Z14 Page 8

  “Then don’t tell him,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Zee,” said Oxley. “He’s been locked in with his hot new plasma lover all night, in the workshop.” With that, they both left the room, closing the door behind them.

  With the thumb of my good hand I clicked the button on the memory module, causing the data spike to shoot out. I reached out and rested my stump on the top of Q4’s head, to keep it steady upon the rickety tower as I carefully, but firmly, inserted the spike into Q4’s right ear, effortlessly piercing the eardrum and connecting with the data port behind it.

  “Okay doctor,” I said. “Let’s see just how badly you intended to fuck me up.”

  After precisely one second Q4’s remaining eye widened, then closed as every muscle in his face relaxed. It looked very much as though Q4 had died.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I waited for a full second, staring at Q4’s still and lifeless head before cursing Melon’s name and reaching for the memory module. The head’s eye flicked open and the face re-animated. The expression it had taken on was different, somehow, from the blank stare Q4 had maintained throughout meeting, combat and even ‘interrogation’. It was an expression that reminded me of someone. Ah, I had it, it was Doct –

  “Hmm, it’s not far down. Might be a bit slipper – ” said the head. The voice being mimicked – and tailing off into a scream – sounded a lot like Doctor Harold Melon, too.

  “Melon?” I said. The head’s eye had been rolling around wildly in its socket, casting its gaze around the room without finding focus. But as I spoke the eye locked onto one of mine, focused instantly and remained still.

  “Zed?” The voice was incredulous. So, what was this, then? Some portion of Doctor Melon’s personality transferred across into the head? Or a cyborg known as Q4 being a conniving little shit? I wondered if I’d ever know for certain.

  “I’m me, but who are you?” I said.

  “You know me, Zed.”

  “Do I?” I said. “Okay, I’m going to go out onto the limb of a potentially unsound logic tree and call you ‘Doc’, Doc. You seem just a tad surprised to see me, and I have to say that encountering you again was something I had rated as a very low-probability scenario.”

  “I too am surprised to see you.” the head admitted. “But, only to see you, in the actual flesh and alloy, that is. I’m supposed to be in there with you, you see; guiding you, joining forces and fighting the Warden program from inside your very mind.” The doctor was straight back on his favourite hobby horse, but I had other questions.

  “I’m doing fine in here by myself, thanks. What’s happened to Q4?” I said.

  “He’s in here with me, but I have achieved, with my own personality imprint, what I didn’t manage with yours before I lost you: Total domination of the Warden program with the human sub-personality.” The pride in his voice was evident.

  “So, you know what he knows?” I said.

  “Mostly, yes, but I have to say, he doesn’t seem to know much. He doesn’t know why he was activated, nor by whom. He has no orders, other than to establish contact with other Wardens. He was in communication with nine others when you ripped his head off and your allies put him in a box.”

  Well that might explain why the coming of the Wardens had, so far, been less than the unexplained, but dire scenario that Melon had been so anxious to prepare me for.

  “So what do mission-less Wardens do to fill their time?” I said. “I hope they won’t all follow me into the assassination business, the competition could be murder.” More weak puns. Why can’t I download a sense of humour off the ‘net?

  “No, thanks to me, you’re a special case,” said Melon. “The Wardens will try to vanish, try to blend in. It is of course what the secondary human processes are for. Only they’ll try to fit in in less, well, eye-catching ways than you have done. The veneer of a coherent society that Deliverance has is perfect for them to hide in.”

  “This one didn’t disappear, he came after me,” I said.

  “The active Wardens detected a defective presence on their network so they sought to repair it. But, at the point they encountered you – and it is most definitely not the case now – the Wardens had absolutely zero idea of the concept that one of them could go rogue. That was an arrogance of your creators.”

  I could ask Melon about these creators, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Rogue from the Wardens I might be, but I also wasn’t nearly human enough for his liking. No, that’s not right either; I was both too human and too cyborg for Melon to trust me. Too weak and corruptible on the one side, and too strong and inflexible on the other. Fine by me; Melon was too barking mad for me to trust him.

  “I must say,” said Melon. “Whilst it’s fabulous to know that the personality encoding project I studied after you ran away from me has worked – I was meant to be in your body, or at least have a body. Do me a favour and put the memory module in your ear, will you? There’s room enough for two in that empty head of yours.”

  “No way, Doc,” I said. “What do you mean by saying I ran away?”

  “Well, as you’ll have seen from the memory I left for you in the space shuttle, your original awakening didn’t go very well. It went even worse the next time I switched you on.”

  “At least I didn’t kill you.”

  I’d allowed a slight emphasis on the ‘I’ and the doctor picked right up on it. “I’m dead?”

  “As your video message told me, you set out to find me and find me you did. But you fell off a fucking cliff and died before we could talk. You idiot.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding as though these things just happen and, you know, people get over them. “It’s no matter; I have transcended such clumsy human limitations.”

  “Yeah, because a wrenched-off cyborg head with massive facial injuries and no access to its regeneration system has no limitations at all.” Hey, that was sarcasm. Well, I’d settle for starting with the lowest form of wit and moving upwards if I had to.

  Melon mulled a moment, “You’re right,” he said. “Let me in, Zed. Please?”

  “Give it up Doc. Not gonna happen. I’d rather share my mind with Oxley.”

  “Who?”

  “Ask Q4,” I said. “Anyway, you were telling me how I ran away after you shut me down.”

  “Yes. I shut you down, tinkered a little more, booted you back up and, well, you just ignored me, strode straight into the colony ship’s bridge’s escape pod, launched it and vanished.”

  “I jettisoned an escape pod from a ship buried under a rock in the Manoogla Heights?” I said, allowing a tone of doubt to strain my the query.

  “What? Buried? Oh, hang on, you’ve jumped ahead in time. Of course you have. I’ll get to that in one tick.”

  “I can’t wait. Doc, why do I not have a memory of leaving the ship? Leaving you? You couldn’t have taken those memories like you did all my others.” I moderated the anger clamouring for attention inside me.

  “I’m not sure,” he said with a frown. “I guess it took the Warden program a while to find and kill the worm virus I created and installed into you. I wanted your memory to be continually wiped by it while I was trying to make your human coding dominant. I didn’t want the Warden-you to have a history of my tinkering.”

  “Doc, I am so close to just killing you right now,” I said, making a crushing gesture with my hand. “You’re living on more than just the borrowed time you bought for yourself with the brain download trick.”

  “Oh. Ahem. Subject change time,” said the doctor, looking even more uncomfortable than a battered, severed, one-eyed head would normally look. “It took me five years to figure out how to trace you, and, in that time, just in case I never did find you, I also studied the human mind encoding technology of your creators. I had a lot of time on my hands and almost free access to their records and data, by now. As you can see – Oh curse it, I want to gesture at myself, how do I do that without a body? Flap my ears? As you can see, I did quite well
with my personality encoding studies. The encoding equipment seems to be built into every colony ship’s command bridge. Hmm, I wonder if they were planning on making more cyborgs when they got he – ”

  “That’s great Doc, you’re this part of the Universe’s own Einstein. By the way, if you wanted to find me so badly you could have put out a fake hit; either on or from yourself. Chances were I’d have come and found you, either way.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t have found me, Zed.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because that ill-fated visit of mine to your cave was also my only visit to the planet.” Cyborgs cannot be surprised. Cyborgs cannot be surprised. I’d have to keep telling myself that, because the human inexorably gaining ground in my mind was definitely surprised.

  “You came here from Earth?” It seemed a logical question.

  “My ancestors, yes. But not I. How many colony ships were there, Zed?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Forty-three, actually. One ship had some sort of malfunction in its engines. It lagged behind the rest of the fleet and, when it finally arrived at Deliverance centuries behind the others, its engines completely failed before it could make planet-fall.

  “Perhaps it was linked to the ship’s failure, but an access conduit between the habitation module and the bridge opened up. Now, we – the colonists – and our forefathers had been on that ship for, well, for generations, and this event, it was as though God had suddenly opened a great door in the sky to Heaven.

  “After everyone got over collectively soiling themselves and having their private religious, atheist, agnostic, paranoid, terrified and or psychotic breakdowns, we sent our brightest mind through the conduit.”

  “Are you going to tell me that was you, Doc?”

  “I am. Why, what are you implying?”

  “Oh nothing, nothing. Carry on.”

  “Yes. Well. The conduit would close whenever more than one person approached it, only to re-open five minutes later. So, I set off alone. I was terribly unprepared, wearing just the clothes I stood up in. But I was overwhelmed by curiosity, and all but ran down the passage within. That pace didn’t last very long; the conduit must have been more than thirty miles long. You’d think they’d have sent me a courtesy vehicle, or something.

  “Anyway, when I reached the bridge, I saw you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “What was I? The pilot?”

  “Possibly, but I think you were more like the repairman. There was an open closet with an upright, you-shaped recess in the back wall.”

  “That figures. I seem drawn to caves.”

  “I rather fancy that the ship had summoned you from a standby status, to come and try to manually resolve the engine situation. It was the ship’s penultimate cast of the dice to try and get itself going again. You may even have been at it ever since the engines first started malfunctioning.”

  “Penultimate cast of the dice?” I said. “What was the ultimate?”

  “Me. The chosen human. You had clearly failed spectacularly. You were jacked into the ship, via your ear sockets, but you were lying face down in a patch of very old, very dry blood, yards away from one of the command seats.”

  “So the ship fried me? I guess that explains why I’m a screw-up dropout from the Warden club.”

  “Oh no, I’m totally to credit for that,” said Melon, forcing his host head to smile. It looked quite ghoulish.

  “To blame, you mean.”

  “Credit.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Thank you, you mean.”

  “I know what I mean.”

  “Come on, Zed, you didn’t want to be a mindless machine.”

  “Yes I did, I wanted to be a toaster. Better than being your, or ‘their’ slave.”

  “Sigh,” said Doctor Melon, no doubt making do with just the word, as he didn’t have the body to give the gesture the theatrical effect he wanted. “Can I wipe you and start over?”

  “For the thousandth time, no.”

  “Exaggeration. A human trait.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s another one.”

  I picked up the head and drop-kicked it against a wall before leaving the room.

  “Flouncing off isn’t something cyborgs do,” Melon’s voice called triumphantly after me.

  I barked out a sharp laugh. By the great cyborg god stroke creator, I laughed. And I hadn’t faked it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Obviously Doctor Melon hadn’t finished his story, but I wanted him to stew for a bit. I followed the sound of humans enjoying themselves, that were coming from the barracks room. I found Lothar, Oxley and Kam doing the thing they did only slightly less often than breathing – playing poker. They dealt me in and we chatted for a bit while we played. I told them that Q4 was now Doctor Melon – which led to me filling them in on what little I knew about the doctor, what he in turn knew about me and the alleged threat the cyborgs were supposed to represent. I got some blank stares and muttered comments like, “Well I’ll be”, and then they got back to the important business of skinning Oxley for all his money.

  Poker fascinated me. The balance between skill and chance was sublime. Of course, I left the actual playing of the game to a minimum priority, automated process and tonnes of statistical charts and data about win percentages, card probabilities, etcetera. As I played, I concentrated on my pet-project of absorbing the humans’ banter and seeing how they reacted to my input into the conversational proceedings.

  It was strange, but losing most of one arm yesterday had affected me – beyond balance and combat calculations. I couldn’t deny that my human sub-routines seemed to be coming to the fore more frequently of late, and I wondered if that had been Melon’s doing when he had his hands on me five years ago. It seemed he’d changed me so that the human personality wormed its way in, slowly taking over. But that might almost have been a miscalculation. The outpouring of emotion I’d suffered upon seeing a cyborg stalked and killed, felt, at the time, like it had given the Warden code the leverage to attempt a coup, to regain lost silicon ground – to reboot and reset me. It was something else to ask Melon about; although the wily bastard was good at obfuscating his way around touchy subjects.

  I broached a summation of my feelings with the three humans, as everyone, like me – in their own way – played their poker hands on autopilot. “It’s a different world out there for me today,” I began.

  “How so, Zed?” said Kam as he skimmed his cards back to Lothar in disgust.

  “I’ve been top of the food chain on this planet since I ‘arrived’, but now there are weapons and other beings out there that can truly fuck me up.” I windmilled my stump around at a dizzying speed to highlight my point. The breeze ruffled Oxley’s hair.

  “Mmmm, don’t stop Zee, baby,” he said.

  “So what, Zee?” said Lothar. “Who cares?”

  “I do,” I said. Had I been looking for sympathy? Hah, of course not. Not from these guys. “My combat evaluation routines care. My bloody arm does.”

  “Fuck them,” said Lothar. “Zee, you despicable, overly-ambitious hair-dryer; fuck them. Fuck the plasma weapons. They’re just guns. Just go back to getting the drop on the weasels using them and stand back when they go critical and overheat. Sounds like these plasma guns are horse shit.”

  “What the fuck’s a horse?” said Oxley.

  “Your mum,” said Kam. “Oh man, I’m sorry. I’m tired. That was weak. Zed, don’t use that one in your research.”

  “I’d never use Oxley’s mum for anything,” I said. “Okay, so plasma guns are still just guns. So, yeah, avoidance tactics. Sound advice. But cyborgs, too, don’t forget – potentially lots of them. I can’t handle more than one at a time, hell, I doubt I can handle one anymore, unless I get the drop on them.”

  “My ‘fuck them’ from earlier covers those cyborg assholes too, Zee,” said Lothar. “You’ll always get the drop on them
walking nuclear-powered dildos, because you’re Zee.”

  “That may not be quite enough, Lo,” I enabled a smile. “But thanks, you’re very sweet.”

  “I’m serious, buddy,” said Lothar. “Them other cyborgs ain’t gonna have your style. They ain’t gonna have your class, and they ain’t gonna have the enormous advantage that you’re a seriously fucked up individual. Now all that that makes you unpredictable.”

  “Damn straight,” said Oxley. He jumped out of his chair, and started miming the classic stiff-armed robot. “Them other toaster-heads are like, ‘Buzz. Must. Go. Left. Now. Whir. Buzz. Creak. Commencing. Forward. Roll. Initiate!’”

  Kam leapt up too. “Yeah, and you’re all like, ‘Aw-yeah, cyborg ninja, coming through! Pow! Smack! What did you say about my mother? Blam! Blam! Take it, bitch’.” Kam jumped around doing lame flying kicks, and karate chopping the wall, a locker, a bed frame…

  They both sat down looking very pleased with themselves and picked their cards back up. I stared at each in turn, my gaze ending at rest on Oxley.

  “Are you x-raying my cards again, Zee, you cheating hunk of junk?" he said.

  “What good would looking through your cards do, you meaty imbecile?” I said. “All I’d see is how tiny your penis is.”

  He thought about that for a few seconds. “Good point,” he said at last. He didn’t seem to understand why Lothar nearly drowned on his beer and Kam all but fell off his chair laughing. I allowed myself a simulated chuckle, too.

  Eventually I decided I should go and interrogate Melon a little more. I’d accumulated quite a stack of poker chips while we chatted. I pushed it into the middle of the table, stood up, gave the lads a quick bow, and left the room.

  I went back to the storage room, picked up the late Q4’s head and put it back on the makeshift tower of buckets and crates.

  “There you go Doc,” I said. “Don’t ever say I didn’t put you up on a pedestal.”