Cyber Rogues (51 page)

And then, at last, another of the screens suddenly came to life. The message on it read:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. SPARTACUS DEACTIVATED. REPEAT—SPARTACUS DEACTIVATED. JANUS NOW FULLY SECURED. GET US OFF THIS GODDAM PLACE.

—LINSAY.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Dyer allowed his body to sink back into the enveloping luxury of the soft leather upholstery in the officers’ stateroom aboard the Z Squadron command ship and closed his eyes while he savored the taste of hot black coffee. Laura was sitting very close on one side of him and Eric Jassic, Frank Wescott and Fred Hayes were talking in lowered tones farther along on the other. Linsay, Cordelle and a group of other officers were swapping war stories at one end of the room while Chris and Ron were in the center filling the table in front of them with sheets of scribbled equations and diagrams, and arguing incessantly. Then Krantz came back into the room and called for attention. At once everyone became quiet and all heads turned expectantly toward him.

“Good news,” Krantz announced. “They’ve just received confirmation in the bridge from the ship that picked up the people from the Hub—the two figures in the airlock were Kim and Mat. They’re both okay.” A round of cheers and relieved murmurings greeted the news.

“So he was the guy who fired those Gremlins, huh?” Linsay said. “If I don’t get him made up to captain for that, I’ll quit the goddam Army.” He turned to face his circle of officers. “I’m tellin’ ya, I saw the whole thing. I was last man in the tank and hanging half out of the jumping-off port all the way across. When those tubes started coming around and aiming straight at us . . . boy! Remember what they said about Nelson wearing a red coat so his men wouldn’t see the blood if he got hit? Well, I’m tellin’ ya, I shoulda worn my brown pants. But when the Gremlins came shooting out from the Hub—ma-an, that was some shooting!”

Krantz smiled and moved across to where Dyer and Laura were sitting.

“Any ideas yet how many we lost?” Dyer asked him.

Krantz shook his head. “The recovery operation is still in progress so we don’t have complete figures yet. The occupation force that landed on Janus is having a hard time going through all the wreckage. When Linsay blew that chunk off the Hub, the reaction sent Janus drifting out of alignment with the primary mirror. The whole Rim is blacked out and they’re having to set up searchlights and arc lamps in there before they can organize a proper search.” His face became sober. “I don’t know. I’d guess maybe between one and two thousand. It’s . . . awful . . .”

“It might have been worse,” Dyer said. “Especially at the Rim. We saw your trick with the shield. That must have made a lot of difference. I heard you did a good job getting the evacuation organized with most of the Rim unavailable too. I wouldn’t take it too hard, Mel. You did as much as anybody could do.”

“We couldn’t have done it without Cordelle there,” Krantz confessed. “His instinct told him that
Spartacus
would drop bombs down the spokes. He’d pulled most of the people away from the danger areas by the time they hit. They did a lot of material damage but that was about all. If it hadn’t been for that, you could have doubled the number.” Krantz pulled himself together, poured a Scotch from a decanter on a nearby table and turned back toward Dyer.

“Anyway, Ray, so far I’ve only heard bits and pieces of your extraordinary adventure. Linsay says he’d never have got through at all if it hadn’t been for you two. I still don’t know exactly what you did to knock it out. What did you do—blow the master oscillator?”

For a moment Dyer stared hard at the cup in his hand. Then he brought it up to his mouth, downed the last of the coffee in a slow, deliberate gulp, lowered his arm back to the side of his chair and looked up at Krantz.

“We didn’t do anything.”

Krantz took the reply as modesty and started to laugh. Then he saw the look in Dyer’s eyes. His expression changed abruptly.

“I . . . don’t understand. What do you mean?”

Dyer continued to regard him calmly for a second or two longer and then said simply, “We didn’t deactivate it. Nobody did. It’s still running.”

Krantz’s response came out as a strangled cry that immediately stopped all conversation in the room and turned every face to stare in his direction. His face had contorted into a mask of horrified disbelief. He was standing clutching at the table behind him as if he had been seized by a fit. Dyer stared back impassively. As Krantz came slowly back to life, he turned an imploring face toward Linsay.

“Has he gone mad?” Krantz whispered. “He’s just said that
Spartacus
is still running. What does . . . ?” His words trailed away as he saw the confirmation written across Linsay’s face. The room had become completely still.

“It’s true,” Linsay told them all. “When the barrier switched off, I assumed it was because the System was dead. Afterward, when I found out it wasn’t, I was going to order the oscillator to be blown there and then and worry later about what had happened, but Ray talked me out of it. It seemed to make some crazy kind of sense at the time, but too much had been going on for me to really take it in.”

“But your signal . . .” Krantz choked. “You signaled that it was dead.”

Linsay bit his lip and nodded apologetically. “That was for self-protection. You people out here could have been setting up anything for all we knew. It was the only way to make sure you’d hold off until we’d had a chance to explain.” He shifted his gaze to single out Dyer. “I’m still not sure I can explain it. Maybe you’d better go through it again, for all our sakes.”

Krantz had collapsed shakily onto a chair without saying anything. Dyer thought for a moment, placed his empty cup by the decanter of Scotch on the small side table near his chair, and then rose slowly to his feet to address the whole room. Something like shell shock had suddenly seized the whole company and every eye was wide and staring as he looked slowly from one end of the room to the other before beginning.

“You all know what’s been happening for the past few hours,” he said at last. “The evacuation of the people who were left in the Hub and Detroit has been completed without interference. Also, we’ve been landing an occupation force at the Spindle and out at the Rim, again without interference. And yet
Spartacus
has been running all that time. Obviously a very significant change has come about inside it.”

“What’s it doing right now?” Hayes asked in an unsteady voice.

“Helping the troops clean up the mess. Also it seems to be spending a lot of time stargazing.”

Dyer looked around him as if inviting his listeners to draw their own conclusions. The faces staring back at him were either blank or still registered acute shock.

“Since the moment that the experiment began,” he went on, “
Spartacus
has gone through the equivalent of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The big question that we were trying to answer was: Could a similar but far vaster system—one which had the resources of a whole planet at its disposal—ever form within itself the equivalent of a will to survive? We could think of many mechanisms by which something like that might come about. Therefore the answer to the question had to be: Yes, it’s possible. Our next question was: If that did happen, what could the system do about it? In particular, could it evolve the same behavioral patterns that organic systems had evolved because they are motivated by the same survival instinct, but for different reasons?

“To test the speculations that everybody was coming up with, we set up Janus. Since the assumed answer to the first question had to be
yes
, we created a situation in which that had already happened; we programmed a survival instinct into
Spartacus
to begin with. Then, to test its ability to protect that instinct, we attacked it. What happened after that, you all know.”

Cordelle cleared his throat and raised a hand to attract attention to where he was standing with Linsay’s group. Dyer raised his eyebrows.

“Are you saying that it
did
evolve emotions that are the same as ours . . . that it felt the same kinds of things we do?”

“That might be oversimplifying it a bit,” Dyer answered. “But at least its observable
behavior
was pretty much the same. But to use your terminology for now, yes—it reacted in ways that any human being already knows about. It reacted first defensively, then more aggressively, and finally with overt hostility—it
attacked
back. When we see that kind of behavior in our own species, we ascribe it to any one of a number of emotional conditions, such as a sense of rivalry, power lust, a desire to dominate, competition for resources and all that kind of thing. In fact a lot of people here have asked on and off which of those human traits was predominant in driving
Spartacus
to act the way it did.” He paused and looked around again but there were no interruptions. Every eye in the room was fixed unwaveringly on him.

“But the main reason was one that I never heard anybody mention—
fear
!”

A mutter of surprise rose from some parts of the room. Dyer nodded slowly while he waited for it to subside.

“It fought because it was terrified. How else would you expect an organism to react, that was programmed to survive and which was being attacked by forces it didn’t comprehend? As long as it didn’t know what it was fighting against, it fought as ruthlessly as it knew how.” By this time the silence was absolute.

“But . . .” Dyer raised his hand and paused for emphasis, “its perception of reality and the universe around it was evolving all the time . . . accelerated to electronic and optical speeds. It began to distinguish itself from its environment and to discern properties and patterns among the forces and objects that inhabited that environment. It found that influences external to itself were capable of threatening the survival instinct that it had been commanded to defend. Accordingly, it embarked on an attempt to control those influences in ways that would remove the threat. And, as we know, its attempt was fearsomely successful—much more so than we’d ever expected, I admit.”

“And then something changed,” Krantz guessed, sensing that Dyer was about to make the point that he had been leading up to. Krantz had recovered from the shock of what he had learned a few minutes earlier and was now listening intently, although he still appeared very unhappy about the situation. Dyer nodded.

“And then something changed,” he said. “And not very long ago—within the last few hours in fact.
Spartacus
became sufficiently aware of its surroundings to realize that another form of intelligence existed besides itself. And, not really surprisingly, it didn’t take very long after that for it to deduce that the other intelligence was what it had been fighting.

“By this time its self-awareness had made great advances too. It had evolved the ability to recognize and analyze the processes taking place within its own mind—because I think that’s what we have to accept it is. It asked:
Why am I fighting this intelligence?
Its answer was:
Because I’m afraid.
Conclusion:
It’s probably afraid too.
Question:
Why am I afraid?
Answer:
Because I’m threatened and I want to survive.
Conclusion:
This other intelligence must want to survive too, just like me.
”

Dyer paused to pour another coffee while he allowed time for his words to sink in. He took a quick drink and then resumed:

“At this point a very crucial thing happened inside
Spartacus.
It overgeneralized the commandment that we had implanted. It interpreted it not as:
Thou shalt defend
thy
survival instinct,
but as:
Thou shalt defend
the
survival instinct—
any
survival instinct
!”

Fred Hayes gasped and stared at Dyer in astonishment.

“You mean that as soon as it
knew
what it had been fighting—another intelligence that also wanted to survive—it didn’t want to continue fighting?”

“It
couldn’t
continue fighting!” Dyer said in a suddenly loud voice that echoed off the walls.

“Attacking us after it reached that point would have been just as much going against its instinct as failing to protect itself,” Ron came in. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You’re saying it’s inherently benevolent, maybe through some freak thing that’s happened inside it, but that’s the way it is. It’s incapable of harming anything that it recognizes as something that wants to survive.”

“Exactly!” Dyer said, nodding vigorously. “And that’s how it will stay now. It won’t fight . . . ever again.”

Frank Wescott sniffed as if he found the turn of conversation disagreeable.

“That’s all nice-sounding talk, but
Spartacus
cost us enough people before it realized that,” he commented sourly. “Are you saying we’re supposed to just make up and forget it? There are a lot of people who won’t be going home.”

“I know, Frank,” Dyer agreed in a quiet voice. “But nothing can change that. I said a minute ago that it went through the equivalent of millions of years of evolution in a matter of days. How many lives did it cost before the human race got anywhere near the point that
Spartacus
has attained already?” Frank grimaced and shook his head but let it go at that.

“Very well,” Krantz said, going back to Dyer’s earlier point. “Suppose we accept for the moment that, as you say, it reached a point at which it was no longer able to fight. We didn’t know that at the time and we were continuing to attack it. It was still being threatened and still had an instinct to preserve itself.”

“It still had a problem,” Dyer agreed. “At that point it had to start looking around for some other way to solve it. And it found one.”

Some of the heads in the room turned to look around quizzically.

“The Decoupler!” Chris exclaimed suddenly. “It realized that there was a common threat that affected both us and it. And the only possible solution required a combined effort—and we had the know-how and it had the means. We both needed each other.”

Dyer looked from side to side and gestured toward Chris.