Electric Church

XXXIV MECHANICAL BUGS IN THE MIDST OF HIS SMILING FACE

I wasn’t sure how to process what I was seeing. We were deep inside the Electric Church’s main complex, underneath Westminster Abbey, and it was for the first time completely silent. Not even Wa Belling had anything to say.

It was a big open square room with a high ceiling. A huge round table of dark, polished wood filled it, and around the table were seated Monks, but the figures weren’t wearing the usual black robes of the Monk. They appeared to be inactive, slumped stiffly in the soft leather chairs. Thick black cables ran from the back of their heads into a well in the center of the table. Across the table from us was a rectangular black box, similar to all the boxes Kieth had lugged around. A thick layer of dust had settled on everything.

“They’ve been here for almost twenty years,” Marin said soberly.

I looked at the King Worm. “This… this is the Joint Council?”

Marin nodded. “Every last one of the senile bastards.”

A wave of dizziness made me reach backward and stumble into the wall. “Wait a second, wait a second,” I panted. Everything had been moving too fast for far too long. “The whole goddamn System is run by Monks?”

Marin shook his head. “They’re not Monks.”

“You said our quarry was in here as well, Mr. Marin,” Belling asked, sounding polite. “Care to point him out so we can get this show on the road?”

Marin nodded curtly, and then twice more for no apparent reason. “Of course. But allow me a moment or two for Mr. Cates, who seems quite distressed. I believe I owe him at least a moment of explanation. Also, once you complete your contract I will be unable to maintain the, er, calm I have imposed on the situation through my authority as chief of Internal Affairs, SSF. All hell will, in fact, break loose even before you pull the trigger, Mr. Orel.”

Belling shrugged. “It’s your dime.”

I pushed off from the wall, my vision clearing. Marin turned to me, his creepy smile in place.

“Dennis Squalor was a Techie, Mr. Cates. Twenty years ago, with the world still smoldering from Unification, with everything still balanced on a knifepoint, he was just a skilled Techie who had an idea about immortality through cyborg conversion. An idea he took to the newly formed Joint Council. He offered to convert the new rulers of the world into immortal cyborgs for a fee.”

“Fucking brilliant,” Kieth breathed, wandering dreamily around the room.

Marin ignored him. “The Joint Council thought he was crazy and told him to sod off. But Mr. Squalor wasn’t easily discouraged. He did the only thing he could think of to prove to the Joint Council that his procedure would work: He performed it on himself. He Monked himself. And returned to the JC months later a cyborg.” Marin paused, cocking his head again. “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s a lot going on. This time, the Joint Council couldn’t wait to sign up. They wanted to live forever.”

I stared at the dusty figures seated around the table. I was mesmerized by them, their empty stares, and moving a distant memory.

“Once this was accomplished, the Council was able to return their attention to the newly formed System. There were a lot of growing pains. Revolts, riots-the System was breaking apart as quickly as it had been formed. Unification was failing. And then, much to everyone’s horror, Dennis Squalor himself began to fail.”

Kieth was on the other side of the table, running his fingers along the shoulders of one immobile form. “Brain function degeneration,” he said absentmindedly. “Inevitable. Modifiable through a mod chip, but incurable.”

Marin nodded, still turned toward me. “Incurable, and horrifyingly obvious to the Joint Council. Squalor’s procedure was subtly flawed, and they immediately knew they were doomed. Things happened fast after that: Squalor was granted broad powers and budget to investigate a solution. Proxy power was transferred from the JC to their secretaries, who have been more or less running the show since. The JC was, as you see, shut down-put into a hibernation mode, actually-until a ‘cure’ was developed for their mental degeneration. Squalor was too far gone to actually find a fix for the problem. As he freefell into madness, he founded the Electric Church. Although he did take one last step that he thought would save him.”

Belling squinted at Marin. “You’re saying the Joint Council’s been a bunch of vegetables for twenty years, and their fucking secretaries have been running the show?”

Marin nodded. “There was never an official proclamation or transfer of power, but the secretaries were in a perfect position, suddenly. Completely anonymous, granted proxy power, and with no mechanism in place for their removal, election, or other curtailment of their power. It was in their interest to leave things alone. Any attention drawn to their situation might lead to their removal. Steps were taken. The SSF was formed, for example, with broad powers. Squalor fell through the cracks for a few years, although he technically never left this complex; the secretaries assumed he was dead, or incapacitated. They saw no reason to pursue him. When he resurfaced with the Electric Church, it wasn’t easy to get rid of him.”

“Fascinating,” Belling drawled. “Where is Squalor? You can finish the history lesson while we tear his circuits out.”

“Shut the hell up,” I said quietly. “He’s going somewhere with this.”

“Mr. Cates, you are a remarkably civilized criminal. But perhaps Mr. Orel is right: Time is wasting. Gentlemen, I give you Dennis Squalor. Or what’s left of him.”

He walked around the table and stopped next to the black box, which came up to his chin. We stared for a moment. Kieth was the first to react, almost running around the table.

“Holy fucking shit!” he gasped. “He’s fucking digitized!”

“Squalor’s last-ditch effort to arrest the degeneration of his mind. It worked. Too late to actually cure him, of course, but it froze the damage.”

“I thought digitizing the brain didn’t work?” My throat felt like sandpaper.

Marin shrugged. “Most of the time, no. But in some people, for some reason, it does. There’s been a lot of research into this topic: The secretaries have plans for an SSF made up entirely of digitized humans in boxes like this, controlling robot avatars.”

“Robot avatars,” I repeated, staring at the featureless box. “The Cardinals.”

Marin nodded. “The Cardinals. Squalor’s avatars, made to look like him physically, controlled remotely by Squalor’s intelligence, which resides here in several redundantly arrayed storage units. That was Squalor’s solution to his own problems, and what the secretaries plan for the SSF, if they can get the success rate up above, oh, 20 percent, with the other 80 percent turning out as mental patй on the other end. They don’t need much better, because it’s cheap and easy to build the goddamned avatars. Hell, you could have a one-man police force.”

The idea of the System Pigs being perfect robots, controlled remotely and instantly replaced when damaged, made me feel ill, my stomach rolling in sudden anxiety.

Belling regarded the box. “This is Squalor?”

Marin nodded. “It is.”

There was a booming noise against the door. Marin didn’t move. “We must move quickly, gentlemen. The Cardinals are attempting entrance. This means that Squalor has determined that we are here to do him harm. This calculation has negated my authority here-it’s programmed in, you see-and his avatars are acting to protect him. Please proceed.”

Belling nodded and took aim. I stepped forward and pushed his arm down. “Wait a fucking second,” I said, staring at Marin. “You need the plug pulled on this fucking box? That’s all? Why in holy fuck did you need us? Why not just do it yourself?”

Marin smiled and reached up and took hold of his sunglasses. A flash of inexplicable dread went through me.

“Because, Mr. Cates,” he said, removing his glasses. “I’m programmed not to.”

Tiny cameras sat like mechanical bugs in the midst of his smiling face.

“The eyes,” Marin said with a sigh. “The eyes are the hardest part. You can make a machine look remarkably human, but the eyes never turn out right, and never fool anyone.”

Kieth was staring happily at Marin. “You’re a… Monk?”

“An avatar, actually, Mr. Kieth,” Marin replied. “One of thirty-four Richard Marins in the System at present. There were thirty-five, but one of me got destroyed in a bombing in Yerevan yesterday. It’ll take a few days to get a replacement.”

He waited a few moments, looking from face to face, smiling. I got the impression the fucker was enjoying his effect on us.

“I was a prototype-the aforementioned all-avatar SSF. I was pretty much a failure as a System Cop, so they figured it wouldn’t be much of a loss if I got pureed by the procedure, which almost every other candidate had been. They digitized me, added in the basic programming restrictions to control me-obeying orders, never breaking rules, protecting the secretaries, etc.-and then made their one huge mistake: They charged me with eliminating Squalor and the Electric Church, which had begun to worry them as it spiraled out of control.”

The booming sound coming from the door had grown steadily in volume, and was now accompanied by the sad terrible sound of metal warping.

“All right!” Marin suddenly animated, replacing his glasses and gesturing at the black box. “History lesson’s over. Things are going to spiral out of control in here very soon, so please, put Mr. Squalor out of his misery. I am programmed to obey all Joint Council resolutions, standing orders, and enacted laws, in both spirit and letter, so I cannot directly harm a citizen of the System or act directly against a certified religion. Mr. Cates? I think you’ve earned the right.”

Belling glanced at me, chewed on this for a second, and then made a sarcastic show of bowing and sweeping his hand toward the box. I stepped forward and took aim.

“Quickly, Mr. Cates,” Marin said behind me. “Squalor is attempting to defend himself.”

The hammering on the door filled the room with noise, and I imagined the dust being kicked up by the vibration alone. My eyes stung, and I found it difficult to pull the trigger: Weeks of effort, so many dead people around me, and here it had all come down to a programming workaround for a robot named Dick Marin. I felt like a goddamn cog in a machine.

There was a cracking noise from behind me. In my peripheral vision I could see Belling and Marin each pull weapons and take up defensive positions.

“Mr. Cates!” Marin shouted.

Well, I thought, if this is how it ends, so be it. I fired three times, the armor-piercing bullets leaving crumpled craters in their wake, diagonally across the blank surface of the black box. A brief crunching sound and a whiff of ozone was the only reaction at first, and I stood there dumbly, gun aimed in shaking hands. Without warning, the pounding behind me ceased, and in the same instant the lights went off, and there was a subtle stilling of the air as the ventilation switched off. We were in total silence and complete darkness.

I heard Kieth breath the single word “Well?” as if it were the most important question he’d ever asked. Then a sharp intake of breath. “Holy shit-the mod boards! They weren’t-”

“Oh, yes,” Marin-or his avatar-said. “Congratulations, Mr. Cates, you’re a wealthy man. Unfortunately, that was actually the easy part.”

This uncorked a hidden reserve of hysterical laughter I hadn’t suspected existed within me. It overflowed my control and I started to bark laughter there in the dark, gasping for breath, my ribs aching and my eyes watering.

“Sweet Christ,” I managed to gasp, my head between my knees. “What’s the hard part?”

Marin’s voice was a marvel of programming as it managed to convey amusement through the pitch darkness. “We have to get out of here.”

This time it was Kieth who barked crazy laughter, putting both hands on top of his bald head. “Through a few thousand Monks whose mod boards were directly linked to that piece-of-shit black box,” he said quietly.

As the words floated by me, invisible, the silence was shattered by the sound of a thousand Monks going simultaneously crazy.