As Spratly stepped into the light, however, he realized almost at once that the I"!0! had something much more serious on their artificial minds right now than a small riot in the prison camp. From here, he could see the vast, squat, black mountain of the Bolo, and for the first time in nearly a T-standard year, the mountain was moving, crawling slowly down the left slope of the hill looming above the camp. It was moving slowly, ponderously, but it was moving, without a doubt, and raising a cloud of dust that made the whole hilltop look like an erupting volcano. The black specks swarming about it like angry gnats must be !*!*! floaters.
And they were calling for reinforcements. Clacker flying machines were swarming out of the east, great, black, insect shapes borne aloft by howling jets. They shrieked low above the camp, scattering running people in screaming packs, smashing the ramshackle huts and lean-tos into whirling fragments with their
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jet exhausts, and raising furiously spinning dust devils with their passing.
On the hilltop, the Bolo's prow tipped slowly down as its forward tracks began negotiating the steepening slope above the waters of the bay.
My God, he thought. He did it! The crazy son of a bitch actually did it!
Panic clawed at his throat. This was a disaster in the making. "Come on," he told Captain Pogue, standing at his side. "We've got to do something or we're going to have real trouble here."
DAV728 was aware of the !*!б! Primary Web-wide alert as a land of knowing deep within his newfound feelings and rippling, brightly colored memories. Since he was already linked in with the Ninth Awareness in the tactical center on Delamar, it took only milliseconds to tap into an active data feed and download specific information.
"The organic combat machine has broken free of our control," he said, studying the stream of incoming information from a thousand different sources. "It is moving."
"There may be involvement by some of the organics," the Ninth Awareness noted. "It may have been a tactical error to leave the combat machine operational.''
"Why was this done?" DAV wanted to know.
"The combat machine showed evidence of both high intelligence and a self-aware sentience of an order similar to high-awareness models of the !*!*!. That sentience was of a markedly different type, of course, and aspects of its operation were not understood. Based on discoveries made with the captured human starship, we believed it possible to train the machine through reprogramming and memory control. Some of us were interested in the possibility of confirming the Maker Hypothesis."
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DAV considered this for several milliseconds. One of the great unanswered questions of the !*!*! cosmos was the one asking where they had come from in the first place. That artificially contrived evolution occurred within the machine genera now was undeniable, as both programming and design were deliberately altered to fit new environments and conditions; what was questioned was where the earliest intelligent !"!*! machines had come from in the first place. Evolutionists insisted that simple machines had evolved on their own within the extraordinary flux of energy and matter at the core of the Galaxy; Makists believed that those first machines must have been created by intelligent organics, possibly by the neDakSha, the enigmatic species that, according to records grown fragmentary over the eons, was the very first organic ufe form to be driven to extinction by the !*!*!. Ever since DAV728 had become sentient enough to consider the question, he'd felt the Makist position was untenable and circular. If organics created machines, what, then, created organics?
The Ninth Awareness, he knew, held Makist views, though he rarely discussed them in dogmatic terms. He was saying, however, that the human machine, the Bolo as they called it, had clearly been designed and built by organics but was also clearly as sentient as many 1*1*1, powerful support indeed for the Makist position.
"We considered dismantling the captured machine," the Awareness went on, "since it represented a large fraction of the available refined metals and materials taken with the planet. We felt, however, that greater advantage would be secured through crippling it so that it would represent no further threat to us, then systematically learning how its programming worked. To that end, we harvested the brains of several organics
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who worked with it, including, incidentally, the organic brain you've recently received."
DAV was already examining some of the vast stores of information secured so far from the Bolo. In one of his minds' eyes, he called up a detailed schematic of the huge machine, examining mass, power plants, weaponry, and overall capability.
"I question whether the Bolo has been sufficiently crippled. Even with limited power, it could still represent a threat to some of our operations on the planet. I recommend that it be destroyed immediately."
"Regretfully, I agree," the Ninth Awareness replied. "You are directed to devise and execute a program to that end and are granted authority over the required assets."
"Simplest would be to disable it as we disabled it before, but with greater precision and efficiency." DAV was already searching !"!*! records, checking the locations of battler/fortresses in local space. Three occupied extended orbits about the local suns and could be brought into position within a matter of a few thousand seconds. A thought sent the appropriate commands flashing out to the battlers' command pilots.
