World Breakers, page 13
She nodded, then drew in a breath and turned to face the dark mass of men. TAV helpfully increased the magnification until she became able to pick out individual bodies, though not faces.
“Men of Cercen,” she said, and listened as her own amplified voice rolled though the pass, bouncing off the stone cliffs and echoing down into the valley. “I am Melisende of Cercen, your rightful Lady. A miracle of past technology has allowed me to speak to you, and I am grateful.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who take your oaths seriously and seek only to do what is right and what honor demands.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who earn what you have, and disdain to steal what is not truly yours.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who shelter those in need of protection, and who would never raise a hand to harm those weaker than yourselves.
“I am grateful to call you Men of Cercen, and I invite you to leave the camp of the usurper, the abuser that you serve, and come home to the keep that will welcome you with open arms. Know that all men who wish to swear loyalty to me as their sole, sovereign Lady will be welcomed, but that any who act with ill intent will be punished. As a token of my promise to you, I give you light, to guide your way home.”
“Illumination flare, firing,” TAV said in her ear piece, and Melisende heard and felt a deep crash shiver through her body. A moment later, her black-and-white view of the world blinked and reformed, and Melisende heard the gasps of her people as a light brighter than the moon rose up into the sky over them.
“Come home, Men of Cercen,” Melisende said. “For our keep is warm and our fires are bright, and only those within the keep shall be saved from the wrath of the mountains. For I am a daughter of the pass and the cliff. I am a daughter of the river of ice. I am a daughter of these mountains, and they are displeased with he who has acted to harm their child.”
This, too, was a prearranged signal. For once again, TAV spoke in her ear and once again, she felt the sound of his great gun firing echo through her chest. On her display, she could see a streak of light arc across her field of view and impact the cliff opposite them down at the narrowest part of the valley. She imagined she could hear Valck’s laughter at the thought that she had missed his host.
But she hadn’t missed.
A few moments later, she watched in an awe that bordered on horror as the snowy side of the far cliff collapsed and slid down into the pass. The snow had a kind of grace to it as it flowed into the narrow neck of the valley and completely blocked Valck’s only escape route.
“Come home, Men of Cercen,” Melisende called a third time, “Swear to me and to no other, and live yet in these mountains who will defend their own!”
She fell silent and waited, watching.
Slowly, a small bit of the dark mass detached itself and began moving at speed toward the gates of the keep. Others moved to stop them, but Melisende’s archers were ready, and provided covering fire from the walls of the keep itself. TAV sent up another illumination flare as the first one fizzled into nothingness, and slowly but surely, more and more of the massed army surrounding Valck turned and fought their way free, then rode hell-for-leather to the keep.
As soon as the men arrived, Joalie and Bricio took their oaths in her stead and the men were given arms and a place on the walls. In this way, Melisende’s new men provided more and more arrows to see their fellows to safety.
When the stream of riders had slowed to a trickle, Melisende had TAV send up another flare.
“Men of Valck,” she called out this time. “Your time has expired. The mountains have found you wanting. You must be washed clean by the ice and the snow. If we find you alive, you will be forgiven. Fire.”
TAV let out another deep crack, and another projectile arced overhead. But this time, Melisende had ordered him to fire one of the precious High Explosive rounds, and had used her headpiece display to aim it right at Valck’s command tent. The resulting explosion reverberated through the valley, sending yet more of the hillside sliding down in that graceful roll to bury the bodies of those who would steal the birthright of the Daughter of the Mountains.
It only took ten days to dig out enough to open the pass once more. The Men of Cercen (as the army was now calling itself) threw themselves at the task with a vengeance, and the supplies that Melisende had laid in were more than enough to see them through. They also found survivors from Valck’s camp—or as some wit named it, Valck’s Folly. A pair of men, father and son, had been partially sheltered by one of Valck’s half-constructed siege engines. They also found a young messenger huddled next to the body of his oreme under the snow. All three of the men enthusiastically swore to be Melisende’s loyal men and she, true to her word, forgave them for not coming home sooner.
Melisende reformed her government, mostly reinstating her own nobility, but keeping one or two of Valck’s most talented and least corrupt men. She worked with TAV and Bricio to reorganize the army under the most competent commanders and to prepare them for the inevitable backlash that would result.
Edsen and his men continued their quest to learn enough to resupply TAV with ammunition.
Two seasons after Melisende’s coup, she bore a child, a daughter that she named Morafia. To Melisende’s delight, the people began to refer to both her and her infant as “Daughters of the Mountains”.
A season after that, a messenger arrived wearing Uto of Kaperado’s colors. He carried a missive from Melisende’s erstwhile father-in-law:
“Lady Melisende,
I take great joy in the news of the birth of my grandchild, and sorrow only to know that she is not a boy who might inherit the throne of my late son. However, I feel confident that between us, we can make a suitable match for her and secure her a husband who will be a strong, strategic-minded leader for Cercen and a valued partner for Kaperado. I want you both to come and visit me here this autumn. The cold harshness of the mountains is no place for a child. And worry not for your keep, I have several very talented men who would do an admirable job administering in your child’s name. You need not trouble yourself about such things, my dear. After all, you are my daughter-in-law and I intend to look after you appropriately.
Uto, King of Kaperado”
“A king, is he?” Bricio asked when Melisende showed him the letter. “That’s new.”
Melisende shrugged and rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what he calls himself,” she said. “Edsen’s progress is encouraging, and TAV thinks that we can have the . . . what does he call them? Oh yes, ‘dumb tanks’ ready to go by next spring. I need only stall Uto until then, and that will not be hard with Morafia so young. He does not have the ability to attack during the winter, and we shall see the Feast of Flowers from the inside of his palace.”
“You are so confident, my lady?”
“I am, Bricio. No one else has the technology that we have. And so we must use it quickly, while our advantage stands. If I have learned anything from TAV’s stories, it is that no technological edge lasts forever. When the iron is hot, we must strike. And so we will. In the spring. In the meantime, I must return my dear father-in-law’s missive.”
“Yes, my lady. Do not let the poison from your pen burn the paper,” Bricio said with a gentle, joking smile. Melisende waved him away and turned back to the parchment stretched out on the desk in her father’s—now her own—study.
“My dear father-in-law,
I am so pleased to hear of your joy in my dear daughter’s birth. I feel confident that she will grow to be exactly the woman and Lady that Cercen needs. I thank you for your kind invitation, but I am afraid that it is impossible to travel with her so young yet. Perhaps next spring. As you say, the mountains can be treacherous and harsh, and so we are safest here at home whilst she is in swaddling clothes. Thank you as well for your kind offer of talented administrators. One can never have too many of those, I have learned. Fortunately, my father and your son agreed, and we are quite well equipped here in Cercen for the time being. Perhaps once Morafia and I are able to travel, we will take you up on your offer, if it still stands?
May this autumn and the coming year bring you many more joys,
Melisende, Lady of Cercen
Daughter of the Mountains”
TANKNOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY
by Hank Davis
What newborn sentient tank wouldn’t develop a sense of humor? It exists in a world of extremes. On the one hand, it is a giant among mortals, true, capable of slinging hot death and blasting cities to the ground. But it is also still a very young thing, a thing with the needs and playfulness of a child. And even if such a tank doesn’t really have a mother and father, perhaps it would want them as badly as any other child. And perhaps it would protect those it chose as family at any cost. All jokes aside.
Another day, another invader from space. But it looked like this one was real.
I was picking up news broadcasts about it. I wasn’t supposed to do that, since the team thinks they would confuse me if I tried to square them with the simulated training input, but it’s always a challenge to sneak around my programmed restrictions, and I was also programmed not to be put off by challenges. The team hadn’t foreseen the subtle contradiction in the separate programs, and I wasn’t going to mention it to them.
The pro newsies didn’t really know what was going on, of course. They thought it was just another terrorist attack, and were concentrating on the pile of rubble where the Tesser Tower and adjoining buildings used to be, and only some online independents had noticed the big tank going down the street, squashing cars and flattening lampposts, and even they hadn’t picked up on what I thought was a large spacecraft hovering a few hundred miles up over the city, and I only detected it by sneaking into different government and civilian radar installations, and putting together different angles of scan from them. Whatever it was, it was absorbing and not reflecting radar impulses thrown at it, but with my overlapping scans I was able to spot a hole in the sky once I put together the different angles. And it wasn’t passing by, or in an orbit, or falling, so the way to bet was something artificial, not likely of Earth origin.
Unless the Cybernetic Research Foundation had gone all out to elaborately counterfeit an extravaganza—and I didn’t think their budget could stand it, with me eating up most of their funds—this wasn’t another training simulation.
Besides, I wasn’t getting the usual sort of input for simulations. In those, the special effects look more real than events shown in newssquirts. Sometimes with better character development, too, So, finally something was actually happening.
But I couldn’t move yet. They don’t want me going topside and charging around in reaction to a merely virtual crisis. Still, it looked like I really should be revving up—looked in real time, in the real world, that is.
While waiting for the three bosses—they can’t just have one boss maybe going off his or her nut, and ordering me into action, you know—I snuck around in Foundation databanks where I’m not supposed to go. (Just another challenge to be met!) I finally found two of the three trigger codes that would release me into action. The team called them passwords, but I thought trigger codes sounded way cooler. Still needed the third one, and I was scouring the networks, trying to find it—maybe it was only on paper?—when Dr. Rieber’s dedicated line went live and her voice came breathlessly in.
Of course, she wasn’t really breathless or she couldn’t have spoken, but she was obviously trying to cancel out an oxygen debt, breathing rapidly and loudly, and I detected strong stress indicia in her voice. They didn’t mean to build that into me, but the programs for voice print identification have unintended uses which I’ve explored, having plenty of time on my circuits. Anyway, from the several thousand works of fiction I had scanned in my copious spare time, I judged that using “breathless” to describe her voice was within the bounds of poetic license.
“Steeleye!” she said, yes, breathlessly, “Emergency. Get ready to roll.” Then she paused and said, slowly and carefully (but still a little out of breath), “Chain up!”
As I expected, it was indeed Dr. Rieber. I accessed a video pickup in the third floor’s hall, and saw her come out of her office and run for the elevators. No wonder she was breathless. And that was indeed the code phrase she was to give me. However, it was one of the two which I had already ferreted out, and I hadn’t located that still-lacking third one yet.
And besides, I was supposed to have at least one of the three humans authorized to give me instructions on board before I could move, another of the precautions to keep me from running amok.
The higher-ups in the Foundation were very concerned about me getting out of control. They would be even more concerned if they knew I had edited my programming so that I could move without anybody being on board. I doubted that they would accept the emergency as good reason for me to throw off my restraints. And, if they knew that, they might wonder what other controls I could veto.
Since I still didn’t have that third password, the matter was academic. I could probably work around that programmed restraint, too, but it would be complicated, and take a lot of seconds, possibly as much as half an hour. And it would be too obvious, and really alert the Foundation that their leash was weaker than they thought. I preferred not to be dismantled, which would probably be their reaction. Dismantling might not hurt, but where would I live afterward?
By now, Dr. Rieber had gotten to my sub-sub-subbasement level, and slipped her I.D. into the card reader next to me, and I could open my access door. As she ran inside, I saw Dr. Carl Knightley pop out of the other elevator on one of my building monitors. In a few minutes, he had joined Dr. Rieber in my control room.
“Steeleye,” he said, unnecessarily since he had my realtime attention (my cyberspeed attention was still spooking around in project databases, searching for that third password), then added, “F-I-A-W-O-D.”
That was his password. Unfortunately, it, too, was one I already had without authorization, though I hadn’t yet ferreted out what the letters stood for. So I was still stuck in place while I tried to work around my programming’s strictures.
Dr. Knightly spoke again (yes, breathlessly): “Erin, you shouldn’t be here. Only one of us is necessary. The Project can’t afford to lose both of us. Quick, get out.” He had dropped the pitch of his voice a bit and put a lot of authority into it. Too bad, his voice cracked on the last word.
Dr. Rieber’s pulse rate had been returning to normal, but now it shot up again. From that and her facial expressions, I knew that Dr. Knightley’s last sentence had been a strategic mistake. It had angered her, just like in similar male-female interactions in a few hundred of the movies I had speed-watched. Of course, I knew that the rest of his statement wasn’t completely true—their importance to the project wasn’t the main thing on his mind. I had observed how he looked at her when her attention was directed elsewhere. I had also noticed her reacting similarly to his presence, not to mention elevated pulse rates and widened pupils.
That also was like in those movies. And I decided I needed to reevaluate them. I hadn’t been sure about how close to reality they were.
Meanwhile, Dr. Rieber was replying. “You’re right, Carl, so stop giving me orders, and you just get your butt out of here. I’ll handle this.”
Actually, I would be the one handling the situation. (If I ever got that third password.) But I could tell that Dr. Knightley was also mad now. That was accompanied by obvious fear, anxiety, and, I thought less confidently, intense curiosity (that last one was trickier to identify). But mostly, they were now mad at each other.
It was a lot like those movies.
Then an outside phone call came in on the secure line. I connected it and put it on my inboard speakers. From the tone of the breathing, I had already identified the caller as Dr. Keith. A second later, he identified himself. “Steeleye, this is Dr. Keith. I can’t get into the building. Wreckage has blocked the entrance.”
“John, we’re both here, Carl and me,” Dr. Rieber said. “We need your password for Steeleye to get moving.”
“But I can’t get there. Debris has blocked the CRF building’s entrances.” He was repeating himself, but he did that frequently. “And I have to be in the building and in range of a monitor for the password to be acknowledged. That was a security measure we all agreed on.”
“You mean, you and Carl argued for it, and I was outvoted,” Dr. Rieber almost snarled. “I thought it was pinning Steeleye’s operational capabilities on a single weak break-point. And I was right.”
This might go on for some number of seconds (like hours to me) while mayhem was unfolding outside, so I spoke. “Dr. Rieber, I’ve noticed what you might call a loophole in my programs.”
Dr. Rieber had complained to me in the past that I should be discreet about the many loopholes I keep finding, and now was staring sternly into the nearest visual monitor, but didn’t say anything, so I continued.
“I don’t think Dr. Keith has to be present to deliver his password—just that an authorized person has to say it from inside the building. If he will tell you the password, and either of you repeat it here, that should work.” Actually, I now had the third password. Dr. Keith had unconsciously subvocalized it when he thought of it, and I had picked it up. Dr. Rieber knew I could hear subvocalizations, but that was another capability I thought I should otherwise keep under wraps—in particular, not letting Dr. Keith know about it.
Dr. Keith didn’t like my suggestion. “We need to plug that hole in the program as soon as poss—”
“Screw that, John!” Dr. Rieber snapped, “what’s the damned password?”
“Well . . . I don’t . . . very well, it’s Rumpelstiltskin.”
My passengers repeated the password, almost in unison, and it was time to roll. “Doctors Rieber and Knightley, please be seated and fasten your seat belts.” I said to my passengers. I thought of a line from one of those movies, “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride,” but did not say it.
“Men of Cercen,” she said, and listened as her own amplified voice rolled though the pass, bouncing off the stone cliffs and echoing down into the valley. “I am Melisende of Cercen, your rightful Lady. A miracle of past technology has allowed me to speak to you, and I am grateful.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who take your oaths seriously and seek only to do what is right and what honor demands.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who earn what you have, and disdain to steal what is not truly yours.
“I am grateful for all of you true men, who shelter those in need of protection, and who would never raise a hand to harm those weaker than yourselves.
“I am grateful to call you Men of Cercen, and I invite you to leave the camp of the usurper, the abuser that you serve, and come home to the keep that will welcome you with open arms. Know that all men who wish to swear loyalty to me as their sole, sovereign Lady will be welcomed, but that any who act with ill intent will be punished. As a token of my promise to you, I give you light, to guide your way home.”
“Illumination flare, firing,” TAV said in her ear piece, and Melisende heard and felt a deep crash shiver through her body. A moment later, her black-and-white view of the world blinked and reformed, and Melisende heard the gasps of her people as a light brighter than the moon rose up into the sky over them.
“Come home, Men of Cercen,” Melisende said. “For our keep is warm and our fires are bright, and only those within the keep shall be saved from the wrath of the mountains. For I am a daughter of the pass and the cliff. I am a daughter of the river of ice. I am a daughter of these mountains, and they are displeased with he who has acted to harm their child.”
This, too, was a prearranged signal. For once again, TAV spoke in her ear and once again, she felt the sound of his great gun firing echo through her chest. On her display, she could see a streak of light arc across her field of view and impact the cliff opposite them down at the narrowest part of the valley. She imagined she could hear Valck’s laughter at the thought that she had missed his host.
But she hadn’t missed.
A few moments later, she watched in an awe that bordered on horror as the snowy side of the far cliff collapsed and slid down into the pass. The snow had a kind of grace to it as it flowed into the narrow neck of the valley and completely blocked Valck’s only escape route.
“Come home, Men of Cercen,” Melisende called a third time, “Swear to me and to no other, and live yet in these mountains who will defend their own!”
She fell silent and waited, watching.
Slowly, a small bit of the dark mass detached itself and began moving at speed toward the gates of the keep. Others moved to stop them, but Melisende’s archers were ready, and provided covering fire from the walls of the keep itself. TAV sent up another illumination flare as the first one fizzled into nothingness, and slowly but surely, more and more of the massed army surrounding Valck turned and fought their way free, then rode hell-for-leather to the keep.
As soon as the men arrived, Joalie and Bricio took their oaths in her stead and the men were given arms and a place on the walls. In this way, Melisende’s new men provided more and more arrows to see their fellows to safety.
When the stream of riders had slowed to a trickle, Melisende had TAV send up another flare.
“Men of Valck,” she called out this time. “Your time has expired. The mountains have found you wanting. You must be washed clean by the ice and the snow. If we find you alive, you will be forgiven. Fire.”
TAV let out another deep crack, and another projectile arced overhead. But this time, Melisende had ordered him to fire one of the precious High Explosive rounds, and had used her headpiece display to aim it right at Valck’s command tent. The resulting explosion reverberated through the valley, sending yet more of the hillside sliding down in that graceful roll to bury the bodies of those who would steal the birthright of the Daughter of the Mountains.
It only took ten days to dig out enough to open the pass once more. The Men of Cercen (as the army was now calling itself) threw themselves at the task with a vengeance, and the supplies that Melisende had laid in were more than enough to see them through. They also found survivors from Valck’s camp—or as some wit named it, Valck’s Folly. A pair of men, father and son, had been partially sheltered by one of Valck’s half-constructed siege engines. They also found a young messenger huddled next to the body of his oreme under the snow. All three of the men enthusiastically swore to be Melisende’s loyal men and she, true to her word, forgave them for not coming home sooner.
Melisende reformed her government, mostly reinstating her own nobility, but keeping one or two of Valck’s most talented and least corrupt men. She worked with TAV and Bricio to reorganize the army under the most competent commanders and to prepare them for the inevitable backlash that would result.
Edsen and his men continued their quest to learn enough to resupply TAV with ammunition.
Two seasons after Melisende’s coup, she bore a child, a daughter that she named Morafia. To Melisende’s delight, the people began to refer to both her and her infant as “Daughters of the Mountains”.
A season after that, a messenger arrived wearing Uto of Kaperado’s colors. He carried a missive from Melisende’s erstwhile father-in-law:
“Lady Melisende,
I take great joy in the news of the birth of my grandchild, and sorrow only to know that she is not a boy who might inherit the throne of my late son. However, I feel confident that between us, we can make a suitable match for her and secure her a husband who will be a strong, strategic-minded leader for Cercen and a valued partner for Kaperado. I want you both to come and visit me here this autumn. The cold harshness of the mountains is no place for a child. And worry not for your keep, I have several very talented men who would do an admirable job administering in your child’s name. You need not trouble yourself about such things, my dear. After all, you are my daughter-in-law and I intend to look after you appropriately.
Uto, King of Kaperado”
“A king, is he?” Bricio asked when Melisende showed him the letter. “That’s new.”
Melisende shrugged and rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what he calls himself,” she said. “Edsen’s progress is encouraging, and TAV thinks that we can have the . . . what does he call them? Oh yes, ‘dumb tanks’ ready to go by next spring. I need only stall Uto until then, and that will not be hard with Morafia so young. He does not have the ability to attack during the winter, and we shall see the Feast of Flowers from the inside of his palace.”
“You are so confident, my lady?”
“I am, Bricio. No one else has the technology that we have. And so we must use it quickly, while our advantage stands. If I have learned anything from TAV’s stories, it is that no technological edge lasts forever. When the iron is hot, we must strike. And so we will. In the spring. In the meantime, I must return my dear father-in-law’s missive.”
“Yes, my lady. Do not let the poison from your pen burn the paper,” Bricio said with a gentle, joking smile. Melisende waved him away and turned back to the parchment stretched out on the desk in her father’s—now her own—study.
“My dear father-in-law,
I am so pleased to hear of your joy in my dear daughter’s birth. I feel confident that she will grow to be exactly the woman and Lady that Cercen needs. I thank you for your kind invitation, but I am afraid that it is impossible to travel with her so young yet. Perhaps next spring. As you say, the mountains can be treacherous and harsh, and so we are safest here at home whilst she is in swaddling clothes. Thank you as well for your kind offer of talented administrators. One can never have too many of those, I have learned. Fortunately, my father and your son agreed, and we are quite well equipped here in Cercen for the time being. Perhaps once Morafia and I are able to travel, we will take you up on your offer, if it still stands?
May this autumn and the coming year bring you many more joys,
Melisende, Lady of Cercen
Daughter of the Mountains”
TANKNOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY
by Hank Davis
What newborn sentient tank wouldn’t develop a sense of humor? It exists in a world of extremes. On the one hand, it is a giant among mortals, true, capable of slinging hot death and blasting cities to the ground. But it is also still a very young thing, a thing with the needs and playfulness of a child. And even if such a tank doesn’t really have a mother and father, perhaps it would want them as badly as any other child. And perhaps it would protect those it chose as family at any cost. All jokes aside.
Another day, another invader from space. But it looked like this one was real.
I was picking up news broadcasts about it. I wasn’t supposed to do that, since the team thinks they would confuse me if I tried to square them with the simulated training input, but it’s always a challenge to sneak around my programmed restrictions, and I was also programmed not to be put off by challenges. The team hadn’t foreseen the subtle contradiction in the separate programs, and I wasn’t going to mention it to them.
The pro newsies didn’t really know what was going on, of course. They thought it was just another terrorist attack, and were concentrating on the pile of rubble where the Tesser Tower and adjoining buildings used to be, and only some online independents had noticed the big tank going down the street, squashing cars and flattening lampposts, and even they hadn’t picked up on what I thought was a large spacecraft hovering a few hundred miles up over the city, and I only detected it by sneaking into different government and civilian radar installations, and putting together different angles of scan from them. Whatever it was, it was absorbing and not reflecting radar impulses thrown at it, but with my overlapping scans I was able to spot a hole in the sky once I put together the different angles. And it wasn’t passing by, or in an orbit, or falling, so the way to bet was something artificial, not likely of Earth origin.
Unless the Cybernetic Research Foundation had gone all out to elaborately counterfeit an extravaganza—and I didn’t think their budget could stand it, with me eating up most of their funds—this wasn’t another training simulation.
Besides, I wasn’t getting the usual sort of input for simulations. In those, the special effects look more real than events shown in newssquirts. Sometimes with better character development, too, So, finally something was actually happening.
But I couldn’t move yet. They don’t want me going topside and charging around in reaction to a merely virtual crisis. Still, it looked like I really should be revving up—looked in real time, in the real world, that is.
While waiting for the three bosses—they can’t just have one boss maybe going off his or her nut, and ordering me into action, you know—I snuck around in Foundation databanks where I’m not supposed to go. (Just another challenge to be met!) I finally found two of the three trigger codes that would release me into action. The team called them passwords, but I thought trigger codes sounded way cooler. Still needed the third one, and I was scouring the networks, trying to find it—maybe it was only on paper?—when Dr. Rieber’s dedicated line went live and her voice came breathlessly in.
Of course, she wasn’t really breathless or she couldn’t have spoken, but she was obviously trying to cancel out an oxygen debt, breathing rapidly and loudly, and I detected strong stress indicia in her voice. They didn’t mean to build that into me, but the programs for voice print identification have unintended uses which I’ve explored, having plenty of time on my circuits. Anyway, from the several thousand works of fiction I had scanned in my copious spare time, I judged that using “breathless” to describe her voice was within the bounds of poetic license.
“Steeleye!” she said, yes, breathlessly, “Emergency. Get ready to roll.” Then she paused and said, slowly and carefully (but still a little out of breath), “Chain up!”
As I expected, it was indeed Dr. Rieber. I accessed a video pickup in the third floor’s hall, and saw her come out of her office and run for the elevators. No wonder she was breathless. And that was indeed the code phrase she was to give me. However, it was one of the two which I had already ferreted out, and I hadn’t located that still-lacking third one yet.
And besides, I was supposed to have at least one of the three humans authorized to give me instructions on board before I could move, another of the precautions to keep me from running amok.
The higher-ups in the Foundation were very concerned about me getting out of control. They would be even more concerned if they knew I had edited my programming so that I could move without anybody being on board. I doubted that they would accept the emergency as good reason for me to throw off my restraints. And, if they knew that, they might wonder what other controls I could veto.
Since I still didn’t have that third password, the matter was academic. I could probably work around that programmed restraint, too, but it would be complicated, and take a lot of seconds, possibly as much as half an hour. And it would be too obvious, and really alert the Foundation that their leash was weaker than they thought. I preferred not to be dismantled, which would probably be their reaction. Dismantling might not hurt, but where would I live afterward?
By now, Dr. Rieber had gotten to my sub-sub-subbasement level, and slipped her I.D. into the card reader next to me, and I could open my access door. As she ran inside, I saw Dr. Carl Knightley pop out of the other elevator on one of my building monitors. In a few minutes, he had joined Dr. Rieber in my control room.
“Steeleye,” he said, unnecessarily since he had my realtime attention (my cyberspeed attention was still spooking around in project databases, searching for that third password), then added, “F-I-A-W-O-D.”
That was his password. Unfortunately, it, too, was one I already had without authorization, though I hadn’t yet ferreted out what the letters stood for. So I was still stuck in place while I tried to work around my programming’s strictures.
Dr. Knightly spoke again (yes, breathlessly): “Erin, you shouldn’t be here. Only one of us is necessary. The Project can’t afford to lose both of us. Quick, get out.” He had dropped the pitch of his voice a bit and put a lot of authority into it. Too bad, his voice cracked on the last word.
Dr. Rieber’s pulse rate had been returning to normal, but now it shot up again. From that and her facial expressions, I knew that Dr. Knightley’s last sentence had been a strategic mistake. It had angered her, just like in similar male-female interactions in a few hundred of the movies I had speed-watched. Of course, I knew that the rest of his statement wasn’t completely true—their importance to the project wasn’t the main thing on his mind. I had observed how he looked at her when her attention was directed elsewhere. I had also noticed her reacting similarly to his presence, not to mention elevated pulse rates and widened pupils.
That also was like in those movies. And I decided I needed to reevaluate them. I hadn’t been sure about how close to reality they were.
Meanwhile, Dr. Rieber was replying. “You’re right, Carl, so stop giving me orders, and you just get your butt out of here. I’ll handle this.”
Actually, I would be the one handling the situation. (If I ever got that third password.) But I could tell that Dr. Knightley was also mad now. That was accompanied by obvious fear, anxiety, and, I thought less confidently, intense curiosity (that last one was trickier to identify). But mostly, they were now mad at each other.
It was a lot like those movies.
Then an outside phone call came in on the secure line. I connected it and put it on my inboard speakers. From the tone of the breathing, I had already identified the caller as Dr. Keith. A second later, he identified himself. “Steeleye, this is Dr. Keith. I can’t get into the building. Wreckage has blocked the entrance.”
“John, we’re both here, Carl and me,” Dr. Rieber said. “We need your password for Steeleye to get moving.”
“But I can’t get there. Debris has blocked the CRF building’s entrances.” He was repeating himself, but he did that frequently. “And I have to be in the building and in range of a monitor for the password to be acknowledged. That was a security measure we all agreed on.”
“You mean, you and Carl argued for it, and I was outvoted,” Dr. Rieber almost snarled. “I thought it was pinning Steeleye’s operational capabilities on a single weak break-point. And I was right.”
This might go on for some number of seconds (like hours to me) while mayhem was unfolding outside, so I spoke. “Dr. Rieber, I’ve noticed what you might call a loophole in my programs.”
Dr. Rieber had complained to me in the past that I should be discreet about the many loopholes I keep finding, and now was staring sternly into the nearest visual monitor, but didn’t say anything, so I continued.
“I don’t think Dr. Keith has to be present to deliver his password—just that an authorized person has to say it from inside the building. If he will tell you the password, and either of you repeat it here, that should work.” Actually, I now had the third password. Dr. Keith had unconsciously subvocalized it when he thought of it, and I had picked it up. Dr. Rieber knew I could hear subvocalizations, but that was another capability I thought I should otherwise keep under wraps—in particular, not letting Dr. Keith know about it.
Dr. Keith didn’t like my suggestion. “We need to plug that hole in the program as soon as poss—”
“Screw that, John!” Dr. Rieber snapped, “what’s the damned password?”
“Well . . . I don’t . . . very well, it’s Rumpelstiltskin.”
My passengers repeated the password, almost in unison, and it was time to roll. “Doctors Rieber and Knightley, please be seated and fasten your seat belts.” I said to my passengers. I thought of a line from one of those movies, “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride,” but did not say it.
