Aces High

UNTO THE SIXTH GENERATION

By Walter Jon Williams

Part One

Cold rain tapped on the skylights. The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner, and Maxim Travnicek was thankful-the jangling had been going on for days. He lit a Russian cigarette and reached for a bottle of schnapps.

Travnicek took reading glasses out of his jacket and peered at the controls on the flux generators. He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome. To his former colleagues at MIT he was known as "Czechoslovakia's answer to Victor Frankenstein," a label coined by a fellow professor, Bushmill, who had later gotten a dean's appointment and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity.

"Fuck your mother, Bushmill," Travnicek said, in Slovak. He swallowed schnapps from his bottle. "And fuck you too, Victor Frankenstein. If you'd known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble."

The comparison with Frankenstein had stung. The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. His first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein's alma mater, Ingolstadt. He'd hated every minute of his time in Bavaria. He'd never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years.

Now, after Ingolstadt, after MIT, after Texas A amp;M, he was reduced to this loft. For weeks he had lived in a trance, existing on ca

Always it had been thus. When he grew obsessed by a project everything else fell by the wayside. He barely needed to sleep; his body temperature fluctuated wildly; his thoughts were swift and purposeful, moving him solidly toward his goal. Tesla, he had read, was the same way-the same ma

But now, in the late morning, the trance had faded. The work was done. He wasn't certain how-later on he'd have to go through it all piece by piece and work out what he'd accomplished; he suspected he had about a half-dozen basic patents here that would make him rich for all time-but that would be later, because Travnicek knew that soon the euphoria would vanish and weariness would descend. He had to finish the project before then. He took another gulp of schnapps and gri

The loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents. Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop microcomputers. Papers, empty food tins, and ground-out cigarettes littered the crude pressboard floor. Blowups of Leonardo's drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.

Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man. He was hairless and the roof of his skull was transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo's better wet dreams.

The man on the table was co

Travnicek adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit. He couldn't afford to heat his entire loft, and instead wore an, electric suit intended by its designers to keep portly outdoorsmen warm while they crouched in duck blinds. He glanced at the skylights. The rain appeared to be lessening. Good. He didn't need Victor Frankenstein's cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.

He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience proper dress was important to him and he wore a tie and jacket under the jumpsuit-and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators. A low moan filled the loft, was felt as a deep vibration through the floorboards. The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered. Half went out. The moan became a shriek. Saint Elmo's fire danced among the roofbeams. There was an electric smell.

Dimly, Travnicek heard a regular thumping. The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.

The scream reached its peak. Ultrasonics made Travnicek's worktables dance, and shattered crockery throughout the building. In the apartment below, the television set imploded. Travnicek threw another switch. Sweat trickled down his nose.

The android on the table twitched as the energy from the flux generators was dumped into his body. The table glowed with Saint Elmo's fire. Travnicek bit through the cardboard tube of his cigarette. The glowing end fell u

The sound from the generators began to die down. The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.

"You'll pay for that television, motherfucker!"

"Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling," said Travnicek. In German, an ideal language for the excremental. The stu

Travnicek stepped up to the table. "How are you?" he asked.

"All monitored systems are functioning." The android's voice was deep and spoke American English.

Travnicek smiled and spat the stub of his cigarette to the floor. He'd broken into a computer in the AT amp;T research labs and stolen a program that modeled human speech. Maybe he'd pay Ma Bell a royalty one of these days. "Who are you?" he asked.

The android's eyes searched the loft deliberately. His voice was matter-of-fact. "I am Modular Man," he said. "I am a multipurpose multifunctional sixth-generation machine intelligence, a flexible-response defensive attack system capable of independent action while equipped with the latest in weaponry. "

Travnicek gri

"To obey my creator, Dr. Maxim Travnicek. To guard his identity and well-being. To test myself and my equipment under combat conditions, by fighting enemies of society. To gain maximum publicity for the future Modular Men Enterprises in so doing. To preserve my existence and well-being." Travnicek beamed down at his creation. "Your clothes and modules are in the cabinet. Take them, take your guns, and go out and find some enemies of society. Be back before sunset." The android lowered himself from the table and stepped to a metal cabinet. He swung open the door. "Flux-field insubstantiality," he said, taking a plug-in unit off the shelf. With it he could control his flux generators so as to rotate his body slightly out of the plane of existence, allowing him to move through solid matter. "Flight, eight hundred miles per hour maximum." Another unit came down, one that would allow the flux generators to manipulate gravity and inertia so as to produce flight. "Radio receiver tuned to police frequencies." Another module.

The android moved a finger down his chest. An invisible seam opened. He peeled back the synthetic flesh and his alloy chestplate and revealed his interior. A miniature flux generator gave off a slight Saint Elmo's aura. The android plugged the two modules into his alloy skeleton, then sealed his chest. There was urgent chatter on the police band.

"Dr. Travnicek," he said. "The police radio reports an emergency at the Central Park Zoo."