Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN R D—And a Split Decision

I notified Bogen that I had initiated the contact and could only wait for results. It would be a nervous time, I knew. The only bright spot was that Dylan was so much fresher, so much more alive, her old self again in spades. If it hadn’t been for the noose, those next three days would have been among the happiest and most satisfying of all my time on Cerberus.

At the end of the third day, though, I received a call from someone I didn’t know and from a place I couldn’t guess. I knew Bogen had the phone bugged and traces all over the place, but somehow I doubted his ability to do much about this.

There was no visual, only audio. “Qwin Zhang?”

“Yes?”

“Your proposal has merit, but nothing can be done without a physical sample.”

I held my breath. “How much of a sample?”

“About fifty cubic centimeters of brain tissue and another fifty of other random tissue should suffice. Is this possible?”

“I’ll see,” I told whoever or whatever it was. “How do I let you know?”

“We’ll be in touch.” The line was dead.

Dylan came in. “Who was that?”

“You know who,” I responded. “Time to call Bogen from the security shack.”

Bogen insisted on talking to me directly, so I got on the line.

“They contacted me. They need two tissue samples.”

He nodded. “Figures. We anticipated that. Just out of curiosity, though—how did they do it? You haven’t been out all day and you haven’t received any phone calls or messages.”

“They called. On my phone. Surely you tapped it.”

He looked more than a little nervous. “We sure did. And your quarters, too. I’ll check it out, but nobody called me from the monitors like they were supposed to. I don’t like this at all. They shouldn’t have power like that—not here.”

He switched off, but I understood his concern and waited at the shack for a reply, which wasn’t long in coming.

“Did you check the phone?” I asked him.

He nodded worriedly. “Sure did. No calls of any kind. And we ran the recording of our bugs in your place, too. You wouldn’t be kidding us, would you, Zhang? There’s nothing on that tape but normal noises. No conversation on the phone at all, although we do hear your wife come in and ask ‘Who was that?’ and you reply.”

I whistled. I was impressed, and so was Bogen—although not in the same way. “So what’s the answer?”

“You’ll get your tissue.”

“Shall I pick up or do you deliver?”

“Very funny. No, it should be picked up, if only because I want to see how they collect the sample.”

“I’ll get a boat started up,” I told him.

“No. As a precautionary measure, Chairman Laroo has ordered that you never set foot on the island again, and security will fry you if you try.”

“That wasn’t part of the deal!” I protested, feeling a sinking sensation in my stomach. If Security went along, I had to be there.

“We changed it. You’re are an admitted assassin, Zhang, and we don’t minimize your skills. We can’t afford to take the chance.”

“But I’ll have to come in if they give me anything.”

“Nope. If anything physical is required that we can’t handle, you will send your wife. Between the psych implant against killing and the fact that she’s native here, we feel more secure.”

“I don’t want to involve her! The deal’s off!”

He laughed evilly. “Well, that’s okay, but if it ends here, so do the both of you. You knew that when you started this. Our terms, or forget it. Now, send her over in two hours exactly.’’

“All right,” I sighed. “We’ll play it your way—for now. But wait a minute. She’s of the motherhood. She’s prohibited from ocean travel.”

“By whom? By authority of Chairman Laroo she’s been waived of that requirement. Anybody gives you trouble on it, tell ’em to call me.”

“But I thought she had a psych implant against it.”

“We had Dumonia remove it. It wasn’t much anyway. Go ahead. We’re wasting time.”

I switched off, feeling less than confident now. This change in the ground rules was hairy indeed.

Dylan, however, didn’t mind at all. “We’re in this together, remember.”

I nodded, and could do nothing but see her down to the docks and off. She was excited to be on a boat again, for she really did love the sea. She was gone about five hours, a time in which I became increasingly worried and nervous. When she finally returned I was still apprehensive.

“They didn’t do anything to you, did they?” I asked her.

She laughed. “No. Mostly I took the wheel and had a little fun. That’s a gorgeous place inside there, though. They only let me on the main floor, handed me the sealed, refrigerated case here, and marched me back.”

I looked at her nervously. Would I know if they’d replaced her with a robot? Would I know if they’d pulled a fast one with the psych machines?

Well, I’d know the robot situation if we swapped during the night, and I felt reasonably confident that at this stage they wouldn’t risk it. For the other, I’d need Dumonia—if I could trust him.

Suddenly I stopped short. “That son of a bitchl” I muttered. “That crafty old anarchist!”

She looked at me, puzzled. “What? Who?”

“Dumonia. He’s ahead of both Laroo and me. He knew this all along, set me up for it.”

Points of similarity indeed. He knew damned well what he was saying when he told me that.

We just brought the case into the apartment and then waited for more instructions, which didn’t come. Finally, we got tired of waiting, caught up on some routine paperwork, and went to bed.

In the morning the case was gone. I reported the theft to Bogen, who sounded none too thrilled about it all. He’d had lenses, agents, and a full security system trained on the place, and nobody had seen a thing. Worse, at least five separate tracing devices had been placed inside the case, all of which had functioned perfectly, apparently. At least they still were—they said the case was still in the apartment. The trouble was, no amount of detection and searching could reveal it, although they finally came up with a tiny recording module, something like a tiny battery, wedged inside the floorboards.

Sure enough, it nicely broadcast exactly all five tracing signals.

Bogen was both furious and unnerved by it all. I knetw damned well that a far different account would reach Laroo, one in which Bogen didn’t look so bad.

I had to admire the Confederacy’s ftther agent in this area, who seemed head and shoulders above even me, at least in audacity. In fact I was so impressed that when he called and made an appointment for us to go and see him, I could hardly wait.

The samples had been gone nine days, and during that time little of interest happened in any direction, except Bogen was becoming more impatient and threatening toward us. Both Dylan and I started becoming a little fidgety.

Finally, though, the call I’d been expecting came, and off we went, almost certainly unsuspected by Bogen and his other people.

“I always wondered how and why you thought you could talk so freely in here,” I told the agent.

Dr. Dumonia smiled and nodded to the two of us. “Oh, it’s a couple of modern wonders, really. The fact is, the place is bugged and Bogen’s people are right now hearing us talk. They’re just hearing something quite different. It’s so pleasant to work in a technological environment that’s a few decades behind what’s current.”

“You and your anti-Confederacy anarchism. I knew there was something funny about you, almost from the first, but I missed which side you were on.”

“I’m on my side, of course. So are you two—on your side, that is. I’m not a fraud, and everything I told you is true. I detest the Confederacy. If I could be sure these aliens of ours wouldn’t eliminate our whole race I’d cheer ’em on as they attacked. There would be no better shot in the arm for humanity than a good old war, as long as the race survived to build and grow. I’m a psychiatrist and I like my creature comforts and my profession, too.”

“Then why—why work for them?” Dylan asked, puzzled.

“Oh, I don’t work for them, exactly. On Cerberus, I just about am the Confederacy, which I consider a delicious joke on all of them. It has to do with the way I look at history and society. Qwin here might tell you more about that. I don’t really feel like philosophical chats right now, there’s too much to be done. Let’s just say that I use them, and they use me, and we both profit. I also use Laroo and his people and system. All to the end of living exactly the life I want, doing what I most love to do.”

“I don’t understand why they sent me at all,” I told him honestly, and with the respect one professional offers another. “You could have done everything easier and with less risk yourself.”

“Well, that’s not true. If I got anywhere near Laroo, or particularly his island and his projects, I’d put myself in severe and immediate danger, and I’m just not willing to do that. As I said, my activities are designed to keep me in my own personal nirvana as long as possible. Indefinitely, I hope. So I’m not the active sort. Laroo wouldn’t trust me near him or his babies simply because I know too much about him, know him too well.” He grinned. “He thinks I had a partial mindwipe about that, which is the only reason I’m still here. But on a secondary level, I’m too close to the problem. I’ve been here too many years, know too many people. My objectivity is askew. A fresh analytical mind was needed to filter the information. Besides, this way it’s your neck, not mine.”

“But you said you didn’t care if the aliens attacked,” Dylan noted, still trying to figure him out. “Then why help against this thing at all?”

He became very serious. “The ultimate threat is those creatures out there. Perfect organisms, superior in every way. Homo excelsus. And all totally programmable. Totally. Everybody’s programmed, of course, by what we call heredity and environment. But we have the ability to transcend much of that, to become what the programming never intended. That’s why no totalitarian society, no matter how absolute, in the whole history of mankind has been able to eradicate the individual human spirit These—robots—are the first true threat to that. They can’t outgrow their programming. Speaking euphemistically, I have to say they scare the shit out of me.”

We both nodded. “So where do we go from here?” I asked him.

“All right. We’ve analyzed and dissected and played with all those samples. I’ll tell you the truth: Dr. Merton is correct. We have no idea how to duplicate that stuft, how to make it ourselves. It’s beyond us. Which is all to the good, I think. I wouldn’t want [ulwin] that business, either, although Lord knows they’ll try. That’s the bad news, sort of. The good news is that though we can’t make it or quite understand how it works, we know how to work it, if that makes sense.”

“Not a bit,” I told him.

“Well, I don’t know how to make a pencil, but I know how to use one. Even if I’d never seen one before, I could still figure it out. The operation, that is. We have an infinitely Complex variation of that same idea here. Now, if the basic obedience programming were in the very chemical makeup of the thing, we’d be up the creek. No way to deprogram without dissolving it. Fortunately, it’s not. There is a programming device inside each quasicell, and it’s quite complex and we don’t understand it at all. However, knowing that, we can add programming information and be sure that the information is transmitted and stored via the Wardens the same way as we swap here. There’s an interesting implication that the thing is designed with Wardens in mind and might not work without them, which may mean that these things were developed by our aliens specifically for us here and now on Cerberus, rather than just being a variation of something common in their culture.”

“So? What does this all mean?” Dylan asked impatiently.

“Well, half the samples went elsewhere and the other half stayed here, where my lab handled the practical stuff. Wardens were essential, which we have in abundance here. It became a fascinating exercise, really. Using an organism we can’t understand at all to influence another we can’t build or duplicate. But with the aid of computers Outside and my lab here, we finally managed to get a readout. The chemical coding language is quite complex and not at all human, and that’s what took the time, but we finally got it. Fortunately, the basic obedience stuff is duplicated in every cell. In fact all the cells, whether brain or tissue, are pretty much the same and can simply become what they need to be. The programming is rather basic, as it would have to be, since it’s serving as a single base for all the different robot agents being sent back to all sorts of different worlds, jobs, and conditions.”

“Then you can get rid of it?” I pressed.

“Nope. But we can do the same thing I suggested as regards psych implants. The aliens have made it impossible to separate the basics without lousing up the cell and triggering this meltdown process. But the cells are programmable, remember. They have to be. So we can add programming to override these initial steps. Cancel it out completely, leaving an unencumbered mind in a super body.”

“Surely Merton would have thought of that,” I pointed out.

“Undoubtedly she has,” he agreed, “but she hasn’t the computer capacity and resources to get a complete readout of the codes, let alone actually break the language used. That’s what stuck them. You wouldn’t believe how much time had to be devoted to this. Laroo was right: not every string he could pull could commandeer that much computer time for that long without drawing Security like a magnet.”

“So we can give him what he wants,” Dylan sighed. “How does that gain us anything?”

“Well, for starters, we’ll need to give you some absolute protection. That can be accomplished simply by making it a complex psych implant using the Security system. Laroo can’t break it. Nobody here could break it—or if they can, we’ve already lost the war. In other words, you can’t give the information to ’em unless you want to, which is the only time you’ll know it—and you’ll just know what to do, not what you’re doing. And it’ll have to be done one at a time, one robot at a crack.”

“But he’s only allowing me on the island,” Dylan pointed out. “Doesn’t that mean he’ll just make a robot out of me and have it any time he wants it, block or no block?”

“No, and there’s an easy way to handle that. Very easy. We add another block, similar to the dozens Security’s placed in Qwin’s brain over the years, as insurance. There is no human who cannot be tortured, or chemically or mechanically made to spill his or her guts. None. So we use the same methods to make sure that such operations will be fruitless. It’s what stopped Laroo from going the robot route with Qwin here right from the start. I’m sure he has some implants like this himself. It’s really simple, and one they’ll understand and accept right off because they all know the type. Basically, it’s a psych command that erases other information if any sort of coercion is used, and can even be triggered voluntarily if need be. He won’t dare try anything with you. He’ll need you totally—and he can use his own psych staff to verify the existence of the erase commands. It protects you—and it protects us.”

Dylan looked puzzled by that, but I understood him exactly. “He’s telling us that not only can it be triggered voluntarily or involuntarily to erase, but it can be triggered externally, as by a Confederacy agent. Similar to what the good doctor here must have used on Laroo to ensure his own well-being.”

Dumonia smiled and nodded.

“But you’re still going to give him the answer he wants!” Dylan protested.

Dumonia kept smiling.

“Think about it, Dylan,” I urged her. “You’ve seen the way we think long enough. Remember the cells are programmable.”

She considered what he said, and I was beginning to think we were going to have to spell it out. Then suddenly I saw her mouth shape into an oval. “Oooh… Oh, my!”

“My only regret is that Dylan’s going to have to do this all alone,” I grumbled. “I hate missing out on the climax of the big scam. After all, it was my idea.”

“There’s a way, you know,” Dumonia reminded us softly, but I could see that eager gleam in his eyes. “I set things up in case you wanted to do so.”

Dylan looked at him, then me. “I—I’m not sure I want to,” she told us. “I’m a little scared of it.”

“I told you there was a big risk,” the psych admitted. “And I understand the cautions. First, you could split. No big deal there, as long as you wanted to stay together forever, and that’s a long time. You could merge into one new personality. Or you could find out that deep down neither of you really like the other. That’s particularly the case in Qwin’s mind, since he was a very unpleasant person until he came here and found his humanity.”

She nodded. “I know. That scares me the most, I guess. I love him the way he is now, but I don’t think I would like the old Qwin very much at all. He sounds too much like Wagant Laroo.”

I looked at her strangely. Her, too?

“There’s another possibility,” he suggested, sounding slightly disappointed at her reluctance. I think he really wanted to pull off that merger or whatever, strictly for professional curiosity or maybe just for fun. “I could manipulate the psych plants so that it would require both of you to complete the programming operation.”

I looked up at him accusingly. “That’s what they recommended right along, wasn’t it? To make sure that neither of us could be held hostage to the other’s cooperation.”

He coughed apologetically, then shrugged and gave a wan smile. “So would I be a good doctor if I didn’t point out all the interesting alternatives?”

“Then we go together, whether they like it or not,” Dylan said firmly. “That’s good.” She hesitated. “But won’t this operation point an arrow straight back to you? Won’t they know who had to be the one to give us the information?”

“If it works, it’s academic,” he told us. “If it doesn’t, or if anything goes wrong, well, I have contingency plans. Don’t worry about me. I cover myself pretty well.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said dryly. “Well, let’s get on with it”

As I predicted, Bogen didn’t like the revised plan, not one bit.

“What could I do?” I asked him innocently. “Here we were going down the elevator from Dumonia’s office and suddenly, bang, out go the lights for both of us. We wake up half an hour later halfway across town, with the briefing identically planted in our minds and the blocks in place. You know your men lost us.”

He didn’t much like that, either, but could only glower.

“Well, you got it, though?”

“We got it.” I had already explained the terms and conditions, spelling out the protections in pretty absolute terms.

“The boss isn’t gonna like this,” he growled. “Too much to go wrong. Tell you what, though. Both of you come out to the island this afternoon. Bring your things—it might be a long stay.”

I nodded and switched off.

“You really think Laroo will buy it?” Dylan asked worriedly. “After all, he’s putting himself in the Confederacy’s hands.”

“He’ll buy it,” I assured her, “although cautiously. He doesn’t have any choice, as you know who assured us.”

“Imagine. The most powerful man on Cerberus, one of the four most powerful in the Diamond, and maybe one of the most powerful men around today, period—and he’s scared to death.”

“Oro/ it,” I responded. “Let’s go pack.”