narrow wall at the far end of the chamber, though, had been smashed in, and plastic shards were scattered everywhere, exposing a gaping, black and ragged hole filled with fiberoptic hairs ashimmer with golden laser light.
And there was something else, something dark and, to Alita's trained eye, very much out of place. She couldn't quite make out tile shape, but it appeared to be smooth, an almost organic collection of curves cast in gray metal. .. .
And it was located precisely where Hector's primary data bus ought to be, the main feed leading from the Bolo's main memory storage to the sequestered working memory array.
Crossing the Main Memory chamber, she leaned closer to toe hole, trying to see just what.. .
At the last possible instant, she saw the glitter of a polished, crystalline lens and the flash of a segmented tentacle uncurling. Stumbling back a step, she raised the power gun just as the tentacle came snaking out of the hole, making a snickering hiss in the air as it came. Her finger clamped down convulsively on the firing button, and a blue-white beam licked across the tentacle, sending half, still twitching, clattering on the deck. Too high, she thought, thumbing the power selector back. Firing the power gun at full bite in among Hector's circuits would be like performing brain surgery with a jackhammer. The beam flicked out again, bubbling into softening gray metal.
She felt something glide across her right ankle, then, like a chain-mail snake, coiling up her calf as it tightened its grip. She ignored this second attack, holding the weapon steady, playing the beam against the dimly seen shape of the! "1 *! machine buried within Hectors data feeds and circuits. By the flickering, arc-harsh light of the beam, she could make out shadowy gray extensions reaching out from the alien machine,
vanishing in among the bundles and cables and feed connectors filling that dark, crowded space.
Her guess had been right, then! Somehow, the !*!*! had inserted this device inside Hector. It had made its way here, to his memory center, and attached itself to his primary memory bus, where it was riding him like a hag, like a parasite, at the one precise place where it could intercept the Bolo AI's memories and thoughts and alter them to suit its own programming.
The tentacle gripping her leg tightened convulsively, and she gasped at die sudden slab of white pain. Another tentacle was rising from the gray intruder now, its tip weaving toward her face like the head of a cobra. Alita ignored pain and fear both, however, and continued holding the beam on the gray monstrosity within the wall, taking her best guess as to where to aim. Sweat trickled down her face and neck, and it was difficult to see what she was doing against the glare. She was attempting nothing less than brain surgery, cutting away a cancerous growth pressed tightly against a critical neural ganglion, and too deep a cut or an unsteadiness in her hands could turn the operation into a literal Bolobotomy.
The pain in her leg grew sharply worse, and she felt herself sinking to her knees. The third tentacle weaved past her face, then wrapped itself about her neck, tightening. Sparks and tiny splatters of liquid metal were hissing and popping from the hole in the wall, now, burning her skin where it touched her, and an acrid, bitter smoke swirled around her. She struggled to breathe, her vision fading. If she didn't kill this thing in another couple of seconds, she knew, it was going to kill her. . . .
I am aware of the death struggle taking place within my main memory core, but there is no physical action that I can take to help.
What I can do, however, is to engage the Intruder
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William H. Keith, Jr.
M a nonphysteal fashion, distracting it, interfering with its attempts to maul Sergeant Kme, sever its contact with other 1*1*1 machines, and, one by one, begin moving into specific operations and storage sectors infiltrated by the Enemy device and reclaiming them for myself. I can sense the Intruder's programming, some thousands of individual and strangely shaped bodies of alien code interlocked in a wonderfully complex array of calculation, logic, and decision. I sense that there is no true self-awareness hereўthe Intruder machine that penetrated my systems was not complex enough for thatўbut, viruslike, it was able to hijack certain of my cognitive Junctions and divert them to its own purposes.
Now, with the Intruder under a double attack, physically by Sergeant Kyle and on an insubstantial but nonetheless quite real level by myself, I can feel its grip on my memories weakening, can feel its own operations turning beneath my assault in smaller and smaller cycles, can feel it dying as Sergeant Kyle's beam sears through its circuits.
I feel it die. ...
"Sergeant Kyle?" I ask. I have no monitor cameras inside my memory core, so I cannot see her. I can hear her pounding, too-fast heartbeat, however, and the rasp of her breathing, so I know that she is still alive. Her weapon is still firing, reducing the Intruder to molten metal. In another second or two, the beam may severe my primary memory bus.
"Sergeant Kyle!" I repeat. "Ceasefire! The Enemy is destroyed!"
The beam clicks off. "I. . . got it?" Her voice is cracked, rasping, and barely audible,
"The Enemy is destroyed," I tell her again. I search my newly liberated memories for the proper words, but doubt that they are sufficient to the occasion. "Thank you."
BOLO RISING
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7 hear a thump and a clatter, the sound of something massive collapsing on the deck of my memory core. Sergeant Kyle's breathing and heartbeat continue, and I surmise that she has just lost consciousness.
At the same time, full access to my main storage floods my awareness with imagery, with an unrestricted and uncensored flood of raw and processed data.
