Alone in a strange and hostile place, out in the open under a sky studded with twinkling stars. Dahlia took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadows, into the bright lights of the wide courtyard. As she walked swiftly, silently toward the gleaming metal hatch, she glanced up at the monitoring cameras perched atop the light poles. Not one of them moved.
The hatch seemed to be a mile away. Off to her right a human guard came into view around the corner of a building, a huge gray Great Dane padding along beside him. The dog looked in Dahlia’s direction and whined softly, but did not leave the guard’s side. Dahlia froze in the middle of the courtyard, unmoving until they disappeared around the next corner.
I am invisible, she told herself. She wished for a tranquilizing spray but knew that she had to keep all her senses on hair-trigger alert. The clock ticked on.
She reached the hatch at last. The computer in her helmet fed her its data on the hatch’s lock mechanism. Dahlia saw it in her mind as a light-sculpture, color-coded to help her pick her way through the intricate electronic mechanism without setting off the automated alarms.
The sensors implanted in her fingertips made her feel as if she were part of the hatch’s electronic system itself. She did not feel cold metal; the electronic keyboard felt like softly yielding silk. The mechanism sang to her like the mother she could barely remember.
The massive hatch swung noiselessly open to reveal a steep metal stairway leading down into darkness. Dahlia stepped inside quickly and shut the hatch behind her before the guard returned.
She blinked her eyes and an infrared display lit up her helmet visor. She saw the faint deeply red lines of scanner beams crisscrossing the deep stairwell. She knew that if she broke any one of those pencil beams every alarm in the complex would start screaming. And some of those beams automatically intensified to a laser power that could slice flesh like a burning scalpel.
She hesitated only a moment. No alarms had been triggered by the hatch’s opening. Good. Now she slithered onto her belly and started snaking down the metal steps headfirst. Some of the beams rose vertically from the stair treads. Dahlia eased around them and, after what seemed like hours, reached the bottom of the stairwell.
Slowly she got to her feet, surprised to find her legs rubbery, her heart thundering. Her time was growing short. She was in a narrow bare corridor with a low ceiling. A single strip of fluorescents cast a dim bluish light along the corridor. Much like the conditioning wards where she had spent so much of her life. No scanning beams in sight. She blinked once, twice, three times, going from an infrared display to ultraviolet and finally back to visual.
No scanning beams. No guards. Not even any cameras up on the walls that she could see. Still Dahlia kept all her defenses activated. Invisible, undetectable, she made her way as swiftly as she dared down the long blank-walled corridor toward the place where the central computer was housed.
“We will use their own most brilliant creation against them,” her Master had told her. “The war will be won at a single stroke.”
The Western Alliance was rich and powerful because its economy was totally integrated. Across Europe from the Urals to the British Isles, across the North American continent, across the wide Pacific to distant Australia and New Zealand, the Alliance’s central computer managed an integrated economy that made its human population wealthy beyond imagination.
While the Southern Coalition languished in poverty, the Western Alliance reached out to the Moon and asteroids for the raw materials to feed its orbital factories. While millions in Asia and Africa and Latin America faced the daily threat of starvation, the Western Alliance’s people were fat and self-indulgent.
“Their central computer must be even more powerful than you are,” Dahlia had foolishly blurted when she began to realize what her Master was telling her. A searing bolt of electric shock was her reward for such effrontery.
“Your purpose is to destroy their central computer, not to make inappropriate comparisons,” said the icy voice of her Master.
Dahlia bowed her head in submission.
The more complex a computer is, the easier to bring it down, she was told. Imagine the complexity of a central computer that integrates the economic, military, judicial, social, educational activities of the entire Western Alliance! Imagine the chaos if a virus can be inserted into the computer’s systems. Imagine.
Dahlia had never heard anything like laughter from The Master, but its pleasure at the thought was unmistakable. In loving detail her Master described how the Western Alliance would crumble once the virus she was to carry was inserted into its central processor.
“World War 4 was fought with biological viruses,” said The Master. “World War 4.5 will be fought with a computer virus.” It was the closest thing to humor that Dahlia had ever heard in her life.
With the virus crippling their central computer, the Alliance’s economy would grind to an abrupt halt. For the Alliance’s economy was dependent on information. Food produced in Australia could not be shipped to Canada without the necessary information. The electrical power grids of Europe and North America could not operate without minute-to-minute data on how much power had to be sent where. Transportation by air, ship, rail would be hopelessly snarled. Even the automated highways would have to close down.
With her cyborg’s senses Dahlia saw the mobs rioting in the streets, felt the power blackouts, smelled the stench of fear and terror as hunger stalked the great cities of the West. The rich and powerful fighting for scraps of food; lovely homes invaded by ragged, starving bands of scavengers; whole city blocks ablaze from the fury of the mob. She felt the heat of the flames that destroyed the Western Alliance.
“All this I will accomplish,” her Master exulted, “through you, my flower of destruction.”
Armies could not march without information to process their orders. And where would the Alliance direct its armies, once its central computer was ruined? The war would be won before the Alliance even understood that it had been attacked. The Coalition will have conquered the world without firing a shot.
All this Dahlia could achieve, must achieve. To avenge her dead family. To obtain everlasting ecstasy. To obey the inflexible command of her Master. To avoid the pain of inescapable punishment.
Trembling with anticipation, Dahlia hurried down the long corridor toward the secret lair of the West’s central computer complex, burning to exact vengeance for her murdered kin, trembling at the horrible death that awaited if she failed.
The long corridor ended at a blank door. Strangely, it was made of what seemed like nothing more than wood. Dahlia placed her fingertips on the doorknob. There was no lock. She simply turned the knob and the door opened.
She stepped into a small well-lit room. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a computer display screen and a keyboard on it. Nothing else. The walls were bare. The ceiling was all light panels. The floor felt resilient, almost springy. The computer display unit and keyboard bore no symbols of the Western Alliance; not even a manufacturer’s logo marred their dull matte-gray finishes.
Closing the door behind her, Dahlia searched the room with her eyes. Then with her infrared and ultraviolet sensors. No scanning beams. No cameras. No security devices of any sort.
Strange. This is too easy, she told herself.
The room felt slightly warmer than the corridor on the other side of the door. The air seemed to hum slightly, as if some large machines were working on the other side of the walls, or perhaps beneath the floor. Of course, Dahlia reasoned. The main bulk of the massive computer surrounds this puny little room. This tiny compartment here is merely a monitoring station.
A small swivel chair waited in front of the desk. With the uneasy feeling that she was stepping into danger, Dahlia went to the chair and sat in it, surprised for a heartbeat’s span that she could not see her own legs, nor any reflection of herself on the dark display screen. Nothing but a brief shimmer of light, gone before it truly registered on her conscious mind.
No keyboard for her. She felt along her invisible skintight leggings and pulled a hair-thin optical filament out of its narrow pouch. Touching it to the display screen, she saw that its built-in laser head easily burned through the plastic casing and firmly embedded itself inside. She connected the other end of the filament to the microscopic socket in the heel of her right hand.
It took less than a heartbeat’s span of time for the computer implanted inside Dahlia’s skull to trace out the circuitry of the Western machine before her. Dahlia sensed it as a light display on the retinas of her eyes, her probing computer-enhanced senses making their way along the machine’s circuits with the speed of light until . . .
“We meet at last,” said a mild, light tenor voice in her mind.
Dahlia stiffened with surprise. She had expected any of a wide variety of defensive moves from the Western computer, once it realized she had invaded its core. A pleasant greeting was not what she had been prepared for.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the voice said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Dahlia was absolutely certain that the voice belonged to the central computer. There was no doubt at all in her mind. She got the clear impression of a gentle, youthful personality. Nothing at all like the stern cold steel of her own Master. This personality was warm, almost— She caught her breath. There was also the definite impression of others. Not merely a single computer personality, but multiple personalities. Many, many others. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. Or even more.
“You’re really very pretty,” the voice in her mind said. “Beautiful, almost.”
“You can see me?”
“Not your outside. It’s your mind, the real you. There are old scars there, deep wounds—but your mind is basically a very lovely one.”
