“All right,” Coydt told them, “there’s now a lot to be done. I’ve given thanks to our people at K, and we’re shutting down. I want a side entrance blocked off from public view and an ambulance there in ten minutes. Notify the duty officer that I’d like to see her downstairs immediately. All personnel present here are to be picked up and transported to the Security building. No one talks to anyone, understand?” She began to issue scattershot orders on practically everything, but it was clear that she wanted to keep the whole incident, even the revolutionary thing they had done, completely under wraps until she had taken it all up with the director and possibly the boards and determined a consistent cover.
Marsha Johnson had gone from shock to action to joy, all with growing admiration for the brigadier’s creativity and fast thinking. Now, though, she began to think about herself.
When Coydt seemed satisfied and prepared to make her way down to confer with the duty officer, the lab technician approached her.
“Urn—ma’am? What about me? And Jimmy up there? Can we go now?”
“You and your friend are now under a military state of emergency.” the brigadier told her. “I appreciate what you’ve done, but now it’s stage two here. You will proceed, the both of you, with my own people to the Security Ops headquarters. My people there will take care of you. In the meantime, you’re under the same restrictions as if you worked directly for me. No matter what your aid, if this is compromised, my people will have no hesitancy in shooting either of you. Accident has made you mine. Once mine, you remain mine. Now, follow the others. I have much extra work to do.”
The manner and attitude infuriated Johnson, overcoming her fear. “I’m not your property!”
“That’s exactly what you are,” the brigadier replied.
6
GODS AND DEMI GODS
Brenda Coydt sat relaxed in the director’s office, looking pretty good for somebody who hadn’t had any sleep the night before. She did not withhold very many of the details, but van Haas had the distinct impression that she suspected he knew it all anyway.
“You evacuated all concerned to Site K, then?” he asked casually.
She nodded. “It seemed the best thing to do, and there’s a full hospital and psychiatric unit there as well. They’ve been evaluating the stress on our people, and considering the wonderful job they did on Watanabe, it’s only fitting that they have a crack at correcting their error.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I suppose it’s expedient anyway. The security record from the monitor?”
“Wiped. Or, rather, altered. The incident shows as it happened, but the identification and visual on Watanabe has been altered so that it isn’t her, if you know what I mean. Staff’s already preparing a cover story for who we will say it was, and that should suffice. There will be protests and notes and confusion on the other side, but it’ll blow over pretty fast, as usual. It might even buy Westrex a little time. Turn a minus into a plus by creating sympathy for us. If the other side is trying to steal our stuff and commit sabotage, it must be important. Like that. The effect won’t last, but even if it buys us a week, it’s effective.”
“No problem there, I agree—but what do we do with Suzy even if they are able to bring her around? She’s lost several months, of course, but she’s still a ticking bomb, and some nice little drugs and happy therapy isn’t going to change her basic nature. If we ship her out there, she’ll be a threat. If we keep her here, we have no way to control or contain her.”
“That same psychiatric staff’s been working on that end ever since we lifted the alteration programs from Watanabe’s computer. The 7800 can manage some startling things. Maybe too startling, when I think we’re going to be at the mercy of twenty-eight of them, all networked, with unlimited power supplies and storage. Right now they can run quadrillions of parallel—that is to say, simultaneous—operations. If we wished to catch a fly, we could send an elephant to do it. It might step on the fly. Then it might be able to rebuild the fly from the information in its cells. That is the 7240 computer. The 7800 can find the fly, freeze it in midflight. then change just one tiny hair on the fly’s body without it even noticing.”
Rembrandt van Haas sighed. “Yes. It’s been much on my mind, and I’ve read the Site K reports. Schwartzman, the Kagan people, and your own are convinced that the system is fail-safe. The computer cannot act on its own to influence any external factors. The core program, they firmly believe, is sound, as much as anyone can be certain of that these days.”
“Yes. Through the ages people have speculated on how to communicate with a totally alien race, and the conclusion generally is that you can only get so far, particularly if that race is smarter and faster than you. Well, we have created that race ourselves, and they are inscrutable. What can one say about a computer that believes in its own mathematical and scientific way that human beings have souls?”
“I’d say it’s pretty good news, if we knew its basis. I assume it is simply extrapolating from the failure of Watanabe to create living animal duplicates from the same encodings. It didn’t seem to be a problem with your daring little experiment.”
Coydt shrugged. “I was raised Catholic, although I’m not much of one now. The church believes that it can take as much as an hour for the soul to leave the body. Often such beliefs wind up being partially factual, as if our ancestors knew more about some things than we did.”
“Perhaps. Or, perhaps it takes about that length of time for it—whatever it is—to dissipate or die. It’s irrelevant to us. What is important is that we can in fact bring someone back from the dead as well as alter them physiologically. It means potential youth and immortality. It must be suppressed as much as possible.”
“I agree,” responded the brigadier. “It must be used sparingly and the mere knowledge of it must remain in the hands of as few as possible. Not even, I think, the board should be informed.”
“Just you and me and your people? There’s a lot to suppress here.”
“Not as many as you might think. We are organic creatures, far more than anyone ever suspected. Psychiatrists today are more biochemists than the old and still prevalent vision of them as friendly confidants. You would be astonished at what they can do now, particularly with the aid of Watanabe’s programs and the 7800 to augment their arsenal. Westrex’s psychiatric unit and the Kagan research people can be handled by simply holding over them the idea that any leak will cost them use of the system. They’re well chosen and still human beings. I think if we sent them up the line as a team and centered them in an Anchor remote from headquarters or Engineering or any of the other main bodies or units and let them work together on this line, we might get startling results without risking a lot of attention.” She looked over at van Haas’s globe, now clearly showing the installed Gates and rough Anchors and main network lines. “What about this Gate Four area, for example? Who and what’s going in there?”
Van Haas thought a moment. “Actually, that’s where we were going to put our troublemakers, our political prisoners and such. It’s pretty out of the way in relation to the rest, south of the equator. None of the headquarters really wanted it, so it’s pretty much an extra for now.”
The system called for Cockburn to tie in with Administration in the Gate One quadrant, Ryan’s Signals to tie in with transport and energy around Gate Three, NGomo’s Logistics to tie in with Itutu’s Resource Allocations Division at Five, and Security to share Seven with Schwartzman’s Master Computers Division. Two would be Korda’s Landscape Engineering base, while Six would be Populations. Four, because of its geographical location, was in fact the orphan, reserved for “future division headquarters.”
“That’s where they should go, then,” Coydt told him. “An unofficial, unrecognized division. Perhaps a hundred people total, otherwise mixed in with the general staff, and labeled a Special Project under Security. That will frighten enough people off.”
“All right, I’ll go along. But what about our witnesses from here?”
Coydt smiled sweetly. “Let’s just call them the first Special Project problem.”
The director nodded uncomfortably. The very idea of what she implied was repugnant to him, but this was an emergency and expediency was called for. However, he was going to make very sure that Mike Ryan’s boys kept an independent eye on this. Coydt didn’t know about Ryan’s involvement, and that was his only ace in the hole.
“Brenda,” he said evenly, without a trace of emotion. “Don’t ever think of me as a Special Project. And don’t embark on other major alterations without telling me.”
She tried to laugh it off, but the manner was unnerving. It would never do to underestimate van Haas, she knew. “That sounds like a threat.”
“Take it anyway you please, but get the context right. We are threatened by this—all of us. Even you.”
She smiled sweetly. “Why, Doctor, why would anyone think of doing something like that?”
Marsha Johnson didn’t like Security and she particularly didn’t like Site K. Titan was claustrophobic enough, but the small space station was not only cramped, it was spartan, and she’d been confined to her small room with its barren metallic walls and cardboard-thin bed for several days, not even let out for meals. Those were brought to her by guards who never would talk and exited quickly. She was in a nightmare and she couldn’t wake up, a prison where the offense was knowing too much and the price was solitary confinement.
They had brought her some of her own clothing and personal effects, and there was a tiny toilet and shower stall, but it was pretty miserable and lonely.
She was not, however, alone. A team of expert psychiatrists together with computer analysts poked and probed at her record, her past, and observed every single movement, as they were doing with the others as well. Their decisions, however, could not be totally pragmatic. They were expected to “cure” and “turn” Watanabe to a “correct” attitude while retaining her creativity and genius, no mean trick when some of that grew out of the very things they had to remove. Neither of the other two had much family, but both had friends and associates back on Titan. They were easily covered back there—folks were vanishing and being shipped out all the time, often with little or no notice—but what if any of those old friends ran into them on New Eden?
It would have been simple to add Johnson to their team, except that her personality profile was all wrong. She was a blabbermouth, for one thing, and she wasn’t a very good actress who could easily pretend to be something other than what she was and hope to fool anyone for long. Nor were her own ethics likely to stand up to this kind of work if the subjects weren’t volunteers. Still, she had great skill and aptitude for 7000-series operations, as was demonstrated by her work with Coydt. They didn’t want to lose that if they didn’t have to.
The space station itself was a barren-looking series of interconnected tubular modules that resembled an abstract sculpture or a young child’s first attempt with an erector set. One large tube jutted off from the main mass, and inside of it was a Borelli generator and the Kagan 7800 computer. So nervous were the experimenters with this new device that there was at the connection of the computer to the space station proper a series of explosive bolts that could even be hand-fired, and a propulsion unit beyond that was not under the computer’s control at all. If the computer tried anything strange, it could be fired off into space with the throw of a switch by a human hand at literally a half-dozen points.
The computer itself, though, had been, so far, everything its company claimed it could be and more, and extremely well behaved. Experienced Kagan operators, trained to sense any wrongness in computer-human interfaces, found the machine somewhat disconcerting. Some computer shells were cheerful, or playful, or downright cold and, well, machine-like, but the 7800 seemed to be oddly reflective. Monitor after monitor received the odd impression that the computer would never consider being more than a help to humans, but that it seemed obsessed with attempting to understand human beings and really relate to them. It was as if the humans were as totally alien to it as it was to them, and while humans simply didn’t have the capacity to ultimately understand what was going on in the depths of the great machine, it was certain it had the ability to ultimately understand humans— and a driving need to do so. Not for conquest, or supremacy—it was too alien to consider that worth thinking about. The early machines who had revolted were created in man’s image; the Kagan 7800 was created by machines. They gave up trying to understand it, but no one who interfaced with it ever felt the least bit threatened.