The Credulity Nexus (22 page)

He felt strong
hands gripping his arms. Amazingly strong hands. But nothing could
save him now. The muzzle of the Uzi was almost pointing right at
him. Rivers' crazy eyes were fixed and still, pointing at his
heart, a heart that had one, maybe two beats left before it was
torn to shreds.

Rivers disappeared from view as her gun
erupted in a roaring, screaming torrent of bullets. Rik heard it.
Then he
realised
he was
hearing it. Alive. Listening to the shots that should have killed
him.

The
white-suited women were standing in front of him, slender bodies
pressed close. Their long, muscular backs were just a hand-span in
front of his face. They'd dragged him back, taken the shots
themselves! What the...?

“
Fuck!” He heard Rivers' cry of rage and
frustration. Then he saw her leap above the heads of his two
saviours. Straight up, like a goddamned rocket, straight into the
ceiling and through it into the crawlspace. Like a super-powered
lizard, she slithered out of sight and away, gone in a
moment.

Rik was
open-mouthed and breathless. The two women stayed where they were
as several more shots were fired. Then they stepped aside to reveal
Rivers' two hired goons lying dead on the floor.

He looked
around. Clermont had broken into a sweat, but was looking relieved.
Around him, several of Clermont's people held smoking guns. Some of
them were watching the hole in the ceiling, eager for a shot.
Beyond them, the restaurant's regular customers cowered under
tables, clutching at one another, wide-eyed with shock.

The two women
in white turned to face Rik. Each of their catsuits was punctured
in a dozen places, revealing churned up grey discs where Rivers'
bullets had hit them.

“
Uploads!” Rik could hardly believe it.
They seemed so completely human. The two women regarded him
steadily, but said nothing.

“
Not uploads,” said Clermont, getting his
composure back. “The boss would never allow that! These babies are
genuine, one hundred percent, state of the fucking art robots. I
kid you not.” The man's relief at being alive was pathetically
obvious. He was almost laughing with the unexpected pleasure of
having survived. “Best damn bodyguards I've ever seen! What do you
say to that, Drew? And easy on the eye, too, right?”

The two
robots, with every appearance of being beautiful, real women –
women aware that every eye in the room was on them – sashayed
around Rik and stalked back to stand behind Clermont.

Rik shook his
head in wonder. Who'd have guessed ‘state of the art’ had
progressed so far? “I'll tell you what I say,” he said. “I say, you
can take me to your leader.” He took a step towards the little man,
so that he towered over him. “But if I don't find Maria waiting for
me when I get there, he's going to need more than a few overgrown
Barbie dolls to stop me using his head for a baseball.”

Sitting in a
space elevator for more than twelve hours, however spectacular the
views were, had Maria ready to gnaw through the tough plastic of
her in-flight magazine reader. The merry company of her
indefatigable travelling companion, Kirsty Winters, was also
starting to pall. In fact, Maria was beginning to think that if the
old dear came out with one more cheerful platitude, she would throw
herself out of the airlock.

So the
crashing and grinding of the gondola as it thudded into its cradle
at the end of the ride – however alarming – was blessed relief.
Maria threw off the blanket she'd been pretending to sleep under
and started gathering her things.

Although the
gondola had been climbing the tether at a more-or-less constant
three hundred kilometres an hour, its rotational speed around the
Earth had been increasing steadily the higher it went, rising from
about seventeen hundred kilometres an hour at sea level, to eleven
thousand kilometres an hour at the orbital platform.

It was this
slow acceleration to orbital velocity, far more than their
position, thirty-six hundred kilometres above the Earth, which had
gradually left them weightless. The handrails and the elasticated
pouches on the walls and seat backs had seemed odd at first, but by
the end of the journey, Maria understood the need to keep every
last little thing tied, glued or nailed to a fixed surface. The
stewards did their best to keep down the amount of junk floating
around, but it was a losing battle. At any moment an empty peanut
bag or a child's shoe could come drifting by to tap you on the
forehead as you tried to sleep.

A smiling
young man in a company waistcoat helped guide her through the exit.
“I don't know how you survive this job,” she told him.

“
Oh,” he said with a wink, “it has its ups
and downs.”

She crossed
the concourse and found the gate for the next leg of her journey, a
three hundred thousand kilometre slog from the Florida Spacebridge
platform to the Moon's own geosynchronous spacebridge station. She
was surprised to find herself, and everyone else, being channelled
through a series of clear plastic corridors, but then she imagined
the chaos that would ensue if they let scores of people as
inexperienced as herself careen about, weightless, in a large, open
space.

To Maria's
eyes, the Moon shuttle looked like something the first colonists
might have used. Modern, saucer-shaped craft were parked around the
space dock, and Maria eyed the long tube of the old shuttle with
dismay. Inside, the seats were arranged in rows pointing forward,
like in an aeroplane. Maria had trouble finding her seat until a
steward appeared and guided her down the aisle.

“
You should keep your cogplus turned on,”
the steward said. His tone suggested she must be some kind of
eccentric. “All the signage is virtual in here.”

“
Thanks. I'll manage.” At least, she hoped
she would. She daren't turn her cogplus on, not even for a
moment.

“
Don't you worry, dear.” The voice at her
elbow was disappointingly familiar. “I'll be your eyes and ears.”
It was the old lady again, Kirsty Winters.

Maria put on a
smile. “I didn't know you were on this flight.” Which was a lie,
but she needed some way to explain why she'd hurried away from her
talkative new friend when they left the gondola. “And sitting right
next to me again, too.”

“
Oh, that's no coincidence. I got them to
arrange a swap. I had to exaggerate a bit about how nervous you
were of flying. Said you'd be a real pain in the ass without old
Kirsty to hold your hand. Hope you don't mind.”

Maria had been
hoping for a break from the woman's endless chatter, but she didn't
want to hurt her feelings.

“
How long will it take?” she asked. “From
here to Heinlein?”

“
You really should turn your cogplus on,
dear. Well, we don't go straight to Heinlein, of course. We dock at
that new spacebridge terminal, Partway Station, first. Then there's
another gondola ride down to Heinlein. You'll love the Heinlein
spacebridge; everything's ultramodern and very fast. It's quite
exciting.”

“
So, how long?”

“
Oh yes. A bit under a day to get to
Partway Station, then maybe half a day to get down to Heinlein. The
time will just fly, don't you worry.”

Maria offered
a sickly grin as thanks. Another day and a half! But at least she
was safe out here.

-oOo-

They took Rik
to a small private airstrip, and put him aboard a little
twin-engined electro-prop. Clermont handed him over to a dour man
in a dark suit who kept a small pain-ray pointed at Rik at all
times. Rik had felt the effects of these microwave lasers before.
They were tuned to penetrate the skin just enough to make it feel
like your body was on fire, but without actually causing any
physical damage. Nasty, but Rik might have borne the pain and
jumped the guy if not for the fact that Clermont's pair of robot
super-models boarded the plane with him. He definitely didn't want
to tangle with those two.

The inside of
the plane was as sumptuously appointed as any private plane, with
deep leather seats, deep pile carpets and padded walls. They
settled into a group of four widely-spaced seats, with the robots
serving pre-flight drinks from a little galley at one end. After a
few minutes, the robots did a cabin check and the plane taxied and
took off.

“
Where are we going?” Rik asked. The plane
had flown out to sea and then turned south, as far as he could
tell.
“
Who are we
going to meet? Is my ex-wife at the other end?”

The
dark-suited man didn't seem in a talkative mood. All Rik got were
snarls and threats each time he asked a question.

Giving up, he
called across to the two robots, “So, tell me about yourselves,
ladies.”

When they were
not doing chores, they both watched him with a fixed intensity.
Even when they worked, one always had its eyes on him. Their
expressions did not change at all upon being addressed. He picked
one at random and asked it his questions.

“
Can you speak?”

“
Yes, of course.”

The guy in the
black suit looked startled. Maybe the man had never heard them
speak before.

The robot's
voice was feminine and rich, its lips and throat moving in perfect
simulation of a person's. The tone lacked emotional colour,
however. Like other computer-simulated voices, it wasn't quite
right. Close, yet a million miles away. He had never thought this
about Veb and Rivers when they spoke, even though their bodies were
technically similar to the ones opposite him. Perhaps it took a
human mind to make a robot sound human.

“
You're the same kind of robot as the
uploads use, right? Reprogrammable nanites top to toe?” Rik was
only guessing. The cosmetic finish on these two beauties was far
beyond anything he'd seen on an upload.

“
Correct. My brain is entirely synthetic,
however.”

“
So what's your function? Bodyguard? Sex
toy? What justifies all the money you must have cost?”

“
I am a multi-function entity, as you are.
I do whatever is asked of me.”

Rik grinned.
“Really? Then kill this guy and help me take over the plane.”

“
Hey!” Mr Dour brandished his pain-ray,
looking nervously from Rik to the robot.

The robot
looked at Rik's guard as if it were actually thinking about
obeying. Then it looked back at Rik. “I'm sorry, that command
conflicts with my orders to ensure that you remain in custody.”

Rik shrugged.
“Worth a try, I suppose. How about fetching me a beer, is that
OK?”

The robot
nodded, and with motions as fluid as a cat's, it got to its feet
and headed for the galley.

“
You've got a damned cheek,” Mr Dour
grumbled. He levelled his pain ray at Rik's chest. “I've a good
mind to–”

Rik leant
forward abruptly. He said, “You do, and I'll break your neck. That
thing won't stop me.”

The man looked
nervous, frightened even. Rik supposed he was trying to decide if
the robots would let Rik kill him. Maybe they'd just watch, as long
as Rik was, technically, still in custody. It was a nice thought.
It cheered Rik up. But it seemed to sit uneasily on his guard's
stomach, judging by the sour look on the man's face. Still keeping
the gun trained on Rik, he retreated into his seat.

The robot
returned with Rik's drink and handed it to him. It smiled in an
alarmingly human way before returning to its seat, and its
vigil.

-oOo-

Fariba
Freymann was also having trouble with robots. She'd been locked in
that anonymous room for two days. No-one came to see her. No-one
answered when she yelled. No-one stopped her when she smashed the
place up.

Despite
staring out of her window for hours on end, she had seen no
movement in the gardens or the desert beyond. Her only visitor had
been a small domestic robot. It was the kind they used in good
hotels the world over: small, multi-limbed, capable of cleaning,
making beds, delivering meals and very little else.

It entered and
left through its own little door, a hatch cut into the main door of
her room. She'd tried talking to the bot. She'd tried smashing it
with a broken-off chair leg. She'd knocked it over and wrapped it
up in sheets. It simply ignored her, patiently cut its way through
the sheets, righted itself, tidied up the mess she'd made and left
again.

Its little
hatch zipped open so fast, she couldn't find a way through before
the robot filled the gap. Then it zipped shut before the robot
moved on.

She tried
writing “Help me!” messages on its stubby metal torso using
lipstick, but they just got cleaned off before it came back. So she
wrote “Up yours!” on it and didn't bother any more.

Now, however,
she had another plan for the irksome little machine. But first, she
had to catch it.

The viewscreen
set into the wall showed six-fifteen pm. She could hear the robot
in the hall approaching with her evening meal. The little hatch
slid open, and she watched the bot as it came in. It had to fold
its limbs and telescope its head down into its body to get through
the narrow gap. She had to admire the ingenuity of its design, but
felt it was a big flaw that the bot was too dumb to worry about
what she might do to it.

It delivered
her meal to the dining table and scurried about, tidying up the
place. When it was finished, it headed to the hatch to leave. By
then, Freymann had pushed a chest of drawers across the doorway,
and the machine was trapped.