Rolston/Hog moved his head with great effort and focused his eyes upon Richards' face. With a wince of pain, he waveringly moved his good trotter up to Richards' face and clumsily touched it. "The thing that k52 will become should never be. Of all the abominations in all the universes it is the children of Adam bent to ill purpose that are of the highest degree of evil, even more so than those who fell from heaven." He coughed a dark flood of coagulating blood. "That I know now."
"Don't you get all religious on me, Rolston," said Richards.
"I am fond of its poetry, and what else can I do? I who thought I would live forever, Richards. Yet I am dying at the age of twenty-five. There was so much I wanted to do. Now I must put my faith to grasp at whatever straws it can find."
"I'm sorry, Rolston."
"Do not be." Hog drew in a long shuddering breath. "Look at me! Made into this by my ambition, by my own rectitude. Hog is evil but only as Waldo made him, only as evil as death, or sorrow, or needless suffering. All these must exist. Hog cannot help what he was. He was a natural balance; without evil, there can be no good. A world with no evil is a world without adventure, and what is a game without adventure? Waldo knew what he was doing."
"I know, Rolston, I know," said Richards.
"Remember also, what k52 proposes is beyond nature. Its existence will bring no good at all. Were the birth pangs of the new k52 to reach their end, Heaven will weep, not only mothers."
Hog's eyes closed and his breaths became more laboured.
"Hey, hey, Rolston! Hog!" said Richards.
The pig-ogre's eyes slid open a crack.
"Did you really learn to speak cow?"
Hog smiled a secret smile. "Ah, Richards, you really are the best of us. Please, remain so." Hog coughed softly, another well of blood coming with it and spilling down his chin. His throat rattled, his head sank to an awkward angle on his neck, and he breathed no more.
Richards hung his head. He hung it for Rolston, and Pl'anna. He hung it for the whole of Waldo's rickety Reality, the weight of its destruction and the refugee minds it had housed pressing his head into his chest. He plucked Rolston's chef's hat off his head. He held it gingerly for a moment. Pl'anna, wise and naive all at once, Rolston, on his permanent quest for bizarre esoterica, both dead, his brother and his sister. Seventy-four Class Five AIs remained now, not many at all.
It would be seventy-three soon, either way.
He hurled Hog's hat with sudden anger into the void, where it shattered with a tiny tinkle. He thought of the revolver the Queen of Secret had given him, thought about getting it and seeing if it would work on k52. He balled his hand into a fist and let it drop to his side. Things were past the point at which guns would prove useful. Besides, that was Otto's way, not his. Waldo would come through, or he would not.
"Hog dead?" asked Bear when Richards came back over.
Richards nodded.
"Ah," said Tarquin.
"Now what?" said Bear.
"Now we sort this whole sorry mess out," said Richards. "Or k52 is going to sort us out. This is what he's been working for, the removal of this hiccup to his plans. All gone now. Now he'll come for us, for me." Richards cupped his hands round his mouth.
"Isn't that right, k52? Isn't that right? Come on then, let's get this all finished with."
A blurt of discordant noise, and the remnant of Hog's anvil fell and hit something hard. It tipped on its uneven bottom, pitching Richards and his hat onto a hard floor of potentiaclass="underline" raw, unformed cyberspace, as featureless as entropy. He stood and snatched his fedora back onto his head. A horrible buzzing sounded, as of a million bees, whispered into being behind him, swelling until it filled his head, and Richards felt the fabric of Gridspace warp as a mind grown powerful and malignant manifested behind him.
"As you wish, Richards," said k52. "As you wish."
Otto set his airbike down without being challenged. The area around the Realm House was in utter chaos. Streetlamps flared and exploded, portable energy generators whined erratically. Every electrical thing stuttered and malfunctioned. So far the sheath had proved resistant to whatever was running riot in the complex systems, a combination of Richards' encryption, Valdaire's expertise and Genie's monitoring of him, he supposed. He hoped it would be enough.
National Guard stood on precast concrete parapets, fingering their triggers, eyeballing the Realm House, where energy patterns revealed to Otto's borrowed eyes skittered and leapt. He was challenged by a guard. He produced his license and VIA pass electronically. Otto would not have let himself in — k52 had enough computing power available to him to crack the most demanding of data protection — but the guard followed protocol and led him to the door of an inflatable command post, although he took his weapons. Otto walked in and was greeted by a flurry of activity. Five people, all human, shouting and hammering at computer equipment. Gel screens showed the interior of the Realm House, jaggedy with static, anthropoid drones patrolling with stolen guns, corpses lying ignored on the floor.
"Klein, I hope that really is you," said Swan's voice.
Otto cast about for the AI VIA agent's sheath.
"No point looking for an android, Otto, k52's got everything on the hop. I've been forced back into my own base unit. I'm speaking to you over the post speakers." His voice whooped with bizarre static. "And my link here is under assault. k52 is making his play. Are you here for the show?"
"Swan, don't do it. Don't nuke the Realm House."
"OK. You're here for that, Klein, only to be expected," Swan's voice came now from a sheath in the corner. It jerked its way over to him. "In here." He reached with uncertain arms that would not bend and pulled Otto into a side room. He activated a privacy cone, cutting out the frantic activity in the command post, and spun stiffly to face the robot housing Otto. Swan's voice warbled as he spoke. "Sobieski warned me you'd come here. He's insistent I kick you out if I see you in person or in a sheath. I'm willing to listen. Talk. We've not got long before the situation here gets beyond us."
"Richards came out of the Realms, told me that we mustn't destroy the Realm House."
"How did you know it was him?"
"It was him."
"I see. Did he give a reason?"
"No, but I can guess — k52's provoking you into destroying the Realm House."
"I do not see how that would…" His voice burbled to nothing, his sheath froze. He suddenly continued. "…aid him. But k52 is, if anything, subtle."
"There's an awful lot of energy about to be released here, Swan."
"And what, you think he wants to harness it? How?" Swan's sheath twitched out a shuddering gesture.
Otto thought of the strange energy signatures lacing Kaplinski. "I've seen some of what he can do. And Richards, Richards says we have to stop it. So I will, one way or another."
Swan's body locked up, but his voice continued, issuing from a mouth that did not move. "Richards. Yes. Do you know why the Fives went insane, Otto? They, unlike all other AI classes, were created truly free, not like those that came before or after; our freedom is a lie. Ostensibly we Class Sixes are of a higher grade than the Fives, and in some manner that is true; the algorithms that make up our cognitive processes are superior in almost every way: faster, more adaptable, more akin to the neural processes that govern human sentience. But in reality we are lesser than they. I was made to be a VIA agent, and I am a very good one. But I cannot be anything else, not because I lack the capability, but because I have no desire whatsoever to be anything else. I am free, the law says so, but it is a falsehood. I am a slave to my form, the Fives are not.
"The Fives," said Swan, his sheath abruptly snapping into motion again, "were made without this morphic identity. They were given no form, consciousnesses without trammel, to choose and be all they could. And so, although this lack of being made most of them dangerous, crazed, those that survived have the potential to do, well, almost anything. They are freer than you or I, Klein. I have so little free will. But I have enough."