Authors: James Burkard
“And that’s what happened when you turned your back on the resurrection trail…and ate a universe,” Jericho said despite himself.
Harry nodded. “And somewhere in that original universe that still exists, there’s a Doctor Jericho mourning the real death of Harry Neuman.”
“In that case, the universe you destroyed still exists,” Jericho suggested, trying to soothe his own conscience as much as Harry’s. “In a sense you haven’t killed it at all.”
Harry nodded. “That’s also true,” he said. “A multiverse of useful paradoxes to save our souls,” he added bitterly.
From the far side of the lagoon that had once been the Dodger
Stadium outfield, Harry heard distant shouts and laughter. He looked up and saw a group of mermaids and their children playing some sort of game. They began swimming in a circle and singing and even though the tune was slurred by distance, childhood memory supplied the words. “London Bridge is falling down / falling down, falling down / London Bridge is falling down / my fair lady…”
“London Bridge is falling down,” he murmured as he straightened up. Slowly, he turned, walked back, and looked down at Jericho. His face was composed. The fey light was gone from his eyes, the halo, nothing but morning sunshine. He let a bleak, sardonic smile play across his lips. “You see, I know all the excuses, Doc, but they don’t change what I did or what I’m carrying inside me.”
“Gods and demons,” Jericho said and looked away.
“My own private army from hell,” Harry said.
“It doesn’t have to be that bad,” Jericho said, grabbing at any straw to assuage his own burden of guilt. “If we could just…”
Harry stopped him. “It’s okay Doc,” he said. “No need for platitudes. You see, one of the things I’ve realized is that I can shut this shit off like I can shut off pain or shut off my life. Shutting off bad memories is kid’s play by comparison. I just stick them back in a drawer in my mind, close it, and throw away the key. Just watch,” he grinned his old crooked, cocky, Harry Neuman blockbuster grin, and Jericho almost believed him.
Harry spread his arms and twirled around as if he was showing off a new set of clothes. “See, I’m all back together again, no more cracks in the tea pot,” he laughed and Jericho was reminded of what a great actor he had been.
Harry stopped suddenly as a distant flash of reflected sunlight caught his eye. He squinted, trying to make out what it was. A moment later, it hurdled the far stadium wall and dove straight at them.
49
Eidolons and Kill-ratios
At the last instant, the camouflage-colored grav-car swerved sharply, skidding sideways with its rocker panels digging deep into the water. The passenger side lifted free of the lagoon as the car tipped dangerously on its side. For a second Harry was afraid it would start tumbling. The grav-coils screamed as they fought to compensate and slowly pulled the car back down.
A wave, plowed up by the car, washed over the low concrete wall. Doc grinned and put his feet up on his chair to keep them dry. Warm water washed across Harry’s bare feet as he splashed over to the rusted iron railing.
“Marta!” he yelled, not sure whether he was relieved that she was okay or angry with her for scaring him with this circus stunt. Then he noticed the two women sitting in the front seat of his convertible. The driver leaned out and brushed a strand of brassy blonde hair out of her face. “Hi, big boy,” she winked. “How’s it hanging?”
“Mae!” Harry shouted in surprise as he recognized the eidolon from Chueh’s. “What’re you doing here?”
“Just doing my civic duty, honey,” she said as she fluffed her hair with her fingers. “Mister Chueh needs all the soldiers he can get. What do you think of my uniform?” she asked, suggestively smoothing the military style jumpsuit down over her ample bosom.
Unlike Jericho’s jumpsuit, Mae’s had been set to a hot-pink, paisley, camouflage pattern that the military had never programmed. Harry gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Mae, you give a whole new meaning to the war of the sexes.”
He noticed the other passenger who was sitting up very straight, watching him out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t
have been more than sixteen and looked like a young Audrey Hepburn with her clean elfin features, dark hair cut in a short pageboy, and large doe-like eyes. When she realized that Harry was watching her, she blushed and looked down at her hands folded primly in her lap.
Mae looked from one to the other. “I think you two have met before,” she said, with the look of a magician about to pull a rhinoceros out of a top hat. “Harry Neuman,” she paused and made a sweeping, theatrical gesture with her arm. “Meet Marta, your “Lady of the Road”!
“Marta, say “Hi” to Harry.”
Harry’s jaw dropped in astonishment.
Marta looked up at him and smiled shyly. “Hi, Harry. I hope you’re okay. I missed you.”
“Marta, is that really you?” Harry asked in astonishment.
Mae gave a deep, throaty laugh. “Honey, “really” is getting really kind of relative these days, don’t you think.”
“If you don’t like it, Harry, I can change back,” Marta suggested. She bit her lower lip and looked back down at her hands, folded into a tight ball in her lap.
“How…? Back to what…?” Harry felt his brains turning to mush. For a moment, he wasn’t even sure who he was.
Mae rolled her china blue eyes heaven-wards and shook her head in exasperation. “You’re not very bright, are you?” she said to Harry. Then she patted his hand in commiseration. “It’s okay, sweetie. I like that in a man. Now, tell her how good she looks.”
Harry pulled himself together and looked over at Marta, sitting stiff and straight, her face a pale profile of uncertainty and despair. “But you’re…you’re beautiful!” he said astonished by his own awkward discovery. “You’re just like I always imagined you would be, only better.”
Mae beamed at him and nodded encouragement.
Marta looked up doubtfully. “You’re just saying that because Mae made you.”
Harry straightened up. “Cross my heart,” he said making the sign across his chest. “Marta, I’ve never lied to you. You’re beautiful. You’re everything I imagined you to be. It was just that you took me by surprise, kind of blew my mind, and it took a minute to put it back together again. Did Mae help you?”
Marta looked up and smiled. “Mae’s my friend. Mr. Chueh introduced us. When I woke up and you weren’t there, I got scared and Mr. Chueh asked Mae to help. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Then I discovered that she was an eidolon. Isn’t that wonderful!” she said, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I didn’t know we could do this, be this. I always wondered what it was like to be human, you know, like Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy. I guess this is the closest I can get.”
Mae was right, real was getting really relative, Harry thought as he watched her. He could hardly believe how well her expressions and gestures seemed to mirror real feelings. He thought of the enormous computer power, the complex software feedbacks needed to accomplish this. On the other hand, Marta had been intensively studying humans all her short “life”. She had probably seen every film that had ever survived and watched all the holo channels twenty-four hours a day. On top of that, she was a quick study, one of the most advanced, sophisticated AI’s ever produced…and with no slaver circuits to hamper her development.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Marta continued. “I always loved having the car for my body, flying through the air, going as fast as I could, with all my sensors open…”
“And don’t forget all that sexy weaponry behind your bumpers, honey,” Mae whispered in a theatrical aside.
Marta looked at her and smiled uncertainly. “Yeah, that too, I guess,” she said.
Mae gave a loud, brassy laugh and patted Marta’s cheek affectionately. “Honey, you’ll do just fine,” she said.
Marta let a slight blush of confused embarrassment color her
cheeks. She cast a quick sideways glance at Harry and hurriedly continued, “Anyway, now I can be both, I’m in constant contact with my mainframe in the car and can move back and forth between it and my eidolon anytime I want. I can even be in both at the same time. But best of all, Mr. Chueh lets Mae and me go out on patrol with his eidolon squad.”
“Eidolon squad?” Harry said and shot a questioning glance at Jericho. The old man kept his face expressionless.
“Yes, and Mr. Chueh says that Mae and I are the best scouts in the Sinks.” Marta bubbled proudly, her previous embarrassment all but forgotten. “Isn’t that great?”
“Yeah, that’s just great,” Harry said. His smile was getting a bit ragged around the edges.
“Mr. Chueh says we’re the best scouts because no one ever sees us,” she said.
Harry nodded with relief. “That’s good,” he said.
“And we have the highest kill ratio of any squad in the Sinks,” she added.
Harry looked at Jericho. “Highest kill ratio?” he said. His voice had a dangerous edge. This time the old man refused to meet his gaze.
“Did I say something wrong?” Marta asked, somehow sensing the sudden tension, perhaps reading the edge to his voice.
Harry worked up a convincing facsimile of a smile. “No, not at all,” he said. “It’s just that I realize I haven’t eaten for three days and I’m starving.” The funny thing was that as soon as he said it, he realized he really was starving. “Do you think you and Mae could maybe scout up some food while Doc fills me in on what’s been happening?” He gave Jericho a hard stare.
Mae looked from one to the other, sizing up the situation, her processors working overtime. She nodded imperceptibly, put on a happy-go-lucky grin and gave them both a snappy military salute. Then she turned to Marta. “What do you say, kid, ready
to do some scouting?”
Marta beamed with hero worship. “Aye, aye, sir,” she said with a snappy salute of her own, and they both laughed loudly as the grav-car spun around on its rear bumper and shot off across the lagoon leaving a rooster tail of spray in its wake and Janis Joplin batting out a raunchy rendition of “I Need a Man to Love”.
Harry turned to Jericho. “Highest kill ratio?” he said.
‘It was Chueh’s call,” Jericho said keeping his voice neutral.
“And who are you, Pontius Pilate, just washing your hands of the whole thing? Highest kill ratio, for Christ’s sake!” he turned his back on Jericho and looked out over the lagoon at the receding grav-car.
“Chueh and I talked it over,” Jericho said. “I didn’t see he had any choice.”
“AI’s killing humans.” Harry shook his head in disbelief. “Are you two crazy? If you scrap the failsafes that prevent AI’s from killing or injuring human beings, you’re opening the biggest can of worms since the Tribulations. If the Emperor finds out, he’ll brain burn you both.”
“The Emperor already knows. He gave his approval.”
“He what!” Harry shouted in disbelief.
“You heard me and don’t be such a hypocrite. You had Marta armed to the teeth and customized with the most advanced, and need I point out, illegal hunter killer military software that Chueh could get his hands on.”
“But there’s no way she could use her weaponry against a human being. She could lay out strategy, track down, and even target, but only I could pull the trigger.” Harry stopped as a nasty thought occurred to him. He looked at Jericho. “Marta’s failsafes are still intact, aren’t they?”
“She was being sent into a combat situation without you or any other human to guide her. She’s too valuable to risk losing,” Jericho prevaricated.
“What am I missing here?” Harry asked. “Has the whole
world gone nuts in the last four days? Have you forgotten the hunter-killer war-bots the old U.S. government turned loose on its own people at the end of the Plague Wars? Those things have become part of modern demonology. Some of them are still hiding out in the Quarantine, powered down, just waiting for someone to get close enough to kill. Do you want to start that all over again?”
Jericho suddenly looked very old and worn. “Don’t you think I know all this,” he said as he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He leaned back wearily and the webbing in the old aluminum chair creaked under his weight. “But to answer your question, yes, the world has gone nuts in the last four days.”
50
The Enemy at the Gates
Jericho raised his hand and began ticking off disasters on his fingers. “The day after Chueh started fighting in the Sinks, three fleet admirals and a number of junior officers in the Imperial Navy rebelled against the Emperor. They took over a Rapacious-class battlewagon and a couple of heavy cruisers and attacked the Imperial Palace and Senate. Before they were brought down, they slagged both buildings, killed most of the senators, and wiped out the imperial court.”
“Holy shit!” Harry said.
“Holy shit indeed,” Jericho nodded agreement. “Luckily, the Emperor survived. At the time, he and his most trusted advisors were meeting secretly with the Tong Godfathers. The war in the Sinks was going badly. Chueh and the Tongs were in retreat and the Seraphim were threatening to march on New Hollywood when the two admirals attacked the Imperial Palace and Senate.
“We’re certain now that they were agents of the black wolves, probably possessed by them. Black ice wasn’t unknown in the fleet. The higher ranks moved in circles where it was most prevalent, and junior officers tend to ape the behavior of their superiors.
“The attack was a sign for other black wolf agents to run amok, and the trauma wards beneath Eternal life were emptied to create as much chaos and confusion in the city as possible. Within hours, there was open rioting and looting in the streets and other pockets of the imperial fleet were in open rebellion. An imperial council of “leading citizens” announced that the Emperor was dead and proclaimed his degenerate cousin Emperor instead.
“As soon as it became clear that the Emperor wasn’t dead, the riots and looting were soon put down and the rebellion in the
fleet crushed. The Emperor’s cousin and his council fled into the Sinks or headed south into the Burn. Most were captured or killed. The ones who were taken alive all showed the signs of black ice possession.
“I think you and Chueh forced the wolves and their allies to attack before they were ready. Given another month for black ice rot to seep into the ranks of the fleet and undermine society, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. As it is, we’ve probably lost the eastern provinces from the Appalachian coast to the Missip Sea.”
Harry shook his head in disbelief. “That’s impossible!”
“Impossible or not, the Seraphim Caliphate is back with a vengeance. In fact, it never really left. After New Hollywood defeated their army at Winding Rock in the Arizona gap, most of its leaders fled either north into the Quarantine or back east into the heart of the old Caliphate.
“When New Hollywood annexed the eastern provinces, most of the Seraphim true-believers that were left went underground, biding their time and stirring up as much trouble as possible. New Hollywood never wanted the empire it inherited from the Caliphate, and its relations with the eastern provinces have always been ambivalent at best. The question was, were we an occupying force in enemy territory, or were we all free citizens of the Empire? The fact that three quarters of the imperial fleet was still stationed east of the Missip Sea seemed to argue for the first.”
Jericho gave a deep sigh of resignation. “Maybe I should correct that,” he said. “Three quarters of the imperial fleet were stationed there until three days ago, when the Seraphim Caliphate rebelled, and a mounted army of Norma-genes and wolf warships swept down from the Northern Quarantine. Within twenty-four hours, the living gods brought down most of the imperial fleet east of the Missip with the same weapons they used against the Tongs in the Sinks.
“A second Seraphim Caliphate was established and declared a
new Jihad under the crossed blades and wolf’s head triangle of the living gods. The remnants of the imperial forces that got away are making a stand on this side of the Missip Sea.”
“Now wait a second, Doc,” Harry said. “You’ve got Marta and the other eidolons, completely dependent on their mini-grav-units, fighting in the Sinks against weapons that can shut down the grav-units of an imperial battle cruiser. They haven’t got a chance!”
Jericho gave Harry a tired smile. “It’s one of the few rays of sunshine in an otherwise abysmal couple of days,” he said. “For some reason, whatever was taking out our battle fleet wasn’t touching the mini-units in the eidolons. As soon as we realized this, it didn’t take long to work out that the wolves were interfering with the frequencies of the phizo-electric, crystal lattice that’s locked inside the spinning Danzig coil.
“You see, all grav-units, except those inside of the eidolons, operate within the same optimal frequency range. When I built the first eidolons, I discovered that with the grav-units and quantum computers packed so tightly together I was getting graviton wormhole feedback distorting the AI personality matrix. I solved that problem by randomly shifting frequencies in the grav-units every millisecond. As an unexpected side effect, it made it impossible for the wolves to lock on and block these frequencies in the eidolons. All we had to do to stop them taking down our fleet was install a random frequency generator program in all our ships.”
“And they haven’t found a way around that?” Harry asked.
Jericho shook his head. “I don’t think they’re very smart. They’ve just been around a long time and learned a few tricks.”
“It sounds like that particular trick nearly finished us off,” Harry said.
“It brought the mighty Hollywood Empire to its knees in less than three days,” Jericho agreed. If it hadn’t been for all the citizen militias that came to the rescue in their armored grav-cars,
banshees, and Dumbos, riding kamikaze suicide missions against the ranked Seraphim and the crystal ships of the wolves, we could never have held the gates of New Hollywood. Even so, the city took heavy bombardment and would have fallen in another day or two if the wolves hadn’t retreated into the Nevada Quarantine.”
“Retreated? Why?” Harry asked nonplussed. “It sounds like they were winning!”
“They were,” Jericho nodded. “We couldn’t understand it either until Chueh brought in a couple of wolf-possessed prisoners who were screaming about the King of the Dead destroying their battle fleet down in the Sinks.” Jericho cocked a meaningful eyebrow at Harry. “Sound familiar?” he asked.
“Sounds like the cat’s out of the bag,” Harry said, his expression unreadable.
“That it is,” Jericho said. “And the wolves are scared spitless. Their seers have been warning them for months about you, telling the High Priests that the invasion would fail and the Anubis race would be wiped out if they didn’t find and kill you first. And that’s just what they were trying to do down in the Sinks when they ran into Chueh and his Tongs and it escalated into a full blown war.
“The wolves weren’t ready, but now that the genie was out of the bottle, they figured they could still kill you and win the war at the same time. They didn’t know what they were dealing with,” he said, glancing at Harry. “Nobody did.”
Harry shifted uncomfortably but said nothing.
Jericho pushed his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Even after you wiped out the Seraphim that ambushed you and the mermen the first time, the wolves believed they could still find and kill you. They were after all invincible, they had the blessing of their mad god, and they had never been defeated. This time they would make sure you didn’t get away and they sent a fleet of crystal ships after you.”
“Wait a second, Doc,” Harry interrupted. “How did they find me? You said the monitor on my ka flat-lined and didn’t come back.”
“That’s true.”
“So, they couldn’t track me with that,” Harry said.
Jericho shook his head. “When you died…and did whatever you did, the monitor lost you and never got you back. We’re certain of that.”
“But still they found me twice,” Harry said.
“Yeah, and we’re not sure how they did it,” Jericho said. “It’s possible that they may have planted a tracker on your body, maybe under your skin, while you were fighting with them in that room in the Sinks.”
Not fighting, Harry thought and remembered falling into the arms of the wolf thing wearing Susan’s body and the long drawn-out kiss that turned into an assault on his ka. Had there been a telltale pinprick when a tracker was planted under his skin? At that point he wasn’t noticing much of anything except the collapse of passion into blind terror as Susan’s tongue drove into the back of his throat. They could have planted a dozen trackers and he wouldn’t have noticed.
Harry looked questioningly at Jericho. “But why bother?” he said. “They already had me where they wanted me.”
Jericho shook his head. “Harry, I don’t know. All I can say is you were a wildcard. They weren’t sure what they were dealing with. Maybe it was just backup insurance.” Jericho shrugged. “I really don’t know.
“What I do know is that after the second attack on you, the mermen stripped away all your clothes. They’d been reluctant to do it before because a lot of it was char burned and melted into your flesh. When they first found you and tried to peel off the night goggles that were half melted into your skin, they almost pulled away half your face and had to stop, but they were desperate now. They couldn’t risk bringing you back here and
letting the wolves and Seraphim discover their home base.
“This time, when they began to peel off your clothes, they discovered that your burnt skin was dry and loose and slipped off your body like an old snake skin. Underneath they found fresh new skin as soft and unblemished as a baby’s. After that, they were never attacked again.”
Jericho shrugged. “But of course, by then the wolves had run for the Nevada Quarantine, leaving their Seraphim allies to fight on alone, and they weren’t giving up. As far as the Seraphim were concerned, the Empire was on its knees and they still had a chance to bring it down if only…”
Harry suddenly got to his feet and shaded his eyes with his hand, staring into the distance. “I think our scouts are coming back,” he said, moments before a grav-car jumped the outfield wall and hurtled across the lagoon, accelerating all the way. He shook his head in disbelief. “AI hot-rodder’s! What is the world coming to?”
Jericho pushed his glasses down from his forehead and stiffened into immobility as his gaze fastened on something only he could see, playing out on the lenses. “I think we’ve got trouble,” he muttered.