"Look," Jaime said. "It must be nearly time for the next shift to hit the pits. Are we going to do this thing, or not?"
"Well, I don't know, Jaime," Wal said. "You still haven't told us what happens after we recruit your Bolo friend."
"We blow the damned cluckers to hell. At least we blow them off the face of Cloud."
Wal shook his head. "It's not that easy, Jaime, and you know it. The !°!°! knocked the Bolo out at Chryse. They'll do it again. They defeated the entire CDF in a couple of days . . . and that was when the CDF had men, weapons, hovertanks . . . We were an army, for God's sake! Now what do we have? A few thousand pathetic, ragged refugees, half-starved, unarmed. Think, Jaime, think! Do you want to see the entire camp slaughtered? Is that what you want? Because that's what's going to happen if you see this through!"
"I thought you were on my side in this!" Jaime cried.
"When it was just a few of us sneaking out, yeah. We might be able to hide out up in the mountains, or in the deep forest. But you're talking about trying to defeat the !°!°! on their own terms. I'm sorry, but I never signed on for that!"
"What if there were a way for us to get off the planet?" Jaime asked. He rubbed at his beard thoughtfully. "If we could fight the machines off, get some ships . . ."
"What ships?"
"Actually, I was thinking about the Tolun."
Wal's eyebrows crept high up on his forehead. "What makes you think they'll deal with the likes of us?"
"They'll deal with anybody. Everyone knows that."
The Tolun were nonhumans, members of a very old species that maintained a trading and mercantile empire across much of this region of space.
"There's an enclave of Tolun at Stardown," Dieter pointed out.
"There was an enclave there," Zhou said. "What makes you think the damned machines didn't smash them too, when they smashed us?"
"The fact that we're still eating," Jaime said. "And have been for almost a year. Where do you think our food has been coming from all this time?"
"Camp rumors. Wild stories . . ."
"Nonsense! People have seen the Tolun," Dieter said, "delivering hovertrucks full of food, presumably from some farming communities out there that didn't get smacked. The word is, they'll do anything for samples of advanced technology."
"Even if that's true, what does that get us?" Wal scratched his beard with savage intensity. "If the Tolun are working for the machines, they're not going to help us. And if they're not, what do we have to give them?"
"I'm willing to worry about that one when it's time, Colonel. Right now, we have to get out of this camp, and to do that we need Hector. This is our one chance to make a break. If we blow it now, we—"
"Psst!" Jack Haley, on watch at the doorway, hissed. "Condition red!"
Conversation stopped. A moment later, a shadow fell across the opening of the hut. It was Dewar Sykes, standing in the doorway, conspicuously clad in jackboots, leather trousers, and a soft, ruffled green shirt. He slapped his shockstick against an open palm. "Right, then," he said, surveying the slaves inside. "What's this, some kind of conspiracy? Get on out here in the light! All of you!"
The ragged line of slaves crawled out into the sunslight, blinking. Sykes made them stand in line, nudging them this way or that with prods from his truncheon. Another trusty, a narrow-eyed little weasel named Philbet, stood nearby with an unpleasant leer on his face. In the distance, Jaime saw, a single !°!°! floater hovered silently, watching the proceedings with a mix of human and glittering, crystalline eyes.
"You people should get more fresh air," Sykes told them. Reaching up, he rubbed absently at the silver band encircling his head. "Exercise, hard work, that's the ticket. How 'bout it, Philbet? Maybe an extra shift for these slimy little crollygogs?"
"Sounds like just the thing, Dewar."
Sykes reached out and touched Shari's chin with one hand, gently stroking her face. "Except. we'll let this one off. I like her."
Shari jerked her head back beyond Sykes's reach. "Turner!" she spat. The epithet was reserved for those humans who'd sided with the machines, the trusties and turncoats and lickmetals who worked for the !°!°!.
"I think you'll spend the day with us, baby." His eyes narrowed. "I think we've had you before, haven't we? Yeah, I thought so. Real prime meat on the hoof." He grabbed her arm and yanked her out of line.
"Leave her alone!" Jaime rasped, taking a step forward.
Sykes whirled, the snarl forming on his lips melting into a grin. Reaching out mildly, he tapped the business end of his shockstick twice against the angry red welt on Jaime's upper arm. "So? How's the arm, soldier boy? Tried taking on any more of the Masters recently?" The grin faded into something darker. "Maybe you'd like to take me on sometime, eh?"
Jaime saw the trap and pulled back. "No . . . sir."
It was all he could do to contain his seething hatred. Sykes and the other trusties, in Jaime's opinion, were the lowest, most detestable life forms in the camp or out of it. They'd betrayed their own species for the comfort and authority afforded camp guards. The name "trusty," dredged from the ancient history of human prisons and law enforcement, was more an ironic joke than a statement of fact.
Sykes leaned closer, peering curiously into Jaime's face. "What's the girl to you, Graham, eh?"
"Nothing. She's . . . she's been through a lot, lately. Give her a break, huh?"
"Oh, but I am, soldier boy! Best break possible!" He stabbed the end of the shockstick squarely against the center of Jaime's bare chest, pushing hard as he leaned forward with a wicked grin. "She gets the whole day off! Gets to have a real shower, get the mud off her skin and out of her hair. Why, she gets to be with me all day, tending to my, ah, personal needs, instead of crawling around on her pretty little knees in the mud, digging up corpses with her bare hands. Like you!"
At the last word, he thumbed the button on the shockstick, and the bolt seared through Jaime's chest, dragging a ragged scream from lips gone numb.
He didn't remember falling, but he found himself on his back, his vision slowly returning. His entire body felt numb, but his legs and arms tingled as though they'd lost all circulation.
Shari was on her knees next to him, helping him sit up. As she bent forward, her lips brushed close beside his ear. "It's okay, Jaime," she whispered. "I can stand . . . anything. So long as there's hope!"
Then Sykes bent over, grabbed Shari by her arm, and hauled her to her feet. "Don't waste your time with garbage, girl. C'mon. You're comin' with us."
"Yeah," Philbet said. He stepped over to Alita and grabbed her by the wrist. "How 'bout this one, Dewar? Let's take her too."
"Suits me. The more the merrier."
"Yah!" Philbet said, roughly caressing Alita. "We'll have a party!"
"The rest of you," Sykes said, "hit the pits! Double shift for all of you! Now move it!" He kicked Jaime in the side. "You too! Move! Move! Or I'll turn you over to our friend over there!"
Under the watchful eyes of the floater, the slaves helped Jaime stagger back to his feet. The doleful tones of the siren summoning the next shift to work were sounding, and they turned and trudged toward the camp's front gate, joining the thousands of others lining up to leave the camp. When Jaime turned to look back over his shoulder, he could just barely see Sykes and Philbet marching the women off in the direction of the trusty compound, a collection of nearly intact homes set well above the squalor of the camp.
"You think the Masters see everything that they do?" Tamas asked.
"I dunno," Dieter said. "They might be trusties, but it stands t' reason the Masters don't trust 'em, right?"
"Yeah," Wal said. He supported Jaime with his good arm as they walked. "I keep wondering about those headbands."
The silver bands they wore on their heads like some high-tech parody of ancient laurel wreaths clearly were more than badges of rank and authority. It was rumored that they somehow picked up everything the trusty saw and relayed it to the Masters.
Of course, everyone knew that the bands also killed . . . or crippled with such blinding pain that the trusty who violated his orders was unable to escape the Harvesters who came for him. They were a kind of insurance for the !°!°!. The trusties had betrayed their own kind to serve the Masters; it wasn't likely that the Masters would trust them without some pretty serious safeguards. The trusties' lives were suspended by the slenderest of threads. Jaime had seen at least two dozen trusties crippled and harvested since he'd come to the dig, some for no crime more serious than not responding swiftly enough when a Master rasped out an order. There were always others, though, willing to take their place.
He could muster no sympathy for them, however. Sykes's life was far better than that of the slaves in the pits. He wore decent clothing, and got more and better food, and even had his pick of women from the ranks of the slaves. Jaime could have understood their treason—not accepted it, perhaps, but understood it—if they'd simply used their authority to maintain order among the slaves. But the trusties abused that authority constantly, took pleasure in their brutality, and acted more like slave masters than any of the detached and unemotional !°!°!.
He could not forgive that. Not ever.
"We'll settle with them, too," he said, his voice low.
Wal tightened his grip. "Major, I don't think you're getting the message. There's nothing we can do, you understand? The machines must be on to us."
"Why do you say that?" Tamas asked.
"How did the trusties know about our meeting, huh?" He sounded genuinely frightened. "I mean, there we were, talking about what to do about the Bolo and breaking out and everything, and there was Sykes."
"Wal," Jaime said wearily, "if the trusties or the cluckers had any idea what we were talking about back there, they wouldn't have just given us a double shift! We'd be dead right now, or they'd be dragging us off to the Harvester. No, I don't think they know . . . ."
"Valhalla is off," Wal said decisively. "I'm going to talk to the general about it as soon as we get back. It's just too big a risk."
Jaime glanced at him sharply but said nothing. He could tell when Colonel Prescott was set in his mind about something, and he knew the man wasn't going to yield. That hurt. He liked Wal and considered him to be the best friend he had in the camp.
But Jaime was not about to let friendship stand between him and his sole chance at freedom.
DAV728 floated in the presence of the Ninth Awareness as hovering manuals completed the final connections to the data receptors in DAV's cognitive racks. Its new brain, gray and wrinkled, afloat in its sealed canister of nutrient fluid, awaited final feed-link and insertion. In another few billion nanoseconds, now, DAV would be initiated into a new and higher plane of awareness.
The Ninth Awareness, of course, was invisible, a complex of several AI intelligences working as a unity, a hive-mind matrix within the labyrinthine circuitry of the vast !°!°! complex now rising from the cluttered waste and confusion of the humans' enclosed Delamar cities. DAV was aware of it only through the constant buzz and flicker of data packets, and the warm, electronic focus of its myriad scanners and active sensory devices.
There was no ceremony, nothing at all like ritual attached to the awarding of a new brain; the !°!°! were not designed to comprehend the concept of celebrations or rites of passage, though they were aware of those social posturings among various of the organic life forms they'd encountered so far in their inexorable advance across the galaxy.
Most self-aware beings with which the !°!°! were familiar had the ability—one not shared by the original !°!°! themselves—of holding several discrete chunks of data in mind simultaneously. How many depended on both the species and the individual, but the number generally ran from three to seven.
Memic chunking, as it was known, was how most organic intelligences remembered things. A typical OI—a human, for instance—might remember the number "3647836837" by breaking it into manageable chunks, as 364-783-6837, perhaps—four chunks of three to four numbers apiece. An AI, on the other hand, would simply store and recall the entire number "3647836837," and not give it another thought. As a matter of fact, for some millennia in their early history, the !°!°!, once they were aware of the phenomenon, had assumed that chunking was a trick that OIs found necessary in order to remember anything at all, but that had no bearing whatsoever on AIs with their infallible electronic memories.
It had taken a long time, in fact, before the !°!°! realized that memic chunking conferred another and more subtle advantage than simply allowing wrinkled blobs of gray jelly to remember long numbers. Organisms that could chunk could also hold separate and simultaneous concepts in mind, and that was something that electronic AIs could manage only through massively parallel processing, and then incompletely at best. An OI might hold A and B and C in its thoughts at the same time by calling them up as three separate memic chunks, then bringing them together as a fourth; an OI could process them separately in one processor and come out with ABC . . . which in the fuzzy logic of mental processes might not be the same thing at all. !°!°! researchers were still studying the phenomenon; there was much about OI mental organization, capabilities, and concepts of reality that were almost impossible for AIs to fathom. "Altruism," for example . . . or "honor," or most organics' desire for ceremony and fanfare or even—and this was the big one—"love."
Among other things, what memory chunking meant for OIs was that they could hold in their thoughts simultaneous concepts of past, present, and future, remembering the past while planning for the future and taking into account the here-and-now. This was something that the original !°!°!, tens of thousands of years before, had not been able to do. The lack had cost them dearly. More than once they'd very nearly been destroyed by the merely organic creatures they battled; final victory, and the ability to extend their rule beyond the teeming starswarms of the Galactic Core, had come only when they learned the trick of linking multiple brains in parallel within the same artificially intelligent system.
The first brain, the silicon brain with the original !°!°! Prime Code programming, was what every !°!°! received in the natal assemblers. It was adequate for basic work and simple tasks, and provided a working memory of some 107 bits, about the same storage capacity as a human book of three or four hundred pages. The second brain, also silicon, upgraded the primary logic functions and extended working memory to roughly 108 bits, while the third brain extended the memory by another factor of 10, as well as providing the adapters, ports, and software for handling a wide variety of scanners, sensors, and data input devices, all necessary if the machine was to be able to move its intelligence from one body to another. All minimally-aware !°!°! possessed at least three brains.
But to acquire more than minimal self-awareness, the individual !°!°! had to go one step further . . . or two or three or more. All ship-fortress-factory commanders possessed at least four brains, allowing them to draw conclusions based on past events, to anticipate future developments, and even to run controlled simulations of future possibilities with one brain while watching the results through the others . . . an ability, not possessed by low-level brain arrays, that organics referred to as imagination.
The additional brains beyond the first four didn't have to be organic. Indeed, many !°!°! insisted that silicon brains were far more durable and efficient than colloidal suspensions of organic jelly. Somehow, though, early self-aware !°!°!, while experimenting on the physiologies of captured OIs, had picked up the idea of keeping organic brains alive in sealed support canisters, equipping them with a silicon interface and using them in parallel to enhance AI systems capabilities. They ran slowly and inefficiently; their neurons operated through the cumbersome transmission of electrochemical signals, but one organic brain did function with the fuzzy logic otherwise possible only through massive parallel processing. Better still, !°!°! designers had learned how to tap into the memories stored within organic brains and translate them into imagery their new owners could understand. The advantages of being able to see how an enemy thought and felt were obvious and compelling . . . even if organic brains did tend to break down after 1017 nanoseconds or so. It was hard keeping them alive for very long . . . and harder still to keep them sane. Special check programs had to be set over each organic brain in a !°!°! series to make certain the data they provided were accurate. The !°!°! manuals completed their final preparations; a Series 24 floater, equipped with grotesque, leathery-skinned human hands, carefully picked up the canister containing DAV728's fifth brain, snapped the primary data bus home, then tucked the unit deep into DAV's exposed internal wiring. A horde of symbiotic assemblers, finger-sized, low-level machines resembling spiders or roaches or thick-armed starfish, scuttled about the package, busily growing the forest of hair-thin optical connections that completed the link.
DAV scarcely noticed. As the primary bus clicked into its receptor, its . . . no, his awareness seemed to unfold like a complex abstract of hyperdimensional topology.
His awareness. No !°!°! possessed anything like a sexual identity, but the word encompassed this new and clearer imaging of self as an individual. As a person. He'd felt something like this before, when he'd gone from three brains to four, but this . . . this was indescribably better, purer, sharper, higher, deeper, more complete, like two dimensions becoming three, like three becoming four. It was as though DAV had been blind and now had the windows to the universe thrown open, bathing his very being with radiance and beauty.
He'd thought himself self-aware before. This new sense of being was far beyond that dim, fog-enshrouded dream of awareness. It was awareness not raised by twenty percent through the addition of a new brain, but awareness instead raised to a new power, an explosion of color from a world formerly viewed solely in grayscale.
"Like it?"
DAV started a bit at the warm and faintly amused voice of the Ninth Awareness in his mind. "It is . . . an unexpected sensation."
"It's all of that."
"Will I always . . . feel this way?" The verb felt strange used in this context. DAV had thought he knew what emotion was, even through restricted response parameter controls. He knew now that he'd understood feelings no more than an AI lacking optical inputs understood purple.
"The shock dulls a bit after a time," the Ninth Awareness replied. "The newness will wear off."
"Is this what organics experience?" How could any organism concentrate on what needed to be done with this, this hyperacute awareness of one's self and surroundings?
He felt the Ninth Awareness's amusement again, sharper this time. "Unknown. Who can really understand what they feel? You are assimilating the added dimension of perspective made possible by a new processor, as well as reacting to the effects of fuzzy logic and holographic memory."
"Holographic memory?"
"Many OI brains, including those of humans, store memory in a way analogous to the data storage for a holographic film. A given memory is stored as sets of chemical relationships over broad portions of the entire processor, rather than as binary bits at a specific stack. The quality of those memories seems richer and more detailed as a result."
"I had no idea such depth was possible."
"As you continue to move up the hierarchy of awareness, DAV728-24389, you will experience further revelation and unfolding."
"This has given me quite enough to consider for the moment."
"New responsibilities are now yours, together with the enhanced capabilities of your processor series. We direct you to take charge of the salvage and recycling efforts on the newly converted world's first continent."
"Running program."
"You may take a few trillion nanoseconds to take the measure of your enhanced capabilities. In particular, get to know your new brain. It was harvested from a human military officer during the initial fighting. Its memories and personality have been retained. You may find them illuminating in your new position."
DAV was already probing the data stores of the new brain and was finding them fascinating. He could sense the new brain's own awareness, a subset of DAV's, a tiny, terrified knot of being trying to work out what had happened to it even as the brain it rode within processed new data and extended its collaboration with DAV's four AI processors.
Probing gently, he felt the being's sense of personal identity, felt the panic-edged swirl of thoughts touched by nightmare terror. Normally, those thoughts were carefully sealed off from DAV's overall awareness, but they flavored the new brain's workings, giving them a distinctive taste.
DAV sampled the thoughts, savoring their alien strangeness. There was much here that might be useful.
The personality behind them thought of itself as Jeff Fowler, and it was wondering what had happened to its Bolo.
Shari looked up as Jaime staggered in. She'd been waiting here in the Barracks, next to the pile of rags he called home, waiting for him.
It had been a long wait.
"Jaime!"
He looked as though he could barely stand. His hard-muscled body was coated with gray mud; his beard and long hair were thick with the stuff, giving him the look of a statue carved from gray rock. Only his eyes showed any life at all . . . and to look into them was disturbing.
"Shari," he said, his voice a harsh croak. "Are you . . . all right?"
She nodded, acutely, embarrassedly aware of how clean her body was in comparison with his. She only felt dirty.
"Shari . . . ?"
"I'm okay, Jaime. The bastard's chosen me before . . . and others have too. My only worry is that someday my shots will wear off and one of those traitor bastards will make me pregnant."
He nodded and slumped to the floor beside her. She saw an angry welt along his chest and right side, visible even through the slick, wet clay. "You're hurt!"
"Wasn't . . . much. Thinking . . . worrying about you kept me going."
"But what happened?"
"Floater zapped me. Don't even know why. It just . . . came up behind me and let me have it."
She felt an unsteady lurch of fear within. "Do you think they know?"
He shook his head. "I don't think so. Like I told Wal . . . if they knew, we'd be dead. I think . . . maybe . . . they noticed a bunch of us together, somehow. They don't know what we're up to, but they damned sure don't want us to do it again. Wal and Dieter and the others all got burned too."
Shari nodded. "The first thing you learn here, I found out a long time ago, was to stay inconspicuous. The nail that sticks up gets hammered, you know? Anyone who does anything to attract attention to themselves gets hurt . . . ."
"Or forced to spend the day with Sykes and his buddies." Gently, he reached out and touched her shoulder. "God, I was worried about you."
She pulled away out of his reach. "Please," she said. "No."
"Sorry . . ."
"I'm sorry. It's not the mud," she added hastily as he looked at his hand. "It's not you. It's me. It's . . . inside . . ."
"I know."
"I just need . . . a little time. To get my head right."
"Sure, I understand. Alita. Is she okay?"
"I think so." She managed a half smile. "She told me, though, at one point, when we were alone for a few minutes, that she was going to see that our friend on the hill was fixed up even if she had to dismantle a dozen floaters herself."
"Dismantle . . ."
"Wires. Feed circuits. Spare parts."
He nodded. "Of course. I'm not thinking too straight. Sorry."
"After twenty-two straight hours in the pits? It's amazing you're thinking at all."
"I need . . . sleep," he said, his voice little more than a mumble. "Sleep. Then . . ."
After a while, when he'd said nothing more and his breathing was even, Shari rose and returned to her side of the Barracks. She'd been afraid, during the too-long day with the trusties, that Wal Prescott might have convinced Jaime to call Valhalla off.
She'd seen the light in Jaime's eyes, though, when she'd pulled away from him, and she knew now that there was absolutely no danger of that.