Looking back at that jagged skyline, I could see a few tiny flickering points of light, but the great capitol was dead. If I was to believe the soldiers and those business suits, most of the people there were dead too. I tried to focus in on the flickering points of light and realized that those fires must have been huge. They were high up, too. There were four near the middle of giant skyscrapers, and three near the ground, but those buildings were either slowly going out, or being hollowed out by flames as they made their way up. “Guess we fried all the safety measures in those places too.”
The wind began to pick up, cool, from across the ocean. I shivered, Lurk retreated into the collar of my suit, and I made my way back down to the cafeteria by the light of a chemical torch.
Part Eleven
The Commerce Complex was larger than most large space ships I’d been in. The backup lights left everything in half-light, but the chemical flashlight I had made up for it when I focused it into a tight beam.
The further in I went, the more complete the silence was until I was self conscious about my every footfall, and knocking a mug off a counter nearly gave me a heart attack. The cacophony of porcelain shattering against the tiled floor seemed to fill the universe for a few seconds, signalling to everything around that there was an intruder about.
I stood completely still for a long minute, listening for any approaching bot or soldier. When my heart slowed back down, and the silence fell back down around me like a dark blanket; I moved on.
The eeriest place I found was a floor with a couple hundred work stations arranged in cubicle blocks. I could imagine what that must have looked like during a workday. So many voices must have blended into a buzz of wordless noise, and so many people must have looked like a too-well organized village, where everyone had their own cube casa, with a few cheap display sheets pinned to their little walls with family, funny pictures, or encouraging images. One of the films survived the electromagnetic pulse, and I noticed it right away. The image loop the previous user loaded into it was a tiny puppy that looked like a teddy bear sniffing a giant flower. I pulled it off the inside of the cubicle, turned it off, rolled it up and stuffed it into my bag. A working screen had to be worth something.
Then I started checking data and computing modules left behind. There were company bracer units and slim computers that were only a couple centimetres wide, nine centimetres long but had ports of every type on each side. “Nice,” I said, picking one up and trying to turn it on.
“Burnt,” Lurk said as it failed to boot.
“Well, we’re here looting right, and we’ve got food. Next is communication,” I told him. “There are hundreds of these things around, and they’re all better than the PC’s I’ve had. If one works, and one probably does, since this crappy screen survived the pulse, then we’ve might be able to figure out what our next move is, or get a map of this place at least.”
“Unlikely,” Lurk said as he slipped under my collar.
“Or I could connect you to this screen. Maybe if I try to reprogram you to do more than shoot down my ideas I’ll get somewhere.”
“Unkind,” said Lurk from where he had burrowed.
“Just asking for a little more positivity, buddy,” I replied as I tried the fifth computer module, hoping it worked. It was this cool looking wrist unit with a holo projector built right in, but it was absolutely fried.
An hour later I hadn’t made it through a quarter of the cubicles, but I found a computer that turned on. The tiny screen flashed red and informed me that I was not authorized to use that unit. “Well it works,” I told Lurk. “Think you could connect to it and reset it to factory defaults later so I can register as the user?”
“Yes,” Lurk said.
“Fantastic, we have a computer, now we need some kind of battery to…”
“Die, fleshling!” screamed a menacing, booming voice from behind me.
I jumped so high that I swear my head brushed the ceiling. A glance behind me into the shadows revealed a thin android surging forward with a rifle slung across its chest. Its artificial flesh was half ripped and burned off, but its eyes were bright red lights.
I didn’t even bother to pocket the wrist computer, but clutched it in my hand as I ran back the way I came as fast and as low as I could, sure that I’d hear the sound of the android’s pulse rifle behind me an instant before I was burned to death.
I made it through the double doors leading to the cubicle village and redoubled my pace down the straight hallway, taking the next corner so fast I slammed into the wall across the hall before ducking behind cover. “If only I could find a working weapon,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
I was about to continue my running retreat then I realized, the android hadn’t followed me out of the cubicle room. I waited, trying to quiet my rapid breathing so I could listen intently, but the beating of my heart seemed like the loudest thing in the whole complex.
I pocketed the computer, and pulled a cylinder of nutrient tablets so I could move them to a lower pocket and started running again. I wasn’t going to take any chances that that bot was somehow contained.
I turned the next corner, retracing my steps, and came face to face with my robot enemy. He pointed the large barrelled weapon at me and shouted; “Halt!” My instincts were dead on, he wasn’t contained within the cubicle village, he had gone around the other way.
I held my hands up, and realized in that second of terror that I was still holding the cylinder of nutrient pellets, which had a neat dispenser button on the top. None of the bots that I’d seen tearing people to shreds seemed to have much of a care for self preservation, but I had to give this new plan a try. The only other option was trying to outrun a machine that could probably move at twenty-five kilometres an hour.
“This is a grenade!” I shouted, brandishing the nutrient tablet cylinder but hiding the label in my palm. All he could see was a pink button with my thumb on top of it.
“Oh no!” the bot said, his eyes going wide. He took a step back, really panicked, and raised the barrel of his rifle. “Hey, look, no need to blow yourself up, young man, I thought you were one of those soldiers.”
“Put the gun down!” I said, knowing I was pressing my luck.
“Okay,” the bot placated, the red glow fading from his eyes. There was either real fear, or a damn good simulation of it in them. “I can’t even pull the trigger, my programming won’t let me operate weapons.”
The gun was on the floor, and the robot, without me asking, kicked it over. At my feet was a fully mechanical rifle with an under-barrel magazine that looked like it had hundreds or thousands of needle rounds loaded inside. I’d seen the type before, just not the militarized version; it was vicious looking. With as much speed as I could manage, I picked it up and pointed it at the android.
By the time I’d managed it, the bot was facing the other direction and two steps into a limping run. “Stop!” I said, not even sure what I was thinking at the time. “You said you ran into some soldiers?”
The android halted and turned around with its head half bowed. It was looking away from the barrel of the rifle with its hands up. “I couldn’t get away, so when they caught me with one of their flamers I let them burn part of my skin off before shutting down and playing dead. When I powered on a day later they’d done a bit of damage, and removed my main power core, so I went looking for a cycle battery that could still recharge itself, found a little one, enough to give me a few hour’s charge at a time. When you came in I was letting the battery recharge, it takes about a day, and I was on standby.”
“Why didn’t the soldiers take the gun from you?”
“Oh, yeah, I found that while I was scavenging,” he replied. “Figured I could use it to scare more soldiers off at least. Didn’t work, evidently,” the bot said sheepishly.
“Oh, it worked,” I replied. “My heart’s still pounding like a spastic hammer arm. If you didn’t try to scare me again here, I would have kept running and neve
r looked back. Every bot I saw was tearing humans apart and feeding them into matter converters.”
“Not me!” the bot said. “I’m a high security data storage bot, employees used to dump their drives into me and I’d hold information for them until it was time to pass it on to someone else who met my security criteria.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied. “So, why aren’t you a crazy bot trying to rip my face off?”
“Right, I guess I didn’t answer clearly. I never connect directly to a network. That would be a huge security breach. I only connect to portable computers that are registered with the company. I’m one secure, mature computer with non-essential programming for allure and I’m made to endure.”
“Okay, that explains everything, but I still expect you to come after me in my sleep,” I told him.
“Hey, if I could kill you, or even wanted to hurt you, I would have, right? That cannon I gave you is a real piece of death and destruction, but I can not pull the trigger. Don’t believe me? Give it a try.”
I pointed it above his head and tapped the trigger. The safety was off, and the ceiling behind him lit up as a dozen or more thin, explosive shard rounds were fired from the barrel. I stopped firing and found the safety as quickly as I could.
“Careful! Careful!” the bot shouted as he ducked, panicked and turning in one place with his hands over his head.
“Sorry,” I told him, partly by reflex. “It’s my first assault cannon.”
“Okay, so now, do you you believe that I don’t want to ‘rip your face off?’”
I thought for a moment, trying to ignore the terrified look on his face and the way he was cowering as close to the floor as he could get while still standing on two feet. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Logically, safe,” Lurk croaked, peeking his head out from under my collar.
“Hey, I love those little synthetics, that’s the lizard, right?” he said, brightening up at the sight of Lurk.
“Yeah, I’ve had him a long time,” I told him. “We gave them out as carnival game prizes.”
“You used to work at a carnival?” the bot’s eyes brightened, and not in a ‘I want to murder everything with a pulse’ way, but in a ‘oh my God, you’re someone famous and amazing,’ way. “I love carnivals. Clowns, rides, games that are unfair to the public, bearded ladies,” he said. “Not that I’ve ever been to one myself.”
I wanted to tell him about my carnival, about the Wicked Wonders, our issyrian shape shifter troupe, or the whirl-a-toss, the game I was allowed to set up and watch every time we made landfall, and about the rest, but instead I could only manage to agree. “Yeah, I’m a carnie, but I think my people and my carnival are gone.” I think the look of sympathy that I saw on his face won me over then. I lowered the rifle. “Do you have a name?”
“Yasmine, one of my favourite investment officers, gave me one. I’m Theodore, everyone calls me Theo,” he said straightening up. “I think I lost all my people too.”
Part Twelve
Theo was half broken. The burns to his cosmetic skin and the basic protection beneath were more extensive than I thought, and some of his joints were barely hanging on, especially on his left side. I couldn’t see the extent of the damage while he was chasing me while he pretended to be a red eyed killer bot, but it didn’t take long to see why the soldiers left him for dead as I followed him through a labyrinth of cubicles.
“How did the pulse miss you?” I asked him as we crossed the large cubicle village. The only sounds were my voice and the laboured whirr-grind of his joints.
“My data and backup systems are carefully shielded, and my joints are mostly mechanical with the control circuits hidden within my innermost casing,” Theo replied. “As the office’s secure data repository for Sure Investments, it is essential that I remain in place, intact, and that the information people placed in me several times a day is undamaged. I’m also quite lucky. The damage the soldiers did could have rendered me helpless, but I’m still ambulatory so I have a lot to be thankful for. I will have to shut down and let a charge re-accumulate soon though. I just want to show you where I keep my collection first.”
When I asked Theo: “How can I trust you?” he told me that he’d show me I could by bringing me to his most prized collection. I had the feeling that he was making every effort to either show me that he wanted to be a friend, or that he was trying to trick me. I would see soon enough. The storage and maintenance room for bots was right ahead. It seemed every time he answered one question, it led to more, so being as bored as I was, I didn’t hold back. “What kind of information do people store in you? I mean, you’re off network, right?”
“So what are people hiding in me?” Theo asked. “I’m immune to interrogation, I’ll have you know.”
“Hold on, I’m not asking for anything specific, like ‘where does Duke Douchebag the Third keep the crown jewels?’ I’m just wondering what kind of info you’re carrying around. You know, generally.”
“Generally speaking, some of Sure Investments’ clients want them to know about some of their collateral and holdings, but they don’t want the rest of the galaxy to be aware of their nature or location. I have records of several long range exploration yachts, the true ownership of several settled moons, last will and testaments for wealthy people, as well as the transferrable deeds for several hundred mines because they are currently up for trade. If my internal data compartment is compromised, all that information, and the encrypted, unique files are then deleted.”
“So those soldiers almost cost some rich people a lot of platinum?” I asked.
“Trillions,” Theo replied. “Not that I care about such things. I’m not very important despite the importance of what I carry. Another secure data bot could replace me easily, which is likely since I found my own controller key.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about. The few bots my outfit could afford weren’t smart enough to know what to do with their own controller key – the encrypted key that allowed someone to take possession of that bot – but a machine like Theo might try to become their own master. Usually the failsafe kicks in and the bot’s memory is wiped, they drop the key on the deck and the owner can reclaim the machine. Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen often from what I know, a really smart bot will find a way to free themselves, and they run off, looking for one of those hyper-progressive moons where artificial intelligences have civil rights. For the owner it means they’re out thousands of platinum, and sometimes their bots even put a price on their head if they weren’t treated so well. I didn’t get the impression that Theo’s programming would allow him to use his controller key on himself, but I kept my mouth shut just in case. I was just figuring out what his deal was, who knew what would happen if he tried to use his own controller key and inadvertently restore himself to factory defaults or worse.
“Some of what I’m about to show you might require some explanation, I’ll do my best,” he said as he opened the door to his service room and stumbled through. “I have to sit down.” He dropped onto a wide seat. “My legs take more energy than anything else.”
Glow sticks had been arranged around a wall of disposable display sheets that Theo must have salvaged. A little battery kept them all running as they displayed the faces of at least twenty employees in the building. Some were animated, as though recorded by someone who pleasantly surprised them in their cubicles or the hallways. I’d seen the inside of a few churches, some of us carnival folk are superstitious, and I like to pray sometimes, I’ll admit, and the wall of displays reminded me of candle lit memorials that I’d seen in a few holy places. “This is beautiful, Theo,” I told him. I looked at him in time to see his head nodding forward, as though he were about to fall asleep like a kid who had been up way past his bedtime.
“Do you think they’d like it?” he asked. “I hope so, they are all people who treated me like a person while I was working here.” His head drooped then came back up. “They were my friends.”
“I
think they’d like it,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Down to a trickle of power, I thought I had more,” Theo said. “Before I go, I need to show you something.” He started to struggle as though he were about to get to his feet.
“Stay there, point at whatever, man. No need to kill your battery for good,” I told him. I didn’t know if his type of battery cell could be recharged if it was depleted completely, but I didn’t want to take the chance.
“There,” Theo said, pointing to a small box under the memorial. “Hard keys for the armoury, the secure data vault, the platinum reserve vault, biological sanctuary, and the emergency communications system under this building. The hard keys will bypass the codes that you would normally need to enter those secure areas. It’s what I was hiding from the soldiers. I could have hid, I could have shut down so they wouldn’t find me, but they caught me when I was drawing them away from those keys.”
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale Page 6
