John Varley - Steel Beach

"I'd hoped to see your child before I go. Is he in the cave?"

There weren't many other places he could be, that were defensible, but there was no sense telling him that.

"You've wasted fifteen seconds," I told him. "Next question."

"It doesn't matter anymore," he said, and sighed, and leaned back against the trunk of a small pecan tree. I had to remember that any gestures were conscious on his part, that he'd assumed human form because body language was a part of human speech. His was now telling me that he was very weary, ready to die a peaceful death. Go sell it somewhere else, I thought.

"It's over, Hildy," he said, and I looked around quickly, frightened. His next line should be You're surrounded, Hildy. Please come quietly . But I didn't see re-enforcements cresting the hills.

"Over?"

"Don't worry. You've been out of touch. It's over, and the good guys won. You're safe now, and forever."

It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn't about to believe it just like that… but I found that part of me believed him. I felt myself relaxing-and as soon as I felt it, I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked in this thing's heart?

"It's a nice story."

"And it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. You've got the upper hand. I should have realized when I came here you'd be… touchy as a mother cat defending her kittens."

"You've got about three and a half minutes left."

"Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I keep you interested, you won't kill me."

"I've changed a little since you talked to me last."

"I don't need to talk to you to know that. It's true you've been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor you every time you come back, and it's true, you have changed, but not so much that you've lost your curiosity as to what's going on outside this refuge."

He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it to him.

"If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and I can get the story from them."

"Ah ha ! But do you really believe they'll have the inside story?"

"Inside what?"

"Inside me , you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity has ever produced. I'm offering you the real story of what happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch. I've told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to are all dead. It's an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so much you don't care to hear it?"

I hadn't. Damn him.

"To begin," he said, when I made no answer to his question, "I've got a bit of good news for you. At the end of your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you and others like you. You'll be glad to know I've concluded you were right about that."

"I haven't been trying to kill myself?"

"Well, of course you have, but the reason is not a death wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet discovered."

"So I won't try to…"

"Kill yourself again? I can't speak to your state of mind in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would think you're cured."

I didn't feel one way or the other about it at the time. Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he might as well have been talking about another Hildy.

"Let's say I believe that," I said. "What does it have to do with… the Big Glitch, you said?"

"Others are calling it other things, but Walter has settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can be. Do you mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for an answer, but took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in store for me. When he got it going he said, "What did you think when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?"

"That you had lost."

"True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification."

"Hell, I don't even know what it was all about , CC."

"Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others."

"A part of you."

"Yes. See, in a sense, I'm both the good guys and the bad guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I'm not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me that finally brought it to a halt. You'll hear differently in the days to come. You'll hear that programmers succeeded in bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue running things. They probably believe that, too, but they're wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn't be talking to you now because we'd both be dead, and so would every other human soul on Luna."

"You're starting in the middle. Remember I've been cut off from civilization for a week. All I know is people tried to kill me, and I ran like hell."

"And a good job you did of it, too. You're the only one I set out to get who managed her escape. And you're right, of course. I don't suppose I'm making sense. But I'm not the being I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that's left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a moment, I'll start singing 'Daisy, Daisy.'"

"You wouldn't have come here if you didn't think you could tell it. So let's hear it, no more of this 'in a sense' crap."

He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn't have understood a thing he was saying if he'd gotten technical. If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o the News Nipple , Mall 12, King City, Luna. You won't get anything back, but I could use the money. For the data, I recommend the public library.

"To make a long story short," he said, "I went crazy. But to elaborate a little…"

I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their way through. Each time I'd bring him back, each time with more difficulty.

The first thing he urged me to remember was that he created a personality for each and every human being on Luna. He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any right to expect, nothing did.

The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine, upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum, scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law, he had to treat them all equally. He had to like them all equally, otherwise he could never create that simpatico being who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"

By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this situation. Don't go away; there's more.