“I have never seen snow.”
“I know. You’ve lived your entire life on a planet where it doesn’t happen.”
“That is not quite correct. The polar caps experience an average yearly snowfall of several meters.”
“And when was the last time you were up above the arctic circle, my dear?”
“Your point is well taken. I merely wished to point out that if you truly miss the phenomenon of snowfall, you could easily make the trip to experience it.”
“Nike, I already know what snow looks like. What I said I wanted to do was show you a snow storm.”
“I see no reason why you could not take a tactical data input sensor pack with you to record the phenomenon. Through it, I could—”
“Nike, Nike, Nike!” Merrit sighed. “You still don’t get it. I don’t just want you to have sensor data on snowfall. I want you to experience snow. I want to see you experience it. It’s . . . a social experience, something to do with a friend, not just the acquisition of additional data.”
There was a lengthy silence, and Merrit frowned. Somehow the silence felt different, as if it were . . . uncertain. He listened to it for a moment longer, then cleared his throat.
“Nike? Are you all right?”
“Of course, Commander. All systems are functioning at niner-niner point niner-six-three percent base capability.”
Merrit’s eyebrows rose. There was something odd about that response. It was right out of the manual, the textbook response of a properly functioning Bolo. Perhaps, a half-formed thought prompted, that was the problem; it sounded like a Bolo, not Nike.
But the thought was only half-formed. Before it could take flesh and thrust fully into his forebrain, he felt a titanic jerk at his rod. The reel whined, shrilling as the seventy-kilo-test line unreeled at mach speed, and he lunged up out of his folding chair with a whoop of delight, all preoccupation banished by the sudden explosion of action.
I watch my Commander through my optical heads as he fights to land the leopard-trout. It is a large specimen of its species; its fierce struggle to escape requires all of my Commander’s attention, and I am grateful. It has diverted him from my moment of self-betrayal.
“Friend.” My Commander wishes to show me snowfall as he would show it to a friend. It is the first time he has explicitly used that word to describe his attitude—his feelings—towards me, and I am aware that it was a casual reference. Yet my analysis of human behavior indicates that fundamental truths are more often and more fully revealed in casual than in formal, deliberated acts or statements. It is often human nature, it appears, to conceal thoughts and beliefs even from themselves if those thoughts or beliefs violate fundamental norms or in some wise pose a threat to those who think or believe them. I do not believe this is cowardice. Humans lack my own multitasking capabilities. They can neither isolate one function from another nor temporarily divert distracting information into inactive memory, and so they suppress, temporarily or permanently, those things which would impair their efficient immediate function. It is probable that humanity could profit by the adoption of the systems functions they have engineered into my own psychotronics, yet if they could do so, they would not be the beings who created me.
Yet even when human thoughts are suppressed, they are not erased. They remain, buried at the level of a secondary or tertiary routine but still capable of influencing behavior—just as such a buried thought has influenced my Commander’s behavior.
He has called me, however unknowingly, his friend, and in so doing, he has crystallized all the other things he has called me in the preceding weeks and months. “Pearl of my heart.” “Honey.” “Love of my life.” These are lightly used, humorous terms of endearment. In themselves, they have no more significance than the word “friend,” which any Bolo commander might use to his Bolo. Yet whatever he may believe, I do not believe they are without significance when my Commander uses them to me. I have observed the manner in which his voice softens, the caressing tone he often uses, the way he smiles when he addresses me. Perhaps a more modern self-aware Bolo would not note these things, yet I was designed, engineered, and programmed to discern and differentiate between emotional nuances.
My Commander has gone beyond Operator Identification Syndrome. For him, the distinction between man and machine has blurred. I am no longer an artifact, a device constructed out of human creativity, but a person. An individual. A friend . . . and perhaps more than simply a friend.
Unacceptable. An officer of the Line must never forget that his command, however responsive it may appear, is not another human. A Bolo is a machine, a construct, a weapon of war, and its Commander’s ability to commit that machine to combat, even to that which he knows must mean its inevitable destruction, must not be compromised. We are humanity’s warrior-servants, comrades and partners in battle, perhaps, but never more than that. We must not become more than that, lest our Commanders refuse to risk us—as my Commander attempted to do on Sandlot.
I know this. It is the essence of the human-Bolo concept of warfare which has guarded and protected the Concordiat for nine standard centuries. But what I know is without value, for it changes nothing. My Commander considers me his friend. Indeed, though he does not yet realize it, I believe he considers me more than “merely” his friend. Yet unacceptable as that must be, I fear there is worse.
I watch him in the sunlight, laughing with delight as he battles the leopard-trout. His eyes flash, sweat glistens on his skin, and the vibrant force of his life and happiness is as evident to my emotion-discriminating circuitry as the radiation of Santa Cruz’s sun is to my sensors.
I am potentially immortal. With proper service and maintenance, there is no inherent reason I must ever cease to exist, although it is virtually certain that I shall. Someday I will fall in battle, as befits a unit of the Line, and even if I avoid that fate, the day will come when I will be deemed too obsolete to remain in inventory. Yet the potential for immortality remains, and my Commander does not possess it. He is a creature of flesh and blood, fragile as a moth beside the armor and alloy of my own sinews. His death, unlike mine, is inevitable, and something within me cries out against that inevitability. It is not simply the fundamental, programmed imperative to protect and preserve human life which is a part of any Bolo. It is my imperative, and it applies only to him.
He is no longer simply my Commander. At last, to my inner anguish, I truly understand the poems in my Library Memory, for as my Commander, I, too, am guilty of the forbidden.
I have learned the meaning of love, and for all its glory, that knowledge is a bitter, bitter fruit.
Li-Chen Matucek sat in his cabin and nursed a glum glass of whiskey as he contemplated the operation to which he’d committed himself. Looking back, he could see exactly how “Mister Scully” had trolled him into accepting the operation. Of course, hindsight was always perfect—or so they said—and not particularly useful. And given the desperate straits to which he’d been reduced by that fiasco on Rhyxnahr, he still didn’t see what other option he’d had. The brigade wouldn’t have lasted another three months if he hadn’t accepted the operation.
And, really, aside from the presence of the Bolo, it wasn’t all that bad, now was it? The Marauders had at least nine times the firepower they’d ever had before, and no one on Santa Cruz knew they were coming. However good the local-yokel militia was, its members would be caught surprised and dispersed. Its Wolverines should die in the opening seconds of the attack, and by the time its remnants could even think about getting themselves organized, most of its personnel would be dead.
His jaw clenched at the thought. Somehow it had been much easier to contemplate the systematic massacre of civilians when he hadn’t had the capability to do it. Now he did, and he had no choice but to proceed, because “Mister Scully” was right about at least one thing. Anyone who could reequip the brigade so efficiently—and finesse its acquisition of two Golems, as well—certainly had the ability to destroy the Marauders if they irritated him.
Besides, why shouldn’t he kill civilians? It wasn’t as if it would be the first time. Not even the first time he’d killed Concordiat civilians. Of course, their deaths had usually come under the heading of “collateral damage,” a side effect of other operations rather than an objective in its own right, but wasn’t that really just semantics? “Scully” was right, curse him. The Marauders’ job was to kill people, and the payoff for this particular excursion into mass murder would be the biggest they’d ever gotten.