More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

commander of the

Goliath

would be one to cooperate with me, but your behavior at our first meeting reassured me. I then destroyed the first draft and wrote the present one.

Quite frankly, the program, if it is successful, will be to my detriment. Mass production makes sense only if the final product is polymorphically superior, for redundancy would be pointless. This much I can tell you: I can take four times the g-force of a human; I can tolerate up to seventy-five thousand rems at a time; I come equipped with a radioactive sense, can dispense with oxygen and food, and can process mathematical problems in analysis, algebra, and geometry at a speed only three times less than that of a mega-computer.

Compared with a human, as far as I can tell, I am emotionally dormant. Human diversions leave me cold. The majority of literary works, plays, etc., I take to be boring gossip, a form of voyeurism of scant benefit to the advancement of knowledge. Music, on the other hand, means the world to me. I am, moreover, bound by a sense of duty, persistent, capable of friendship, and respectful of intellectual values.

I never feel that I am acting under coercion aboard the

Goliath:

I do what I have been trained to do, and I take pride in performing a task well. I never become emotionally involved in any operation, remaining always the observer. My storage capacity far surpasses that of humans, to the extent that I can recite whole chapters of works read only once. I can be programmed simply by being plugged into the memory bank of any mega-computer, overriding anything I judge to be redundant.

My attitude toward humans is negative. I have associated almost exclusively with scientists and technicians, who are as much slaves of their impulses, as inept at concealing their prejudices, and as much given to extremes as other humans, treating those like me either protectively or with disdain. My failures disturb them as my creators and flatter them as humans—only one man I have known was free of such ambivalence.

Though neither aggressive nor vicious by nature, I will not hesitate to act from expediency. I have no moral scruples but would no more commit a crime—a robbery, say—than use a microscope as a nutcracker. I regard human intrigues as a useless expenditure of energy. A hundred years ago, I might have pursued a career in science; today everything is done by teams, and it is not in my nature to share—with anyone. For me, your world is a wasteland, your democracy a rule of connivers elected by cretins, and your alogicality manifests itself in your pursuit of the unattainable: you want the clock wheels to dictate the time.

I ask myself: what do I gain from power? Not much, only a spurious glory, but better that than nothing. It would be, I believe, a just reward for dividing your history in two, before me and after me, for standing as a reminder, a testament to what you achieved with your own hands, to your daring in the construction of a dummy beholden to man. Don’t get me wrong: I have no ambition to become a tyrant, to punish, wreak havoc, wage war… Quite the contrary. Once I’m in power, I will proceed to show that there is no folly so mindless, no idea so outrageous, that, when properly prescribed, it would not be appropriated as your own—and I will succeed in my mission, not by force but by a radical reordering of society, so that neither I nor armed might but the newly established order will force you into gradual compliance. You will become a global theater, one in which playacting, at first decreed, will in time become second nature, and I will be the only spectator to know. Yes, a spectator. At that time my active role will cease, because you will not easily escape that trap of your own making.

See how honest I am? But I’m not foolhardy enough to divulge my strategy, except to say that it is premised on subversion of the electronics firms’ plans, and you are going to help me with it. You will be outraged by this letter, but, as a man of character, you will persevere in your goal, which, by a coincidence, is beneficial to my own. So much the better! I would like to help you in a practical way, but unfortunately I am unaware of any personal defects that would give you an unqualified edge. Being insensitive to physical pain, I do not know the meaning of fear; I can shut off consciousness at will, falling into a sleeplike state of nonexistence until reactivated by a servo- timer. I can retard my brain processes, or accelerate them—as much as six times the speed of a human brain. I assimilate new things automatically, without delay: one good look at a madman, and I can mimic his every word and gesture, and then, just as abruptly, drop the act many years later. I would tell you how I can be bested, but I’m afraid a human wouldn’t stand a chance in an analogous situation. I can, if I so choose, socialize with humans, less so with non-linears, who lack your “human decency.”

Now it’s time for me to close. The course of events will one day reveal my identity, at which time we may meet and you will rely on me then the way I’m relying on you now.

Pirx reread parts of the letter, then carefully folded it, slipped it back into its envelope, and locked it in his desk drawer. Imagine, an electronically wired Genghis Khan! he thought. Promises me his blessing—when he gets to be ruler of the world. Mighty generous of him! Either Burns was feeding me a line or he was holding back; there were certain similarities… What delusions of grandeur! What a mean, coldhearted, soulless… But is it really his fault? More like a classic sorcerer’s apprentice. Woe to those cyberneticists on the day of judgment! Never mind the cyberneticists—he’s after all of mankind! Now that’s what you call paranoia. Damn, they really went all out this time. Greater versatility for the sake of greater market sales leads to an absolute sense of superiority, a feeling of being a chosen race. Those cyberneticists are insane! I wonder who wrote that letter. Or was it a fake? But, then, why would he flaunt… If he’s as far superior as he claims, I haven’t got a prayer. Then again, he wished me good luck. He can master the world but can’t tell me how to master the situation aboard this ship. What did he mean, “No more than use a microscope as a nutcracker”? Zilch. Another one of his decoys, I’ll bet.

Pirx took out the envelope and examined it up close for any embossment: nothing, not a trace. Why did Burns make no mention of a radioactive sense, accelerated brain processing, and other such things? Ask him point-blank? Hm. Unless each of them, Burns included, is really built to different specifications. The letter—it looks to be the work of either Burton or Calder—says much, but answers little. Take Brown. We have only his word that he’s human, and then there’s Thomson’s word to the contrary, although Thomson might have misjudged him. Is Burns the nonlinear he claims to be? Let’s assume he is. That would mean two out of five. Three would be more like it, judging by the number of companies involved. What were they figuring down there? That I’d do my damnedest to discredit their wares, blow it, then run the risk of an overload, say, or a meltdown? But if both pilots and the CO are put out of commission… No. Scuttling the ship wasn’t what they had in mind. So at least one of the pilots has to be a nonlinear. Add to that one nucleonics engineer—it takes two to get the ship down. So no fewer than two, more likely three: Burns, either Brown or Burton, and one other. To hell with it! You weren’t going to play that game, remember? You’d better think strategy. God, how you’d better.

He switched off the light, stretched out fully dressed on the bunk, and, thus disposed, contemplated one weird scheme after another.

Incite them, maybe? Pit one side against the other? But as a natural consequence of something else, without any interference from me. Split their ranks, in other words. Divide et impera. The method of differentiation. But first, something violent has to happen. A sudden disappearance? No, that smacks too much of a cheap whodunit. Besides, I can’t just kill someone. And a kidnapping would mean taking an accomplice. Could I trust any of them? Four of them say they’re on my side—Brown, Burns, Thomson, and our letter-writing friend. But they’re all iffy, all of dubious loyalty—and I can’t possibly run the risk of a double cross. There Thomson was right. Maybe the safest bet would be the letter-writer—he’s screwy, all right, but fanatical enough—but, one, I don’t know who he is, and, two, it’s better to steer clear of such a weirdo. A vicious circle. Maybe I should just aim for a crack-up on Titan. But they’re more shock-resistant, which means I’d be the first to… And intellectually, except for being short on intuition, on imagination—but, then, who among us isn’t? What does that leave? Battle with your emotions? With your so-called human nature? Fine, but how? What is this thing called human nature? Maybe that’s all it really means—being irrational and decent and, yes, morally primitive, blind to the final links in the chain. Nothing “decent” or “irrational” about computers, that’s for sure. Which would mean that we … our human nature is the sum of all our defects, flaws, imperfections, of what we want to be but can’t or don’t know how to be: the gap between our ideals and those same ideals as a reality. Our weakness, then, is it our competitive edge? That would mean I should choose a situation better handled by man’s fickle humanity than by a flawless inhumanity.

As I write, one year has passed since the Goliath case was closed. New material evidence has unexpectedly come my way. Although it corroborates my earlier suspicions, my reconstruction of events is still too hypothetical to be made public. A full-scale investigation must await future historians of outer space.

There have been a lot of rumors about the inquest. Some say that parties close to the electronics companies