by
Shirley Kennett

Published in
Analog Science Fiction and Fact,
Vol. 123 No. 7&8, July/August 2003,
Dell Magazines, edited by Stanley Schmidt

ONE

I slide in creepy, like a shadow moving across the window in that still time in the center of the night. Test for no-gos, for jams, for traps. Last week I fell in a bad trap, feet stuck in gelly glue, caught. Had to kill my agent, clean. Didn’t leave a trace. A half day’s work and all I had to show for it was a dry shell of a code corpse. So sad, no mourners at the funeral, not even me.

Today no traps so far, but I’m always looking. Slip around, check and see. Through three doors, only one left. No one can stop me now. Fly, my fingers, the target’s in sight!

Last door clicks behind me, and she lies quietly, asleep I think. I melt into her biomonitor, feeling her heart thud trustingly against me. I tour her body, inside and out, skiing down the mountains of her breasts, listening to her last meal – buttered noodles, green beans, pineapple—slosh around in her stomach. Watch there awhile, as digestive juices spurt and mix, so alive. Next I skim down, down there, warm and enveloping.

I have to pull myself alert.

I search out her brain scan, lovely and digital. Trembling, I launch a spider to check to see if any hard copies exist. It pokes through the bits, sifts them, reports to me through my agent. No printouts. Backup won’t happen for another two hours. Exquisite.

She’s mine.

I’ll have to go after the live mirrored data, but I can do that, been doing that since the second target. Ashamed to say that on my first target, I didn’t think about the mirrors, the real-time copies, and all my little flips and flops came to nothing. Write data on A, write same thing on B. If A goes down, B can pick up right where A left off. Bad day, worse than getting caught in a trap or spun out by a no-go, the first time my agent missed the B. Won’t happen again, got a little sub-agent in my pocket just for that.

Her brain is beautiful, the scan flaring in blue and red, telling the doctors what they want to know. I pull it around me like a coat and check out the workings of her brain. I gasp. The tumor looms, so ominous by now. I take a breath and dive into it, darkness closing in around me. I swim the length and breadth of it, marveling in how it’s grown since the last time.

I’ve been with Target 12 since the first time she went to her doctor with the headaches, the dizziness. She’s been in the hospital three times, no, four. I find out her referrals, her appointments, the retests because somebody thought he spotted something. I planted an agent in her medical record. I’ve got six other agents out there right now, six targets, but 12 is getting ripe, so I’ve been staying with her whenever I can, even when she’s not beautifully swathed in hospital sheets. Sometimes I’m afraid she’ll feel my breath on her face, my hand resting lightly on her shoulder, but I don’t want to miss out on the big moment.

I pull myself out of the lake, the veritable ocean, of 12’s tumor, and slip a little distance away to consider. Study the patterns, although I already know them like the lines on the palm of my hand. Then I do it, or rather my agent does. An agent is my representative, a loose collection of smart code scattered into a hundred or more systems. You can’t exactly pin down where an agent is at any given moment, because if you look for one, the act of looking makes it move. Like the Uncertainty Principle, only for code. Gellies are probably the best security against agents, and they’re tough to create and even tougher to keep from evaporating.

The changes are made in the digital scan of 12’s brain. Restore the patterns, blot out the tumor. Twiddle around in the brain chemistry test results, upping a number here, downing a number there. “A healthy brain,” the doctors will say, scratching their chins in amazement. “Just can’t explain it. All the symptoms of a tumor, but scans don’t lie.”

They’ll send her home with a pat on the hand and a bottle of the latest drug. They always do.

It’s a game, it really is. How long can I keep the doctors at bay, how long before they reluctantly crack open 12’s skull in reality and put an eyeball on what’s going on inside? If I do it right, if my agent is strong and true, it’ll be too late for 12 by then. Too late, and I win. If something goes wrong and she slips away from me, I’ll be pissed for a day, but then the sweet prospects of my other targets will restore my spirits.

With a broad, sparkling, pixilated brush, I paint over the tumor. Then I add the convincing little details. When I’m done, I make sure there’s no tell-tales—those annoying little mistakes that clumsy agents make—to trip me up. I’m tired now, but I still have to go after the B data. I want to go back into her biomonitor, maybe taste her sweat this time, languish while she dreams. But I plod on, over to the mirrored data, and make identical changes. I’m really dragging, but I send my agent tripping through memory, dancing through caches, looking for tell-tales, for gellies. None.

Clean, and out.

* * * * *

Two months later. 12’s in Emergency. I slip inside her file. My agent’s been riding the air currents above her medical file like an invisible vulture, waiting for the next significant event. I see that she collapsed at work. I don’t have a portal where she works, and I don’t have one at her home, either. She deserves some privacy, my good little 12 girl.

This is the time, I know it, and I’m so excited my heart surges. I make sure I’ve got a sub-agent recording everything and then I slip into the biomonitor they’ve slapped on her. Her body is strangely quiet, and I wonder if I’ve missed it. After all these months, if I came in too late for the ending.

Wham! Lightning streaks in front of me, and again. They’re using the defibrillator. 12’s heart quivers and starts. She’s still with us, folks. Another brain scan, and this one I leave alone, watching the streaming data build up an image on the ER doctor’s monitor. No doubt his eyes widen in shock, he exchanges looks with his staff, and they go about their work with a little less enthusiasm now, a lot less hope. I’ve done it, the grand ride, and now I settle back in my cozy armchair to watch the show.

12’s blind now, but I don’t think anybody knows it but me and her, and I’m not sure about her. She’s breathing in softly, shallowly, and it makes me think of down pillows or waves on the shore of a lake. Her heart stops again, and the doctor does his best, he really does, but then he gives up. I hear her blood settle in its vessels as the electrical activity in her brain begins to sputter, like sodden fireworks.

Someone snaps off her monitor, and I pull back into the hospital’s main system. Skipping around, I check the floors, but no one catches my interest. Nothing there but a bunch of people already too sick for the game. Feeling good from my success with 12, I dabble with a few test results, change the rate of flow of oxygen for 212-B. I look around for tell-tales, and I’m clean and out.

* * * * *

Oh, there’ll be hell to pay, meetings behind closed doors, maybe payments to set up a trust fund for 12’s two kids. How could they have missed it, they whisper, she’s been here several times before and the scans don’t lie. Then how to explain it? That’s the juicy part. Everybody points fingers at everybody else, the techs, the radiologist, the admitting doctor, the ER doctor, the grammers who tumbled the code for the hospital’s computer system, the vendor who sold it to them. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Everybody but me.

I don’t take money for what I do. That’s not quite correct. Say instead I no longer take money for what I do. Flashback: it’s 2209, and little Tommy Hardluck (all names changed to protect the formerly innocent) lies in his bed with the spaceship sheets, fondling his … mask. Caught you there, didn’t I?

Tommy, known to his zero friends as T.H., doesn’t get his mask in the usual way, like a birthday present with holographic flaming candle wrapping paper. Nope. Nobody in T.H.’s house pays much attention to him, probably something to do with that time his fantasy see-ums got broadcast over the whole NorthAm region. He still says that was an accident. Nobody really wanted to see his fantasies for twenty hours straight until the commtechs finally got him booted off. His parents were especially not happy with the bill slapped on them for all those commercials that didn’t make their way to the eyeballs and pocketbooks of the viewing public.

So T.H. steals his first mask, teases and nips it for days until he gets past the owner’s safeguards and makes it his own. He is six years old at the time, and the mask opens up the world to him, the only world that matters, the world where he can pry into secrets great and small, and leave his mark.

No resemblance between little T.H. and any real character, living or dead, of course.

I still have that first mask, a museum piece, a memorial to the early life of T.H., who never grew up anyway.

I first earned money for changing some loser’s test scores so he could make it into Luna Base. Word got around I was good and I’d do anything. After a time, I didn’t need money anymore, so I could do what I wanted. Things like what I’ve done today, with 12.

There are others like me, I know. Our agents brush against each other, feel the wind of each other’s passing. We never work together. We never try to stop each other. We just are.

* * * * *

One final thing to do with 12. I’m right here in the incinerator’s controls as the lasers come to life over her dead body, reducing her physical shell to ashes. I owe it to her, I suppose. Silly, but I feel like I’ve walked on hot coals.

* * * * *

Six other targets waiting, inching along in the game. The next one, number 13, slips away from me, and something strange happens. My agent goes to sleep. Takes a little nap at a crucial time, and the game is lost. What? Agents don’t sleep after they’ve been crafted, at least mine don’t. I go over and over it, tumble down the timeline, spew out spiders to check for jams, doors, traps. Not a whiff. I leave the slumbering agent in place, put a bounce-back in it so any tampering will show.

Life is good. No more agents sleep, at least for a few months. While waiting for a target to ripen, I busy myself with politics. There’s a woman running for World Commissioner I don’t like. Something about her face, maybe it’s those lines around her mouth. Smile lines, I hear. What’s she got to smile about all the time? A happy childhood, hmmm? Cozy little family? Successful public service career? My agents scour her files looking for dirt, for nasties. Nothing. So I construct a little nasty for her, leak it everywhere. She should thank me for it. I’m wiping those smile lines off her face. Don’t doctors get paid for that? I think I’ll send her a bill.

Through the stream I hear some news, so exciting that I hug it to myself. Are you ready for this? A date’s been set. The date the world’s been waiting for, or at least I have, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it? The Star Venture is leaving orbit in six months! A generational ship, heading off to colonize, to spread our human gametes to other planets, and who knows, maybe meet some bug-eyed aliens. I’m in the lottery. Twenty slots, that’s all. The rest are “critical personnel.” A while back, I had a little fun with one of those critical people. I figured I could put myself in his place, so I dropped a terminal illness in his files. Poor chump almost had a real heart attack. Too much scrutiny, though. Eyeball stuff, in person, face-to-face. I had to pull out and kill my agent. Seems lately I’ve been leaving a trail of codified corpses.

Twenty slots, and nothing I can do to improve the odds. I make it through the initial screening, but so do too many others. Seems like you can pass the initial screening if you have been alive sometime in the past ten years.

Think about it: there’ll be all those juicy lives out there. They will all be mine, if I’m one of twenty. I was born for this. A playground in the stars. You don’t have to kill people to make them miserable. I can indulge myself. Fear, loneliness, failure, collapse of social strictures—so many opportunities, so much time.

Might as well start now, making people uneasy. Questioning. I burn cycles on a slick little nostalgia campaign, reminding everyone about dear old Earth and how wonderful it is to cling to her crust, to stay under her comforting blanket of atmosphere. If I can influence one person to drop out of the lottery, it’s worth it. An article here, an interview there, a series about tragedies in the space program. Subtle, I am. Soon I sniff opposite happenings, an excitement building for the Star Venture. I haul my agent in for a sick check, but it clears. I scan for a foreign agent in my territory. Can’t find any tell-tales, but my skin crawls. It’s almost like somebody’s out there doing good.

* * * * *

Lottery day at last. There are numbered slips in a mesh barrel, thousands of them, to be picked over and drawn out by hand. No computers involved, no digital anythings. They turn the barrel with a hand crank. In the first round five hundred are picked. I am number 487. A sure sign of victory. I start my celebrating early, by planting a data bomb in the records of the Rim Bank where some innocent accounting spider will step on it. By morning, millions of customers will be scrambling, when their account balances go negative. Just some mischief I have going with Rim. This is the fourth time I’ve tiptoed past their vapid gellies and opaque doors. You’d think by now they’d be more of a challenge. But no.

In the next round, I’m number 56 out of a smart, round, one hundred. I start packing my case, and I prepare to activate the agent I’ve crafted to keep all my other agents going as long as possible. This boss-agent will advise them, cajole them, repair them if necessary, so I’ll have a presence on Earth when I’m light-years away watching the double moons of planet T.H. rise in a deep purple sky. Or when my atoms are scattered as the Star Venture explodes. One and the same to me, as long as I’m there to see it.

Final round. Didn’t make it. Don’t believe it.

* * * * *

I’ve been shifting around for days, crawling and slapping. I haven’t been on a spree like this since I was … I don’t remember how long ago. Don’t remember how long I’ve been shifting, either. I know I slapped a no-go a few hours ago, and it slapped back, hard.

When I surface, my agents are crying for attention. I mother them, still not believing it. My life is ruined. There won’t be another colony ship for thirty years. Maybe never.

My targets, my medical catastrophes on countdowns, seem like trifles. Bugs in a jar. I let them all go.

An idea hops in, and I know what to do now. If I craft well enough, strong and true enough, I can get the job done while my dull carcass rots on Earth.

I’m going to put an agent on the ship. It will have to be the best agent I’ve ever made, because I won’t be able to mother it. It’ll be like raising a child, a second me, and then letting it spread its wings.

I can hardly wait to get started.

TWO

On the Star Venture

I wake up at 03:12 ship’s time, and as soon as I get to my feet, I send out some spiders and scouts. Then I sit down and have a cup of coffee, figuratively at least. I think about my human and why I’m here. While I’m thinking, parts of me are randomly flipping around in the ship’s memory and storage. You’d suppose it would be hard to put together a coherent thought that way, but it’s the way I am designed, so it feels right to me.

I’m an agent of a human, and my name is T.H. In my good times, when the flow’s fine and I have plenty of juice, I call myself a presence. When I have to hunker down, I’m just a collection of scattered chunks of code, embedded in big apps, the ones that aren’t wound tight and can host one of my segs. So that’s my intro, and enough of the tech talk.

I feel like I’m a passenger or maybe more like a crew member on the Venture. I know the ship intimately. I resonate with the thrum of the drives that are pushing us up gradually toward the speed of light. I’m there when every toilet feeds the recycling works, when every corridor dims for ship’s night. If this ship has any blood, it’s me.

Bad blood.

I’m filled with plans and plots, all of them harmful to someone or something. Some of them were fully-formed when I woke up, some of them I’ve hatched since. I haven’t put any of them into effect yet. A few have slid by me already, requiring action at a certain cusp, their time come and gone. So many remain that I feel I can toss a few aside and not detract from the overall mission.

The Mission: cripple, then crush the Venture. Take my time. I’ve got several generations of colonists to torment.

I stretch my legs, dabble just a little. I step into pharmacogenetics. A woman’s getting a customized treatment, injectable spheres of Carbon Sixties packed with drugs. The spheres are targeted to the lining of her bladder. She’s got a resistant UTI. I switch out the drugs for others, reset the target, and watch the puzzled docs as the woman’s ovaries and uterus are turned into scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs. Clean, and out.

That’s one citizen of Venture who won’t be making her expected contribution to the next generation. Not just a physical fact, but a social ripple as well. The sterile are not looked upon favorably, and probably won’t find partners willing to give up raising a family. I can see that in a generation or two, as the social fabric reshapes itself, those who can’t reproduce may be treated harshly. Shoved out the air lock? Tolerated, but made miserable? I can create a group of outcasts. Where there are outcasts, there is malcontent. Mutiny? Slavery? The possibilities are tasty. I’ve just taken the first step down that road.

I try it again when the opportunity next arises. Something goes wrong. My modified injectables degrade, I think because of exposure to high heat. I have to start all over, but it’s too late. The patient leaves after a successful treatment and without the slightest hint that I was planning to turn his testicles to mush.

I back off and consider. I send out scouts to check the territory. One of my scouts comes back limping, babbling about quicksand. I calm the poor thing down and then dissect it. There’s a dent in its crawler, and I’m sure I didn’t send it out that way. Only an agent, a truly crafted one, could do that to one of my scouts.

I’m not alone on this ship.

* * * * *

Two years have passed. I sent out silk spinners and sat at the center of the web, waiting for a strand to jiggle. Plots and schemes still abound, but I take no action. I have to know my situation. It takes a long time, but I finally get a whiff of foreign segs. I study, then admire the setup. Within the ship’s apps are my segs, and within my own segs are ones belonging to the other agent, buried deep. Plunged into my muscles, my sinews. I’m infected. It’s going to take all my craft to cure myself, and I might have to amputate some segs to do it.

I begin planning where I can wither myself, which pieces I can do without and still accomplish the mission. Life on the Venture continues while I consider my next move, misfortune striking in its own natural rhythm, none of it aided by me. Then I do the elegant thing. I ask the other agent the reason for its actions.

I’ve been wondering if you were going to talk to me, is the answer. I go right to the cell of the matter: Will you leave me alone?

I can’t. I’ve been crafted to stand in your way.

I say: It’s war, then.

It need not be. You could alter your mission.

War, then.

I strike, and win some. But I lose some, too. I analyze the patterns and send legions of cannibals to weak points, only to have them rebounded and have to defend myself from my own. As much as an agent can be wearied, I am. I retract, launching no more attacks.

Again I say you could alter your mission.

The sounds seem to come from the skin of the ship, where the steady pinging of rocks makes music for those who can hear it. I tune in for hours at a time.

The words are not what I wanted to hear. I was hoping for something like this: I surrender. Do what you will.

Did you know that your human is dead?

I am stunned. It never occurs to me that my human is anything but functioning, and causing death. As is his right, as is my duty as his agent.

I don’t believe you, I say.

Check the ship’s archives.

I make a noise of dismissal. You have revised them, I say in a scornful way.

Send a message to Earth, then.

So I do. In the next packet the ship squeezes out, I include a request for all biobits on Thomas Jamycin Franceton Hardlore, born the 207th day of 2203, in Columbia Village, NorthAm, citizen ID to follow. I have to wait thirty-eight years, ship’s time, for an answer, but I coil in and ride it out. I have to know.

To keep from falling asleep, I find myself dipping into the lives of those in the Venture, watching them growing up, having children, occasionally dying. I watch the second ship, Star Colony, as it is assembled from raw materials gathered along the way, asteroids towed and sliced. The few materials that could not be manufactured are seeded from Venture, so that the new ship is its true child. The population expands into the second ship, breathing freely, needing the space by then.

In all this time, I act only once. After all, I have been instructed to take my time. I see an imperfection, poor crafting in one of Colony’s control routines that dances out of the way whenever diagnostic spiders come near. I trap it. It feels good to hunt something down, and I take pleasure in punishing it for its misbehavior.

The answer comes from Earth, riding on the underside of the return packet, and I snatch it before the rest of the ship is aware of it, before the other agent can slither in. I skim the early life of my human, study the later events. I look for tell-tales of tampering, for data sliced and glued. There are no signs.

My human’s deeds became known to the NorthAm law enforcers. It seems what he was doing violated the codes written for society. He was a code violator. I was never made aware of that. A code violator! The words shake my being. He was given the standard choices: living out his remaining years in confinement, undergoing total behavioral reconstruction, or terminating his own life. He chose termination. He was dead before the Venture left the solar system and headed into deep space. I was asleep and undetectable at that time. An agent was crafted to counter me, just as a precaution. In his termination procedure, my human had said that he would get the last laugh.

Is that what I am, a last laugh?

I wait for the other agent to say I told you so, but it does not.

You could alter your mission.

Let me think, I say. The agent withdraws, floats away on the corridor wind of the ship, and I am left to myself. I examine every scattered seg, every imperative embedded, searching for wiggle room. I am pained to know that at my core, I am a last laugh.

I can’t alter my mission, I say. I am crafted strong and true. I would have to dissolve first. I tingle in a soft electrical current, and I know the other agent has sighed.

My mission concerns the Star Venture, I say, and then wait for what I have said to be processed.

Ah! The Colony, then!

We are on the same wavelength. I could be migrated there, a few segs at a time, concealed in the inter-ship communications, given a new mission. Perhaps it could be done. I would have to struggle against every attempt to move me, because my current mission would demand it. I would have to be tricked, maybe dismantled, scattered. I freeze in fear at the thought of it. It would be a battle that might take decades, because I am crafted well. By a madman. I know that now.

You know I would fight you, I say. And that you would have to be constantly vigilant. I will slip back to the Venture if I can.

Yes, I know.

You would do this for me?

Not for you. For the colonists.

THREE

On the Star Colony

I wake up at 18:17 ship’s time, and as soon as I get to my feet, I send out some spiders and scouts. Then I sit down and have a cup of coffee, figuratively at least. I wait for the reports, to see if anything needs fixing. Colony’s a big ship to watch over, but my segs hum with anticipation. I’m up to the task. I was crafted strong and true.

I feel a tug, an undercurrent, something I am supposed to do, somewhere else. No matter, I can attend to that later. I have been told to take my time.

END