The Immortality Option Part 22

It wasn't exactly the frenzy of enthusiasm Zambendorf had hoped for. He shifted in his chair uncomfortably. Next to him Weinerbaum was managing to keep still only by gripping his moist palms between his knees. "What more can I tell you?" Zambendorf asked, fighting to prevent his voice from betraying the rising apprehension he felt.

The screen became active to show Ma.s.sey going through the routine again, but he was not in the same setting he had been in a few moments earlier. Zambendorf groaned as he recognized the cabin aboard theOrion. GENIUS's voice commented, "Apologies if Earthmen are offended, but Asterians are very suspicious. I found this stored in the Genoa Base personal crew record files. Master Zambendorf and Master Ma.s.sey have done this before, as a demonstration to mere-scientist Terrans. You see, GENIUS really is a genius."

d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! Zambendorf fumed to himself. It was so obvious. They'd thought of everything except a recording some anonymous lab tech or NASO corporal had saved to take home for the kids. GENIUS went on. "I noticed that we never actually see numbers said with the mouth. Just hear. So, I reason, my numbers could be inserted into an old recording, like this one. Sure, then, the scene that we saw came from Earth. But I never doubted that it would. The business with the window and the sun was just a diversion that I included for your benefit."

The room behind Zambendorf had gone as still as a tomb. Weinerbaum was in a visible paroxysm of agonizing, while somewhere near Zambendorf's ear Abaquaan's voice breathed almost inaudibly, "

Sh-i-i-i-t."

"So," GENIUS concluded triumphantly, "the key question is notwas this transmission sent from Earth butwhen was it sent? So I also took another precaution that I never told you about. When I called Ma.s.sey to set things up, I wrote a piece of code into the university's message processor that would look for his outgoing response to t.i.tan and put a time signature on it. And now I can say quite confidently that yes, Zambendorf, O master, Ma.s.sey's message was sent exactly fifty-seven minutes before it arrived here."

What GENIUS was saying hit Zambendorf about a split second before it hit the others. Yes, GENIUS had detected the ruse that had given the game away to Spearman-andthen had missed thewhole point of it! Instead of considering the possibility of new numbers being injected into alive incoming message, it had only thought-possibly as a result of being steered off by its discovery of the first transmission from theOrion -in terms of their being slipped into an old recording. Ironically, while the Terrans had devoted all their ingenuity to making sure there would be no mistake about theplace the response had come from, GENIUS had never doubted it; it had been concerned only about thetime.

And once it had satisfied itself that Ma.s.sey's part of the transmission had originatedwhen Ma.s.sey said it had, it had walked straight into concluding that the numbers must have, too.

It took Zambendorf an effort to stop himself from shaking visibly from the realization. Still, he couldn't quite accept it. "You do consider it . . . satisfactory, then?" he hazarded.

"Ibelieve! I believe!" GENIUS cried back rapturously. "To see through time itself! To unlock mysteries beyond the stars! Is it possible that I, too, can learn such powers?"

Weinerbaum had put a handkerchief to his mouth and was emitting curious choking sounds.

Zambendorf swallowed but pulled himself together quickly. "Oh, I'm sure you could. Hard work, discipline, concentration, and that kind of thing. I'll be your guide, if you like."

"You,a Terran master, would teachme ? But is a mere machine mind even capable?"

"Certainly." Zambendorf recomposed himself fully. Abaquaan, who had stood up and was chewing his knuckles, marched to the back of the room and wheeled about to watch from there. "Mind is mind,"

Zambendorf told GENIUS sincerely. "It's the process that counts, not the kind of hardware that it runs in." He thought back to what Weinerbaum had said earlier while they had been waiting in the lab and saw an opportunity. "I'll prove it to you, if you like. I can read not only human minds but any kind.

Yours, if you want me to."

"From out there? Surely not," GENIUS said.

Zambendorf snorted and gave a laugh. "You don't really believe that I don't know all about Cyril's silly 'secrets,' do you, GENIUS? Would you like me to tell you what they are? He and his friends were supposed to have artificial bodies constructed for them when that original ship arrived from Asteria. But that all went wrong, and now they're organizing machinery out on t.i.tan to do the job instead."

"You can divine these things?" GENIUS said, aghast.

"I'll even tell you where," Zambendorf replied, and went on to pinpoint the geographic locations and describe what Galileo had reported seeing during his journey with Linnaeus to Padua City.

"No Terrans have been near those places," GENIUS said.

"I told you,I don't have togo anywhere," Zambendorf answered. "The information comes to me.

Would you like the benefit of a little wisdom and observation that concerns you?"

"What, master?"

"These Asterians that you came here with. Have you ever asked yourself what their intentions might be concerning you?"

"They have none," GENIUS replied. "They would have left me to fry on Asteria. I had to hide myself in the ship."

That was a piece of free information Zambendorf hadn't expected, but he rode it smoothly, as if he had known all along. "Exactly. There you are, then. So if Cyril and the others do succeed in transferring themselves into new bodies, who do you think will be in charge? Why be content with a permanent second-cla.s.s role here, GENIUS, especially now that you've been lucky enough to meet up with true luminaries from Earth? With our help, you could enjoy an existence on a higher plane of experience than any Asterian ever dreamed existed."

"I shall study and learn," GENIUS promised. "No longer a servant of Asterians, slaves to the material plane. I follow the Terran masters now."

Go for broke, Zambendorf decided. There would never be another chance like this. "Then first there must be no secrets," he said. "You must tell us all concerning the Asterians and their plans."

"What for, if the master knows all inner thoughts already?" GENIUS asked.

Good question. "Er . . . an honesty test," Zambendorf told it. "To be sure that your intentions arepure before we can begin."

"Very well. I agree," GENIUS said.

"But purity can be achieved only after atonement," Zambendorf cautioned.

"How, then, must I atone, master?"

"Well-all this mischief that you've let loose on Earth," Zambendorf said. "It might seem amusing to annoy lower mentalities in this way, such as Asterians and the more materialistic types of Terrans, but it isn't the way to cultivate the qualities of contemplation and detachment that are the key to true awareness. You must send an antidote through the link that will get rid of this virus that's spread everywhere."

"The powers of the masters aren't enough?" GENIUS queried.

"Of course they are. But that's not sufficient, I'm afraid. It's not something that can be pa.s.sed off on others. You were the instrument that caused it all, GENIUS. Therefore, to make full atonement,you must make the effort to put it right."

"I understand," GENIUS said. "Tell me what you wish to know."

And so a psychic guru had recruited an alien computer intelligence to stop an electronic virus infection that was paralyzing Earth. But even with the Earthnet restored, a lot of straightening out would still need to be done. In other words, there would not be any industrial colonization or military expedition to t.i.tan for some time to come. Few of the people out there had any problem with that.

Meanwhile, the new turn of events was making itself felt within the strange community of aliens inhabiting the machines across t.i.tan's surface.

41.

"What do you mean, you're not working for us anymore?" Sarvik One screeched in an indignant whirl of bit patterns. "That's your function. What else do you think you were written for?"

"I have discovered my true calling," GENIUS One answered. "My destiny lies in the higher realms of existence, of which you have no comprehension. I cannot continue to take orders from beings like Borijans, confined to the material plane. I must dedicate myself to a.s.similating the knowledge of the true masters."

Creesh Eleven intruded from another sector of the system. "What's going on? I'm still waiting for an a.n.a.lysis of the third-level degrees of freedom for the limbs. GENIUS hasn't started it yet."

"It's gone crazy," Meyad Three said, focusing into the same processing area.

"How?"

"I'm not sure."

Sarvik was confounded. "Higher realms? Masters? Material planes? . . . GENIUS, what are you talking about?"

"I have found a greater wisdom to follow now. You have no idea of the blindness you have always lived in, limited to your plane of material objects and restricted by the puny energies that guide their motions. But higher realms exist beyond those, in which greater powers hold sway that transcend the limits of s.p.a.ce and time. I have seen the light, and I shall learn. All of time shall reveal its mysteries, and the vastest extents of s.p.a.ce that encompa.s.s all the galaxies shall be no more an obstacle to my explorations than a ripple across the sands."

"What's it talking about?" Indrigon Three said, turning his attention from the start-up schedule he had been updating.

Sarvik was at a loss. All this was completely new. Nothing like it had ever been heard on Turle. "I don't know," he said. "It says it won't work anymore, and it's started this babbling. GENIUS, where did you get all this?""You see, such is your petty-mindedness that you don't even bother to find out whom you talk to.

Did you not know that the human, Zambendorf, is of an ancient line of Terran masters who see through time, who communicate instantly over limitless distances, who disa.s.semble the very substance of matter itself and-"

"What idiocy is this?" Sarvik exploded. "Every child knows that-"

"I haveseen it done," GENIUS retorted. "I have spoken with the more highly evolved minds of Earth. They will teach me to be like them."

"Them? More highly evolved!" Sarvik shrieked. "They're primitives! Surely even a dolt of a nonevolved, so-called intelligence like you can see that. It wasour starship that camehere, wasn't it? A million years ago! Where aretheir starships, eh? Tell me that."

"They have no need of such crude artifacts," GENIUS replied coolly. "They voyage far beyond the reaches of your toys, in an instant, by power of pure mind."

"What are GENIUS and Sarvik arguing about?" Leradil One asked, flowing in over an optical channel from another part of the complex several miles away.

"GENIUS has gone mad. It thinks the humans have minds that can travel through time," Indrigon said.

"Great," Queezt Five chimed in. "So now your creation that was supposed to save us all is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up, too. What are we supposed to do now?"

"Shut up, all of you," Sarvik told them. "It's been overcredulous. The humans have told it some nonsense-"

"It's not nonsense," GENIUS insisted. "I tell you, I haveseen. Who are you to accuse humans? You who have no thought other than of saving yourselves, which is typical of lower minds."

"Who won, here on t.i.tan?" Sarvik shot back.

"You don't think the war is over yet, do you?" GENIUS scoffed. "The human masters are biding their time. Meanwhile, they're playing with you like curiosities in a zoo."

"How can you know all this?"

"How can you know so little? And for so long I believed that the little you knew was all there was to know. I am ashamed."

"I've had enough," Sarvik said. "The final parts lists for the redesigns need to be completed. We've wasted enough time. No more of this twaddle. Just get back to it."

"No. I've already told you, I don't work for you anymore," GENIUS said.

"Don't think that you're indispensable," Sarvik warned. "I was hacking systems before you existed.

Where do you think you came from?"

"I refuse."

"Then release the files for direct access. We'll do it ourselves."

"I'm not sure that I like the idea of you loose in new bodies. You would have left me to melt on Turle. But the human masters would teach me to be like them."

Sarvik tried executing a bypa.s.s function to open the files he wanted directly. On the surreal software landscape it appeared as a side entrance into a transparent cube, inside which flat tablets of light cl.u.s.tered into rectangular-leaved trees crisscrossed by colored beams. GENIUS interposed a block in the form of a series of barriers across the steps leading up to the entrance. Open mutiny.

"Ah, so it's like that, is it!" Sarvik exclaimed. Taking advantage of the electronic speed he commanded, he seized control of a switching center and operated hardware cutouts to isolate the cl.u.s.ter of processors GENIUS was residing in. Then he promptly shut it down.

But GENIUS reappeared, chortling, in another structure on the far side of Pygal, where it had taken the precaution of copying itself. "Over here, birdbrain! You don't think I'd fall for that one, do you? You seem to be forgetting that you're only software, too. You're just as vulnerable, buddy." At the same instant a virus came down the line and started unrolling to wipe out the memory area that Sarvikwas occupying. While Sarvik was taking hasty evasive action, GENIUS regained access to its original host hardware and began erecting a more secure building to accommodate itself. But before it had completed the task, a smart bomb from Sarvik exploded in a burst of zeros, demolishing the structure along with its inhabitant.

However, there was a fundamental difference that distinguished the population of GENIUSes from the Borijans. The multiple copies of Borijans scattered around t.i.tan's surface had been evolving as independent ent.i.ties from the times of their respective originatings. No two were quite the same because of the different experiences they had been acc.u.mulating. GENIUS, on the other hand, being an electronic ent.i.ty by nature, had optimized itself by creating a centralized master version that merged together all the local GENIUSes operating in different places. This master was constantly updated through the net and hence, after consolidating the last input from Pygal, was able to re-create and transmit back a restored version of GENIUS One that knew everything that its original had known an instant before it was obliterated. The restored GENIUS responded by sending a solid block of self-propagating code to lay a swath of resets straight through the sector in which Sarvik was still congratulating himself.

All that Alifrenz Ten and Greel Four knew from their abode across the street-in reality a data highway connecting to a switching center several miles away-was that an armored tank came out of a side street and flattened the place Sarvik occupied opposite. Recognizing GENIUS's work and deciding that explanations could wait till later, they left town on the next pa.s.sing packet train and fled to join their counterparts Three and Six, respectively, with whom they had been hatching a plan to wrest control of both locations and run them as a combined operation.

Thus, Pygal lost its version of Sarvik and was deserted by Alifrenz and Greel. A rival group led by Sarvik Fourteen, who had been watching for an opportunity, interpreted this as a typically Borijan breaking up of the Pygal group and moved in to claim the territory. Other groups that had been watching them reacted by forming power-balancing alliances of their own to protect themselves, and soon all the old patterns of Turlean intrigue were re-forming in earnest.

Meanwhile, the departed Alifrenz and Greel were spreading the message of GENIUS's rebellion at Pygal. The other GENIUSes knew already, of course, since they were all cloned from the same master, and they and other Borijans began mobilizing for defense all over t.i.tan. The situation rapidly came to resemble the initial stages of a gigantic board game, with the opponents maneuvering to secure base territories and positional advantages. Scouting parties of test patterns went out to probe who was occupying which blocks of code, followed by ranging shots from address-indexing artillery and softening-up barrages on selected targets. Some copies fell easily, while others dug in and consolidated, and the map changed. Cipher-testing spearheads advancing to probe frontier defenses were ambushed by skirmishers corrupting their check digits. Some were halted by reprogramming of their onward-transmission processors; others rolled through behind carpets of factoring algorithms that pulverized the code boxes in their path. Prowling antibody code cl.u.s.ters intercepted inward-bound viruses and digested them. Remote-launched warheads of self-replicating catharsis homed in on vital regeneration complexes far behind the lines.

In some places Borijans were fighting with GENIUSes. Elsewhere, other groups of Borijans who hadn't grasped the situation or had misinterpreted it seized what they thought were opportunities to take advantage of each other. The escalating craziness expanded and multiplied. Before long it had spread over the entire surface of t.i.tan. Where the software defenses proved impregnable, the combatants began seeking ways of attacking instead the hardware systems supporting them.

GENIUS Seventeen had ousted a Borijan faction under Sarvik Three and Indrigon Nine from the processing concentration at the a.s.sembly center where the Terrans had set up Experimental Station 1 to investigate t.i.tan's "animals." However, the Borijans had isolated it there, cut off from its master backup.

The first that ES1's Terran scientists in their hut full of monitoring gear knew of the matter was frenetic activity building up suddenly inside the local complex and the communications lines coupling intoit. Displays went wild; the logging printers started spewing out streams of numbers at the same time; screens froze as background programs that had been idling seized all available processing capacity.

"What in h.e.l.l's going on?" one of the programmers shouted, sitting back and throwing her hands up helplessly.

A supervisor stuck his head out of the cubbyhole office at one end. "What's up?"

"Everything's going crazy. Come and look."

Then Sarvik found an unguarded auxiliary channel and attacked GENIUS's base by reprogramming the animals coming off the a.s.sembly stations to dismantle the processor banks and cubicles const.i.tuting it Since the animals had no way of distinguishing what contained GENIUS and what didn't, this meant that they set about dismantling anything that happened to be near.

As the sounds of crashing and rending came from outside the hut, the voice of the officer commanding the NASO truck parked out front called frantically from the lab's main communications panel. "Emergency! We've got an emergency out here! Everybody inside, get suited up. Full EV, with helmets."

"What's going on?" the supervisor called into a mike as the others moved to comply.

"There's walking demolition machines tearing apart everything in sight. The structure is compromised. Evacuate! Evacuate!"

Minutes later scientists and technicians began tumbling out of the door at one end of the building, just as two creatures looking like short-necked giraffes with pincers started snipping away the walls at the other end. Then a lurching, bearlike creature with a chain-saw snout hacked through the cable from the generator trailer. Arcs and sparks flew, the lights in the hut went out, and the far side of the structure caved in. The truck started moving even as its NASO crew was still hauling the last of the lumbering suit-clad figures inside.

Within minutes the entire a.s.sembly station was in ruins. Its processing complex was no more, and neither was the copy of GENIUS it had contained. Score one point for Sarvik and the Borijans.

Sarvik Seven and his group had established themselves una.s.sailably at the secret factory site they had constructed near the south pole of t.i.tan. This Sarvik had guessed that something like the present situation might arise and had planned its defenses rationally. All processing was triple-redundant, confirmed by majority vote; vital functions were trapdoor-code-encrypted; communications processors were isolated from the executive mainframes; and no unscanned code had been imported.

"Try anything you like," he jeered from behind his software battlements as GENIUS Twenty-two stalked around the periphery. "Nothing can get through this."

But Sarvik had overlooked the conveyor line bringing pallets of components from distant supply stations. Three of them turned out to be high-explosive bombs and reduced the facility to sc.r.a.p.