The Pardoner's Tale Read online

“He isn’t a who. He’s a what. It’s an android, a mobile anti-pardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Culver City. Something new that we have going around town.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”

  “It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”

  “You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned hacker, you know that?”

  “Why did you go to work for them?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Everybody works for them. Except people like you. You took everything I had and didn’t give me my pardon. So what was I supposed to do?”

  “I see.”

  “It’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for TTD.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for TTD?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”

  “To whom?”

  “The system always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive. You’ll work for us.”

  “You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” I said, amazed.

  “It beats TTD,” she said.

  I fell silent again. I was thinking that she couldn’t possibly be serious, that they’d be fools to trust me in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to let me near their computer.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it. On one condition.”

  “You really have balls, don’t you?”

  “Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. Okay?”

  “You know you aren’t in any position to lay down conditions.”

  “Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”

  She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”

  “Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”

  “You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”

  “Let me find that out.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” I said.

  * * *

  She went along with it. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and pretty soon they brought in the android I had encountered in the park, or maybe another one with the same face. It looked me over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.

  Someone came in and took the security lock off my wrist and left again. She gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to me and we made contact. And I jumped right in.

  I was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but I knew what I needed to do and I knew I had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. So I bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. I went right around it while the android was still setting up its combinations, dived underneath, got myself instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level and gave the master Culver City computer a hearty handshake.

  Jesus, that felt good!

  All that power, all those millions of megabytes squatting there, and I was plugged right into it. Of course I felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant. That was all right. I might be a mouse but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. I hung on tight and went soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine.

  And as I soared, I ripped out chunks of it by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.

  It didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That’s how big it was. There I was, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t even know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is still stuck with operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was huge. Mouse riding on elephant, did I say? Amoeba piggybacking on brontosaurus, was more like it.

  God knows how much damage I was able to do. But of course the alarm circuitry did cut in eventually. Internal gates came clanging down and all sensitive areas were sealed away and I was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense staying around waiting to get trapped, so I pulled myself free.

  I had found out what I needed to know. Where the defenses were, how they worked. This time the computer had kicked me out, but it wouldn’t be able to, the next. Whenever I wanted, I could go in there and smash whatever I felt like.

  The android crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.

  Lights were flashing on the office wall.

  She looked at me, appalled. “What did you do?”

  “I beat your android,” I said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”

  “You damaged the main computer.”

  “Not really. Not much. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised, seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”

  “I think you really damaged it.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there and crashed the hell out of their programs.”

  “You think I could do something like that?”

  She studied me. “I think maybe you could, yes.”

  “Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. But I’m not a crusader, you know. I like my life the way it is. I move around, I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t start revolutions. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough, and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I stick my finger in their eye, they’ll cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”

  “But now you might,” she said.

  I began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you,” I said, although I was beginning to think that I did.

  “You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down in L.A. and put you to work, what the hell would you have to lose? You’d go right in there. You’d gimmick things but good.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And then you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’d fix the Entities, sure. You’d do such a job on their computer that they’d have to scrap it and start all over again. Isn’t that so?”

  She was on to me, all right.

  “But I’m not going to give you the chance. I’m not crazy. There isn’t going to be any revolution and I’m not going to be its heroine and you aren’t the type to be a hero. I understand you now. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Because if anybody did, you’d take your little revenge, and you wouldn’t care what you brought down on everybody else’s head. You could ruin their computer but then they’d come down on us and they’d make things twice as hard for us as they already are, and you wouldn’t care. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upside down for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”

  She looked at me steadily and all the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.

  After a little she said, “Can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I could do that.”

  “Do it, then. And then get going. Get the hell out of here, fa
st.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You think I’m not?”

  I shook my head. I understood. And I knew that I had won and I had lost, both at the same time.

  She made an impatient gesture, a shoo-fly gesture.

  I nodded. I felt very very small.

  “I just want to say—all that stuff about how much I regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.”

  “It probably was,” she said. “Look, do your gimmicking and edit yourself out and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. Okay? Do it real fast.”

  I hunted around for something else to say and couldn’t find it. Quit while you’re ahead, I thought. She gave me her wrist and I did the interface with her. As my implant access touched hers she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder but I noticed it. I felt it, all right. I think I’m going to feel it every time I stiff anyone, ever again. Any time I even think of stiffing anyone.

  I went in and found the John Doe arrest entry and got rid of it, and then I searched out her civil service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. Not much of an atonement. But what the hell, there wasn’t much I could do. Then I cleaned up my traces behind me and exited the program.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s done.”

  “Fine,” she said, and rang for her cops.

  * * *

  They apologized for the case of mistaken identity and let me out of the building and turned me loose on Figueroa Street. It was late afternoon and the street was getting dark and the air was cool. Even in Los Angeles winter is winter, of a sort. I went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself and it came driving up, five or ten minutes later, and I told it to take me north. The going was slow, rush-hour stuff, but that was okay. We came to the wall at the Sylmar gate, fifty miles or so out of town. The gate asked me my name. “Richard Roe,” I said. “Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x. Destination San Francisco.”

  It rains a lot in San Francisco in the winter. Still, it’s a pretty town. I would have preferred Los Angeles that time of year, but what the hell. Nobody gets all his first choices all the time.

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