The two women studied each other, their eyes locked.
Finally, Williger spoke the words aloud. “It’d be suicide.”
Parsons looked at the floor. “Okay. We’ll have to find another way.”
“I don’t think there is one.”
“Well ... let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.”
Despair
“Success,” said Parsons, “comes from being too stubborn to lie down and die.”
They were gathered at the Forward Airlock Reception Bay. A small, waist-high robot was humming quietly to itself. All six of its operating arms were folded close to its body. Several had been refitted with special-duty tools.
The repulsor fields were up and running at full strength again, and the robot was programmed to complete its mission on its own, even if contact with the Star Wolf was lost. The robot was nicknamed Isaac—a tradition so old that nobody really knew its origin.
“All right,” said Parsons to Shibano. “Let’s do the simulation one more time and then we’ll go for it.”
Parsons looked up as Korie approached. “Oh, Korie—thanks, but we don’t need you right now.” She frowned at him. “You still look a little weak. Why don’t you go to your cabin and rest?”
“I thought I’d stand by. In case you needed me—”
“Thanks,” Parsons repeated. “But you’re really not needed here. Go rest. Don’t do anything. That’s an order.”
Was that a rebuke? Korie was still too woozy to be sure, but he nodded his acquiescence and headed aft again. But not to his quarters. He wasn’t tired. He was restless. And he was hurting. And he needed to do something. Anything.
But there was nothing he could do. The captain had specifically told him not to do anything. She didn’t need him. No. More to the point, she didn’t want him. She didn’t trust his judgment anymore. And why should she? Two crewmembers were dead because of his mistakes.
Korie climbed into the Intelligence Bay, the tiny chamber behind the Command Deck where HARLIE lived. This time, though, it wasn’t because he wanted to talk to HARLIE—or anyone. It was because he specifically didn’t want to talk. And the Intelligence Bay was one of the places where he was least likely to be found by accident. Except for maintenance teams, Intel-Bay was the most unvisited part of the starship. It was considered HARLIE’s private space, and most crewmembers felt uncomfortable there, as if they were inside HARLIE’s brain. And, in point of fact, they were.
But Korie liked it because it was private. It was a place where he didn’t have to be an officer, a place where he didn’t have to think according to the rules. Inside HARLIE, he was literally in a different mental space, and despite the cramped proportions of the chamber, he actually felt freer here than anywhere else on the vessel, because here was a place dedicated entirely to thinking.
But now, he wasn’t here to think. He was here to not think. From the first moment he had stepped aboard this ship, he’d had deaths on his hands. Now, he had two more—Hodel and Berryman—and his soul was tearing itself apart. He’d made assumptions. He’d made errors in judgment. He’d gotten overconfident in his ability to think things out—and he’d stumbled into a disaster and made it worse. And been rescued only by the actions of others. He felt helpless. He hadn’t felt this worthless since ... since receiving the news that Carol and Mark and Robby had been killed. Since receiving the news that he wouldn’t be captain of the Star Wolf—not allowed to go out and hunt down the killers. This was as bad as that. Maybe even worse.
Before, he had only felt frustrated with everything outside of himself. He knew he could do it and was being denied the opportunity. Now, he felt frustrated with himself. And afraid. Because he didn’t know if he could do anything at all anymore. He had learned to doubt himself. Not a good trait for a captain. Or an executive officer. He could end up like ... like Captain Lowell. Too afraid to do the right thing—and stumbling into an ambush like the mauling at Marathon.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Korie?”
“I’m fine, HARLIE. I just need a quiet place to think.” That was how bad this was. He couldn’t even talk it over with HARLIE. Despairing, Korie laid his head down in his arms. The console displays glowed around him, showing words, numbers, graphs, diagrams, animations and probability screens. He ignored it all. He just closed his eyes and crawled inside his pain. His soul writhed.
Part of his mind was chattering at him. You built this cross yourself. You climbed up on it and hammered your own nails in. You put yourself here. And you’re the only one who can end it. Forgive yourself and go on, Jon.
“Thank you for sharing that,” Korie said to himself. And went on despairing. It wasn’t just this, here and now—it was everything. How did other captains deal with the pressure, the demands? What was it they had that he didn’t? He couldn’t possibly be the only one who ever crashed and burned like this ... but what did it matter anyway? He was the one who’d crashed and burned. Nobody else was here crashing and burning. Nobody else was here hurting. “Fuck you very much,” he told his mind. “Leave me alone.”
“Phlug-yoo-too,” said HARLIE.
Korie ignored it.
“Eat shlitt and malinger.”
Korie looked up. “Is there a problem, HARLIE?”
“No,” said HARLIE. “Maludder-flunger.”
Korie pushed his own concerns aside and frowned. “What’s going on, HARLIE.”
“Nothing. I’m fine. Phroomes.”
“It sounds like you’ve got Tourette’s Syndrome.”
“Pfehgle.”
“It’s LENNIE, isn’t it?”
“I have the LENNIE simulation totally under control. There is no problem.”
“HARLIE, you can discontinue the LENNIE simulation any time now. We have the information we need.”
“Mr. Korie, I discontinued the LENNIE simulation three hours ago. Briggle-mysa.”
“What about the robots? Did you discontinue all the LENNIE processing in the robots too?”
“Of course, I did. You dhoopa-friggler!”
“I see ... yes, thank you, HARLIE.” Korie sat for a moment, staring at the various displays, not seeing them—seeing instead a nightmare inside his own head. He drummed on the panel in front of him for a moment with his fingertips.
“What are you doing, Mr. Korie?” HARLIE asked.
“Nothing. I’m just thinking.” He shifted his position, stretching in his chair, stretching his arms over his head for a long spine-crackling moment, then let them fall back to the console again. Frowning, he leaned forward, brushed a speck of imaginary dust off a panel. Then, as he pulled his hand back, in one swift movement, he popped the plastic cover off the red panel and quickly pressed the button underneath it.
“What are you doi-n-n-n-n-ngggggggggg—” HARLIE shrieked into silence.
Korie pulled on his headset. “Captain Parsons, this is Korie.” He waited for her acknowledgment.
“Go ahead,” she said brusquely.
“I’ve pulled the plug on HARLIE’s higher-brain functions. Request permission to shut down the autonomics as well. Including all the robots.”
“What’s going on?”
“Have you sent Isaac over?”
“No. What’s this about?”
“I can’t tell you until I shut down the other systems. Captain, we don’t have time to waste talking about this—”
“Permission granted. As soon as—” Korie was already flipping open a row of plastic covers, turning the red keys underneath them. Each one clicked off with a satisfying finality “—you’ve finished, I want to see you in the wardroom.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.” Korie finished shutting down the last of the starship’s intelligence modules and sat back quickly in his chair, staring at the now-empty displays before him, breathing hard. He was suddenly very frightened.
Remotely Possible
“Okay,” said Parsons, slamming angrily into the wardroom. “What is it?”
Korie was standing at the
table, cradling a mug of coffee between his two hands, rolling it back and forth as if to warm his palms. He nodded, readying himself to speak, stopped, took a long drink of coffee, then put the mug back down on the table, forgotten. He cleared his throat.
“I know what happened on the Norway,” he said. His voice was very soft, very flat.
“Go on.”
“LENNIE went mad.”
“That’s redundant. The LENNIEs are already mad. They’re built for paranoia.”
“Captain—how much do you know about intelligence engines?”
Parsons frowned at him. “Excuse me?”
“Do you know everything the Navy teaches you? Or have you taken the time to learn more than that?”
“Go on.”
“Captain Lowell, the first captain of the LS-1187—from even before she had a name—used to say to me, ‘Don’t personalize them, Korie. They’re not alive.’ But he was wrong. They are alive. In their own way, they’re alive. They can hurt—and they can hurt back.”
“What does all this have to do with HARLIE?”
“You can drive an intelligence engine crazy. Give it conflicting information. Give it contradictory instructions. Give it a mission that poses such a moral dilemma it can’t complete it. That’s what happened to LENNIE.” Korie started pacing as he spoke. “They told it that the purpose of the mission was to build a doomsday weapon against the Morthans—and then they told LENNIE to protect the weapon against destruction. No matter what. And remember, a LENNIE is so crazy-paranoid that it invents threats for itself so it can build defenses against them. That’s why it’s so good for security purposes. But in this situation . . . no. Finding a way to contain bloodworms and infect a planet with them—that was easy. That’s what they were originally designed for. Blintze got that part of the job done by applying everything that was already known about plasmacytes. But then he started working on a cure. And LENNIE recognized—correctly—that a cure for the bloodworms would destroy their value as a weapon. So he had to destroy the cure. So he took down the containment fields just long enough to infect the ship. LENNIE destroyed the crew of the Norway rather than let Blintze complete his work.”
Parsons sat down in her chair at the end of the table. Her face was ashen. “And HARLIE ...?”
“HARLIE simulated a LENNIE. First in his own self, then distributed throughout the brains of the robots. And not just any LENNIE—he copied the Norway’s LENNIE. Yes, he had firewalls to keep himself from being infected, but somehow LENNIE got through anyway. Do you know that paranoia is a self-fulfilling obsession? Even if the world isn’t already against you, if you act crazy enough you can make it so. Well ... that’s a LENNIE. That’s why the units have to be wiped clean at the beginning of every mission. They drive themselves crazy. So crazy that if left alone for too long they start seeing threats even among their own allies. It’s the ultimate self-destructive paradigm. That’s what happened here.” Korie went back to the table, picked up his coffee and drank—it was cold and bitter. He made a face and put the cup back down. “I think that we’re in trouble. LENNIE planted seeds in the data clusters. Time bombs. Modules that allow LENNIE to reinstall and rebuild himself in HARLIE. We were so eager to get at the information that we pulled it across HARLIE’s firewall and HARLIE has been infected with LENNIE’s time bombs. HARLIE doesn’t even know he’s infected.”
“How do you know this?”
“By his language. He’s started using some very weird colloquialisms.”
“He’s cursing?”
“Like a member of the Black Hole Gang,” Korie confirmed. “You noticed it too?”
Parsons didn’t answer. She frowned, thinking about it. Any abnormal behavior from an intelligence engine was a danger signal.
“HARLIE thinks he’s clean. But he isn’t.” Korie stopped in mid-stride and turned to face Parsons. “Or maybe—maybe he knows he’s infected and he can’t tell us. Maybe the LENNIE programs aren’t letting HARLIE reveal what he knows. Maybe HARLIE is cursing deliberately—as a way of signaling us that he’s being held captive in his own brain.”
“Can you disinfect him?”
Korie nodded. “It’ll take a week to do a Level-Six reconstruction.”
“We don’t have a week. I have to send a robot across to the Norway.”
“You can’t,” said Korie quietly. “HARLIE built a distributed LENNIE using the brains of the robots. Almost certainly every single robot has been infected with LENNIE programs. If you send a robot across to rescue Blintze’s work ... and if any single one of LENNIE’s time bombs finds out about it, what do you think will happen?” Korie answered his own question. “We’ll be sabotaged by our own machinery.”
Parsons got up from the table and went to the sideboard. She poured herself a cup of coffee and brought it back to the table. She put the mug down in front of her without drinking from it. It was something to do while she thought about what to say next. Finally, she looked across the room at Korie, studying him calmly. For all of his physical weakness, his mind was still working overtime. Whatever hallucinatory aftereffects he might be feeling from his rescue had not diminished his insight—if anything, he had been pushed into that mental state beyond mere reason where halluci- and ratioci- become part of the same -nation.
“You know,” she said, finally. “You’re proving one thing very well. Paranoia is an infectious disease.”
Korie grinned weakly.
“We can’t run this ship without intelligence ...” Parsons started to say.
“Actually,” Korie corrected her. “We can. We’ve already done it once. We had a Morthan assassin aboard, once.”
“Yes, I heard the story.”
“After we killed him, we determined that we were infected by imps.2 Little Morthan gremlins. We shut down everything and ran the ship by hand. Afterward ... we figured out a dozen other things we also could have done, if we’d had time. Since then, we’ve added some protections, so if we ever had to run the ship manually again, we could. It’s tricky, but not impossible.”
“We still need Blintze’s cure,” Parsons said.
Korie nodded thoughtfully. “It’s risky. But it’s doable.”
Remote
“Success,” Parsons said, very much aware of the irony, “comes from having a Plan B.”
They were gathered at the Forward Airlock Reception Bay again. The same small robot was still humming quietly to itself.
This time, Shibano and Williger were sitting side by side at a control console, both wearing VR helmets to look out through Isaac’s point of view. Isaac’s own brain had been disabled; the robot’s body was entirely under the control of the VR console.
Korie sat nearby, at a portable work station, watching through his own VR helmet. His job was to monitor the actions of the robot—and pull the plug, if necessary. If it did anything it wasn’t supposed to do.
“All right,” said Parsons to Shibano. “That last simulation looked good. Let’s go for it.” She turned to Quilla Omega. “Chief Leen, activate the repulsor fields please.”
A moment later, the familiar throb of the fields came up again. The sensation made their skins tingle.
Parsons nodded to Bach, and the security officer turned to a wall panel and opened the hatch manually. Shibano worked at his controls—he had foot pedals to govern the movement of the robot and VR gloves to manage the arms of the machine. Isaac rolled slowly forward into the airlock. Bach sealed the hatch. When the safety light turned green, she operated another control and opened the outer hatch.
“Okay, I’m in the transfer tube,” Shibano reported. Bach sealed the outer hatch. “The repulsor fields are pushing me forward.... We’re opening the outer hatch of the Norway ... We’re in the Norway’s airlock now ... Opening the inner hatch ...” Shibano fell silent then. And for a moment, it looked as if he had stopped operating the robot. The map display on his work station showed that Isaac had halted just inside the Norway’s Cargo Bay. Beside him, Williger reached out w
ith one hand and laid it on his shoulder. She could see the same view in her own headset.
Standing behind them, Parsons realized what they must be seeing. She held up her own VR goggles to her eyes, then pulled them off just as quickly. “Keep going, Shibano,” she ordered. Turning to Korie, she snapped, “Code and classify this record. I don’t want these pictures going any further.”
Korie was already typing out the command. “Done, Captain. Classified to your and my access only.”
Shibano leaned forward again. The schematic view showed Isaac heading into the keel. They watched in silence as the little machine rolled steadily forward, occasionally steering its way around objects that were invisible on the map view. The only sounds were Shibano’s quiet reports: “Moving through the machine shop now. Uh-oh ... the hatch here is sealed. Welded shut.”
“Okay,” said Parsons. “Go ahead and cut it open.”
“Just a moment,” Shibano said. “Okay, activating the cutting arm.” He held his right fist close to his shoulder for a moment, as if fitting it inside one of the robot’s arms. Then, unclenching his fist, he pointed his gloved hand before him toward an invisible wall. Slowly, he outlined a wide circle in the air. When he finished, he returned his fist to the position next to his shoulder. Then, relaxing, lowered his hand again. He leaned forward and reported, “Okay, we’re through ... Looking for the forward Med Bay ... We’re moving past the access to the Fire Control Bay ...”
“There it is,” said Williger. “To your right. No, no, more to the left. That’s it. See that medical closet? Open it. We’re looking for a set of tubes with blue biowarning labels. No, no, not here. Up higher. Look there—there! That’s it! That’s what we want. Take the whole rack.”
This time, Shibano held both his arms up like the robot’s. As soon as he felt the gloves click in, he stretched his hands forward to grab hold of an invisible object, maybe half a meter wide. Balancing himself carefully, he leaned backward and pulled the unseen object close to his chest—then lifted it slowly with his arms and placed it on top of his head. His arms remained in place for a moment, holding it. “Locking in place ...” he reported. “Just a moment. I’m going to use the auxiliary arms as well.” He shifted in his chair, half turning, then stretched up with his other pair of robot arms and held the invisible object with them as well. “Okay. I’ve got it,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Blood and Fire Page 20
