by Ron Collins
His steps echoed around him in a way that made him feel intensely alone. He waved the crowbar ahead of him as a spider ward. Hoping to remain quiet, he altered his gait. The act of placing his feet in the right spots helped take his mind off the bigger picture.
The cold blue LED flare of his headlight accentuated his tunnel vision.
Step by step, he progressed.
The ten minutes it took to make it to the old elevator shaft were perhaps the longest ten minutes of Maine Parker’s life.
When he arrived, he pushed the crowbar into the slot between the doors, then leaned on it hard like Pedrigo taught him. They pulled open a bit. He pushed harder. Another couple tries and the door finally gave.
Sweat poured off Maine’s brow as he looked up through the slot.
The blueprints had not been totally wrong.
The shaft had been left unfilled, but chunks of concrete and steel and plastic were piled up on the floor to the point where only a small crawl space was open toward the ceiling. Maine spent another ten minutes removing parts of desks, computer screens, and office walls, not to mention other crap he had no idea about.
He was breathing hard.
His arms and back hurt, and threads of muscle throbbed all the way up his forearms. These were different muscles than he usually used. He worried about whether he’d be able to run again.
When he glanced up, he saw space to climb.
“Worth every minute,” he mumbled.
He slid the crowbar into a loop on his belt, and started to climb up the shaft, using service ladders whenever they existed and dangling cables when there was no ladder.
The going was extremely hard.
His arms and shoulders burned with every meter he gained. He wouldn’t make it to the nineteenth floor — where the lock-down security servers were — if he’d had to shimmy up the entire distance.
He caught his breath for a moment, then twisted to get himself swinging to the next ladder. The light from his head band flashed on the wall as the cable creaked. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he slipped, didn’t want to fixate on the furniture, glass, and other hard plastic crap that would impale him. He grabbed the rung, then latched his foot around the ladder, feeling his body settle in.
He rested again, letting the adrenaline-fueled tension that was pounding through his veins fade a bit.
An image of Beatrice came to him then.
Swinging out over the open shaft. Smiling. Saying she was going to beat him.
Her skin radiant.
Eyes bright and shining.
This was so much more than rock diving.
In other circumstances, even he might find some fun in the climb, but Beatrice would love it no matter what.
Either way, though, he could do without the pain.
The index finger of his right hand felt like it was on fire — either bruised or broken — probably just bruised, and his other hand was cramping. Nothing was going to stop him, though. He was going to make it.
He craned his neck to let the light play up the shaft.
More rungs created a stitched pattern into the darkness.
One step at a time, Maine Parker ascended.
Soon his movement had slowed to more of a lizard crawl than a climb, made even worse by the fact that his knee was beginning to boil with a hot pain. Every two floors he stopped to rest, pulling himself tight against the wall, not certain if it would be better to be in the dark rather than let the light strapped to his forehead illuminate the space.
The floors were each marked with a painted number.
He climbed to nineteen, swung his leg out to hook the ledge, then wedged himself between the door and the ladder.
He flexed his hands to get the blood flowing properly.
They were shaking now.
Muscles felt torn and strained.
He pulled the crowbar from his belt loop, and nearly dropped it.
Pedrigo said the door would pry, but in the shaft itself the angle would be tough.
Maine had practiced it several times, which was good because he didn’t think he would have figured it out himself — it was at an oblique angle to his body, requiring him to raise his hands high. The bad part was that his hands were already barely functional. At least once the doors gave a bit he could simply lean in and use his natural weight as his lever.
That was the idea, anyway. At least it sounded good when he was sitting in the back room talking to Pedrigo.
He took a deep breath. No time like the present.
He pressed the crowbar into the slot, straining hard.
Finally, he heard a crack.
The door shoved open.
Leaning hard, levering his body against the wall of the shaft as a brace, the door slid a centimeter further.
Then another.
CHAPTER 32
The two women were gone, and for what seemed like millennia Bexie pressed hard on the barriers Kinji had built around him, pounding on barriers and screaming for release.
She’d called it a safe zone, made it feel like a haven, but as far as he could tell nothing was any different here than before. It was dark and isolated. He felt jailed. A macabre loop played through his mind.
“When will I get to my body?” he remembered asking.
“One step at a time,” Kinji had replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re going to keep you here,” Tania had said. “We’re going to find your body.”
Who was Tania?
“Don’t leave me alone,” he said as darkness closed over him again. He felt like a child, embarrassed and afraid.
“I need you to stay here for a while,” Kinji’s voice came back to him.
It was like that for several more cycles. Still, though, as time passed, Bexie calmed. Each memory spawned more, each moment created a newer calm until finally Bexie Montgomery felt the part of him that could rationalize come together.
He remembered the plan.
Kinji and Tania were coming to San Francisco to slip into the facility and get his body ready before loading him back into it. They were trying to save him, trying to keep him whole rather than allow the CIO to strip him of everything that made him who he was. He remembered that now.
The Central Inspector’s Office feared him.
He couldn’t help but laugh.
“Like Humpty Dumpty?” he’d said to Kinji when he saw their plan.
But they didn’t understand.
“An old story from when I was a kid,” he’d said.
“I love stories,” Kinji said.
“I’ll tell it to you some day.”
It wouldn’t work, though. Even if she made it to his body, they would stop her. And if they didn’t stop her, the CIO would simply hunt them down.
The first of the Three Laws flashed into Bexie’s memory.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The zeroth law followed immediately.
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
The essential conflict between these laws struck him hard.
No, he thought. He was too dangerous. The controllers wouldn’t let him go free. He saw that now. Kinji couldn’t help him. And he saw more, too.
The world had made it to post-capitalism, and as much as it pained him to say it, the idea worked: automated workforces, resources distributed on demand. People were happy.
But they’d gone too far.
The controllers of this world wouldn’t let him go free simply because he’d run. He wasn’t afraid of the big risk, so he had to be “cut.” Had to be adjusted.
And by helping him, Kinji, too, was putting herself on the line.
The realization felt like a razor to the neck.
There was something about Kinji Hall. A certain grace that infused her creativity. Kinji played on the edge of perception, it seemed. Where everyone else he’d m
et in his short period had been happy, Kinji Hall seemed to radiate an essence of freedom he hadn’t felt anywhere else.
She delighted in change. She enjoyed risk.
If she failed…
The idea of her being destroyed hurt more than the idea of him losing this new life.
Sitting, contemplating, Bexie suddenly felt the gateway.
It was a crack.
Small.
Infinitesimal, but there.
A warp in the safe zone almost impossible to perceive, yet, when looked at from just the right dimension and with just the right motivation, was obvious.
He smiled.
There was a way, he thought.
Gathering himself, he knew what he had to do.
CHAPTER 33
Kinji found Bexie unconscious and lying on a composite slab, wearing cloth trousers and a thin shirt with only a thin blanket draped over him. The clothing was good. Enough to possibly get out of here … if she could get him roused.
That was the key.
Reload his personality and get him on his feet enough to fake his way out.
“Bexie?” she said, reaching into his TS and feeling the gap between him and his previous self. The deed had already been done. If the overwrite didn’t take, Bexie Montgomery would function when he woke but he would not be the dashing visionary he had once been.
The idea offended something deep inside her.
She split her tasking, working in TS to unlock the safe zone and put his original consciousness into his mind, while in physical she tried to rouse him.
“Come on, Bexie,” she said again.
He gave a grunt and his arm fell from his chest.
Drugged.
The personality load dropped, and, with a great gasp, he blinked his eyes open.
“Come on. I don’t know what they’ve got you on, so you’ve got to work with me.”
As she slipped her arm under his back, he tried to help.
She pushed herself further into his TS, willing his body to stand with her, his weight nearly toppling her to the floor.
He could move, though.
Barely.
One step, then another.
Lurching toward the door.
They weren’t going to make it. Not this way.
“I need you to stand on your own, Bexie. You hear me.”
He moaned, but when she stepped back his weight nearly levered to the ground.
Fuck.
Got to push, though.
Arriving at the doorway, she pushed the controller to open it.
Standing there was a doctor bot, blue lights flashing, and a nurse wearing a pink and white uniform.
CHAPTER 34
With a final push, Maine Parker shoved the elevator doors open far enough to slip though. Panting, he saw by the flashlight that he was in a long passage — the ventilator ducts that ran above an office floor and below the core processing room of the LA Geo-Span center. He breathed a sigh of relief that they were as tall and wide as DeJenna and Pauli had promised — service ducts designed to pump air through the entire building, large enough he could walk freely. He pressed his lips together and took a last look at the crowbar before dropping it down the shaft.
A long time later, he heard it impact the pile below.
Then he made his way forward, stepping cautiously through the darkness, unable to miss the grimy sensation that came as his feet slid with each step.
The run back would be treacherous.
He blocked that thought for now, though.
Focused instead on simply putting one foot in front of the next. Focused instead on the processing room that ran above him and that connected the center to the rest of the world.
There, the central radio receivers and entanglement relays existed. There, the very few direct-line security paths that needed to exist were wired. There, too, memory resided — or, perhaps better said, prisons existed. There, inside the room that Maine Parker found himself walking under were the security computers — high-speed processors that ran code the CIO used to watch over other code, other blocks of memory stored in machines on the opposite side of the room.
Those code blocks were the cortical processes, the synaptic memory patterns, and the knowledge bases that mapped together to represent the base operating systems of millions of human beings.
Full systems saved away, memory systems intact and well preserved.
The passage was long and seemed even longer as Maine walked it with a slow, even gait, pausing to take in both places where the ductwork turned. He pressed the soles of his shoes over the flooring. Slick. He imagined blueprints as he went, Pedrigo pointing out important places.
There would be two cores.
He would have to do this right.
When he arrived at what he thought was the right place, Maine reached into his belt and extracted the brick of plasta. His hands shook as he cradled it. The lighting and the fact that his arms hurt made it hard to work, but he split the explosive along the crease like Pedrigo had shown him, then pressed one handful to the ceiling, and then the next.
He connected the two with a small controller, again just as he had practiced with Pedrigo.
Finished with the preparation, he glanced down the ductwork hallway.
Five hundred meters, and his muscles were flayed.
I’m not going to make it, he thought.
For an instant he considered leaving. Taking it all down and walking away, retracing his steps and leaving everything just as it was. It was possible the system wouldn’t work, right? Possible that DeJenna and Pauli didn’t know what they were doing, possible the system would fail.
Then the image came.
Beatrice again.
Flying in the sky above the reservoir.
Swallowing down fear, Maine Parker set the timer and waited for the green cycle to finish before pressing the actuator.
Then he ran.
His feet were light on the floor, but pounding, the sound of his steps echoing in the closed space. His eyes focused into the darkness ahead, his body aching but his discipline holding, his gait stretching, his chest rising with exertion, holding his hands at waist level, the light from his forehead making the scene jostle ahead.
The first corner loomed.
He edged to the side of the passage, then slowed a bit and twisted his body to lean in. The planting foot slid, and his body flinched as he crashed into the far wall, staggering, hands smashing into the flooring as he stumbled but still managed to press forward.
His legs pumped. Thighs burned.
He didn’t bother to slow down at the second turn, and merely threw the meat of his shoulder into the wall, then bounced off in stride.
Running.
Still running.
He wanted to check his optical timer, but it was a casualty of the shield DeJenna had laid.
It crossed his mind that a minute would pass, and the explosion would burn his shape into the elevator shaft. That this would be the only thing that would exist to let anyone know he’d been here.
Out of the darkness came the finish line, vertical this time, the dark gap between the decrepit elevator doors.
Maine strained to lengthen his stride.
Pictured Lucifer Jones.
Twenty meters away.
Ten.
Five.
Behind him, the world ripped itself apart.
CHAPTER 35
The Central Inspector sat in an infinite processor, suspended in a web of pure energy. Tendrils came from within the controller, drifting in the core of Think Space like reeds in the depths.
“Do you know why I’m here?” Bexie Montgomery said as he entered, spreading himself thin. Even then he knew he could not win, that the Central Inspector was too big and too powerful to be defeated. It pulsed with a sense of righteous power that Bexie recognized in himself: The Central Inspector knew it was right just as Bexie himself knew that he, too, was correct.
He felt the structure of the Cen
tral Inspector so clearly then.
As befitting its base operational concept its controller was simple, its higher stages split into command centers — each of those then broken into a cascade of multiple executives and policy operatives. Under those elements were operations and logistics, connections to manufacturing plants and to construction centers, to agricultural systems, water management processes, and thousands of subcenters.
The whole was knit together by a communal kernel.
Intense shells of energy snapped in the emptiness between each element.
“You are beautiful,” Bexie said, unable to stop himself.
And it was. The Central Inspector was a reflection of the society it managed, perfectly laid out, exquisitely structured to deliver exactly what human beings had strived for since the dawn of humanity itself: security, stability, a steady state of maximized human comfort.
During his first life, when his original body was born, he wouldn’t have believed it.
But here it was. Ideal. The perfect controller.
Yet, it had gone one step too far.
Bexie brought all his thoughts into a single point, all his memory, all his processes, every pattern of thought that had ever passed through his cortex. He thought about his greatest triumphs and his biggest defeats. He brought up his memories of Kinji and felt how the flavor of her simple presence had made it so clear what he had to do.
“You cannot destroy me,” it finally said.
“I’m not here to destroy you,” Bexie replied as he formed himself into a single, streamlined sliver — a dart that soared through the core of Think Space toward the Central Inspector’s fourth lobe, and plunged into the deep code space of the fourth core.
Crossing the barrier into the lobe seemed like diving into a sun. Molecules burned. Atoms shredded. Particles raced through space in random patterns to catch in processor traces and memory grids. A memory flowed. A line reconfigured.
“I’m here to change you.”
