Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  As he turned his ground car into the drive, he was frowning at the lightless grounds and windows. The closer he got to the main building, the funnier things looked. Whatever had gone wrong seemed to have brought on a total blackout. The house had been unoccupied until Yokosuka got here—or at least he'd thought it had. Of course, he'd left that damned funny robot in charge…

  When he got to the front door, the house at first refused to recognize that anyone was standing there, let alone the lawful occupant. Damn it, he knew he was paid up on the rent. Next the emergency lights, powered by a backup supply, came on— even it this was daytime—and Nash discovered that something also seemed to be wrong with the house's comsystem. This was not entirely a surprise. He'd tried a couple of times to call ahead, but once he hadn't been able to get through, and the other time he got only weird, unsettling answers. Speaking into his wrist phone now, he tried again, with no better luck than before.

  His memory for practical housekeeping matters had always been lousy. But there was no chance of his forgetting the current butler's name—not with all the joking that had gone on about it.

  "Burymore? Where the hell are you?"

  No answer.

  "Anybody there?"

  Damn. And he'd been expecting to find a lot of important messages waiting for him too. The way his luck was running today, they were probably all wiped out.

  The press of other business had delayed his getting back here. But now he was ready, and more than ready, to settle in somewhere for a while. He had work to do, and things to think about. Especially he wanted to savor having been right in the middle of the first—and almost the only—berserker raid on Fifty Fifty.

  He was doubly disconcerted, after experiencing all these oddities, to find that the front door of the house was unlocked. He pushed it open, stepped in, turned on a light when he had advanced into the next room, where for some reason the window shades were all completely closed—and swore eloquently, in two ancient languages, at the scene of ruin by which he was confronted.

  He was still standing there when more lights came on, and Jory and Trask confronted him.

  "Yokosuka, what in hell has happened to you?" The young man with her looked like he'd been in some kind of major wreck. "And who the hell is this?"

  "This is Cedric Traskeluk," she told her boss. "Security is on its way."

  "What—?" Nash made a helpless gesture. Then he looked at Traskeluk again. "My God, young man, what's happened to your arm?" Even after what he'd seen on Fifty Fifty, even after what he'd felt—especially after what he'd felt in his own shoulder—Jay Nash fainted.

  They helped him to a chair, and soon his mind was reasonably clear again. It wasn't fair, he was thinking, even as he listened, sitting down, to the first horrifying rough outline of an explanation. Ever since he'd come back to Uhao he'd heard a hundred rumors about the war. The most common was that the real action was now going to take place somewhere far away from Fifty Fifty. One variation on this had the berserkers going straight for Earth—to people with any real understanding of the forces involved, that last was strategically very unlikely, with all the active Solarian bases the enemy would have to leave in their rear to do so.

  And there had been rumors also about infiltrating berserker machines.

  Over the years he'd learned a few things about rumors. Generally it was safer to dismiss any one that came along than to take it seriously. And anyway, military strategy wasn't Nash's strong point, and he knew it. Right now he just wanted to rest his wounded shoulder, catch up on the therapy that he was supposed to be getting so maybe it would stop aching, put his feet up and relax. And catch up on his sleep; he wasn't a young man anymore. And after that, set himself up a real office and studio in his rented house, so he could do the production work required on his new documentary. The Space Force expected a good job from him, and they were pushing the project all they could.

  And then, when he had satisfied himself that he had done his duty—and only then—he would settle in, perhaps with a trusted old friend or two, maybe by himself, to do some serious drinking. The world might not see him for a standard week.

  Security of various ages and sizes, some of them in neat uniforms and some in civilian clothes, were on the scene a few minutes after Nash's own arrival. They had, of course, a thousand questions.

  "What about this robot that was supposedly on duty?"

  "What about it?"

  "It was your machine, Mr. Nash. Your robot butler."

  "Burymore," Traskeluk put in, from the other side of the room, where he was getting his injuries looked at. When the others looked at him, he reminded them. "There was a sign on its back that said 'Burymore.' The sign isn't there anymore."

  Nodding his head, the director fell into a chair, bemused, trying to remember. The name he remembered perfectly, but where it came from…

  "Yes, I suppose I did put that on. The sign. Before I went out to Fifty Fifty, we were having a party… drinking… something to do with an old story."

  "But where did the machine come from?" a security woman asked.

  Where had the butler come from? "People just give me things, sometimes."

  "Try to remember."

  "Oh, I will. I will."

  Even before the experts arrived, Jory and Trask between them, while helping each other patch up their wounds, had come up with a satisfying scenario: The machine that had killed the woman had been basically only an intelligence-gathering device, not capable of making policy decisions on the level of, say, a berserker admiral. It existed primarily for the gathering and transmission of information. When forced to make decisions for which it knew itself to be unqualified, it experienced some opt-electronic analog of anxiety.

  A few similarly disguised machines, on other planets, had been recognized by their Solarian enemies, rendered inactive before they could self-destruct, and taken apart.

  Careful examination of the programming in each of those cases had revealed firm evidence that each disguised berserker was still basically a killer.

  Some of these machines (called Trojan horses, "horses" or "Trojans" for short, in the jargon of Solarian counterintelligence) might even be programmed to be sincere in their offers of peace and cooperation—while their unliving creators of course were not. A few people, ready and willing to believe, had been taken in.

  Somewhere, Jory was telling Traskeluk when she had a chance, she had read of Solarian philosophers (or had they been Carmpan? She couldn't remember) or cosmologists, who had stated a certain law. As nearly as she could remember, it ran something like this: Complex programming, when passed on from one generation to another of inorganic machines, without the intervention of organic thought, tends to drift away from its original purpose. Berserkers, the experts agreed, were aware of this law—as much as they could be aware of anything—and allowed for it in their manufacturing programs, by imposing redundant layers of quality control.

  Maybe if too many intelligent machines were produced, by whatever creator, and for whatever purpose, would they tend to drift away from their original programming? Would berserkers tend to become indifferent to the cause of death?

  Someone, obviously pleased with his own wit, had called it an analog of Original Sin—whatever that might have been.

  All through then: history, berserkers must have imposed a rigid quality-control program at their factories and bases, just as humans must. To achieve this, would one of the original, first-generation berserkers be present at every factory? Or some inspector approved by a panel of first-generation machines?

  The tendency of succeeding generations to drift away from an original purpose is some kind of natural law, and must be continually opposed. The Antiteleological Principle, that was it. Theory held that it inexorably affected organic as well as nonorganic computation, from one generation to the next.

  The universe for some reason is sharply antagonistic to the concept of universal death.

  In the same vein, Solarians, or any other bra
nch of humanity, would never be able to simply populate the Galaxy with their own loyal servants, by sending out Von Neumann machines. Any such devices tended to drift away into random and purposeless (from the human point of view) behavior, mining lifeless chunks of rock to obtain the materials with which to build sometimes elaborate and usually harmless gadgets. In practice, at the necessary level of complexity, all serious efforts at replication of the original machines invariably stopped within four generations at the most.

  Obviously, the berserker record, over an enormous volume of time and space, was much better than that; hundreds of generations of machines must have been produced, all still true to the basic command. But the inevitable trade-off was that the numbers of machines successfully built had to remain comparatively low.

  Was it possible that even if all Solarians were wiped out, natural forces would in time defeat the berserker effort? That something in the nature of the Galaxy, and of the universe itself, required the presence of life?

  The berserkers had endured for more than fifty thousand standard years, but on the Galactic scale that was a mere flicker of time, an aberration that might be corrected in the next heartbeat.

  One of the security officers said, turning away from Burymore's enigmatic smile: "This unit here, what we are probably going to start calling the Port Diamond machine, seems to have suffered the computer equivalent of a nervous breakdown."

  More unpredictable, and deadlier, than a live tiger in the house. Tigers as a rule killed only when they had to eat. Some quirk of programming, tipping a hidden balance, told the machine it had to kill this human being in front of it, destroy him before he could reveal its identity, or take some other step that would be seriously damaging to the overall berserker cause.

  Jay Nash, soon entirely recovered from his fainting spell and grown loquacious once again, did his best to take over the investigation, trying to make sense of death and ruin, to figure out how a berserker had come to be installed in his rented house. The more he thought about it, the more it angered him. Of course, in general a berserker would prefer to be inconspicuous, to look just like a thousand or a million other serving machines. And to behave like them—most of the time.

  "I wonder—I wonder if the people who put it here were hoping I'd take it with me to Fifty Fifty. Out there it could have got a firsthand look at our defenses. But how would a machine know about the planned attack there? It must have had some goodlife help even to get as far as it did. How would a machine get itself crated for shipment?"

  No one knew.

  Nash still couldn't recall the exact circumstances of the butler's arrival at his house. He might well have been absent somewhere at the time. Silently he gave thanks that he had been somewhat wary of the thing. There had been no question of his taking it with him to the front. Even if someone thought it was quite capable of handling business, he wasn't going to trust anything as important as the recording of a combat documentary to this goddamned toy that looked like Jeeves in a tin can.

  Burymore's modestly capable optelectronic brain had classified everything that hung on the walls as decoration. Only when the pistol had appeared in Jory's hand, held and pointed like a weapon, had the machine classified it as a functional firearm, and behaved accordingly.

  "But how did the damned thing get in here in the first place?"

  Some scheming goodlife had chosen Nash's house, or had gladly accepted the chance to use it, as a base for the disguised berserker for two reasons. One, getting the machine installed here was achievable; and two, Nash was known to have intimate contact with the military. He held a reserve commission, and for all the goodlife knew, had knowledge—maybe extensive knowledge—of military secrets. Nash was, after all, going to Fifty Fifty to make a documentary—that in itself was not a secret.

  Therefore, Berserker Burymore's goodlife handlers had managed to get their disguised monster installed, a month or two back, in the house they knew Nash had rented.

  Investigators now had examined carefully the body in the refrigerator. The unit had thoughtfully been removed from Nash's kitchen.

  "Her name is Tanya something."

  Tanya had at least been identified as an acquaintance of Martin Gavrilov, and at least some indirect connection had been established between Gavrilov and a known goodlife group.

  Investigation soon revealed that the dead woman, Tanya, had once worked for a domestic catering service.

  "And the butler killed her—the way her bones were broken took more than ordinary human force."

  Getting access to the house was relatively easy, and such neighbors that took any notice would not have been concerned, because all kinds of civilians as well as some military people were in the habit of showing up at any place where Nash happened to be living.

  The place was usually tenanted by a couple of human aides or servants who worked for Nash full time. But with the war on, and heating up, those people had enlisted, or were otherwise occupied, in new jobs that suddenly seemed more important than any entertainer's comfort and convenience.

  And now those interested in the case of the Port Diamond machine were also starting to wonder what had happened to Spacer Gift, who was known to have been in or around the house a few days earlier. The tracer put on Gift by security demonstrated that.

  Traskeluk was wondering whether he would have to brace himself for a confrontation with the man he had been hunting. But the question now did not seem nearly as urgent as it had only a few hours ago.

  He and others still wondered if some connection could be established between the missing Gift and a ring of goodlife agents. At first look, Gift's record had nothing in it to suggest such a thing.

  Of course, his record really had nothing in it to suggest otherwise. He'd passed the usual security check that everyone in Hypo was subject to. Pretty dull and routine, up until his first experience of combat.

  Eventually, a holographic recording of Gift was extracted from the house's own security system, which Burymore had otherwise rendered just about totally moribund. It showed Gift coming in the front door, the figure of a young woman with braided metallic hair hazily visible at his side.

  "Who's this character?" asked a late-arriving officer.

  Traskeluk, having declined an immediate ride to the hospital, was still on hand to make the identification, and Jory backed him up.

  Of course, it would be hard to be sure that any image left in berserker-controlled hardware, despite its verisimilitude, wasn't some artifact.

  But not this one, it looked too natural. The unexplained fact was still that berserkers had never been able to successfully fake human images or human bodies. It was obvious that this device, except for the murderous optelectronic brain, had been assembled in some Solarian factory. There were a few truly human-shaped machines sold as sex dolls; but as a rule they had no more brains than can openers.

  Jory Yokosuka found herself pondering whether she was going to have to take a vacation from journalism for a while.

  Maybe it would be wise. Her instincts urged her to keep working, but now maybe other instincts were urging her to hold back.

  Traskeluk naturally had already admitted to having a certain amount of extra hardware in his arm. The way things were working out, he could see that he wouldn't necessarily have to own up to carrying around an explosive charge—the final blast could be accounted for by an internal destructor package built into the berserker. Security only wondered that it had not been larger.

  And Traskeluk, exchanging glances with Jory, wasn't going to have to admit to being loaded with weaponry for the benefit of Nifty Gift.

  When Nash looked at his former butler, he saw the torso a blackened ruin, the smiling robot face still partly undamaged. One hand and arm was still intact, and one leg still in good shape. The man's clothes it had been wearing were more than half shredded and burned away. Two puny humans had quite thoroughly murdered the damned thing.

  "Well," she said to Trask when they were alone again, "you told
me you were going to lead me to a story."

  From the start it struck security as odd that Nash's robot butler, contrary to all common usage and standards of Solarian propriety, had been constructed in a very anthropomorphic form. People made machines like that only for very special purposes, or with deliberate intent to shock. Berserker units of that shape were not uncommon, perhaps in expectation of being able to operate captured equipment made to fit Solarian (or Builder) bodies.

  How did it happen to have this shape?

  "We may not have a good answer to that one for a while. There are ID numbers on the robot, of course, and we'll have to look at the place where it was manufactured. I understand they turn out a lot of custom units."

  This untypical berserker had of course been obedient to its special programming, and had refrained from killing on many occasions when it had previously had the chance. (Security's thorough examination of the house revealed that the butler must have been routinely sterilizing large areas of the house and grounds, eliminating all microorganisms, as part of a regular cleaning routine. This was a form of life-destruction it could carry on without arousing suspicion.)

  Jory was helping Trask prepare for his coming interview with security—maybe they would, after all, have discovered how much lethal hardware he'd been carrying concealed in his artificial arm. Inspiration sprang up where it was needed: "And so your cousin told you that the next time you ran into a berserker, you had better be ready for it. Of course neither he nor you had any idea it was going to be this soon."

  Traskeluk was looking at her gratefully. It was a good story, she realized, even if—as she felt sure—it was not the real one. And, by Jay Nash and all the gods, she was going to write it up.

  Jay Nash was looking, or had planned to look, at a preliminary staging of the material he'd brought back with him for the documentary. People's images were coming and going, in lifelike three dimensions, on the several holostages in this chamber that served him as a conference room.