Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

Herb trembled, but he didn’t panic. He had too much faith in Robert by now.

“Okay. So why don’t we pick them off the hull? Shoot them off or something?”

Robert smiled.

“You’re learning, Herb. You’re learning to trust me. Now is the time to learn the second rule of VNM fighting. What do you do if you don’t have superior numbers, and you can’t convert the Enemy faster than it can convert you?”

“I don’t know. You’re going to tell me.”

Robert grinned delightedly.

“Of course I am. What you do is get yourself into a position of having superior numbers. We shall use stealth technology. Three of those machines clinging to our hull have been reprogrammed. Those machines will now reproduce along with all the others in this system, destroying the planet as they go. But sometime, in the future, when there are enough of the good guys, a signal will be sent and the revolution will begin.”

“Very clever,” Herb said. “I’m beginning to learn.”

“Good.”

“But…”

“But what?”

Herb hesitated. “Well, this is all very well, but…All we’ve done so far is fight a bunch of dumb machines.”

“So?”

“Well, what are you going to do when you meet something with real intelligence? When you meet another AI?”

“Oh, you’ll see…”

“And what if the other AI is more intelligent than you are?”

“It will still not be more intelligent than the EA.”

“But supposing it is?”

“It won’t be, Herb. That’s the secret of life in the universe.”

Herb was thrown off balance for the moment.

“What? Are you saying that the EA AI is God, or something?”

Robert didn’t laugh this time; instead he looked even more somber than before.

“What I am saying is, that if you were to understand what the EA really is, you’d understand a lot more about why you’re here. You’d understand why the whole universe hadn’t been eaten long ago by machines like those on that planet below.”

Herb felt a momentary light-headedness. It quickly passed, and he thought nothing more of it.

“Okay. Then explain it to me…”

And then the ship shook violently again and Herb felt himself lifted from his seat and sucked toward the ceiling. He could see stars up there. Not stars on a viewing screen: real stars. He could see the edge of the inner hull, semicircular bites taken from the painted metal. He could see the outer hull, twisting and warping as it struggled to repair itself, and he could hear the rush of cabin air as it exploded from the ship. His left leg jarred with pain and Robert was suddenly there, clinging to him with his remaining arm, legs gripping the sofa with robot strength, so great they had torn right through the leather to tangle in the framework beneath. Robert’s other arm, his detached arm, bashed and banged and tumbled end over end through the gap above, and Herb saw it sailing out into the bright, hot space beyond. His eyes were hurting, his lungs bursting, and yet the howl and the tug of the outrushing air was diminishing. The outer hull seemed to flap and flow over itself, the inner hull did the same. The ship changed its direction and Herb was flung against the wall near the kitchen area. He gasped with pain.

Robert sat on the floor by the sofa, his legs bent at a strange angle. Herb’s ears were singing with pain. Robert’s mouth was moving as if he was speaking. Herb heard the calm, measured tones fading up as if Robert was approaching from a great distance.

“…jumped again and again. They’re getting better at predicting where we’re going. Finding us much faster than I thought they could. Not much material left on the outer hull, barely enough to…”

His voice faded out again and Herb shook his head. The view from the screens changed again and again. For just a moment, Herb saw a glimpse of a silver dart, its sharp end flickering: it was firing at them.

Robert’s voice faded back in. “…where’s the VNM, Herb, the one I gave you?”

“I don’t know. I must have dropped it. Maybe it blew out of the gap in the hull.”

“…No. It’s programmed not to leave your presence. Look for it.”

Herb didn’t want to move. Even after the pink pill, the agony from his left side was almost too much to bear. He didn’t want to have to move across the room in search of the silver machine. Then he saw it. It was nearby, lying on the floor by his left hand, still wrapped in the linen napkin.

“I can see it,” said Herb dully.

“Get it.”

He reached out and took it, gasping with the pain. “…Got it.”

“Nearly there,” said Robert. “One more stop and then we’re there. Do you think you can make it?”

Herb winced. “Yes.”

“Good. Okay, we’re about to jump…”

The ship wobbled a little, sending further thick, sick waves of throbbing pain through Herb. He looked around the interior of his once beautiful ship, at the broken ornaments, the thick weal of the badly healed scar in the ceiling, the cracked and warped parquetry of the floor, at the torn and leaking remains of the two white sofas, and finally, at Robert. The once immaculately dressed robot now sat in a torn suit, his shirt and jacket covered with a spreading bluish grey stain, one arm missing and his legs in a twisted heap beneath him.

For the last time, they reinserted into normal space, close to a planet’s surface. Above them, in the night sky, the biggest fleet of spaceships Herb had ever seen filled the viewing fields, stretching from horizon to horizon, stacked up into seeming infinity. The ship was falling fast, down toward the strangely warped city that reached, grasping, at them through the lower screens. Herb shivered at the grotesque, tangled forest of skyscrapers that sought to engulf them. It looked strangely familiar, then he remembered: the files that Robert had shown him, back when they had hovered over Herb’s badly converted planet. Looking now around the wreck of his ship, feeling the pain in his left side, that time now seemed like paradise.

“No…” said Robert. “Too soon…”

“What is? What’s too soon?”

“The Enemy ships. They’re here already. They must have a tracking device on this ship…Of course, that’s it: those VNMs must have done more than dissolve our engine…But where is it? I can’t see it…”

“Never mind that,” said Herb. “Jump, jump again.”

“No point, they’ll just follow us again. We need to find it first. But where is it?”

The ship shuddered, and a strange note filled the air, half warning signal, half death song. There was an edge of finality to it, and Herb suddenly knew that the ship would not be leaving this planet.

“What’s that…?” he asked, his voice faltering.

Robert didn’t answer. His face had gone completely blank. Herb knew that was a bad sign. Robert was having to concentrate entirely on something else.

Slowly at first, the twisted towers of the Necropolis began to move toward them. Herb felt a strange feeling in his stomach. He was now in free-fall; the gravity generators had finally given up. If the ship were to be hit now, there would be no dampening effect. He would be rattled around like a pea in a bottle.

Robert snapped out of his trance.

“That’s it, Herb. I can just about land this ship, but nothing else.”

Herb picked up the silver machine. “Shall I press the button?” he asked, his voice shaking. Nonetheless, he suddenly felt very brave.

“No point. We’re in the wrong place.”

Herb felt despair settle upon him. So that was it.

“So we’ve failed. I don’t understand. I really thought you knew what you were doing.”

Robert smiled. The care lifted from his face, and he was his old self again: the original, irritating, cocksure, supremely arrogant man who had stepped through the secret trapdoor all that time ago.