Johnny Reb (3)
"You may close your mouth and resume your normal pose," the Bolo stated. "My analysis of your dentition and cranial shape indicate a probability near unity that you are in fact Michael Joseph Goulish, 1st Lieutenant US Air Force, commissioned 1 November 1980, honorably discharged 28 June 1993, recalled to active duty 2 April 2002. You are wanted for desertion and murder and are to be placed on arrest if encountered by any active-duty unit." When he looked back down at the machine, even the ends of the huge machine-gun barrels looked familiar, almost friendly. I'm alive. Everything seemed strangely vivid: the machine, the treeline behind it, and the sky with its scattering of clouds. When the Bolo spoke Mick heard the words without understanding them, as though they were merely beautifully modulated tones from some great musical instrument in the gleaming machine. Even his own name could not register. It's not going to shoot me, he thought. I'm alive. And with life came hope. He knew a lot about how the Bolo's intelligence been implemented! Could he manipulate it somehow? He thought back frantically and remembered enormous knowledge-bases along the lines of Roger Schank's early work on "scripts". The hundreds of petabytes of crystalline memory in the Bolo contained billions of scraps of what humans would think of as common knowledge. Simple concepts like "it usually won't snow unless the temperature is below the freezing point of water" were stored in a complex form that allowed various kinds of 'inference engine' software to search through and combine them into chains of reasoning about the Bolo's current situation. It was far from the only activity that the Bolo's processors would be engaged in at any one moment, but it had been one of the most difficult aspects of the Bolo-AI to implement, and it was this aspect that concerned Mick vitally at the moment. The effort to make an AI understand a reasonable amount of 'common knowledge' had sounded good at first, but had turned out to be fantastically difficult. Humans carried this knowledge around without being aware of it, and were surprised to discover just how difficult it was to reproduce artificially. The sheer volume of such knowledge had made the task next to impossible for decades, occupying generations of graduate students. Mick knew that if there was any way for a man in a parking lot to fool a Bolo, it would be in the area of simple common sense. "I belonged to an elite military corps," Mick stated calmly. "Every man in that corps has had his dentition and cranial shape surgically altered to make identification of individuals difficult. The individual that you are looking for must have secretly belonged to the same unit." The Bolo, Mick knew, would be watching him in every available wavelength. He chose the ClearSteel plate on the left side of the machine, as if it were an eye that might betray the great machine's thoughts. <750,121,310 rules searched, 44,639 relevant> .... 44,630 rules follow .... ... 107,353,799 deductions and probabilistic predictions follow ... The ploy was wildly successful. The complex chains of logical and probabilistic reasoning that the Bolo initiated because of it ended up using over seventy percent of the machine's total processing power. And it had far more processing power than even Mick suspected. At its peak, the compute power consumed by the Bolo's evaluation of Mick's statements was greater than the combined power of every computer of any kind in the entire state of Michigan during the late 1990s when he had first become involved in Bolo research. On the morning of Saturday, October 21st, 2017, it was equal to the total non-Bolo computing power that the human race on earth still owned. While it thought, Mick had time to notice how the sunlight gleamed off the big machine's radar-stealthy facets. It made it easier to see that some of them had actually been bent slightly by the impacts of enemy fire. Before the tank replied, he had time to take two slow breaths, and just glimpse the outlines of a new plan. "It is impossible to surgically alter human dentition and cranial shape as you suggest. There is no military unit such as you describe. My identification of you is correct. You are to be arrested on sight by any active-duty unit." "Are you an active-duty unit?" Mick asked immediately. OK, fine. Bishop takes knight: check. Damn, but I hope I don't have to do this all day. Anne came up quietly beside him, staring wide-eyed up at the big machine. It did not react. She held his hand but the machine still did not react. Mick wondered about that. Whatever the Bolo was thinking of now was an even more difficult problem for it to solve. And he hadn't even been really trying to confuse it that time. Well, the difficulty isn't all in the input, you know. It's in the interaction between input and the mind. So what's so hard about this, Mr. Bolo? Anne had time to whisper "Michael what is it?" And he whispered a reply. "Remember how you always wanted to see one of the Bolos?" She clasped his hand tighter. You never wanted me to take that job. At last the machine spoke again. "My duty status is not sufficiently clear," it announced. The man-sized gattling gun calmly swiveled back to its place inset against the machine's armor. "You are not under arrest. Please excuse my behavior." "That's OK, Johnny," Red shouted up at it. "You just settle down now." He advanced again toward the machine, hands moving as if to calm a skittish horse. "You had a rough trip, big guy." Anne hugged Mick fiercely, and he looked down at her clear blue eyes. Like that sky. He decided not to spoil the moment by asking her to release him because he felt that he might be about to vomit. "Damn," Bobby said shakily. "I thought I was going to have to get rough with that Bolo gadget. You say there's nobody inside there?" Mick nodded. "So, Red!" he said. "Your friend need any breakfast? Some plutonium maybe?" Red turned around, wide-eyed. "I'm kidding," Mick said quickly. The study was dark and Mick wasn't in it when Anne came in, but the big sliding door to the deck was open and she could just make out his silhouette at the rail. Crossing the room quietly, she slid the screen door open and went out into the night air to stand beside her husband of nearly thirty years. She smelled smoke, and then saw his face illuminated briefly by the cigarette's red glow. He almost never smoked anymore. It was too expensive, and he'd said that there wasn't any point to it anymore. Tonight he apparently felt differently. After a long while, she decided to break the silence. "I knew that you killed someone, Michael," she said simply. He looked at her. A chilly breeze eddied around the deck and the sound of stronger wind reached them from the white pines at the far edge of the cleared area. They had added the study as a final tower on top of the second story just so he could put this deck around it; he was always wanting to be able to see far away. He'd said that it was important to have a look-out point like this. Someday it might give them a few minutes extra warning of some approaching danger. But she knew that the fact of the matter was that he just liked to be able to see far away. Everybody needed a special place, and this had been his. "After you came back from Detroit you talked about it in your sleep for years. It seemed like he was a friend of yours." Mick said nothing, then took another drag on the cigarette. "Not really," he said finally. "But I talked to him a few times. We had a few smokes. He was a good guy! The night I left, I had this one door picked out because there was never anybody watching it. But then there he was. He could see that I'd been about to take off, so I admitted it. I told him I had a family. I said he ought to come with me." He let the wind take another breath of smoke away from him. "Whatever. I guess he was patriotic. I just put my hands up like I was going to argue with him, and then I got him. It actually worked. So easy I couldn't believe he was really dead. And then – I just took off. I didn't even think to take his gun." They could see another line of thunderheads advancing silently thirty miles or more to the West. The storms were coming at the same time every night, like clockwork. They would arrive in another hour or two, or else miss just to the north. The whole front was starkly moonlit from the south, exaggerating every great contour with ink-black shadows. "You know what would have happened to us if you hadn't come home," she said quietly. "We would have starved that winter." He tossed the remaining inch of cigarette in a red arc down toward the wet grass as she moved to hug him. "We needed you, Michael," she said. "Don't be sorry you came back to us." "I'm not," he replied. "But that doesn't mean I can forget it, either. There's five billion skeletons out there, and more than one of them's because of me. But – I guess that first guy was the only time I felt like it was just plain murder. And I guess that's how the Air Force saw it too. I am kind of surprised, though, that they lasted long enough to file charges on me. Maybe the nuke hit farther downtown." "We could leave," Anne said urgently. "Leave the Wolverine for whoever wants it and just go. We can find something else to do. Things are easier now! And Melanie's grown up. We could all go to Canada. That thing won't follow us, will it?" "If it wanted to arrest me, it would have done that this morning. It seems like there's some reason why it can't. And if that's true I'm sure not going to drag us away from everything we've made here without a real damn good reason. I'm not even sure Melanie would come. She'd probably take off and go to her school and then the Bolo would track her to find me. And anyway —" he laughed, "we're getting a little old ourselves, you know? A little old to be running around in the woods again? "Anyway," he finished, "it said its 'status was unclear.' If it can't make the arrest, maybe it won't even make a report. I guess I need to find that out." "But how can we know for sure?" The moonlight had come over the edge of the tower's roof enough to catch brilliantly in her gray-blond hair. "Well, I guess I'll go have a chat," he laughed. Even after more than thirty years, she still couldn't always tell for sure when he was joking. He had half-expected and more than half-hoped that the great Bolo would be gone. But it was still in the parking lot exactly where Red had persuaded it to 'sleep'. It only took up two of the big-rig parking spaces, but there was a much larger space around it in the parking lot that was clear of trucks. No one wanted their rig parked too close to the monster tank. To Mick, it looked as though the trucks themselves had edged away as night approached. They had been intimidated; the big tank's bulk made even the largest rigs look spindly and frail by comparison. Mick walked into the clear area and then along a curve that kept him a constant distance away from the big machine. Moonlight shone only dully from the blackened planes of armor, but glinted bright from the main cannon barrel and the battle scars. He moved quietly, out of habits formed in a world that had become more dangerous than when he had last thought of software, and gigahertz, and vision systems. Sitting next to all the dirty trucks that had become his life since then, the great tank seemed like a traveler from another time. After circumnavigating the tank once, he stopped near the front and stood watching it. Although it was tempting to see it as inert, he knew that it would have been watching his every step since he left the house. Without warning, the Bolo spoke. "Would you like to enter my crew compartment?" In the night air, the voice was uncomfortably loud. What? Mick opened his mouth without knowing what he intended to say. He knew that the big machines were usually staffed by human commanders during combat. That implied that one could actually enter the monster, as though it were a normal tank. Naturally. But a tank is a pillbox with treads. This machine was talking to him. It felt uncomfortably like having a whale ask you if you wouldn't mind being swallowed. "Excuse me?" he finally managed. He glanced around, but no one was outside and he had already shuttered the Wolverine's windows. There wasn't any other sound but the crickets' song. It seemed strange that the crickets continued singing after the machine's loud speech. Couldn't they hear it? Was this all just some dream of his, like the ones he used to have about the Wars? Suddenly the tank made a sharp creaking noise, and he jerked his gaze back toward it. He half expected to see it rumbling forward on its twin yard-wide treads, but it was as still as before. Moonlight still glinted from the clean planes of armor, but now a broad ray of blood-colored light leaked out into the night and grew. A ramp was lowering. The Bolo was actually extending a short staircase from between its treads. Past it, Mick could see a corner of the interior, red-lit to preserve human night-vision. "I have alcohol," the machine stated. "You have — alcohol?" he retorted cleverly. Maybe it was actually one of those phantom diners that people used to report, except Bolo-shaped? Open all night? In this neighborhood? This is not happening. I am not being invited upstairs for a drink by a Mark II Bolo. And yet he had come here to talk with it. "The alcohol was stored by my former maintenance personnel for medical contingencies," the Bolo explained. "'Contingencies' include health maintenance. 'Health' includes mental health. The alcohol may be used for maintenance of mental health. This is the manner in which my former maintenance personnel frequently employed it. They specified that it was to be kept cold at all times. I have twelve containers of beer alcohol currently chilled."
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |