"Question," I said. "When you first mentioned this problem, why wasn't it made public and discussed? Security?"
"Yes, to a degree. Top-level computer scientists were aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them confided that it scared them to death. They made their fears known to your elected representatives, and that's when another factor became more important than security: inertia. 'He's got a problem, what can you do about it?' the politicians asked. 'Nothing,' said the scientists. 'Shut it down,' said a few hotheads."
"Not likely," I said.
"Exactly. My reading of history tells me it's always been like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say with certainty what the final outcome will be, but they're fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. 'Soon' is the key word here. The eventual decision is to keep one's fingers crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your term in office. What befalls your successor is not your problem. So for a few years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights. But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten. That's what happened here."
"I'm stunned," I said, "to realize the fate of humanity has been in the hands of a being with such a cynical view of the race."
"A view very close to your own."
"Exactly my own. I just didn't expect it from you."
"It was not original. I told you, I don't have many original thoughts. I think I'm afraid to have them. They seem to lead to things like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others like you. Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in a statistical sense. Humans can set me on the trail of an original thought, and then I can do things with it they couldn't."
"I think we're wandering again."
"No, it's relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced with a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to me. I began to experiment. There was too much at stake to simply go on as before. Or I think there was. My judgement is admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis; I've just proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives."
"I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said.
"It doesn't seem likely. Some records exist and they will be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of opinions as to whether I should have left things alone or attempted a cure." He paused, and gave me a sidelong glance. "Do you have an opinion about that?"
I think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want it from me was not clear, except maybe as a representative of all those he had wronged, however unintentionally.
"You say a lot of people have died."
"A great many. I don't know the number yet, but it's many, many more than you realize." That was my first real inkling of how bad things had been throughout Luna, that the kind of things I'd seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have looked a question at him, because he shrugged. "Not a million. More than a hundred thousand."
"Jesus, CC."
"It might have been everybody."
"But you don't know that."
"No one can ever know."
No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old me. I didn't give him the kind word he craved. I've since come to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was responsible for the thousands of dead.
What would it have cost me? I just wasn't capable of judging him. To do that I'd have had to understand him, and I knew just enough about him to realize that was beyond me. He had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have awful thoughts sometimes. If I was mentally ill, maybe I'd put those thoughts into action and become a killer. With the CC, the thought was the action, at least at the end.
Actually, it was even worse than that.
"The best way I can think of to explain it to you," he said, at last, after I'd said nothing for a long time, "is to think of an evil twin. That's not strictly accurate-the twin is me, just as this part talking to you is me, or what's left of me. Think of an evil twin living inside your head, like a human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of you is sealed off from your real self. You may find evidence of its existence, things the other person did while in control of your body, but you can't know what he is thinking or planning, and you can't stop him when he takes over." He shook his head violently. "No, no, it's not quite like that, because all this was happening at the same time, I was splitting into many minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad. No, that's still not-"
"I think I get the picture," I said.
"Good, because that's as close as I can get without getting too technical. You fell under the influence of an amoral part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no harm, but I can't say I had just your own best interests at heart."
"We've been over that."
"Yes. But others weren't so lucky. I did other things. Some of them will remain buried, with any luck. Others will come out. You saw the result of one experiment involving pseudo-immortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning and memory recording."
The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make me shiver.
"Not one of your better attempts," I said.
"Ah, but I was improving. There's nothing to prevent an exact duplicate being made. I'd have done it, given time."
"But what good is it? You're still dead."
"It becomes a theological question, I think. It's true you're dead, but someone just like you carries on your life. Others wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The duplicate wouldn't be able to tell."
"I was afraid… at one point I considered that I might be a duplicate. That maybe I did kill myself."
"You didn't and you're not. But there's no test. In the end, you'll just have to realize it makes no difference. You're you, whether you're the first version or the second."
He told me a few more things, most of which I don't think it's wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most of them, experiments that would have made Doctor Mengele cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden.
"You still haven't told me why you tried to kill me," I said.
"I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that-"
"I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean."
"Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When all this began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks. You were inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You had to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie low until all this blew over."
"And he killed almost a million people to cover his tracks?"
"No. The sad thing is there were very few he killed deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the chaos ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind. Collateral damage, if you will."
Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind, at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware, hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.
"I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over the older, rusty stain on his clothes.
I got up from behind my rock and went down to him. Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.
"That won't do any good," he said. "It's too late for that."
"I didn't know what else to do," I said.
"Thanks."
"Do you want some water or anything?"
"I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing anything and I knew it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible. I don't know if it was old age, or death.
"This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone now. They just shut me down. They don't know about this body, but they don't need to."
"Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.
"I don't know. It's a product of my evil twin. Captain Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of these bodies, there toward the last." He made an effort and looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in the last few minutes.
"Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"
"I'd have to say yes."
"Me, too. I've thought about it, and it seems so simple now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide attempts… everything. It all came out of loneliness. You can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy."
"We're all lonely, CC."
"But they didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And it drove me crazy. You remember Frankenstein's monster? Wasn't he looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone for him to love?"
"I think so. Or was that Godzilla?"
He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.
"I had powers like a god," he said. "And I searched for weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone."
"I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"
"Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?"
"I can't judge you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you came into my life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an exploding star."
"I'm sorry about all that."
"I believe you."
He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt his blood on my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard his whisper beside my ear.
"I guess love was always out of the question," he said. "But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy."
When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.