“Christ,” Derek said aloud, “he’s retracted himself.” He spun on the metal floor and felt the grit abrade his feet. He walked quickly to the door, drew it open rapidly, slipped out into the humid darkness, and closed the door. He loped slowly through the grass, and the dew immediately watered his feet in familiar, cold, total immersion. The fire-watch sentry was at the far end of the barracks, his dimly luminous helmet glowing, and Derek’s feet left damply fading prints as he made for his bunk. He crept silently into the metal-framed bed, breathing louder than he wanted to, and drew the light blanket up over him. From the bunk above came the slow chittering purr of a man snoring. Derek held his breath as the fire-watch sentry padded by. The distant echo-call of the bobwhite sounded, and Derek felt a kinship with the bird. I am one of God’s most vulnerable creatures, he thought, and so is the bird. The D.I. is a faulty block of machinery. He felt triumphant, despite his fear of both immediate and ultimate discovery, and he slept well, dreaming of high-speed, low-altitude flights over complexly bristling megalopitan vistas.
Word of the incident spread rapidly. The fire-watch reported to the D.I.’s quarters at 5:30 A.M., got no response, entered, and saw the overtly squared torso on the floor. He alerted the assistant D.I. (a 32-percent bione), who called the post commander (a 12—percenter). The fire-watch was a scrawny, sociosyntonic, bird-faced boy from West Virginius, who delighted in telling what he saw. “By God, his belly-button string was cut plumb in two. His head was By God down in his chest, and his arms and legs were folded up like broken branches. He was By God on the floor like an old packing crate By God.”
After breakfast, the men were confined to their barracks and instructed to field-strip their archaic Garands until further notice. At the noon mess call formation, the post commander himself addressed the entire battalion, the twelve platoons ranked up six abreast and two deep. The post commander was short, thick, muscular, with a salt-and-pepper-colored handlebar mustache, and his chest was embroidered with four equal rows of campaign bars. The silver eagles of his rank lay supine on his khaki epaulets and vertical on his pisscutter cap. The men were hungry and restive, but intent on his words.
“Sergeant S—5 Alpha 430 was maliciously deactivated sometime between 10 P.M. last night and 5:30 A.M. this morning by person or persons unknown. Sergeant Alpha 430 is a gladiatorial bione of the highest order. He represents a government investment in the range of 8 million preferred barter-script units. It is our assumption that one or more of you men committed this action, but we have no suspects as yet. If any one man jack of you here has information about this, you are ordered to report it at once. The Bionics Guild has already authorized a twenty-five-thousand-unit reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. This is no matter of simple personal assault. A valuable item of government property has been damaged—quite extensively, I might add—and the person responsible must be apprehended. That is all. Platoon leaders, carry on!”
Oh, shit, Derek thought, as the men trooped into the resonant mess hall, I will be suspected. But I will lie, and if they break me, I will claim self-defense. That D.I. box of transistorized pneumoplast was going to zap me with a phaser.
A large number of the plebes had witnessed Derek’s two encounters with the D.I., and so when Derek was summoned to the post commander’s quarters the next day, he was not surprised, nor did he suspect any particular informant. With a quickly posted reward of twenty-five thousand units, he even thought there might have been a torrent of early informants. Derek ran through his plan again: he was to deny the incident, plead self-defense if clearly discovered, and give as his base of defense that fact that the D.I. had violated the ancient and honorable robotic code by pointing a phaser at him. He was not accustomed to lying, but felt this a justifiable first line of defense. After all, he was merely protecting himself from a malfunctioning machine. One need not have a code of honor when dealing with a machine. His denial would be strategic, the confession objective, and the circumstances extenuating. But Derek did not reckon on the cruel sophistication of the interrogation process, nor did he expect it to begin with such startling suddenness.
He entered the commandant’s office and was immediately phaser-stunned by an MP standing behind the door. He was dragged into a small room adjacent to the commandant’s office. He later remembered that he had just begun his salute when the phaser hit him. Now he was set upright in a square chaise, his arms and legs and head quickly bound, and various monitoring devices were connected to his body. Psychogalvanometers were set up, the thin, snaking leads attached to the tops of his hands by exquisitely small, sharp needles. An electroencephalographic skullcap was lowered down over his head, and an eye photography scanner fitted over his face. Videotape cameras telescoped out from the walls, like Cyclopean howitzer barrels capped with a single glowing eye-lens.
He tensed for a sigmoidal probe and was grateful that it did not come. Through the slightly anesthetic haze the phaser-stun had produced, Derek saw something comparable to the move the D.I. had made with the phaser: a medic moving toward him, an injection pistol in his hand. He tried to move, to surge, to burst his bonds, but was totally flaccid and powerless. The medic blatted in Pentothal and Demerol synthetes in both Derek’s arms and groin, and Derek felt a pleasurable ballooning, as if his essence were filling the entire room. He felt primally secure, and yet light and airy, swimming effortlessly in warm gelatin, his skeleton glowing, his organs itching deliciously, but not needing to be scratched, his muscles perfectly striated slabs of tensile colloid, the color-coded wires of his neural filigrees alive and singing with rapidly somersaulting ions, like tiny prickly spheres of radiating thorns, parading through the myelin-sheathed tubes. His skull, his cranial world, felt huge, a wonderously burgeoning resonant grotto of osteal integrity; his visual agates soft rubbery insets; and his vestibular channels the purest springs of nectar in their cilial nests, twin fleshy mediators of his total somesthetic comfort.
“I am vestibular man,” he found himself saying, and it was a proudly echoing pronouncement, as if quadraphonic speakers were sounding in a great stone hall.
“What was that he said?” the commandant asked the medic.
“Didn’t catch it,” the medic said. “Something like ‘vestibule.’”
“Is he ready for interrogation?”
“Yessir.”
“Gladiatorial creep,” Derek said. “Immature militant soldier boy. Spuriously programmed ramrod, obscene nest of transistors—”
“Silence, Plebe,” the commandant hissed. “State your name, rank, and serial number.”
“Go suck a swagger stick,” Derek said, his voice permeated by confidence. He felt like a man kneeling by a pool of liquid gold, and the gold was cool and thick, like mercury, and it was beautiful to see and touch and drink. He saw the pool as his id-level psychic energy, his generic fuel cell, his power source, his organismic distillate, his holistic tincture.
“What the hell did you shoot this boy with?” the commandant asked the medic.
“Routine blats of Pentothal and Demerol. It should clear away his inhibitions.”
“Name, rank, and serial number,” the commandant tried again.
“Bionic D.I.’s eat silicon shit,” Derek said. “All gladiators hop their pneumoplastic grannies. They have grease-pit asses—”
“Whatever you shot him with has broken something loose,” the commandant said to the medic. “Shoot him with something else.”
“Give it a little more time.”
“You gave him too much. He’s talking crazy.”
Derek looked out at the short man with the eagles on his shoulders and the water buffalo horned mustache, and saw him as a windup toy soldier. The 2,000 cc’s of chemical filled his bloostream with gently pressuring tranquility, and he felt omnipotent and at the center of the world. He stood in the grotto of his skull and watched the capillary pumpings, the crackling of synaptic junctures, the tumescent arc of the vestibular cilia, and the p
lacid horzontality of the inner-ear fluid. He smelled wet leather, lemon rinds, mushroom cellars, and ambergris. He felt infused with slowly metabolizing anthracite briquettes, nodules of mercury, cubes of congealed honey, crystalline amber ellipses, and the soft inner seedpods of apricots and mangoes. A fat orange candle simmered in his thorax, and the flame was painless and nourishing and energizing. The oxygen level in his inhibitory cortices was low, and his life-space felt gaseous. I am a thick mist, he thought to himself, and yet I am a sodden giant, a black hole in space, a thick-skinned balloon full of liquified Stilton, a fleshy embryo with eight extremities, a plump fetus, a star with wet tendons.
“How come you got silver birdies on your shoulders, boy?” Derek asked the commandant. The man’s body stiffened, but his face sagged imperceptibly, and the medic barely held back a smile.
“I am your commanding officer,” the man replied, affecting a marginally effective authoritarian retort. Derek’s face remained flaccidly confident.
“You’re a tin-box soldier boy, you mean. You pin metal sparrows on your shoulders, besides. And you wear water buffalo horned hairs under your bulb-nose. You lack authoritarian presence also.”
“Name, rank, and serial number,” the colonel persisted.
“You know me. You know me. You sure as hell know me.”
“Did you attack Sergeant Alpha 430 last night?”
“Didn’t know that clanking can of tin and plastic had a name. He’s got some sort of serial number, some metal tag stapled to his ass.”
“Did you attack him?”
“Don’t use personal pronouns for that device.”
“Did you sever his umbilical conduit?”
“He damn well needed to be unplugged.”
“Then you did attack him?”
“I disconnected a faulty machine. When you get a burnout, you pull the plug, you shut down. You shoot horses, don’t you?”
“Why did you sever the conduit?”
“That hive of cheap circuitry pulled a phaser on me.”
“That is within the scope of his duties.”
“Robots don’t point phasers at humans. Robots have their robotic roles. This bag of bolts blew his pop-off valve. He was going bonkers. He flipped out. He blew a fuse.”
“You admit the cutting of the conduit?”
“Well, hell, yes. I performed a good deed. I shut off a crazy machine.”
“Do you understand the consequences of your action?”
“Yeah, and I want a robotic cluster on my basic hero medal.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a styrofoam crutch,” the commandant said, “am I hearing this plebe right?”
“The tapes are getting it,” the medic replied. “It beats anything I ever heard.”
“Do you admit to trespass, assault, and maladaptive actions?” the commandant continued to Derek.
“I admit to unplugging a malfunctioning machine. And I admit to the stupidity of gladiatorial pursuits. And I admit to the emotional immaturity of military types. Furthermore, I admit that fire is the most potent extension of man, that career gladiators have frustrated dependency needs, disproportionately large hypothalamuses, dull normal cranial amperage, and poor body image.”
“Heavy. Weird,” the medic said.
“How did this boy ever get accepted into war school?” The commandant turned to the medic again. “How’s his personality profile?”
“Centile fifty, across the boards,” the medic said, producing Derek’s readouts quickly. “A garden variety normal.”
“Wonder how he’d respond detoxed.”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Stash him in the brig—no, stash him in the infirmary. Flush all the tranquilizers out of him. Get him detoxed. We’ll have another go at him later.”
Derek was hospitalized for several days and recovered rapidly from the massive sedation effects. He was brought again to the commandant’s office on yet another bright steaming afternoon, and the silent air-conditioned room was a welcome change from the outside heat. This time the commandant was flanked by two majors, one a judge advocate, and the other a psychonomist.
“You are charged with malicious assault, destruction of government property, and military maladaptive behaviors. How do you plead?” It was the surprisingly robotic-sounding voice of the judge advocate.
“I do not plead in any context,” Derek answered, his voice boldly inflected, for now he was convinced that the judge advocate himself was a bione.
“Did you sever the conduit attached to Sergeant Alpha 430 on the night of 22 July last?”
“I did.”
“And why did you do this?”
“That plastic bag of ropes and pulleys pointed a phaser at me.”
“Are you anti-bionic? Do you hate biones?”
“No more than I’d hate an antique parking meter, or a robot copter pilot, or a stripped Phillips-head screw. I’d have to be mechanophobic to hate a machine.”
“You then plead self-defense?”
“I plead nothing. A machine malfunctioned, and I cut off the machine.”
“It is within the scope of a drill instructor’s power to use his phaser on his troops,” the judge advocate said in his dull robotic voice.
“A robot may not harm a humanoid, sir. I’m sure you are aware of this six-hundred-year-old statute.”
“Sergeant Alpha 430 is not a robot.”
“He is a 97—percenter,” Derek shot back, “and he broke one of the prime laws of robotics.”
“I repeat, he is not a robot.”
“No hive of Akai-Sony transistor paks points a phaser at me.”
“You’ve got a good record here,” the commandant said. “What could have motivated you to take these actions?”
“Self-preservation, sir, defense against unreasonable force, an instinct for survival.”
“You have no malicious motives, then?”
“None, sir.”
“How do you know Sergeant Alpha 430 to be 97—percent bionic?”
“He told me so, himself.”
“How do we know he truly pulled a phaser on you?”
“It was in his hand when I chopped the cable.”
The judge advocate closed a dossier—rather noisily, Derek thought. “That’s it, gentlemen,” he said, “this man is telling the truth. The phaser was indeed found in the retracted hand of the sergeant. Since 66—percent biones come under the purview of the robotic code, I must conclude that this man acted appropriately. The rebuilding of Sergeant Alpha will doubtless reveal the cause of the malfunction.”
“The sergeant is covered by the robotic code, then?” Derek questioned the judge advocate.
“He is.” Derek heard a relay click in the man’s body as he spoke.
“May I ask, sir, your own bionic percentage?”
“Seventy-two percent,” the judge advocate answered Derek, and there was another click, this time clearly from the thorax area.
“And yours?” he asked the silent psychonomist.
“Eighty-nine,” the very deep voice replied, and it was obvious that the man had had a laryngeal implant. God, I’m talking to another bunch of machines, Derek thought. He looked at the faces of the two majors and felt disdain for them. Then a sliver of mechanomorphic empathy stirred in him.
“Dismissed,” the 12—percent bionic commandant barked.
Derek Carlson, Plebe I, Eastern Continental Gladiatorial Service, was discharged on Christmas Eve of the year 2800. The discharge cube read that he was constitutionally unsuited for gladiator training. It was later revealed that the bionic drill instructor, Sergeant Alpha 430, had been abused as a fledgling bione, and that his programming had not extirpated his residual hostility against humans. It was further determined that Sergeant Alpha had been, in effect, abusing himself with nonstandard, hedonistically reinforcing recharging regimens. He had become hooked on his own nuclear-pak rechargers, and, over the years, this had come to dilute the inhibitory mechanisms of his cortical matri
ces. He was indeed a machine gone bad, his cognition scornful of his ersatz personality and identity; and deep in his bionic matrices, a kind of primitive-instinctual death wish had developed—a computerized Thanatos drive. Sergeant Alpha’s computer-repressed destiny had been to die as a biohuman kamikaze bomb. He fantasized being in single combat with large numbers of enemy, and to die as a hero atomized by a thoracic nuclear device. Now his George Patton personatype was being carefully replaced by an Eisenhower, and the plans were to make him a captain at the war college.
After this incident the gladiator service promptly switched its major bione contracts from IBM Akai to AT&T Mitsubishi. The Bionics Guild filed a class action suit against the gladiator service, and in a central Georgia pasture, the ancient KKK burned an archetypal robot effigy. In the Vatican exile island of Scorpio, the 27—percent bionic pope was summoned by the College of Cardinals for a review of his infallibility parameters, and there was a brief backlash of commuters teasing robot policemen on the major traffic quay of Chicago City.
Aboard the Amtrak terrafoil van back to Old Orleans, Derek looked up into the multifaceted visual agates of the 92—percent bionic conductor and demanded the full itinerary of the route-manifest. Later he ventured a gluteal pat on the 78—percent bionic stewardess, who flashed a coy smile at him, warned him of her stunbolt implant, and then introduced him to an 87—percent copulatress. While the terrafoil shot over the mountains and valleys of the Tennessee Territory, the copulatress fitted Derek with a pubococcygeal probe, and performed a panaperture sexual regimen on him that yielded his orgasm at centile 99. The barter-unit price was high, and the girl kept breathing, “To the victor belongs the spoils.” For a few pinacular seconds, Derek felt oceanically penile, and decidedly nonvestibular.
Future on Fire Page 36
