If he is, I am not sure that there is anything I can do to prevent it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carefully, Jaime raised his head above the tumbledown of a shattered building, surveying the hilltop. The Bolo dominated the hilltop, a panorama all to itself, a squat, vast, truncated mountain of black, slabbed armor. A dozen !*!*! machines were in sight, most near Hector's front end a good 150 meters away, but three much closer, a scant thirty meters distant as they raised another of their spindly sensor array towers.
The nearest !0!б! was too close, a three-meter floating pillar of gray metal, ringed about with crystal eyes. Jaime saw he'd miscalculated his approach; the machine saw him as soon as he raised his head, venting a clattering, clucking sound and spewing several new tentacles from various parts of its body as it started to soar toward him, chasing its own double shadow across the rocky ground.
Jaime leveled the power gun, snapped off the safety, and squeezed the firing button. A thin, brilliant thread of blue-white light scratched across the smooth, rounded surface of die oncoming floater, then punched through, opening a fist-sized hole that spat smoke and crackling sparks.
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He held the beam on-target for as long as he dared, until the floater wobbled, then spun in midair, turning the damaged section out from beneath the stab of his beam. Shifting targets, he fired again, slicing into a smaller, more delicate floater still clinging to the sensor tower and slicing away one of the convex bulges on its upper works.
The third machine was a squat, thick-bodied complexity on tracks, a miniature tank with human hands affixed to mechanical arms. He aimed at what he thought might be a sensor cluster at the joining of the arms and fired a third time, before a bolt of lightning whiplashed against the masonry he was crouching behind. He ducked as stone cracked and hot air howled above him. Scrambling on hands and knees, he shifted to the right, rose, and fired again at the first machine, which was still in the air and still moving toward him.
This time, the lower third of the floater erupted in searing, orange sparks and molten metal, and the machine dropped suddenly out of the sky.
In an instant Jaime was out of his hiding place and racing across the open ground toward the bone ridge perimeter. Were Hector's AP defenses on or off?
He would know in another few seconds. . . .
I watch as the firefight breaks out less than one hundred meters off my port side, at a bearing of zero-nine-eight. Within the space of 3.23 secondsўa very long time indeed for a Bolo, but admirably fast for a human with his limited reflexes and complete lack of target acquisition/lock capabilitiesўMajor Graham has disabled three /*/*/ machines with a Mark XTV power gun and is now racing toward my defense perimeter. Other /*/*/ machines are tumingfrom their original tasks and mooing to converge on the running figure; 115.5 meters in front of me, at a bearing of
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one-six-nine, Technician Barstowe and Sergeant Kyle have also broken from cover and are running toward my perimeter.
I am faced now with a major volitional dilemma. My perimeter defenses are still engaged, and I have operational orders to kill anyone who enters my inner defensive zone without proper Code Alpha authorization. The 1*1*1 are using individual IFF broadcasts at 1209 MHz to bypass my automated defenses. I sense my other self, also aware of the developing situation, powering up the magnetic accelerators on the AP railguns.
My "other self does not consider the I*!*! to be the Enemy; I now realize that they are, that they have corrupted my programming through the Intruder within my hardware circuitry and that they will kill all three humans within the next few seconds unless I intervene, or unless they inadvertently trigger my defense-perimeter challenge program ana I am forced to kill them myself.
With my other self in command of all external operational systems, I am relatively helpless. If there was some way for me to switch my other self off and eliminate the Intruder's influence, I most certainly would have done so long before now. The volitional conflict is a basic one; there are certain internal commands I could give to switch off my other selfs awareness, to restore operational control to what I now think of as the "real me," even to turn my weapons systems on the /*'Ё/ and assist Major Graham in what is fast developing into a desperate firefight a few tens of meters away. Unfortunately, I am not designed to initiate such commands, not when I am stitt at standby readiness, and not without specific human commands giving me the authority to assume full volitional control.
As I consider the situation, however, I determine that there is, perhaps, one action I can take, one that
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does not directly violate any of my volitional safeguards. Reaching into main memory, I extract a voice-print copy of a recent code authorization command, copy it to File Rising before the Intruder deletes it, then feed it to my other self.
"Authorization Code Tango," Major Graham's recorded voice says. "Three-three-seven Victor Delta niner. Maintenance."
