"Thank you, Lazarus," he said, finally. "That ... means a lot to me."
"You are welcome, Lieutenant. I wish it were possible for me to do more. Indeed, I had hoped it would be. But she is gone, and I must confess that I would very much like to watch her children grow to adulthood. For themselves, as you yourself said, and not simply as a living memento of her. But perhaps also as a promise that life continues. That what she died to protect, will live on."
Hawthorne gazed up at the Bolo and surprised himself with a smile.
"Well, Lazarus, I suppose a single parent could do worse for a godfather for his kids than a Bolo. It'd sure as hell trump the 'My old man can beat up your old man' thing, wouldn't it?"
"I had not thought of it in precisely that light," Lazarus replied with a soft electronic chuckle.
"Probably not," Hawthorne agreed. "I know you Bolos are supposed to be a bloodthirsty lot, but we humans have spent a lot longer than you have thinking long and homicidal thoughts."
"I imagine so, but even so, I would sus—"
Lazarus' voice stopped. It didn't slow, or slur, or fade. It just stopped in mid-syllable, and Hawthorne jerked upright as the red power light on the optical head facing him blinked suddenly off.
"Lazarus?"
No response. Not even a flicker.
"Lazarus?"
Hawthorne took two quick steps towards the Bolo before he made himself stop. If something had happened to Lazarus, what did he think he could do about it? He was no Bolo tech! Hell, he would have been barely qualified to hand a real Bolo tech his tools! But if something was wrong with Lazarus then—
"Ed."
Edmund Hawthorne froze, his eyes suddenly huge, as the optical head power light blinked back on and the Bolo spoke once more. Not in the mellow tenor he heard before, but in another voice. A smoky, almost purring soprano.
"Ed," the Bolo said again, and then it giggled. Unmistakably, it giggled, and the eyes which had gone wide in shock suddenly narrowed in a combination of disbelief and something else.
"Oh, Ed," the soprano said contritely a moment later. "I'm sorry. But if you could have seen your expression—!"
"Lazarus," Hawthorne said harshly, "this isn't funny, goddamn it!"
"No, it isn't," the soprano said. "But it isn't Lazarus doing it, Ed. It's me—Maneka."
"Maneka is dead!"
"Well, yes, I suppose I am. Sort of." Hawthorne leaned back against the pile of track plates again, then somehow found himself sliding down them into a sitting position as the soprano continued. "It's just that, well, I don't seem to be gone."
"What ... what do you mean?"
"That's going to be just a bit difficult to explain," Maneka's voice—and it was Maneka's voice; somehow Hawthorne was certain of that—replied.
"I will. But bear in mind that we're in some pretty unexplored territory here. All right?"
"If you really are Maneka, then 'unexplored territory' doesn't even begin to cover it!"
"I guess not," the soprano agreed. "Well, as simply as I can explain it, it all starts with the fact that Lazarus and I were still linked when I got shot. If we hadn't been—"
Hawthorne had the distinct mental impression of a shrug in that slight pause, and then the voice continued.
"Mary Lou's medics did all they could, you know. But the damage was just too severe. My heart stopped within two minutes, and even with CPR, I'd lost so much blood that brain function ceased three minutes after that."
Hawthorne was distantly astonished, somehow, that he was able to suppress the shiver which ran through him at that matter-of-fact description of the death of the woman he had loved.
"Five minutes doesn't sound like very much, I know," her voice went on, "but for a Bolo, it's a long, long time, Ed. I knew at the time that Lazarus had thrown us both into hyper-heuristic mode, but I didn't know why. And he didn't tell me, either—because he wasn't at all sure it was going to work, I think. But what he did was to ... well, to download me."
"Download you?" Hawthorne got out in a half-strangled voice.
"That's the best way I can describe it to you," Maneka's voice said calmly. "And while The Book doesn't exactly cover what he did, it violated at least the spirit of twenty or thirty Brigade regulations. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason there isn't a Reg specifically against it is that it never occurred to anyone that anything like this could be done in the first place."
"I wouldn't doubt it," he said, and shook his head. "In fact, I think I agree with them."
"And you'd probably be right, under most circumstances. But Lazarus isn't exactly a standard Bolo anymore, either. You know that when they repaired and refitted him after Chartres they upgraded his psychotronics. That included hauling out almost all of his old mollycircs and replacing them with the new, improved version, all of which took up a lot less volume than the older hardware had required. Since they had all that volume, they went ahead and installed a second complete survival center at the far end of the core hull. They intended it for redundancy, since Lazarus had managed to get himself brain-killed twice already in his career. But when he knew I was dying, he used that space to store me."
"You mean to store Maneka's memories," Hawthorne said hoarsely.
"No. Or, at least," Maneka's voice said in a tone he recognized well, the tone she used when she was being painstakingly honest, "I don't think that's what I mean. I'm not really positive. I'm here, and as far as I can tell, I'm ... me. The same memories, same thoughts. The same emotions," her voice softened.
"I'm a fully integrated personality, separate from Lazarus, that remembers being Maneka Trevor, Ed. I don't know whether or not I have Maneka's soul, assuming souls really exist, but I truly believe I'm the same person I've always been."
"And where have you been for the last seven and a half weeks?" he demanded, fighting against a sudden surge of mingled hope and shocked almost-horror.
"Trying to get out," she said simply. "Human minds and personalities aren't wired the same way as Bolo AIs. I always knew that, but I never realized just how different we were until I found myself trying to adapt to such a radically different environment. It wasn't Lazarus' fault. He didn't have any more to go on than I did. The only technique he had was the one Bolos use for downloading the memories of other Bolos under emergency field conditions, so that was the one he used. And it took me a long time—longer than you can imagine, probably—to 'wake up' in here. Remember what I said about hyper-heuristic mode. The differential between the speed of human thought processes and Bolo thought processes is literally millions to one, Ed. I've spent the equivalent of more than a complete human lifetime reintegrating my personality over the past seven weeks. I was getting close before this evening, but when you started talking to Lazarus, he tried to access me again. He hadn't done that in a long time, for the same reason he'd never mentioned what he'd tried to do to anyone who'd cared about me—because he'd decided his effort must have failed. That humans and Bolos were too different for it to work. But we aren't—quite.
Just ... almost. And when he tried to access me again, it finally let me out."
"No, Lieutenant," the Bolo said in the familiar tenor, which sounded almost shocking after Maneka's soprano. "My personality and gestalt remain intact and unimpaired. I must concede that there was a certain period of ... uncertainty when Captain Trevor's—Maneka's—personality first fully expressed itself once more. As she has just explained to you, however, Bolos in hyper-heuristic mode have extremely high processing rates, by Human standards. We have evolved a suitable joint interface which leaves Lazarus—'me,' for a practical referent—in direct control of this unit's weapons systems. Access to sensor systems, data storage, central processing, and communication interfaces is shared."