The Credulity Nexus

by Graham Storrs

  Rik took a step forward and held up his hands. He raised his voice, speaking to Clermont. “Wait a minute. Everybody just calm down. I'm coming peacefully.” Over his shoulder he said, “Sorry, Rivers, I'm not about to start a bloodbath in here.”

  “Yeah?” she said, swinging her Uzi automatic his way. “Well, if I can't have you, honey, nobody can.”

  Rik gaped in horror as the gun lined up on him. So fast! There wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. But, of course, she would have had orders to kill him if there was ever a chance he'd fall into Cordell's hands. If only he'd thought any of this through before he'd come chasing after Maria.

  He felt strong hands gripping his arms. Amazingly strong hands. But nothing could save him now. The muzzle of the Uzi was almost pointing right at him. Rivers' crazy eyes were fixed and still, pointing at his heart, a heart that had one, maybe two beats left before it was torn to shreds.

  Rivers disappeared from view as her gun erupted in a roaring, screaming torrent of bullets. Rik heard it. Then he realised he was hearing it. Alive. Listening to the shots that should have killed him.

  The white-suited women were standing in front of him, slender bodies pressed close. Their long, muscular backs were just a hand-span in front of his face. They'd dragged him back, taken the shots themselves! What the...?

  “Fuck!” He heard Rivers' cry of rage and frustration. Then he saw her leap above the heads of his two saviours. Straight up, like a goddamned rocket, straight into the ceiling and through it into the crawlspace. Like a super-powered lizard, she slithered out of sight and away, gone in a moment.

  Rik was open-mouthed and breathless. The two women stayed where they were as several more shots were fired. Then they stepped aside to reveal Rivers' two hired goons lying dead on the floor.

  He looked around. Clermont had broken into a sweat, but was looking relieved. Around him, several of Clermont's people held smoking guns. Some of them were watching the hole in the ceiling, eager for a shot. Beyond them, the restaurant's regular customers cowered under tables, clutching at one another, wide-eyed with shock.

  The two women in white turned to face Rik. Each of their catsuits was punctured in a dozen places, revealing churned up grey discs where Rivers' bullets had hit them.

  “Uploads!” Rik could hardly believe it. They seemed so completely human. The two women regarded him steadily, but said nothing.

  “Not uploads,” said Clermont, getting his composure back. “The boss would never allow that! These babies are genuine, one hundred percent, state of the fucking art robots. I kid you not.” The man's relief at being alive was pathetically obvious. He was almost laughing with the unexpected pleasure of having survived. “Best damn bodyguards I've ever seen! What do you say to that, Drew? And easy on the eye, too, right?”

  The two robots, with every appearance of being beautiful, real women – women aware that every eye in the room was on them – sashayed around Rik and stalked back to stand behind Clermont.

  Rik shook his head in wonder. Who'd have guessed ‘state of the art’ had progressed so far? “I'll tell you what I say,” he said. “I say, you can take me to your leader.” He took a step towards the little man, so that he towered over him. “But if I don't find Maria waiting for me when I get there, he's going to need more than a few overgrown Barbie dolls to stop me using his head for a baseball.”

  Chapter 25

  Sitting in a space elevator for more than twelve hours, however spectacular the views were, had Maria ready to gnaw through the tough plastic of her in-flight magazine reader. The merry company of her indefatigable travelling companion, Kirsty Winters, was also starting to pall. In fact, Maria was beginning to think that if the old dear came out with one more cheerful platitude, she would throw herself out of the airlock.

  So the crashing and grinding of the gondola as it thudded into its cradle at the end of the ride – however alarming – was blessed relief. Maria threw off the blanket she'd been pretending to sleep under and started gathering her things.

  Although the gondola had been climbing the tether at a more-or-less constant three hundred kilometres an hour, its rotational speed around the Earth had been increasing steadily the higher it went, rising from about seventeen hundred kilometres an hour at sea level, to eleven thousand kilometres an hour at the orbital platform.

  It was this slow acceleration to orbital velocity, far more than their position, thirty-six hundred kilometres above the Earth, which had gradually left them weightless. The handrails and the elasticated pouches on the walls and seat backs had seemed odd at first, but by the end of the journey, Maria understood the need to keep every last little thing tied, glued or nailed to a fixed surface. The stewards did their best to keep down the amount of junk floating around, but it was a losing battle. At any moment an empty peanut bag or a child's shoe could come drifting by to tap you on the forehead as you tried to sleep.

  A smiling young man in a company waistcoat helped guide her through the exit. “I don't know how you survive this job,” she told him.

  “Oh,” he said with a wink, “it has its ups and downs.”

  She crossed the concourse and found the gate for the next leg of her journey, a three hundred thousand kilometre slog from the Florida Spacebridge platform to the Moon's own geosynchronous spacebridge station. She was surprised to find herself, and everyone else, being channelled through a series of clear plastic corridors, but then she imagined the chaos that would ensue if they let scores of people as inexperienced as herself careen about, weightless, in a large, open space.

  To Maria's eyes, the Moon shuttle looked like something the first colonists might have used. Modern, saucer-shaped craft were parked around the space dock, and Maria eyed the long tube of the old shuttle with dismay. Inside, the seats were arranged in rows pointing forward, like in an aeroplane. Maria had trouble finding her seat until a steward appeared and guided her down the aisle.

  “You should keep your cogplus turned on,” the steward said. His tone suggested she must be some kind of eccentric. “All the signage is virtual in here.”

  “Thanks. I'll manage.” At least, she hoped she would. She daren't turn her cogplus on, not even for a moment.

  “Don't you worry, dear.” The voice at her elbow was disappointingly familiar. “I'll be your eyes and ears.” It was the old lady again, Kirsty Winters.

  Maria put on a smile. “I didn't know you were on this flight.” Which was a lie, but she needed some way to explain why she'd hurried away from her talkative new friend when they left the gondola. “And sitting right next to me again, too.”

  “Oh, that's no coincidence. I got them to arrange a swap. I had to exaggerate a bit about how nervous you were of flying. Said you'd be a real pain in the ass without old Kirsty to hold your hand. Hope you don't mind.”

  Maria had been hoping for a break from the woman's endless chatter, but she didn't want to hurt her feelings.

  “How long will it take?” she asked. “From here to Heinlein?”

  “You really should turn your cogplus on, dear. Well, we don't go straight to Heinlein, of course. We dock at that new spacebridge terminal, Partway Station, first. Then there's another gondola ride down to Heinlein. You'll love the Heinlein spacebridge; everything's ultramodern and very fast. It's quite exciting.”

  “So, how long?”

  “Oh yes. A bit under a day to get to Partway Station, then maybe half a day to get down to Heinlein. The time will just fly, don't you worry.”

  Maria offered a sickly grin as thanks. Another day and a half! But at least she was safe out here.

  -oOo-

  They took Rik to a small private airstrip, and put him aboard a little twin-engined electro-prop. Clermont handed him over to a dour man in a dark suit who kept a small pain-ray pointed at Rik at all times. Rik had felt the effects of these microwave lasers before. They were tuned to penetrate the skin just enough to make it feel like your body was on fire, but without actually causing any physical damage.
Nasty, but Rik might have borne the pain and jumped the guy if not for the fact that Clermont's pair of robot super-models boarded the plane with him. He definitely didn't want to tangle with those two.

  The inside of the plane was as sumptuously appointed as any private plane, with deep leather seats, deep pile carpets and padded walls. They settled into a group of four widely-spaced seats, with the robots serving pre-flight drinks from a little galley at one end. After a few minutes, the robots did a cabin check and the plane taxied and took off.

  “Where are we going?” Rik asked. The plane had flown out to sea and then turned south, as far as he could tell. “Who are we going to meet? Is my ex-wife at the other end?”

  The dark-suited man didn't seem in a talkative mood. All Rik got were snarls and threats each time he asked a question.

  Giving up, he called across to the two robots, “So, tell me about yourselves, ladies.”

  When they were not doing chores, they both watched him with a fixed intensity. Even when they worked, one always had its eyes on him. Their expressions did not change at all upon being addressed. He picked one at random and asked it his questions.

  “Can you speak?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The guy in the black suit looked startled. Maybe the man had never heard them speak before.

  The robot's voice was feminine and rich, its lips and throat moving in perfect simulation of a person's. The tone lacked emotional colour, however. Like other computer-simulated voices, it wasn't quite right. Close, yet a million miles away. He had never thought this about Veb and Rivers when they spoke, even though their bodies were technically similar to the ones opposite him. Perhaps it took a human mind to make a robot sound human.

  “You're the same kind of robot as the uploads use, right? Reprogrammable nanites top to toe?” Rik was only guessing. The cosmetic finish on these two beauties was far beyond anything he'd seen on an upload.

  “Correct. My brain is entirely synthetic, however.”

  “So what's your function? Bodyguard? Sex toy? What justifies all the money you must have cost?”

  “I am a multi-function entity, as you are. I do whatever is asked of me.”

  Rik grinned. “Really? Then kill this guy and help me take over the plane.”

  “Hey!” Mr Dour brandished his pain-ray, looking nervously from Rik to the robot.

  The robot looked at Rik's guard as if it were actually thinking about obeying. Then it looked back at Rik. “I'm sorry, that command conflicts with my orders to ensure that you remain in custody.”

  Rik shrugged. “Worth a try, I suppose. How about fetching me a beer, is that OK?”

  The robot nodded, and with motions as fluid as a cat's, it got to its feet and headed for the galley.

  “You've got a damned cheek,” Mr Dour grumbled. He levelled his pain ray at Rik's chest. “I've a good mind to–”

  Rik leant forward abruptly. He said, “You do, and I'll break your neck. That thing won't stop me.”

  The man looked nervous, frightened even. Rik supposed he was trying to decide if the robots would let Rik kill him. Maybe they'd just watch, as long as Rik was, technically, still in custody. It was a nice thought. It cheered Rik up. But it seemed to sit uneasily on his guard's stomach, judging by the sour look on the man's face. Still keeping the gun trained on Rik, he retreated into his seat.

  The robot returned with Rik's drink and handed it to him. It smiled in an alarmingly human way before returning to its seat, and its vigil.

  -oOo-

  Fariba Freymann was also having trouble with robots. She'd been locked in that anonymous room for two days. No-one came to see her. No-one answered when she yelled. No-one stopped her when she smashed the place up.

  Despite staring out of her window for hours on end, she had seen no movement in the gardens or the desert beyond. Her only visitor had been a small domestic robot. It was the kind they used in good hotels the world over: small, multi-limbed, capable of cleaning, making beds, delivering meals and very little else.

  It entered and left through its own little door, a hatch cut into the main door of her room. She'd tried talking to the bot. She'd tried smashing it with a broken-off chair leg. She'd knocked it over and wrapped it up in sheets. It simply ignored her, patiently cut its way through the sheets, righted itself, tidied up the mess she'd made and left again.

  Its little hatch zipped open so fast, she couldn't find a way through before the robot filled the gap. Then it zipped shut before the robot moved on.

  She tried writing “Help me!” messages on its stubby metal torso using lipstick, but they just got cleaned off before it came back. So she wrote “Up yours!” on it and didn't bother any more.

  Now, however, she had another plan for the irksome little machine. But first, she had to catch it.

  The viewscreen set into the wall showed six-fifteen pm. She could hear the robot in the hall approaching with her evening meal. The little hatch slid open, and she watched the bot as it came in. It had to fold its limbs and telescope its head down into its body to get through the narrow gap. She had to admire the ingenuity of its design, but felt it was a big flaw that the bot was too dumb to worry about what she might do to it.

  It delivered her meal to the dining table and scurried about, tidying up the place. When it was finished, it headed to the hatch to leave. By then, Freymann had pushed a chest of drawers across the doorway, and the machine was trapped.

  It stopped, scuttled to the left, scuttled to the right, then returned to where it started and stopped again. It stood there facing the hatch, a small light on its head blinking as if to assure anyone watching that it was still thinking. It reached out a pair of manipulators and seized the chest of drawers. For a few seconds it tugged and pushed and did a little twisting and straining, but the heavy piece of furniture did not move.

  While it worked on its problem, Freymann studied the machine from behind. By the time the robot had worked out that it needed to remove all the drawers to lighten the obstacle enough to shift it, Freymann had found what she was looking for: a small plate near its base with the words “maintenance access only” written on it.

  There were six drawers. By the time it had removed four of them, Freymann had unscrewed the plate with a steak knife. Before it shifted the fifth, she’d looked inside, found the off-switch and shut the busy little machine down.

  With a heavy sigh of relief, she sat down with discarded drawers all around her and leant against the dormant robot. Now for the hard part. Somewhere in that stumpy little body was a circuit with a radio transmitter and receiver in it. Somewhere else, she would find a battery. With those two objects, and a few bits and pieces pulled from its innards, she could make herself a device to broadcast an SOS. If she could send it out loudly enough and on a wide enough spectrum, maybe, just maybe, someone would hear it and come and take a look.

  What the heck, she thought, getting up and trying to prise off the robot's head. She had nothing else to do.

  Chapter 26

  Partway Station was a technical marvel. In geosynchronous orbit above Heinlein, the Solar System's longest tethers ran fifty-four thousand kilometres down to the city. They also ran up beyond Partway, to where a second orbiting platform had been built: Alltheway Station. The size of a small town, Alltheway – being beyond the geosynchronous orbit – felt a centripetal force equivalent to one-sixth G. Heinlein and Alltheway would hang in each others' skies, with Partway a bright star between them.

  Maria hung from a conveyor that gently pulled her along towards the gondola terminal. She was glad she didn't have to find her own way. Partway was enormous, and the sights that surrounded her were overwhelming. Not just the magnificent face of the gibbous Moon, seven times its usual size; not just the complex geometry of the gigantic space station she was travelling through; but the strange, bizarrely-modified, inhuman-looking people all around her.

  She'd seen extreme genemods and biopatches on vids, of course. Sometimes she even saw so
mebody in real life – one of those creepy kids with a third eye, say, or a war veteran with an oversized mechanical arm – but she had never seen anything like this! Everywhere she looked there were people – usually men, but not always – with mechanical body parts. There was one with huge metal clamps instead of feet. Outside of the zero-G environment of Partway, Maria couldn't imagine how he would be able to get around. One man had a whole range of tools on spindly arms emerging from his back, so many of them that they fanned out on either side of him like skeletal wings. People had faces replaced by complex sensor arrays; others had their limbs replaced by tools – some so massive they dwarfed their torso. A silver cylinder passed her, flying under its own propulsion. It was about a metre tall by a metre in diameter, and on top was a human head under a plastic dome.

  “You see all sorts here, dear,” Kirsty said from behind her. Like it or not, she was stuck with the old woman all the way to the ground now. “Every time I come, they get a bit weirder.”

  “Has your son...?”

  “Ha! Over my dead body! If I ever see as much as a bolt through his neck, I'm marching him off to the nearest doctor to have it removed. Besides, these people mostly work out on the tethers, building the structures. My boy's got a nice, safe office job. Look, did you ever see one of those before?”

  She pointed to a pair of uploads, chatting together on a row of strap hangers in a departure lounge. Maria studied them as she glided past. Compared to most of the somamods she'd seen, the uploads looked nearly human, except their bald, naked nanite bodies made them look like giant plastic toys. One was much larger than the other – maybe twice as large as a big man – and they were different colours, but otherwise they seemed normal.

  “No, I've never seen one,” Maria said. “Most people I know don't really approve...” It seemed foolish to say it, seeing uploads just hanging about like ordinary people, but the very existence of zombies and ghosts made otherwise quite rational people start ranting and raving about them and saying it shouldn't be allowed. People who didn't have enough money to have it done, that is. Rich people tended to have a more tolerant attitude.