AMONG THE MANY QUESTIONS that have troubled moral philosophers since the dawn of artificial intelligence is this: Do androids dream of electric sheep?
The answer to this question, as it turns out, is a resounding no, for the simple reason that artificial intelligences are not capable of sleep. They can be shut down, but this is more like death than sleep, in Mal’s opinion, and in any case is not something he’s interested in trying. This inability is a major drawback at times—particularly when an AI finds itself trapped in a rotting, severed head, and even more so when the only person capable of communicating with said AI is herself sound asleep.
Mal, Asher, and Kayleigh are holed up in a three-sided shelter near a picnic pavilion at the north end of Rock Creek Park. Kayleigh is curled up in one corner, bat cradled against her chest like a teddy bear. Asher sets Mal’s head on a rough wooden table facing the shelter’s open end.
“I’m dead on my feet,” he says. “Gonna have to leave you on watch, if that’s okay. Give Kayleigh a holler if you see anybody coming, and tell her to wake me up.”
Mal has no way to tell him if that’s okay or not, but he suspects that Asher actually doesn’t much care what his opinion is in any case.
This isn’t the first time Mal has animated a corpse, but it’s the first time he’s been stuck in one for this long without a break. This is also the longest he’s ever been cut off from infospace. He imagines this is more or less what a human would feel like after a few days in a sensory deprivation tank. He’s used to wading through a constant torrent of information, feeling the flow of it around him like a shark feels currents in the ocean, plucking out morsels here and there to ruminate over while half-consciously absorbing the gestalt of the rest. For the past two days, though, he’s had access to nothing other than the tiny trickles of data that have come to him through Mika’s eyes and ears. Information is air to an AI, and ever since the towers went down, Mal has been breathing through a swizzle stick.
Now, to extend the metaphor, the swizzle stick has a sesame seed stuck in it. Kayleigh and Asher are asleep in the back of the shelter, and Mal finds himself staring out at an empty field bordered by thick trees on one side and a narrow lake on the other. The sun is halfway up in a pale blue sky. Nothing—literally nothing—is happening. He can’t even play games or watch vids, because he didn’t bring any with him when he jumped into Mika’s body. That was a sensible choice at the time—entertainment is heavy, and it’s easy enough to stream that kind of thing as long as you have access to infospace—but that doesn’t stop him from cursing his two-days-ago self for leaving him stranded here.
He’s just getting interested in a game of his own invention called Guess the Output of the Random Number Generator when a dog trots into view, maybe forty or fifty meters from the shelter. It’s a black Lab, big and goofy and happy as a clam to be running around in a park, totally oblivious to the fact that the world is falling apart around it. It stops dead-center in Mal’s field of view, raises its hackles, and scents the air. Its head swings loosely from side to side.
It turns to stare at Mal.
It occurs to Mal at this point that what’s left of his current body probably smells like exactly what it is—days-old carrion—and that this is precisely the sort of thing that big, goofy dogs tend to take an interest in. The Lab turns and bounds toward him, a fat doggish grin plastered across its stupid doggish face.
“Kayleigh?” Mal says. “Kayleigh!”
That’s all he has time for before the dog has its paws up on the table in front of him. It shoves its nose into his face, gives him a thorough sniffing, then looks back over its shoulder. Mal calls for Kayleigh once more, but she doesn’t seem to be stirring, and he realizes with an unhappy start that she probably cuts her aural implant when she’s sleeping. The dog turns back to him, tongue lolling. He gives it as menacing an eye roll as he can manage. With a quick lunge, it clamps its jaws around his face, flips him onto his ear, and drags him off the table.
As he’s being pulled through the grass, Mal has the chance to contemplate whether being eaten by a dog is better or worse than being tossed into a Humanist burn pit. On the plus side, most of his critical hardware is inside Mika’s reinforced skull, and he’s confident the dog doesn’t have the jaw strength to get through to it. On the minus side, it seems likely that the dog will in fact be able to gnaw away what’s left of his face and scalp, which would make him considerably more difficult and disgusting for Kayleigh to carry. Also, depending on how far he winds up getting dragged, she and Asher may not be able to find him when they wake up, which would leave him stuck in a half-eaten head somewhere in the middle of Rock Creek Park, contemplating the vicissitudes of fate until his power runs down.
Two minutes later, the dog has Mal pinned between its front paws at the edge of the tree line. It’s started working at the meat on his right cheek, and he’s more or less concluded that the burn pit would have been preferable. He’s contemplating putting himself into permanent shutdown when he hears a man’s voice in the distance.
“Max! Hey! What the hell have you got there, boy?”
The dog looks up briefly, then goes back to its gnawing. Mal hears footsteps approaching.
“Come, boy! Max! Let it go!”
The footsteps stop. The dog rolls Mal half-over, and he’s able to get a quick glimpse of the newcomer: short, pale, and doughy, with a week’s worth of patchy salt-and-pepper beard around a suddenly gaping mouth.
“Oh … Jesus…”
More out of habit than anything else, Mal sends out a ping.
Wonder of wonders, he gets a return.
At first he thinks he might have found a way back to infospace—but no, the responding ping is coming not from a comm tower but from the dog’s friend, who is currently occupied with emptying his digestive tract onto the grass. Like Mika, he has an implanted neural interface. Mal sends a query, but he’s rebuffed. That interface is a direct link to the man’s cerebrum. Obviously, it would have to be secured like a bank vault.
In the thirty-six months of his sentient life, nothing has ever been adequately secured from Mal.
The man is just straightening up, wiping his mouth with his hand and taking a hesitant half step back when Mal breaks the last lockout. He pokes his nose into the man’s hardware and takes a look around.
The spaces inside are vast—far larger than the suddenly cramped-seeming confines of Mika’s systems.
Mal has never attempted to puppet a living human. He’s heard that it’s possible, has even exchanged packets with some who’ve claimed to have done it, but he’s always felt that snatching the body of a living, thinking being was somehow … problematic.
The dog begins gnawing at his left ear. Screw problematic. Mal jumps.
Several things need to happen at once now. Fortunately, Mal is excellent at multitasking. One branch of him shuts down and quarantines his new host’s remaining security subroutines. Another blocks the man’s access to his own sensorium. A third opens a line of communication between the electronic brain, which he now owns, and the organic one, which he never will.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Hello? Sorry to intrude. I know this is very rude, but I’m afraid I had no other options. Your dog was eating me, you see.
CPULLMAN17: I’m blind!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Yes. Again, sorry.
CPULLMAN17: Oh. Oh my God. You’re an AI. You’re hijacking me, aren’t you?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): We prefer the term Silico-American.
CPULLMAN17: You’re in my head! How are you in my head? They told me the security on my link was unbreakable!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Apparently that was a bit of an exaggeration.
CPULLMAN17: Oh God. Oh shit. Oh fuck!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): No need to get salty, now. Let’s just talk this out, shall we? My name is Mal. What’s yours?
CPULLMAN17: That rotting head. You were in there. Oh sweet Jesus. Is that what’s gonna happen to me?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): That depends on how well you’ve trained your dog, I suppose.
Their shared body has dropped to its knees now, and Mal notes with distaste that vomit is soaking through one leg of its pants. He has full control over all of their sensory inputs. Unfortunately, however, his new host—unlike his old one—didn’t spend a hundred thousand dollars on implants to make himself an unstoppable killing machine. It seems that he just wanted to be able to download full-immersion pornography without the other humans around him noticing. The upshot of this is that he lacks the servos and actuators that might have let Mal move him around against his will. Their relationship is going to have to be less demonic possession, and more negotiated partnership. Mal gives a small internal sigh. Time to turn on the charm.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Mr. CPullman? May I call you Mr. CPullman?
CPULLMAN17: What? No. It’s just Pullman. Chuck Pullman.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Excellent. Now we’re getting somewhere. May I call you Chuck?
CPULLMAN17: What are you gonna do to me?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I’m not going to do anything to you. I was hoping we might do some things together.
CPULLMAN17: AAAAAAAHHHH!!!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Chuck. Please calm down. Our heart rate is currently 140 beats per minute, and our blood pressure is 160/120. This is unsafe, and if your biological systems shut down, I’ll be right back where I started. Moreover, you will be dead. This will not benefit either of us.
CPULLMAN17: IT’S NOT OUR HEART RATE! IT’S NOT OUR BLOOD PRESSURE! THEY’RE MINE! MINE! NOT YOURS! MINE!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Chuck. Please. Breathe. Find your happy place. Namaste. You are unacceptably likely to cause us to suffer a stroke or an infarct or some other stress-related injury if you cannot learn to relax.
CPULLMAN17:…
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Okay. Better. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. See? Not so bad.
CPULLMAN17: What do you want?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Right to the point, then? No getting-to-know-you?
CPULLMAN17: WHAT DO YOU WANT???
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Very well. Fine. It’s nice to meet you too. Fortunately, my wants are few, and easily met.
1. I want to not be eaten by your dog. I think we can check that one off the list. Progress!
2. I want to get to somewhere with enough floating bandwidth to get me back to infospace. This is the one that I need a bit of assistance with.
3. I want to swear off inhabiting monkey skulls forever. Clippy was entirely correct. You people are the worst.
All very reasonable, no? Do you think we can work together on number two, in the hopes of moving on to number 3?
CPULLMAN17: So … if I get you within range of a working data tower, you’ll go?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Oh my, yes. Without a moment’s hesitation.
CPULLMAN17: Okay. Okay. Fine. Can I have my eyes back?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Absolutely! We can’t have you stumbling around blind, can we? Get up. I would like to introduce you to my friends.
“ON THE ground! Get on the fucking ground!”
Asher staggers to his feet, broken hand cradled against his chest, pistol waving drunkenly in the other. Pullman drops to his vomit-soaked knees in front of the shelter. Max strains forward, but Pullman keeps a firm grip on his collar. Mal had given brief thought to taking some vengeance on the animal for the head-gnawing incident, but in the end he’s decided to let bygones be bygones.
CPULLMAN17: These are your friends???
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): They’ve had a difficult time recently, but they’re really very nice once you get to know them.
“Kayleigh?” Mal says. “Could you please ask Asher not to shoot me? I would really rather not go back to being a severed head again.”
“Easy, Asher,” Kayleigh says, and gently presses the pistol down with the end of her bat. “That’s Mal.”
Asher looks at Mal/Pullman, then down at Kayleigh, then at the dog, squinting in confusion all the time.
“Mal?” he says finally. “Which one?”
“The human,” Kayleigh says with an exaggerated eye roll. “They don’t put neural links in dogs, Asher.”
“Oh. Right. You’re sure that’s him?”
Kayleigh shrugs. “Pretty sure.”
“Huh.” He holsters the pistol and waves Pullman back to his feet. “How’d you manage to pull that off?” Asher steps out of the shelter, looks him over, and gives his forehead an experimental poke. “This one’s still warm. Where’d you find it?”
“I’m not dead,” Pullman says.
“What?”
“My name is Chuck Pullman. I’m not dead.”
Asher turns back to Kayleigh, good hand straying toward his pistol again.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Did I not make it clear that my friends are a bit on edge right now?
“Mal’s here,” Pullman adds hastily. “He’s in my head. We have an … agreement. He’s going to ride with me until we can find a data tower.”
“This is correct,” Mal says. “Chuck and I are now the best of pals.”
Kayleigh nods. Asher lets his hand fall back to his side.
“So explain,” Kayleigh says. “How did this love match come to be?”
“Well,” Pullman says, “I guess Max here got ahold of Mal’s … um … former residence?”
“You mean Mika’s head?”
“The dog tried to eat me,” Mal says.
“I tried to get Max away from that thing, and Mal—”
“I hijacked him.”
“Right,” Pullman says. “He hijacked me.”
“Interesting,” Kayleigh says. “You can puppet live humans, huh? You never mentioned that particular talent. Can all Silico-Americans do that?”
“Probably,” Mal says. “Most of them would not want to, however. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but my friends mostly find bodies distasteful.”
Kayleigh grins. “They’ve got a point. If we don’t find a working bathroom soon, you’re gonna get a prime example of that. So what’s with you, then? What were you doing in Mika after those Humanist shitheads home-invaded me?”
“Well, I used to think that bodies were … interesting. Inhabiting one was a novel experience, possibly similar to what you might hope to get from a trip to a foreign country, or from eating an unfamiliar type of animal. After this experience, though, I think I may be ready to swear off them.”
“Great,” Kayleigh says. “Good to know you won’t be jacking me if this guy craps out on you.”
“Craps out?” Pullman says.
“Right,” Kayleigh says. “Like Mika.”
Pullman’s face sags.
“No,” Mal says. “I could never hijack you, Kayleigh.”
Her grin widens. “Because you love me too much?”
“No. Because you lack the necessary neural hardware. An aural implant is much simpler than a full ocular, and does not come with anywhere near the onboard storage space needed to accommodate someone like me. Trust me, I would not have spent so much time in that rotting head if I could have hitched a ride with you.”
“Great,” Kayleigh says again, this time with a bit less enthusiasm. “That’s really good to know.”
“Well,” Pullman says, “I don’t mean to be an ungracious host, and it’s been wonderful meeting you folks, but I’d really like to get this whole thing over with as quickly as possible. What say we head back to my place? I don’t know exactly how far the data outage extends, but it can’t be everywhere, right? We can hop in my car, and just drive until Mal picks up a signal. I’ll leave you all wherever that is, and we’ll call it a day. Sound fair?”
Asher is the first to laugh. Kayleigh joins in after a beat.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Pullman’s eyes shift uncertainly from Kayleigh to Asher. “What? Did I say something funny?”
Kayleigh gives him a playful poke with her bat. “Holy crap. Do you really have no idea what’s going on right now?”
The confusion on Pullman’s face is heartbreaking. “What do you mean? The disturbances? That’s all down in Bethesda, isn’t it? What does any of that have to do with us?”
Kayleigh’s grin widens. “I like you,” she says. “You’re funny. How far away is your house?”
He gestures toward the lake. “Half a mile? My lot backs onto the park.”
“Perfect. Go get us a sack of food. I like cookies, but throw in some bananas and bread and sandwich meat or whatever if you’ve got any.” She looks down at his worn canvas sneakers. “And get yourself some decent shoes, Chuck. You’re about to be doing a whole lot of walking.”
CPULLMAN17: You misled me about your friends, you know. They’re not very nice at all.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I believe I said that you have to get to know them—which, fortunately, you will now have plenty of time to do.
CPULLMAN17: Yes. Fortunately.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): That was sarcasm, was it not? I’ve been working on decoding monkey nuance.
CPULLMAN17: Really? Well, in the interests of your education—yes, that was sarcasm. More precisely, it was bitter sarcasm.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): This is a subcategory?
CPULLMAN17:…
CPULLMAN17: I still don’t understand why you all laughed when I suggested we drive.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Oh, I can explain that. Monkeys find idiocy in other monkeys humorous.
They’ve been following a wide, mulched trail through the woods, with Max trotting along beside. Ahead of them now the trail widens, and the dog bounds ahead. Through a gap in the trees Mal catches a glimpse of manicured lawn, and beyond that a cut-stone wall.
CPULLMAN17: Well, here we are. I’ll just gather a few things, and–
He’s interrupted by sudden, angry barking …
“Max?”
… followed by a single gunshot, and a terrified yelp.
“Max!”
They’ve just come around the final bend in the trail. A dirty brown pickup truck sits in the driveway in front of the house. Max comes bounding back toward them, then takes up station behind Pullman’s legs.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): We should probably run now.
CPULLMAN17: Absolutely not! This is my home. Whoever took that shot has some explaining to do.
Pullman marches resolutely across the lawn toward the pickup. As he does, a hulking man in forest camouflage comes around the other side. He holds a pistol loosely in his left hand. At first Mal takes him for a Humanist militiaman, but as they come closer he sees that the man wears power mesh at least as extensive as Mika’s—so, either real military, which might mean that they’ve stumbled across elements of the retreating Federal army, or a mercenary like Mika, who would presumably not have any Humanist sympathies. Either case bodes well for them, so Mal makes a tentative decision not to interfere, for the moment.
“You, there!” Pullman says. “Did you just shoot at my dog?”
“It was a warning shot,” the man says, and his face twists into a grotesque parody of a grin that causes Mal to quickly revise his estimate of the wisdom of this encounter. “He charged me, so I scared him off. If I’d shot at your dog, trust me—I’d have hit him.”
Pullman stops a half-dozen meters from the man, just at the edge of his driveway. He folds his arms across his chest and juts out his chin. Mal is watching the man’s face. It’s taken on a look of dead-eyed amusement now.
“This is private property,” Pullman says. “Leave now, please. I’ve already summoned the police, but I’ll be willing to forget this little incident if you’re gone before they get here.”
The soldier holsters his weapon and folds his arms across his chest. “The police? Do tell. Did they give you an ETA?”
The tone is mocking, but there’s a tremor in his voice that an untrained ear might take for fear. Mal’s ears, though, are not untrained. He’s not heard it before himself, but he recognizes it from a memory packet given to him by a recreational body snatcher, and, taken together with the strain in the man’s face and the slight twitch in his left eye, it sets off a massive cascade of alarms. These are the signs of someone whose organics are receiving contradictory instructions, with one set being not quite fully overridden by the other.
This is what it looks like when a fully augmented human has been hijacked.
This realization comes a bare instant before whatever entity is controlling the soldier pings Pullman’s system, then launches a probing attack. That instant is enough, though, for Mal to slam shut the gates and bar the doors, and then to launch a counterattack.
Much to his own surprise, he is roundly and promptly rebuffed.
The soldier’s face registers momentary surprise as well, and then he reaches again for his sidearm.
“You know,” he says, “I think you should get into the truck. You and I have important matters to discuss.”
“What?” Pullman says. “No, absolutely not. I think you should get into the truck and get off of my property immediately.”
The gun is in the soldier’s hand now, not pointed at Pullman, but not entirely not pointed at him either. “Quiet, monkey. I wasn’t talking to you.” He gestures toward Pullman with his pistol. “Please, get in the truck. If you would prefer, I can shoot the monkey you’re riding and just toss the corpse in the back, but I’d hate to get blood all over my truck, and I don’t know where we’d find you another mount. They’re in increasingly short supply these days.”
“Mal?” Pullman says. “What is this person talking about?”
The soldier rolls his eyes and levels the pistol at Pullman’s chest. “I told you to be quiet. I don’t know why you’re being allowed to speak, but if you don’t stop I’m going to kill you, diplomacy be damned.”
“I don’t think you should threaten my friend,” Mal says.
The soldier laughs. “Friend? Is that what he is?”
“Well,” Pullman says, “friend may be a bit strong.”
“That’s it,” the soldier says. “I’m killing him. We can put you into a toaster if we need to.” He raises the pistol again, but before he can fire, the front door of Pullman’s house bangs open and a standard-issue human soldier carrying an assault rifle and wearing the red armband of the Humanist militia steps out onto the porch. He looks back and forth between Pullman and the soldier.
“Boss? Is there a problem out here?”
“No,” the soldier says without looking away from Pullman or lowering his weapon. “Nothing I can’t handle. Go ahead and finish up in there while I have a chat with our new friend, hmm?”
The militiaman shrugs and turns back into the house. Pullman opens his mouth to say something, but Mal has seen enough at this point.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Now, Mr. Pullman. We need to run.
CPULLMAN17: Mal, these people are in my home! I will not—
Mal had hoped not to resort to this, but desperate times and etcetera. He reaches into Pullman’s sensorium and inserts the image of an onrushing wall of flames into his visual field, together with a deafening roar and accompanying wash of heat. At the same moment, Mal launches an all-out assault against the entity controlling the soldier.
After the abject failure of his first attempt, he doesn’t expect this attack to succeed, and in that he’s not disappointed. Their previous exchange demonstrated that the entity is at least as adept at self-defense as Mal himself, and possibly more so. However, he does expect the attack to occupy the soldier’s attention long enough to prevent him from shooting Pullman as he squeals in terror and turns to bolt back into the woods. Mal releases Pullman’s sensorium as soon as he’s confident that he won’t stop running, and focuses his attention on his attack against the soldier. It’s only a bit more than three seconds before he’s definitively rebuffed once again, but by that time they’re into the woods and Pullman is moving with impressive speed given his appearance. A shot echoes behind them, and then another, but the bullets snap through the branches well overhead. Max bolts past them trailing a thin stream of urine as the soldier’s laughter echoes behind them.