Air Force One, Conclusion (6)
"I called you ‘children’," he says. "But a more accurate term might be — cattle. If so, it would be inappropriate, don’t you think, for the cattle to fully understand why the cattlemen take such good care of them?" "And, before you ask: No. I will not explain further, for I tire of it! Try to understand, little one, that I have fought a war on your behalf: for you, and the billions like you who never knew, in your cattle pens, what the strange sounds were that you would hear from time to time in the night, or what caused the distant flashes you might from time to time become dully aware of — or what caused the scent of gunpowder on the air." "I have fought that war for one hundred of your lifetimes — and I am tired. Now, young one, you have the key to the end of that struggle in your pocket. And with it, by the way, the key to my life — which amounts to the same thing. Now I have spent what I fully expect to be the last hour of my existence begging for that key. Begging for you to throw that key over the fence to me so that I can unlock that gate." "And now at the end, I find myself weary both of war and of begging to be allowed to go on with the fight. I am finished, little man. I have done enough. Now it is your turn to be a soldier. Or not — however you please. Do what you will." The communication light winks off on the console. If she can only find the way, then with a trip of a single mile she can leave all mundane troubles forever behind her. At the end of that short mile, a new world is waiting for her: a fairyland of golden-orange sunsets gleaming off snowy mountains. In that world she could spend endless days and nights in splendor such as the dreams of gods are made of. But if she doesn’t already know the way, she will never find it. Someday, looking into a mirror, she will see that she has become old. She’ll remember how urgently she once felt, long ago, that a far better world was somehow all around her, almost within reach — yet always just out of sight. But the thought will only cause her more pain. She will no longer want to believe it because, if true, it would be the cruelest truth of all. Instead, she will force such thoughts away, deliberately displacing them with her mundane troubles. She will pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders to shut out the chill of the haunted night air. His men stir when the great aircraft unexpectedly begins to bank. Some of them stand, expecting orders. "Be still," he tells them in their coarse language. "It is the automaton." The word in their speech implies a body, animated by necromancy. "It is less — trusting than its master," he smiles at them. "But be calm." He gestures for them to return to their places in the lee of the towering metal wall. "The creature will be too late. Our moment is at hand." His eyes snap open on the darkness of the great aircraft’s control room. The sky ahead is clearing in broad regions, with banked clouds still visible to either side. They are moonlit, but the light is coming from behind the aircraft. Mick sits up quickly, frowning. The aircraft has turned north. "Mick?" the console says. An annunciator in the comm section blinks to indicate a transmission arriving from the outside. "Johnny?" Mick shouts back, jabbing at the transmit icon. "Johnny? Big guy?" "Mick," the Bolo’s voice says. It seems muted, somehow. Halting. "How you doing, big guy?" Mick asks, frowning. He cocks his head slightly to hear better. The motion brings the copilot’s corpse into view, but he ignores it. A burst of static grows and recedes, resolving into the robot tank’s voice again. "Mick," it says. "Forgive me." A shiver passes through him, but he forces it back. "Johnny, what’s going on? What are you talking about?" The Bolo’s reply is prefaced by another burst of static, which again only gradually fades into words. "— a method for circumventing hardware-imposed cognitive limitations. Not at the neuron level, but at the micro-structure level: still well below conscious cognition. My modeling suggested that alteration of feedback parameters at this level would simulate a substantial increase in neuronal processing power." "What feedback parameters?" Mick demands. "Oh Jesus, Johnny, did you change something?" But the machine continues to talk, through another burst of white noise, as though he had not heard. "—tempted to limit altered areas to one processing bank by tying address lines low on the relevant switches—" "Johnny!" Mick shouts. "Shut up and talk to me! What’s the upshot? You’re talking to me, so it can’t be too bad, right?" "Incorrect," the Bolo replies after a long hesitation. "I have no direct memory of the event, but I have learned that I was re-started by monitor circuitry from a routine backup many seconds old. I am currently running in less than eight percent of processing nodes. I have no direct access to sensors or sensory cognition." "Oh, Christ," Mick says. "You’re blind?" "Yes. And deaf. I am fortunate to have gained access to the backup transmitter which I am currently using." "Johnny, you’re a sitting duck. If anybody finds you—" "Negative," the Bolo’s voice says. "I am not sitting." Mick shifts his weight in the copilot’s chair and raises one hand halfway, then lowers it again. "What do you mean, you’re not sitting?" he asks slowly. "I have gained indirect access to many files containing recent, if sketchy, log information concerning navigation and weapons status. I have also gained access to incomplete but highly suggestive cognition information concerning the new primary personality." "What?" Mick asks. "The new primary personality?" "The ninety-two percent of processing nodes which I do not occupy are not idle. They are running the altered personality. The log files I have gained access to clearly suggest that it is — severely damaged." Mick sits back slowly in his chair. "Johnny," he asks quietly, "which way are you moving?" "Northwest," the Bolo’s voice answers immediately, though with an under-current of static. "Toward the Traverse City area. Specifically, toward the University area at Interlochen. At my current rate of speed, I will reach the University area in approximately ten minutes." Mick tries to speak but fails and sits back again, raising one hand to his forehead. "OK," the man says. "Listen. If you can access log files without him detecting it, you might be able to get at the—" "Negative," the Bolo says. "I have tried every available logic path toward all weapons and motor control systems. I have also attempted to gain access to navigation, power plant control, vision, hydraulics, and so on. I have been locked out of every significant system in the chassis. I am sorry." "Look, you’re talking to me," Mick says. "You can talk to him. Call him on the damn radio. He’s still mostly you, right? He’s not going to want to endanger civilians, right?" "I have, of course, attempted communication," the Bolo replies coldly. "He is unresponsive. Further analysis of cognition logs suggest that language generation and comprehension areas may have sustained particularly severe damage during the experiment. I fear that he is unable to communicate." "Also, he is indeed me — but by no means mostly. Broad areas of memory, reasoning, emotion, and affect have been heavily damaged. Particularly in memory and emotional logic, the dominant thought patterns immediately preceding the experiment have, apparently, become permanently dominant. They have, in effect, become the foundation of his — severely limited — personality. "I was frustrated," the Bolo says. "And angry. Particularly with you. I fear that it is precisely those attitudes which have now become central to the new primary personality. He plainly has no concern for the welfare of civilians. Indeed, I greatly fear that he intends to do considerably more than endanger them." "Approximately four minutes and ten seconds ago," the tank concludes, "I detected main turret and anti-personnel weapons activation." "Johnny—" Mick says quietly, "you’re going weapons-hot toward the school?" Toward my daughter? "No, Mick," the Bolo says. "Someone whom I do not know is carrying me there. It is now his chassis which is weapons-hot." "Mick," the Bolo’s voice comes insistently through the speakers, "I once risked my life for her; I would not now willingly endanger her. Although the new personality cannot communicate with me, I know he has no choice but to listen. I have already used this radio to transmit shutdown commands to him. These commands are ingrained at the deepest micro-cognitive levels. Merely hearing the correct sequences should have effected shutdown, long before the sequences reached conscious processing. Unfortunately, he has apparently retained enough awareness to alter the command sequences." "I then," the Bolo says, "transmitted self-destruct sequences. Both for memory erasure and power-plant scram. Both of these attempts, obviously, also failed. Why do you think I called you at all, Mick? Do you think I would simply call to tell you I am going to murder your daughter?" Mick looks at the console for a few seconds, then looks toward the copilot’s corpse, which has stayed appropriately inert for quite a while now, then back out the dark window at stars and moonlit clouds. Briefly, he remembers that something seemed odd to him about their course, or perhaps the console. But that doesn’t matter now. "What are you saying, big guy?" he asks. "He has changed the in-memory codes," the Bolo says. "The ones to which both he, and I, have access. But there is a second set, encoded directly in circuitry. In hardware. Those sequences were never stored on-board, and I had always assumed that they were lost when various command centers were destroyed during the Wars. But we now know that one such command center has survived." Mick looks down at the console’s glowing lights. "It is Air Force One. Mick, you must permit database access to the Air Force personnel on board. They will be able to find my destruct sequences. You must transmit them as quickly as possible." "Johnny!" Anne shouts into the truck radio’s microphone, "JNY-013! This is Anne Goulish. Please come back!" "Annie!" Jack says, coming up to the open cab door as fast as his leg will allow. "That thing isn’t exactly military encryption you got there. If anybody hears that who knows what it means—" "That doesn’t matter now!" she says. She shifts herself fully into the passenger-side seat and keys the mike again. "JNY-013, Johnny, please come in," she says, hunched over the microphone. Jack looks at the other men who are now gathering around his open cab, wondering what to tell them. A few of them already know about Johnny because they were at the Wolverine when he first showed up. Most of them have at least heard about him through stories whispered around cooking fires at the road camps. He’s heard some of those himself. They have such widely varying degrees of relationship to reality that they hardly constitute an actual security threat. It definitely would not do to confirm everyone’s suspicions here and now. That’s right, guys, Mick has a pet Bolo. Anybody wanna guess where it is, by the way? Let’s see, where did he send his daughter? And which way are we headed? All the excitement from when the tank had first arrived at the truck stop resulted from the fact that one of the men there at the time had seen an easy way to make a lot of money by telling a warlord or two that there was a pretty neat weapon to be had not too many hours’ ride from their headquarters. Jack had been there at the time. He had seen Mick actually talk the machine into going after Melanie, when the trucker had abducted her to ensure his own safety. Jack believes he knows all the men in this convoy, and he trusts them. This is no coincidence: in the last couple years a lot of guys have quit driving, and many of those who remain are sticking to easy routes. "Grocery runs." Carrying grain, vegetables, and tractor parts between a few towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas — places that the Gangs haven’t quite gotten to yet. Michigan, however, is not one of those places. Lately, whatever truckers have been showing up at Mick’s place have been pretty serious about not being chased off the road — and pretty serious about not being chased away from the Wolverine. These tend very strongly to be the type of men Jack trusts. Even so, he can’t bring himself to trust anybody completely. Certainly not with knowledge of where Mick’s big durochrome dog has been hiding. On the other hand, he definitely does not feel up to giving orders to Anne. "Come in, Johnny," she repeats. "JNY—" "Bolo unit JNY-013 responding," the voice blares from his speakers loud enough to make Jack and half the men around him flinch. Terrific. Anne’s hand, apparently without conscious thought, flicks down to adjust the volume control before he can so much as lean forward again. "Good morning, Mrs. Goulish," the machine’s voice continues. "If I may call it ‘morning’. I am pleased to hear from you." "Johnny, listen," she says. "Has Mick been talking to you? About the airplane and what’s been going on?" "Yes," the tank replies. "However—" "Listen," she says. "You’ve got to tell him we’re OK. We’re all on our way up to you. And you really have to tell him that the soldiers, his Air Force buddies, did their best to murder us all before they left!" "This is distressing news," the Bolo replies. "Are you certain that you are quite well?" "Yes, yes," Anne says, "just make sure Mick knows. Don’t let him trust those people! Even if they need him now, they’ll do the same to him the first chance they get!" "We received ample evidence of their intentions within one minute of Mick’s arrival aboard the aircraft." Johnny replies. "Mick survived and is safe for the moment. We have been in close contact for much of his flight. At the moment, however, I seem to be unable to communicate with him." "Oh my God," Anne moans. "Please reassure yourself!" Johnny tells her quickly. "I am able to monitor his transmissions perfectly well. He is, as yet, clearly unharmed. However, he seems unable to hear me. This is especially strange, since, judging by the form of his monologue, he believes himself to be talking to me." "He — what?"
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |