Transhuman (34 page)

I saw a gleam of metal through the trees—they were onto me that fast. The multimatrix would be, of course. I ran again, trying for the least probable direction, short of straight at the ranger-bots who would now be seeking me, while the robochops did heat-scans from above. Well, my suit would make that difficult—until they hooked onto its fullerine and metal nature—which would not take long. Then a few bolts of circuitry-eating nanogoo would immobilize me until the ranger-bots arrived. There was only one possible escape.

Water. It was a good-sized, strong-flowing river, murky and full of debris. I didn't hesitate. I dived in. I'd swim underwater. Upstream. Very clever no? Not something any logical thinking machine would do. Not something any logical thinking human would do either. Not with a river in spate. Firstly, I nearly knocked myself out on an upthrusting rock, and secondly it was flowing far too strongly to swim against the current. I did manage to grab a piece of dead tree wrapped over the rock that had nearly brained me. There was a turmoil of water around me—fortunately, I was still in the space suit I had worn for the descent. Unfortunately, the robochops would get onto that. Their scanners would be doing size, shape, and makeup surveillance analysis of river objects by now. I keyed in the suit release codes with my tongue, blessing the engineer who had realized that the one time you might really need to use them would be just when you could not use a hand. Tongue pressure and the numbers on the vis-plate counted up, you just had to stop at the right time . . . and then flexi-sections of the suit slid back and water rushed in. I very, very nearly drowned before I could shake free of the suit. Clever George!

I started to swim for the bank . . . and realized that wasn't going to happen either. The runoff water from the melting snow of Mount Kenya was more than a match for me. The cold was numbing, and the flow strong.

Then I was joined in the water by something big, black, and hairy, and a much better swimmer than I was. I clung to it, kicking out as much as I could.

At times like this one doesn't ask what a Newfoundland dog is doing there. Nor does one think that all dogs are tracked onto the multimatrix. I knew that. I'd done some of the programming myself. I crawled up the sandbank next to the dog, and lay there, gasping. But, having given me the benefit of a shake-shower, my black furry rescuer was in no mood for leaving me to feel sorry for myself. She pawed at me, and stuck her large black nose under me. And she was joined in her efforts to rouse me by a border collie who was taking nips at my ankles. I was either hallucinating or they wanted me to get up. Now.

Well. I could be caught here, and quietly go to my virtual reality doom, or go along with the canine Tonto and the Lone Ranger who was worrying my ankles. And, as Tonto was trying to pick me up by the scruff of the neck . . .I got up.

The multimatrix would pick up the tracers of two dogs on the loose in the parkland. They weren't indigenous animals . . .

So where had they come from? The answer had to be where I was heading for. The Frame enclave. The little piece of Mount Kenya that was above ground, human residences for the wealthy and powerful of Compcor. I walked. Anyway, have you ever tried to stop a border collie who wants to herd you along from doing so? Especially one with a lugubrious-eyed Tonto-the-Newfoundland as a sidekick. The enclave was a long way, uphill, on foot, through podocarp and bamboo forest for a man who hadn't walked further than a mile on a treadmill in many years, but the dogs kept me going. They, at least, were enjoying themselves.

There are some advantages to not thinking too deeply about the future. There is a twelve-foot fence around the enclave. The gates would definitely be linked to the multimatrix. Even the wire would probably be. The dogs, however, had ideas on a neat little hole. It was impressive to see just how a small mountain of Newfoundland could fit through it. The Newfie had thick fur to protect it from wire ends. I, on the other hand, had a damp, torn thermoflex formfit, without the electronics, and sore feet, and I was less adept at getting down on my belly and wiggling. Still, I got through with a few more rips, and a licked face. They led me on toward to a house I recognized, with a magnificent view of the space elevator coming out of the top of Batian peak, like a thin line of silver to the stars.

She was waiting, and the dogs greeted her enthusiastically. She patted them, and cooed at them. I wasn't inclined to love Compcor, but her personal shares went up in my book. She looked at me with far less affection than at her dogs. "The system thinks that you're dead, but it's determined to make sure. I've been eavesdropping on the transmissions."

"I thought I said to keep out of sight?" I said, going on the offensive. "Not to get noticed. Not to send the multimatrix messages. This house is safe enough . . ."

"I did. I stopped trying to hook up. This was passive reception. Not detectable."

"The dogs?" I asked.

Her upper lip curled into the sort of sneer I've utterly failed to perfect. "Did you expect me to sit on my hands?" she asked grimly. "About all I am still able to access is the pet-net. It hasn't been updated for some years. In fact, it seems entirely contained on the sector that I am able to access." I blinked. "It makes sense, I suppose. It's just come on a long way since the original tracers. I started integrating that at about the same time as I wrote the bit of code that called me. It was just after I lost Munchkin," I said quietly.

"Munchkin?"

I reached out and patted the big Newfie head. "Munch was my Staffie. He went walkabout while I was at work. Got run over by a truck." It wouldn't happen these days, with the controls on vehicles. Progress did bring some good things. It was not something I wanted to dwell on, even now. "You sent your dogs to fetch me?"

She nodded. Dogs had taken happily to human voices in their heads. It seemed to them that we'd always been in there anyway. Cats . . . were another matter. They guarded their independence and privacy, except when it suited them.

"How did you know I would come out there?" I asked.

"It was fairly obvious," she said.

Well, maybe it had been to her. I decided not to mention the fact that I'd ended up there by carelessness, and that I'd intended to abandon the cargo-pod in the space elevator receiving yard. Which, now that I thought about it, might have been even harder to get out of, to say nothing of the complication of descending from Batian. "You've been playing around the dog's minds," I said—more for something to say, while I gathered my thoughts for the next phase, than anything else.

"Kim enjoys it," she said defensively.

"Well, yes," I nodded as the border collie looked adoringly at her. "Dogs like to interact with people. They like us, for some bizarre reason."

"He learned how to manipulate the system to get my attention," she said, proudly.

"And then you learned how to use the system to get him to do tricks," I said, raising one eyebrow. It was something I'd spent years learning to do. I'd had a fair amount of time out in deep space to pull faces at a mirror.

She shrugged. "It was a game. I could tell from the link monitor that he loved doing it. Amber"—she patted the Newfie amiably drooling at her side, "likes it too. She's just not as quick as Kim. A lot of people do it with their dogs now. And the dogs use it to communicate among themselves. There is even a barknet . . . Anyway, I don't see what that's got to do with . . . the problem. Except that pet-net's been overwhelmed with trapped and unfed animals . . ."

I took a deep breath. It was bad enough being responsible for humanity. "We'd better move. I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to take off all your clothes. And remove any implants. I hope like hell they're not surgical." Fortunately, large surgical implants and augments were old-fashioned. With rapid redundancy they all had to be self-removable.

"All?" she asked, staring at me.

"Yes. We're going to have to pass as local fauna. The sort of scanners they have around the Cenframe building will pick up artificial materials. There's too much circuitry woven into the fabrics. It's not just that I want see your body."

She waved an impatient hand. "It's the idea of being totally without implants. Just what do you plan to do?"

"Walk the mile or so to the Cenframe building. Use your DNA, retinal, and biometric scan to get in and override access limits and shut down alternate sections. Cut power. You can only do that manually, and I can only get in with you. We'll drop the Frame to below the critical intelligent threshold and reassume control."

She grimaced. "Things have changed a lot since you were last here. It won't work. It won't even start to work. There is no way that you can get to the actual power inputs, interface links, or the transmission of more than one of the sections. And as soon as you do that the backups in Edmonton and Nagqu cut in. Can't we just do something to stop the . . . I mean, people just weren't there when I tried to talk to them. Deep VR trance."

I shrugged. "They're happy. With VR at the neural input level they don't even know that it is VR. They think it is real. Nanobots will clean up for them. I assume house bots will naso-gastric feed them. The human race will survive in the Amish enclaves."

"The dogs. The cats . . . the horses . . ."

"It would probably look after them too, if pet-net wasn't linked into this section. Us as well." She put her hands onto the heads of her dogs. I'd heard that VR pets had been a failure. A fad that disappeared after a while. People with dogs clung to them, even if they farted more than simulations did. Something about the interactive relationship didn't simulate right. Of course, cats were worse. You can't predict a cat. "No," she said grimly. "What else, George? I had time to check on you. What access I had lists you as a perverted genius."

"I'm not! I'm as straight as the next man. I just prefer it in the flesh to VR," I said weakly. I do not like people, or computers, digging into my mind or my psyche. They might want to fix it.

"You know what I mean," she said without a hint of a smile.

The Newfie fixed me with a worried beery-eyed but trusting gaze . . . I might survive the head of Compcor Technical's bullying, but I was a pushover for a big black furball. "All right. But . . . well, can we still physically get into the subsystem section that is isolating you? In my time it would have been module beta seventeen a."

She nodded. "Probably. If we could get to the Cenframe building. But there is nothing that we can't do from here . . ."

"There is. My DNA and retinals are needed to link it back into the overall system again."

"But why? The moment that happens . . ." she drew a finger across her throat. I nodded. "Yes. But I can't think of any other way to do this. Now. I am one of those real dinosaurs who likes to program on a keyboard. Have you got one?"

"A VR version . . ."

"I don't do VR. Besides VR is going to be a really bad idea soon."

"I have some antiques. I could nano-rig the transmission . . ."

"Hit it. And if this place runs to a decent single malt? I had to leave my glass behind," I said regretfully. She shook her head. "I suppose you will do this in . . . Fortran?" The minuscule pause, as the computer memory she still had access to struggled for the right word.

I grinned evilly. "No. I'm saving that for the next millennium, when they will need me again. But modern high-level programming languages are too much like English for writing simple complicated stuff like this."

"Simple complicated?" She shook her head.

"Simple concept. Complex effects. And very hard to stop from working. Now get me that keyboard." The truth was I didn't want to talk about it. I wasn't that sure that it would work. If I was right then the Cenframe was using neural feedback to make the VR input into a contentment loop for the wetware. All the brain really got from the outside world was electrical impulses via the nervous system, which it turned into an image of the world . . . with direct neural input, that world could just be AI-generated electrical impulses instead of originating from the human nervous system. The brain would never know the difference, and, because of the feedback, it would get exactly what it wanted. When I'm really working I don't notice much around me. . . . When I'd done the assembling and uploaded, I looked up again, stiff from hours of sitting. It had been early morning when I arrived. Now the afternoon was drawing in. She was watching me. So were some twenty dogs of various sizes and shapes.

"Kennel club?" I asked.

"Barknet." She answered wryly. "Don't assume that dogs are unaware that people are in trouble, and that they haven't figured out the source of that trouble."

I nodded. Munch had been brighter than anyone would suspect of an animal that liked to spend ten minutes hanging by his teeth from an old tire I had hung in a tree. He knew exactly what would make me mad, and sometimes he'd do it anyway. Co-evolution had shaped dogs around us. It would have been true about computer systems too, if we hadn't set up forced self-evolution software programs, and left them to get programmed alone.

Jacinth pointed to the dogs. "I think we're going to need some extra cover. There are another seventy of them out in the reserve already, working. Two of them have been tranked by the rangerbots. Even with the ghosting, the AI in the Cenframe's going to pick up a pattern soon."

"What have you been doing?" She was too clever for her own good. Just the way I liked women. I never could handle dumb ones.

"Drifting antelope and a few baboons toward the Cenframe building. And causing havoc elsewhere. The rangerbots are busy."

"That just leaves Cenframe's own security."

She nodded. "I was taken aback by what you said I had to do. I checked. You're right. I hate people who are always right," she said, conversationally, slipping out of her clothes.

"Then we'll get on fine. I wouldn't have been manning an asteroid-mining ship and transporting no-G

crystals, if I'd got my predictions right. I'd have owned Compcor," I said wryly, following suit. I wished vaguely that I had more time to follow up on the old reasons for two people getting undressed together. Somewhere the game of stealth and detect had slipped into a tail chase of detecting and hiding mechanical and electronic components, not people. People, after all, without the augmentation were not dangerous. Ha! With the Green agenda, plenty of wild game wandered around the Cenframe building. The security system wasn't inimical to life—just to tool-using human life; naked apes were no threat. We left the way I had come in—except that we were naked and covered in camouflage mud. At least that was my reason for the mud, and I'm sticking to my story. Jacinth—perhaps at the prompting of certain canine friends—had made sure that it was the one way we could leave the enclave without alerting the multimatrix. Watching the boss wriggle—naked and muddy—under the wire is something every employee needs in their lives. It made the fact that we would shortly be under the electronic eye of Cenframe's laser-armed security system more comforting.