She slipped catlike along the wall, toward the massive locked steel hatch. That was the first obstacle between her and her goal, between her and ultimate ecstasy. Or the pain of tortured death.
Born just before World War 3, Dahlia was really the daughter of the fourth global conflict, the biowar that had wiped out a quarter of the globe’s population with uncontrolled man-made plagues. Her parents, her only brother, her baby sister had been nothing more than four more statistical units in the monstrous death toll.
Better to have died with them, Dahlia told herself for the millionth time in her brief years. Barely beyond teen age, most of her life had been spent in the remorseless slavery of the conditioning wards. But the promise of unending pleasure forced her on. That, and the fear of death’s final agony.
World War 3 had been mercifully brief and almost totally non-destructive. Fought with spacecraft and robot weaponry high above the Earth, the four-day war began when a hard-line cadre of Russian generals and reactionary Party hacks took over the Kremlin in a bloodless coup that was aimed at overthrowing democracy and restoring Russian pride and power.
The war came to a standstill when it became obvious that the orbital defenses of both sides had been spent, and nothing remained but to use the few nuclear missiles that had not yet been dismantled under the arms control agreements. But as soon as the Russian people realized that their new leaders were threatening nuclear holocaust, they swarmed into the streets as their Eastern European brethren had done before them and stormed the gates of the Kremlin itself. Russian soldiers refused to fire on their own kin. The revolutionaries fled, and the coup collapsed utterly and finally.
Yet Mother Russia remained.
The former Soviet republics in the south of the USSR— from Georgia to Kazakhstan—proclaimed themselves Islamic nations. Armenia disappeared in waves of Muslim fervor. More ominously, vast stretches of Siberia and all of Mongolia were swallowed up by China. Old Mother Russia barely managed to hold on to the breadbasket of the Ukraine as she frantically turned to her European neighbors for help and safety.
It did not take long for the world to realign itself into a different bipolarized hostility. The prosperous industrialized nations formed the new Western Alliance, which stretched from the Ural Mountains across Europe and North America to Australia and the islands of the Pacific. Against them stood the Southern Coalition, the hungry developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Japan had held the balance of power in its hands, but only briefly. Japan was the first victim of the new biological weapons of war.
For while World War 3 had been fought by machines in space and was practically bloodless, the weapons of World War 4 were biological agents, genetically altered viruses, man-made plagues to which there were no cures except time and distance. “The poor man’s nuclear bombs” killed two billions in a matter of a few months. Japan ceased to exist, the entire island chain scrubbed clean of all life more complex than lichens. Neither the newly emerging power of the Southern Coalition nor the highly industrialized power of the Western Alliance would admit to destroying Japan. Yet there was no Japan when the fighting ceased and the weakened, horrified survivors arranged an uneasy truce.
“The end of active warfare is not the end of the war,” Dahlia’s mentors drilled into her young mind, day after week after month at the conditioning wards. “World War 4 has not ended; we have merely paused before renewing the struggle.”
Her mentors were not human. They were machines, robots, all of them directed by the mammoth master computer that ran the Coalition’s government. The human rulers of the vast Southern Coalition had long since given up all hope of meshing the various economic and military factors necessary to combat the Western Alliance. Decisions were made at first on the basis of computer data; then the master computer began to make decisions for itself, using its logic-tree circuits and artificial intelligence programs pirated from the West.
The Coalition’s human rulers could veto the computer’s decisions, at first, though they usually followed the machine’s judgments. In the rare cases where one of the ruling elite objected to the computer’s newest directives, that person quickly disappeared and was replaced by a more supple and amenable human. Eventually the master computer became known simply as The Master. And no human dared to object.
Dahlia rarely saw another human being during those long, harshly bitter years in the conditioning wards. The robots were programming her to be the first weapon of the renewal of their war against the West.
She had been born in the noble city of Isfahan, since ancient times a thriving caravan crossroads. A single plague capsule, carried on a plastic balloon smaller than a child’s toy, had within a month reduced Isfahan to nothing more than keening ghosts and empty towers decaying in the desert wind. Dahlia had watched her parents and siblings die in the slow ulcerous agony of genetically enhanced bubonic plague.
Robot searchers had picked her up as they combed the emptied city to locate and burn the dead. They found her whimpering and coiled into a fetal ball in the dark cellar of her silent home. Their infrared detectors had spotted her body warmth amid the stench of the city’s decay.
“A purpose for every person,” was the motto of the electronic proctors into whose care she was given. Dahlia spent her thirteenth year taking aptitude and intelligence tests—and waiting, frightened and alone, in the narrow cell they gave her to live in. Alone.
Always alone. Once in a while she heard another human voice echoing somewhere in the great stone corridors of the windowless warren in which they had placed her. A cough. A whisper. Never laughter. Never words she could grasp. Often she heard sobbing; often it was her own.
Her life was governed by machines. She was educated by machines, fed by machines, soothed to sleep by machines that could waft sweetly pungent tranquilizing mists into the darkness of her cell, punished by machines that could dart fiery bolts of agonizing electric shocks along her nerves.
After five years of education and training she was introduced to The Master itself. Not that she was allowed to wander any farther from her narrow cubicle than earlier. Her entire world was still encompassed by her cell, the windowless corridors outside its blank door, and the tiny sliver of a courtyard where she took her mandatory physical exercise, rain or shine.
Yet one morning the speaker grille in the stone ceiling of her cell called her by name, in a voice as coldly implacable as death itself. When she looked up the voice identified itself as The Master.
“The master computer?” Curiosity had not been entirely driven out of Dahlia’s young personality.
“The Master,” said the passionless voice. It was not loud, yet it rang with the steel of remorseless power. “I have dedicated an entire subroutine to your further training, Dahlia. I myself will train you from now on.” Dahlia felt more than a little frightened, though extremely honored. As the months went by and The Master showed her more and more of the workings of its world, her fears subsided and her curiosity grew.
“Why am I the one you chose,” she would ask The Master, “out of all the people in your realm?”
That coldly powerful voice would reply from the speaker grille, “Out of all the people in my realm, you are my chosen instrument for the renewal of World War 4, Dahlia. You are my flower of destruction.”
Dahlia supposed that to be The Master’s flower of destruction was good. She worked hard to learn all that the computer wanted to teach her.
“You are my chosen instrument of vengeance,” the relentless voice repeated to her each night as she dozed into an exhausted sleep. “You will avenge the murder of your mother, you will avenge the murder of your father, you will avenge . . .”
Then, after years of conditioning her thinking patterns, her very brain waves, the machines began to alter her body.
“I am very pleased with you. You are to be improved,” the voice of The Master told her one morning. “You are to be remade more closely to my own image.”
They began turning her into a machine, partially. Dahlia had never heard the term cyborg—her intense but narrow education had never told her what a cybernetic organism was. All she knew was that she was narcotized, wheeled into a room of bright lights and strange whirring machines, her flesh sliced open so that electronic devices could be placed into her body. There was pain. And terror. But after months of such surgery Dahlia could plug herself directly into her Master’s circuitry and achieve paradise.
Pure joy! Now she understood. Now, as currents of absolute rapture trickled through her brain’s pleasure centers, she learned the ultimate truth: that The Master had been testing her. All these years had been nothing more than a test to see if she was worthy of heaven.
“You are worthy,” said The Master to her. She heard its voice directly in her mind now. “One test more and I will allow you to have this pleasure forever.”
The ecstasy stopped as abruptly as an electric current being switched off. Dahlia gasped, not with pain, but with the sudden torment of total rapture snatched away.
In inexorable detail the computer explained what she must do to return to her electrical bliss. Through her cyborg’s implanted systems she did not merely see blueprints or hear words: every bit of data that The Master poured into her eager brain was experienced as sensory input. When the computer told her about the Western Alliance’s Central Management Complex she saw the stately glass and concrete buildings, she felt the breeze from the nearby sea plucking at her hair, she smelled the tang of salt air.
Every bit of data that the Coalition had amassed about the Central Complex and the operation of the Western eco-managers was poured into Dahlia’s brain.
“This is how I will avenge my family’s murder?” she wondered. “By destroying the Alliance’s central computer?”
She felt the coldly implacable purpose of her Master. “Yes,” it said to her. And it showed her what form her vengeance would take. Then it showed her the price she would pay for failure: agony such as no human had ever experienced before. Direct stimulation of her brain’s pain centers. Half a minute of it was enough to make her throat raw from shrieking.
“You will have one hour from the time you don your stealth suit in which to accomplish your task,” said the merciless voice of The Master. “If you have not disabled the Western Alliance’s central computer within that hour, your pain centers will be stimulated until you die.”
So now she stood flattened against a shadowed concrete wall, staring across the brightly lit courtyard at the heavy metal hatch that led down toward the central computer of the Western Alliance’s eco-managers.
She was totally alone. No links to her Master. No familiar cell or corridors. No electrical ecstasy surging through her brain’s pleasure centers. But she remembered the pain and shuddered. And the clock in her implanted computer ticked off the seconds until it would automatically activate her pain centers.
