The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (10 page)

The Chief was a man whose bio Trent had studied quite thoroughly, a stolid, unimaginative fellow who Trent knew –

The woman sitting behind the desk, a Peaceforcer Elite in perhaps her early thirties, looked up from her systerm, smiled at Trent, and said pleasantly, over Trent’s swiftly mounting horror, “Welcome to Halfway, Chief.”

Something had gone disastrously wrong, all right.

It was Melissa du Bois.

10

TRENT SAID, “UH....”

Ten years had passed since Trent had last seen Melissa du Bois; she had been there, with Mohammed Vance, when he stole the LINK and escaped from the PKF DataWatch headquarters at Jules Verne, Luna.

“Uh ...”

She had had that effect on Trent before – she’d stood there in the flight bay at SpaceBase One, at L-5, in August of 2069, pointing a maser at him, the maser she had just stolen from him, the maser Trent had stolen from Sidney Zinth. Melissa had cracked one of his ribs taking the maser from him. The last time he’d spoken to her struck him like the kick she’d broken his ribs with –

Melissa looked at him curiously, and Trent whispered, “Thank you. For everything.” The puzzled look left her features slowly, and her eyes widened slightly. Trent did not move at all; held her eyes with the intensity in his own, held the connection. Her breath caught, stopped, started again at a quicker pace. Trent said nothing at all for a long moment, and then relaxed all at once, leaned back in his chair. Melissa shook herself with what appeared to Trent like a real effort.

Trent said, “Remember I said that. I mean it.”

Melissa du Bois looked away from Trent and said softly, “I should take you back to the infirmary.”

It was 1:52 A.M. –

– it was 2080.

A decade later Trent shook himself, said for the third time, “Uh –”

Melissa du Bois looked at him with a polite, interested expression. “Yes?”

I thought Gerard Tepare was Chief of Security at Halfway,
Trent could say, and watch this fearsomely intelligent woman say politely,
Indeed? And how does a civilian come to know who Chief of Security is, fresh from Earth? Who told you this?

“Melissa du Bois,” said Trent. “That’s a
very
nice name.”

She smiled at him pleasantly and said politely, “I’ve always thought so. How do you know it?”

Her English was spoken with an exactly correct American accent, the flat atonal Hollywood accent affected by newsdancers. The dissonance, the lack of her old French accent, threw Trent almost as badly as finding her here. To the far side of his field of vision, Trent could see a PKF pressure suit hanging in the corner, a simple security precaution most people took in pressurized environments. Trent smiled back at Melissa du Bois. “Lucky guess. Someone in the corridor mentioned the name as I was coming in, and then I saw the name on your pressure suit when I came in.” Wishing desperately that someone had mentioned the name on his way in, Trent turned slightly, reached out and turned the p-suit just a bit, so that the patch came into view –

The karma gods
liked
him. It said:

Sergent M. du Bois.

Trent let go of the p-suit with a hand that threatened to shake, shrugged, and said, “Did I guess right?”

Melissa sat back in her seat, and nodded with a faintly amused expression. “Yes. You did, Chief. You’re a quick-witted individual.” The smile came to her features easily; it marked her for an Elite created within the last seven years. Except for the artificial eyes, one would not have easily known her for a cyborg – even the eyes were better than the glassy oldstyle black Elite eyes; they were brown and just a bit too shiny to be real. Her hair looked real, cut short in a brush cut, the rich brown Trent remembered; and the golden brown skin, the color of a white woman with a tan, managed to look both soft and tight, stretched across hard muscle. She wore the long-sleeved black and silver PKF dress uniform, in a close cut. She looked military, looked dangerous, and looked, to Trent at least, amazingly sexy.

Trent had been following her career since he had last seen her, in January of ’70. She had been cyborged six years ago, in 2074, and had served in Los Angeles during the TriCentennial Rebellion. The last report he’d had of her, she had been assigned to duty in Capitol City, on Manhattan Island in New York. There was no meaningful discord between her rank of Sergeant, and her posting as Chief of Security at Halfway: an Elite Sergeant was an important individual, perhaps the equivalent of a commissioned Major in any traditional military service. Mohammed Vance, the Elite Commander, had, eighteen years prior, ordered a thermonuclear strike while still a Sergeant. Elite ranks more nearly resembled those of police: Officer and Corporal and then Detective – a very few Elite held the rank of Detective, though it was a common enough title among standard Peaceforcers assigned to a particular prefecture. Then Sergeant, to Lieutenant, to Captain, to Commissioner, and from there to Elite Commander.

Mohammed Vance had advanced from Sergeant to Elite Commander in only fourteen years.

“Have a seat,” Melissa said. “This won’t take us long, but we do need to get through it.” She gestured at the three smooth silvery ovals, sitting on the desk in front of Trent’s seat. “If you please.”

Trent picked up the largest oval, placed it against the back of his neck. It was light and it adhered to his skin. He picked up the two ovals that remained, held one in each hand.

A holofield appeared hanging off to Melissa’s right. She glanced at it, at the information it held, and then back to Trent. “Please answer yes to the next six questions. Are you twelve years old?”

The world around Trent grew distant. A voice that did not belong to him, a voice with Eugene Yovia’s faint English accent, said, “Yes.”

“Are you thirty-six years old?”

“Yes.”

“Is your name Antoin Smith?”

“Yes.” He’d introduced himself to her, ten years ago, as Trent Smith –

“Is your name Eugene James Yovia?”

“Yes.”

“Are you three meters tall?”

“Yes.”

“Are you 190 centimeters tall?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, M. Yovia. We’re calibrated.”

Call me Gene
, Trent’s inskin said. “Call me Gene,” Eugene Yovia’s voice said.

She smiled at him, a gorgeous smile that reached Trent even through the layers of haze. “Very well, Gene. I’m Chief du Bois in public, and you’ll be Chief Yovia, but in private I’ll be happy to call you Gene.”

The muscles of Trent’s cheeks moved. A smile.
Great
. “Great.”

She glanced at her screen. “You can answer these questions as you please. This is your second tour of duty at Halfway?”

“Yes.”

“Nearly three years, your last tour, early ’73 to late ’75. You helped install most of the Three-C systems.” Command, control and communication. “You oversaw the early programming of Monitor.”

Monitor, the expert system that ran the
Unity
. It lacked self-awareness, like all legal expert systems. “That’s right.”

“You were promoted three times in three years, from programmer to sub-Chief of Three-C. You received a commendation for design improvements in the tracking systems used by the laser cannon –”

Trent’s inskin shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not a weapons guru, just a decent coder. I eliminated some unnecessary error checking in the target acquisition routines, improved response time nearly a sixteenth of a second. It was basic optimization, just hand-tuning; Monitor would have caught it when it went online. I just trimmed three large conditional blocks down into a single re-entrant loop.”

The smile came back, slightly larger. “Whatever that means. I don’t program, Gene. Your superiors were impressed, at the time.” She glanced at the holo, and the smile faded. “You got married on December 31, 2075.”

“Yes
...
bad day to get married, it turns out. Commonest day of the year for people to get married. Everyone jacks their prices up
...
caterer alone cost us each a month’s salary, and we were a well paid couple.”

“You quit your job and went downside to conceive and raise a child.”

“Yes. Janice was – concerned. She didn’t want to bear a child who would be trapped in low gee its entire life.”

“You tried to have the child genegineered.”

Silence. Trent let it stretch, then said, “Is that a question?”

“Why did you do that?”

“I went through all this with the PKF and the Space Force Security officers, downside.”

“Again, please.” It was not a request.

“The world is complex,” said Trent. “Multiple things happen on multiple levels.”

“Is that your answer?”

Reluctantly: “Janice has a tendency toward obesity. She fights it, but it’s a fight. On my side of the family we have weak eyesight and hereditary coronary disease. When we were arrested the court took notice of ameliorating circumstances. The designs we’d agreed to merely corrected our deficiencies. There was no attempt at radical genegineering
...
it was just a misdemeanor.”

Melissa nodded, glancing at the holo. “Interesting,” she murmured, and Trent was not sure what she meant by that, his story or his readout. “I concede that I understand the impulse, Gene, to provide for your children, but the willingness to break the law – any law, no matter how much you disagree with it – it’s a discouraging thing to find in the record of a man being moved up to Chief of Information Systems.”

“If they could have found someone better, they would have,” Trent said softly. “I’m the best there is.”

She glanced at the holo again, and her lips twitched. “Well, there’s no doubt in you about that, is there?”

Trent shook his head. “No.”

“How do you feel about the Unification?”

It wasn’t even necessary for Trent to lie: “Mixed feelings. It may have saved humanity from nationalism. Today – we have problems, don’t we?”

“Yes. We do. How do you feel about the rebels?”

“The Reb and the Erisian Claw,” said Trent, answering a question she had not asked, “are fools. They’ve chosen an approach to the problem that doesn’t work. We have things that need to be improved, but the way they went about it, it won’t work. It didn’t.”

“How do you feel about the
Unity
?”

His inskin had to answer that one, and it did, manipulated Trent’s larynx, tongue, jaw, and Trent heard Yovia’s voice through a half-klick of radiation shielding. “About the ship itself? I don’t feel much of anything about it. Maybe it’s necessary. I’m not wise enough to know.”

“You have never danced, never considered Playing?”

“Considered it? Everybody considers it.” Sitting in fast time, the Image of self watching the body’s reactions, skirting around the truth – “I imagine I’d be a great Player. But I am extremely good at what I do, and extremely well paid. The incentives are outweighed by the disincentives.”

She nodded. “Have you ever been approached by the Rebs, or by the Claw, or any subversive organization?”

Eugene Yovia was approached, yes indeed. Months and months before the last Chief informed you folks that he was going to retire, we moved in on him. Have I been approached by a subversive organization, no, not the way you mean –

He said simply, “No.”

“Have you ever thought about joining one?”

The information was on file from other interviews with Yovia; Trent said, “When I was a young man, sure,” which was nothing but the truth, for both of them.

“Leaving aside your feelings about the ship: do you feel any conflicts about your work here on the
Unity
?”

Trent smiled at her. “None.” It was not the inskin speaking. “None at all.”

IT TOOK NEARLY another half an hour before Melissa du Bois was satisfied. More than once she approached the subject of his divorce, and then stopped herself; once she said, “No, never mind, none of my concern.” Finally she took the plates back from Trent, and told him she was done.

“So I pass? I’m a good patriot, am I?”

The look she gave him had steel in it. “Do I sense a certain cynicism in that question?”

“Noooo,” said Trent slowly. “Not really.”

“‘Not really.’” She nodded decisively. “I rather like you, Gene. You’re a good computerist, I’m sure. You seem a decent fellow. But a good patriot?” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t go that far. Not by my standards. A good patriot would never have left his job here, not even to get married and raise children. A good patriot would be oriented less toward his job, and more toward what his job here meant to the Unification.”

“I see.”

She stood, and Trent stood with her. “I’m fairly new here myself; I just took over from the previous Chief two days ago; so you and I will be starting out here together, come Monday morning.” She held a hand out, and Trent took it. Her handshake was pure business. “I’m looking forward to working with you, Gene. Chief Yovia.”

“Chief du Bois – Melissa – I’m looking forward to working here.”

She let go of his hand, and hesitated. “You know – if you don’t mind my saying, your file says you had biosculpture – you are a very
interesting
looking man.”

“Me and Elvis,” sneered Trent. It was a good sneer too, the King would have been proud, except he’d been dead for over a hundred years.

Melissa du Bois looked at him, at the sneer. “Right,” she said, with the faintest possible touch of uncertainty. “You and Elvis.” Clearly she had no idea who “Elvis” was. “Chief?”

Trent paused in the doorway. “Yes?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Is it possible
...
you seem familiar. Have we met before somewhere?”

Trent felt as though someone had dipped his skull in liquid hydrogen. Wild goose bumps prickled the back of his neck. He gazed at her with as complete a lack of expression as he could manage. “No. I am sure I would remember.”

“Yes. Of course. Well ...” Melissa du Bois stared at Trent, visibly struggling with it, and then said, “Doubtless I’ll see you again in the next few weeks.”

Not if I see you first,
thought Trent. “No doubt.”

IT WASN’T UNTIL after he’d left that it came to Trent what she’d meant by the questions, wondering if they’d met: she had no idea who he looked like.

Had she really never seen an Adam Selstrom sensable?