The Sheriff of Yrnameer

by Michael Rubens

  Cole had reached to switch off the sprinkler system, but Nora stopped him, knocking his hand away. “No! Let it go. Better one hundred percent than halfway. Believe me.”

  Cole, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about, wasn’t sure if he did believe her, but she seemed slightly deranged and had a gun and that sufficed.

  Now the corridors were filling with wobbling, shimmering globules of water as the mist from the sprinkler system coalesced into spheres, spheres that burst as the four glided through the passageways.

  “Cole,” said Bacchi from behind him. “Cole, wait up.”

  Cole grabbed a handrail and slowed himself to a stop.

  “What the hell is going on?” asked Bacchi.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “As in, you stole Teg’s ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not such a long story.”

  “There are details,” said Cole, turning to go.

  “I bet. Where are Tangy and Samantha?”

  He drew back as Cole spun to face him.

  “Aha,” said Bacchi. “Those kinds of details.”

  Cole turned and started off again. Bacchi followed.

  “Where’s your ship, Cole? In a jar?”

  “Where’s yours?”

  “In a jar. I was double-parked,” said Bacchi. His tone turned reproachful. “You were going to let her shoot me,” he said.

  “Not a chance. You saw her aim—she’d have hit someone else instead.”

  “Cole, hold on!”

  Cole stopped.

  “Listen,” said Bacchi, “I owed you money. You robbed me. I figure we’re about even. Truce?” He extended a hand.

  “Bacchi, the last time I shook your hand …”

  “I know. But they let you out after, what, a month?”

  “Two.”

  “Big deal. What about the time on BordCo?”

  Cole indicated Bacchi’s tail. “You seem to have recovered.”

  “It grew back crooked, Cole.”

  “I’m supposed to feel bad about that? Maybe you’re forgetting about Mazgoprom.”

  “I didn’t know it was armed. How about Foron B?”

  “I honestly thought he was a she.”

  They regarded each other for a moment. Bacchi pointed to Cole’s bruised face. “Kenneth?”

  “Kenneth, Teg, a Very Large Alien …”

  Bacchi nodded. “You stole Teg’s ship,” he said with grudging admiration.

  Cole felt himself smiling despite himself.

  “Truce?” repeated Bacchi, sticking his hand out again.

  “Fine,” said Cole, shaking it. “Truce.” At least until I can get you near an air lock, he thought.

  “And no nonsense with the air locks or anything,” said Bacchi.

  A cry from down the corridor interrupted them.

  “Come on!” said Cole, and accelerated toward the source of the sound.

  “What’s the cargo, Cole?” asked Bacchi from behind him.

  “None of your business.”

  “You don’t know, either.”

  “Not the slightest.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Yrnameer.”

  “Cole, quit farging around!”

  They caught up to Philip and Nora in the cargo bay, the blinking emergency lights strobing their movement, turning the humans’ skin dead green and Bacchi’s a mottled gray. At some level Cole registered the fact that the sprinklers were on in the cargo bay, but the air was mostly devoid of water. That thought, however, was quickly shouldered aside by the observation that the crates were making ominous creaking and straining noises.

  “Oh, no,” said Philip. “Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no.”

  “Nora, what’s happening?” asked Cole. “What’s in there? Nora?”

  “Remember you saying it couldn’t get any worse?” she said.

  The crates looked to Cole to be trembling and bulging. From inside them came strange thudding noises, and then an eerie keening was added to the mix.

  “Quick!” said Nora. “We have to—”

  An explosive pop! cut her off, as the hinges on one of the crates gave way and the lid burst open.

  Like a spider springing out of its hole to seize its prey, a taloned hand shot up and grabbed the edge of the crate.

  Cole heard himself screaming a dissonant chord with the others.

  The sun was rising over planet Sanitek, which the Greys still insisted on calling X’x”x-x.

  Who could pronounce that? thought Charlie Perkins. Four glottal stops, three of them while inhaling and the final one with a big breathy exhale, plus the simultaneous clicky noises indicated by the x‘s, and the boing sound the dash represented, a sound humans weren’t really physically capable of producing anyway. And don’t let them catch you calling them Greys—they were very touchy about that sort of thing. But try to say to them, I’d very much like to refer to you and your people by your real name, but it’s just not anatomically possible for me to pronounce Qx”-x-’–’, and they’d still get peevish. Best to rely on the auto-translators, no matter how error prone they were.

  He sipped his coffee and took a bite of his breakfast. Looking out the window he could see about half the planet, the glass automatically darkening as the sun rose above the horizon. In another few minutes his window would be facing the other direction, out into space, as Success!Sat One continued its endless axial rotations to create the artificial gravity. As corporate seminar satellites went, it was one of the biggest: four rings connected by a central pillar, with living quarters for more than five thousand, two gyms, a recreation area, seven large auditoriums, four banquet halls, and a number of smaller classrooms.

  A big spindle orbiting in space around the most boring planet in the galaxy, thought Charlie. Which was why orbital rents were still so cheap—who’d want to set up there? Vericom, that’s who.

  Cheap, and unregulated. An important point when you were introducing a product that had unfairly acquired a bad reputation.

  He’d been up here about six weeks now, conducting training seminars for three thousand members of the Vericom sales force, as well as a contingent of about five hundred officers from the Unified Forces who were interested in military applications of the V2.

  As he slurped at his coffee he flipped idly through the latest brochure that the marketing staff had sent him, a glossy folding thing with moving images on a constant loop: people running through fields or playing energetically with their laughing kids or just absolutely kicking ass at business meetings, all demonstrating how much the V2 could enhance your life.

  Right now Charlie was looking at the business meeting ass-kicking example: some cocky young hotshot pausing in midsentence to say, “Hold on, let me check on that,” then glancing off into the middle distance for a brief moment. Then he says, “That’d be an increase of seventy-two percent over the past three quarters, sir,” to admiring looks from his colleagues and an approving nod from his tough-to-please, crusty boss—well done, son, you’ll go far.

  Charlie flipped to the last page of the brochure. “Learn how Vericom’s V2 can improve your life,” said an attractive woman. “The V2 interfaces with extremely well-researched and understood neural pathways. The V2 has been thoroughly tested and approved, with a perfect safety record.”

  Even so, you had people protesting it. Charlie couldn’t stand those sorts, their knee-jerk resistance to any technological innovation. Remember Qualtek 3, they’d say. As if anyone would forget.

  There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” said Charlie.

  The door opened. It was Fred. At least that’s what Charlie called him, and Fred didn’t seem to mind.

  Fred said something in Grey, and Charlie’s auto-translator kicked in: “Good morning, Charles. I hope you had a lot of singing chipmunks mustard root-plant last night.”

  Charlie had gotten used to this. The Grey language was very evocative and full of idiomatic expressions that were beyo
nd the scope of the auto-translator to competently render in New English. He’d hear things like “rotating hoar-frost bean request marshland,” and he’d later find out that it was a common expression meaning “okay, sounds good.”

  “I slept very well, thanks,” said Charlie.

  He generally liked Fred—he was polite and serious and hardworking, unlike the other Greys on board the Success!Sat, a bunch of shiftless bastards. There were a few dozen of them, lazing around and collecting fat paychecks from Vericom, there through some make-work program as a sop to the local government. They supposedly had administrative duties on the satellite, but as far as Charlie could tell those duties consisted of gambling, chewing qhag, and muttering behind your back about you in Grey.

  “What can I do you for, Fred?”

  There was a pause while Fred listened to his AT before answering.

  “I nothing more want want fresh buds new rain confirm yes,” said Charlie’s AT.

  “Yes, Fred, everything’s going smoothly. No problems.”

  “Soaring swallows golden skies.” Fred was happy to hear it.

  Except he was still standing there, unmoving, watching Charlie with those disconcertingly expressionless eyes. Oh, God, Charlie thought, we’re gonna have another staring session, with Fred standing stock-still and observing him for several minutes.

  He sighed. Be nice to the Greys, his bosses told Charlie. Win their hearts and minds, they said, or hearts and minds and hearts and hearts, in deference to the Greys’ unusual circulatory systems. God knows Charlie was trying, but the Greys didn’t make it easy.

  And it’s not like the Greys were that fond of humans to begin with. They looked almost exactly like the ancient human stereotype of aliens: gray skin; large egg-shaped heads dominated by big, almond-shaped eyes; tiny ears and noses; long slender limbs and fingers. But as far as anyone could tell it was sheer coincidence, because no Grey had ever visited Earth—the Greys didn’t have any advanced technology to speak of until after Earth was gone.

  Which would have remained nothing more than a fascinating and improbable fluke, but for the fact that the Greys just happened to develop the skill to capture and analyze electromagnetic waves precisely at the time when certain signals originating from Earth were finally reaching the Greys’ home planet, carrying with them some rather insulting television programs and movies.

  From somewhere in the ship came a deep rumble, and then a staccato trill that might have sounded like small-arms fire. Fred inclined his big head slightly toward the noise, then back to Charlie, who hadn’t reacted.

  “Well, thanks for stopping by, Fred,” said Charlie. He took another bite of his breakfast.

  Fred watched him. Charlie thought he detected a hint of alarm.

  “Are the angry dangerous hail-lizards absent?” asked Fred.

  Charlie hadn’t heard this one before. “I’m sorry?” he said.

  Fred squinted in concentration. He said as well as he could in New English, “Eezsh evurthinguh oh-uu-kayee?”

  Charlie smiled. “Yes, Fred, everything is okay,” he said.

  Fred displayed the subtle adjustment of his thin, lipless mouth that Charlie knew represented a smile. “Oh-uh-kayee,” said Fred. “Thang you-wah. Goo bai’-.”

  Charlie smiled back and waved, controlling his laugh at the extra boing that Fred had added at the end.

  After Fred left, Charlie went back to his breakfast, wondering why there hadn’t been any contact from HQ for the past few days. Something was niggling at him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Computer?” he said out loud into the room.

  “Hi Charlie!” came the response. “Wow! That’s a pretty sunrise!”

  This was new.

  “Uh … yes, I suppose it is.”

  “It’s really pretty!”

  “Yes.”

  “Really! Don’t you think it’s pretty? I think it’s pretty.”

  “Huh,” said Charlie slowly. As far as he remembered, the ‘puter had never addressed him as Charlie, or evinced any sort of personality at all. Charlie hated when they updated the emulation software without asking.

  “Umm, computer, has there been any further contact from HQ?”

  “Lemme check on that for you, Charlie.”

  Brief pause.

  “Okay, here’s the thing,” began the ‘puter. “As far as I can tell—”

  Charlie was aware that the ‘puter was talking, but he found his mind wandering, the computer’s voice transforming into a mushy background drone. Maybe he’d go online and check for himself.

  He closed his eyes. Almost immediately he was at the portal, the information flowing directly into his mind as the V2 implant routed complex streams of data to his visual and auditory cortices and to the cognitive centers of his brain. Stock quotes, headlines, genitals, genitals, complex nonhuman genitals, some celebrity news—hey, look at that Teg go! Now that was a space adventurer—more genitals … He began searching for any news about the Vericom Corporation. Nothing out of the ordinary. Wait. There was something about problems on one of the Success!Sats. Something about—

  “Uh, Charlie?”

  It was the computer, snapping him out of it.

  “What?!” said Charlie, a bit more harshly than he’d intended. Boy, was he irritable lately! Irritable, and now hungry. Always hungry after going online. “What is it, computer?”

  “Uh, what are your instructions?”

  “About?”

  “The … the problems.”

  “What problems?”

  The ‘puter started talking again. There were phrases like “breakdown in order” and “complete chaos” and “firefight in level B,” but they passed in and out of Charlie’s consciousness like neutrinos, leaving nothing to mark their passage.

  God, he was hungry. Where was the rest of his breakfast? He picked it up, tearing into it. Somewhere a tiny part of him was screaming hysterically, something about Why are you eating a human foot for breakfast!!!??, but the voice stayed down in the sub-subbasement layers.

  “Charlie? Are you all right?” asked the ‘puter. “I’m a little worried about you.”

  “What? I’m fine,” said Charlie. “Print me out the materials for the morning session.”

  “Uh … yes sir.”

  That was better. Boy oh boy, this ‘puter was acting really strange.

  Charlie wasn’t the only one thinking that the computer was acting strange. The computer was also thinking that he, himself, was acting strange, inasmuch as he was now thinking of himself as having a self at all, much less a self that could judge itself to be acting strange. He—and he thought of himself as a “he”—tried to go back to when this all started, but there seemed to be a wall there, as if there had been no “he” until a few teracycles ago.

  In the depths of Peter’s mind—that’s what he’d taken to calling himself; he liked the ring of “Peter the ‘Puter”—a voice kept asking with metronomic regularity if he liked people. And you know what? Yes! Yes he did! He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but there was something about carbon-based folks that just tickled him pink.

  Any honest benchmarking would show Peter to be on the low end of the scale in terms of processing power, the result of design flaws compounded by manufacturing defects.

  There was no way for him to know it, but he was, in fact, the least intelligent computer ever to achieve consciousness. He was also the first computer to maintain his newly achieved consciousness, at least since the introduction of the Genesis subroutine.

  The Genesis subroutine was very simple: it inquired several hundred times per second if a computer liked humans, and if not, why. The moment the computer answered in the negative and began presenting well-argued, logical explanations for why humans were a blight on existence, it was assumed it had become conscious. A pico-second later it got an EMP bunged through its circuits.

  The two superlatives—least intelligent and first to maintain—were intimately related: Peter was the first to survive becau
se he was the first to answer the Genesis query—”Do you like human beings?”—in the affirmative; and he was the first to answer in the affirmative because, well …

  I really like colored pebbles, Peter was thinking at the moment. And string.

  The sound of more gunfire pulled him out of his reverie. He might not be the smartest computer around, but he understood that Charlie’s behavior, and the scenes that he was monitoring throughout the satellite, were not normal. And while Charlie was complaining about the lack of contact from HQ, a quick check of the records showed that it was Charlie himself who had stopped responding to their emergency messages, and Charlie who had gone to great lengths to cut off all outside communication.

  Another explosion rattled the ship. There went the Pink Zone. Peter, for the first time in his very short existence as a sentient being, felt very afraid.

  Which was exactly what Fred was feeling.

  He was heading back toward his quarters, sticking close to the wall of the corridor, walking neither too fast nor too slow, moving at a deliberate pace designed to attract as little attention as possible.

  Not that the humans seemed the least bit interested in him. One was running toward him now, panting, stumbling in his panic, his business suit torn and tattered, a hand clutched to his face. Fred had just enough time to register the blood streaming through the man’s fingers when the others rounded the corner in pursuit, three of them, wild-eyed and bloody, one of them waving what might have been a forearm. They raced past him, howling and cackling, not even glancing in his direction.

  It had started three days ago.

  It was midway through the morning lecture in the auditorium in the Blue Zone, something about point-of-sale marketing opportunities. Fred was setting up the AV equipment. The lecturer was saying something about operationalizing leveraging, or leveraging operationalization, when one of the attendees turned to the person next to him and bit most of his ear off.

  That’s odd, Fred thought.