I have no trouble locating the wrecked enemy Bolo designated Alpha One, thanks to its recovery beacon transponder, signaling combat engineers and AI recovery technicians who now will not be coming. Pulling alongside the wreckage, I lower my rear ramp so that my Commander and the colonel can exit, along with several of my techspiders.
Under my guidance, they swiftly find the AI containment pod, still embedded within the burned-out hulk. The pod, complete with armor and containment shielding, masses 214.57 tons and would be impossible to move without heavy crane and construction equipment. The data still locked within the psychotronic circuitry and mem-modules, however, masses nothing. I need only get at it.
We must move quickly, however. I detect heavy underground movement through my seismic sensors, and there is evidence of surface traffic as well, detected on BIST pickups and on my long-range sonic detectors. The Enemy is moving and in force.
I dislike the fact that the last of the regimental staff members remaining alive and free must operate outside in a hostile combat zone, relying solely on lightweight emergency E-suits for protection. The incidental radiation here, in the vicinity of Alpha One, measures 45 rads, which limits their exposure time outside.
And if a firefight develops, they will be in serious danger.
I contact both Invictus and Ferox, who have rendezvoused at the tunnel entrance 68.9 kilometers from this location, on a bearing of zero-five-eight. They have begun firing at the armor in an attempt to ablate it. We have discussed the possibility of the three of us working together but agree that the information housed within the Caernan Bolo's AI pod is vital. Even if they can burn through before I can return, it is likely that the pod's memory cores include maps or navigational information that will help us in our sub-surface explorations.
If the two humans working in the wreckage outside now can complete the task in time. . . .
Streicher pulled back, raising a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then cursing when his gloved fingers thumped uselessly against his helmet visor. It was hot out here, and the E-suit's cooling system was struggling with the load.
It was hot in more ways than one, too. The radiation levels here were high enough to kill him with a few hours' exposure. The suit could protect him against alpha and beta particles, but any gamma radiation in the vicinityinduced, say, by high-energy neutrons irradiating this enormous mass of twisted, heat-blackened metal before himwould be sleeting right through his suit's slender defenses.
Strangely, though, and very much to his surprise, he wasn't thinking about the turquoise pill in his pocket. Right now, he had other things to worry about.
A Bolo Mark XXXII was smaller than a Mark XXXIII, but that was only a matter of degree. It had two sets of tracks to either side instead of three and only a single 200cm Hellbore turret on the flat upper deck, but the thing was still as big as the hull of a small starship. The entire front end of the machine had been melted away, with layers of duralloy and ceramplast folded back like the petals of an open flower. Victor had peeled back the armor shrouding the deeply buried inner AI core, using beam weapons with a surgeon's delicacy.
"In there, huh?" Streicher said.
At his side, Kelly nodded behind her helmet visor. "Victor says this cave leads straight to the Mark XXXII's AI pod . . . its control and memory core, everything we need."
Funny to think of a "cave" inside a human-made artifact. The Bolo wreckage before them, though, looked more like a natural cliff face transformed into duralloy. Fully a third of the enemy machine had vaporized under Victor's relentless high-energy hammering, but what was left was still a literal mountain of metal and alloy composites. He found himself looking up . . . and up . . . and up, and he could not see the machine's top deck, or the main turret mounting.
"Let's get the hell on with it, then." He started climbing.
It was a treacherous ascent. Most of the duralloy edges had been dulledhalf-melted by the ferocious heat of Victor's assault, then solidified again in lumpy, almost organic shapes that were all curves and rounded edges. Still, there were places where duralloy had split clean along knife-edged fracture lines, as surgically sharp as obsidian blades. He started up first, but Kelly soon passed him, climbing with speed and a precise beauty and athletic efficiency. Eventually, they helped one another, offering gloved hands for support and counterbalance as they picked their way in a dizzying free climb up the ruined face of the Bolo.
Finally, they reached the tunnel entrance. It started out broad and wide-open, a crater ten meters across, but as they picked their way inside into deepening, brooding shadow, the tunnel narrowed, forcing them into single file, then a hobbling stoop that led deeper and deeper into that metallic labyrinth of pipes, conduits, wiring, and slab armor. The radiation levels, he found, fell rapidly. The exterior of the Mark XXXII had been hot, leaking secondary radiation from the severe neutron blasting it had received earlier. Inside, however, the surrounding tons of duralloy armor shielded them.
Soon, the tunnel was so narrow they had to crawl, picking their way ahead over broken shards of technology. Behind them, one of Victor's techspiders clicked and scuttled along after them, and Streicher had to fight down a momentary pang of claustrophobia . . . and perhaps something worse. The spider was a gleaming, metal sphere half a meter across, dangling from four slender walking legs and pocked with gleaming camera lenses. Its legs had telescoped down until they were a quarter of their usual length, giving it the appearance of a grotesque amputee spider dragging itself along on its stumps. It clutched a slender power cable in one mechanical gripper and a data feed in another, dragging them along as they snaked in from outside. Lights mounted on its body cast bizarrely shifting patterns of light and dark across the tangle around them.
At last, twenty meters into the wreckage, they reached the dull black surface of the AI pod. Victor had peeled back the inner armor with a surgeon's precision earlier, laying bare a tangle of molecular circuit boards, hundreds of book-sized slabs of plastic, each mounting several rectangular blocks of translucent gray plastic and labyrinthine tracings of silver.
The opening in the AI pod was just wide enough for Lieutenant Tyler and Streicher, lying on their sides, to reach into the opened pod's exposed internal circuitry.
Behind them, the spider unfolded tool-arms that telescoped in and out with tiny, metallic chirps and whines from its servos. "We need more light here," Streicher told the spider, and one jointed arm shifted a bit, playing the beam from a small light at its tip to better illuminate the psychotronic module in front of them.
"This looks like an old VY-700 board," Kelly said, extracting a board sprouting dozens of optical data cables. "Old tech." She touched a contact point with the probe in her gloved hand and gave it a charge. Colored pinpoints of light flickered briefly deep within the dark, translucent plastic of the molecular circuit blocks. "It's live."
"Attach the power lead to the contact point marked cGYk-1," Victor said over their helmet phones.
The spider handed Streicher the power cable. Kelly pointed to the AI unit's main power supply, and he attached it to a receptor. Streicher knew they were trying now to energize enough of the powered-off circuit boards to get a low-level response from the apparently dead machine, but he felt pretty much in the dark, reduced to the role of untrained assistant. He'd worked a bit with molecular circuits, back when he'd first entered the Bolo service, but that had been a long time ago, and he'd never worked on the guts of a combat unit as advanced as a XXXII or XXXIII. All he could really do here was lie in a cramped and uncomfortable position, holding the circuit board with his right hand, and keeping a stray flap of titanium clear of the work area with his left.
"Okay," Kelly said. "Power supply connected."
"Stand by," Victor said.
The board in Streicher's hand lit up in a soft, gold galaxy of deeply embedded lights shining through the plastic.
"Power okay," Kelly said. She tested several touch points with her probe. "Memory active."
"Attach the data cable, please," the Bolo said. "Contact point 88-K-7r."
The spider extended the data feed cable with pinchers mounted on a telescoping arm. Handing the circuit board to Kelly, Streicher reached back, accepted the cable, then passed it along to her.
"Is this really going to work?" he asked her.
He sensed her shrug in the dimly lit tunnel. "It should, if there's no major damage to the system hardware. We should have access to all of the Bolo's memories, which are stored in molecular circuit mem-modules. Non-volatile, at least short-term."
"Yes, but does that mean it's going to, well . . . wake up?"
She laughed. "That, Colonel, depends on your definition of `awake.' We've been working with artificial intelligence for over a thousand years now, and we still can't exactly define the important terms like `consciousness' and `self-aware.' "
"They're supposed to be self-aware," he said. "Ever since the . . . which one was it? The Mark XXIV?"
"Well, the Mark XXIV was the first truly autonomous Bolo," she said. She continued to probe the circuitry as she spoke. "Earlier marks were self-directing on a tactical level, but the XXIV had improved id-integration and a much better personality center. They were the first ones with whom you could really feel you were having a conversation. They said they were self-aware. But we couldn't really be sure of what they meant by that."
"How do you get inside the other guy's mind, huh?"
"Yes, sir." By the light of glowing molecular circuits, he saw her eyes shift to give him a hard look through her visor. "I can't even know for certain if you are self-aware. Sir." Then she broke eye contact. "Sorry, sir."
"Not at all. Sometimes I wonder the same thing myself."
The moment was broken. She continued working on the circuits. "Are you getting anything, Vic?"
"I have access to the machine's level six memory. Basic programming and personality integration. Please make additional connections to the remaining mem-module boards."
"I am. Hang on."
Kelly Tyler, Streicher was now realizing, was not nearly as awkward as she sometimes seemed. She knew exactly what she was doing and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of her field. She seemed completely self-possessed when she was talking with Victor . . . or able to freely elaborate on Bolo AI theory.
"Any sign of that ghost, Vic?"
"Negative, my Commander. But my original impression was fleeting. I may have been mistaken."
"Yeah. And I might be the Trixie Queen of Caern. How's this?"
"I am now accessing level five memories. Please continue."
"What ghost?" Streicher asked her.
"Vic was telling me earlier that when he destroyed this Bolo, right after the battle he sent in some spiders and was able to touch the AI mind, just briefly, before it went dead. He said . . . he said he sensed a human personality in here."
"Human!"
"Yes, sir."
"You're not talking about . . . about humanlike, are you? I mean, it's like we were just talking about. Mark XXXIIIs have personalities, have self-awarenesswhatever that meansthat's like human awareness. . . ."
"No," she replied. "Victor was quite clear about what he felt. It wasn't a Bolo mind he sensed. It was human."
"A downloaded personality?"
"That's what I think."
So little was known about the Aetryx and their technological abilities. To precisely copy a human mind and download it into a machine . . . could they perform such a feat?
He knew there'd been talk of doing such a thing ever since prespaceflight days, of somehow transferring a person's memories, his thoughts, his mind, his soul from a failing organic body to immortal robotic or computer hardware. When it had become clear that a copy could be transferred, but not the original, interest had faded. It was more useful to focus on the creation and improvement of an artificial intelligence that could be programmed for specific work, than to merely make copies of oneself that did nothing to enhance the life or life expectancy of the original. . . .
The Aetryx, evidently, didn't think that way.
"Could the human part of this thing still be alive, then?" It was a strange thought, a creepy one. The surrounding metal felt so dead. . . .
"Well, it is just data," Kelly replied. "If the mem-modules are intact, we ought to at least be able to tap the guy's memories."
But did that mean the person trapped inside this radioactive hulk would become aware? Alive?
Did such terms even have meaning in a case like this?
"Okay, Victor," Kelly said. "I've hooked up another ten modules. Whatcha got?"
He awoke, stretching . . . and then the fear hit him in deep, shuddering waves, like the icy surf at Gods' Beach. The last thing he remembered . . . no . . . what was the last thing he remembered? Memory eluded him, like fragments of a dream.
Elken opened his eyes, then wondered why he couldn't see. He reached out with a trembling, sweat-slicked hand, then realized he couldn't feel anything, that the tremors, the sweat, the cold were all imagined, anchors for the mind adrift within a vast and lightless void.
Concentrating, he summoned memories from deep, deep within. He'd been in a battle . . . he'd been . . . he'd been a Bolo combat unit, his brain housed in a huge mobile armored vehicle. He could remember . . . The memories were still dim, still fragmentary, but there was something about going in for elective surgery . . . a chance at immortality . . .
What had gone wrong? . . .
Can you hear me? The voice, deep and quiet, spoke within the terror-haunted depths of his thoughts. Who are you?
Was it the voice of his god? He desperately wished for it to be so.
"G-god? Where am I? Why can't I see?"
You have been badly damaged. Your optical processing units are off-line. Can you remember what happened to you?
He was trying. Gods, he was trying! "I was in a battle with an enemy Bolo. One of the invaders. I think . . . I think I was hit. Who are you?"
"One of your brother Bolos. I am attempting now to access your level three memories. Is this better?"
Images flashed through Elken's mind, of the deep blue of the predawn sky, of the golden slash of the rings of Dis arcing above the eastern horizon.
Of a huge and powerful Sky Demon Bolo, bearing down on him in fire and thundering destruction.
Other memories surfaced, flickering past too quickly to identify in some cases, and in others . . .
He was at the Tower of Learning in Ledelefen, overlooking the circular, tree-rimmed sweep of the Park of Divine Prospect. The Brotherhood had assigned him here to research The Histories. The gods wanted to know all that was known of the outreach of Humankind from mythic Earth . . . the ships they'd used, the wars they'd fought.
Thirteen hundred standard years of history, all told, the millennium before the colonization of Caern compressed into download files, e-books and microfiches, and even ancient tomes of paper and clothboard. Assimilating it all was utterly beyond the capabilities of Elken and his small team of student monks, but at least they could get a feel for the overall sweep of history and be able to report to the gods in general terms what they'd discovered.
He'd had no idea that there was so much history waiting to be revealed. . . .
There was a flash, and then he was . . . elsewhere. Elsewhen.
He was on the cliff above Gods' Beach, and Sendee was with him, held close within the circle of his arms. "But why?" he asked, his voice a wail. "You're still so young! Why do you need the surgery now? . . ."
It wasn't fair. They'd been lovers for only six months. If she accepted the gods' offer of immortality, her old body, this body, so soft, so warm, would die. His beloved Sendee would reside within a god-form, alive, but inexpressibly alien. . . .
"Elken, I have to," she told him. Her eyes glistened as she looked up into his eyes, as her hand traced the line of his jaw. "I only just found out. I have a . . . a disease. It's cancer. Pancreatic cancer. The gods can't do anything . . . except offer me immortality. But that will be in another body."
"That's not right!" he cried. "They can grow whole new bodies. Grow different kinds of bodies, like the warrior-forms! They could give you a new pancreas!"
"No, Elken. That's not how it works. I asked, and my god explained it to me. They can transfer my mind to another body, but they can't stop the disease that's already spreading through this one."
"They could grow a new pancreas! Remove the old one, put in a new . . ."
"No, Elken. Once, a long time ago, our people could do that sort of thing. A . . . a transplant, they called it. But the gods say we've lost that knowledge. And the gods, well, they never had it. Not for our species, anyway."
"But the gods can do anything!"
"Some things, even the gods can't do, dear Elken. . . ."
Elken drew back from that memory, horrified. Why hadn't he remembered that conversation? He remembered it now, yes, as clearly as though it was scant hours old, but it had happened many cycles ago. It had been the reason he'd opted for immortality himself. But it simply hadn't existed until it had surfaced just now.
He felt cheated . . . and robbed. Why had that memory been taken from him?
I am surprised to find that the personality within the enemy Bolo appears to have completely reanimated. I expected the personality matrix to collapse and dissociate completely when the AI lost power, but apparently the data has been stored in a nonvolatile buffer, at least for the short term. There is growing evidence, however, that this personality, which calls itself "Elken," is growing increasingly unstable.
He appears bewildered by some of the memories arising now, as I download the contents of his mem-modules into my own memory core. Some memories which, I gather, were extremely important to him were blocked or somehow suppressed. As he regains access to them, he is becoming more and more confused.
"There is evidence that your gods blocked certain of your memories," I tell him. "Perhaps they feared that strong emotion would interfere with your programming."
"Who are you?" he demands. "Why are you showing me these things?"
"I am not showing them to you," I reply, sidestepping his first question, which could be a difficult one for him to have answered right now. "I am downloading your memories into my system. Some of those memories were blocked, apparently by the Aetryx. To access those memories, I removed the blocks. You now have access to them as well."
"You . . . you're not a god?"
"No."
"Who are you?"
"Go ahead and tell him, Victor," Colonel Streicher says. I have been echoing my conversation with Elken to both Lieutenant Tyler and Colonel Streicher.
"He may refuse to cooperate if he knows we are the enemy," I tell them.
"You have his memories," my Commander says. "He's a human being, or he was. He deserves to know."
It is an emotional gesture, but I find myself in essential agreement. There is no military reason to hide the truth, especially since I see no way of keeping this system alive once we stop supplying it with power. It seems a proper and honorable course of action.
"I am a Bolo of the Line, Mark XXXIII," I tell Elken, "in the service of the Confederation Armed Forces. Until recently, I was your enemy."
"The enemy! Sky Demon!"
"I wish you no harm now. I am trying to help you, in fact."
"You're trying to trick me! I will tell you nothing, demon!"
"I have recovered the information which I sought," I tell him. "Believe me, I have no need to trick you."
"You . . . you're like me!"
"Outwardly, at least. We both are high-mark Bolo combat units. I am an artificial intelligence arising from hyper-heuristic programming matrices within an advanced AI architecture of psychotronic molecular circuitry and massively parallel neuro-networking within an n-dimensional polymorphic array. You appear to be a gestalt of a similar software AI native to the Mark XXXII and a downloaded composite of personality and memory derived from a human source. . . ."
I stop speaking when I realize Elken is no longer listening.
He appears to be screaming.
The full realization had just struck home for Elken. He'd been tricked, been used by the beings he thought of as his gods.
He'd been downloaded into this . . . this machine and sent out against overwhelmingly superior odds. He'd been told that this was his one chance at immortality, with a promise of a new body if he won.
He saw now, though, that it had all been a sham. If this enemy Bolo was correctand Elken had a nightmarish feeling that it was telling him the complete and perfect truthhe was no more than an electronic copy of himself, downloaded into an old reserve combat unit. The real Elken was . . . was . . . where?
Was his body even still alive?
Suddenly, Elken wasn't sure of anythingof who or what he was or what he was seeking . . . or even whose side he was supposed to be on. The gods had lied to him, had deceived him. Sendee . . . she, too, was just a copy. The gods had promised her new and everlasting life. She, the real Sendee, must be dead by now, while the gods used a copy of her mind to run a Bolo.
In Tharsee, the dominant Caernan religion, the wicked were punished for eternity by being set adrift by the gods among the stars, unable to move or help themselves, lost in an endless night. Stories were told to disobedient children of how the only hope these damned souls held was the knowledge that eventually, after millions of cycles, they would wander into the gravitational grasp of a planet and be disintegrated in a flash of flamedying meteors against the night.
Few Caernans believed those stories any more, of course. The gods themselves denied that they would do such a thing. And yet, being doomed to an imitation of life played out within the circuits of a lifeless machine, placed there for the gods' purposes, unable to choose for one's self . . . was that hell any less terrible than eternity adrift among the stars?
This was the true, living hell, and Elken was damned.
This had to stop. He had to stop it. He would stop it.
Like any purely organic entity, Elken had limited power over his own mental processes. It was impossible, he found, to step outside of himself, analyze his own mental state of being, or change the sudden cascade of bleak, self-destructive thoughts tumbling through the sphere of his awareness.
But he did possess some control, more, perhaps, than was the case for an organic brain. His emotions as a man-machine were essentially the outgrowth of chaotic processes, but there were circuit breakers, power shunts, feed blocks, and yes-no-maybe trinary logic switches that he could control, even if it was on an almost purely hardwired-instinctive level.
With fragmenting nightmare snippets of his god's promisesand his liesthundering through his thoughts, he began shutting down his motherboard power receptor feeds.
As the darkness closed in, he could not stop screaming inside his own mind.
"Victor!" Kelly yelled. "The voltage output is dropping! What's happening?"
"He is dying," Victor's voice replied in her helmet phones. "I cannot hold him."
"Tell us what to do! . . ."
"I do not know myself. He appears to be self-terminating."
Kelly stared at the molecular circuit board in her hand. Power was flowing into the module, and through it to the entire tightly packed array of MCBs filling the AI core. But the golden pinpoints of light, like myriad stars, were fading as she watched. There was no reason. . . .
For much of her life, she'd wished that human beings could be like Boloshonorable, duty-bound, dependable, reliable. They represented titanic, awesome power, but if they did something, they did it for a reason . . . a reason other than the fact that they were feeling grouchy that morning, or petty, or irrationally depressed or angry.
They were rationality personified.
And this one was dying for no rational reason that she could perceive. Was it because it was haunted by a human ghost . . . the downloaded personality of some unknown human Caern native? Or was there something more?
Artificial intelligences, like even the most primitive of computers, essentially did what you told them to do. Program them, and they acted according to the dictates of that programming . . . even if the software running was complex enough to allow it to write its own software. Even with a human's mind downloaded into its circuitry, this Bolo ought to operate in a rational fashion.
"Victor!" she yelled. "Save him!"
"I do not believe he wants to be saved," was Victor's only answer.
It is now known and well understood that the Aetryx possessed a singular advantage over their human opponents, one unguessed at until late in the battle. Evolved from a parasitic chthonic species, they learned to manipulate their own and other species genetically. Maintaining an extraordinarily plastic vision of just what it meant to be Aetryxha, they grew specialized bodies, "parasomes," for specialized tasks. It is believed that at the time of the Caern campaign, there were 12 major genera of Aetryx, 44 distinct species, and an unknown but large number of subspecies, all of them the product of genetic engineering in their deep racial past.
This plasticity of worldview was imposed on the species conquered by the Aetryxha Reach. Subject races were manipulated genetically to produce ideal servants according to Aetryx views of place, properness, and utility. Perhaps more important from a sociotechnic dynamic, their use of sophisticated AI to pattern and download mental patterns, both into machines and, in some cases, into appropriately prepared organic brains, allowed them to vastly extend their control over subject races, and to fashion living toolsand weaponsto their express purpose.
The mothballed Bolos recovered by the Aetryx on Caern were a case in point. Reactivated, equipped with the thoughts, memories, and mentation patterns of selected humans promised a form of immortality by the Aetryx "gods," these Bolos became the chief weapon against the Confederation invasion forces; by downloading periodic backups, the same personalities could be reinstalled in new bodies, complete with the memories of earlier downloaded iterations. Those personalities did possess a kind of immortalitydestroyed time and time again, yet returning, in a sense, to bring new experience and skills to the tactical problem at hand.
If the system had not possessed an unexpected hidden flaw, the Aetryx defeat of the invading forces would have been complete and overwhelming.
Disaster at Caern:
A Study of the Unexpected in Warfare
Galactic Press Productions, Primus, cy 426