Less Than Human (45 page)

T
he livelines sang. They diverged in related melodies, data passing in ripples of harmony. Eleanor was awash in a euphonious
polyphony that beat, danced, and trilled around her. Enchanted and dismayed—how could she navigate in
this?
—she tried to distinguish structure in the seemingly infinite complexity of refrains, passages, measures, minor and major
keys …

Each liveline seemed to have its own theme, its own tone. This one flowed low and throbbing in a complex beat. That one flowed
higher and flat, in a repeated toccata.

This way,
Akita sang in a low, hornlike riff.

He began to fade into distance and she followed, dodging through thickets of pastorale and tight knots of counterpoint, until
they came to a simple sequence of five notes, repeated continuously.

Akita’s song was lighter.
I am glad you have seen the truth.

If she had any feelings in here, she would have been sick with nerves. Would she be able to keep him in the robot? It all
depended on whether she could destroy his connection with the Macrocosm. What did he say when he showed her how to plant the
virus—impose your color over the place? In this version of the Macrocosm, she’d have to overlay her song.

The five-note sequence was the gate out of live-lines into the world of ordinary cables. Akita matched his horn-voice to it,
and his song disappeared. Eleanor did the same—her song seemed to be a simpler melody in a different key, G-flat maybe? A
string sound, like a cello or viola.

They were back in the world of tunnels stretching into infinity, filled with sparks captured in strips along the sides. Here,
Akita’s presence was only an echo of song, a brightness in the spaces between sparks.

They sped along the tunnels until she realized they were in the familiar layers of her own system—in the lab, computer systems
idling. Her humanoid robot Sam was still connected to the battery recharger, a dark circle in the system wall, edged dimly
with phosphorescence. Through the room’s cameras she could see that the service bot still slept in the corner, connected but
inactive.

Akita did nothing for a moment. Was he suspicious?

Perhaps I was mistaken
she “said.”

With a derisive flash, Akita flowed into Sam’s circuitry.

Eleanor edged close to the portal. She couldn’t sense anything more of Akita in the tunnel with her. In the lab camera’s wide-angle
view the robot didn’t move, but activation lights flickered across its chest panel. Akita was inside.

Do you feel it now?
she said, but there was no sign he’d heard. She slid through the other lab subsystems and found the voice-over within the
internal phone.

“Can you hear me?” She couldn’t hear herself until she remembered to activate the audio input as well. “Retract your wall
connection and try to walk to the other side of the lab.”

If he was on the other side of the lab, he couldn’t suddenly activate the connection again.

Sam’s gangly arms rose, not quite together, and straight out, as though Akita couldn’t manage the elbow joints. The oversized
camera lens eyes swiveled each way, too fast for efficient image processing, she noticed.

“When … did you … feel what you … said?” Akita’s synthesized voice crackled from Sam’s little speakers.

“When I was walking the robot. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

Sam’s recharge connection rod withdrew from the wall socket and retracted with a whir. One skeletal metal leg, traced with
various colored wires, lifted. The robot teetered. The leg swung forward, down.

Eleanor felt better. She’d walked Sam far more easily than this. Then she became concerned—what if Akita got discouraged?

“That’s right,” she said. “Try a few more steps.”

Sam wavered five steps. It was time. The recharge connection glowed in a red circle. She concentrated on making it disappear,
imagined her own pattern in its place.

Nothing happened.

Keep concentrating. She reached out with her mind’s hand and picked the circle off the wall.

It still glowed mockingly.

“I do not feel anything,” Akita’s voice croaked from the speakers. “We must leave.”

It was strange to panic without feeling any of the associated physical sensations, like beating heart or sweaty palms. Why
the hell wasn’t it working?

She plastered herself over the connection, then it hit her—when they seeded the virus, they’d been in the NDN, which was livelined.
The damn technique probably didn’t work in ordinary cable. What could she do to stop Akita accessing the connection?

Keep it simple. She rushed back through the maze of tunnels. All she needed was the circuit board for the recharger panel.

Akita in Sam teetered one slow step after another back toward the wall. “Lilith? What are you doing?”

How to activate the circuit breaker? Oh, for a pair of hands …

She wouldn’t be in time. Akita was almost at the wall. In desperation Eleanor dived into a narrow cluster of tunnels, found
the dark circle of the service bot’s recharger panel, and flowed through it.

In the service bot she had hands, and more than one pair. She wheeled it in Sam’s direction. In the service bot’s limited
perception the other robot was a brighter blur in front of the dull glow of the consoles. Overriding the proximity alarm that
attempted to lock the wheels, she slammed the heavy body into Sam.

The bipedal robot fell with an all-too-familiar crash. But she’d built it so that it could get up by itself. There was only
one way to stop Akita accessing a connection, and that was to destroy the connection. She hadn’t been able to do it inside
the Macrocosm, so she’d have to do it out here.

“You have betrayed me.” In the service bot’s audio receiver, Akita’s voice from the speakers crackled with static. “You have
betrayed our plan.”

Your plan, not mine. Eleanor pushed the service bot forward. Hammer tool, hammer tool … the service bot’s reactions were so
slow, it felt as though she was acting on the world underwater. Input target, raise tool, impact target. In the infrared blur
of the service bot’s viewer, she saw the recharge panel shatter. The shock absorbers twanged. Another impact. A bright spray
of sparks flew outward.

Behind her, in the rear viewer, the collection of lines and lights that was Sam folded together and rose off the floor.

“I cannot allow this.”

You can’t do anything about it,
Eleanor would have liked to say, but the service bot had no vocalizer. She wheeled easily around the swaying Sam and back
to her own connection.

Wait. Akita would access this one, too. It wasn’t configured for Sam, but that wouldn’t stop him for long. Her only hope of
stopping him properly was to destroy this connection also, and any other ports in the room.

And trap herself as well.

“You cannot do this. You … come with me in the Macrocosm …”

Or she could destroy Sam. The service bot’s tools could do it. And would Akita’s body sit back at the console until it died,
waiting for him to return?

Sam’s lights moved, a ghost against the darkness of the lab. She could see a vague outline of its head and torso, where wires
ran along the skin, and the eyes glowed distinctly. The battery pack on its back shone red.

She couldn’t destroy Sam, even if Akita controlled it. Even if he had shown her what a flawed creation it was. Sam was still
hers.

She began to methodically smash every wall connection and every port—some of the drives had ports she couldn’t reach, so she
simply pushed them onto the floor. Fortunately, they’d tidied away most of the peripheral equipment. Akita’s voice raged from
the speakers.

“I will destroy you in both worlds …”

Crash, fizz of sparks.

“I will rule without you, I will make sure you are trapped in your decaying body while we fly free …”

Sam lurched toward her and swung its arm, but the humanoid had not been designed to attack other robots and its fist merely
bounced off the service bot’s covering. Sam nearly fell with the momentum of the swing.

“Ignorant gaijin, you’re a disgrace to your profession …”

She cringed at the waste of equipment in the lab, but what else could she do? She had to get back into the Macrocosm and leave
it before Akita caught her in there, where he could devour her in his anger.

“Do you know what I shall do to your niece?”

The closest connection would be one of the help-bot stations in the corridor. She couldn’t access any of the other labs from
within the service bot, without retina prints or fingerprints. In fact … she wheeled the service bot over to the door … how
could she get out of
this
lab?

The service bot’s extendable clipper tool was the closest she had to a finger to press her numeric access code into the pad
by the door. Sam’s digits would be better, but Sam couldn’t reach the pad.

Akita had shut up. He was walking Sam toward some of the mess on the floor, probably looking for a connection she’d missed,
but the service bot’s viewer wasn’t clear enough for her to tell if he’d found anything. The damn service bot’s viewer couldn’t
see the access pad, either. She’d have to do it from memory.

The extended clipper tool was unwieldy and swung back and forward. She tried to fine-tune the balance mechanism, but it seemed
to take hours just to press the first number in the four-digit sequence. She would never get out. She would never see Masao
again, never tell him that he was right, that they needed to spend more time together, go away for a holiday … if robots could
cry, she would have been bawling in frustration.

What was she doing wrong? She thought of what Fujinaka/Gagiel had said that night in Okayama when she told a helpbot to dance
and it did. He said he
thought about dancing.

She thought about reaching up to the access pad, extending her index finger, and pressing the code numbers. Concentrate. This
is all that matters, this moment. Do it. Press the button. And another. And another.

The numbers pinged. The door swished open.

“No! You can’t leave me,” Akita yelled.

Eleanor propelled the service bot through without retracting the tool, frantic in case the door shut automatically before
she could get out.

“I will find you …” Akita’s voice echoed, then was cut off by the door’s closing.

The service bot bounced off the corridor wall with the momentum, then whirred off down the corridor in search of a connection.

Oh, the joy of free movement again! After the constricted body of the service bot, the flow of the Macrocosm was like balm
to nonexistent senses. Did Akita feel his human body to be such a prison?

She had worried whether she could find her way back without him, but the faint song of the livelines provided a beacon through
the tunnels. Some of the tunnels were dark, dead, and she had to detour. More began to dull as she passed through. Akita’s
virus? She reached the livelines gate, a glowing knot from this side, not five notes, and dived through. The melodies flowed
as before, but far away there were discordant notes in the musical flux.

What should she do? Akita would find a way out of Sam’s robot body, sooner or later. From within the service bot she couldn’t
see if she’d completely destroyed every connection. Akita would come after her. If she stayed in the Macrocosm, he could erase
bits of her, and what would she become when she returned to her body—a memoryless zombie, living only in the present?

But Akita knew Eleanor was his prisoner in the real world. He could have his revenge at his leisure. Wouldn’t he be more likely
to go on and finish his wretched plan? In that case, she should wait and try to lure him out of the Macrocosm before he could
seed the rest of the viruses; make him angry enough to follow her back into the real world.

Which wouldn’t help her or Mari once Akita told the Silver Angels what she’d done …

Undecided, she followed a strand of song she remembered, staying with the simple melody until it reached a familiar ordered
cacophony, the systems of the factory where the Silver Angels were. The antisurveillance shield was deactivated. Iroel had
taken Mari, as promised. Perhaps. She sifted into the symphonic layers and the security cameras became her eyes.

The corridors, bathroom, and meditation rooms were empty. She couldn’t see Ishihara; either he’d escaped, or they had shoved
him somewhere without a camera pickup. All the acolytes and novices were still in the interface room, their praying backs
looking like an infestation of pale beetles. How strange to see them there but hear only the multistranded music of the Macrocosm.
Stranger still to see her own small figure seated beside Adam’s larger one at the console. What am I in here, if that’s also
me down there?

One of the standing silver figures moved. Melan tiptoed down the dais and picked her way between the praying figures. She
paused at the door to whisper to Samael, then walked out into the corridor.

Eleanor watched her as far as the stairs in the alcove, after which there were no cameras. Gone to join Iroel, wherever he’d
gone. Had he really taken Mari with them? She switched back to the interface room camera and scanned the backs of the believers.
Impossible to tell if Mari was there.

How long had it been since they started? Surely the police must be able to trace Akita’s interference …

Then she heard a deep, distinctive tune in the lines of harmony. Akita was approaching. He’d found a way out of Sam.

I’m here,
she sent.

The song dulled for a moment then resumed with vigor, getting louder all the time. It sounded brassy, infuriated.

She wavered, then decided she’d rather face Akita in her own body than in here. Back to the interface she raced, Akita’s song
so loud now that when—

—her eyes snapped open her ears were ringing with the sound.

Her breath coming in ragged gasps, she pulled her left hand out of the console and fumbled with the straps on her chair. She
was shaking all over with the shock of sensations, the murmur of prayers sounding like a roar, the blinding light, strips
and streaks of pain where her body touched the chair…