But one thing I was sure of. Whatever remained of Kit in Jarl’s brain would not side with Jarl to lead me into a trap. In fact, they both had seemed to collaborate before to keep me out of trouble.
And while I still didn’t trust Jarl, and I very much would like to know what was going on with these things, I would take Kit’s word for it that he meant what he said, and that I should get out of here. Or at least that was the best of the guesses made by my husband from what he gleaned from Jarl.
“All right,” I said. “Fine. We’ll go towards the door. But then you’re going to explain everything to me.”
“Yes,” he said, in a strangled voice. “Everything.”
We turned as one and cleared a space of ground to the side of us. Then we stepped into it. Then again. Electronic spiders rushed to take in that space, then again, but we managed to move, slowly towards the door.
And then suddenly Jarl screamed, “Stop!” I turned to look the way he was—towards the door.
In front of the door there were yet more spiders, but these were human-sized, and though Jarl immediately aimed at them and burned—as did I, though I wasn’t aware of deciding to do it—all it did was make their carapaces glow. It didn’t make them stop. There were a lot of them, and they were rushing at us.
“Stop firing,” I said, scared half to death but preferring to sound angry. “If you make them all hot, all it will do is make them burn us when they touch us.” And that’s when I realized the things would touch us, and my mouth went very dry and my throat tried to close.
They were large and rounded, covered in some sort of circuits that I guessed ended in sensors, which means they’d have eyes or ears or equivalents. Six of their legs advanced relentlessly, seemingly not caring that they were crunching their smaller congeners under foot. And their two front legs had pincers and other instruments I didn’t understand.
As the front four or so advanced, I realized there were more behind, dozens of them.
“Thena!” Jarl screamed, and his voice seemed to echo both Kit and Jarl’s tones. He burned behind him, towards the wall, and advanced into that spot. I followed him, not because I thought we could escape the electronic things advancing on us, but because I wanted to keep my back pressed against him, to feel human warmth a little longer.
I’m not afraid of insects. Or rather, I’m not afraid of non-poisonous insects. I lived long enough in broomers lairs, where no one is responsible for cleaning, that ants and fliers and spiders don’t bother me as much as they would your average patrician. I kill poisonous insects, but that’s something else.
But these weren’t insects. They might have some biological component—I didn’t know, most of Eden’s machines did, and these had been designed by Jarl who had been the seminal force in Eden science—but I didn’t care about that. They were still machines.
Seeing them advance, I understood the unreasoning fear that many humans have for machines. Not that I’d ever had it. I’m a Nav by trade, which means I have an innate ability with machines. I understand them, and most of them are a lot less troublesome than human beings. Machines have made human life better. Kit says that machines are what allowed humanity to dispense with the age-old evil that was slavery. I believe him. He read a lot more history than I ever did.
So I never feared machines. But these machines were different. What had they been built for, and what did they want with us? What did they think they could achieve? Could they think? What were they designed to do?
In the face of creatures like that, human warmth was a comforting thing, even if the warmth came from my husband’s body, which had been taken over by a crazed old genius.
I burned the ground in front of them, even as Jarl burned to the other side—kind enough to clear a space for my feet also—and we retreated into it. Again and again, he burned and we stepped that way. Again and again towards the wall, as the things advanced. I made the ceramite floor glow in front of them, causing the smaller creatures to flame out and become so many piles of charred components.
The giant mechanical spiders didn’t care. They kept on coming.
And coming.
As they surrounded us on all sides, save for our backs which were tight against the wall, I felt the smaller spiders climb from the wall into my skull. “What the hell are these things, Jarl? What do they want?”
“They’re peripherals,” he said. “They were supposed to defend the central computer in this place.”
“What? Why?”
I swear he said “Because it was me,” before the world went black.
SPARE PARTS
I woke up in the dark, and I was cold and naked.
My bare bottom was pressed against a flat, dusty surface; my arm had been bent at an odd angle under me, my face was pressed against a hard, cold, vertical surface. And I felt fuzzy-headed and somewhat less than awake. My head hurt. So did my body, at various points, as though I’d been dragged, naked, along a floor. And as though pincerlike claws had tightened hard somewhere near my wrists.
They’d given me some drug.
From somewhere in the direction of my feet came a groan that sounded like the type of sound men make when they’ve drunk too much and are about to throw up.
Thena? Kit’s voice, like a distant murmur.
Here, I said. Where are we? What have they done to us?
I don’t know, Kit said. Something like an implied chuckle. When he’s unconscious, I can’t see or hear.
What did he mean by saying “it was me”? I asked.
Kit said, He thinks of the computer as himself, which…is weird. I can’t explain it, you’ll have to ask him.
The groan came again, low and forlorn, and I thought: Right.
I did not like this situation. I was alone with a man who didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t view him as my husband, and whose concept of “no” was fuzzy. I was naked. I was fairly sure they’d given me some drug or done something to me that made me still not fully awake or capable of reasoning. And though I had not the slightest idea where I might be, I was fairly sure that I was somewhere within reach and patrol of truly strange electronic “insects.” And those were under control of a computer that Jarl said was him…Right.
I didn’t have to like the situation. Sometimes, reality must be accepted for what it is. There is no point wiggling and trying to pretend it is something it isn’t. People and civilizations who do that usually go under and die while still gallantly clinging to their beautiful illusions.
In the end there are only two types of people: those who survive and those who don’t. And I intended to survive.
I forced myself to sit up against the protest of my abraded skin and bruised limbs. A quick inventory showed me that I had no broken bones and the arm hurt only because I’d been thrown into a heap, while unconscious, by things that didn’t understand the human body at all. It screamed in pin-prick pains as circulation returned, but it would be fine eventually.
I massaged it slowly, while taking another type of inventory. As far as I could feel, I was disarmed. My burners had been taken from me, even those that were in places where I normally kept them while naked.
This alarmed me more than anything else, because as far my body mass goes I’m a thoroughly non impressive human being. Oh, because of the way I was designed, I’m somewhat stronger than most humans the same size. But in the end without a burner, anyone could take me and hold me hostage—if they had a burner and me without one.
It was like thinking of disarmament efforts of the twenty-first century and before, where people actually believed that groups or individuals would give up on armament that was technologically possible in the name of high mindedness or something. Never happens.
When there’s the possibility that a hostile—or whatever you consider a hostile—will get hold of a weapon to use against you, your best bet is to have that weapon or a bigger one in reserve. Counting on other people to be nice to you because you’re disarmed and patently peaceful is one o
f those mistakes that individuals and civilizations only make once. It is a characteristic of the dead that they can no longer make mistakes.
So I liked being disarmed as much as I liked being naked. Which of course, were two problems of the same sort. I lacked protection. Fortunately, I still had me.
I blinked, as my eyes became used to the surroundings. There was a little light starting to filter in, and I identified its source—a window high up to my left—covered in something translucent and green. I’d guess glass obscured by either foliage or a film of green scum.
The light was visibly increasing by the moment, which probably meant that it was morning and the sun was coming up. Which meant more than twelve hours had passed since the fight. Yes, they had to have drugged us. There was no possible way hitting me on the head would make me sleep that long, or wake up this confused.
As more light filtered in, I could see the surroundings, not clearly, but well enough to tell where I was. It was a room, and the door was locked. The windows would be, I guessed, dimatough. And though this might, at one time, have been a resort, before Jarl bought it, and while I assumed the rooms had been minimally taken care of, we were not in something as sophisticated as a bedroom. No. This had all the hallmarks of a high-tech broom closet. It was us and some machinery that looked like robot cleaners—turtlelike vacuums and columnar waiter-robots—thrown together in various states of disarray. The machines were sideways and upside down, as though they’d been flung down, without the least care for their functionality.
Horror made my skin crawl as I realized that it was far, far worse than us being thrown into a broom closet. We were thrown in a broken-broom closet, one in which machinery and things were kept that were no longer used or needed.
I swallowed and looked at the softer heap that I knew was Jarl. Jarl was thrown against another wall, opposite me, also naked, and from the way he’d been flung, I’d have thought he was dead, except for Kit’s mental voice reaching me, and for Jarl’s occasional groans.
So, he was alive and not well.
I looked around the room again. Broken machinery that was no longer needed. Humans who had been stashed in here because they weren’t needed, or had to be kept out of the way.
The fact that we’d been thrown in with machines made me wonder whether the computer controlling the things that had captured us even understood that we were different—that we would need water and food, for instance. Or perhaps the electronic brain behind our troubles thought of us as spare machinery, which could be thrown aside and forgotten until it was needed to be repaired and used.
I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath of the air that felt musty and dusty. It didn’t matter, did it? Whatever the computer thought, whatever the computer was, it was, clearly, the key to our getting out of captivity. We were being held prisoner by a machine whose peripherals we couldn’t defeat, and which had locked us in a room, away from whatever its plans and interests were. That meant that where we needed to be was out of here. What we needed to do was turn off that computer.
Easier said than done, I know, but if you’re going to allow yourself to be defeated by overwhelming odds, you’ll…probably not survive, or not in any way you want.
First, to find out what the computer was. If I was very lucky, that would tell me what the computer had been programmed to do and how to defeat it.
Given that I’d have to beat the truth out of Jarl—possibly literally—and that my being naked already put me at a disadvantage with him, I needed a weapon.
I found it in the torn-off arm of one of the servo robots. Its severed-from-the-body end made a passable club; the other end made a passable stabbing tool.
I grabbed it and turned with it in my hand, ready to hit Jarl over the head and make him confess what kind of monster he’d created when he’d programmed this computer.
And felt immediately guilty. Jarl was pulling himself up to sitting, in the sort of movement people make when everything hurts.
He dragged his back up against the wall, and looked in my direction, as his eyes appeared to be trying to focus. Then his eyes widened. Thena! Kit’s mental voice said. Jarl just looked shocked.
I repressed an impulse to reassure Kit or comfort Jarl. No. If you’re too kind in this sort of situation, it just means you have to be harsher later.
“Talk,” I told Jarl. “Start by telling me what you mean by the computer being you.”
THE GALLERY OF FRACTURED MIRRORS
Jarl groaned again, that deep-body groan that speaks both of pain and nausea, and his hand went up to rub his forehead in a gesture that was too much like Kit’s for me not to recognize it. It was the gesture that meant “my head is killing me, give me a few hours alone in a quiet room.”
This time I couldn’t grant him either the quiet or the alone. So, I didn’t try to pretend. I just stood there, holding my improvised weapon. “Don’t stall,” I said. “We don’t have time. I think the computer doesn’t understand humans aren’t machines.”
He blinked at me, then cleared his throat. “I’m not stalling. I have no idea what you want to know.”
“I want to know why you said the computer was you.” I said. I didn’t add that Kit had lent credence to this idea. I wasn’t sure how aware he was of Kit, still within him, and I didn’t want him to become aware of Kit, if he wasn’t.
“Oh.” His fingers rubbed at his forehead again, and they must have dragged us over very dusty ground indeed, because even though he looked grimy, as did those parts of myself I could see, his fingers left yet darker marks on his forehead, like symbols of some forgotten religion. “That.”
“Yeah, that. How can the computer be you? I’ve heard of cyborgs but…” I was about to say that Jarl had clearly not canned himself in the computer’s machinery, when it occurred to me that I couldn’t put it past him to have created a replica of his brain and put it inside the computer, as a cyborg component. I mean, if he could see absolutely nothing wrong with reforming an embryo’s brain into his own, then why would he care if he created a replica of his own brain to can?
Cyborgs were one of those concepts the ancients had been fascinated with and which even worked, to an extent. To the extent that adding some biological components and brain cells to computers could make them faster and better. But those components didn’t need to be, and usually weren’t human in nature. I thought—or I’d been told—that our computers nowadays were almost complex enough to be on the level of mouse-brains. But here was the thing: taking the entire brain of any creature, including mice or birds, and canning it—encasing it in circuits and electronic components, which it controlled—didn’t create a supercomputer.
What it did was create insanity. A cyborg created from a whole brain was always insane, regardless of whether the brain had experience of being in a body at any time or not.
Of course, I had no reason to think we were dealing with something sane. And Jarl himself wasn’t sane. I suspected he’d started to fracture in his horrible childhood and had, since then, parted company with whatever remaining shreds of sanity he might have held onto.
The idea of his having an additional brain stashed within a machine, growing crazier and crazier through three hundred years out of contact with humans made the hair stand up at the back of my neck. My mouth tried to go dry again, but I wasn’t about to give it time, particularly since it was dry anyway—from lack of water and, at a guess, from dust.
“Not a cyborg,” he said. “Not…really. At least, it wasn’t when I made it.”
“Explain not really.”
Jarl blinked at me, in a myopic way which had to be related to headaches, since Kit’s eyes are excellent. Then I realized Jarl was squinting against growing light. Which meant he couldn’t have his lenses in. What kind of machine was so detailed as to remove his lenses? And why would they? Jarl hadn’t worn lenses. Kit did. But Kit was designed in a completely different way. What did the computer know about Kit?
“Well…” he said, “there
is no real brain in the machine.” He smiled a little, at what must have been my reaction. “How could you think I’d do that? Even back then, we knew that those didn’t work well in machines.”
Work well in machines. That was his criterion. Clearly the idea’s monstrous qualities meant nothing to him. I’d grown up hearing that the Mules, raised apart from humans, and created in a way that humans weren’t made, had been amoral. I believed they were amoral, but I thought it was how they were raised more than how they were made that caused them to have no moral sense. Kit and I were not amoral, though I sometimes managed to be immoral. I knew where good and evil were. If I crossed the lines, it was only when it was needed.
“Right, so what is this computer? I take it it’s not just a supercomputer of the twenty-first century.”
Jarl took a deep breath, then hissed it out between his teeth. He looked a little worried, as though he might have to admit to something embarrassing. “It started out as a supercomputer of the twenty-first century,” he said. “Then I added…biological components and…and other things.”
“Other things?”
“Peripherals. The machines that you saw are also peripherals, but the ones I gave it initially were…well, in one room, and more…more restricted. But they did have the capacity to both repair the computer and…”
“And improve it. That was where I came up against it, see.” His eyes suddenly acquired animation. It was an expression I knew all too well. Father’s work often required him to come in contract with scientists of various stripes. And, as his social hostess, I often came in contact with them too. Over the years, I’d arrived at the conclusion a scientist is someone who will speak happily and with great enthusiasm of a cunning method for his own execution.
There was this weird light that came to scientists’ eyes when they described something particularly creative they’d invented or some tricky way they’d found around an eternal problem. The light was in Jarl’s eyes now.
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