CHAPTER SEVEN

HOW MICKOLAI DERDOWSKI GOT INTO TROUBLE

So everything was finally starting to look up. What with the food imports, we were all getting almost enough to eat for a change (including soon, we were promised, some real meat!), and of course we were also getting in the raw materials with which to expand our system of hydroponic vats. The growing light factory was going at full production for the first time since we’d built it. We finally had the sand to make enough glass. We’d have no problems reprocessing all these new organics again and again. The new projections showed that within a year, we could relax most of the emergency measures, and start living like human beings again, with clothes on, and with our families, and dating girls and having weddings and everything!

I guess the big problem was that Kasia and I started celebrating a little early, and she turned up pregnant.

"But Mickolai, I thought you said that you were totally segregated," my tank said.

"We were," I said. If she could talk, I figured I could talk.

"Then how . . . ? You know that I’m a machine, and that my grasp of this sort of thing is only theoretical, but my information was that physical contact was required . . ."

"It is. Love found a way."

"But I still don’t understand, Mickolai."

"Look! I said there was that hole in the wall, didn’t I? How graphic do I have to get?"

"That doesn’t sound very satisfying."

"It was a hell of a lot better than nothing at all," I said. "Say, just how much longer does this calibration thing have to go on, anyway?"

"I had enough data a while ago, Mickolai, but I was interested in what you were telling me. Why don’t you complete your story."

"There’s nothing much else to say. Kasia was pregnant and the gene prints said that I was the father. My uncle tried to help, but he got absolutely nowhere. Nobody cared about our work records or education or anything. The court case lasted three minutes and the jury didn’t even leave the room before they gave their verdict. Our kid was aborted as the law required, and we were both sentenced to death or worse."

"Living with me can’t be worse than death, Mickolai."

"It’s a lot like being buried alive, and the view is boring." I’d been forced to stare at these magic television goggles inside my helmet since I got up and they showed nothing but a blank wall.

"What do you think of this, Mickolai?"

Suddenly, my view changed from a blank palladium wall to a lovely forest scene from Earth, with a brook and a little waterfall. But more importantly, the view on the screen in my helmet was like an old-style TV picture, with the scan lines visible, but this was just like real life!

"It’s beautiful!" I said. Then a breeze blew through the woods, rustling the leaves, and I felt it on my cheek!

"How in the world did you do that?!" I shouted, and realized that I was smelling the trees and flowers, too.

"Direct neural stimulation, Mickolai. This is part of what I have been calibrating for. Get up. Walk around!"

"You’re serious?"

"Of course I’m serious! Do it!"

So I did. I stood up and looked down at my feet. I was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans, and a comfortable pair of sturdy hiking boots, just like I used to own on Earth. I looked at my hands, flexed my fingers, and they really were my own hands, not those of some movie actor. This wasn’t some kind of recording. I was wearing my old flannel shirt!

"It’s like a dream!" I said.

"Very perceptive, Mickolai. It’s called Dream World. It is very like a dream, except that you are awake and I am controlling it."

"I’ve never heard of such a thing! How could this be possible without my ever hearing about it?"

"Dream World is not the sort of thing that they’d tell a poor boy about, Mickolai. It takes some massive computer power and some very expensive sensors and inductors to do it, but if you were a manager with the Wealthy Nations Group, you’d probably have a Dream World set of your very own to play with."

"Then why would they put something this fancy on a tank?"

"Because almost everything required to do it with was already needed here for some other reason. In fact, all of the special equipment required for Dream World was originally developed for military purposes. The neural pickups are also needed for both biological monitoring and for receiving your command inputs. The neural induction circuits are required militarily to give you rapid feedback on combat situations. A Mark XIX already has a sentient computer, so more computer power is already available than is needed. In fact, the only additional cost was the fairly minor, one-time cost of purchasing an off-the-shelf program.

"In return, the army can vastly lower its expenses and logistical problems by not having to provide field kitchens, barracks, and Rest and Recuperation Facilities. Military training costs are reduced to almost nothing. Combat fatigue is greatly reduced. Military leave requirements are reduced. Reenlistment is no longer a serious problem. In fact, some troops elect to so rarely leave their tanks that they don’t even bother to draw their pay! It is good for morale and it doesn’t cost very much more. On top of that, I’m a weapon, and ever since the beginning of time, men have always done everything possible to make their weapons as perfect as possible, and hang the expense."

While pondering it all, I waved my hand in front of my face. "I’m controlling this dream, too."

"Correct, within certain parameters."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I have decided that this is a realistic environment. If you decided to flap your wings and fly, it wouldn’t work. You’d just flap your arms and stay where you were."

"But it doesn’t have to be realistic, does it?"

"No. The world can be anything that I want it to be, Mickolai," she said as a white unicorn walked by. "Go ahead! Try to catch it! You need to work up an appetite for lunch!"

It was all too magic for argument, so I took off running down the forest path after the beautiful creature. It was exhilarating, and it felt like I was in better shape than I’d ever been before. Even so, after more than a kilometer, I was gasping for breath and I had to slow down. The unicorn had fled, but I hadn’t been qualified to catch it since I was sixteen, anyway.

"That’s just fine, Mickolai. You’ve had close to an optimal workout. What would you like for lunch?"

"What do you have?" I asked, panting.

"That’s a silly question, my friend. You can have absolutely anything at all."

"Anything? Then make it a steak and a lobster, and both of them broiled. Hey, I really feel exhausted. Isn’t that carrying things a little too far?"

"You have just had a strenuous physical workout, Mickolai. It was real. While your mind was practicing running, and the coordination required to do it, your muscles were getting a workout as well. We have to get your weight up to optimal, and we don’t want to add any flab, do we?"

"Huh. If you can give me a workout without my knowing about it, why let me know at all? Why do I have to put up with the bother and pain of it all?" I said as I walked slowly down the path.

"I could do that if all I wanted was to put uncoordinated beef on you. You’ll need more than clumsy strength if you want to survive battle. You’ll need a mind that knows how to coordinate the muscle. Anyway, it’s not that painful, and it won’t get any worse providing that you stay cooperative."

"Well, you’re the boss." The path opened out into a meadow, and there, absurdly, was standing a table and a chair that belonged in a good French restaurant, with polished silverware and impossibly white linen. I sat down at the table, still surrounded by the lovely, manicured forest.

"I’m the boss until your training is complete. After that, we’re partners," she said as she brought a serving platter with a big silver lid to the table. She was an attractive young Scandinavian woman, wearing an abbreviated French maid’s costume, low cut, and with mesh stockings and high-heeled shoes.

"So you’re in the dream, too," I said. "I was wondering what you looked like."

"I can look like anything you want." Her hair darkened and somehow she now looked sort of Italian.

"Enough. Don’t throw everything at me at once," I said. I started into my meal, cutting off a big slice of beef and swabbing it in A1 sauce. It was indescribably delicious! Protein! "I suppose that my real body is eating, back in the tank?"

"Yes, although what you’re really eating is simply a nutritious paste. I didn’t bother with any special flavorings or textures. Do you want me to switch you back for a moment?"

"No. I’m in pig heaven, so I might as well wallow in it. So what I had for breakfast wasn’t a fantasy? You can fake it either way?" I broke off the lobster tail with my hands and split the back open with a pair of heavy scissors. I gouged out the meat with a small fork, dunked it into a bowl of melted butter and gloried in it! After three years on a horrible vegetarian diet, and not nearly enough of that, this was God in Heaven with All of His Angels!

"Yes, but maybe neither mode is faking. I control the food synthesizers, your neural net, and a whole lot else. But your personal reality is always what it appears to be."

"That’s either very profound or very sophomoric. To me it seems like a silly duplication for you to be able to do both."

"In combat, you’ll need a strong grip on reality, Mickolai. It wouldn’t be a good idea to have you in Dream World then."

"You’re the expert. For right now, are you going to eat?" God, but the lobster was delicious! The first I’d had in five years.

"No, but I can make it appear that way if you want me to."

"Don’t put yourself out. So what’s next on the agenda?"

"Once you finish eating, we’ll continue your training. This afternoon, we’ll start you on target pattern identification."

"Okay. When are you going to teach me how to drive this tank?"

"Not for quite a while. Not until we get into emergency override procedures. Ordinarily, I do all the driving, Mickolai. My reflexes are much quicker than yours could ever be."

"So you’re the driver and I’m the gunner? Is that how it works?" I wolfed down the rest of the magnificent steak and started work on the lobster claws. The tool provided looked like a nut cracker and wasn’t up to the job. Suddenly, some clean, new electrician’s tools appeared as part of the place setting. Needle nose pliers and diagonal cutters made quick work of the lovely beast.

"No, I handle the weapons as well. Again, my speed and accuracy are better than anything that you could ever attain."

"Then what do you need me in here for? A sacrificial victim?" I dropped an empty lobster claw on my plate.

"Of course not! You are a vital part of the system, or you will be once you are properly trained."

"Doing what, for God’s sake?"

"Doing just what I told you in the first place, Mickolai! Target pattern identification. It’s like this. I am a system of digital computers that are very well qualified to perform any task that can be quantified. If a problem can be defined, a machine can always be designed and programed to solve it better and faster than any human possibly could. I am a logical system and I can handle any logical problem. Your brain is not logical—"

"I resent that, young lady. I am perfectly sensible!" I started work on the baked potato, but my heart wasn’t really in it, even though it had real sour cream on it. I had eaten entirely too fast.

"I completely agree, Mickolai, but a human neural net is not a logical system. It’s an associative system. It is arranged to solve problems that are not well defined, or even those that are not defined at all! Except for some of your subsystems, like your visual apparatus, which are hardwired, the rest of you is self-programming, or maybe even non-programing!"

"You’re saying that I can do some things better than you?" I got a little of the salad down, too.

"Of course! You can spot the enemy! A tank with a trained human observer has nineteen times the combat life of a tank without one. Modern weapons are such that if we can see the enemy, we can destroy him. Some of my weapons configurations include a rail gun that can shoot a stream of osmium needles at one quarter of the speed of light. No armor, nothing physical can stand up to that for more than a few milliseconds."

"Then why do you have all the armor?" I asked.

"I can take quite a bit of punishment, but not a series of direct hits. Even a near miss by a rail gun is very destructive. This was all covered in the introductory lecture that I showed you, Mickolai. Weren’t you listening?"

"I think I must have been daydreaming for most of it."

"Humph. Then no recreation for you this evening, student! You have to watch it again, and this time there will be a quiz afterward."

"Yes, teacher. But for right now, it’s my job to find them and yours to destroy them?"

"Correct. And you must learn to be very good at finding them. If you don’t see the enemy and they see us, we both get killed. And if you make a mistake, and have me shoot out something that isn’t the enemy, and they see us doing it, well, an operating rail gun is about as obvious as a fireworks display. It does not take a keen observer to spot the source. If we shoot first and shoot wrong, we’re dead, too."

"I see. So it’s mostly a matter of hiding and sniping at each other."

"Right. You and I work together at hiding."

I’d finished eating, and the forest glen dissolved around me. I was in the tank again, flat on my back and watching the displays on my helmet screen, augmented by other information coming in through my ears and my spinal column.

The tank had active communication and detection systems, like lasers, radar and headlights, but these were never used in combat. Any energy that you put out can be used to detect you. Combat is done using passive systems only. We could search the whole electromagnetic spectrum, darn nearly, and hear everything from a tenth of a hertz up to a few megahertz, but we tried not to broadcast anything on our own.

It was a long afternoon, with the tank feeding me simulated displays and pointing out what other, more experienced operators had found, when as usual I had missed them entirely.

It’s hard to explain what I was actually doing, and how I was doing it. I was seeing, but I was seeing over a huge bandwidth, but while I was doing it, it seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. Then, if something caught my attention, I could narrow down my attention like a zoom lens, and I could look at only a small bit of the spectrum, if that’s what I wanted. All I can say is that at the time it seemed not at all unusual to be able to do this.

My new hearing was much the same as my new vision, in the way I could control it, pick out one part and amplify what I wanted.

My other communications with the tank also had that same strange-ordinary feeling about them. Sometimes, I simply knew what she wanted me to do, without her saying anything. When she did speak to me, it wasn’t in words, exactly, but I knew that she was talking and what she was saying. And it was fast, fifty times faster than ordinary conversation. When I wanted to point out a target, or whatever, I sort of thought "There!" and meant her to know what I was seeing, what I wanted her to do, and she always did.

I guess this doesn’t make much sense, the way I’ve put it, but I don’t know how else to explain it. As I write this journal, I’m going to write it as though all of our conversations were in regular words, and when we were in Dream World, as we were when I was eating lunch, they were. But in simulated combat, well, we used something else, and at Combat Speed.

Anyway, it seems that whatever I was doing, I had a knack for it.

"Well," she said at last, "That was a fairly good start, Mickolai. Tomorrow, you’ll do better. For now, let’s get in some more physical training and then have supper." Suddenly, I was back in the forest again.

"Suits me. Where’s my unicorn?"

She stepped out from behind some bushes. She was wearing gym shorts and track shoes, but she was topless. Worse still, she looked entirely too much like the real Kasia, the woman that I loved.

"No unicorn. This time you get to try and catch me!" She laughed and took off running.

I hesitated a moment, but then decided that I’d better stay with the program and followed her. It wasn’t just a straight run this time, but had a lot of obstacle course stuff in it, going over log piles, bridges and so on, as well as climbing some ropes and one fair-sized cliff face. She left me in her dust, even though I was doing my best, which was probably just as well. I didn’t really like to think about what I’d do if I actually caught her.

The trail ended at a nice little cottage by the side of a clear blue lake. The place was like an illustration from a children’s storybook, with medieval-looking timbers, white plastered walls and a real thatched roof. Smoke curled invitingly up from the chimney. I caught my breath for a bit and then went in.

Inside, it seemed to be bigger than it was on the outside, and there was nothing of the peasant’s hovel about it. The furnishings inside were extravagantly expensive, with oil paintings and a massive electronic entertainment center. The furniture was mostly leather and teak wood, and all of the fittings seemed to be real gold. Supper was already on the table.

Kasia was already there, waiting for me. She was a busty redhead now, with a tiny waist, pure green eyes, and freckles. She was wearing a lovely green evening gown with some huge emeralds at her neck and wrist when she sat down beside me. I noticed suddenly that I was freshly bathed and wearing a formal tux, something I’d never done before. There was a gold-and-diamond watch on my wrist and matching studs on my shirt.

"I think I like you when you’re well dressed, Mickolai. You did well this afternoon, so you deserve something special this evening. I caught you thinking about roast duck a while ago, so voila!" With a flourish, she took the golden lid from a golden platter, displaying a beautifully roasted duck with all the trimmings.

"It smells as wonderful as you look," I said, "But you know, I think you were right, yesterday."

"What about, handsome?" She rested her chin on her intertwined fingers and smiled at me in a way that very few women had ever done before. It felt good, but somehow it was also frightening.

"About how I should call you something else than Kasia. It’s confusing, you know, having two Kasias on my mind. How about Maria. My mother’s name was Maria."

"I don’t think I’d want you confusing me with your mother, Mickolai."

"Okay, then. How about Agnieshka? I once had a childhood crush on a pretty little red-haired girl named Agnieshka."

"If you want, you can call me that. Eat your supper before it gets cold."

So I carved the duck and served her, too. We both knew that she wasn’t really eating, but then we weren’t really here at all, so what the heck.

After eating a very full meal, she suggested that we put off desert for a while and go to a show.

"I thought that I had to spend the evening watching that orientation lecture again, Agnieshka."

"Tomorrow. You’ve been a good boy today, and all good boys deserve favor. You speak English. Do you like Shaw?"

"GBS? Sure. A fine writer."

"Good, because I have tickets to the theater."

The cottage had a garage now, and the garage had a big new Hunyadi in it. We drove only a mile to town and saw a fine play from the front row, center balcony. We had the best seats in the house because all the rest of the seats were there just to give the proper atmosphere. Not that I could tell that anything was phony.

There didn’t seem to be any limitation to what she could fake up. At one point during intermission when she was in the women’s room, I hit up a conversation with one of the engineers from Soul City that I’d met when we were getting the power plant installed on Freya, and I swear I couldn’t tell him from the genuine article.

The play was Man and Superman, and well performed, though I’d seen it once before. Driving back to the cottage, Agnieshka sleepily rested her head on my shoulder. It was all so real that I couldn’t help being more than a little attracted to her.

Back inside, she got us some champaign and said, "Desert, boss? You got your choice of Big Boy fresh strawberry pie or New York cheese cake." Now she was sort of American, but still with red hair and freckles. Her skirt was much longer, but the top of her dress was about as low at the law allows.

"Make it the cheese cake. Why are you still changing your appearance?"

"Just doing some more calibration, boss. I’m monitoring your blood pressure and pupil diameter with each of my body and clothing changes, zooming in on what you want in a woman." She came next to me on the couch, sitting much too close.

"Can’t we just be good friends? You know that I’ve already found the woman I want, and I’m going to marry her as soon as I can be done with this army business. Can’t you understand that I don’t want to get involved with another woman right now?"

"Especially one who’s really a computer in a war machine, Mickolai? Your physiological reactions will tell me what they will tell me, so don’t you worry about it."

"Okay, I won’t," I said, getting angry. I mean, forcing me to go through a training program was one thing. Forcing me to have a love affair with a goddamn army tank was quite another! It was not only illegal but downright immoral on top of it! Suddenly, the cheese cake stopped tasting good. "Hey, wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that you have feelings?"

"Me? Of course not! I’m just a goddamn army tank! But I’m programed to act like I’ve got emotions, so you’d better watch your step, buster!" She was still an American girl, but now her canine teeth were about a centimeter longer and she wasn’t pretty anymore.

"All I said was . . ."

"I know what you said! I know what you thought, too, asshole! You sure know how to wreak a nice evening."

"But . . ."

"Go to sleep, Mickolai."

I slept.