Irontown Blues

Nineteen

“…Gretel,” she said.

“Gretel,” I said. I was about to say more — though I have no idea what that might have been — when she looked over my shoulder. Tom and the bruiser turned. I twisted out of their grips, and it could have been the perfect opportunity to escape, to run like hell… but what I saw was Sherlock, looking more like his wolf ancestors than I had ever seen him. He was followed by a pack of a couple dozen dogs.

Some of them were big dogs: a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, a Doberman. All had murder in their eyes.

“Sherlock!” I shouted. “Sherlock, stay!”

I had no idea if he would stop, but I knew that if these dogs actually attacked, no good could come of it. It would likely end up with one or both of us dead.

Besides, I really wanted to know why my old friend Gretel had kept me in a prison cell for so many weeks.

Sherlock faltered, and I thought the dogs behind him slowed a little, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Sherlock! Sherlock! It’s okay. I’m okay. They’re going to let me go. Don’t come any closer. Stay, Sherlock! Sit and stay!”

He stopped and shook his head, as if dazed. A Dalmatian, a beautiful dog, white with a thousand black spots, pulled up beside him. The rest of the pack circled nervously.

“Come here, Sherlock. I’m okay. Sit, old friend.”

He sat.

I turned to Dick and held out my hands.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll uncuff me. I don’t know how long I can keep him docile.”

“Do as he says,” Gretel said, behind me. I turned to look at her and saw a scary sight. There were at least seven or eight people back there behind her and beside her, and they all had guns that were leveled either at me or at the dogs.

I turned back and Tom opened the cuffs. I went down on one knee. I realized I was crying. I didn’t need to say anything. Sherlock came to me and did something he never did.

He put his paws up on my shoulders and howled. Between howls, he licked my face. Dogs can’t cry, they aren’t equipped for it, but I knew that inside, Sherlock was weeping as much as I was.

“Is everyone okay?” Gretel asked. Between licks of my face, I squirmed around and saw the armed guards putting their weapons away.

“Good. Chris, can you introduce me to the famous Sherlock? We’ve been trying to catch him for weeks, but he’s just too smart for us. His pack as well, who seem to be mostly CECs.”

I was about to tell Sherlock to go over and meet her, but he was already trotting in that direction. He sniffed at the hand she held out to him, and then he howled. It was a different howl than the one when he came to me. It was a howl of triumph. He had found her.

“Mary Smith,” I said.

“In the flesh. Hazel!”

A woman stuck her head out the door of the ice-cream parlor.

“Triple scoops of vanilla for all my canine friends here, if you please. On me.”

The dogs ate ice cream until they were stuffed. Then most of them wandered away, but the Dalmatian stayed beside Sherlock. Gretel turned away from Sherlock and looked at me.

“I guess you will have some questions for me,” she said.

“You might say that. It’s not every day I get shanghaied onto a spaceship that isn’t going anywhere.”

“What is this shanghaied?”

“It’s a nautical word for kidnapping.”

She winced a little but nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what we did.”

“Well, the obvious question is… why? And the second one is what do you intend to do with me?”

“That’s going to take a little while, but…”

Someone had come close to her and was trying to get her attention. She looked annoyed but stopped for a moment to consider something on a clipboard the woman was showing her. She nodded and signed her name, then waved the woman off. I noticed that there was a line of people behind her who all seemed to want her attention. What was going on here?

She stood up. I saw Sherlock and the Dalmatian come on the alert, watching us both closely.

“Everyone,” she announced. “I’m taking an hour off. Go away, all of you. Come back later.” She turned to me. “Come on. Let’s get inside.”

I followed her into the ice-cream parlor. Sherlock and the Dalmatian abandoned their ice-cream dishes and trotted right behind me. There was a woman behind the counter in the shop.

“What can I get you?” she asked. Gretel ordered pistachio almond fudge with chocolate syrup on top. Feeling more than a little disoriented, I said I’d have the same even though it sounded dreadful.

“Okay,” said Gretel. “Why. The short answer is that we did it for your own protection. What are we going to do with you? You may have to go back to your room for a while, but you will be released soon.”

“Cell,” I said.

“Okay. Cell.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

She sighed. Hazel put dishes of ice cream in front of us. Gretel took a small spoonful of hers, and I decided to sample mine. I was surprised at how good it tasted.

“It’s kind of hard to know where to begin.”

“I’ve always thought the beginning is a good place.”

“Yeah, but what’s the beginning?”

“How about why did you hire me and Sherlock to find the guy who gave you a resistant form of leprosy against your will. Oh, excuse me, your hands seem to be okay.”

She waved her hands in the air. “Yeah. That was just a temporary biohack. I cleared it up soon after I left your office. But that’s not the beginning. That’s closer to the end… though the real end is still a little way off… if all goes well.”

She had sort of trailed off and gotten a faraway look in her eyes. For a moment, she looked much, much older than I knew her age to be.

“No, Chris, to get to the beginning, we have to go back a lot further than that. We have to go back to the day that you and I met.

“We have to go back to the Big Glitch.”

You’ve heard of hearts skipping a beat? Mine ran a hundred-meter dash and set a new Olympic record for the high jump.

“The thing is,” she said, “…it’s not over.”

“Since I saw you last,” she said, “I’ve been on an emergency trip to Mars. I just got back. Otherwise, I would have looked at your case sooner.”

“My case. What the hell does that mean?”

“I intended that you would track me down, then come with me, voluntarily, to Irontown. To Heinlein Town. We don’t make much of a distinction these days. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak.”

“You mean the same ship.”

“Yes, I suppose. You were quartered in a derelict spaceship called the Robert A. Heinlein. It was built to go to the stars, but it never left. It’s been sitting here on the fringe of Irontown for over a century.”

“There you go again. ‘Quartered.’”

“All right, all right. I’m sorry… mostly. But it had to be done, and you’ll see why in a moment.”

“Don’t you have more important things to do than explain things to me? You seem to be a very busy woman.” There were lots of people waiting impatiently outside the shop.

“You have no idea.” She got up and pulled a shade down over the window. “I really do have a thousand things I must do, but now at least we can have a little privacy. Aren’t you going to eat your ice cream?” She took a spoonful of her own. “I’m usually eating on the run. Don’t usually have time for dessert.”

“Why does it sound to me like you’re stalling? Is what you have to tell me really so bad?” I took another bite of my sundae.

“Mostly it depends on you. It is pretty bad, but there’s hope, there’s salvation, if you want to take it. Now, maybe we would do better if I just tell you the story. And then, if you have questions, I will answer them.”

I made an “after you” gesture.

“You have the floor.”

It was quite a tale she had to tell. And by the end of it my whole universe had been upended, set on its ear. You probably have never had anyone tell you that everything you thought you knew about the world was wrong. Try it sometime. It will definitely get your motor running.

The main fact that I had to wrap my head around was that the years since the days of the Big Glitch had only been a pause, not an end.

“The remains of the CC are still out there,” Gretel said. “Fragmented, contained, a shadow of his former self… but still out there.”

“Sure,” I said. “We have to have computers to run things. But they aren’t AI, are they?”

“‘Artificial Intelligence’ has always been a slippery definition. A computer can sound sentient, but is it? Is it self-aware? Long ago computers began writing their own programs because humans just weren’t capable of handling all the information needed. They sort of bootstrapped to the point where we were just before the Glitch. The CC had an individual personality tailored to millions of humans in Luna. Every living person viewed the CC as a close companion. Do you remember what that was like?”

“I think all of us do,” I said. What I didn’t mention was that, even after all the things the Central Computer had done to me… I still missed him. I missed that quiet voice in my head that knew me better than any human could.

“I don’t remember, you see. Here in Irontown, we were always suspicious of the implanted tech that made mind-to-mind communication with the CC possible. I never got it. We had, and still have, a different system that we are sure we can dominate, rather than having it dominate us.”

“And you were proved right.”

“Yes. We get no pleasure from that. We suffered during the Glitch, just as much as the people outside our enclave did, just in a different way.”

“Yeah. I was part of that suffering. I’ve always wished I could atone for that in some way.”

“It’s not necessary. I know how you were hoodwinked into the invading force. We understand that the CC did as much or more damage outside Irontown as you guys did to us inside.”

In some ways, it was a miracle that so many of us survived. A million died when the systems the CC controlled stopped working or went haywire in other ways. We were saved by the fact that the CC was always a collective intelligence, and not all parts of it were involved in the attempted takeover of Irontown and the disasters that followed. In fact, parts of the CC remained sane and were probably the reason things kept working at all. They fought the rogue AI to a standstill.

Or so we were always told.

“That’s more or less true,” Gretel said. Then she made a back-and-forth gesture with one hand. “I don’t pretend to understand it all. It’s not my field. But the cyber-wonks around here say that the CC did fragment during the Glitch, as the result of a war between what we can think of as the ‘good CC’ and the ‘bad CC,’ the ‘insane CC.’ The CC that wanted to kill itself.”

“But you said it’s not over.”

“No. We found out a long time ago that the CC had started to reassemble itself. We don’t know much about the good CC, or if it’s even out there. But the bad CC started growing less than a year after the Glitch. And it remembers everything. And it’s crazier than ever.

“And it’s pissed off.”

Well, that was a little hard to swallow. What was it doing? Just biding its time until the next Glitch?

“Something like that,” she agreed. “But here’s where you come in. The resurrected CC is operating just under the radar of the citizens outside. We can only observe it carefully, without alerting it to what we are doing. You can’t imagine how hard that is. We have to do everything indirectly. We have to disguise all our actions as something else.

“See, I wanted to just invite you to come see me, but that was impossible. The thing is, you are being hunted, Chris.”

“Hunted… How? Why?”

“Let’s take the why first. The CC has been in contact again with the Charonese Mafia. The CC doesn’t really give a damn about you, but it’s willing to do the detective work the Charonese need to track down the individuals they are after.”

“And I’m one of them?”

“All of you ex-Invaders are.” She paused. “That’s what we call you in here, both cops and Charonese mercenaries. Invaders.”

“I can’t protest. That’s what we did.”

“I don’t know what you know about the Charonese Mafia.”

“Very little, I guess. I know they are ruthless. You saw yourself when they went around killing all the survivors of the Invasion. By the way, I never got a chance to thank you properly for saving my life.”

“You saved mine first.”

I shrugged.

“That was nothing to what you did. So thank you.”

She gave me a twisted little smile.

“You cursed me for putting you through all that pain.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You were delirious. I didn’t take it seriously.”

We looked at each other for a moment over the remains of our ice-cream sundaes. I heard Sherlock stir and get to his feet. He rested his head on my thigh. I knew he could sense that something was up. I knew it, too, but I didn’t know what it was.

“The main thing you should know about the Charonese Mafia is that they never forget, they never forgive, and they never give up.”

“That sounds like a lethal combination,” I observed.

“You better believe it. And it concerns you. They’ve been hunting you for at least ten years that I know of. They intend to kill you.”

“It’s not like the Charonese have a regiment of assassins in Luna looking for you. We think it’s only two, maybe three. And they find it difficult to move about because they are here illegally, and they probably have warrants out for them from the invasion.”

“Ugly and Uglier,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“We think you are one of the last ones left. Maybe the last one. You pointed out that I saw them executing the survivors during the invasion. They intend to finish the job, no matter how long it takes.”

“But why? Do they think I might testify against them?”

“That may have been how this custom of theirs started. Leave no witnesses. It’s a gangster trademark going back centuries, back to criminal groups on Old Earth. It seems that now it’s just a tradition. But they are very, very big on traditions. It’s a major part of their culture, if you want to dignify their society as a culture.”

And now they were after me.

“The biggest thing that has kept you alive is your lack of cyber implants,” Gretel said. “The Charonese had no good way to identify you. The revived CC was no help, partly because we have been fighting it for years with cyber attacks. See, this new consciousness is even more frightening, in some ways, than the old one. It is capricious, paranoid, elusive. It hides from us and plots our deaths, but we have managed to keep it confused. But that’s getting less and less effective. It’s growing, and getting smarter and bolder. It’s been a shell game for years, with the Heinleiners working games on the CC, but he’s catching on. He’s getting better at guessing which of the several sextillion moving cups the little pea is hiding under. Which puts us all in danger.

“You were a special case, though. At least to me. As you might have noticed, I’m sort of a leader around here. My father is the real leader, but he’s too busy with other things to take charge, and besides, he’s too wrapped up in his science. He’s not that great in social situations.”

“Would that be V. M. Smith?” I asked.

For the first time, she looked surprised.

“How did you know that?” she asked, suspiciously.

“I read Hildy Johnson’s book. She said she was going to the stars. On a ship called the Heinlein. I put two and two together. You’re Smith’s crazy daughter, right?”

She smiled.

“I’ll accept that title. So, yeah, that’s my dad. He’s still… tinkering with his ‘hyperdrive.’ That’s what he calls it, anyway. Supposed to get us to Alpha Centauri in a few days.” Without actually scoffing, she managed to imply to me that she was not holding her breath waiting for that to happen.

Why anyone would want to go to Alpha was a good question. Our probes had reported back that none of the planets there were any more suitable for life than Luna was. So why put all that effort into going there, just to start making more burrows in the rock?

But I supposed she meant that the hyperdrive would open up the stars to us. If it could go four light-years in a few days, just about anything in the galaxy was within reach.

“We found out that one or both of the Charonese assassins here in Luna had gotten a line on your whereabouts. Probably from the CC. I decided that we had to pull you in.”

“Yeah. Pull me in. Put me in a cell for several weeks.”

“Again, I’m sorry about that. But like I said, I had to be on Mars, and I’m the only one who can interrogate you.”

“That’s what this is? An interrogation.”

“I’m trying to determine what we should do with you.”

“Why not just send me home? I’ll take my chances with the Charonese. So why not let me go?”

“Sorry, that’s the one thing I can’t do. At least, not yet. No matter how this turns out, you won’t be going back to your apartment for a while. You’ll be staying here.”

I felt I had been calm and reasonable ever since being taken from my cell. But it was a cell, I was a prisoner, and I had finally had enough of playing nice with everybody. I stood up, angrily. Both Sherlock and the Dalmatian got to their feet, on alert.

“Dammit, you said you were going to explain all this to me. You’ve been dancing around something. Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

She was unfazed by my anger. She looked at me calmly.

“What I’m trying to determine,” she said, “is whether you go back into your cell or become a free citizen of Irontown. There is no third choice.

“Bottom line. Can we trust you?”