“I’m glad to hear it,” she responded, “and I don’t want you to feel guilty or responsible for anything. This is my last job out here, Toby, but I should tell you I checked out everything with Medical and higher-ups and they said they wouldn’t stand in my way either, so you’re off the hook.”
He felt better about that, but sad to be losing her. He switched over to his private computer line. “Seventeen—is it true? She has the O.K.?”
“It is true,” Seventeen responded, but it seemed somehow saddened. “I—I think without violating any instructions, though, I should warn you that she has written a program for herself that will be included in the master system. It will cause severe, permanent, and irrevocable changes which she knows and accepts. It will do no good to talk to her, only cause her pain. My analysis is that there is absolutely nothing that can be done.”
“How severe?” he asked, mouth going dry.
“Very. But she’ll be happy, Toby. I guarantee that. I will not, however, be specific. That is outside your provence.”
“Cancel it, then. No matter what.”
” I can’t. She’s anticipated you all the way.”
“Not in one way. I can refuse to run the program. That would buy time.”
“It would buy nothing. She can run hers without you and create a bad imbalance that might cost lives. She’s that determined. And, Toby—the storm has finally broken just south of the core. It’s worse than the first one and it’ll be within populated limits in less than ten minutes. Something of this size isn’t done in an instant, you know. We’ll be lucky to minimize damage and possible loss of life if we run it right now. The only shot we’ve got is the pressure drop we’ll create that could suck that thing north and dissipate it. I don’t like to run it now anyway. It’s bigger than anything we’ve ever done, and a couple of modules at the north point haven’t even been verified yet, but we must take the gamble.”
He swore and hit the side of the metal casing so hard it hurt. Why all this right now? This instant? Why couldn’t that damned storm hold off another twenty minutes? Another hour?
“Toby—it’s many lives and maybe the Anchor versus a fruitless delay talking her down. I tried myself already. Insert your modules. Give the orders. Run the program now!”
“Damn!” he swore aloud. “Station One, insert modules. Stations Two and Three, insert modules. Station Four, insert modules. Sound out on my mark!”
“Mark!” came back four times—including Connie’s voice.
“We’ve got to roll. Storm is in. Repeat, storm is in. Just pray this works, guys, or run for whatever hills we manage to build. Inserting master module. Master in. Locked on. Guard, on my mark—key off. Mark! Guard—key on. Mark!”
“Fired and ready,” came the response from the Guard safe and cozy deep inside the headquarters complex.
“Amp check! Full power! Report!”
“Full power!” they all reported.
“Computer link. Do you have program read?”
“Program read, aye,” responded Seventeen. “Running normal checksum. Done. Recommend a Go code at your command.”
“All amp keys off on my mark. Mark! Computer—execute on completion of five-key circuit. Ready remotes! Hands on keys—” He hesitated just a moment. The difference between leadership and just having a job was taking the responsibility for some pretty damned shitty necessities. “Mark!”
He turned his key, and watched all five lights go on almost at the same time. She hadn’t even hesitated.
There was nothing to do now but turn and see if this whole damned cursed bloody thing worked. If it didn’t, he was a ripe candidate to cut his own bloody throat.
The crackling wall went out from his position and expanded away in all directions, raggedly rather than in a circular manner, but that was the way these things went. He watched in fascination as it left him, and then struck Cuassa’s position below, which was not as protected as it should have been. The line of fire came up to her, parted right around her feet, and continued on. She gave a yelp, although there was no real sensation, and jumped back. Two shoeprints of dirt stood where she’d been, surrounded by grasses.
It looked fine here, but now he’d have to depend on Seventeen’s sensors and the satellite links to tell him if his gamble had paid off with only five amps. He couldn’t help but notice the energy guage creep rapidly down on his own panel. The farther the wall traveled, the more energy would be expended, since it was fed from the amp and the amp alone. If it ran dry, or too low to make the conversions before it hit the other walls of fire, they’d have five disconnected Anchors and hell to pay with atmospherics, stream flow, and natural drainage and seepage. Even Seventeen had said it was too close to call.
“Well? Status check?” he commanded.the computer.
“It sucked those storm clouds clean back north so fast, it was hard to believe,” the computer informed him. “First time there’s been real daylight on the core since that first one. Everything’s holding fine, but it’s going to be really chancy between you and the east point wall. Five minutes or so should tell.”
“And Connie?”
As soon as she turned the key, Connie had felt a shock, then a tingling that seemed to reach into her very core and through every cell of her body. Then she seemed to black out—the world shifted for a second—and it was over and the wall was moving away from her.
She removed the headset. It didn’t interest her anymore. Slowly, she climbed down from the cab and felt her bare feet touch real grass, and it felt good. There was a slight wind blowing, and the sky overhead blazed now with the big planet that was its light source.
She knew who she was—or, rather, had been. She had to put Connie Makapuua to rest, she knew. She didn’t have a name in mind, but she’d think of something. She wanted to find some surface to see herself, and she found that the side of the big amp was pretty shiny and with its Guard panels down reached the ground. She gasped at what she saw. She was in every way more than she desired, but she was also Seventeen’s, and Suzuki’s experiment. The computational filter wasn’t absolute. As she’d discover, she could not compose music, but she could sing perfectly just about anything she heard even once and her ability to intuitively play the string instruments she’d always played in an average way remained and was enhanced, although she’d never read a note of music or anything else. The computational flag had also filtered basic literacy.
Nor could she relearn these things. The filter was permanent and would block it, and prevent any understanding of it.
Psychologically, Seventeen simply took the libido she’d suppressed and craved and made it the master. She was still human—she could think, reason, learn and remember—but the nonaggressive parts of the animal brain would take precedence. Aggression centers had been neutralized by the creation of specific peptides for the necessary receptors in the brain and the continued natural creation of these peptides would be a normal body function. Pleasures of the flesh would later take supremacy over pleasures of the mind, yet future memory would be nearly photographic. The baser emotions, such as jealousy and possessiveness, would be dampened by a combination of data filtration and self-perpetuating biochemistry. Her attention span was short, her behavior generally governed by the impulse of the moment. But for the brain, she would not physically age, each cell renewing itself, even to the point of regeneration.
The figure reflected back at her was based upon this and her own fantasy image, but taken to its utmost extremes. Her Polynesian features were perfection, beauty and eroticism in one, yet her face was childlike, an eternal sweet sixteen. She was short, with a trim, athletic body and long silky black hair down to her hips, but her breasts were both firm and enormous, far out of proportion to her body size. So prominent, in fact, that normal human breasts of that size could not possibly be firm, nor be carried by so petite a frame without causing back pain or even curvature, yet none was there. Seventeen had carefully altered her bone structure and muscles to compensate. She was inhumanly erotic and she loved it.
She was also, to a large extent, exactly what Dr. Suzuki wanted from the exercise. The Special Projects chief and her security bosses, most notably Coydt herself, knew that there were several other projects on New Eden experimenting with the whole process, and while they’d managed to get some results from Watanabe’s side, the rest had been impenetrable. Seventeen could not be driven to break its seals from those groups, but, given some discretion, it was able to use the knowledge it had from those other projects, knowledge gotten through the network from other 7800’s as needed, in doing something like this. An incredible amount of complex work had been done to create this new individual, whose value lay not so much in who and what she was or had been but in what they would learn was possible that they hadn’t already discovered.
This fact was not lost on the Signal Corps, particularly after Gorton retired to the void until after the landscaping operation and had used that time to plug in and call his superiors on a very tightly scrambled circuit. He had lingered at the big amp station long enough to learn that she had received permission to go ahead with her idea, and to guess its meaning.
“I wish we could get her in with our medical team and equipment for a thorough study,” said his superior over the radio, “but that’ll only tip our hand in these circumstances. Could she be removed to the void for some remote hookups’?”
“I doubt it,” the corporal responded. “She’s part and parcel of the landscape, remember. She’s tied in to a specific maintenance program in the Anchor Luck master plan. She won’t network because she’s considered by the computers the same as a tree or a flower, and she can’t be affected by the amps because she’s tied into a code she alone knew but which she no longer knows and which was erased from the computer after the routine was run.”
“All right. The best we can do, then, is for you to offer to take her back up to the core overland. Use your portable medical kit as much as you can and record everything. What about this fellow Haller?”