Air Force One, Part Four (3) Of course he almost always finds it essentially impossible to predict Mick’s actions, but it is frequently interesting to make the attempt. Now, however he realizes with some excitement that, in this particular situation, he might actually be able to do it. After all, Mick is on an airplane. Further, this an airplane that Mick knows very little about. The knowledge that Mick does have concerning the aircraft can only be what was available through public channels during the last years before the Wars, most of which Johnny has probably collected during his occasional idle raids on still-viable information dumps over the last several years. Excitedly, Johnny takes a long break from other activity — spending several tenths of a second constructing a model of what knowledge Mick is likely to have regarding the aircraft. So, given this information — what is Mick likely to do? Johnny quickly sets up the requisite situation generation heuristics, then waits impatiently while they produce possibilities. He rapidly examines each one, comparing them against his collection of a priori expectation graphs. These complex networks of probabilities are his crowning achievement: constructed over years of contemplation of his several hundred hours of direct human interaction, they occupy a significant portion of his permanent memory and require his full processing capacity to examine. After a few milliseconds of careful study, Johnny realizes that every one of the generated scenarios is hopelessly unlikely. With such low probabilities he would be forced to generate millions of the things, and spend endless minutes in contemplation before he could reasonably hope to find one that would so much as make it past his expectation graphs, let alone correspond to reality. And Johnny himself is the problem! By gaining control of so many of the aircraft’s systems so quickly, he has opened a large range of possible actions for Mick to choose from. He can model hundreds of them. What he can’t do is understand how Mick might choose between them. Each possible action opens out into a bewildering forest of consequence probability trees, and each leaf on each one of those trees has a desirability function with scores or hundreds of contributory event probabilities — The task is inconceivably daunting. By a quick estimate, it would require many hours of maximum effort to achieve a fifty-fifty chance of guessing Mick’s next action, or of making his own choice in a highly similar situation. Yet Mick has apparently come to his decision in no more than a few seconds. Johnny realizes that he should not allow this disparity in capability to distress him. According to the most recent cognitive research before the Wars, he actually has a factor of two times more processing power than an average human being. Indeed, in certain areas of cognition he can outperform human capabilities by a large margin. That would tend to indicate that his problem does not lie in raw processing power, but in the software that uses it. This line of reasoning is cause for hope. He can, after all, design new software: even the highly abstract logic required by cognition is, he feels, not beyond his reach — given sufficient time. And he has nothing but time. It is precisely in the formal manipulation of well-defined logic that he can out speed human thought processes by a factor of hundreds. On the other side, honesty forces him to admit that there is one glaring difference between the hardware on which his consciousness is implemented, and that of a human brain. Where he has a thousand processors operating at one or two hundred billion instructions per second, a human brain has one or two hundred billion processors operating at a thousand instructions per second. Or so researchers in human cognition believed. If they were mistaken concerning the nature of the "calculations" performed by human neurons — if they are not simple thresholded decaying-sum engines, for example — then raw human processing power may still exceed his by a large factor. And if the glial cells or even the axons are significantly involved in cognition — Realizing that a callback timer has expired several times with ever increasing levels of urgency, Johnny immediately checks the hallway again, filled with shame for his negligence. What he sees only confirms his guilt: he has allowed his attention to become so focused on his hobbies that he has nearly missed an important possibility. It is time to stop trying to second-guess Mick, and remember his duty. Earlier, he had thoughtlessly planned to time the door’s firing for a simple bisection. Now, watching how the foremost soldier’s body is oriented and producing high-accuracy predictions for the next few tenths of a second, Johnny realizes that a better possibility has presented itself. It is easy to imagine situations occurring over the next several thousand seconds that would require Mick to have a weapon of his own — and Johnny sees a perfect opportunity to provide him with one. He waits a while longer, checking a few recent diagnostic results on the door hardware to be sure that he has calculated the timing correctly. At last, he lets the door go and watches it coast across the width of the hall. He satisfies himself that its speed is close enough to the expected value, then turns his attention back to Mick — who is now beginning to speak. The foremost of Tennen’s men sprints up the hall, running past some pieces of the door before they have had time to roll to a halt. He is only yards away from the end of the hall and almost within sight of the staircase that his quarry climbed just twenty seconds ago. He is fast, but not fast enough to see the door that kills him. Its edge travels at just over two hundred miles per hour, covering the six feet of the hallway’s width in one fiftieth of a second. It intersects with him at exactly his right shoulder-joint, because, hundreds of miles away, Bolo JNY-013 believes that this will cause the least jarring to the machine gun that he is carrying. The gun ends up, with its former owner’s arm, on the far side of the door. It is not, however, the loss of his arm that kills the man. His severed arteries have only had time to lose a few ounces of blood when he impacts the left wall at over a hundred miles per hour. His compatriots, a few paces behind him skid to a stop as his body rebounds from the wall in front of them. And, although it was not part of the Bolo’s plan, the sound of the dead man’s impact insures that not even the most alert among them could have noticed the clicking noises in the ceiling. Normally the counter-intrusion weapons would be triggered before the barrier. Johnny has chosen instead to time the opening of the gun ports so that corpse he has just created, and whose arc through the air he predicted with reasonable accuracy, will not block the trajectory of the first few rounds. "Do you have—" Mick begins to shout, but the sound of the new door’s closure reaches him as a jolt traveling through the floor. He wonders for an instant whether Tennen’s men have begun to batter down his door, but quickly realizes that the sound came from the hall below. Then the sound of machine gun fire reaches him, similarly transmitted through the floor, and it doesn’t sound at all like Tennen’s guns. "Seven dead," Johnny reports in his clipped battle-voice. "Thirty-one remaining. There is a weapon —" "Do you have the flight controls?" Mick demands. "Yes." "Stall the aircraft and the recover!" "I believe," Johnny replies quickly, "that the aircraft descended to low altitude and reduced airspeed recently—" "Goddamn it!" Mick yells. "Stall the aircraft and recover right now!" He takes a breath, prepared to argue with his mechanical friend, but then feels the long deck of the darkened communications room slowly beginning to tilt upward. "OK, good! And throttle up fast!" he adds. "You can bring it back down after the recovery. I want some decent pitch on this thing before we stall! And check status on all the engines. If any of the inactive spares are still good, start warming them up in case we have some flame-outs." "I was saying," Johnny persists as the aircraft’s perpetual engine noise begins to rise in frequency, "that the aircraft may be structurally damaged. This would explain why the aircraft has only recently begun flying at low speed and altitude. It may be unwise to attempt this maneuver. The unusual stresses may cause further damage to the airframe." But even as Johnny complains, Mick notes that the room is continuing to tilt up around him. With no windows, indeed no visual cues anywhere in the large communications room to tell him that he is even in an airplane, this is a particularly sickening sensation. It feels as though he is in a building that is somehow sinking — its aft end tilting downward to slide into some abyss. "Well," Mick says — but stops talking when he notices a simple one-point belt dangling from his seat. He fastens it around his waist and grips the edge of the desk with both hands. The angle of the room has already risen by twenty degrees and is still coming up rapidly. And, surprisingly, the engines are spooling up fast enough to keep the nose rising, although he can already feel the beginning of the pre-stall buffet. On one of the monitors on the long console near him, he can see monochrome images of the hallway, bodies littering the floor. Through the ruined aperture of the far door he catches glimpses of soldiers running on the landing area. Someone back there has figured out what he’s about to do to them. "Well," he repeats, "I think we’re going to take it a lot better than the helicopters." "Captain," Anne speaks loudly to the soldiers’ officer. He turns toward her with an expression of distaste. Only minutes ago he received the signal from the boarding party that he had awaited impatiently for hours. Now that his men have nearly finished herding the truckers back into the Inn’s large dining room, he is within moments of discontinuing the charade that he has played with these fools. "Captain," the woman says, "Many of my boarders have perishable cargoes. I believe you owe us all some indication of how long you intend to keep us under guard. I am sure you intend to treat my guests with all due respect." The officer looks at her for a long moment with no reply. Sensing that he may be about to issue a command, his men nearby become still. "It will give me great pleasure to treat you and your guests," he smiles thinly, "exactly as I treated your dogs." Eyes widening, the woman steps back from him. The Captain takes a moment to enjoy her fear — and thus takes one moment too long to notice that the man who had been standing behind her is carrying something. Once, not very long ago by his reckoning, the Captain would never have let himself be taken in by such a simple ruse. He would not have underestimated the danger, even from such witless cattle as these that he is about to slaughter. And the Captain knows much of slaughter. He has much more experience of it than even Jack would suspect. He has been a soldier longer than Jack or any other guest of the Wolverine would imagine or believe. Long before he wore the childish sky-blue uniform of the U.S. Air Force and long before he ordered massacres of the enemies of U.S. Foreign Command — the Captain saw tank combat in the deserts of North Africa. He remembers the armies of Napoleon, the Thirty Years’ War, and the British invasion of Ireland. On long nights, he can sometimes remember his very first battles in the long-sunken cities of Herakleion and Canopus. Every uniform he has worn across all those centuries has been a disguise, a part of the long masquerade played for the benefit of the human cattle that fill this world. It was from among their masses that he himself arose to join the ranks of the rulers of the Earth, although he prefers not to think of that fact. He prefers to see humans as food animals: useful for the nourishment that they provide, and dangerous only if they are handled carelessly enough to permit a stampede. And control them he has, in the service of Masters such as Tennen. As often as not, the wars he fought in were nothing more than dramas, enacted to control or entertain the cattle, with the Masters and their servants in charge of both sides of the supposed conflict. It has only been in recent centuries that the system of control put in place by the Masters began, somehow, to erode. Too many of the conflicts he has participated in have been half-real: the masquerade still maintained by mutual agreement, but the opposing side in the war controlled by beings that the Captain’s Masters have taught him to call "rebels". Finally, in the last decades, the Captain has seen his Masters’ power crumble, consumed by the flames of an apparently human war that they could neither stop nor control. Even as he fought the Captain also watched, infuriated, while the strength that he had trusted and served for a thousand years was confused, misdirected, and finally humbled and brought to the very edge of final defeat — all by enemies who have never shown themselves except in glimpses. Deeper shades, hidden in the shadows. He watched as even the strongest and cruelest of his order perished, all while the Masters claimed incessantly that their enemies are still the same disorganized, scattered, and impoverished guerillas that in the past have hardly been able to raise their heads from their concealment among the human masses for fear of immediate capture or destruction. It hasn’t been easy to resist the desire to take out his frustration on these cattle around him, even when ordered by one as great as Tennen. As useless as he knows the gesture would be, he has longed to unleash his anger upon them: to rend them in their helplessness, to bathe in their blood. He knows that it is for the sake of such as these that their shadowy enemies fight. But of course he mastered his anger and continued to serve, not daring to disobey one such as Tennen, and hardly daring to question the beings above Tennen even in his most secret thoughts. Yet at the end, the Captain knows that it is precisely his most secret thoughts have betrayed him — not to his Masters, but to the very lowliest of the cattle he has so long despised. Blinded until the last moment by his own bitterness and anger he has forgotten that, even among the cattle there are always, of necessity, a few young wolves. The Captain’s last sight in this world is of the streamers of wide gray tape that hang from the weapon, waving in the air like heavy ribbons as Jack Arnet, his face set in an expression as bleak as the killing fields of Wisconsin, raises the shotgun. "Get me a camera on the landing deck!" Mick says. He braces one foot against the tilt of the floor that has risen now to over thirty degrees, and holds on to the edge of the long desk with both hands to keep his chair from turning downhill. A screen to his right flickers to life, and shows a vague image. After a second of frowning at it, he realizes that he is seeing men, moving frantically near the silhouette of a helicopter. "What the hell is this?" Mick asks. "Hallway camera enhanced image," the distant Bolo answers in battle-voice. "Taken from a reflection off a windscreen. They have destroyed all cameras in landing area." The survivors of Johnny’s ambush have already realized that whoever is controlling the vessel can see them through its cameras. What they have not yet understood is that the "person" looking through those cameras is still quite capable of seeing them with nothing more than a distorted reflection on a curved piece of glass that is visible through the main hall’s ruined blast-door. It does not occur to Mick that many of the cognitive structures that Johnny is using to show him this picture are the very ones that he himself once helped to design. It doesn’t cross his mind that the attention-allocation and belief-representation strategies operating in hundreds of Johnny’s processors are little changed in their fundamental principles from the late nights when he first imagined them, while consuming packs of cigarettes and pots of coffee in the AACR Lab cafeteria. These thoughts do not occur to him, because the intervening years have made those facts irrelevant. It has been too long since he was the programmer and JNY-013 was the program. Now, he and Johnny are both warriors. "OK, get ready!" he yells, feeling the floor under his feet and the long table under his hands beginning to tremble in earnest with the pre-stall buffet. A headset from a console a few yards aft of him tumbles from its perch and clatters down the steep desk surface into the darkness. A few moments ago the man-shapes on the screen seemed as though they were concentrating their efforts on trying to tie down one helicopter securely to the deck. Now, however, they are simply trying to hang on. "What should I prepare for?" Johnny asks quickly. Almost too late, Mick realizes that Johnny has no way to feel the shudder in the deck. "The stall!" he yells, but then realizes that Johnny won’t understand that, either. Johnny is a powerful computer, a terrifying battle tank, and a good friend to have in a tight spot. As an airplane, however, he sucks. And as for the innkeeper — it has been thirty-five years since he last touched an airplane’s stick. The pit of his stomach suddenly feels the emptiness of all the thousands of feet of air between him and the ground. He grips the console edge harder, forces his foot to press more firmly against the terrible slope of the deck. He ought to know, at least intellectually, that a firmer foot-hold won’t really help at all. Just at the moment, though, he doesn’t have the spare processing power to maintain an intellect. There’s probably some low-level logic that got designed a zillion years ago that is marginally less panicked if he holds on tighter. Fine. The tremble in the deck can be heard now, a deep rattling bass note resonating through the structure of the great craft. "OK, listen!" Mick yells. "We’re going to stall and spin! The aircraft logic must know how to recover. Can you return enough control to the aircraft so that it can fly us out of it?" "Yes," Johnny says. "But, avionics and communications control are linked. If the aircraft regains communications control it will immediately shut me out." The deck is angled at forty-five degrees now, but it feels like ninety. The engines have spooled up much faster than Mick thought they would be able to, or perhaps Johnny was able to bring some of the spares on-line to give him the steep angle Mick wanted. Tennen has certainly understood by now that Mick’s "friend on the ground" — the guy with all those heavy-duty computers — is the cause of his problems. If even a single one of the helicopters survives, Tennen will immediately use its equipment to jam all radio frequencies and keep Johnny out. Then Mick will be as good as dead, and likewise for everyone at the Wolverine as soon as Tennen has a chance to phone home. The shudder of the impending stall is like a freight train running through the bones of Air Force One. "OK," Mick yells over the drumbeat of the buffet. "I guess it’s just you and me, big guy! Can you give me my instrument readings?" "Air speed sixty-two knots," Johnny replies. "One knot below rated stall speed. Altitude thirteen thousand two hundred feet, rate of ascent forty-two hundred feet per minute." Well, that will just have to be enough altitude, won’t it! Mick hesitates another second to look at the shadowy man-shapes on his monitor. It seems as though most of the ones clinging to the helicopter’s tie-down ropes are on its port side. "Pull power idle," Mick yells. "Full left rudder!" The buffet increases suddenly, until it seems as though the long console will simply shake itself loose from the floor. In a breathless moment, Mick wonders whether the vast aircraft will shake itself to pieces rather than relinquish its grip on the sky. Then, just as suddenly, the vibration ends. The wings have lost the ability to even intermittently generate lift. The great ship’s momentum continues to carry it upward, slowing rapidly, until, for an endless moment, Air Force One hangs motionless in space. Then it falls. Mick opens his mouth intending to say something like "Here we go!" but he only has his breath knocked out of him in a huff. The nose of the aircraft falls like a rock straight through the vertical until only the single-strap belt is holding Mick in the console’s seat. Johnny is saying something, but all Mick hears is how remarkably silent the communications room is now that the engines have been idled and the air speed is still near zero. Silent, that is, except for the creaking of the gigantic aircraft’s spine. Even hanging inverted, Mick again has a moment of fear that the aircraft is disintegrating — but the threat of slipping out of his seat and falling toward the ceiling quickly claims his complete attention. His hands have come lose from the console’s edge, and he swings his arms to grab for it in the faint green and red light cast by the instruments. The ceiling is at least ten feet below him, but not directly below. The aircraft is at a shallow negative angle, perhaps ten degrees past the vertical. Some part of his mind understands instinctively that if he slips out of the single belt and hits the ceiling he will find himself on a smooth metal surface that’s slanted eighty degrees, and that his fall will end with his death seventy feet away on the aft wall of the room. One hand reaches the console edge and clings. Then he feels the spin beginning. The rudders, slammed hard to port, have done their job. Rather than stabilizing in a flat inverted spin — which would certainly end only in an impact with the ground — the aircraft is beginning a complex spiral only slightly inverted. In the first nine seconds of the maneuver, the ship completes three full rotations. With a diameter of six hundred thirty-two feet and nine inches, the tips of its wings are traveling in opposite directions at four hundred and fifty miles per hour. For a few seconds, the great wings support an average of two point five times their own weight over their entire surface. Another twelve percent would exceed their design strength, and likely cause catastrophic failure of the wing soon followed by the disintegration that Mick feared. But the moment passes. Winding finally out of its complex initial spiral, the aircraft stabilizes in an attitude that’s only sixty degrees head-down, rather than actually inverted. Its spinning stabilizes at the rate of one rotation in just over nine seconds. This is a much more comfortable situation for Mick. Being near the axis of rotation, he feels only very mild G-forces, and they are in the usual direction. He is pressed into his chair again rather than hanging from it, and his hands finally clamp onto the console edge like vice-grips. The relative comfort of this situation is destined to be short-lived, however, considering that the aircraft is now passing through nine thousand feet above the ground and heading earthward at two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Then he hears Johnny’s voice. "— two," the Bolo says. "Targeting. Targets destroyed." His voice sounds exactly like it always does in battle. Fast, but absolutely calm. Bastard. Well, he is a machine after all. And he wasn’t hanging in the damned straps five seconds ago. He must be talking about helicopters. They have fallen free, and he must have been targeting them with the big rear Gatling guns as they got far enough behind to see. That’s a good idea. Just making sure that they don’t somehow manage to fly one free. Bolos will think of things like that. "— destroyed. All helicopters are destroyed!" Johnny is shouting at him. Mick realizes that this is good news. It means he doesn’t have to ride it in all the way into the ground. The maneuver was a success. He remembers that he had been intended to do something special in case this happened. "— thousand seven hundred feet!" Johnny is saying. "All helicopters are destroyed! Seven thousand one hundred feet!" "Reverse the rudder," Mick says, not nearly loud enough that anyone but Johnny would have been able to hear him. His hands still just want to grip the console edge. Holding on to the desk is not going to help! he tells them. Damned low-level physical logic routines. Arboreal. Have to get those looked at. "Stick full forward," he adds. "Throttles up full."
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |