Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [221]
She circles it gingerly, getting between it and the wet area. It moves towards her: whip, tug, bounce; whip, tug, bounce. It stops. The tip of the flail rises and sways from side to side, then presses against the ground. Tamara steps forward, stumbles as her left foot comes up from the ground with an unexpected sucking noise. The rubbery limb recoils.
Tamara squats down and reaches out with her grapple, a simple mechanism a couple of metres long which has a primitive robot hand at the far end and a pair of handles for her to grasp, one-handed, and thus extend her clutch. She eases it across the ground and grabs the flail at the root. In obliging reflex, the tentacular appendage wraps around the grapple and starts trying to crush it to death.
Tamara lifts it off the ground and heads back to the boat. The biomech, evolved or designed at the interface between domains, is not a bad catch. It has senses, reflexes, and apparently a capacity to concentrate radioactives within its tough skin. Somewhere in the human quarter there’s a technician who is looking for just such a genotype, or so she hopes.
She’s just sat down in the boat and in the middle of manoeuvring the grapple and its load, awkwardly trying to keep her distance from it (at less than two metres the tickle in her geiger-sense is becoming a pain) while selecting and opening a container, when there’s a ringing in her left ear.
‘Damn,’ she says loudly. She tenses her throat-muscles to turn on the mike, winks up the phone-screen, and with a rightward flick of her eyes accepts the call. The first screen to come up is clunky, even as it hangs with hallucinatory vividness in the space between her and the end of the grapple. It’s like a camera is looking at a monitor screen, in some primitive glimmer of machine self-awareness. Text scrolls down it, a voice-over spell-checks itself along.
‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ it intones. ‘Incoming challenge call from –’ and here it hesitates, as if even this august implementation of the voice of the IBM is amazed at its own temerity ‘– David Reid. Will you accept?’
‘Yes,’ gulps Tamara.
The screen is instantly minimised to the corner of her eye, and the main view is taken by a solid image of a face she’s seen many times before, but never before speaking to her. The window floats in front of her eyes, with Reid’s head and shoulders at a comfortable speaking distance behind it. Behind him, she can see different parts of a room, a bright window (real, apparently). He’s pacing about as he talks.
‘Tamara Hunter?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
He grins, peering past her.
‘I can see why you call yourself that. Well, to business m’lady. You’re currently in possession of one of my machines, a Model D gynoid, and I want it back. Now.’
Tamara takes a deep breath.
‘I’m not in possession of it – her. She’s claiming self-ownership and I’m defending her. So are several sworn allies of mine, and other clients of Invisible Hand.’
‘Crap,’ Reid retorts. ‘She doesn’t even have the wit to claim self-ownership.’
‘She does now, and did, before witnesses.’
‘To a fucking IBM, you mean. Your legal expert-system couldn’t pass the Turing itself, let alone administer it.’
‘I RESENT THAT.’
‘Shaddap,’ says Tamara, still struggling with the grapple. The thing on the end is rolling like a badly held forkful of spaghetti. ‘Sorry, Reid. That wasn’t for you.’
‘I appreciate that,’ says Reid dryly. ‘You were saying?’
‘I can get human witnesses to testify before any court you like. The gynoid ain’t your pet zombie any more.’
Reid’s eyes narrow. ‘That’s because she’s been hacked. It’s still not an autonomous development, even if that matters, which it doesn’t.’
‘It’s time