Mark Tiedemann - Chimera

She aimed.

A head appeared over the hunched shoulder. Eyes fixed her, unblinking and sharp. The face…the skin looked rough, disfigured…the hair was a ragged growth of oily brown and red.

It grinned at her.

It moved with alarming speed, turning toward her, crouching to spring

Ariel fired.

The weapon felt warmer in her hand. The bolt of energy, nearly invisible, slammed into the assailant and tossed him from the roof of the transport like a mass of compressed air buffeting a rag.

He hit the pavement with a solid, meaty impact and a puff of air.

He sat up, shook his head, and looked at her.

Terrified, Ariel fired again.

The head snapped back, so savagely that it must have broken the neck. A few moments later, though, he began to stand.

Ariel watched, seized by amazement and fear, as he rose, to his full height.

Shoot it again, she thought, but her finger did not flex against the stud.

He took a step toward her.

A brilliant splash of crimson-white burst against him. She glanced back toward the bolt's source: Coren had managed to get off a shot. The attacker screamed, a sound like a million sheets of paper ripping at once, and staggered back.

Ariel fired a third time. A pungent burnt odor filled the air.

The attacker fell to his knees, rose, then ran away.

All at once the stillness engulfed her.

Coren coughed.

Ariel came around the transport and found him lying on the pavement, holding his throat in one hand and his pistol in the other. She set her weapon down and helped him sit up with his back to the transport. He coughed and hacked for a minute, spit out a gob of phlegm, and sucked air in huge gasps.

"I know that hand," he said finally. "Son of a…"

He got to his feet shakily and looked around.

"Get your weapon," he rasped.

Ariel snatched up the stunner.

Coren accessed a different transport. He drove fast now, taking the turns recklessly until they made the avenue. Ariel waited till he slowed down to a normal speed before saying anything.

Before she could speak, though, Coren made an ugly throat-clearing noise and said, "He should've died. Only thing I can think of that could resist a shot like that is a robot. So tell me, Ambassador Burgess of the goddamned Calvin Institute, when did you people start making humanoid robots?"

"It wasn't a robot."

"No? Then what the hell was it?"

"Something we stopped playing with a very long time ago," she said. "A cyborg." Ariel's hands trembled.

Figures, she thought wryly, now that we're safe.

Relatively safe, anyway, she added. Her eyes ached from trying to see all around her and into the darkness of third shift faux night. Coren drove them out of D.C., southwest, past industrial enclaves and private neighborhoods, through abandoned sections, and into an area Ariel had never been to. She recognized the main building from the subetheric-dimly, an old memory-as the headquarters for DyNan Manual Industries.

Coren got through all the security checks, sent the transport back where it belonged, and took her through unpopulated corridors to a suite of offices.

She watched him work a desk that was similar to the one in his private office, though, from the attention he gave to each command, it was far less sophisticated, not even close to an AI. Her pulse slowed, adrenalin drained away, and her fears took over in the form of the shakes.

Coren glanced her way and stopped what he was doing long enough to pour her a drink. Gratefully she sipped at the dark liquid. She had never been sure why alcohol helped at times like this-perhaps it was the care with which one had to take it in that distracted the mind from its own terrors-but she finished the tumbler of whiskey at the same time Coren sat down across from her.

"We're secure for the time being," he said.

Ariel nodded toward his desk. "Smart matrix?"

"An old one."

"Your desk is an AI. "

"Was. Rega would never allow one on his property."

"I don't understand. If you're willing to use one, how do you?"

"Life is a compromise. I prefer working for Rega to working for anyone else. That doesn't mean I agree with everything he says or believes." He smiled thinly. "Much like you, I imagine. "

"Ah, well. To coin a phrase, 'That's different:"

"Really. Well, I won't argue. How are you feeling?"

"Better," she said, raising the empty glass.

"Want another one?"

"Yes, but later. Too much comfort dulls the reflexes. How are you?"

Coren shook his head.

"Let me see your shoulder," Ariel said. She reached for his shirt.

Coren leaned away from her. "I'm all right."

"Of course you are. Let me see."

With obvious reluctance, Coren unzipped his shirt and pulled the left half away, revealing his shoulder. Ugly bruising spread from the base of his neck down to his clavicle.

"Have you seen a doctor?" she asked.

"In my spare time," he said grumpily and pulled the shirt back on. "Painblock."

"You'll pay for that."

"I know." He shrugged. "I made an appointment, but…"

He went to a sofa and sat down heavily, letting his head fall back.

"Your desk," Ariel said. "What happened?"

"Something got through my buffers," he said. "I had the AI doing a lot of in-depth searches. It was spread fairly thin and it must've become vulnerable."

"Or some of the files it was accessing were corrupted."

"Sleeper programs?"

"Maybe. If I could look at the software I could tell you. But bringing it here-"

"-would corrupt this system. Unless we knew exactly what had gotten through."

"Go to the head of the class."

Coren rubbed his shoulder, frowning. "This…cyborg. He's the one who rolled me in Petrabor."

"You're certain?"

"I think I'd remember a deathgrip like that." He frowned at her. "Unless there's more than one?"

"No," Ariel said suddenly, hoping it was true. "Let's not get more paranoid than we need to. "

"You said it was a cyborg."

"I was guessing. I could be wrong-"

"But if you're not, what is it you're talking about?"

"A composite. An organic machine."

"I've seen some pretty impressive soldiers come out of-"

Ariel shook her head. "No, this different. I've seen those people, too, and they aren't like this."

"You said an organic machine. Like augmentation? Prostheses?"

"Far more intimately involved than that. Yes, you could claim that people with artificial limbs, organs, new skin, bone replacements are cyborgs, but it's a much too limited use of the term. No, people like that are still fundamentally human-there's a clear line of separation between the organic and the augmentation. You haven't replaced their basic being with a full-partner robotic symbiote. A cyborg is a blend of the two into a third kind of being. "

"I don't quite follow."

"Neither did we. That's why we stopped fooling with them."

Coren scowled skeptically. "I thought Aurorans were the experts on robotic intelligence."

Ariel sat forward. "We are. That's what I mean. This isn't robotic intelligence. It's…something else. And we couldn't figure out what."

His disdain faded to a guarded respect. Ariel sat back, mollified.

"All right," he said. "I'm listening."

"A positronic brain," Ariel said, "is basically a sensory-data receiver-collator that operates by a collection of discrete parameters arranged in constellations that shift in response to new data. That's a gross simplification, but accurate enough for our purposes. We're talking about a few billion discrete parameters and nanosecond processing time, and a complete lack of an unconscious, and a few other additions and subtractions that allow us to actually program it while granting it a modicum of creative responses-"

Coren held up his hand. "I get the idea. I think. But that sounds like any other AI system."