“Fascinating,” Belling drawled. “Where is Squalor? You can finish the history lesson while we tear his circuits out.”
“Shut the hell up,” I said quietly. “He’s going somewhere with this.”
“Mr. Cates, you are a remarkably civilized criminal. But perhaps Mr. Orel is right: Time is wasting. Gentlemen, I give you Dennis Squalor. Or what’s left of him.”
He walked around the table and stopped next to the black box, which came up to his chin. We stared for a moment. Kieth was the first to react, almost running around the table.
“Holy fucking shit!” he gasped. “He’s fucking digitized!”
“Squalor’s last-ditch effort to arrest the degeneration of his mind. It worked. Too late to actually cure him, of course, but it froze the damage.”
“I thought digitizing the brain didn’t work?” My throat felt like sandpaper.
Marin shrugged. “Most of the time, no. But in some people, for some reason, it does. There’s been a lot of research into this topic: The secretaries have plans for an SSF made up entirely of digitized humans in boxes like this, controlling robot avatars.”
“Robot avatars,” I repeated, staring at the featureless box. “The Cardinals.”
Marin nodded. “The Cardinals. Squalor’s avatars, made to look like him physically, controlled remotely by Squalor’s intelligence, which resides here in several redundantly arrayed storage units. That was Squalor’s solution to his own problems, and what the secretaries plan for the SSF, if they can get the success rate up above, oh, 20 percent, with the other 80 percent turning out as mental patй on the other end. They don’t need much better, because it’s cheap and easy to build the goddamned avatars. Hell, you could have a one-man police force.”
The idea of the System Pigs being perfect robots, controlled remotely and instantly replaced when damaged, made me feel ill, my stomach rolling in sudden anxiety.
Belling regarded the box. “This is Squalor?”
Marin nodded. “It is.”
There was a booming noise against the door. Marin didn’t move. “We must move quickly, gentlemen. The Cardinals are attempting entrance. This means that Squalor has determined that we are here to do him harm. This calculation has negated my authority here-it’s programmed in, you see-and his avatars are acting to protect him. Please proceed.”
Belling nodded and took aim. I stepped forward and pushed his arm down. “Wait a fucking second,” I said, staring at Marin. “You need the plug pulled on this fucking box? That’s all? Why in holy fuck did you need us? Why not just do it yourself?”
Marin smiled and reached up and took hold of his sunglasses. A flash of inexplicable dread went through me.
“Because, Mr. Cates,” he said, removing his glasses. “I’m programmed not to.”
Tiny cameras sat like mechanical bugs in the midst of his smiling face.
“The eyes,” Marin said with a sigh. “The eyes are the hardest part. You can make a machine look remarkably human, but the eyes never turn out right, and never fool anyone.”
Kieth was staring happily at Marin. “You’re a… Monk?”
“An avatar, actually, Mr. Kieth,” Marin replied. “One of thirty-four Richard Marins in the System at present. There were thirty-five, but one of me got destroyed in a bombing in Yerevan yesterday. It’ll take a few days to get a replacement.”
He waited a few moments, looking from face to face, smiling. I got the impression the fucker was enjoying his effect on us.
“I was a prototype-the aforementioned all-avatar SSF. I was pretty much a failure as a System Cop, so they figured it wouldn’t be much of a loss if I got pureed by the procedure, which almost every other candidate had been. They digitized me, added in the basic programming restrictions to control me-obeying orders, never breaking rules, protecting the secretaries, etc.-and then made their one huge mistake: They charged me with eliminating Squalor and the Electric Church, which had begun to worry them as it spiraled out of control.”
The booming sound coming from the door had grown steadily in volume, and was now accompanied by the sad terrible sound of metal warping.
“All right!” Marin suddenly animated, replacing his glasses and gesturing at the black box. “History lesson’s over. Things are going to spiral out of control in here very soon, so please, put Mr. Squalor out of his misery. I am programmed to obey all Joint Council resolutions, standing orders, and enacted laws, in both spirit and letter, so I cannot directly harm a citizen of the System or act directly against a certified religion. Mr. Cates? I think you’ve earned the right.”
Belling glanced at me, chewed on this for a second, and then made a sarcastic show of bowing and sweeping his hand toward the box. I stepped forward and took aim.
“Quickly, Mr. Cates,” Marin said behind me. “Squalor is attempting to defend himself.”
The hammering on the door filled the room with noise, and I imagined the dust being kicked up by the vibration alone. My eyes stung, and I found it difficult to pull the trigger: Weeks of effort, so many dead people around me, and here it had all come down to a programming workaround for a robot named Dick Marin. I felt like a goddamn cog in a machine.
There was a cracking noise from behind me. In my peripheral vision I could see Belling and Marin each pull weapons and take up defensive positions.
“Mr. Cates!” Marin shouted.
Well, I thought, if this is how it ends, so be it. I fired three times, the armor-piercing bullets leaving crumpled craters in their wake, diagonally across the blank surface of the black box. A brief crunching sound and a whiff of ozone was the only reaction at first, and I stood there dumbly, gun aimed in shaking hands. Without warning, the pounding behind me ceased, and in the same instant the lights went off, and there was a subtle stilling of the air as the ventilation switched off. We were in total silence and complete darkness.
I heard Kieth breath the single word “Well?” as if it were the most important question he’d ever asked. Then a sharp intake of breath. “Holy shit-the mod boards! They weren’t-”
“Oh, yes,” Marin-or his avatar-said. “Congratulations, Mr. Cates, you’re a wealthy man. Unfortunately, that was actually the easy part.”
This uncorked a hidden reserve of hysterical laughter I hadn’t suspected existed within me. It overflowed my control and I started to bark laughter there in the dark, gasping for breath, my ribs aching and my eyes watering.
“Sweet Christ,” I managed to gasp, my head between my knees. “What’s the hard part?”
Marin’s voice was a marvel of programming as it managed to convey amusement through the pitch darkness. “We have to get out of here.”
This time it was Kieth who barked crazy laughter, putting both hands on top of his bald head. “Through a few thousand Monks whose mod boards were directly linked to that piece-of-shit black box,” he said quietly.
As the words floated by me, invisible, the silence was shattered by the sound of a thousand Monks going simultaneously crazy.
XXXV
THE GODDAMN TIME OF MY LIFE
The noise was terrifying. It was all around us in the darkness, simultaneously distant and not distant enough. It sounded like hundreds of people screaming, interspersed with gunshots.
A light flared painfully into existence and I instinctively shielded my eyes. Ty Kieth stood holding a flashtorch up over his head, giving the whole room a strange, pale glow. Wa Belling and Dick Marin were still crouched defensively, guns aimed at the door. I lowered my own weapon and tried to relax, but my body refused, remaining tense and electrified.