful vid personages. I decided to be honest with her. “I wouldn’t look like anything at all, Allison. I was never organic.”

  She made a sour face at that, then sighed and said, “Oh, well. So, as I was saying, there I was on Peggys Planet. I’d never had much luck. Not even as a Gateway prospector; Out three times, and not a single winner. That third trip was the worst, too, because it was the one that took me to Peggys Planet, which naturally had been discovered four or five times already and had a whole active colony going. So I just decided to stay there, and—”

  Even by microseconds, she was getting tedious. I said, “Wan, Allison. You were telling me about him.”

  “I am telling you. I was hanging around bars on Peggys Planet, trying to scrounge up enough money for a Here After—you know, there’s this chain of Here After shops that’ll machine-store you if you have the price? Only if you’re Wan you don’t need the shops because you’ve got all that kind of equipment standing by, and Doctor Death is right by your side to use them all the time. Along with his court jester and his lawyers and secretaries and—”

  I had a good deal of time, but not an eternity of it. I raised a hand. “Please, Allison.”

  She collected herself. “Yes. Sorry. Well, Wan was hanging around some of the same bars as I was. He bought me drinks. He thought it was funny that I’d been a ballet dancer, because I admit by then I didn’t look like your grand prima ballerina assai anymore, but he liked to listen to me talk. Especially when I talked about how the girls in the troupe all had boyfriends, and what kinds of things you could do with your legs after ten years working at the barre—you know, the kind of barre you exercise at when you’re a dancer, not the kind I was hanging around in. And anyway—” She shrugged. “Here I am.”

  She seemed to have left something out. “You mean Wan took you away from Peggys Planet?”

  She shook her head. “Aw, no. Not then. He just went off, I think with some other woman, and I kind of forgot he existed. Then, six or eight months later, just when I was really hitting bottom, along comes this guy from some lawyer’s office, and he tells me Wan’s willing to pay for the makeover at Here After if then I’ll come out to his place and teach some friends of his how to be ballet dancers.” She giggled. “I guess you’ve seen the friends. They’re girls he picked up here and there, and I guess they have a lot of talents, but dancing isn’t one of them. Well, except maybe Liz. I kind of owe her, I guess.”

  She was waiting for me to ask her what for, so I did.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” she said—as though there had been any brevity before that. “Wan was always scared sick of dying, you know. So he kept the whole Here After machine-storage stuff with him, with Liz trained to run it. Only he didn’t die. I did, and Liz stored me.”

  “Liz?” I said, to keep her going.

  “Elizaveta. Doctor Death, we called her. The Russian bimbo that’s up there with Wan. You can recognize her because, A, she’s not all that good-looking, compared to the rest of us, and, B, she’s always looking worried because she’s still organic and she’s scared of getting pregnant.” She bobbed her head to confirm what she’d just told me. Then she said, “Anyway, after I got the hang of stored activity I figured out how to simulate a whole ballet company, and he watches them sometimes—not in Giselle or The Nutcracker, you know, but special performances that I make up for him myself.” She winked at me, and then asked, “You sure you wouldn’t like a drink or something?”

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. I was getting impatient with this woman, so I decided to cut this interview short. “Let me ask you a couple of questions. The Owner’s secretary asked us if we knew how to make a star explode. Do you know why he wants to know that?”

  She looked puzzled. “Oh, wait a minute. He said once that he wished he could do that. Maybe could, if he could find some old Heechee thing somewhere that could make it happen. Could that have anything to do with it?”

  That was surprising for two reasons. Apparently Wan was getting close to something the old Heechee, Thermocline, had once hinted at. I needed to discuss this with Thor Hammerhurler. Meanwhile I needed more information, but this woman was not the source to ask. “One more thing, then. Do you have any idea why Wan has all these weapons?”

  She shrugged. “Because he wants to kill some people. That’s what those things are for, right? He’ll do it soon’s he works his nerve up to it, I guess. Which won’t be like today; he’s not real brave. He’s sure good at hating, though.”

  “Do you know who it is he hates?”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “pretty much everybody. But especially Robinette Broadhead—you know who that is? Well, of course you do. And some women. Quite a lot of women, I think. He’s not so good at being in a relationship, and when they end he blames the women, a lot, and most of all he hates the Heechee. He hates every last one of them, the whole race. But he’s a good hater, and he probably hates dozens of people I never even heard of… Listen, you sure about that drink?”

  “I’m sure, Allison.”

  “Because,” she said, getting up and moving closer to me, “you don’t have to be in a hurry, you know. I don’t get that much company these days.”

  At this point I must confess to something that, in an organic, I would have to call embarrassment. You see, I understood what Allison was saying, not just the expressed words but including the subtext. What she was offering was to have sexual intercourse with me.

  Sexual intercourse is not an activity AIs like myself have had much experience in—no, not just not much experience, none at all. It isn’t part of our programming.

  But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. Even me, if I had chosen. I am, I remind you, one of the most powerful AIs ever constructed. It would have been possible for me to simulate everything necessary to engage in such an entertainment.

  I can’t say whether or not I would actually have done it. Certainly any new experience is interesting, and I enjoy having them. I did go so far as to make a quick trip back to the throne room just to see how things were going, in case I wanted to take a little extra time with Allison.

  But things weren’t going that well.

  The conversation I had left in progress had stopped. Wan’s gatekeeper-secretary female had assumed a visible shape and she was whispering in his ear, and his expression was on the verge of something between anger and worriment.

  I returned to Allison’s chamber at once. “Sorry,” I said, as politely as I could. “I really should be getting back. But there’s one thing that puzzles me, though. I wouldn’t have thought Wan was the ballet type. Why do you suppose he wanted to go to the trouble of bringing you here?”

  “That’s easy,” she said, looking regretful as I went through the motions of simulating standing up and getting ready to leave. “He asked me why ballet was worth watching. I told him because it was a lot of pretty girls in not much clothes bending their bodies into all kinds of peculiar positions.”

  The Owner’s expression hadn’t changed. Even the pursed lips of the woman whispering in his ear had not yet slackened—earning my sympathy, because I knew what it was like for an AI to have to slow down speech for an organic listener. The whole throne room was exactly as I had left it a moment before. In the corridor outside, however, there was something new: Harry himself, no longer in the throne room and looking very uneasy as he stood in the grip of two larger-than-life security guards wearing the livery of the Owner.

  They wore pretty fierce expressions, too, but neither their size nor the threatening look on their faces bothered me. When you’re only a simulation to begin with you can be any size you like; what matters is the power of your programming, and, as I have mentioned, mine was powerful enough to make me a useful ally of Thor Hammerhurler. I subsumed the space around the two guards and contracted myself around them. When they were squeezed suf
ficiently small to be insignificant I gave them their orders. “Leave him alone. Go away,” I commanded. Having no choice, they did.

  Harry rubbed his arms just as though the grip of the guards had caused him actual physical pain. “What took you so long, Markie?” he demanded. “Things were going all right, and then all of a sudden those apes grabbed me and dragged me out here, I dunno why.”

  “Because they found out what we’ve been doing. Come on. We’re going back to the ship.”

  VIII

  We stopped to pick up Allison, because Harry begged. There weren’t any problems. Scurry through the castle’s communication channels until we found an antenna. Locate our spacecraft in the sky. Launch ourselves toward it—we were in our ship, and well beyond the reach of any forces Wan could summon, long before Wan had time to act.

  The first thing I did was call, “Kugel! Come out. We need to talk.”

  For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to choose to respond, but then that patchwork of spots and colors began to form, greatly startling Allison. “Jesus H. Kee-rist,” she yelped. “What the hell is that?”

  “Relax,” I told her. “He’s a friend”—quite untruthfully, of course, but all I wanted was for her to shut up and stay out of the way. Then I told the Kugel about Wan’s armaments and intentions, finishing, “So we need to keep him from causing trouble. We could request help from the authorities—”

  “Hell we could,” Harry interrupted. “Nobody would get here for days and by then he could launch all those ships, armed and on their way, and—”

  “So,” I finished for him, “that’s not a viable option. We’ll have to take action ourselves. Neither Harry nor I have that capability. Do you?”

  The figure’s components stirred. “It is known that we have,” it pointed out. “We have already sterilized this object once, can do so again: A simple flip of its magnetic field, thus canceling its radiation-opaque atmospheric layer and thus allowing lethal radiation to reach the organisms on the object—”

  Allison had been listening, her mouth hanging open. Now she used it to yell at the Kugel. “Hold it right there, buster! You’re not doing any of that! You’re talking about murdering Rose and Liz and Jilly and Jean, not even counting the Old Ones and—”

  I gave her the kind of semi-lethal stare that I had learned for my deputy war-wager role. It worked. She shut up, and I told the Kugel: “That is unacceptable. We are not authorized to destroy living persons.”

  It hung silent for a moment, as though trying to come to terms with this unexpected new concept. Then it said, “There is another difficulty with our first proposal. Our numbers in the present locale are not sufficient for that task. Summoning others would require time of same order as requesting reinforcements.”

  I nodded. “So let’s go back to your first idea. Can you volatilize all Wan’s weapons without causing any loss of life?”

  “And hurry up about it,” Harry put in. “He’s still got those guns trying to line up on us, so we don’t have all the time in the world to make up our minds.”

  Well, really we did. The Owner would be just about getting warnings from his guardminds—having just noticed that our simulations had broken up and disappeared. But I was impatient to get things settled. I addressed the Kugel again. “Can you do this?”

  Another pause. Then, grudgingly, “There is no question. Can do so quite accurately.”

  “Then do so,” I requested. “Destroy his weaponry. And while you’re at it, better take out his spacecraft, too.”

  That was all it took. Kugel didn’t answer in words, just shimmered, dissipated and was gone, back inside his pressure-cooker. We never saw him again.

  We did see what he did.

  I had not really formed any picture of what the Kugel’s “volatilizing” would look like. So I wasn’t quite ready when the process began.

  You understand that I have no physical ears. So I heard nothing directly, but I felt the shocks, even at the very limits of the planet’s atmosphere, when my acoustic sensors picked up fifty or sixty quick, stinging blasts of great magnitude. Harry felt the same shocks. He clapped his simulated hands to his simulated ears, quite uselessly, of course. “Hey, Markie!” he begged. “Make it stop!”

  I couldn’t do that. It didn’t matter. The blasts had stopped already. What was left, I saw, was a blistered patch of infinitesimal liquid-metal bubbles on Kugel’s containment shell. Another, similar pattern had erupted on the wall of our spacecraft, and I recognized them as the femto-scale emissions Kugel had promised. It occurred to me to be grateful that my hardware, and Harry’s, hadn’t been in the line of sight to Wan’s palace; I doubt that Kugel would have bothered to miss them.

  What was happening on the surface of Arabella was not femto-scale at all. Little white puffs began to appear here and there around the castle, then a couple of larger ones, then the mother of all blasts, not just smoke but pieces of structure, billowing flame. A big part of Wan’s castle was in ruins, though not, I was pretty sure, the part I had left him in. I think one of Kugel’s rounds had set off Wan’s main ammunition dump. Its magnitude made me feel for the Old Ones, but Harry zeroed the optical sensors in on them and reported that they were cowering under the trees, but physically unharmed.

  So that was that.

  Then we began our vigil as we waited for other ships to come.

  The thing was, we couldn’t afford to let Wan’s castle out of our sight. We didn’t know what he might have hidden in some other tunnels. Maybe nothing, but we didn’t want to take the chance. So we couldn’t leave our spacecraft in a normal planetary orbit, because anything could happen when we were on Arabella’s far side.

  So we did it the hard way.

  We allowed our ship to fall along its orbital trajectory until Wan’s place was just about to drop below the horizon, then zapped ourselves, super-lightspeed, to where it had just come up on the other horizon…

  And repeated that, over and over, until the other ships arrived. Which was 3.813 days later.

  Would you like to know how many of those partial orbits make up 3.813 days? 83 of them. Totaling those 3.813 organic-time days. And would you like to know how long that is for a couple of people like Harry and me, used to operating on AI time?

  Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. Just call it interminable.

  But even the seemingly interminable does, sooner or later, terminate. Reinforcements arrived. We were relieved. We faced the equally interminable voyage home to the Wheel. But for that time we could at least turn ourselves off.

  IX

  When we got back to the Wheel, Thor Hammerhurler was fairly glad to see me, Marcus 2 wasn’t and nobody else seemed to care much one way or the other. They were thrilled about what we’d done on Arabella, of course. They had Harry’s organic-time simulation appearing on the p-vid over and over to be interviewed as the hero of the event, and Allison almost as often, playing the part as the escaped captive of the monster, Wan, who was planning to kill thousands of innocent organics until we superheroes arrived to thwart him.

  I was not disturbed by this. Harry was a former organic, with vanity accordingly, and I was just a machine-made AI. You don’t congratulate AIs if they do something that needs to be done. All you do is scrap them if they don’t.

  Marcus 2 showed no signs of wanting to share his work with me, in fact showed every sign of wishing I would go away—jealous that I had had all the adventures, I think. It was a very queer sensation. For the first time in my existence, I had nothing to do.

  Except, of course, to see Thor Hammerhurler, so I went there.

  I caught him at a bad time. He was in the middle of the daily check of all the weaponry on the Wheel, and, although all the checks were always go, he didn’t like to be distracted. “Try me a little later,” he said testily. “Maybe three or four seconds; I should have the results in by then.”

  “Sure, Thor,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  Which left me with all those seconds to
fill and nothing much to fill them with. I didn’t even want to practice cooking up some particularly tough dish, because I didn’t want Marcus 2 to think I was competing with him. I didn’t have Harry to feed, because Allison was more interesting to him than food just then. I wandered back to our ship where it was plugged into its dock—why, I’m not sure; I guess I thought maybe Kugel would be in a talkative mood. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t there at all. Back in the blitz, I supposed, because the pressure container that had held him was now open and empty.

  The seconds did pass, and not just three or four of them; I didn’t want Thor to think I was rushing him, so I waited a full six before I returned to his eigenspace.

  The flashing lights were dark, the bells and klaxons were silent, and Thor was busy debriefing his Heechee advisor.

  I knew that one. His name was Thermocline, a steady customer of mine—couscous, Greek lamb dishes and halvah at first, but then he became more daring, when his digestion would allow. That is to say, Thermocline was organic. That meant that when I said Thor was busy debriefing him I had overstated again. Thor had plenty of time to do other things as well.

  What he was doing this time was huddling over a diagnostics screen that was taking in readings from the Kugelblitz. I didn’t see him lift his head to glance at me, but he knew I was there all right. He took another few micros before he acknowledged my presence, though. Then he said, “So you screwed up and let him get away.”

  That was Thor for you, always getting right to the point, never mind whose feelings might be hurt. I stood my ground. “We don’t know that. We found his body.”