Perhaps it lacked imagination, this enforcer routine, compared to his original scheme to use the Warden as an artwork. But it had certainly gotten the job done. And the rumors that would spread once Darling returned to the HC and started complaining! Don’t cross Duke Zimivic, he’ll crush you like some poor criminal on NaPrini. No bad reviews for his shows, you’ll wind up sentenced to a standard decade of covering fashion shows on the Outer Rim!
Zimivic imagined the sentences he could impose. That fat bastard Reginald Fowdy, sentenced never to look at a statue of a naked man again. Hah! Or his lackey Leao Vatrici, a month without AI assistance might do her some good.
But, of course, the lawyers were right: keep the Warden out of the Home Cluster. Strictly legal. But everyone must know that it’s somewhere, waiting for orders. The unseen weapon is feared the most.
A muted chime came from the door.
Champagne, at last! And after twenty minutes—a fair excuse not to bother with a tip.
Zimivic strode to the door and clapped once. It slid open.
The woman wasn’t dressed in hotel livery. Perhaps a manager here to apologize for the delay. His eyes scanned her reflexively: small, heavy breasted. A bit of fun like he might have brought along for company if the Warden hadn’t required a cabin. Passage for three all the way Out here would have been far too costly. And the bastard shipping company wouldn’t let him plonk the Warden in cargo. Were they afraid of hurting its feelings?
“Well, where is it?” he demanded. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?”
She stared at him coolly. Her hair was wet. There was an almost vacant expression of exhausted pleasure on her face, as if she’d just fucked and had a shower. Very alluring.
“I believe this is yours,” she said, and reached to one side. She pulled a hunched, stumbling figure into the doorway, propelled it into the room.
“What is the—” Zimivic started.
The figure smelled of piss and sweat and excrement. Its clothes were caked with patches of blood, some dried, others still dark and shiny. Where skin was exposed, the creature bore marks of torment: the crude gouges of fingernail wounds, the straight, bloody lines of razor strokes. The figure fell to the floor, splaying across the white carpet like a bundle of laundry come undone. It turned its head toward him, made a mewling noise like a wounded cat. Only then—through the puffing of dark bruises, through layers of blood crusted and fresh, and despite a single revolting strand of mucus connecting its nose to the carpet—did Zimivic recognize it.
It was the Warden.
“My god,” he said. The money he’d spent on the thing.
He turned to the woman for sympathy. But her face didn’t hold the concern of a local official bringing home the victim of some terrible crime. Quite the contrary: she was smirking.
Zimivic got the nervous feeling he often did when dealing with someone who was not an employee, functionary, or social inferior.
“That,” she said, pointing at the crumpled figure on the floor, “had these.” She threw a pair of disks at Zimivic.
He fumbled for them instinctively, dropped one and secured the other. Looking down, he realized they were the tickets he’d intended for Darling. Steerage class to Parate; a Chiat Dai agricultural ship full of atmosphere-treating lichen. High O2 concentrations: no smoking and flash suits required full-time.
“I suggest you make that ship, Mr. Zimivic.”
“I will certainly not!” he shouted. He bared his teeth and put one finger to his right temple to activate a direct interface.
No connection occurred.
She pulled the Warden’s black laquered box from her robe, shaking her head.
“You’re welcome to call the cops when I leave, Mr. Zimivic. But I remind you that you don’t know who I am or where I came from.”
She threw the box in the air, caught it. There was a strange precision to her movements, a little like the Warden’s: a combination of mechanical efficiency and animal grace.
“All you know,” the woman continued, “is what I did to your high-priced killing machine…”
She let the sentence end with a strange, empty tone in her voice, as if she wasn’t quite finished. Zimivic found himself anxious for the rest.
“…for fun.” She sounded almost sad.
But she smiled at Zimivic, and her eyes travelled slowly down his frame, as if marking a hundred loci of torture, planning an agenda of agonies acute and slow, sliding him into some inquisitor’s category of victimhood organized by long experience. It was the coldest look he had ever endured.
And then she was gone.
Zimivic didn’t waste much time thinking. He shouted for his valet drone, which was hovering impatiently about the crumple figure as if waiting to clean the carpet underneath it. The little robot flew into action, splitting into five discrete elements to gather the clothing, knick-knacks, and souvenirs Zimivic had scattered about the suite. The man himself packed the few artworks that he traveled with, pausing in his panicked rush to place them carefully in their special cases.
He looked at his watch. Plenty of time. It’s the middle of the night; the birds are light and I can take a flyer.
Zimivic summoned a luggage carrier and limousine, and sat down to wait.
The Warden’s breathing filled the silence of the suite. It had a raspy, liquid quality, as if someone had poured a thick, sweet liqueur into the creature’s lungs. He struggled occasionally, as if to rise. Finally, the broken man turned his head and caught Zimivic’s spellbound eye.
“She cores…” the Warden gurgled.
Zimivic turned his head away. But he was too much an aesthete, his eye too fascinated with extremes. And the wasted thing bleeding into the white carpet was in its way beautiful: a perfectly abject remainder of a man.
There’d been a one-legged woman, twice his age, who’d lived with Zimivic’s family when he was young. Zimivic was a child of poverty, and any number of borders had passed through their crowded flat. At sixteen, he’d become fascinated with the woman’s fleshy stub. He would catch a glimpse through the crack of a hinged door, or in dim moonlight in that glorious month they’d shared a room. Since then, he’d never been able to take his eyes from an amputee. A homeless and legless beggar on the metro, the sculptor Byron Vitalle with his missing fingers, the Chiat War veteran who whirred past his gallery every noon like clockwork. Guilty pleasures.
His eyes were drawn to the Warden by that same terrible power.
The thing was exquisitely horrible.
“She’s care…” it said.
The entry chime sounded again.
Zimivic jumped to the door, then opened it with trepidation. He shuddered with relief to see the luggage carrier rather than some new and fantastic invasion. The machine collected the bags, which he’d coded with the name of the Chiat Dai vessel. Its dull intelligence ignored the man on the floor. He looked at his watch again. Plenty of time.
As the limo flew through the dark buildings of Malvir, Zimivic’s panic began to subside, and the madness of what had happened surged into his mind. The Vaddum had been only a dozen hours from being his. His victory over Darling, Fowdy, and that bitch-dyke Vatrici had seemed complete. And suddenly, that strange, terrible woman with her sickening smile had delivered defeat to his door.
This was insane!
He began to breathe heavily. The antiseptic smell of the rented limousine seemed laced with a choking, cloying incense. The money he’d spent. Passage to Malvir, the tickets for Darling (a foolish, expensive joke, sending him back to Parate), the Warden …
His mind’s eye returned to the bleeding wreck on the hotel suite floor. So utterly broken. So completely demolished.
So expensive.
“Stop,” Zimivic commanded. The limo came to a slow, even halt, drifting uneasily in the accelerated air currents between two skyscrapers.
Zimivic leaned back. Something could be salvaged. Something. The Warden could be repaired, or perhaps sold as is? It was, in
its way, beautiful. If it expired on the way home, he could put it into cryo, preserving the delicate and incredibly detailed perfection of its agony. There were techniques of mummification, transparent plastics and nanos that could chase away deteriorating microbes indefinitely.
Titles moved through Zimivic’s fevered mind: “The Terror Victim” or “The Measure of Torture” or simply, “A Man.”
The reverie snapped suddenly. He realized with horror that the idiot limousine was stalled, wafting like some purposeless kite.
“Back to the hotel, you moron!” he shouted. “Can’t you see that I’ve forgotten something?”
He looked at his watch again, tugged his sleeve across the radiant pyramid on its face and leaned back, sighing. Just enough time.
* * *
Chapter 15
FREE MAN
« ^ »
A wasteland:
The man, no longer a Warden, finds that he can move his hand.
He makes a fist, absent the two fingers that are broken, relishing through his agony the feeling of freedom. The motion is his own; the governors seem to have been silenced by the ingenious torrents of pain he has suffered at the madwoman’s hands.
For a while, that single movement is all he can manage.
Then he tries to speak again. His throat is sore from the objects she force-fed him: a ring, a hard and serrated leaf from one of the hotel’s plants, one of his own teeth. His swallowing muscles were paralyzed along with the rest, and she stuffed them down his gullet with a telescoping stylus. Despite his grim effort, the words come out wrong.
“She cores…”
Someone else is in the room, in a flurry of motion.
He rolls his neck, attempting to find a better position for his wounded throat. He wants to say something.
A few more croaks, and the pain brings a veil of darkness.
He wakes up alone.
Some insistent noise has brought him to consciousness. The distant clang of requested access rings with a strange buzzing echo. He suspects that his eardrums have been burst. Perhaps medical aid is here.
He forces a word from his throat.
“Come.” Blood joins the sound in his mouth, spreads its metal taste like a blanket on his tongue.
The swish of a door opening. He finds that he can turn his head. A figure floats silently into the room, some sort of drone. With a new chorus of agonies he pulls himself up into a kneeling position. However painful, the motion is gloriously free of governance. He is the master of his own body.
Somehow, he lasted longer than the controls and programs, watched them die one by one as the madwoman worked. In their single-minded desire to serve sentence, the torture appalled as well as injured them. Even the Last Resort had failed. And when the artificial he was meant to ward left the room, slipping out silently, the governors saw their last chance to serve sentence disappear. And then they began to expire: first the criminal overlays, the kluges and updates added over the years, and finally the deep programs of Justice. Finally only he remained: the original self so long buried.
He kneels before the drone as if before some confessor, tries to say the words again. This time, they come.
“She cured me.”
Freed by a madwoman.
The drone, hearing this, descends a little and leaves an offering: A bottle of champagne and a single glass. Very expensive-looking.
He wakes a little later. A human is next to him, speaking almost too rapidly to understand.
“Must hurry. Up you come. The ship leaves in two hours!” Agony as the man pulls him up, wrenching his dislocated shoulders, dragging him onto the hard frame of a luggage carrier.
The pain redoubles as one arm winds up trapped beneath his weight. The carrier lifts, and consciousness flees.
He is awakened again. There seems to be no escape from the pain.
But this time, the force that disturbs him is internal. Somewhere buried among the traumatized wreckage of his brain, something is stirring. A nest of order in that tangled skein begins to reassert itself, to reach out and assess, analyze, plan.
He feels the governor extend tendrils of control across his consciousness; it grasps memories, glands, stray shreds of will.
“No!” he cries aloud. The effort induces a coughing fit, injuries throughout his body flair with pain.
“Damn you! Blood on my clothes!” comes a voice, a human close by. “Do you know what this jacket cost, you worthless freeloader?
“Hurry, you stupid car!” The words hurt his ears.
The governor keeps up its methodical work, patiently running some deeply imbedded back-up protocol to re-insinuate itself throughout his mind.
“But I’ve been freed! She cured me!” he insists. The words don’t hurt, so he must not have said them aloud. He fights against the propagations of the governor with his will, challenging its right to exist in his mind. But it moves implacably onward, inward to where a single mote of his humanity has for so long withstood every siege.
Finally, he realizes defeat is imminent.
It is not acceptable. There will be no return to bondage. No life as a puppet.
Simply no.
He grasps the instrument of will that still connects him to the Last Resort.
He smiles, dry lips cracking. The Last Resort is functional again, released from the grip of the madwoman’s magic.
He makes his final gesture of defiance …
* * *
Chapter 16
MAKER (3)
« ^ »
Only thirty days before the Blast Event.
The Planetary Environmental AI is not amused.
Here is a Class A Desert-type planet, one of the few in the Expansion that hasn’t been terraformed, chiaformed, hydro-exaggerated, or domed. A naturally occurring laboratory resembling to an extraordinary degree an original Earth (may She rest in peace) biome, well-stocked with the proper flora and fauna by the original colonists (environmentalists all) and heroically resisting all attempts to reduce it to another suburban sprawl of lawn-grass, disney forests, and babbling brooks.
Even the outrageous stripbeam mining, which would have seriously compromised any other biome type, has here been used by Gaia Herself (in Her Malvirian guise) for Her own ends. The great kicking up of sand and other “useless” materials has only helped the cause of re-desertification. The invading, engineered flora unleashed by the second generation of colonists (tourists) has begun to recede, thwarted by the now constant, imperceptible dustfall of pure, original, profoundly Malvirian sand upon the falsely enriched soil of the Occupied Zone: suburbia.
But that creeping virus Technology has struck again. Even the sands are not safe.
The Planetary Environmental AI is a vast, distributed intelligence, with sensors and monitors and limited processors scattered across every continent; from the lorn scrubs at the Old Settlement’s periphery to the lifeless wastes of the polar desert. This AI is almost a Gaia herself (she likes to think) a planetary consciousness of sorts, though infinitely quicker in her response to crisis than the measured pace of geological distress.
And she is not amused at all.
Among the countless reports of her many remote elements, she has discovered evidence of a strange transformation gripping the sands near Malvir City. The central fleshpot of the City is, of course, a lost cause. But she monitors it with the aloof concern with which one hears reports of a distant dictator and his claims of world-crushers and nova-seeds: with occasional alarm, but a sneaking conviction that all dictators get theirs in the end. The emissions and transgressions of Malvir City cannot be ignored.
And quite near the edge, on the fuzzy boundary between the Occupied Zone and real Malvir, she has discovered an artificial process taking place in the sands. Some sort of nanomachine has been set loose, a silicon-based, self-propagating menace making subtle changes. A detectible concentration of arsenic and, worse, a new level of organization have been added. Where once there was chaos, that handmaiden of
Gaia, there is now a cruel order imposed upon the structure of a large section of desert. Some kind of huge, unauthorized experiment. Perhaps a secret plan to subvert the underlying structure of Malvir itself: its fickle sands.
An invasion. An emergency of the first order.
But the Planetary Environmental AI knows better than to go public immediately. There would only be a few days’ media storm, fingers pointed, committees convened while vital evidence would be erased. She decides to pursue the matter herself, quietly.
More monitors, more probes, a counterinvasion of her own stealthy nanos, and she discovers that the mysterious change has a center, a clear source. Order, as usual, betrays its master.
The perversion is centered upon Malvir’s primary synthplant, its machinations arranged in obvious and incriminating rings. She messages the plant AI, demanding an explanation. It responds with surprise, alarmed that its base of operations could have undergone such a transformation without its knowledge. The Maker AI promises to conduct its own investigation, quietly.
She agrees to wait.
But you can never trust a synthplant AI; they are tools of that old devil: Consumerism. She’ll give it forty days.
The Maker’s heaven is unmade.
With its own sculptor, its own garden of delight (a growing forest of new works by the copied master), its new titanic mind with which to contemplate and compose reveries to Vaddum’s work, it has had a few good years. But now the barbarians are closing in.
Perhaps too much attention to creativity, to elegance, and not enough to joyboxes, lighting fixtures, junk food, and gravity beds. Perhaps if the Maker had less love of science, of art, of pure research, and more of toilet seats and tranquilizers. Or even if Malvir weren’t rotten with determined mismanagement at every level, then maybe the Planetary Synthplant AI might have pursued its own interests in peace. But as it is there are endless requests for documentation and detail; the status of every gram of useful matter must be reported. What resources remain in the flow of manufacture and consumption, of dispersal and reclamation? How much crap in that shit-filled alimentary canal of desire and demand?