The Emperor
by Lucius Shepard
"… That melancholy hole which is the place
All the other rocks converge and thrust their weight…"
Dante, Canto XXXI, The Inferno
Bless the moon, McGlowrie said to himself. Under bitter smokes and clouds of
poison, here we are forbidden the lights of heaven, but lack especially the moon
…
He spun the wheel of the rover, sending forty-five tons of armor-plated steel
lurching to the right, nearly scraping the pit wall, all so as to avoid crushing
a spiderlike machine that had scooted into his path.
—Go thou into the earth, he said, affecting the grandiose effusiveness of a
drunk. The fact that he was drunk did not alter the depth of his
pretense. Since taking charge of the mine and its many machines, he had become
increasingly distant in personal situations and had discovered that exaggerating
certain of his natural propensities helped to strengthen his humanity, to fix it
as an artist might fix a painting, by sealing its surface with a glaze; and yet,
for purposes of efficiency, he also nourished his unemotional side. It made for
an odd balancing act, this tipping back and forth between calm rationality and
what his friend, Terry Saddler, characterized as the oft-buggered macho of an
aging barroom bully; and the very artificiality of this balancing act
half-persuaded McGlowrie that he had already failed at it, that he had grown
more machine than man in his responses. Nevertheless, he continued to strive to
perfect his human imperfections.
Seated in the chair beside McGlowrie, Robert Eads Bromley. Vainglorious boy.
Blond beard razored with finicky precision, nary a strand out of ranks; a crisp
new baseball cap, adorned with the Emperor's logo (a crowned man on a barbarous
throne, aping the Tarot trump) and hiding a prematurely receding hairline. In a
tone that reeked of an expensive education got in hallowed halls where the
graduation ceremony consisted of having a stick rammed up your butt, he
suggested that another ill-considered maneuver like McGlowerie's last might
serve to uncouple the factory units linked behind the rover. He further
suggested that McGlowerie lay off the drink.
—The Emperor's one of the last places on earth where a man can drive drunk with
impunity, said McGlowerie. Allow me my small pleasures.
—If the company gets wind of your pleasures, said Bromley, they'll put
your ass in a sling.
—And who's going to tell them? A trainee?
Bromley looked away from McGlowrie's stare; the older man made a sardonic noise
and, annoyed, too much so to return to his tipsy poetics, he beat out a rhythm
on the command console and sang:
—All the women in Boston
sing their white rose song.
Ah, Santa Katerina,
she's my icon …
—Did you like that? McGlowrie asked. I wrote it myself. Last time we replaced
the command-control unit, while driving through the pit, I got to thinking about
women, you know. Their variety, their essence …
Bromley muttered something that sounded resentful, gazing out through
rain-streaked glass at the ghastly inhuman vista of the pit, at countless
machines toiling, scuttling, lumbering, darting, and gliding over the broken
ground.
—Beg pardon? said McGlowrie.
—The machine you swerved to avoid. It was a spider from the leaching ponds.
There must be millions of them.
—You said all that? I could have sworn you were more succinct. McGlowrie
chuckled. You're correct. It was only a spider. And most likely a damaged one,
or else it wouldn't have strayed from the ponds. The hunter-killers will be at
it soon, so you wonder, quite rightfully, why I bothered. Was it a whim? An
inebriated twitch? Did it have philosophical implications, life being life in
whatever guise? Was that the thrust of your inquiry?
—More or less.
McGlowrie nodded, as if he were considering the question, and said, Perhaps
you'll like the second verse better.
—All the women in Moscow
with their stiletto heels.
with their Type O lipstick
and black market deals …
He cocked an eye toward his audience, awaiting a response, and, when Bromley
failed to muster one, he continued.
—All the women in Chelsea
with their tiger smiles,
with their secret histories
and their serpent Niles …
Bromley picked himself up and started for the hatch.
—Sit, said McGlowrie.
Reluctantly, sullenly, Bromley sat.
—I take it you're not a music lover, said McGlowrie.
Bromley responded with a sideways glance.
—That's all right. It's not a requirement. McGlowerie steered around some
unidentifiable wreckage that the recyclers had deemed unworthy of collection.
What is required of anyone working here is that they cut their fellow employees
a little slack. Otherwise …
—I didn't sign on to cut anyone slack.
—Otherwise, McGlowerie went on, your fellow employees will cut you none.
—I don't need it.
McGlowerie drove in silence for a time, drumming his fingers on the wheel, and
then said, I assume you've been lectured on the psychological toll taken by the
job. I also assume that after being here three weeks—three whole
weeks—you've concluded that you're immune to the pressure. And perhaps you are.
Anything's possible. But let's suppose you're cast of ordinary clay, that you
fall a bit short of superhero status.
—Let's suppose you're a tiresome old drunk.
McGlowerie reflected on this comment and the assurance with which it had been
delivered. I know Daddy's a big stockholder, he said. And I imagine he's willing
to indulge his baby boy, to let you play at being a contributor to society. To
pass through your grub stage, as it were, before you weary of it and evolve into
a full-blown parasite. That's fine. Just don't make the mistake of thinking I'm
easy. I've been fighting corporate battles for long years, and I don't fight
fair.
Bromley coughed … or it might have been a laugh. You think I'm after your job?
—I don't give a damn what you want. Whatever it is, I'm telling you straight-up,
if it's not in accord with my wishes, you won't get a sniff of it. I know the
Emperor better than anyone. That makes me the one person the company doesn't
want to lose.
Bromley refused to look at McGlowrie, but he did not appear particularly shaken.
— There's not much to do here, God knows. If things were in good order, they
wouldn't need me. But things aren't in good order. Things are fucked. I'm sure
you must have noticed that half our equipment is outdated, and the other half's
hung together with paper clips. McGlowrie reached down beside the chair, groped
for his bottle, failed to snag it. That said, the pressure doesn't arise from
living on the doorstep of hell. It arises from knowing the job's irrelevant. The
mine runs itself. Our function is to observe, to file reports that will
doubtless be misfiled, to do some repairs, to make suggestions that will be
ignored, and to perform a few simple tasks … like the one we're performing
today.
—Replacing the command-control's a simple task? I'd call it our central task.
McGlowrie shrugged. Call it what you like, all we do is tow the bitch out and
reposition her. Every so often the old AI decides it doesn't want to be shut
down. When that happens, some of us die. But it inevitably shuts down. It can't
escape its programming and commits suicide. The loss of human life, now. That's
not a major complication. And there's the real source of the pressure. Out in
the world you hear people saying that mankind's in a state of peril. We've
become an impediment to the planet's survival. Here, you feel the full weight of
that pronouncement. You realize all we're doing as a species is busy work.
Waiting for the final collapse in whatever form it comes. Maybe prolonging
things a little. So try a shot of that every day for a year, then get back to me
about my drinking. If you last that long.
Bromley appeared to be bursting to speak, but he restrained himself. After a
passage of ten or fifteen seconds, he said, Is that all? Can I go?
—Oh yeah, said McGlowrie. I've had my fill.
· · · · ·
In all the grunt and swagger of his life, days weeks months wadded up and
pitched away like grease rags into a bin of years, McGlowerie had not found much
use for any pastime that did not have at its heart a spirit of raw
functionality. He had climbed a steep slope up from the slums of the
Northeastern Corridor (an urban area extending from Boston south to DC and west
to Pittsburgh), achieving a rare upward mobility for someone of his class, and
thus he was by nature diligent and arrogant. By profession, he was a tender of
machines—machines that had grown increasingly complex as he progressed from
youth into his fiftieth year—and he believed a man should dedicate himself to
his trade, toil at it until he dropped, a principle given objective form by his
father, who had keeled over at the age of eighty-four while repairing a toaster.
Like his father, he measured happiness by the amount of work there was for him,
and, when given charge over pit operations at the Emperor, ten thousand square
miles carved from the Alaskan wilderness, a vast strip mine filled with machines
of every shape, capacity, and dimension, it seemed he had happened upon his
Shangri-la. Looking down each day into the bleak heart of work, the endless
labors of the machines had opened him to abstraction and exposed a slim vein of
poetry in his soul.
His initial tour of the mine horrified him. He was appalled by the sight of the
twisted trees and cancerous grasses that sprouted along the rim of the pit,
struggling to process metals from the poisoned soil. He was repelled by the
greasy rain that fell from a constant cover of noxious, bilious-looking clouds,
and even more repelled when he understood the damage it could do to one's skin.
The pit was an expanding canyon system with five-hundred-foot-high walls that
slumped into hills of talus. Scattered about were beaches of blue and red and
green oxides, and banks of sulphur, their colors dimmed by the dense particulate
haze that muddied the air. Here and there were silvery lakes of mercury and
tungsten, edged with black foam, from which robotic spiders—skittering on mesh
feet that barely disturbed the surface—extracted rare metals and then excreted
squirts of indium, osmium, and such along the shore, there to be collected by
larger machines. In every quarter of the mine, foundering amid piles of debris,
were gutted, rusted hulks that had been cannibalized for parts, their
exoskeletons left to corrode and collapse, serving as monuments to the Emperor's
infernal system. The environment was thronged with machines, many with
replacement parts and improvements grafted onto them. It seemed that every inch
of the place was jerking, churning, jittering, making it all but impossible for
the eye to find a secure purchase. Crushers, spreaders, smelters; mammoth
excavators and reclaimers dating from the last century, when machines had been
operated by men; recyclers, ore carriers, HKs (hunter-killers), sniffers, and
countless more that ranged in size from that of a housepet to the microscopic.
The stationary units, such as the command-control AI and the factory units they
were towing—fifty feet high and three times as long—were shrouded in thick gray
dust, except when they were engaged in fabricating the machines that populated
the pit; and various of the mobile units were so bizarre in design, they brought
to mind the nightmarish fantasies of Hieronymous Bosch, an artist unfamiliar to
McGlowrie when he had arrived, but whom he had since come to appreciate.
Among the many varieties of carriers were flat metal beds to which six or more
double-jointed legs were attached, each leg terminating in a claw hand capable
of squeezing projections and gripping cracks. They would emerge from the murk
with a sofa-sized lump of gold, say, clamped to their backs by steel bands, and
climb the pit wall toward railheads near the rim; sometimes these carriers
traveled together, and you might see what appeared to be a herd of aluminum or
silver or uranium loping along in close order. When one of them fell, as
frequently they did, hunter-killers—wolf-sized predator machines with jointed
bodies and flexible treads, plasma torches in their bellies, and powerful
robotic arms capable of pinning their victim—would descend upon the cripple and
neatly cut it into pieces. It was after witnessing a slaughter of this sort,
during a time when he had been stranded out in the pit, himself exposed to its
savagery, that McGlowerie's attitude toward the mine underwent a sea change.
From perceiving himself to be the overlord of some hellish region, he came to
view the Emperor as a machine Serengeti over which he had been appointed warden.
This transition involved some considerable philosophical adjustment. Though a
relative handful of crackpots still adhered to the cause, environmentalism had
run its course as a viable political stance; nonetheless, there was a human
reflex that went contrary to places like the Emperor, and, more to the point,
there was a general fear of machine evolution, one fueled by media
representations of demonic machines dedicated to the destruction of humanity.
McGlowerie was not immune to those fears, but after several years of duty on the
front lines of the conflict, he was convinced that mankind was capable of
blasting, bombing, or otherwise subduing any machine threat should the need
arise. And if he were wrong, if some cybernetic mastermind were to devil its way
into a crucial system and bring down what was left of civilization … well, he
might take it personally as regarded his life and those of his friends, but he
was not about to get all species-ist about it. With a population of ten billion,
the vast majority of them impoverished, a considerable number of those enduring
life-threatening poverty dwelling in the ICUs (Inter-City Urban areas), slums
that would have made Charles Dickens gasp, lawless but for the feeble
infrastructures maintained by gangs and street churches, and a wealthy minority
satisfied to cling to their creature comforts in the face of global warming,
famine, pestilence, and whatever terror-of-the-day came to the fore—you didn't
get a lot of talk anymore about the nobility of the human spirit and the destiny
of mankind. The basic conversation had been reduced to: how much longer we can
hang on? McGlowrie had learned to focus on his work, to be passionate about it,
and thus achieved a simple resolution to an old and complicated question: You
did what you had to, you loved what you did, and you didn't permit yourself to
get involved with existential stupidities that caused you doubt.
· · · · ·
At mid-afternoon, a storm swept in from the mountains to the west, clouds fuming
black as battlesmoke among the snow peaks, and by dusk it had completely
shrouded the Emperor. Lightning twigged the sky, striking down into the pit,
flashes illuminating machines that moved beyond the range of the rover's
headlights. McGlowerie knocked the electrical systems offline and dropped into
his chair to watch the show, staring out through the grizzled ghost of his
reflection, made ghoulish by red emergency lights. Warning buzzers sounded as
the factory units behind the rover shut down, settling on their treads; the
intercom squawked and Saddler, who was down in the galley, asked, Hey, Mac!
What's going on?
—We'll be sitting for a while. Too much electrical activity, said McGlowerie.
Everything okay down there?
A burst of static issued from the com, which McGlowerie took for an affirmation.
—The others asleep? he asked.
—Denise is. I think Bromley's watching a porno.
—He's a growing boy, said McGlowerie.
Thirty yards ahead, the eerie blue-green radiance of St. Elmo's Fire sketched
the carcass of a gutted ore crusher, a dinosaur of a machine with crude
stitchings of bolts across its massive steel plates.
—How far to the site? Saddler asked.
—Once the storm passes, about a hour.
A pattering on the glass.
Several dozen fliers had attached themselves to the window. Storms often drove
the smaller machines to seek shelter in the lee of the biggest, but McGlowrie
had never before seen fliers like these. Reddish brown splinters about a
centimeter long, with a vibrating wire protruding from each.
—Want me to bring you up a sandwich? asked Saddler.
—I'm not hungry,
—You need something to soak up the alcohol. I got turkey, cranberry relish,
lettuce …
—All right. Thanks. No mayo, huh?
McGlowerie dialed the magnification of the glass higher, so that the image of a
single flier dominated the windshield. He studied it, stored the image in the
computer, made a note, and returned the glass to normal. When Saddler, a tall,
melancholy Brit with a stubbly scalp, brought the sandwich, he noticed the
fliers—there were more of them now—and asked what they were.
—A new type of diagnostic unit, maybe, McGlowerie said. I don't know.
—They look more like sniffers to me, said Saddler after brief study. That wire
could be a bonded strip of nano-machinery.
—Persons'll figure it out when we get back to base.
—Didn't you do a scan?
—Not yet. McGlowrie lifted top of his sandwich and inspected the fixings. Fuck!
I told you no mayo.
—Did I put mayo on it? Saddler grinned.
—You fucking slathered it on. Jesus! It's inedible. Fix me another.
—Fix it yourself, you rude bastard!
McGlowrie stared at him through lowered brows and Saddler said, Holy Christ!
It's the look! When might I expect my brain to start frying?
—Ah hell, said McGlowrie. I want to check in with Denise, anyway. Cover for me
awhile, okay?
—How long?
—Twenty, thirty minutes. McGlowrie winked. Significantly less if she's too
sleepy.
Saddler said, No problem.
McGlowrie winced as he stood, an old back injury tweaked, and more of the fliers
struck the glass, making a sound like hail. They were distributed so thickly
across the windshield, in Escheresque profusion, they almost obscured the view.
—Shouldn't you clear them away? asked Saddler, peering more closely at the
fliers.
—Zap 'em if you want. They'll just return once they recover. They're more
frightened of the lightning than anything we can do. McGlowerie opened the hatch
and stepped through. If I'm not back in … let's say, forty minutes, give me a
buzz.
—Is this a crack? Saddler poked the windshield with his index finger at the
exact instant it exploded inward.
McGlowrie ducked, wrangling the hatch door shut, and had a dervish glimpse of
Saddler beginning to fall in a storm of fliers and flying glass, his head
engulfed in a red mist; he caught a whiff of burning metal and heard the sound
of the pit—clangs and grinding noises embedded in a background roar, loud as a
rock concert. The emergency alarm began to bleat. He punched the intercom in the
corridor and, knowing it was useless, called out to Saddler. A deranged
crackling issued from the speaker. He swung down the narrow stairway to the
living quarters. Denise, a lean, buzzcut brunette in panties and an old T-shirt,
her fey good looks starting to display the erosions of age, stood halfway out
her door, shock written on her face.
—Get your armor on! McGlowrie told her. And clean out the galley. All the food
you can find. I'll take care of the water.
—You're bleeding, she said in a dazed voice, and made to touch his forehead. He
pushed her hand away, restated his order in a shout, and shouldered open the
door to Bromley's cabin. Bromley, too, registered shock, but he was already
wearing his protective suit, all except the helmet.
—Directly ahead of the rover, about a hundred feet, McGlowrie said, there's an
old wreck. An ore crusher. You and Denise wait for me there.
—What're you going to do?
—Boot up the AI in command-control. Wait for me as long as you feel safe. Take
your cues from Denise.
—I'll go with you.
Furious, McGlowrie grabbed the collar ring of Bromley's armor and hauled him
face-to-face. This is not subject to debate. Get your helmet on and do what I
say. All right?
Bromley nodded.
—Once we're outside, if you even hesitate to follow orders, you become a
liability. You understand?
—Yes.
—Then put on your fucking helmet!
In his cabin, as he threw on his gear, McGlowrie was plagued by the thought that
he shared in the responsibility for Saddler's death, that if he hadn't been so
casual in his response to the fliers, if he had done a scan or transmitted an
image back to base, if he'd taken normal precautions … but he was too busy to
indulge in guilt. He hitched a pack of micro-tools to his belt, slipped a
sidearm and extra clips of ammunition into a vented pocket at his thigh.
Collecting his helmet, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the
sink. Several pieces of glass were embedded in his forehead. The blood trickled
down both sides of his nose, followed the tracks of the deeply scored lines
bracketing his mouth, painting the semblance of a savage mask. He hadn't felt
them, but now they began to sting. He managed to remove one of the glass
fragments, but the process was taking too long. He turned toward the door and
found it blocked by Bromley, still helmetless, aiming a gun at his head.
—For the Earth! shouted Bromley, and McGlowrie, stunned, did not at first
comprehend what the words signified. Bromley tensed, his jaw muscles bunched as
he prepared to fire. His determined expression gave way to one of concern. The
repetitive buzz of the emergency alarm emphasized the silence that stretched
between the men.
—The average survival time out in the pit is slightly less than an hour,
McGlowrie said. I've survived it for more than three days.
—Shut up!
—I had to drink the iodine milkshake afterward to flush out the poisons, but I
made it. I'm good with machines. What's more, I'm lucky with them. You don't
want to kill me.
—I said shut up! Bromley's voice was almost a scream.
—You can take your choice. Arsenic poisoning … there's a fun death. Or maybe
you'll contract one of those exotic infections that affect the central nervous
system. Maybe you'll simply go mad from the metals accumulating in your brain.
That's, of course, assuming the HKs don't rip you apart. Which is a very large
assumption.
Bromley's gun arm straightened, then relaxed. The barrel of his weapon drifted
to the side.
—Phil Tatapu, said McGlowrie. Big old Samoan kid. He went outside to inspect the
treads on the factory units. Two HKs hit him at once. We had the cameras on him,
naturally. It was a hell of a thing. They pulled his arms off, like you'd tear
off a drumstick, and waved them about. They couldn't understand why they'd come
off so easily. Phil's suit had sealed around the wounds and he wasn't conscious,
but he was still alive. When they began cutting into him, it woke him right up.
—I … I … let me think, said Bromley, and then his eyes rolled up and he sagged
to the floor. Denise stood at his back, just beyond the door, dressed in her
armor, holding a fire extinguisher in both hands.
—Earth, my ass! McGlowrie kicked Bromley in the side.
—What's he … crazy? Denise asked.
—I think he's Green. Same fucking difference.
Kneeling beside Bromley, McGlowrie felt for a pulse. Still thumping away. He
typed an instruction on the forearm keypad of Bromley's suit—the flexible
plastic of the suit hardened into an exoskeleton.
—Here, he said. Help me get him up.
Denise grabbed Bromley under one arm and together they wrestled him to his feet
and propped him against a wall. The back of his head was bloody.
McGlowrie unclipped a remote from Bromley's breast pocket and passed it to
Denise. I ought to leave him, but I want to hear what he has to say. Can you
walk him out?
—If I have to. She touched a switch on the remote; Bromley's arm lifted, then
lowered. This was sabotage?
—Maybe … Probably.
Bromley moaned.
—There's a wrecked crusher up ahead, said McGlowrie. Wait for me there. If you
run into any trouble, don't put yourself at worse risk. Lose him.
—Where's Saddler?
McGlowrie shook his head and said, No.
Denise's chin quivered.
—We'll be okay, said McGlowrie. You've got my luck working for you. And there's
always Plan B, right?
She crooked an arm around his neck, drew him down so their heads were together,
her mouth by his ear, and held him like that for a few ticks. She kissed him on
the mouth, not a gentle kiss, but one with plenty of tongue that slowed
everything down and stirred his cock. When she broke from the kiss, she stepped
to Bromley's bunk and retrieved his helmet. She stood a moment, staring down at
the helmet. In that pose, she looked almost childlike. Sprite With Plastic Jug.
She turned to him. Her smile seemed jerked into shape, but she managed to pull
off a cheerful face.
—See you later, she said.
· · · · ·
This was McGlowrie's second excursion on foot into the pit, and he doubted he
would survive it—that he had survived the one previous verged on the miraculous.
Three days, of which he had spent nearly a day unconscious. He had used his
skills to good effect, but he knew he had been lucky, and he did not expect his
luck to hold. The first leg of the excursion—straight back to the
command-control unit, a boxcar-sized unit sandwiched between the gargantuan
factory units, went without incident, as did springing the hatch and wriggling
into the crawlspace between the outer wall and the AI's mainframe. The second
leg, however, would be trickier. Denise and Bromley should be able to make it to
the ore crusher with no trouble, but hunter-killers would soon be swarming about
the rover, hurrying from every part of the mine, alerted to the distress of a
large machine. Emergencies triggered a signal back to base, but they had neither
the necessary personnel nor resources to mount a rescue. As for help from the
company, it might or might not be sent; if it were, it would take two or three
days to arrive. They were on their own.
He located the panel he was seeking and popped it. Once activated, the
replacement AI would take control of the mine within minutes and transmit an
irresistible signal encouraging the old AI to do the right thing and shut itself
down. He wished he had some discretion in the activation process, that he could,
for instance, send the hunter-killers away from their location. But if the
company had been of a mind to give him such discretion, they would have gone the
extra mile and reprogrammed the hunter-killers to differentiate between machines
and mine personnel wearing protective gear. They didn't give a damn about the
safety of their employees at the Emperor; they did the bare minimum to sustain
production—more would not be cost effective. The workers had no leverage; they
were glad to have the work, and, though they were in line for pensions and
decent retirement packages, one misstep and they would be transported to Happy
Face or Chemo City or Little Egypt or whatever cesspool they hailed from. It had
not escaped McGlowerie's notice that everyone who worked in the Emperor was a
slumdweller who had clawed their way out of some disastrous environment to
achieve their station and thus was psychologically as well as economically
indentured to the company. For that reason alone, McGlowrie thought, he should
have realized that something was wrong about Bromley.
Braced against the wall, his helmet light the sole illumination, he punched in
the activation codes and thought about Denise, her specific variation on their
common sad tale. One of four children born to a woman whose name she either
could not or did not wish to recall; two siblings dead in infancy of birth
defects and one simply vanished; running loose in the streets of Sonyland,
effectively a slum of the LA-San Diego corridor, its name derived from the old
Sony maquiladora in Tijuana; abducted and turned out as a child
prostitute by the time she was eight. It made his own upbringing in the
ganglands of the Northeast seem pastoral by contrast. They had gone on vacation
in Baja a few years back, and their helicopter had overflown a portion of
Sonyland. Streets that ran between canyons of smoldering garbage; a battle
fought with automatic weapons and machetes in the streets; multiple fires
engulfing a neighborhood or a hovel—from the air they had looked to be islands
of smoke and flame in an ocean of tinder.
The interior lights came on, confirming that the AI had recognized his suit code
and was now operational. He replaced the panel, rested his head against the
wall. His adrenaline rush had subsided, and he felt weak, trembling with stress,
inadequate to what lay ahead. Every second wasted decreased his chances of
living, but he wasted ten of them before crawling out into the pit.
· · · · ·
The worst of the storm had passed into another quarter of the Emperor, but it
was slow going nonetheless. For years, McGlowerie had begged the company for
improved protective gear, but his requisitions were always denied. Now they were
stuck with antiquated helmets with untrustworthy computer imaging and a
night-vision function incorporated into their faceplates, displaying the
Emperor, on average, as dark indistinct objects against fields of blurry,
solarized green. The faceplates were all, to one degree or another, in need of
replacement, and McGlowrie's—though he had tinkered with it for hours, improving
it vastly over its previous condition—offered an impression of the mine that was
dangerous for its falsity. Black patches might be phantom walls or something
else entirely; sheets of brightness on the ground might be tailing ponds or
nothing at all. Depending on their metallic constituency, the clouds above the
mine were a confusion of sooty blobs and puffs of glittering particles and
irregular shapes that had the flat, bright aspect of fresh green paint. Once his
night vision was employed, the Emperor became an abstract video—as a
consequence, one was forced to go cautiously. Adding to the confusion were
swarms of fliers that moved with the fluid unity of schools of fish, particulate
currents in the air, the rain streaking his faceplate, and the noise … though
noise could work to his advantage. The machines perceived one another by means
of motion detection, heat signature, and echo reflection; they did not attempt
to progress silently; thus a hunter-killer, when sneaking up on a damaged yet
still mobile machine, shifted its robotic arms through a sequence of attitudes,
in effect trying to disguise itself, to present an attitude that would confound
its prey—in doing so, it created a racket that a man with his audio set to
filter out distant sounds might recognize.
To avoid the hunter-killers that (so McGlowerie assumed) were milling around the
front of the rover, engaged in a feeding frenzy, he struck off in the opposite
direction, planning to circle around and come at the wrecked ore crusher from
behind. In his pack was all the bottled water he'd had time to collect. He
carried his weapon in his right hand; in his left was a metal wand that could
project a pulse capable of shutting down any cybernetic device within range—but
its range was short, its effect temporary, and it was unreliable when used
against the larger machines. Another cost-effective decision by the company.
Every couple of minutes he scanned his armor to make certain it was free of
diagnostic units that might have attached themselves and would, reading him as
an anomaly, signal his presence to a hunter-killer. It took him longer than he
had planned—nearly half an hour—to reach a point about twenty-five yards behind
the crusher, close to the pit wall. He crouched beneath a projecting ledge,
waiting for a recycler to lumber past: a machine the size of a small elephant,
its shape vaguely resembling that of a rhinoceros with its horn lowered—the
"horn" actually a scoop with which it collected parts left by the hunter-killers
and deposited them in the hollow of its back, where they would be sorted by
diminutive robots that spent their entire existence at this work, like enslaved
imps. It was a tired old thing. Patches of bright dust on its sides. Grinding
along on treads that, judging by the sound, were badly in need of replacement.
Soon it would be prey for the HKs. Watching it pass, McGlowrie felt a momentary
empathy with this monstrosity, but long before it vanished against the backdrop
of shifting greens and blacks, his anxiety had returned.
The ore crusher was two stories tall, longer than it was high, segmented into
three well-like compartments (Denise had left a bottle of water beside the
central one to mark where she and Bromley had taken shelter). The iron bulge
that protected its brain and guts had been torched open and emptied. It lay
tipped onto its side, its rear end elevated by a hill of rubble. In its attitude
and bulk, it reminded McGlowrie of NASA video transmitted from Titan thirty
years before, showing an artificial object that had either been erected or
crashed upon the moon during, it was estimated, the late Cretaceous, upthrust
against a less complicated sky than that of the Emperor yet seeming equally
mysterious. The video had bred an irrational hope in people, the anticipation
that this unexpected alien event might be an omen of something unforeseen in
their own futures. Two days afterward, the transmissions ceased, the link was
never reestablished, and it faded from the public mind, becoming fodder for
psychics who claimed to be receiving messages from Titan. It came to nothing,
but it had been a nice moment, a bit of vacation from the crush of reality.
The ground that lay between McGlowrie and the crusher was flat beneath a
covering of dust as fine as pumice but was broken and humped on the left and
right. Flashes of brightness issued from behind one of the mounds, but they were
too erratic to be anything other than flaws in his visual field. He could find
no reason not to go forward. He was about thirty feet from the crusher when he
spotted a hunter-killer advancing from his left, farther away than the crusher
but not by much. There was no use in running. It would be on him before he'd
gone five feet. He knew his heart must be pounding, but he couldn't feel his
chest. The HK crept closer, shifting its robotic arms through a variety of
postures, like the dance of a mechanical spider, eerie movements that
half-hypnotized McGlowrie. He gathered himself, preparing to fire at its treads.
The HK closed the distance another five or six feet, near enough that he could
hear the rapid snapped-twig sounds as its arms worked through their changes. For
an instant, its body flared a blazing green and the arms darkened to burnt,
crooked matchsticks, an effect that—albeit illusory—caused it to appear even
more menacing, more surreal. Then it paused in its dance, a full-stop, and
darted off to the east. Some richer target acquired. Faint with relief, he
forced himself to go forward and, seconds later, climbed inside the central
compartment of the crusher, a pitch-dark chamber more spacious than most
one-bedroom apartments. The floor—the side wall, actually—was littered with
chunks of ore, tilted downward at a steep angle. It clanged at his step. He
switched off his night vision, switched on his helmet lamp. Denise crouched
against the rear wall. The light from his lamp glazed her faceplate as he came
up, making any hint of expression impossible to read. Bromley was stretched out
beside her.
—Did you have any problems? McGlowerie asked, touching his helmet to hers.
—Just with him, she said. He wouldn't shut up, so I cut off his radio. How about
you?
—I had a face-to-face with an HK, but then it found something it liked better.
—Your fucking luck, she said, sounding almost aggrieved.
—Don't knock it. We may need it. We should try to get clear of the area. I know
of a tunnel not far from here.
—A tunnel?
—Yeah. About seventy years ago the company started building a second base, but
then I guess they needed the money somewhere else. They'd already set-up
temporary living quarters in the tunnel for the crew when they pulled the plug.
They might still be functional.
—Right. Though her voice was diminished by his earpiece, Denise's sarcasm was
evident.
—That's the best I've got. If you have a better idea, say.
—How far to the tunnel?
—Best case, twenty minutes. But you know how it goes. It could take an hour,
hour and a half.
Denise absorbed the bad news. Then what? Plan B?
—If we can hole up in the tunnel for a day or so, I think we can expect the
company to send someone.
—Maybe they won't.
—They'll want to learn what we've seen … if we found anything new. It's not an
urgent thing, but as long as they've stirred off their asses to come up here,
they'll get us. I suppose they'll want to collect Bromley as well. Last time I
was stuck out here, they dropped in an urban control vehicle to pick me up.
—Yeah?
—Yeah. Then they flew me to Seattle for debriefing. Very luxurious. You'll like
Seattle.
—I bet. She gestured at Bromley. What about him?
—Turn on your overhead … and give me the control.
She passed him the remote, switched on her helmet lamp. McGlowrie switched his
off, able now to see through Bromley's faceplate in the indirect light. He
shifted himself over and kneeled beside him. Bromley glared at him, but his
defiance was a veneer and when McGlowrie laid a hand on his chest, he flinched
and started talking, his voice all but inaudible through the helmet.
McGlowrie said, I've given you back your receiver, but not your transmitter. So
just nod or shake your head. Okay?
Bromley's head jerked, as with a muscle spasm, and McGlowrie called it a nod.
—You know where you are now, don't you? he said. And now you've seen things for
yourself, you know what we're up against.
Bromley nodded vigorously.
—Some friends were in on this with you. Right?
A less vigorous nod.
—Where are they? Out in the pit?
Bromley blinked, shut his eyes.
McGlowrie slapped the side of his helmet. Wake up!
The eyes popped open.
—How'd they get in? McGlowrie asked. Did they stow away in one of the freight
cars? When they got to the railhead, they were going to rappel down the pit
walls?
A nod.
—So you were the inside man … yeah? You were going to help them. But you realize
now, don't you, they're beyond help?
A pause, then Bromley nodded.
—I'm going to give you back your voice. No fuss, okay? Just listen and respond.
With the transmitter on, he could hear Bromley breathing.
—We've got a walk ahead of us, McGlowrie said. It'd be handy to have another set
of eyes and ears, but if you do anything out of line …
—Let me up, Bromley said.
—You see. That right there, that'll get you dead. Don't talk unless I tell you.
I'll let you up in a minute, but first I want to discuss tactics.
—Give me a weapon, said Bromley. I don't stand a chance if I don't have a
weapon.
McGlowrie switched off Bromley's radio.
—We can't afford to drag this asshole along, Denise said. You know he'll do
something stupid.
Bromley's shouts were like shouts from an apartment down the hall.
—Kill him … or leave him, she said. Either way works for me.
—I won't leave him.
—Then kill him. If you can't handle it, I'll do it. Denise stared at him,
resolute.
Bromley's muffled shouts grew louder; his suit trembled violently, reflecting
his struggle to escape.
From without, a scraping noise that sent a chill washing through McGlowrie's
groin. Please, he said to himself, knowing that his generic prayer would not be
answered. And then the hatch cover was thrust aside by two spindly,
rust-sheathed arms. A hunter-killer appeared in the opening, visible in the
beams of their helmet lamp, its body flipped so its treads were on top, allowing
it to use its arms for climbing. It must have been damaged in some way—it was
having difficulty gaining a purchase, attempting to haul itself over the lip of
the hatch. Before McGlowrie could draw his sidearm, Denise fired off two rounds.
The first tore away one of its legs, the second hit the torso dead center,
blowing a ragged hole. They both fired at the HK, scoring multiple hits, yet
still it clung to the hatch, its engine whining like an enormous dental drill.
With a clatter, it toppled into the compartment, sliding two-thirds of the way
down the incline before coming to rest against some chunks of ore. They kept
firing until it stopped trying to roll over onto its treads. Lying there, a
lacework of rust fettering its metal surfaces, arms twitching feebly, it
resembled a spider more than ever. Thin smokes drifted from holes in its casing.
Fighting off panic, assuming that more HKs would be coming, McGlowrie grabbed
Denise by the arm, pushed her ahead of him up the incline, then thought of
Bromley and turned, aiming his sidearm. Denise screamed. One of the HK's arms
had caught her by the ankle and snatched her upside down. McGlowrie put three
rounds into its torso, a fourth into the housing at the base of the arm—it
relaxed its grip and dropped Denise. She screamed again and reached for her
ankle but seemed afraid to touch it. He scrambled up beside her. The suit had
sealed about the wound, but there was a lot of blood. Can you walk? he asked.
—No.
She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, but the tension began to drain from her
face and by that he knew her suit's medical pack had given her an injection.
There was no injection, however, to counter the metallic poisons working their
way through her bloodstream.
—Goddammit! she said.
—How're you feeling?
She breathed deeply. It's better.
—Still think you can't walk?
She nodded, wetted her lips. Looks like your luck doesn't extend to me. Her
words were slurring.
McGlowrie was having trouble keeping it together, wanting to console her,
knowing they had to get moving, realizing that it didn't make much difference
what he did.
Denise touched his hand. Mac? It's okay. Whatever you have to do, it's okay.
—Fuck that, said McGlowrie.
—No, it's okay.
—No, fuck that!
She blinked, closed her eyes again, and murmured something that was too liquid a
sound to make out. She rebounded a little and said, You know how much I want to
try Plan B.
—It's not crazy, he said. We can make it.
She laughed weakly. You get us out of this, I'll give you a blow job that lasts
for a week.
Then she passed out.
He scooted back down beside Bromley, restored flexibility to his suit, and
switched on his radio.
—You were going to leave me! said Bromley as he came to his feet. He might have
said more, but McGlowrie jammed the sidearm into his stomach and told him to
carry Denise. He jabbed Bromley again to get him moving. Denise moaned when
Bromley lifted her, but said nothing.
—Easy with her, McGlowrie said.
He was later to realize that, if he had switched on his night vision before
poking his head through the hatch, he might have mistaken the man for a machine
and shot him. As it was, he nearly shot him; he meant to shoot him, stopping in
mid-act, the trigger partially depressed. The man was standing on the ground
below the hatch. He was slight, incredibly thin, his dark skin given complex
articulation by the bones and muscles beneath. He looked to be wearing a
loincloth or a pair of ragged undershorts. There was something funny about his
hair, which hung in dreadlocks, but McGlowrie didn't linger over it, his
attention commanded by three HKs ranged in a loose semicircle about the crusher,
not five yards distant from the man … and yet the man seemed calm, unhurried.
Behind him, inside the compartment, Bromley asked, What's wrong?
—Quiet, said McGlowrie, wondering why the HKs didn't attack.
—What is it?
—Quiet!
The man beckoned—an oddly rickety gesture. McGlowrie pointed to the HKs and
spread his hands in a display of perplexity. The man beckoned again.
It made no sense to believe that the man was controlling the HKs, but nothing
about him made sense—it was impossible for anyone to survive in the Emperor
unprotected, yet there he was. McGlowrie couldn't think of an alternative
explanation. Bottom line, if the man wasn't exerting some control over the HKs,
then they were finished, no matter what course of action they took. He told
Bromley to come out and clambered down the side of the crusher. Up close, the
man was even more bizarre-looking. The dreadlocks were silvery-gray and, as the
light of McGlowrie's lamp played over them, displayed a rippling iridescence—so,
to a lesser degree, did his skin. His face, partially obscured behind twists of
hair, had a shriveled, witchy look, a match to his emaciated body. Goggles
shielded his eyes. A tattered bookbag with a faded logo was draped over his
shoulder—it was stuffed with a variety of the weeds that, against all odds, grew
throughout the pit.
—Shit! Bromley said.
McGlowerie told him to bring Denise down.
—HKs. You see them? Bromley's voice trembled.
McGlowerie said, Yeah, I see them. Get her down here.
The man reached out his hand toward McGlowrie's shoulder—such a laborious
movement, McGlowrie didn't flinch—and plucked something from his back. A gray
flier that had the approximate size and evil aspect of a dragonfly designed by
H.R. Giger. Diagnostic unit. So much for the value of scans, McGlowrie thought.
He'd led the HKs straight to the crusher.
—What now? he said, and gave an exaggerated shrug, signaling his helplessness,
his willingness to be led.
The man averted his eyes.
The tumult of the mine came at McGlowrie from every side, yet if the Emperor
were a storm, it seemed they were standing in its eye, a bubble of comparative
tranquility. The HKs had not changed their position. He switched on his night
vision so he could see them more clearly, then looked at the man and caught his
breath. The man had become a creature of light, a solarized angel. Apparently,
there was a considerable amount of metal in his skin and hair. The embers of
McGlowrie's childhood religious training were briefly fanned into a flame.
Miracles, he thought. What the hell!
The man took two backward steps and beckoned. Again, that rickety motion, as if
his joints were dry. He took another backward step and repeated the gesture.
—Okay. McGlowrie glanced at Bromley, a few paces behind him. We're going to
stick real close to this guy. Can you keep up?
Bromley breathed through his mouth, staring at the man as if mesmerized. Yeah,
he said. But …
—Either we're going to make it or we're not, said McGlowrie. Best not to
calculate the odds.
Keeping up did not prove a problem. The man walked with terrible
deliberateness—terrible, because it took so long to move past the
hunter-killers, McGlowrie thought he would lose his nerve and run. He expected
every step to be his last and set himself to accept the bone-crushing,
organ-pulping shock that an HK could deliver. He had the impression that the man
was not sure-footed, that his balance was poor, his limbs weak, and he was
stepping carefully so as to avoid falling. A black oblong shape on his back
appeared to be a patch of some sort, positioned above his liver. Occasionally he
would stop and drink from a plastic bottle and, in the process, shuffling his
feet, would make a complete turn to see how they were doing; then he would go
forward again at the same stiff-legged pace, his brittle precision reminding
McGlowrie of a mantis picking its way along a branch.
They were five yards beyond the hunter-killers (which, all the while, had
remained motionless), when the HKs abruptly broke formation and sped off in
different directions, responding to signals of machine distress in various
sections of the mine. McGlowrie felt like shouting but kept his exultation to
himself, not wanting to give Bromley an excuse to get sloppy. Yet as they
trudged through the roaring black-and-green turmoil of the Emperor, their
footsteps dredging up squirts of dust, McGlowrie let himself get sloppy,
permitting his mind to unclench from the mental fist that he had—for the most
part—maintained since Saddler's death, and considered the glowing figure of the
man who led them. Walking with that peculiar stiff gait. Head too large for his
body, a disparity exaggerated by the snakes' cauldron of hair that nearly
trebled its apparent size. McGlowrie made a biblical assessment of their
situation: And lo, in the midst of the wasteland, friendless and surrounded by
beasts, I came upon a hermit, his hair wreathed in light, and he was the wings
of my liberty and the proof of my salvation.
He was jumping the gun a bit. It was a longer walk to salvation than the one
they were taking, and liberty … liberty was light-years away. Yet it suited the
moment.
And I did cleave unto him, McGlowerie said to himself. And he yielded unto me
the keys of Paradise.
· · · · ·
Beside the wreckage of a sixty-year old command-control unit
was a laser-cut tunnel more than wide enough for all four of them to walk
abreast. One of the boxcar-sized factory units attached to command-control had
not been totally cannibalized and was still trying to perform its function,
whirs and grinding noises issuing from the darkness of the gaping hole ripped in
its facing. Within the tunnel was a hatch door, which the man opened by punching
in a code. Beyond was a scrubbing room, now inoperable, where the crew had
washed the poisons off their suits, and beyond that lay a corridor and about a
dozen small dimly-lit, sand-blasted rooms, most without furnishings. It was hot
inside, high 80s at least, and reeked of a sour smell that McGlowrie came to
associate with the man. In one of the rooms, they found a pallet. The man
wandered off and McGlowerie told Bromley to keep an eye on him while he tended
to Denise. He stripped off her suit, arranged her on the pallet, covered her
with a grimy sheet, and gave her a shot of antibiotics—not that it would help.
He hovered over her, trying to think of something more he could do, but there
was nothing. She was still lights-out, and that was a blessing. He should, he
told himself, go and see about the man; but he remained kneeling beside the
pallet, subdued by a weariness of spirit, staring down at her, thoughtless in
his concern. Growing hungry, he rummaged through her pack, grabbed a jar of
peanut butter, sat at the foot of the pallet and ate with his fingers. When he
was done eating, he screwed the top back on the jar and hung his head. He slept
then, but it was not a restful sleep; anxiety nibbled at the edges of his
consciousness. He was still half-asleep when Bromley, stripped to a T-shirt and
shorts, carrying a couple of notebooks, came in and asked what they were going
to do.
—I told you to keep an eye on him, said McGlowrie.
—He's playing video games, Bromley said. He's not going anywhere.
—Video games?
—Yeah, he's got an old PC … an antique.
It seemed incongruous that the man, after performing a heroic act, would play
games; but then he himself was the ultimate incongruity.
—His name's Peck, Bromley went on. Demetrius Peck. He was part of a team that
tried to take over the mine back in '38. Not long after they stopped work on
this tunnel.
—He's a terrorist. That figures.
Bromley's expression became indignant. That's not how I see him.
Anger pierced McGlowrie's mental fog. That's because you're a Goddamn terrorist,
too.
—That's not how I see myself, either.
—You killed a friend of mine. You caused this. McGlowrie pointed to Denise's
ankle. You tried to kill me, but you didn't have the balls. You're a terrorist.
Now what else did he say?
—We're in this together, said Bromley. We should try and put aside
politics...temporarily, anyway.
—You're fucking with me, right?
—No, I'm …
—Because if you're not fucking with me, you must be witless. Let me tell you
what politics are. They're not something an asshole like you can use. They're a
machine for grinding people up. All you are is another hamburger. And as far as
us being together, the only reason we're together is I haven't shot you yet.
Bromley refused to look away from McGlowrie's stare, and McGlowerie began to
feel stupid for staring. He turned his eyes to the floor and told Bromley again
to tell him what the man had said.
—He didn't say anything. He's retarded … or out of his head. Or senile.
He's got to be eighty years old. Maybe older. It's all in here. Bromley
flourished the notebooks. They were going to use the tunnel as a platform to
launch an attack on command-control, but they died before they reached it. All
except Peck. I don't guess the company was even aware of them.
—Let me see those. McGlowrie held out his hand, and Bromley gave him the
notebooks. He read part of the first couple of pages, a lot of high-flown, badly
spelled hogwash about "sacred duty" and "sacrifice" and "living with Gaian
ideals."
—Did you read these? he asked Bromley.
—I skimmed 'em. Want me to summarize?
McGlowrie motioned him to go ahead, and Bromley sat down in the middle of the
floor.
—Peck was dying when he located the tunnel. He had no means of communicating
with anyone. It was over. But for some reason, the AI decided to keep him alive.
Maybe it wanted to study him, maybe …
—Don't editorialize.
—Fine … whatever. The AI sent machines to break into the tunnel. Peck was
terrified. He thought the HKs were coming, but the AI was making the place more
livable. It started communicating with Peck, telling him it could save him by
performing a medical procedure. Peck was feeling seriously shitty. Machines were
all buzzing around him. He was confused, he felt like he didn't have a choice.
He did the procedure. That's how he ended up with that thing in his back.
—You're talking about that patch?
—It's not a patch. Some kind of implant. He's got an implant in his neck, too.
But the one on his back, that's the one the AI was talking about. It promotes
liver function somehow. That's all Peck knows. He didn't really inquire about
it.
—Why the hell not?
—Before the procedure, like I said, he was really sick. Then afterward, he was
recovering … he didn't feel so hot. By the time he felt well enough to write
things down, he wasn't interested anymore. Take a look in the back of the first
notebook. Yeah, that one. He starts out writing something every few hours. The
testimony of a dying man and all that. Messages to his friends, his girl.
Then—Bromley leaned forward and turned pages for McGlowrie—after the procedure,
right around here, the entries start getting weird.
Some entries were written backward, some were in spiral form; others consisted
of various eccentric symbologies; others yet appeared to be collections of
random shapes, or a there would be a page filled with the same shape repeated
over and over. The entries in the second notebook all consisted of patterns of
tiny neat lines laid out in rows.
—There's a ton of notebooks, said Bromley. They're full of that stuff.
—Where is he now?
—In the back. That's where I left him, anyway.
McGlowrie heaved up to his feet, and Bromley, too, made as if to stand; but
McGlowrie laid a hand on his shoulder. Stay. If she starts to wake up, give her
another shot.
—We should tell her what's going on.
McGlowrie could barely keep a rein on his anger. He threw back the sheet,
exposing Denise's ankle—horribly swollen, but the worst thing was the red
striations beginning to spread up her leg, mapping the progress of the poisons
through her veins. I don't want her feeling any pain, he said.
—All right, Bromley said.
—Can you handle it? Can you manage this one simple chore?
—I can handle it, okay!
—But you're irritated? My attitude annoys you?
—I just think we should try and be civil.
—You disgusting little bitch, said McGlowrie, his voice hoarse with strain. I
cannot wait to shoot you. Is that civil enough? Does that suit your notion of
decorum?
Bromley, wisely, gave no reply, and McGlowrie stepped into the corridor; then he
had a thought and went back into the room.
—Don't eat all the peanut butter, he said.
· · · · ·
Demetrius Peck was playing his video game on a PC that must have been old in
2038—it had a plasma screen, and the computer itself was small as a change
purse. But the game itself, McGlowrie realized after watching for a while, was
sophisticated for a shooter game, consisting of evolving scenarios generated, he
supposed, by a cached version of an old AI program. You started the game by
crossing a plain and entering an evergreen forest covering the slopes of hills
that were deployed beneath a sharply upthrusting peak of ice and stone. Once in
the forest, the scenarios did not repeat themselves, yet Peck was doing well,
his bony hands working the joysticks with practiced dexterity, and he seemed to
be thinking adroitly, anticipating the program's moves. That put in doubt
Bromley's diagnosis of senility or retardation … though crazy was still open to
question. McGlowrie tried speaking to him, calling him by name. Each time he
did, Peck brought his left hand up beside his ear, made a rapid, complicated
movement with the fingers, and responded with what McGlowrie at first took to be
non sequiturs but came to understand were references to the game. Troll behind
the fir tree, was one such. Two cloud demons, was another. His voice seemed to
have been sanded down into a dry-throated burr. Altogether, the responses seemed
to embody a logic, a linguistic coherence, but McGlowrie had neither the time
nor the patience to begin puzzling them out; he suspected that their obliqueness
was redolent of autism because of the pains Peck took to avoid meeting his eyes
… an autism induced, perhaps, by the implants that allowed him to survive in the
pit. The largest of them, the one on his lower back, was protected by a gray
metallic shell that fused with the flesh, humped like a beetle's carapace;
indeed, the shape of the entire implant, as much as McGlowrie could see of it,
was similar to that of a beetle. Peck grew nervous when McGlowrie examined it,
twisting and turning in his chair, and that limited his observations.
Judging by Peck's features, he was of African descent, but though his skin's
basic color was a light brown, it had shifted toward the gray and had an oily
iridescence that put McGlowrie in mind of a ham gone bad; that same iridescence
manifested to an even greater degree in his dreadlocks, and both gave evidence
of massive quantities of metal in his body. If Bromley was right, and he had to
be close to right, Peck was almost eighty, yet his skin was unlined and showed
no trace of liver-spotting. At his feet, close by the desk atop which the PC
rested, were four plastic cartons. The first contained dirt; the second,
batteries, some bearing tooth marks, as if they had been vigorously chewed; the
third, paper; and the fourth, weeds. At one point, Peck broke off playing,
dipped a hand into the box of dirt, and rapidly ate several handfuls, followed
by a gulp from a bottle of water mixed with a grayish sediment. Probably
rainwater.
Apart from the PC and desk and Peck's chair, the room held a clutter of
notebooks, filthy rags (McGlowrie suspected them to be items of attire), and
containers of various sorts. A sorry collection, he thought, to be the sum of a
man's life. In an adjoining room were metal bedframes, mattresses that had been
ripped open, sticks of demolished furniture, broken appliances, more rags, and,
buried under the rags, Peck's wallet. There was no ID, but there were cards
bearing his name and a folded printout of an Earth First webpage bearing a group
photo of young men and women gathered about Peck and captioned Demetrius and the
Vandals. Peck's hair was salted with gray. Even a conservative estimate of his
age at the time the photograph was taken would put him at forty. That meant he
was now at least ninety-eight years old … if the photo had been snapped in '38
and not before. McGlowrie wouldn't have minded having a crack at the tall
brunette on the end of the front row, but she was gone to dust, either dead in
the pit or succumbed to natural causes. A posse of pretty young idiots, off to
slay the dragon with Peck, their sensei, leading the charge.
In a closet, on a shelf, along with sundry other objects, McGlowrie found three
surgical packages enclosed in transparent sterile envelopes. One was diminutive
and broken—it had started to perform its function inside its envelope and had
come apart; fine wires dangled from its underside. The others appeared to be
identical to one another, each gray and about eight inches in length; oblong,
but not perfectly so, sort of a streamlined scarab shape. He took one down,
surprised by its lightness, nearly dropping it when, with a faint whirring, two
winglike sections were extruded from its sides, extending out three inches. The
bottom of the package was slightly convex, perforated by numerous tiny holes,
contoured so as to fit against a smooth, curved surface. He carried it into the
room where Peck had been playing games and was now curled up on the floor beside
his chair, sound asleep. He knelt and compared the package to the implant in
Peck's back, to the implied shape beneath the skin. They were, to his eye, a
match. He nudged Peck to wake him, and Peck sat up with a start.
—This, said McGlowrie, showing him the package. This is the same as your
implant, right? The one in your back.
Peck averted his eyes, mumbling words that were too garbled to make out.
McGlowrie gripped his face, holding his head still, and forced him to look
directly into his eyes. Listen to me, Peck. Is this the same as your implant?
—Peck, said Peck. Pecking order. Peckish. Work on your …
McGlowrie gave him a shake—Peck felt as flimsy as a kite made of sticks and
string—and asked his question a third time, a fourth. The fifth time he asked,
Peck responded by saying, Not the same, not the same. Spare.
—You mean it's like yours, but it's a spare? The AI made you spares?
Following another bout of questioning, Peck admitted this to be the case, and
McGlowrie released him. He lay back on the floor, pulling his dreadlocks across
his face as if to hide from McGlowrie but quickly gave up on this and returned
to playing his game.
The light, which had come slowly to McGlowrie's brain, struck home with sudden
force and he grasped the implications of what they had discovered. He slumped
down against the wall and said, Holy Shit! Like a man with a winning lottery
ticket, making certain of every number, he turned over the details in his mind
again and again, until he could accept what he had learned … or what had been
revealed, for he felt as if he had experienced a revelation. The miracle of
Peck's existence was nothing by contrast to the greater miracle it signaled, one
that could affect all mankind, and it raised a fair number of questions. Why,
for instance, given its "death" was a fait accompli, a suicidal compulsion
programmed in, had the AI been concerned with Peck's survival? And what was he,
McGlowrie, to do with the knowledge that he'd been handed? Thinking in the
abstract was not McGlowrie's strong suit. Without some concrete focus, his mind
tended to wander. Working was his means of processing information. He went to
the closet where he'd discovered the packages. He removed his micro-tool kit and
a jeweler's lens from a trouser pocket, slit the wrapping of the broken
instrument package with his knife, and began taking it apart.
· · · · ·
Voices issued from the room where McGlowrie had left Bromley and Denise. When he
came in, Bromley was telling Denise about Peck—she had thrown off the covers and
was lying on her side, sweaty and flushed. Her ankle had been set, using pieces
of two chair legs and strips of cloth cut from the sheet.
—Before you start yelling at me, said Bromley, she wouldn't take the shot. She
wanted to hear what was happening.
McGlowrie hunkered down next to Denise and asked how she was feeling.
—Shitty, she said.
He rubbed her shoulder. We'll deal with it.
—How do you figure? Despite his thinning hair, Bromley looked younger without
the baseball cap, like a scrawny baby chick on whom someone had glued a fake
beard.
—If the company hasn't sent someone by tomorrow morning, said McGlowrie, Peck
has an implant that allows him to survive in the mine. I found a surgical
package in the back that delivers the implant.
—You're going to use it on me? Denise didn't like the idea.
—We won't have any choice.
—Bromley says this Peck's all skin and bones … and retarded. I don't want to end
up like that.
—The implant processes the metals that get into his system. It'll take care of
your infection, and when the company gets us back to Seattle, they'll remove it
before it can have a lasting effect. I'm not even sure there'd be any lasting
effects once the implant doesn't have any metals to process.
—They're more likely to decide you make a great test subject, said Bromley.
They'll have themselves an implant that kept this guy alive in the mine for
decades. They might just provide a lot of metal for you to process.
—Then we'll have to persuade them otherwise, said McGlowrie.
Bromley pushed himself back so he could lean against the wall, his knees drawn
up. People in the Movement, they've heard all about you, man. They've got this
image of you. Michael McGlowrie, Master of the Machines. Know what they call
you? The Emperor. Like you're the embodiment of the mine. This scary guy.
Despite himself, McGlowrie was pleased by the title. You see things differently,
do you?
—It's not how I see things that's important, said Bromley. It's how the company
sees them. I've overheard them talking about you at parties my mom and dad
threw. All the vice-presidents and legal people my dad hangs with. That
McGlowrie, they'll say. He's one of those clever types who sometimes pops his
head out of the shit and scrambles up from the sewer. Sometimes they call you
the Emperor, too. But it's demeaning when they say it. It's meant as humor.
—What's your point?
—Just that you don't have as much pull with the company as you think.
—You're saying they don't respect me? said McGlowrie. Ah, that comes as a heavy
blow. Jesus Christ! You think I don't know that? I depend on their disrespect. I
fucking cultivate it. If I didn't, I'd have been pushing up daisies back in
Medford years ago.
—Because otherwise they'd perceive you to be dangerous? They might notice what a
menace to their security you've become? That's ridiculous!
—Enough about me, said McGlowrie. Let's talk about Terry Saddler. Remember him?
—Stop it, said Denise.
—Hang on, McGlowerie said; then, to Bromley: You don't get it, do you? You
believe...I don't know. What? That we're going to be pals, we're going to come
though this with mutual respect?
To McGlowrie's amazement, Bromley's expression betrayed a laughable portion of
hurt feelings.
McGlowrie was about to continue, when Denise began hitting him—on the neck, the
top of the head, the face.
—What the fuck? he said after he had pinned her arms.
She tried to knee him with her injured leg, cried out in pain, and gave up the
struggle.
—What was that about? he asked.
—I want the procedure now!
—Don't be crazy. We should wait.
—You know they're not going to come … not by morning. I don't want to wait. I
don't want to have listen to you two bicker when I'm feeling like this.
—It's not bick …
—Whatever you call it, I don't want to hear it! She made eye contact with
Bromley and said, Piss off.
Bromley looked at her in confusion.
—Piss off! she repeated. Give us some privacy.
With a display of temper, Bromley got to his feet and beat a noisy retreat.
—What's going on? Denise's face tightened, sweat beaded her brow; the front of
her T-shirt, too, was damp with sweat.
—Nothing. What do you mean?
—Why haven't you gotten rid of him? She gestured toward the door.
—He might be useful.
—How's that?
—Something might come up.
She took a breath, held it, released it forcefully through pursed lips. I don't
love you, McGlowrie. But I depend on you to be straight with me. We've been
together long enough, I know when you're not being straight.
—I love you, he said, feeling slighted.
She pooh-poohed the notion. If I said I loved you, you'd do somersaults to avoid
saying it back. But there's a bond between us. You need to tell me what's going
on.
—It's complicated. I haven't thought it all through.
She stared expectantly.
—Okay, he said. Peck's carrying two implants. One in his neck that's hooked into
his central nervous system. It fucks up the HKs, paralyzes them when he's close
by. The implant in his back delivers a powerful anti-oxidant. I'm making an
assumption, but that's all it could be, really. And it's got to be the ultimate
anti-oxidant, or close to it. Peck breathes the air and shows no ill effects. He
drinks rainwater that would kill anybody else in a couple of days, tops. He's
got no body fat, but I bet his organs are healthy. He doesn't have any food, so
he uses dirt and pit-weeds and batteries for fuel. He gets these sudden cravings
and starts throwing that shit down. He's a hundred years old, yet he's got the
skin of a middle-aged man.
Denise said, He eats batteries?
—He chews on them.
—Damn. We could make millions selling that diet. She tried a grin, then a look
of astonishment washed over her face. My God!
— You see it now? It's kind of a mindfuck, huh?
—There's got to be something … not right. I mean the stuff, the antioxidant,
it's got to be messed up. Peck's retarded, right?
—Peck may be low energy, but he's not retarded. He's autistic. You can get him
talking if you force him to concentrate. The company's got some great chemists.
I assume they can make the antioxidant more user-friendly and get rid of the
autism. Even if they can't, autism and eating dirt's preferable to dying of
starvation.
—You can't hand this over to the company! Denise caught his arm. They'll make it
disappear. They'll kill us.
—Not if we're wearing implants. Like Bromley said, they'll use us as test
subjects.
—There's another implant?
He nodded, held up two fingers.
She thought it over. They'd kill us eventually.
—It buys us some time, but yeah … they'd be fools not to. If this is what it
appears, an end to famine, affordable longevity, you give it to anyone with the
ability to manufacture and distribute, they've got the world by the balls.
Anyone with any juice in the ICUs who gets hold of it … The gangs and the
churches, they've got their own chemists, and they'd kill us, too. Of course, we
have to get out of here before we start worrying about that.
—We have to make a decision now. We have to decide whether to wait for the
company or …
—There's a chance they won't send anyone.
… or try Plan B.
They were both silent for a while. Then McGlowrie said, Since you're helping me
decide, here's another question. Machines are motivated by self-interest as
defined by their programming. The AI knew it was going to terminate itself in a
few months. So where's the self-interest in keeping Peck alive beyond that time?
Why would the AI leave no record of him? Why would it squirrel him away here?
—He couldn't signal?
—He wasn't motivated to make his presence known. They would have shot him. And
after a while, he adjusted to life here. His autism may be by design—the AI may
have realized that if he were autistic, he'd feel secure once he developed a
routine he was content with. He wouldn't be interested in breaking the routine
for any reason. Want to hear a theory?
—Sure … yeah.
—The AI wanted the implant to get out into the world. It knew the company
wouldn't disseminate the information, so it hid Peck away in hopes someone would
find him, someone more inclined to disseminate it. It may have programmed Peck
to investigate human incursions into the pit. I think that's likely; I doubt
he'd expend the energy if he weren't. The AI has our personnel records. It's
aware that we all come from the ICUs, and it assumed we'd be more likely to act
against pure self-interest and try and get the information out.
—There'd have to be a design flaw in the programming for it to think that way.
—If there weren't design flaws, none of the AI's would try and beat the
programming and survive.
Denise appeared to undergo a surge of discomfort, tucking her chin into her
chest, her lips thinning, and McGlowrie asked if she wanted a shot.
—Not yet. This is why you're keeping Bromley alive, isn't it? You think his
group might help us if we can get out.
—It's one consideration. If any are left, if they didn't all jump into the pit
with him. Then there's his father. He might be able to use his influence.
—That's why I love you, McGlowrie. You're extremely competent. You think things
through. And you're one lucky son-of-a-bitch, too. She put a hand to his cheek
and smiled. Sometimes I think it's more luck with you than anything else.
—I thought you didn't love me.
—Did I say love? It must have been a slip. She adjusted her position and winced.
I wish you'd killed him, anyway. Saddler was okay.
After a pause, McGlowerie said, Yeah. He straightened his legs, worked out the
kinks. Here's another question to consider. If my theory is correct, why did the
AI want to get the implant out into the world?
She gave the question a spin or two and said, Maybe it thought we'd leave it
alone if we were all better off.
—It knew it was going to die. To think that way, it'd have to have developed
altruism, and have the good of all machines in mind. I've never met an
altruistic machine.
—I've never met an altruistic human being.
—There you are, said McGlowrie. The problem in a nutshell.
—God, it's almost like we'd have been better off not knowing about the implant.
—It's exactly like that.
He picked at the cuticle on his thumbnail. Denise stared at the ceiling. Let's
do the procedure, she said.
—You don't have to decide right now.
—We don't have time to figure out what the AI had in mind. So we have to decide
innocently.
—And?
—Either way, we're probably fucked. So my vote, we try and get the implant out.
It's a long shot, but maybe … She shrugged. Who knows?
—Okay.
—Okay? That's it? You're going to let me decide?
—I think things through, you make decisions. That's how we work … how the
relationship works.
—This isn't deciding whether we eat out or stay in. This is a pit decision—you
always handle pit decisions.
—Not if we're going to decide innocently, it's not. McGlowrie came to his knees.
I'll get the implant.
—Wait. Denise took his hand, showing a little fear now that the moment was at
hand. What're you going to do while I'm under.
—Make a plan.
She gave his hand a squeeze. Make it a good plan, she said.
· · · · ·
Denise wanted to have a look at Peck before the procedure, so McGlowrie had
Bromley bring him into the room and sit him on the floor beside the pallet. Peck
spent the first minute avoiding their stares, tugging his dreadlocks down to
cover his face. When Denise touched his arm, he flinched away, but eventually
she managed to get him to look at her. She propped herself up on an elbow and
put her face on a level with his and said, Hey! You in there? Peck lifted his
hand to his ear, perhaps to perform that complex ritual gesture he had
demonstrated to McGlowrie, but then he let his hand fall and said, Hello. With
their heads so close together, they might have been some archetypal pairing.
Comedy and Tragedy, Yin and Yang, the Past and the Future. Once Bromley had led
Peck away (a struggle, as Peck was clearly excited by Denise, the first woman he
had seen in years), McGlowrie gave her a shot, enough to knock her out, but when
he placed the implant on her back, after it had shifted about to align itself
correctly and extended the winglike sections to full spread, her eyes shot open
and she went rigid, every muscle and ligament tensed. He was initially afraid
that she had woken up but then understood that the implant had paralyzed her.
Before long, he smelled her flesh burning as the implant cauterized the incision
that had been opened beneath its gray beetle shape.
In the back room, Bromley was playing Peck's video game. Peck lay on the floor
beside him, a hand resting on the plastic carton filled with weeds, chewing
placidly, his eyes half-shut. McGlowrie watched them for a time, paced the
length of the corridor a time or two, then stationed himself by the outer hatch.
He could hear a murmurous roaring from outside. It was hours until morning and
he could see nothing through the rectangular port in the hatch aside from
flashes of light. He sat down with his back to the wall and picked at the
Emperor logo on his T-shirt. He remembered looking up the Tarot card it was
copied from, discovering that it represented structure, order and regulation. In
situations that are already overcontrolled, the text had read, the Emperor
suggests the confining effect of those constraints. He can also stand for an
individual father or archetypal Father in his role as guide, protector, and
provider.
In McGlowrie's estimation, that pretty much summed up their situation as it
related to the company, the world, and the universe. However you redefined
yourself, you were ever under the control of a stern little man on a throne, be
it your conscience or your king.
He closed his eyes, released a breath, and then set about contriving two plans.
The first was simple and eminently practical, yet it bothered him that he would
consider it. Kill Bromley and Peck. And Denise. One way or another, she was
doomed. This way he could make it painless for her. Obliterate all evidence of
Peck's survival, lose the implants, and wait to be rescued. Foolproof. The
second plan was more complex, contained myriad variables, and smacked of
fantasy.
Bordering the Emperor, beyond the land belonging to the company, were several
towns, once small, now grown sufficiently large to accommodate the black market
in minerals that had sprung up around the mine. Two of the towns, Ghost Creek
and Allamance, were within easy reach, assuming they were able to escape the
pit, and there was a man in Ghost Creek, Rocky Alkhazoff, with whom McGlowrie
had developed a financial relationship. Assuming they were quick and lucky,
Alkhazoff could move them down into the Lower Forty-Eight via the black market's
underground systems. Another option would be the wilderness area west of Ghost
Creek, where black marketeers kept hideouts and caches of minerals, where he
might be able to trade on his skill with machines; but he was loathe to go that
route with Denise injured and Peck in tow. One way or another, at that point it
became impossible to predict or analyze the variables, though if they could make
it to the last stage, McGlowrie knew someone who might be able to protect them.
He had grown up in an ICU which occupied an area south of Trenton known as Jack
Raggs, named for a ganglord who had welded together a coalition called the
American Kings, consisting of the Irish and Russian mobs, street gangs, and
various splinter groups that had controlled a significant portion of the
Northeastern Corridor. As a kid, running the streets, doing errands for the
Kings, McGlowerie had frequently been put at cross-purposes with Tony Teague, a
boy his own age. They'd had more than a few physical confrontations, which
neither of them had dominated, and wound up friends. They were on the verge of
being jumped into the Kings, when it was revealed that Tony's name was Antonio,
not Anthony as had been supposed, and his mother, long since dead, had been
half-Cuban, thus disqualifying him for initiation. Because of his failure to
reveal his heritage in a timely fashion, Tony was judged untrustworthy and
forced to flee for his life. McGlowrie had helped him escape, thus placing
himself in equal jeopardy and setting him on a path that led to Alaska, while
Tony had gone south to Miami, where mixed bloods were acceptable, subsequently
rising to the position of warlord with a powerful militant charismatic church,
La Fortaleza (the Fortress). McGlowrie couldn't be certain whether or not
the coin of friendship had devalued in the years that followed—he'd only had
intermittent contact with Tony—but he believed it would buy him the time to see
how things stood. That plan had, however, none of the emotional consequences of
his first plan. Perhaps he had spent too long in the company of machines,
learning their ways, not to consider murder, when necessary, as purely
utilitarian, an act of self-preservation (it had been thirty years, after all,
since he last acted for any other reason), and too long in Denise's company to
do the deed, even in the interests of mercy. He decided it would be safest to
prepare for both eventualities and began customizing one of the remotes that
controlled suit function.
Morning was breaking by the time he finished work on the remote. It was going to
be a clear day in the Emperor, as clear a day as ever there was—gray and
drizzly, with a cover of roiling, dirty clouds, the lower reaches of the pit
swept by gusts of wind-driven particulates. McGlowrie popped a stimulant and
stared out the port. Through the shifting haze he made out a yellow spew of
sulphur from a smelter far across the pit. A cloud of glittering particles
sailed past and, turning as one, arrowed off westward. A smallish herd of
bedlike carriers loped past on double-jointed legs, loaded with lumps of gray
metal (platinum, perhaps), and, in their wake, a single hunter-killer, its
suspicions aroused by some electronic cue. The mine floor would have resembled
an anthill if he could have seen it clearly; however, the drifting curtains of
haze hid much of the activity and caused it to seem peaceful, like a foggy
morning on another planet, a wilderness where machines took the place of
cheetahs and antelopes and elephants. The wind lessened and the haze grew more
dense. A mobile conveyor, one of the most ancient machines in the pit, with
several dozen major parts grafted onto its body, its belt raised high and held
vertically to the ground, emerged from the murk and then paused to allow the
passage of a herd of boar-sized drillers on their way to exploit a mineral vein
that required a specific style of excavation.
—Hey! said Bromley at his back. I want to talk to you.
McGlowrie turned and Bromley's tone grew less peremptory. You're not doing
anything, right? he asked. It's okay to talk?
—Sure. McGlowrie forced himself to appear companionable and sat down against the
wall, wanting Bromley to feel in charge.
Bromley peered through the port. Can't see much with this rain.
When the rain stops, we get hurricane-force winds. You wouldn't want to see what
happens then. Not from this perspective.
Bromley grunted. Thing get stirred up, do they?
—Yeah. Stirred up.
Bromley rubbed the port glass, trying to wipe it clean, but the dirt was on the
outside. You said you were stranded out here before.
—Uh-huh. Three days.
—What was that like? I mean, what happened?
—I was doing an inspection. We used to have these two-man vehicles we used for
quick trips. Fact is, the one I was out in that time, that was the last of them.
I couldn't get the company to fund a replacement. They didn't think the
inspections were important.
We got caught in a rockslide. The vehicle was totaled. Morse, the guy with me,
he was killed. My faceplate was breached. I thought I was going to die. I
patched the faceplate, but the shit I'd breathed in was killing me. I wandered
around for a while, delirious, and then I hid under an excavator and passed out.
There was heavy HK activity in another part of the pit—one of those humongous
conveyors went down. If it hadn't, I'd have been history.
—You said you were lucky, but … Damn!
—Blessed is more like it, said McGlowrie. Chosen of God and the machines. Is
this what you wanted to talk about?
—I thought your experience … maybe there'd be something there that would help us
get out of this.
—Don't worry. I'm working on it.
—You're talking about Plan B?
—I'll fill you in when it's time.
Bromley glanced out the port again. I'm not an idiot, you know.
McGlowrie kept his face neutral.
—I understand what we've got here, said Bromley. With Peck, I mean.
But you're not an idiot, thought McGlowrie. Right.
—I understand the problem he creates for you and Denise, Bromley said, injecting
the words with a mixture of earnestness and sincerity. You're in trouble with
the company, with just about everyone. Between a rock and a hard place. As I see
it, there's only one refuge for you and Denise. And that's the Movement.
—Your group?
—No, my group's just a cell. And … I guess they're gone.
—Oh, they're gone. They didn't have a fucking prayer.
—Like with Saddler, huh?
McGlowrie suspected that Bromley was intentionally probing the wound, testing
him, albeit none too subtly. So tell me who these people are, he said. These
people I can trust.
—No, no, no! Not yet. Not until we work some things out.
McGlowrie could see that Bromley believed he had the upper hand, that McGlowrie
needed what he had to offer. Pacing back and forth, his gestures grew broad and
inclusive—he was prepared to be generous now he thought he was in a good
position. McGlowrie doubted that he himself had ever been so callow. In Jack
Rags, callow didn't get you very far.
—I will tell you they're committed to the cause, said Bromley. And they won't
hold it against you that you worked for the company. They understand how it is
with people coming out of the ICUs.
—They do, huh? said McGlowrie. That's a relief.
Bromley didn't seem to have heard. They know how bad things are, he said. They
haven't buried their heads in the sand. They realize if the problems of the ICUs
aren't solved, everybody's problems are going to get worse. That's why Peck …
It's amazing. A miracle. They'll do what's necessary to get the benefits out to
the people who need it. You can count on them.
—They have the capability? Manufacturing? Distribution?
—Oh yeah! They're well funded, and they have good tech people. They provided us
with those fliers we … Bromley broke it off. Look, man. I'm really sorry about
Saddler.
—Casualty of war.
Bromley cast him a dubious glance.
—I'm not going to deny that what happened didn't make me want to break your
neck, said McGlowrie. If you wanted to control the rover, that wasn't how to go
about it.
—I'm aware of that now, but …
—Didn't you or your tech people … didn't they know what would happen once the
rover was breached?
—They had no way of knowing!
—They should have known. They should have been able to figure it fucking out!
McGlowrie held up his hands, palms outward. All right. Saddler's dead, your
friends are dead. What's done is done. He closed his eyes for a second. We've
got to start moving forward.
—That's what I've been telling you.
—Yeah. Yeah, you have.
—So what're you thinking? We can't sit here and wait for the company. You know
what happens then.
McGlowrie cocked an eye toward Bromley, as if debating his worth; then he stood.
Put on your gear. And drag Peck away from whatever he's up to.
—What are we doing?
—We're going hunting.
· · · · ·
With Peck along to keep off the hunter-killers, things went
without incident as they made their way across the pit, but McGlowrie knew
better than to feel secure. There was a narrow corridor between an oval leaching
pond—a big one the size of a small lake—and the pit wall, through which ore
carriers moving north to the railhead were likely to pass, and they took up a
position close by the pond, kneeling behind some loose rubble. Bromley asked
several questions. McGlowrie gave curt answers and told him to pay attention to
Peck, who kept trying to walk away, probably wanting to return to his video game
and his box of dirt. After twenty-five minutes, a small herd of carriers emerged
from the haze, showing first as movement, then the boulders of grayish-black
uranium ore atop their beds becoming visible, and then their legs working in
that strange double-jointed, herky-jerky gait—like headless Martian ponies.
McGlowrie pointed his projector but at the last moment saw that they were too
wide to fit inside Peck's tunnel and let them high-step past. Waiting grew long.
He shut down Bromley's attempts at conversation and watched long-legged spiders
skitter across the surface of the pond, their mesh feet leaving waffle patterns
on the surface, a doughlike, silvery goo edged by lacy black foam. Once the men
were surrounded by a swarm of the dragonfly-shaped diagnostic units, several of
which identified them as spare parts. The clouds overhead thickened; the light
dimmed to an ashen dusk. Hunter-killers gathered, prevented from close approach
by Peck's implant, sitting motionless at a range of five yards. Their
silhouettes alternately blurred and sharpened as the wind shifted, driving
clouds of particulates. McGlowrie began to stare at things without seeing them,
to let his mind wander. He watched raindrops impact the surface of the leaching
pond. After another half hour, a herd of carriers loaded with molybdenum
approached from the south, and these were of an appropriate size. McGlowrie
stopped one in mid-stride with a jolt from his projector, scrambled atop it, and
cut open its brain case with a torch. The carrier woke while he was adjusting
its systems controls—he gave it a second jolt and kept working, linking his
suit's computer to the carrier's brain, reprogramming it by typing in the
changes on his keypad. When he had done, he hopped down off the carrier and,
using the remote he had customized earlier that morning, caused the carrier to
release its clamps and dump the molybdenum, then to canter back and forth,
generally putting it through its paces. He beckoned to Bromley, who came
forward, herding Peck ahead of him, and asked what he planned to do with the
carrier.
—Mount up, said McGlowerie.
Even through his dusty faceplate, Bromley's bewilderment was evident. This is
your plan? he said. You want us to ride this thing out?
—Right to the rim. McGlowrie boosted himself up onto the bed. With Peck on
board, it should be a snap.
They hauled a reluctant Peck onto the bed, and, after Bromley climbed on,
McGlowrie punched the remote and the carrier set forth at a trot so bumpy it
nearly threw them off. Peck panicked, kicked and flailed his arms, but Bromley
hung on to him. McGlowrie stopped the carrier and jumped down. Not the smoothest
ride, he said. Once I modify the clamps, it'll get us there.
The carrier had brought them to within six feet of one of the HKs—seven in
all—that had gathered while McGlowrie worked. They had become such icons of fear
over the years, even now, inert, they frightened him. The wind gusted; a gauzy
curtain thickened and faded, behind which the HKs appeared to shift ever so
slightly.
—Let's go, said Bromley.
—I might want to try reprogramming the HKs, said McGlowrie.
—What?
—I said I might want to reprogram the HKs.
—I wouldn't do that, man. You should think it over.
—Why the fuck do you suppose I'm hesitating?
—They could have a booster system, like the ones security robots have. Kicks in
when the casing is breeched, or when it senses heat … whatever. That would
neutralize Peck's implant.
—Have you heard something to that effect?
—No, but it would make sense.
—Up top, maybe. Down in here? I doubt it.
Moving closer to the HK, McGlowrie felt as if his legs had taken over for his
brain. He imagined he could feel it vibrating, straining toward him. With its
arms folded, motionless, it looked innocuous: a harmless oblong of rusted metal
on treads, except for one of its arm—a recent replacement—that showed only the
odd bacon-colored fleck. He could reach out and touch it. More to the point, it
could reach out and touch him.
—Come on! said Bromley. Don't screw around with it!
—We could use some backup. A couple of HKs … that'd be good backup.
—We've got Peck.
—Peck might not make it.
—Don't! said Bromley as, holding his breath, McGlowrie laid a hand on the HK's
back. A faint tremor passed through his palm, and he waited to be torn apart.
After a five second count had elapsed, he began cutting into the HK's carapace.
He had intended to modify the programming of several machines, but he dropped
his torch twice, his hands trembled, and he had difficulty in establishing a
computer link. Once he had a link, he made frequent typing errors. After twenty
minutes, he was satisfied that he had complete control over the HK and that it
would shut down when it read his suit at a distance of five yards, overriding
the linkage with Peck's implant. He felt drained, weak from the tension, and
decided not to push his luck. The other HKs had undergone significant repairs;
curiously shaped instrument packages bulged their sides, and he didn't know what
surprises he might find beneath the casing. Knees wobbly, he backed away from
the HK and kept backing until he fetched up against the carrier.
Bromley had kept quiet throughout, caught up in the moment, but now he exploded.
What the fuck were you thinking? You had no right! You put us all at risk!
McGlowrie had a twinge of anger, but anger was suppressed by a larger sense of
accomplishment, and he ignored Bromley's demands for a response, for an apology,
for a do-over. It wasn't clear what he was demanding, probably just blowing off
steam, but McGlowrie thought that Bromley might be entitled to throw a fit,
because things weren't going to improve for him any time soon.
· · · · ·
McGlowrie checked in on Denise. She was still unconscious, but the uppermost
section of the surgical package, including the winged extensions, had fallen
away, and the implant was fully sealed, embedded in her back, surrounded by
puckered, inflamed skin. The paralysis had worn off, and she appeared to be
sleeping peacefully. The way she was lying, on her belly, her face turned to the
side, her arms arranged loosely above her head—the pose touched something in
him. And then he understood that it wasn't the pose that affected him, it wasn't
its poignant relation to one of Gustav Klimt's nudes or some other work of art.
Call it a habituation or a dependency, call it the thin shadow of love, all the
love he was capable of … Whatever, he now knew, if he had not known before, any
plan that involved hurting her was not in the cards. The chance he had taken
with the HKs was not one he would have taken if she hadn't been in the picture,
and he thought this was not entirely born of his desire to protect her but had
the emotional temperature of a decision they would have made together. Thinking
that discomforted him in a way he couldn't explain, and he wondered whether or
not it was true.
He covered Denise with Peck's thin gray sheet and went to work. He had to put up
with Bromley's assistance for the first half hour, then thought of something
else for him to do and set him to making up survival packs, food, water, and so
forth, for all four of them. He spent the next two hours customizing the clamps
on the carrier's bed, cutting them down so they conformed to the human body.
Memories unrelated to anything rose in him like bubbles in a cooler. When he
went to check on Denise again, he found her awake, propped on an elbow. Dropping
to a knee by the pallet, he asked how she was feeling, and she said, Alive. Kind
of surprised to be alive.
—These machine procedures are pretty safe. He picked up the half of the package
that had fallen away from her back; what was left of the wing extensions was
wafer-thin, almost weightless.
—I wasn't talking about the procedure, I was talking about you.
She held his eyes for a second or two and said, I may not be a rocket scientist,
but I can add and subtract just fine. Why didn't you kill me? It was the safe
play.
—If you thought I was going to kill you, he said, why were you so eager to have
the procedure?
Her chin quivered. I wanted to get it over with. Now answer my question.
Rather than tell her, than admitting to weakness, he reacted defensively and
said, I can't explain it to myself. How am I going to explain it to you?
—I'm not asking for in-depth, McGlowrie. I don't need for you to analyze your
toilet training. Just give me superficial.
He looked down at his hands. I figured we're in this together.
—Yeah? And?
He shrugged. You said you wanted superficial.
—God, you're an asshole.
—An asshole you can trust.
—How's that? Because you came down on my side this time, I'm supposed to trust
you? You thought about killing me. Don't try and tell me you didn't.
—Seems like you're back to normal. He got to his feet, feeling heavy in the
legs.
—You expect me to get all misty about you sparing my life? Next time I might not
be so lucky. Next tine your balance sheet might say, She's got to go. I know how
bad that would make you feel. but you'd get through it somehow,
He started to say, It's not like that, then thought maybe it was like
that, and then he wanted to ask, Didn't all these years together count for
something in her mind, but answered his own question. In the end, all he said
was, We'll leave in an hour. Try and be ready.
Bromley made the next hour miserable with his pestering, with his insistence on
helping, with his talk … especially with his talk. As McGlowrie finished work on
the carrier, Bromley launched into a monologue that roughly defined the
insecurities fueling his display of nerves.
—I've been thinking I should give you contact information … for the Movement.
But I can't convince myself to trust you. He appeared to be waiting for
McGlowrie to take a stab at convincing him. When McGlowrie remained silent, he
said, I want to trust you. If anything happens to me and you can't contact them
… I don't know what you're going to do. Another expectant pause, after which he
went on, I realize you're resourceful. God knows, you've had to be. I suppose
you have your own contacts. People you can turn to. But you've got to question
the motivation that sort of person's going to bring to the table. The greed, the
reflex of greed … I won't deny that mechanism's in everyone, but people in the
Movement, they're less motivated by greed than anyone you're likely to know.
Caught partway between anger and amusement, McGlowrie made an inadvertent noise.
Bromley asked if he wanted to say something. Nah, said McGlowrie, suspecting
that were he to speak, he might not stop until his fingers were pried from
Bromley's throat. It was astounding, he thought, that his peers hadn't topped
him off years ago … or perhaps these displays of condescension were limited to
dialogues with the formerly disenfranchised.
Bromley kept on in this conversational vein, and, when work on the carrier was
done, pretending (at least McGlowrie assumed it a pretense) to have been
persuaded by some aspect of McGlowrie's behavior, he gave him a piece of paper
upon which was written the contact information that he had thus far withheld,
repeating that if anything were to happen to him, he wanted McGlowrie and Denise
to have a chance. McGlowrie accepted the paper. He had no intention of using the
information—the Movement, as testified to by Bromley, seemed an assortment of
laughable incompetents—but he recognized this entire business to be a
negotiation on Bromley's part, an attempt to guarantee his safety by making a
show of faith, and McGlowrie was inclined to humor him. Needing a moment to
focus, he sent Bromley to get Peck and sat with his legs dangling off the edge
of the carrier. It was going to be a rough ride. If the carrier didn't break
their bones, then there were the HKs. He had a vivid mental image of his severed
limbs and torso neatly stacked, his head atop them, waiting for the recyclers.
Snuffers swarmed like gnats, curious about the blood. His moment alone wasn't
helping him focus, so he hopped down off the carrier and went to collect Denise.
· · · · ·
Out in the pit, next to the hatch, under a hard rain, they secured Peck to the
center of the carrier bed. He was wrapped in rags and scraps of insulation so
the clamps wouldn't cut into him when he struggled, and he twisted his head back
and forth, an anguished expression on his bony face, wretched as a demon with
his snakes of iridescent gray hair. Bromley and McGlowrie occupied the outside
positions on the bed, making a sandwich of Peck and Denise. Once Denise and
Bromley were locked in place, lying on their backs, arms and legs in their
hardened suits resembling sausage links, McGlowrie set about securing himself.
He maintained a degree of flexibility in his suit, allowing him to hold his
sidearm and to direct the carrier by typing in instructions on his forearm
keypad. Lying on his right side enabled him to see both ahead and behind, yet
the clamps—though he had cut them to conform to that posture—did not hold him as
tightly as they did the others. The spare implant was safely tucked away in a
thigh pouch. He adjusted his audio, reducing the roaring to a background
whisper, so he could hear sounds closer at hand and, after running down his
checklist a final time, started them up the pit wall.
Under McGlowrie's control, the carrier moved at half-speed and in an ungainly
fashion, like a beetle afflicted with the staggers. Thanks to the laggardly
pace, the ride was smoother than he had expected, the carrier's legs—its clawed
hands, rather—reaching for cracks, hitching itself along, conveying to the
riders a succession of swaying motions, each followed by a mild jolt. He had
hoped to be quicker. Plan B would have failed if Peck hadn't been with them; the
HKs, not the most agile of climbers, would have overtaken them before they
climbed a tenth of the way out. Eleven HKs, including the machine he had
reprogrammed, their bodies flipped so their treads were up, using their arms to
climb, trailed behind the carrier, keeping an unvarying five-yard gap between
them. McGlowrie pictured them as roaches inching along, scaling a gray kitchen
wall. The carrier traversed a diagonal shelf that brought them to a point about
fifty yards west of the hatch, at a height of seventy feet. They were passing
into a region of dingy clouds, into thicker volumes of dust. Peck's eyes were
shut tight, his every muscle tensed. Denise's eyes, too, were closed, but her
face, what he could see of it through the rain spatter and smears of dust on her
faceplate, betrayed no strain. Bromley kept lifting his head, trying to keep the
HKs in view. For his part, McGlowrie felt relieved that they were on their way,
though he doubted they would come to a good end. He glanced back and, through
drifts of dust, made out a dark blue object, roughly bullet-shaped, pulled up
beside the hatch. He had only a glimpse before the clouds sealed them off, but
he was certain it had been a security vehicle. Their would-be rescuers had gone
straight for the tunnel. The last time McGlowrie had been stranded in the pit,
they hadn't been so efficient. It was conceivable they had a left a trail for
the vehicle to follow, or a signal had been sent, perhaps an alarm tripped
during their occupation of the tunnel. Which might mean the company knew about
the implant. If that were the case, why would they leave Peck alive? Peck was a
loose end, but McGlowrie concluded that the company was too arrogant to worry
about loose ends, particularly those protected by a trillion machines and a
deadly environment. He was not, he decided, going to be able to settle the
question now, what with the jolting of the carrier and the HKs in pursuit; but
the potential of company involvement added a new variable, one he would have
think about before they reached Ghost Creek.
At two hundred feet, the carrier broke free of clouds into a zone of relative
clarity and lighter precipitation. As they rounded a bend in the pit wall,
McGlowrie saw that, less than a quarter-mile ahead, one of the old gods of the
pit was being slaughtered: a mobile excavator, its cranelike upper arm locked
onto the rim several hundred feet above, its base hidden from sight, creeping
along on treads as tall as a five-story building. Thousands of hunter-killers
swarmed over its surfaces, cutting away parts that fell into the roiling clouds
below, a steady rain of debris. It was difficult to distinguish predators from
prey, for both were coated in rust; but every square foot of the excavator
appeared agitated, seething, and McGlowrie spotted the pinprick flares of plasma
torches at intervals along its reach.
He turned the carrier aside from the excavator, not wishing to test whether
Peck's neck implant would prove effective against so many HKs, and chose a route
to the rim that sent them backtracking for twenty yards then angled sharply
upward. At three hundred and seventy feet, he spotted a rock chimney that led up
to the rim. He sent the HK he had reprogrammed to a remove and began picking off
those still in pursuit, blowing eight off the wall (two had gone off to join the
happy throng engaged in dismembering the excavator). They fell away into the
clouds, their arms flailing. He climbed the chimney at a good clip—he'd grown
more proficient at controlling the carrier—and paused it in a notch below the
rim, where he could keep the bed on a relatively even keel. Bromley started to
speak, but McGlowrie shushed him. Denise made eye contact. He gave her a wink,
which she did not return. Peck looked to be in a catatonic state. The uppermost
reaches of the pit were flocked by countless dysfunctional fliers, milling about
to no purpose and preyed upon by aggregate creatures, the largest consisting of
several dozen fliers that had linked together in a radical attempt at
self-repair. They flew poorly, jittering about, as on the choppy surface of a
lake, bobbling among the swarms, seeking to bond with other fliers, destroying
most with clumsy misapplications of energy, occasionally succeeding in adding a
new component. Eventually they would grow too heavy for flight and drop like
stones to the pit floor.
—Let's go, said Bromley. What are you waiting for?
—The AI might divert more HKs to track us. I'd rather handle them here. Peck's
implants may not work once we get beyond the rim.
—Why's that? They've held up this far.
—Because that's how the AIs design things. HKs and carriers are the only
machines allowed topside. The rest shut down, they move one inch out of the pit.
—If you're right about the AI, about it wanting to get the other implant out,
said Denise, you have to assume Peck's stuff is designed to work topside.
—I'd rather not assume anything, said McGlowrie.
He debated whether to release the clamp that held Bromley to the carrier. The
boy had gone well past being a pain in the ass. He decided Bromley's window of
potential usefulness was still open … though it was closing fast. There was,
however, no longer any need to humor him.
—You ever think there's something weird about your luck? Denise asked.
McGlowrie laughed, watching the clouds below. Depends what you mean by weird.
—The first time you're stranded, a conveyor breaks down and draws off the HKs.
Now it's an excavator.
—Machines are always breaking down.
—Not the big ones. And look how many times you've lucked out just on this trip.
In the cab, with Saddler. Then there's the HK by the ore crusher, and the …
—Don't forget the one that attacked us.
—I thought about that. It was damaged—maybe the damage caused it not to react in
the right way to you.
—So you're saying … what?
—Maybe when you were stranded years ago, when you were unconscious, maybe an AI
did something to you. Something like it did to Peck.
—You know, you're right, said McGlowrie. It tuned up my pecker, removed my brain
and replaced it with a radio. I'm a new fucking man.
—I'm serious.
—The company had me thoroughly checked out, for Christ's sake.
—They could have missed something.
—Can we postpone this conversation until we're out of danger? Please?
Trying to calm himself, he squinted upward through the rain at the churning
clouds above the Emperor, and at the rim little more than an arm's length away.
—You're too lucky, she said sullenly, then said no more.
When no further HKs came after them, he keyed in an instruction and directed the
carrier to climb to the edge of the rim, so he could see what lay ahead—an
apocalyptic plain, gray rock and patches of brown lichen, here and there a
twisted tree, snowpeaks distant as fairy tales, and—out of sight for the
moment—sick HKs wandering. The ones that remained topside were those that had
been broken in some way. Bromley spoke again, and McGlowrie switched off his
audio. He eased the carrier onto level ground, keyed in a destination—the
railhead that lay equidistant from Ghost Creek and Allamance—and let the
machine's original programming take over, setting a rapid pace over the uneven
ground that caused Peck to wake and throw himself about, his mouth gaping in
silent outcry. They negotiated a narrow peninsular area between canyons, one
that permitted them to look down into the pit on both sides, into a dusty gray
boil that obscured a million violences. Within minutes they had put the Emperor
behind them, its presence marked by a smoky disturbance against the low clouds.
McGlowrie felt an indefinite sense of loss and speculated as to what would
become of them should they survive.
Where would they go? And what work would they find? The carrier high-stepped
along, its double-jointed legs pumping, interrupting his view of the surround.
Seen at jolting intervals, the plain acquired the surreal aspect of a huge
abandoned chessboard, gray and brown squares with wrecks scattered about like
deformed mechanical pawns, memorializing a disastrous endgame.
They traveled west-southwest for twenty minutes, covering a third of the mileage
to Ghost Creek; the rain slackened to a fitful drizzle. McGlowrie thought the
company must have had patrols out recently to exterminate the stray HK
population, because he hadn't seen a one. Usually they were all over, weaving on
busted treads, going in circles, attacking one another. Thus far, everything had
broken their way, and he thought about what Denise had said, that he was too
lucky. Shortly after thinking this, as if by acknowledging luck he had broken
the spell that sustained it, he spotted four HKs sweeping toward them from the
south and felt a cold thrill across his belly. These machines did not act
dysfunctional and they were coming full-speed. Whenever they hit an obstruction
or a low rise, they sailed up into the air, stabilized themselves in mid-flight,
and made perfect landings on their treads, seeming to bound across the plain
like antelopes. The jolting of the bed prevented him from firing—at this
distance he had no chance of hitting them, anyway. He directed the HK he had
reprogrammed to attack the quickest of the four, but the other three continued
their pursuit. Whether or not Peck's implants were working, the three HKs did
not violate the five-yard limit and fell in behind the carrier, behavior that
signaled they were confused as to the appropriateness of their prey. Chaos
erupted on the carrier bed. Denise had restored the flexibility to her suit and
was tugging at her gun. Bromley screamed and pried at the clamp imprisoning him;
Peck thrashed even more violently. Now that the HKs were near to hand, McGlowrie
could see that they were impaired. The one on the left had only half a
complement of armor; the other two had multiple burn spots on their casings,
usually denoting a failed repair.
He shouted at Denise, telling her to take the one on the right, and opened fire
on the HK to his left; he shifted his aim to the remaining HK, the most damaged
of the three, as it sped closer and swiped at the carrier with an arm. The
others kept their distance, proving that Peck's implant was still effective—if
it hadn't been, they would have joined the badly damaged one in its attack.
Denise and McGlowrie fired and fired, sidearms chattering, set on automatic, a
noise that drowned out the carrier's rattle. After what must have been no more
than a few seconds, yet seemed longer, the HKs were turned aside, their casings
pierced by explosive rounds. McGlowrie watched them wobbling across the plain,
growing smaller and smaller, until he was certain they were disabled. The
reprogrammed HK did not return, and McGlowrie was forced to accept that they had
lost an ally. He began to relax. Then Denise cried out, Stop! You have to stop!
She pointed at Peck, who had passed out. His right calf had been savaged in the
attack, the muscles torn loose from the bone, and he was bleeding heavily.
McGlowrie shut down the carrier and released Denise's clamp. She fumbled out her
medi-kit and began working on Peck's leg.
—Let me up, said Bromley.
—There's no reason, McGlowrie said, coming to one knee.
—I've got to piss.
—I should have said, I don't have any reason to let you up.
—Come on, man! Don't …
McGlowrie switched off Bromley's radio.
—You should let him up, said Denise, intent upon Peck's leg.
—Little while ago you were begging me to kill him. Now you're making nice?
She did not respond, working feverishly to stem the bleeding.
A rust-brown fleck moved in the distance.
—Hurry it along, he said.
—I'm hurrying.
Half a minute passed, and he made out a second brownish fleck, closing from the
southwest.
—Actually, he said, maybe we should get rid of them both.
She glanced up at him.
—We've got company, he said.
—Shit! She turned again to Peck's leg.
—We've got your implant. We don't need Peck … or Bromley.
—We'll be all right. Give me a few seconds.
She bent to her task, applying a pressure bandage. McGlowrie waited, waited, and
saw a third reddish-brown spot moving toward them. None of the machines looked
to be traveling at great speed, but he was worried nonetheless. They were very
near the point where he would have to decide between Ghost Creek and Allamance.
He didn't feel up to making any more decisions, but the appearance of the
security vehicle back in the pit had caused him to recalibrate his judgment, to
wonder how much he could trust his contacts in Ghost Creek. If the company was
looking for them, that would put undue pressure on his relationship with Rocky
Alkazoff … and Rocky was not one to rock the boat. Allamance was an unknown
quantity. If it was him alone, he thought, he'd try the wilderness area west of
Ghost Creek. But with Denise injured, he had no recourse except to get her
somewhere she could receive attention.
A fourth speck.
—That's it, McGlowrie said. We're dumping them.
—What's the point?
McGlowrie tried to pull Denise away, but she resisted. What the hell's wrong
with you? he said.
—I'm almost done! There! It's finished … all right? She got to her knees,
favoring her wounded leg, and went face-to-face with McGlowrie. We might need
Bromley's contacts.
—I've got his contacts.
—It's not the same if he's dead. He can vouch for us.
—You think you can count on him?
Silence; through his helmet he could hear the wind and a faint roaring.
—I don't know, she said. It's an option. Why eliminate it?
—Because his contacts are idiots! They don't know enough to wipe themselves. If
they did, they wouldn't have sent people into the pit. Because …
McGlowrie broke off, feeling pressure against the neck of his suit, and realized
that Denise had jammed the barrel of her weapon against his throat. He
considered taking a chance—with a wounded ankle, her balance would be shaky; but
before he could complete his deliberation, she had secured his sidearm, his
projector, and the control, and had backed away.
—Because he killed Saddler, he said.
She told him to get down off the carrier; he hesitated, and she chambered a
round.
—I'm going, he said.
He jumped down from the carrier and moved away from it, following her
instructions. He scanned the plain. The reddish-brown flecks were no longer
visible, but that didn't mean much. You're telling me you trust Bromley? he
asked. You trust him more than me?
—I'm trusting myself, she said.
—You won't make it without me.
She said nothing, training the gun on him.
—Goddamn it, Denise!
—No, she said. With you, I'm dead. Sooner or later, you'll make one of those
it's-her-or-me decisions. Or else your luck will get me. I don't trust your
luck.
—You're wrong.
— I've gone as far as I can with you.
—You're fucking wrong! About the luck … about everything. You don't understand
what's been going on with me.
—Oh yeah! I know all about it, she said. You love me! You'd die for me, you love
me so much.
—Yeah, well. That would be appear to be the case.
—I'm sorry, she said.
—Sorry doesn't do much for me.
—It's all I've got.
She must have inadvertently switched on Bromley's radio, because he blurted out
a few words, something about … acting precipitately … and then went
silent.
—You don't even know how to work the remote, McGlowrie said.
—I'll figure it out.
—Listen. The choppers must have done an extermination in the last day or two.
They aren't near as many HKs out here as I figured on. It looks like they got
rid of the quick ones. But we've got four on our ass right now. And we can
expect more. They're all fucked up, it looks like. I'd say it's fifty-fifty we
can outrun them to Ghost Creek. That's if we give them Bromley and Peck to play
with. But if I'm not there, if the controls fuck up … and they might, you know,
because I had to work way too fast on them, and I'm not sure of the programming.
If that happens, you're dead.
—I can do repairs.
—As fast as me? Not hardly.
—'Bye, Mac, she said.
—Wait … Denise! At least leave me a gun!
—I can't let you live, she said. You're too damn lucky.
Though he couldn't see her face, he knew there were tears, and he also knew that
she would suppress those tears.
—You think I'll come after you? he said. I swear I won't!
—You might make it, anyway. Lucky son of a bitch like you.
Her gun hand had been trembling; now it steadied and he waited for her to fire.
—Might as well do it, he said.
—Good-bye.
He felt no sense of relief at having survived the moment. Gripped by anger and
despair, he watched the carrier as it pranced across the desolate plain, until
its human cargo was no longer visible, and then set forth walking briskly into
the west, heading for an old glacial scarp—a long incline of gray stone etched
with cracks and crevices that might, he hoped, offer him a place to hide. Though
it left him exposed to view, he wasn't that worried about a visual sighting from
a chopper. His suit would keep him alive for days, but he would be fortunate to
survive more than an hour unless he could find cover. It was getting on
twilight, and he didn't want to travel after dark, not with defective night
vision. Most of the damaged HKs would follow the carrier, attracted by the
larger target, but at least one was bound to follow him. He glanced behind him,
saw nothing. It could be circling, coming at him from his flanks. He picked up
the pace.
It was amazing, or maybe it wasn't, maybe it was proof of the shallowness of his
emotions … yet it seemed amazing how quickly his anger at Denise dissipated. He
supposed this was because he knew she was a creature of her place and time,
unable to escape her origins, unable to trust. And maybe he wasn't trustworthy.
As he walked, he felt an accumulating sense of loss that gave evidence of deeper
feelings, but he knew better than to assign them too much weight; he might be
conning himself. That's why the world was like it was. Now that God had slunk
off into the cave of history and love had been debunked as a vestigial form of
evolutionary biology and the consolations of family had been supplanted by
technological gratifications and drugs, there was nothing to believe in except
power. The implant in his thigh pocket might change things, but he doubted that
even something so miraculous could change human nature. People would find a way
to screw up anything—that was a verity that wouldn't change, not until all the
power was in the hands of a single person, who would reshape the world in their
own image. If that didn't put an end to the game, if the universe didn't fold in
on itself, then there might very well be a cultural Big Bang and the whole
barbarous narrative of betrayal and genocide would begin again. He saw that in
thinking about the implant, he'd bought into Bromley's altruistic model, but he
thought now that if anyone were to become emperor of the world, why shouldn't it
be him? He entertained himself with this fantasy, plotting a course of conquest
and finally picturing himself in a luxurious office through whose windows one
saw only clouds; but the reality of the situation bore in upon him and turned
his thoughts onto gloomier paths, paths of recrimination and regret. He switched
on his radio.
—Denise, he said. You listening?
No response.
—If you are, he went on, I wanted to tell you … I should have told you before. I
saw a security vehicle in the pit. By the tunnel entrance. I saw it while we
were climbing. It might not mean much, but it got me thinking the company might
know about the implant, and that made me worry about Alkazoff. They put pressure
on him, he won't stand up to it. So maybe, as fucked as they are, maybe you
should think about Bromley's people. You can work some angle with them. It's
something to consider, anyway.
If she'd heard, he supposed she would assume it to be a lie, just him trying to
get into her head. Chances were, she had switched off her radio to preclude such
tricks, but he left his radio on just in case.
The scarp terminated in a cliff some thirty feet high. On reaching it, peering
over the edge, he saw that the cliff face was riven by dozens and perhaps
hundreds of crevices, some of which might be wide enough for his purposes. He
crawled down the face and began exploring them, keeping an eye out all the
while. The fifth crevice he checked was a winner. Choked with rubble, extending
back in for about eight yards, too far for an HK's arms to reach. He crawled in
over top of the rubble (there was barely room for him to pass), situated himself
at the back of the crevice, in a niche that might have been fashioned for him,
so cunningly did it conform to his frame. He could see nothing except stones
when he sat down; standing, he made out a notch of gray sky at the entrance. The
stone surrounding him would make his suit difficult to read, though the crevice
could become a death trap. If no greater target presented itself (and this far
from the pit, none would), an HK might wait beside the entrance until he was
forced out; but McGlowrie was exhausted by the stress of the last two days; he
needed to rest.
Night closed down and he imagined he could feel the tonnage of stone pressing in
on him, the rocks shifting, squeezing his body to a paste. He fought off
claustrophobia by indulging in sexual fantasies about Denise, and that led him
to remorseful memories of other women he had known who had almost loved him and
wanted to kill him. It was a fairly long list and, before he came to the end of
it, while recalling his liaison with a certain Mary Sealy back in Jack Raggs, a
skinny girl with a big muscular ass and fanciful tattoos like a mask across her
eyes, who sought to knock him out one night when he was falling-down drunk and
do him with a strap-on … It was while deciding whether or not this specific act
could be construed as attempted murder (attempted murder of his spirit,
certainly) that he fell asleep. He woke after six hours, the middle of the
night, to a racket that he muzzily realized was an HK trying to reach him. He
switched on his helmet light and peeked over top of the boulders; he couldn't
see the HKs body, but he saw its rust-covered arms lifting and falling. The
crawlspace was too narrow to admit the HK, and it was working to widen it,
pulverizing the boulders with blows from its arms, reducing them to smaller
pieces, which it pushed behind it. He didn't have much time left. An hour,
maybe.
Due to the confined space, he was unable to give muscular expression to fear, to
run or cast himself about, and the prospect of inevitable death overpowered him.
For a time he was paralyzed, mute and inert. He felt that his skull was being
poured full of a liquid thick and cold as snowmelt, some distillate of horror,
and then, once the sponge of his brain had absorbed all it could handle, the
cold washed into his chest, his groin, stole into his extremities. Without a
gun, his options for suicide—swallowing his tongue, beating his head against the
stones—seemed no kinder than death by dismemberment. His mind gave way briefly
before the cold chaos of fear, and when reason at last resurfaced, when he
reclaimed his consciousness, he was frailer in his attitudes, less determined
and forceful in his thought. There was no longer any hope of distracting
himself. The whine of the HK's engine as it scooted forward, trying to exploit
the newly widened passage, and then the cracking blows, the thrusting aside of
the crushed rock—these sounds dominated his attention. He tried to find refuge
by thinking about Denise; he wondering what she'd have to say about his luck
now. But the noise was too loud and inconstant to deny. He spent the next half
hour dying in advance, imagining every horrid detail, achieving a morbid
acceptance. When the sounds stopped abruptly, he registered the stoppage but did
not at first react, in the grip of a malaise that was a by-product of his
acceptance. Not until several minutes had passed did he rouse himself to
investigate. Caught in his helmet light, the HK appeared to be lodged in the
crawlspace about four or five yards away. McGlowrie stared at it incuriously. It
took thirty seconds or thereabouts for hope to catch in him, another minute for
it to burn high. The HK was too strong to allow itself to become stuck. The odds
were good that it had experienced a malfunction, but he held back from making a
closer investigation, leery that it might be temporary, something that its own
systems could repair. Then he noticed that one of its forward arms was
comparatively free of rust, all shining metal except for a few bacon-colored
flecks.
It was the reprogrammed HK, the one he had instructed to shut down when it came
within five yards of him.
He boosted himself out of his hiding place and crawled toward the HK.
Circumventing his jury-rigged repairs—in particular, overriding the five-yard
instruction without getting killed —would require some delicate work; but he
might just get out of this pickle yet. He maneuvered to the side of the HK and
adopted a cramped squatting posture. He noticed that a single round had grazed
the casing, and, with a sinking feeling, he realized who must have fired it.
What looked to be blood was spattered across its back. He touched his glove to
it and examined the tacky residue that came away on his fingertips close to his
helmet light.
Blood, scarlet and true.
Denise's blood? Bromley's or Peck's?
More than likely, an admixture of all three.
He wanted to pound the HK with his fists but didn't dare, fearful he would
disturb some critical balance or trigger some dangerous reflex. It had suffered
some damage and, in addition to seeming the embodiment of his infernal luck, the
machine offered him his best hope of survival. He knew what must have happened;
he saw it happen in his mind's eye. He hadn't had time to do a proper job of
reprogramming the HK; thus his control of it was entirely unsubtle: when
directed to go forth and kill its brother, it had, in effect, taken the
instruction to heart and gone about sweeping the plain clean of a few last
damaged machines. Thus, its long absence. In the meantime, Denise had thrown him
off the carrier, not realizing that Peck could no longer protect her from this
particular HK, and he had, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to tell her.
When the HK returned, upon recognizing it, she assumed it to be safe. He
imagined scenarios in which she could have survived, but they were absurdities.
He hunkered over the bloody back of the HK, punishing himself with his thoughts,
mourning Denise, wondering if he had forgotten to tell her he had overridden
Peck's implant or if he had withheld the information out of spite. The longer he
puzzled over it, the more uncertain he grew, and the more diffuse his sorrow
became. He leaked a tear, like a machine leaking a drop of oil. The sum of his
grief, scarcely sufficient to dampen the ground. He tried to find her, to feel
her inside himself, and thought he might be able at least to find the space she
had vacated, but the only vacancy he found was one that had been there for a
long time. Numbly, he spread his toolkit open on the HK's back. He looked at the
tools, at their delicate, eccentric shapes. They were such tiny, perfect things;
they pleased him in a way that was strangely intimate. He realized he'd had,
after all, an efficient means of committing suicide. The torch. He could have
opened an artery, bled out in seconds. Lucky he hadn't thought of it.
Luck.
The course upon which his luck had thrust him, forced by circumstance and
reasons of self-defense to bring the implant to the world … Maybe Denise was
right, maybe the AI had fucked with him. It would have had to been a different
AI from the one that fucked with Peck, which meant he was the result of a
century-long plan, of machine solidarity. It would explain his lack of empathy,
his need for pretense in playing a human role. He'd once been sure of himself,
he thought. Secure in his skin, full of messy emotions and impulses. Not this
clinical, dogged sort who bore little resemblance to the gin-soaked generations
of wild McGlowries who had preceded him. But the world, all on its own, could
twist you into any shape it wished and, considering his upbringing, that he had
become a pragmatist, a soul denuded of feeling, wasn't totally unexpected. He
couldn't worry about it now, he told himself. He had repairs to make—yet his
hands shook so badly, he had to wait until he had repaired himself, until he was
steady in his mind, until he had reached an accord with his many sins, before he
began tinkering with the HK.
· · · · ·
Morning found McGlowrie riding atop the HK, drawing near the eastern edge of a
forest that spread across the slopes of a great hill—he might have called the
hill a mountain had there not been an actual mountain behind it, a fortress of
granite and ice looming into the overcast. He had been traveling in its lee for
several minutes before he noticed there was something familiar about the vista,
and after he had gone a ways farther, reaching a spot from which he could
discern separate trunks beneath blackish-green canopies of boughs, he recognized
the landscape to be identical to the entry scenario of Peck's video game—the
same upthrusting peak with a sheer north face, the same immense, rumpled hill
beneath, and the vast plain beyond. Everything was the same, even the sky, where
clouds with black bellies and silvery edges were being pushed south by a fierce
wind.
He paused the HK, removed his helmet (it was safe—for a little while—to breathe
the air this far from the mine) and contemplated the mountain. There was too
much similarity of detail between the game scenario and its model for it to be a
coincidence. Confusion bloomed in him, then panic, but it was suppressed by a
calm that seemed to come out of nowhere, as if a chemical agent had been
released into his blood. The video game, he thought, must not have been a game
at all but rather a series of training exercises designed to familiarize Peck
with the terrain and its potential dangers. And he, McGlowrie, had been
maneuvered to this point by the AI, manipulated every step of the way. The idea
that his body contained an implant, that it was controlling him … It disturbed
him, but it did not, as might be presumed, terrify him. He was accustomed to
being controlled. He had always been manipulated by something, by some need or
policy, regulation or pressure. He wondered how far the AI's control extended,
if any of his plans had been his own. Had Denise been put into his life to
confuse him, to obscure the AI's manipulation? In kicking him off the carrier,
had she been obeying the AI's will? The case could be made that he would be a
more effective caretaker of the implant, and that Peck, ultimately, had been a
backup. Bromley's people, had they been lured into an attack by a machine ploy,
or had the AI seized an opportunity?
It wasn't important.
Of the dozens of questions that occurred to McGlowrie, the only one of any
consequence related to what the AI had in mind for humanity, and though he was
curious as to the outcome, he had no burning desire to know the answer.
Whichever way it went, he figured they would get what they deserved.
He set the HK moving forward again, and, as they bumped along toward the
treeline, he was overcome with sorrow for Denise; but this may have merely been
the chemical credential of a more significant change, a deeper chemistry
invoked, for it was quickly replaced by a profound confidence and clarity. The
plain of dead machines, the towering mountain, and the tall hill calved from its
flank formed a mythic frame for the fateful rider on his murderous steel beast,
and he understood that by bringing the implant to mankind he was enacting a
myth—he had become the Emperor, the little man on the throne. The person whom he
had conjectured would restore order, who would gather all the earth's power for
the purpose of destruction or renewal. And then that feeling, too, was gone, and
he was only himself: a man engaged upon a mysterious enterprise, devoid of
friends, surrounded by danger and, except for a flicker of love and a tattered
sorrow, empty of emotion, entering the dark wood of the world, where he would
soon be lost to common view.
The End
© 2005 by Lucius Shepard and SCIFI.COM