Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [111]
Coffee. Just give me a cup of coffee! I could smell it, taste the welcome bitterness at the back of my tongue.
Coffee, I thought. Coffee. Then—
Ratchet.
In the pocket of my jacket was an object I’d trekked about for the last few days without remembering it, which was something to do with a computer, but wasn’t RAM. I pulled it out.
As I ran my fingers over it I realized that the chip Ratchet had slipped into my bag sometime during the last minutes at the Farm was about the right size to fit in the slot in the “IQ” panel. Maybe the number “128” printed on it was a code designation, or even a serial number, rather than a unit of measurement. And perhaps the “IQ” referred to intelligence, or the central processing unit.
I put the chip on the desk and frowned at it for a while. Then I reached forward and gently slotted it into the socket, with the number facing up. It fitted perfectly.
Nothing happened. I waited for five minutes, finishing my cigarette, feeling slightly foolish. Of course the chip had nothing to do with a gunship. How could it? Which left me still sitting in a piece of archaeology, with no idea what to do and with time running on and on. I ground the cigarette butt out on the floor with my boot, abruptly deciding to just get out, shoot up, and go running into the forest like some chicken gone berserk.
“Initial checking procedure completed,” said a voice, scaring the living shit out of me. I glared wildly round the cabin to see who’d spoken. There was no one to be seen, but a small camera in one of the top corners suddenly swiveled its beady eye toward me, and lights came on across the whole control panel.
Then the voice spoke again.
“Hello, jack,” it said.
My brain tried to crawl out of my ears.
“Fuck!” I said, when I could breathe again. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s Ratchet, Jack,” the voice said calmly.
“Ratchet,” I said, as my brain had another crack at escaping, presumably in a bid to find somewhere more explicable to live. I considered jamming my fingers in my ears, to firmly block that route, but then realized I wouldn’t be able to hear anything.
“Yes. It’s good to see you. I gather we’re in The Gap.” With a quiet whirring sound the camera zoomed in on my face. “Your pupils are pinned. Have you been taking Rapt again?”
“Fuck that,” I said. “Screw what I’ve been up to. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” said Ratchet. “I assume you brought me.”’
“Well,” I said, “yes, I did. But how did you get in my bag? You were still at the Farm when I left.”
“I was running on a back-up processor. When it became obvious that the events at the Farm were unlikely to have a uniformly positive conclusion, I put my main CPU somewhere safe, so you were likely to take it with you.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to die,” he said, simply. “Also, I hoped I might come in useful someday. Why are you in The Gap?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story. But how come you can run this gunship?”
“That’s what I was built for in the first place. Not this ship, but another like it. At the end of the war the CPU’s were salvaged. Arlond Maxen bought up a job lot of them. I ended up on the Farm.”
“You were a warDroid?”
“Yes. I was.”
I stared at the camera, mind whirling, picturing war-scarred computers running traffic control and electronic toasters all over the country. It could explain a lot. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew I’d been a Bright Eyes. Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”
“You didn’t ask—and I wouldn’t have told you anyway. The last thing you needed at the time was to remember the war. It wasn’t relevant.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s why you were so stupidly powerful. That’s why you were so weird”
“What—compared to you?” Ratchet asked, and I suddenly realized just how much I’d missed him.
Then I remembered the overall position, my global world view at that time, and the mood transformed into panic.
“Look,” I said. “Weird