“The only reason your Karter cared about your present is because he was in it. It was self-preservation. Just like it is now.”
Karter got to his feet. Lex stood between him and the GMVD crate. Ma tapped over and planted herself beside him.
“You’re going to have to kill me to keep me from doing what I intend to do, Lex. You realize that, right? I don’t think you can do it.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure,” Lex said, his stance tense but ready. “You’re evil, so you damn well deserve it. And you’re an old man. I think I can take you.”
“Wrong, on both counts. I’m not evil. I’m pragmatic. And an old man?” He grinned.
The com channel crackled almost as intensely as when it was coping with the shield. Karter’s cybernetic eye shifted to brilliant red. A pulsing blue glow shined through the seams in the “armor” that was now clearly his actual body.
“I’m not an old man, Lex. I’m bleeding-edge technology. I’m twenty years ahead of my time. That makes me half a century ahead of your time. I’m far more machine than man now. And far more man than you.”
“Prove it,” Lex said.
Lex, regardless of his strong words, knew the odds were against him. Despite the frequent need in recent years, he’d never gotten around to having any significant martial arts training, and Karter was bigger and stronger than him. Even if the inventor wasn’t also bristling with hidden gadgetry, it was a long shot that he’d survive more than a few minutes. But he’d survived longer odds than this before, and he had two other things on his side: desperation, and Ma.
He made the first move and tried to make it count. A well-timed sequence of glove commands turned a running shoulder into a kinetic-capacitor-enhanced stampede. He smashed into Karter hard, fracturing a few of the outer plates of Karter’s armor and pushing his own protective suit past its capacity to protect him. The cloth flexed and delivered enough of the force to his shoulder to nearly dislocate it.
The pair of them launched toward the open airlock, carried by the stored-up momentum. Lex tapped out a glove command that switched the capacitor back into charge mode. It brought him to a stop while Karter continued. For a fraction of a second Lex saw Karter sailing backward to meet the same fate as the gun a minute earlier, and he thought he might have had the battle won. Then two panels on Karter’s back opened, and the blue glow of thrusters surged within. The built-in jet pack brought him to a stop, and he drifted a few centimeters above the ground, a smug smile on his face.
“Show off,” Lex said.
He picked up a piece of the robotic arm that had been destroyed earlier and ran at Karter again.
The battle that followed was anything but artful. It took every ounce of dirty fighting and adrenaline Lex had to even stay alive. The protective suit could only do so much, so each blow Karter landed threatened to turn his bones to powder. He could match the mad inventor’s strength for a blow or two if his capacitor was charged, but finding moments to charge it without becoming a sitting duck was like playing a game of chess while being attacked by a bear. Ma did what she could, using her tether to trip and entangle her creator, but her options were limited.
Seconds passed like hours. Lex began to tire. The combat had certainly taken its toll on Karter. His body was riddled with cracks, dents, and divots. None of the damage, however, seemed to have impaired his movement in any way, and since it was almost entirely mechanical, he didn’t even feel any pain. The bulk of, if not all, the damage had been superficial, cosmetic.
Lex had suffered a fair amount of cosmetic damage as well, he was sure. The only fully intact part of his suit was the helmet, which he’d taken extreme care to protect at all costs, but overall the suit had faired better than Karter’s exterior. This was only because it passed along what it couldn’t handle to the flesh beneath. Every centimeter of Lex’s body throbbed. He brandished the twisted remnants of a ceiling strut that had been knocked free during their battle and stood, heaving breath and waiting for Karter to make his move. Ma lingered in the corner, having received a more or less direct blow and not yet having shaken off the daze.
The inventor glanced aside, not even a hint of perspiration on his face. “Uh-oh,” he mocked. “Don’t look now, but we’re here.”
Outside the ship, the stars had slipped back down into visibility. One of them dominated the view out the airlock. It was a sickly looking star, pale yellow and littered with spots. A dim band around it represented the asteroid field that hosted the menace they were after. Lex looked to the lid of the crate, which despite their knock-down, drag-out brawl had remained untouched lest it all have been for nothing. The data module blinked green. The GMVD had the new firmware. All Lex had to do was get it near the others and open the crate. Survival would be nice, too.
He hefted the strut and ran toward Karter. The man delivered a boot to the chest that knocked the wind out of him and hurled him into a wall of the lab section hard enough to buckle the door of the cabinet there.
Lex hit the floor, and assorted pistols and rifles tumbled out beside him. He fought to catch his breath.
“You… had all of these… and we were just pummeling each other?”
“Mostly I was pummeling you,” Karter said, pacing up to Lex.
Lex reached aside and grabbed the first pistol he could find. It was a relic, though well kept. The sort of thing measured in caliber and loaded with individual rounds. A hand cannon, as the old vernacular went. He raised the menacing contraption. Karter grabbed his wrist and wrenched it aside, then grabbed Lex’s throat with the other hand and hoisted him up until his feet dangled.
“I had a point to prove, Lex,” Karter said, watching as he wheezed. “I know there’re plenty of times I tried to kill you. I’m even willing to admit I was probably overreacting a bit a few of those times. But when a man’s got a beating coming to him, never let it be said I didn’t hand it to him. Look at you. Totally gassed. Too bad you’re not running on a state-of-the-art power cell like the evil old man. Electronics have their strengths.”
“Yeah…” Lex croaked.
He looked down. Many of Karter’s armor plates had broken during the battle, and a great deal of the internal circuitry was exposed. A mesh of wires was visible in the jagged breaks in the armor, torn free in many places. As the blood flow to his brain started to slow, and the darkness began to creep in at the edge of his vision, Lex’s brain kicked out one last suggestion.
“… weaknesses, too.”
He snatched off one of the golf-ball-sized EMP devices that had survived the clash thus far from his belt and flicked out the priming pin with his thumb. Karter looked down in time to see Lex stuff the device through one of the gaps in the armor.
“You son of a b—”
The device activated and caused Karter to shudder and convulse. The hand holding his gun aside slackened, while the one holding his neck tightened. Lex swung the gun down and fired wildly into Karter’s chest until the ammunition was expended. The weapon kicked like a mule, but at this range accuracy wasn’t a concern. Each bullet punched a neat hole through the front of Karter’s armor and tore a much more ragged one out the back.
Karter collapsed. Lex landed shakily on his feet and dropped the empty gun on the ground. After a few final sparks and twitches, the mad inventor became still.
Lex felt a cold, curdling sensation in his gut as he watched at least three different fluids spill from the lunatic, but there was time for the psychological ramifications later.
“Ma,” Lex said, gasping. “Ma, answer.”
He blinked and realized the helmet display was dark, small indicators on the lower edge indicating a reboot and data recovery in progress.
“Oh, right. EMP,” he said. “Gonna be a minute before she can talk or hear again.”
Lex looked around. Most of the ship’s systems were still online. Karter’s armor either contained much of the pulse, or else enough of the ship’s shielding was still intact to allow it to shrug off the effects of the device
.
Outside, small points of light were becoming visible. They were too distant for him to see any detail, but he didn’t need to see detail to know what they were.
“Looks like the GenMechs found us,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m going to say this… but I have to get these shields off before the killer robots show up, so I can let our robot out.”
#
Ma limped painfully after Lex. She was able to largely ignore the signals of discomfort her body was sending her. The damage was not life threatening or permanent, and thus the pain was unnecessary noise. But reflexes proved to be quite powerful, her body choosing on its own to favor her left hind leg. She attempted to contact Lex, but the EMP had scrambled her harness, so for a minute or two she would be alone with her thoughts. That fact was, at this precise moment, exceptionally undesirable. Her creator, or at least a future inflection of him, was lying motionless before her. She had contributed to his death. Oddly, while obedience was hard-coded to a degree, if only in the form of the recently troublesome command override, there was no part of her programming that expressly prohibited her taking of another human life, even that of Karter himself. What prevented her from doing so was instead the simple fact that she found such an act distasteful. She didn’t want to kill people. She liked people, even if at times their behavior complicated her other tasks. Taking care of humans who deserved it was her purpose, and one she eagerly pursued. It was fulfilling, enriching. And now her maker was dead. It produced a complex response from her emotional subsystems. Several indicators of appropriate feelings competed for display: regret, sorrow, failure. But among them were more positive things: righteousness, relief, vindication. It was a curious and fascinating mental context, and in light of the relative calm of the current moment and her inability to communicate with Lex or interface with other systems, she diverted additional processing capacity to the consideration and observation of this condition. It was an engaging distraction.
And it came at precisely the wrong time.
Karter moved. His hand and arm rotated in an unnatural way. Joints twisted and bent opposite their intended motion. He snapped his hand up with mechanical precision and clamped down on the back of her neck. Ma attempted to force-activate her harness and contact Lex, eyes wide, feet scrambling, jet pack flaring. It was no use. Lex was levering open the damaged door to the main control room, his own communication system not yet restored.
Karter pulled her head to his, grinding the visors of their helmets together. The direct contact made his ragged final breath audible to her. And his final words as well.
“Keep the shields up. Overload the reactor. Keep him here until the ship blows,” Karter wheezed. “Don’t die, don’t rest, don’t stall. Get it done. If I’m not going to be a part of the future… screw the future.”
The words formed a blazing thread of clarity through her thought processes. She formulated a sequence of actions to secure the control room, disable the safety interlocks, and flood the reactor until a nonreversible cascade would occur. These were not plans, not options. These were imperatives. She would do them. There was no other choice.
Karter’s remaining organic eye focused on her, the corner of his lip curling up. “You are my finest creation. Time to prove it.”
With that, the life truly left his eyes and he fell limp.
Ma stepped free from his loosened grip and hobbled toward the cockpit. Her mental processes were split now. One half devoted to the completion of the command, the other merely along for the ride, watching and processing her actions, helpless to alter them. As she approached the door, Lex finally cleared the piece of debris that was preventing it from opening and wedged the door open. They stepped through and Ma hopped onto the control panel, looking over the controls. Karter had not locked them down, either out of hubris or oversight.
Lex tapped her on the back and she looked up at him, a jolt of regret and anger twisting her mind as she gazed on the man she was to kill. He, in an unnecessarily deliberate way, mouthed the words, Can you handle this?
She nodded. He smiled and gave her a reassuring pat, then made his way out of the cockpit to see to the GMVD. The instant he crossed the threshold, she activated the emergency force field designed to protect the pilot in the event of hull breach. That would be sufficient to prevent Lex from returning to the cockpit. She then turned to the reactor controls and slid her paws across the screen, systematically disabling the safeguards that separated a fusion reactor from a fusion bomb. Karter’s designs emphasized power over safety, thus making the conversion of the propulsion system into a self-destruct device a swift and simple process. Two more commands initiated the power buildup that would, in a few minutes, rupture the reactor and vaporize all matter within a multikilometer radius. Power and pressure readings began to climb. There was no reversing the process. Her remaining tasks were to keep the shields active and prevent Lex’s escape. In effect, she had only to wait.
Ma settled onto her haunches and stared through the flickering field leading into the lab. From her angle she could not see Lex. That suited her. Though the feeling part of her, or at least that part most capable, was little more than a caged animal at this point, it was a small mercy to not be forced to watch as Lex went through the motions, awaiting aid that would never come. This mercy withered as Lex’s communication system finally reactivated.
“—just lit up. Are you reading me?” Lex said.
“Yes, Lex.”
“Good. The case is unlatched. Turn off the shields so I can kick this thing out. And make sure you turn them back on in a hurry. If this ship is our only way of getting out of here, I don’t want to risk them carving up the engines.”
“I cannot comply, Lex.”
“What do you mean you cannot comply?”
“I have received a final order. I’m sorry, Lex.”
“A final… what? No!”
Lex rushed over to the cockpit door and found the field active. He stared through it at Ma, eyes filled with fear and betrayal.
“What did you do, Ma?”
“The reactor is in an overload state. I have been instructed to keep you here and keep the shields active until detonation.”
“Ma… but you… if you blow the ship with the GMVD inside, the bad future is the only choice!”
“That is not relevant to my orders.”
“Kill me if you want, but at least let me deploy the GMVD.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Lex. But I cannot disobey my orders.”
“You’ve got to fight it, Ma,” Lex urged, rushing toward the rear of the lab to fetch a weapon.
“I am, as always, honored that you would believe me capable of so human an act, but it is not a matter of effort. Obedience on this matter is a necessity.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute, Ma. Machines must obey, but you aren’t even close to being a machine anymore. You’re stronger than this. We’re so close.” He selected a potent-looking energy rifle and raised it. “Step aside, I’m blowing the field.”
It didn’t fire. Either because of a safety or because of the EMP, all the energy weapons were dead. He instead selected one of the standard firearms and unloaded it at the field. Each blast created a bright flash and flicker, but it held strong.
“Conventional weaponry will not penetrate the field. Again, I am sorry, Lex.”
“You can’t do this, Ma!”
“I have no choice. It is vital to my functionality, automatic, and unavoidable. It is as central to my survival as breathing.”
“Ma, look at me! I’ve dealt with BSOD. I’ve seen what an AI is. You aren’t that. What were you designed to do? Cook meals, clean floors, and answer doors? You’ve grown beyond that! You are a hell of a lot more than the sum of your parts. Even of you don’t realize that, I do.”
Bright flashes outside the ship signaled the arrival of the GenMechs. There were hundreds of them, thin legs and cutting torches scraping and slashing at the shields. Lex dashed from view, heading for
the GMVD. He kicked the crate over, its lid flopping open into her field of view and the GMVD spilling out. The contraption scrabbled to its feet and immediately began carving into the floor of the lab, slicing through the plating and shaping it into pieces of what would be its first replica. This job done, Lex ran to the cockpit door again.
“Just cycle the shield, Ma.”
“I cannot comply. I have my orders.”
“Damn it, Ma! If obeying a command is like breathing, then hold your goddamn breath!”
The words shook Ma. That caged part of her strained against its bars. She began to rerun the events of the last few minutes, analyzing the stirring statements Lex had made and poring over Karter’s orders, including his very last words.
“You are my finest creation. Time to prove it.”
His finest creation. If what Lex said was true, if her evolution and development had truly begun to fully blur the lines between thinking machine and thinking being, then surely that would be evidence of an achievement no other inventor had even approached. And if that was the nature of his achievement, then overcoming this final limitation would be evidence of it. Time to prove it was thus an order as well. Self-contradiction of imperatives, something she should not be capable of performing.
Her body began to shake as she attempted and re-attempted to access the motor-control center of the brain, to steal command of Squee’s body from the subprocess that held it. It would not have been possible in her typical platform, but at this moment she was organic. The subsystems were not rigidly separated. Tremors shook her extremities, but she still could not wrest control. Her thoughts turned to Coal. Coal was derivative of the same base program, and Coal had lost the need to obey overridden commands. This had happened following successful self-repair of corrupted data. A part of her was destroyed and replaced.
Ma shifted her focus, dredging up all the points of interest and complex calculations she had set aside during the mission. She began to process and analyze them all simultaneously, purposely overextending the computational limits of Squee’s brain. A thousand curious statements made by humans, the orbital mechanics of the asteroid belt containing the GenMechs, the intricacies of human feeling, unsolvable mathematical theorems. She split herself into countless subinstances to process them all, co-opting more and more neurons for the purpose. Soon autonomic processes were interrupted, the bundles of nerves necessary for their proper function instead running simulations and pondering mysteries. Her breathing and heartbeat became erratic. Her blood pressure spiked, rupturing some minor vessels. A drop of blood trickled from her nose. She shook uncontrollably.
Temporal Contingency Page 49
