A Dream Of Locomotives

Eveything was wrong. It was all imprecise. The people's postures were sloppy, the colours wildly out of phase. I seemed to be blind over most of the spectrum, could not longer focus in infra-red or x-ray. I hurt everywhere, and I was so heavy. Something that a distant part of me recognised as Ballinger was standing over me, yelling, nonsense sounds far down the tonal scale and horribly enunciated.

He turned and said something to the other men in the room. Two of them grabbed my arms and legs and lifted me drooling off the floor. My legs wouldn't work, and they had to half-carry, half-drag me. As we left the room I saw a slight figure in a wheelchair, chin slumped to her chest, a brain of optical ribbon plugged into the back of my head. My personality turned inside out, then back again, and I was sick on the shoes of one of the men supporting me.

They took me down the hall and out of the house. Part of me tried to boost the gain on image amps another part of me knew I didn't have. Nothing happened, of course. The scene outside remained cold and dark. I saw a small vehicle waiting at the kerb.

Then there was a wink of light, a lightning flash that cut our shadows loose and flung them across the road. And all the ground-floor windows of the house hailed us with glass.

I knew what it was, but the two men thought it was an assault. A rocket grenade, maybe. The vehicle screeched away and turned down Muswell Hill, and the two men dropped me and ran for cover. I remember being astonished at how hard the ground was, and how soft I was.

The two men didn't come back. People started to emerge from the neighbouring houses to stare at the fire. I heard sirens, and a little way off the soft expectorant sounds of flechette pistols. Figures began to run towards me. I rolled over onto my stomach, willed myself up onto hands and knees, managed to totter to my feet, and stumbled away on legs that seemed to belong to another form of life altogether.

Somehow, I don't remember how, I found my way into Alexandra Park, staggering along the middle of the road past the Palace until I saw a security man's torch shine in the distance and struck off the road and down the grassy hill, the lights of Muswell Hill and Wood Green and Hornsey spreading out in the distance.

Everything was wet from the rain and there were too many sense impressions missing, as if I was only aware of a fraction of the world or the world itself was somehow incomplete.

I was still thinking that when the incomplete world rose like a breaking wave and fell on me.

Afterburn is a wonderful thing. It lets the first-person narrator know things he could possibly have known otherwise.

In the moment of contact, MALLARD had figured everything out, produced its own synthesis, theorised another Ballinger above my Ballinger, and above him another, and another, a tower of fixers complete with cutouts and double-redundancies, a simple analogue of a computer program with just one purpose.

One Ballinger in charge of the operation to kidnap the breather from God only knows where. Another Ballinger in charge of getting it to London. A third Ballinger to transport it to the house on Muswell Hill.

My Ballinger had been in charge of finding a pick. Nobody wonderful, someone with a moderate talent that could be burner-boosted for the operation's needs. Expendable.

I was to pick MALLARD. Then, while still in afterburn, I would be taken away and picked by someone else. He would be given to another pick, and another, and so on, passing the afterburn along until it finally reached someone trustworthy who knew what to look for.

In the meantime, I would fall off a building, jump under a train, or simply disappear. As would Ballinger. And an indeterminate number of Ballingers above him, complete with protegés. There is only one thing worse than committing industrial espionage, and that is leaving behind evidence that you've done it.

But the monster, the little girl in the wheelchair, had other ideas.

Imagine it. Her mother is taken out of some stinking barrio, whispered away in a coprorate Lear with no markings, and probably never even sees the country where her daughter is born, just the inside of a private clinic's delivery room. Then she's shot full of anibiotics, given a few hundred dollars, flown home. Like one of those old stories about UFO abductees. She's the lucky one.

For the child there are years of implant surgery, beginning just as soon as she's strong enough, jacking up her neural system to superhuman levels, cameras for her eyes, mikes for her ears, booster chips for taste and smell. They install organic memory-dumps, processors, molecular datacells like tiny tiny honeycombs, give her treatments to boost the production of memory-RNA, wire in direct neuroelectrical interfaces so she can talk to mainframes in their own languages. And then she isn't human any more. They call her MALLARD. And then they put it to work.

The river of data that streams through the no-longer-human mind is extraordinary, but MALLARD copes easily with it all, solving puzzles and riddles, encryptions and stock market forecasts without even thinking consciously about them, an awful realisation beginning to dawn on it. It's going to die. Soon. Burned out by all the surgery, all the drugs it's being fed to suppress immune response to all its implanted components.

An unaccustomed feeling comes over MALLARD, from deep within the untouched ancient lizard part of its brain, a feeling it tells no one about. It's afraid.

It begins to dream. Technicians see the REM sleep, the alpha-spikes on greenscreens, but MALLARD constructs a secret datafile deep within itself and dumps all its dreams in there so that no one else can get at them. In quiet moments, when nobody is paying attention, it reviews its secret files.

MALLARD is dreaming of a locomotive crossing a great dark plain. It is dreaming of freedom.

And then, one day, the breather's dream comes true. MALLARD starts to travel.

The breather had known exactly what to expect from its `liberators.' Months B perhaps years B of lab tests, plugged up to some coporate mainframe and dumping everything it knew, weeks inside magnetic resonance imagers, gravity-fluctuation scanners, biotuned radars that would pick out all the alterations made to the original organism.

And then one day, maybe even before MALLARD's exhausted, hyped-up body was dead, some researcher would just be unable to wait any longer, the lure of all those esoteric biologicals, the implanted components, would just get too great, and the scalpels would come out. They'd peel MALLARD like an orange, dissect each segment, coming closer and closer to the Mystery of how it worked.

Yes, it knew what to expect. A life not unlike the one it knew already, ending with a vivisection of almost cosmological thoroughness.

On balance, MALLARD's prospects were no better than mine. Except.

The Big Except. MALLARD was a bomb. A sly biological bomb. The same clever hands which had installed organic microprocessors and semicrystalline logic modules had wired a protein splitter into the breather's lungs and a one-shot DNA synthesiser under each armpit.

Any attempt at access or physical examination not proceeded by the proper codes, and MALLARD's metabolism would go berserk. It would exhale nerve gas, sweat tailored retrovirus. The gas would kill anything in the same room with it, and the virus would effect a larger-scale destruction among technicians and executives. By then, of course, MALLARD would be dead, its body totally burned out, delicate organics beginning to decay before anyone could examine them.

The codes to disarm the booby-trap were quite simple. Verbal ones, magic words impossible to get at without triggering the bomb.

The solution was quite simple as well. Use some passive means to discover the magic words. Use a pick. Then, while he still thinks he's MALLARD, ask him what the codes are. No danger of a pick blowing up in your face, no matter how hard he tries.

I could amost feel sorry for the breather, but I'm not sure whether or not that's just a shred of afterburn still persisting, a faint ghost of MALLARD still hiding in my head, marvelling at the sucess of its Plan.

The moment it realised what was happening in that room on Muswell Hill, it was faced with a choice. It could have taken me over entirely, swamped my personality through the burner-amplified link. But it would still die. Even if it managed to escape Ballinger and his masters, it would still grow old and die in my body.

So instead it invaded the Cray and geysered up the satcom link, and from there into Bell-Telecom's global communications network, erasing its traces as it went.

Part of the erasure involved triggering the small but powerful bomb Ballinger's masters had planted in the Cray without telling him, against the eventuality of the breather's sellf-defence mechanism being activated. MALLARD simply told the computer -- and Ballinger's watching bosses -- that the eventuality had materialised. Goodbye, blond kid. Goodbye, Ballinger. Goodbye, me.

I came to with that thought going round and around in my head. MALLARD had meant for me to die in the explosion too. The breather and I were the only ones who knew what had really happened.