04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (13 page)

The brigadier was beginning to know the frustrations of dealing with a computer's mind.
"If resuscitation achieved, can subject be restored in sedated position?"

"Risks are too high in this instance. Recommend against any modifications at this time. However, there is a slight period of shock lasting thirty seconds on average."

It would have to do. "Have someone right down there with a strong sedative," she ordered the troops. "I'll wait until you can find one. I want her out before she knows she's back.
Move
!"

The small medical team dispatched by Security for the casualties had been held up downstairs, as confused as the rest outside, but they could supply what was asked.

"Why a sedative?" Marsha Johnson asked worriedly.

"Because if she came out as she was four months ago, we'd have to explain all this and fast," the brigadier told her. "And if we did that, we'd have a setup of the conditions that caused it. I don't propose to bring her back only to have her do this all over again. I want her to awaken in a psychiatric-care ward, where we can try to ease the pain before it builds up again."

That seemed reasonable.

One medic was brought up with the small inoculator and taken by one of the soldiers out onto the lab floor. Both were assured there was no danger if they did not actually touch the tube or base until told it was safe to do so. The substance chosen was quick, as instructed. Once in the bloodstream, it would knock the average person out in three to five seconds.

"We're going to do it now!" Coydt announced loudly, and there was a collective intake of breath not only from those around her but also from Ryan and van Haas. Even the dullest of the troopers understood by now what was being attempted, although few of them believed it was possible.

"Stand by!" the brigadier announced, and then silently said to the computer, "Run program as instructed."

A light went on inside the giant tube, not so much for the computer's benefit but as an automatic mechanism so that observers could get a good view. There was a whining noise, then something seemed to crackle, and inside the tube an eerie sight was taking place. Outlined there was a figure, a humanoid shape framed and defined only by energy. The shape filled in with an increasingly complex grid, and the image became three-dimensional, holographic. The grid lines of energy grew increasingly fine until, inside the shape, there was solidity. An eerie, glowing skeleton took form, then a whole network of organs, then a circulatory system. It was like watching a computer teaching aid on how the human body was constructed. The process was quite fast, but not fast enough for the human eye to miss each major stage. The 7800 had decided to take it slow and easy.

Now the skin and hair and surface features were in, and it was clearly the nude body of a whole, unpunctured Suzy Watanabe. Whole—but did it live?

A buzzer sounded, and the nearly invisible door in the tube clicked.

"Medic! Now!" yelled Coydt, and the startled and awestruck medic rushed to the door, opened it, and with the help of the soldier pulled the limp body out. She knelt down and gave a cursory check to the form.

"My God! She's breathing!" the medic exclaimed, awestruck.

"Administer the damned sedative!" the brigadier snapped sharply.

The medic snapped out of it, took a quick, professional estimate of size and body weight, set the little injector dial, and moved close to give it to the still form.

Watanabe's eyes fluttered, then opened, and an expression of anger and confusion was on her face. "What the fuck—?" she managed, even as the injector forced in the sedative, but that was all she managed before passing out once again.

Spontaneous cheers and scattered applause broke out.

"All right," Coydt told them, "there's now a lot to be done. I've given thanks to our people at K, and we're shutting down. I want a side entrance blocked off from public view and an ambulance there in ten minutes. Notify the duty officer that I'd like to see her downstairs immediately. All personnel present here are to be picked up and transported to the Security building. No one talks to anyone, understand?" She began to issue scattershot orders on practically everything, but it was clear that she wanted to keep the whole incident, even the revolutionary thing they had done, completely under wraps until she had taken it all up with the director and possibly the boards and determined a consistent cover.

Marsha Johnson had gone from shock to action to joy, all with growing admiration for the brigadier's creativity and fast thinking. Now, though, she began to think about herself.

When Coydt seemed satisfied and prepared to make her way down to confer with the duty officer, the lab technician approached her.

"Urn—ma'am? What about me? And Jimmy up there? Can we go now?"

"You and your friend are now under a military state of emergency." the brigadier told her. "I appreciate what you've done, but now it's stage two here. You will proceed, the both of you, with my own people to the Security Ops headquarters. My people there will take care of you. In the meantime, you're under the same restrictions as if you worked directly for me. No matter what your aid, if this is compromised, my people will have no hesitancy in shooting either of you. Accident has made you mine. Once mine, you remain mine. Now, follow the others. I have much extra work to do."

The manner and attitude infuriated Johnson, overcoming her fear. "I'm not your property!"

"That's
exactly
what you are," the brigadier replied.

6

GODS AND DEMI GODS

Brenda Coydt sat relaxed in the director's office, looking pretty good for somebody who hadn't had any sleep the night before. She did not withhold very many of the details, but van Haas had the distinct impression that she suspected he knew it all anyway.

"You evacuated all concerned to Site K, then?" he asked casually.

She nodded. "It seemed the best thing to do, and there's a full hospital and psychiatric unit there as well. They've been evaluating the stress on our people, and considering the wonderful job they did on Watanabe, it's only fitting that they have a crack at correcting their error.''

"Uh-huh. Well, I suppose it's expedient anyway. The security record from the monitor?"

"Wiped. Or, rather, altered. The incident shows as it happened, but the identification and visual on Watanabe has been altered so that it isn't her, if you know what I mean. Staff's already preparing a cover story for who we will say it was, and that should suffice. There will be protests and notes and confusion on the other side, but it'll blow over pretty fast, as usual. It might even buy Westrex a little time. Turn a minus into a plus by creating sympathy for us. If the other side is trying to steal our stuff and commit sabotage, it must be important. Like that. The effect won't last, but even if it buys us a week, it's effective."

"No problem there, I agree—but what do we do with Suzy even if they are able to bring her around? She's lost several months, of course, but she's still a ticking bomb, and some nice little drugs and happy therapy isn't going to change her basic nature. If we ship her out there, she'll be a threat. If we keep her here, we have no way to control or contain her."

"That same psychiatric staff's been working on that end ever since we lifted the alteration programs from Watanabe's computer. The 7800 can manage some startling things. Maybe too startling, when I think we're going to be at the mercy of twenty-eight of them, all networked, with unlimited power supplies and storage. Right now they can run quadrillions of parallel—that is to say, simultaneous—operations. If we wished to catch a fly, we could send an elephant to do it. It might step on the fly. Then it might be able to rebuild the fly from the information in its cells. That is the 7240 computer. The 7800 can find the fly, freeze it in midflight. then change just one tiny hair on the fly's body without it even noticing."

Rembrandt van Haas sighed. "Yes. It's been much on my mind, and I've read the Site K reports. Schwartzman, the Kagan people, and your own are convinced that the system is fail-safe. The computer cannot act on its own to influence any external factors. The core program, they firmly believe, is sound, as much as anyone can be certain of that these days."

"Yes. Through the ages people have speculated on how to communicate with a totally alien race, and the conclusion generally is that you can only get so far, particularly if that race is smarter and faster than you. Well, we have created that race ourselves, and they are inscrutable. What can one say about a computer that believes in its own mathematical and scientific way that human beings have souls?"

"I'd say it's pretty good news, if we knew its basis. I assume it is simply extrapolating from the failure of Watanabe to create living animal duplicates from the same encodings. It didn't seem to be a problem with your daring little experiment."

Coydt shrugged. "I was raised Catholic, although I'm not much of one now. The church believes that it can take as much as an hour for the soul to leave the body. Often such beliefs wind up being partially factual, as if our ancestors knew more about some things than we did."

"Perhaps. Or, perhaps it takes about that length of time for it—whatever it is—to dissipate or die. It's irrelevant to us. What is important is that we can in fact bring someone back from the dead as well as alter them physiologically. It means potential youth and immortality. It must be suppressed as much as possible."

"I agree," responded the brigadier. "It must be used sparingly and the mere knowledge of it must remain in the hands of as few as possible. Not even, I think, the board should be informed."

"Just you and me and your people? There's a lot to suppress here."

"Not as many as you might think. We are organic creatures, far more than anyone ever suspected. Psychiatrists today are more biochemists than the old and still prevalent vision of them as friendly confidants. You would be astonished at what they can do now, particularly with the aid of Watanabe's programs and the 7800 to augment their arsenal. Westrex's psychiatric unit and the Kagan research people can be handled by simply holding over them the idea that any leak will cost
them
use of the system. They're well chosen and still human beings. I think if we sent them up the line as a team and centered them in an Anchor remote from headquarters or Engineering or any of the other main bodies or units and let them work together on this line, we might get startling results without risking a lot of attention." She looked over at van Haas's globe, now clearly showing the installed Gates and rough Anchors and main network lines. "What about this Gate Four area, for example? Who and what's going in there?"

Van Haas thought a moment. "Actually, that's where we were going to put our troublemakers, our political prisoners and such. It's pretty out of the way in relation to the rest, south of the equator. None of the headquarters really wanted it, so it's pretty much an extra for now."

The system called for Cockburn to tie in with Administration in the Gate One quadrant, Ryan's Signals to tie in with transport and energy around Gate Three, NGomo's Logistics to tie in with Itutu's Resource Allocations Division at Five, and Security to share Seven with Schwartzman's Master Computers Division. Two would be Korda's Landscape Engineering base, while Six would be Populations. Four, because of its geographical location, was in fact the orphan, reserved for "future division headquarters."

"That's where they should go, then," Coydt told him. "An unofficial, unrecognized division. Perhaps a hundred people total, otherwise mixed in with the general staff, and labeled a Special Project under Security. That will frighten enough people off.''

"All right, I'll go along. But what about our witnesses from here?"

Coydt smiled sweetly. "Let's just call them the first Special Project problem."

The director nodded uncomfortably. The very idea of what she implied was repugnant to him, but this was an emergency and expediency was called for. However, he was going to make very sure that Mike Ryan's boys kept an independent eye on this. Coydt didn't know about Ryan's involvement, and that was his only ace in the hole.

"Brenda," he said evenly, without a trace of emotion. "Don't ever think of me as a Special Project. And don't embark on other major alterations without telling me."

She tried to laugh it off, but the manner was unnerving. It would never do to underestimate van Haas, she knew. "That sounds like a threat."

"Take it anyway you please, but get the context right. We are threatened by this—all of us. Even you."

She smiled sweetly. "Why, Doctor, why would
anyone
think of doing something like that?"

Marsha Johnson didn't like Security and she particularly didn't like Site K. Titan was claustrophobic enough, but the small space station was not only cramped, it was spartan, and she'd been confined to her small room with its barren metallic walls and cardboard-thin bed for several days, not even let out for meals. Those were brought to her by guards who never would talk and exited quickly. She was in a nightmare and she couldn't wake up, a prison where the offense was knowing too much and the price was solitary confinement.

They had brought her some of her own clothing and personal effects, and there was a tiny toilet and shower stall, but it was pretty miserable and lonely.

She was not, however, alone. A team of expert psychiatrists together with computer analysts poked and probed at her record, her past, and observed every single movement, as they were doing with the others as well. Their decisions, however, could not be totally pragmatic. They were expected to "cure" and "turn" Watanabe to a "correct" attitude while retaining her creativity and genius, no mean trick when some of that grew out of the very things they had to remove. Neither of the other two had much family, but both had friends and associates back on Titan. They were easily covered back there—folks were vanishing and being shipped out all the time, often with little or no notice—but what if any of those old friends ran into them on New Eden?