Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  Doubtless, Vivian thought sourly, Brother Angel is thrilled to have the action come to him.

  “That’s an interesting suggestion, Brother Angel,” General Gosnick said. “I’d be interested in seeing the specs for such a mine. This might not be the only wave in this attack.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Brother Angel said.

  Vivian excused herself. She headed back to her quarters, still wearing her armor, although she’d opened the face plate on the helm. She might first have dropped her armor off at the lab, but at the moment the shortest path to a hot shower and a meal took priority.

  She strolled through “her” hub, waving at a few neighbors who were gathered in the garden area of the central residential plaza, sharing drinks and doubtless speculating about the berserker attack. A bit of excitement for a change, and no serious harm done—that seemed to be the flavor of the remarks she caught. She waved and promised to join them when she’d had a chance to clean up.

  Vivian’s quarters were grouped along their own corridor off one of the residential hubs. Most of the residential suites were arranged in about the same way, as it facilitated sealing off an area in case of mechanical failure or contagious illness. It also guaranteed that the residents would have a certain amount of privacy, a valuable commodity in an enclosed and isolated social system.

  Thinking ahead to the pleasures of warm water followed by whiskey and light conversation, Vivian almost bumped into the service robot that was coming around one of the blind bends in what amounted to her private hallway. The serbot was shorter than she was—shorter than most humans—perhaps a meter and a third where its upper portion rose like the head and chest of a centaur above the multilimbed barrel that scuttled along on a variety of adaptable appendages.

  “Excuse m—,” Vivian began automatically, then stopped herself. First, it was ridiculous to apologize to a service robot, any more than to a table or a chair. Second, there was no way a properly functioning robot should have come that close to hitting her. Buffers were preprogramed, and the corridor was plenty wide enough that, even allowing for the relative bulk of her battle armor, the serbot should have had plenty of clearance.

  She was about to demand that the serbot submit to inspection when she realized that what now blocked her return to the hub only superficially resembled a serbot—or rather, it would resemble a serbot to anyone who did not look at it with a critical and experienced eye. To Vivian, who was both critical and experienced, the differences were glaring.

  Sheer, deadly terror hit her so hard that had she not been encased in her battle armor, it was likely her legs would have buckled. She broke into a sweat and backed against the corridor wall, trembling with fear.

  When she could force herself to think clearly, all the evidence needed was there in plain sight. Joints and support struts were too flexible, too solid. The central chassis was armored, although the armor was nearly concealed by the outer carapace. The optic lenses were of a model capable of seeing into the infrared and ultraviolet. The manipulative digits were too numerous and included a tentacle-like appendage that extruded from the base of the thing’s wrist. Finally, no serbot had ever been armed, but this one had raised one limb, revealing a glowing fingertip that had precisely the look of the muzzle of a charged energy carbine.

  The mysterious piercings on one of the fighters’ hulls had been just about the right size to have been made by the claws that ended four of the ostensible serbot’s limbs.

  Vivian realized in horror that the two battered dreadnaughts, the feint at a full-scale attack on the base, had all been to accomplish this . . .

  Standing before her, holding a weapon on her, was a berserker unit, undoubtedly an assassin model. It had somehow hitchhiked in on that fighter, possibly for the sole purpose of killing her, the genius inventor who kept piling up new weapons for the human side. Why, then, wasn’t it getting on with the job?

  Vivian had enough control of herself now that she could scream for help. Surely it was her duty to yell, alert the base. But she remembered her neighbors, unarmored, unarmed but for the refreshments in their hands, and knew that calling them would be a summons to Death. There must be another way . . .

  Before she could think of one, the berserker spoke. “You are life-unit Vivian Travers.”

  Its voice was not, as was often the case with the death machines, a hodgepodge of human utterances spliced together to create a discordant and frightening sound. This berserker spoke in a pleasant and even melodious voice, possibly adapted from that of one of the human traitors—the goodlife—who for reasons as varied as human perversity joined sides with the killer machines.

  “I am,” she agreed.

  “You are the life-unit who created Lancelot.”

  Vivian blinked. Lancelot was the code name for what had been—depending on her mood and how she chose to look at it—either her greatest success or her greatest failure. Some had termed Lancelot a type of battle armor. Others, focusing on its capacity for interstellar flight, had termed it a fighter craft.

  Vivian had thought of Lancelot as a miracle, the means of transforming a soldier into a perfect knight. However, Lancelot had proven to be Siege Perilous, as well as armor and mount, and had rejected most of those who donned it. Only one had lived up to the promise and he . . . 1

  Vivian shook her head, putting memory aside. It was surprisingly easy to do so. The glowing fingertip, along with the promise of claws sharp enough to rend the hull of a space fighter, were wonderful at concentrating the attention.

  1For the tale of Lancelot and the one who could use it to its full capacity, see the novel Berserker Man by Fred Saberhagen.

  “I did create Lancelot.”

  “You are the greatest artificer of all humanity, but alas here you are isolated on this small rock, effectively deprived of honor, of all the great rewards you might justly have expected from your fellow humans. Am I not correct?”

  Vivian was confused. “I have not ‘been deprived.’ I chose to come here. This base is a secret. Therefore, so is my work.”

  The berserker was unfazed. “I have come to offer you an opportunity to continue your career as a servant of death.”

  “Servant of death? I am no goodlife! I serve no berserker.”

  Somehow the sweat inside her armor seemed to have turned cold. The life support continued to wick moisture away efficiently.

  “But you have already served us,” it told her gently.

  “I . . . what?”

  “You are the greatest artificer of all humanity,” the berserker intoned with what Vivian could have sworn was a note of reverence in its voice. “Your weapons have prolonged the war considerably, led many to fight berserkers when otherwise they might have fled. Your armor has shielded so that ships and warriors thought they could join battle against us and live. But for your actions, much life would have been destroyed, but also because of you, much life—and that often of those who are bravest and finest among your kind—has been taken. Therefore, we already classify you with us—a servant of death.”

  “You are insane.”

  “No,” the berserker denied with perfect calm. “I can give proofs, show where the death toll was much higher because your creations led to battle being joined.”

  While it addressed her, the berserker had slowly reconfigured itself so that it was no longer oriented after the fashion of the squat centaurian serbot but instead stood nearly as tall as she, although its lower body rested on four limbs rather than her two. Two other limbs showed the stubby ends of what appeared to be carbine barrels, both aimed squarely upon her.

  Between them a central panel glowed, becoming a screen across which marched symbols of logic and mathematics.

  “The Battle of Pelam Deeps,” the berserker said,

  “where your improved form of the hydrogen lamp was used for ship power. We were halted there, but at the cost of . . .”

  “Stop!” Vivian said imperiously. “I am not interested in your rationalization
s. You said you came to offer me an opportunity. What I assume you are offering—when shorn of all the psychological claptrap—is an opportunity to turn goodlife or die.”

  The berserker did not disagree. “I offer the creator of Lancelot an even greater challenge.”

  It was time, and long past time, for Vivian to make an all-out effort to warn the base of the killer among them. Even with whatever protection her armor might afford, it was far from certain that she would succeed in such an effort. And Vivian had already prolonged this conversation enough to open herself to charges of goodlife activity.

  Even so, she heard her own voice ask, “And what is that task?”

  “To create an android indistinguishable from a human, one that can bear within it a berserker mind.”

  “Ahh.” Vivian felt thunderstruck, almost more astonished than when she had realized a berserker had trapped her right outside the door of her own home. One mysterious limitation under which the berserkers labored was that they had never managed to create an android that could pass as an ED human, or even a convincing animal. As far as any human knew, they had never even come close.

  Talk about a challenge . . .

  “Your new laboratory already awaits you. I promise you, it so far exceeds the facility you have here as your own genius surpasses the minds of the life-units who deny you your just recognition.”

  Despite herself, Vivian Travers felt a thrill the like of which she had not felt for many decades, certainly since the days when she had created Lancelot. What the enemy offered would truly be a challenge worthy of her skills—and think what she would learn about the berserkers themselves! In order for Vivian to bridge the gap between whatever device she might create and the berserkers’ mechanical natures, they would need to open themselves to her. She would learn their most intimate secrets, acquire the knowledge human generals had wished for since humanity’s first encounter with the killer machines.

  “Create an android berserker,” she murmured.

  “That is what I have said. I am equipped with devices to enable me to read with some degree of accuracy the level of a human’s emotional response. I can tell you are interested in this challenge.”

  A hot swell of anger rose in Vivian’s heart at the thought of how her “interest,” her curiosity, her intellect could be turned against her. Perhaps the berserker sensed the change in her emotions, but it moved too late. Berserkers were swifter than humans by as much as machines could out-speed living fingers and organic calculation. But Vivian’s battle armor was customized to respond to her slightest whim. She was sure she had a chance.

  The berserker had not finished speaking. “Your answer will be required in three da—”

  Her helm dropped into place faster than she could see it move, and from the center of her breastplate erupted a close-range shotgun-blast of force that would have torn to shreds almost any material object within a couple of body-lengths of where she stood.

  The shot of energy was sufficient to rip the berserker in two. Metal ran like water. Slag dripped onto the corridor floor.

  The berserker’s carbines fired in reaction—but inaccurately. They cut great gouges from the living rock of the corridor walls. The flying fragments bounced off Vivian’s armor, not even chipping the cobalt blue finish.

  Screaming in rage, Vivian grabbed the berserker’s upper torso in both gloved hands. Now she could call upon another component of her armor: using its computer-brain to sink her awareness into the enemy’s optelectronic system, searching for the self-destruct that was nearly always there. She located it and began fusing the paths that would carry the berserker’s command to destruct, reaching backward through the machine’s equivalent of a neural network, seeking to intercept the signal before it could reach the key point.

  She did not find such a signal. What she found was a whispered message that flowed into her awareness as static and seduction. It reinforced the last few words her ears had heard.

  “You are the one who created Lancelot. Our offer is good for three of your standard days. If at the end, you do not come forth to join us, we will continue on our mission to bring perfect order to the universe, beginning with this base.”

  Vivian felt the berserker’s memory begin to wipe. This was no self-destruct command that she could block, but an integral part of this particular program loop.

  Still convulsed with fury, Vivian squeezed, smashing the berserker’s limbs beneath her armored, cold-fusion powered gauntlets, magnifying her physical strength many times. The enemy machine dangled limply, its various appendages trailing to scrape the chipped and ravaged stone. Acids and molten metal flowed over her armor, but both it and the woman it protected remained immune, while the stone floor beneath was scoured in deep, smooth rivulets.

  That was how her neighbors found Vivian when, alerted by the sound of weapons firing, they left their cocktails and ran with more good will than good sense to her assistance.

  A team of first-response commandos in full battle armor arrived less than two minutes later. Brother Angel was in the lead. Some small part of Vivian’s mind thought this odd. He’d been briefing General Gosnick, hadn’t he? He didn’t even live on this hub.

  But she felt relieved that someone of his rank and reputation was there to assume responsibility for the mess.

  “It’s over,” she said, when she had regained some composure and convinced everyone she was unhurt. “Can someone get this hulk to my lab? I’ll be down to dissect it as soon as I’ve had a shower.”

  As she had known he would, Brother Angel stepped forward to take charge.

  “A berserker?” he said. “Here?”

  “I think the marks were made by your ‘mine,’ Brother,” Vivian said. “It seems we both were wrong about what left the marks on the fighter. Would you handle the initial report to General Gosnick? I need a drink.”

  Of course, even for someone of her rank and reputation, that was not the end of it, but Vivian would only allow her debriefing on the incident to continue while her hands were busy making sure the berserker assassin held no further surprises.

  A thorough inspection of the whole base was still in progress. So far there was no evidence that any other berserkers had slipped through the defenses.

  The general was pondering what the purpose of the single confirmed intruder might have been.

  “It would seem, then, to have been meant for you specifically,” General Gosnick said, as the debriefing was concluded. “How fortunate that you were still armored.”

  “Very,” Vivian agreed.

  The General departed, trailed by his entourage. Vivian continued working, aware that Brother Angel had remained.

  When he and Vivian were alone, Brother Angel asked, “How long did it stand confronting you?”

  Vivian had not wished to lie directly, but she didn’t feel she needed to lay herself open to charges of goodlife activity by answering accurately. Hadn’t her destruction of the berserker been proof enough of her loyalty?

  “As I said during the debriefing, I was so terrified that I lost all sense of time.”

  Brother Angel was the last person Vivian would have expected to ask the next question. “Why didn’t you accept its offer?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think perhaps you do,” Brother Angel insisted. “I was in the outer corridor when the berserker confronted you. I had seen you pass through the garden still wearing your battle armor. I was heading down to the labs and was going to offer to take your armor back with me. I know you keep another set in your quarters. You know how my senses are fragmented—I eavesdrop unwittingly on what is going on next door, while I may be blind and deaf to what is right in front of me.”

  “I know.”

  Brother Angel went on. “At first I wondered with whom you could be talking. Then when I heard what the berserker was saying to you, I understood. You did not refuse, and, as the berserker said, you sounded interested.”

  “Why then did you not alert the base
?” Vivian asked.

  Brother Angel smiled thinly. “I might ask why you did not. It would seem that we were both shocked into temporary silence. Under a considerable strain. Under the circumstances, I believe that we can both be pardoned.”

  He paused to draw a breath. “You in particular could be forgiven, I believe, even if you were to seriously consider accepting the berserker’s proposal.”

  It took Vivian a little while to find an answer. “How do you see that?”

  “You could perform a service of great value by accepting the berserkers’s offer. They would need to let you study their workings as no one has ever been able to before.” Brother Angel gestured toward the hulk on the lab table. “Dissecting that may contribute a little to our knowledge of this particular model’s electronic and mechanical workings, but it will tell us nothing about their brains. You yourself showed us how that was wiped by the berserker itself when it realized your attack would disable it. If you were to work closely with the berserkers, you would learn things about their brains, their programming, that could be of great value.”

  Vivian stood unmoving. Three days, said a traitorous voice in her mind. They gave you three days. She wondered if Brother Angel was aware of that detail. And you would be saving the base, perhaps learning what Life needs to defeat Death’s servants once and for all.

  “Become goodlife,” she said aloud. “That’s what you’re telling me, that I should become goodlife.”

  Brother Angel sharply drew in his breath. “May the Creator forbid it! I am suggesting that as a double agent, working for humanity, you would have a perfect opportunity to learn those things the berserkers have hidden from us. For you to be able to find what flaw it is in their programming that keeps them from successfully counterfeiting humans, they would need to open not only their bodies but their minds to you.”