Denner_s Wreck

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

Bredon had long ago lost track of time, and it occurred to him, as he sat at the entertainment console sketching commands on a sensor with his thumb, to ask Gamesmaster how long he had been in Arcade. Before him, naked women who had never lived anywhere but his imagination danced obscenely. Several bore a remarkable resemblance to Lady Sunlight, but he had never dared to intentionally depict her.

The machine's answer shocked him. He flicked the sensor aside, and the holographic display he had been manipulating vanished in a mist of pinkish sparkle, leaving only the faint scent of female sweat that he had added for an extra touch of realism.

“Four wakes?” he said, looking up at the vermilion ceiling. “Just four wakes?"

“Well, seven lights, anyway; it's just now first sunset outside."

“Is that all?"

“Hey, kid, it's enough!” Gamesmaster replied. “What did you think?"

“I've learned so much,” Bredon said, marvelling. “It feels as if I've been here a season or more!"

Gamesmaster buzzed derisively. “Not hardly. You've slept just four times; did you think you were going a couple of dozen wakes at a time?"

“I don't know; I lost track, spending all that time under the ne… nyoo…"

“Neural-pattern imprinter."

“That's right, the imprinter. That seemed to last forever, sometimes."

“It generally took about ten seconds a shot."

“I know, I just… wait a minute.” He paused, readjusting himself to the real world after hours in the fantasy-land of high technology. “Four wakes? Has Geste been back?"

“No, he hasn't, not yet, but as a matter of fact he's on his way right now."

“I thought he must have come and gone while I was being taught,” Bredon said, concerned. “What took so long? Has something gone wrong?"

“That's hard to say,” Gamesmaster replied judiciously. “He didn't exactly set any recruiting records, but so far nobody's shot at him since he left the mountains."

“Who does he have as allies now?"

“The same two he started with, Imp and the Skyler."

Startled, Bredon asked, “No one else?"

“No one else. He got resounding disinterest from all the rest, from Starflower to the Lady of the Lake."

“Can the three of them stop Thaddeus?” Bredon asked worriedly.

“How the hell should I know?” Gamesmaster's voice remained fairly calm, but Bredon knew it was upset.

“Sorry, I guess that wasn't a fair question,” he said.

“It's all right. I guess we're both a little nervous."

Bredon hesitated, then asked, “Can an arti… artif… artificial intelligence be nervous? A silicon one, I mean?"

“Well, technically, kid, I don't really know if it's what you would consider nervousness, but it works for me. I feel it in situations that ought to make someone nervous, and not in others, and it's uncomfortable, so I call it nervousness."

“I guess that's nervousness, then. After all, I don't really know how other humans feel, just what I feel."

“Hey, you've got it exactly! Although I have the equipment to hook you up to someone else so you do feel what they do, if you want. But you'd need a volunteer to hook up to."

“Oh, that's all right,” Bredon said hastily, “I'm not that curious."

“The boss should be landing soon; he's just left the Skyland."

“Uh… why did he come back here, if he didn't get any more recruits? To pick me up?"

“Not hardly, kid. Don't get exaggerated ideas of your own importance. I don't think he plans to take you anywhere. He's here to pick up the weapons I've been whipping up for him."

“That's right, Bredon,” Geste's voice said from nowhere.

“Hey, boss, that's not nice! I hadn't had a chance to tell him you were listening!"

“I'm sure he doesn't mind."

“Well, I…” Bredon began.

“See?” Geste cut him off. “So, Gamesmaster, what little surprises have we got for Thaddeus?"

Bredon leaned forward in his seat and tapped panels on the console; a wallscreen blinked, and he found himself looking at a flawless three-dimensional image of Arcade's entrance hall where he had slept that first dark, home to the “enchanted forest” where almost all Geste's carbon-based playthings lived. The ceiling was rolling back to admit a flying platform. The Trickster himself, wearing dark red this time, stood aboard the airskiff.

“Well, boss, not as much as you might like, I'm sure,” Gamesmaster said. “I've whipped up a lot of plain-vanilla energy weapons, up and down the spectrum, most of them mobile and semi-intelligent and the rest portable miniatures, but I'll bet my last circuit that Thaddeus can defend against every damn one of them. I can't nail down his gene pattern exactly enough to tailor a personal virus-anything I can come up with by approximation has a good chance of killing someone else, usually Shadowdark, but sometimes Sheila or Feura, and it might get any number of short-lifers, so I haven't done any anti-perso

“What about his personal modifications, symbiotes, whatever?"

“We don't have good records on those, boss; remember, he's a born immortal, so he doesn't need as much symbiosis as most of you. I've worked up some bugs that I think might possibly eat out what he's got in his bloodstream, but you need to get them close. And of course, he may have added more that we don't know about at all, and he's sure to have his immune system alarm-rigged and multi-layered. Basically, boss, unless he's been sloppy, I don't think we can get at him with anything microscopic, but we may be able to invade some of his equipment and rot out the soft parts. And I've got some macroscopic stuff I'm working on, but even with forced growth and imprinted training I don't have anything bigger than a cockroach yet, and what I do have is dumber than dirt. They'll eat plastic, though, and dodge anything that moves, and they can take pretty high voltage without frying. I used what we had, but we didn't have anything in the forest that I could use unmodified. Those little brains don't hold much unless you build it into the genes, and they'd need better claws and teeth and defenses, so I've mostly been growing new ones, not training the ones we had. I'm working on some machine-killer mice, but they need another five wakes, minimum."

“We probably don't have five wakes."

“I know, boss, that's why I didn't bother with a metal-eating rhinoceros."

Geste, standing on his platform in the entrance chamber, cast a startled look in the direction of Gamesmaster's central processor. “Is that a joke?"

“Matter of opinion, I guess."

Geste smiled, and would have laughed aloud under other circumstances. “Have you got anything else?” he asked.

“Sure, boss, lots of it, hardware and software both, and a lot of it is already launched and trying to burrow into Fortress Holding, or riding in on the airwaves looking for a foothold. Saboteurs of all kinds. I think we may have taken out a few of his peripheral systems already, but I don't have enough feedback to be certain, and he's so decentralized and layered that it may not matter. And I've been working on space-benders and time-warping stuff; I've got a half-decent pocket-sized stasis field generator ready to go."

“Good, that's all good; I'm proud of you. Start loading it all on the Skyland, then, and see if you can give me an inventory, with instructions for use, that I can load into inboard memory."