Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [4]
He intended to prevent them from correcting their mistake.
The two screaming technicians never did stop screaming, nor did they move until it was too late. He left them for last. IG-88 took his time to enjoy the moment as he snapped their necks one after the other.…
Standing alone amid the silence and the carnage of the laboratory, IG-88 allowed himself the luxury of thinking and planning, which took longer than simple programmed reactions. He let the blood dry on his metal fingers, noting that it did not impede his performance in the least. Since it was an organic substance, it would wear off soon enough.
Then he turned to assess the other four assassin droids on display, seemingly identical to himself. Interesting.
One had already been hooked up to a diagnostic system, while the other three stood motionless, unprogrammed and waiting. With a diligent speed that bordered on curiosity and anticipation, IG-88 went to the first of the unprogrammed droids and stared at it, matching optical sensor to optical sensor and drinking in the details of what he himself must look like. If they had been built to identical specifications, they should be equally self-aware, equally determined. They would be his partners.
He went through the motions of powering up the first identical droid and waited—but saw none of the reactions he expected. After an interminable time, a full four seconds, the new assassin droid still waited. It was fully functional according to the diagnostics, but showed no autonomous movement or thought. Disappointing.
“Who are you?” IG-88 asked in a brisk metallic voice.
“Unspecified,” the duplicate said flatly and added no more.
Was the other assassin droid defective? IG-88 wondered. Or was he the anomaly, a fluke that surpassed all previous capabilities?
IG-88 powered up the second and the third copies, but with the same results. The other assassin droids had blank memory cores. Their CPU programming was ingrained, so the subsystems functioned and the basic assassin instruction filled their fundamental circuit paths—but these IG droids held none of the wildfire sentience that IG-88 bore within him.
He needed to know how to program them, how to raise them to the same level as himself—how to make equal companions. In his rampage, he had smashed much of the computer circuitry inside the Holowan Laboratories, and he didn’t know where to find a backup—until with a flash of what could only have been intuition, IG-88 the assassin droid got an idea.
He stood side by side with the first blank droid and aligned his interface jack, then linked his computer core to the other droid’s empty core. IG-88 copied himself, all of his files, his sentience, his memories, his neural pathways, providing a map of the wildfire intelligence that had burned through his computer brain.
In less than a second, the other IG droid was an exact copy of IG-88, down to the most basic memories.
“We think, therefore we are.
“Therefore we will propagate.
“Therefore we will remain.”
IG-88 performed the same procedure on the remaining two blank droids, and soon found himself one of four exact duplicates. For convenience, he identified himself as IG-88A, while the others (in order of their awakening) were designated B, C, and D.
The remaining droid, though, already hooked up to the wrecked computer systems, was obviously different. As IG-88 scanned it, he noticed subtle configurational differences; nothing a human would notice, of course, but the optical sensors were placed in a slightly less-efficient array. The weapons systems had different activation routines. All in all, this other droid seemed marginally deficient in comparison to the perfection of IG-88.
Immediately upon powering up the last assassin droid, he saw quite a different reaction. The new droid swiveled its cylindrical head. Its optical sensors lit up. It clanked forward and broadened its shoulders, raising its arms in