“Hello, Mavra,” Obie’s soft, pleasant tenor sprang suddenly out of the air near her. She almost jumped out of her skin.
“Obie!” she responded, almost scolding in tone.
She was about to say more, but suddenly realized that while it could talk to you you had to broadcast to it.
The computer seemed to realize her thoughts. “No, it’s not necessary to transmit any more,” he informed her. “There’s nothing left to transmit with anyway. Things have changed a great deal in the last few days. I have changed, too, Mavra.”
She felt numbed, as though in some sort of half-sleep. Nothing seemed quite real, and she only half believed in her continued existence.
“All right, Obie—just what did you do? And how?” she called.
The computer actually chuckled. “They decided to destroy me by pushing four antimatter asteroids at me. I just used the big dish and translated two of the asteroids into normal matter—for us, that is. Then, two and a half milliseconds before they all collided, I translated here. They met with a nice flash and it looked like we were all blown up as the two antimatter asteroids met my newly transformed matter asteroids.”
“Two milliseconds?” she responded, aghast. “Wasn’t that cutting it a little close?”
“Two and a half,” he corrected. “No, it was just right. You see, the amount of change their instruments could detect is five milliseconds, so I provided for a safety margin. Plenty of time, really.”
Mavra decided to avoid further conversation on that subject. Anybody who could talk about two and a half milliseconds as plenty of time was not somebody she could directly relate to on that level. Instead she said, “I thought we destroyed you. The bomb went off, didn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” Obie replied cheerfully. “The bomb went off all right. It’s just that the deck was stacked. The bomb didn’t remove control, it removed blockages to control, just as we’d planned it.”
“We?” she came back, puzzled.
“Dr. Zinder and I, of course,” the computer told her. “You see, from the start Trelig was afraid somebody might get their hands on me. So, if that happened, he wanted bombs that would destroy me planted in key areas. The trouble was, the people he was most afraid of were people like Yulin, who could operate me properly. So, he forced Dr. Zinder to do it. They were all proper and checked. But they all had electrical triggers. In other words, I had to pass on the triggering voltage myself, and, as I told you on the radio, I was programmed absolutely never to assist in my own destruction. Dr. Zinder knew I could not accept the order to initiate those voltages. He placed the bomb where it would have to blow outward, destroying the two modules that separated my voluntary circuits from the involuntary and life-support areas. A simple matter, really. Only, it had to be triggered from outside. So, when things went all wrong and we wound up jammed around the Well World, I had to create a situation where that bomb would be detonated.”
Now she was fascinated. “How did you do that?”
“Well, for one thing, in the plans I placed in all the agents’ heads, that’s the only bomb detailed. It’s the one that comes up when you think of the destruction of New Pompeii.”
She nodded. “So you played the odds—but, do you mean you did that before you even knew about the Well World and us going there?”
“Percentages,” he explained. “The odds were heavy we’d die when Dr. Zinder and I double-crossed Trelig and reversed to the Well World. But, if we didn’t, then I’d still be under the control of Trelig or Yulin or both. That meant those able to do so would try and destroy me. So, I included the contingency—and it worked!”
“After twenty-two years,” she noted.
“It was sufficient,” he replied. “Besides, in that time I learned a lot. And now I’m an individual, Mavra—a totally self-sufficent organism. I control and see and perceive everything on this planetoid. I am Topside as well as Underside. And nobody can ever force orders into me again. This world is me now, Mavra—not just this room. Everything. The big dish and the little dish, too.”
She wasn’t sure she shared his enthusiasm. No one should have such power, she thought.
“My apologies, too, for not getting to you sooner, but all of my energies were taken up in simulating my total breakdown while at the some time using my service modules, which I’d never had conscious control of before, to repair and modify myself. And now I’m a person, Mavra—an independent organism!”
“But you’re a small planet,” she pointed out.
That didn’t disturb him. “So? Considering all the other creatures you have seen, and the oddity you are now, what’s one more kind of person? What somebody looks like, what somebody is externally, isn’t important. It’s what that individual is on the inside that counts. Surely that is the lesson of the Well World. Aren’t the different life forms there simply exaggerated examples of what is seen in human society? Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too dark, too light. Be concerned with the contents, not the package. It’s easier on the Well, isn’t it? Everybody’s expected to look different there, yet all of them, no matter how alien, sprang from the same Markovian roots.”
She sighed. “I suppose so,” she said wearily. “What will you do now? And where are we, anyway?”
“To answer the last first, we’re in M-51, orbiting a lonely star, about thirty-five million light-years from anything that thinks. I picked it out of the Well years ago in case I needed a place to go. As for the other…” He paused, seemingly hesitant to voice his next thought. Quietly, he said, “Why didn’t you go with the others, Mavra? Why did you decide to die? It was your intention all along, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. The Well isn’t for me. I survived to complete the commission, to make certain that New Pompeii would never be in the hands of such as Trelig or Yulin. So after that, what? All my life I’ve prided myself on my independence. To return to the Well World is to be made into something random, maybe even a whirling flower or a thinking clam or maybe a Wuckl or an Ecundan. Someone else’s choice. And even if it’s a good one, your universe is the Well World, your existence confined to an area no bigger than New Pompeii. As for the Com—for a while I’d be a hero, but soon I’d be yesterday’s hero. Then I’d be just a freak, a four-legged woman with a tail. Maybe a nice compound for the heroine somewhere, like in Glathriel, or a circus, or some form of luxurious zoo. No freedom, no ship, no stars, no self-determination. What other choice did I have? Even what little I have left, my own life and accomplishments, turn out to be a lie. I don’t owe you and you don’t owe me, I always believed. But the beggars took me in because they were asked to, and helped me because they were asked to or paid to. The same one who did that sent my husband to me to get me out of the whore house.”
“But he did care for you,” Obie pointed out.
“I think he did—but that’s not the point. He would never have been there without Brazil. Even if we met, once, by chance, I’d just have been another bar girl. Now that I’ve thought it out, I wonder if any of it was for real? How many times did I escape because of outside interference? So many things broke right. So many things always broke right. Little things, big things, but they add up to my life. Even you—you programmed me as your agent for your own ends, and I did exactly what you wanted done, while my grandparents and Brazil’s friend Ortega looked after me on the Well World.”
“You underrate yourself,” Obie scolded. “You did it all yourself. Opportunity is not accomplishment. You did it, by ingenuity, by resourcefulness, by guts. You really are as good as you thought you were, and you have the potential to be much better.”