Part 49 (1/2)

When Stanuel wriggled out and around the tube he saw trees. They'd blown a hole in the lawn of the gardens. They carefully climbed out, pus.h.i.+ng past dirt, and the tubes and support equipment that monitored and maintained The gardens and soaked the roots with water.

”Now what?” Stanuel asked. ”We're going to be seen. ”

”Now it gets messy,” Pepper said. He pulled Stanuel along toward the large elevator at the center. ”I'm going with a frontal a.s.sault. It'll be messy. But. . . I do well at messy. ”

”There's no reason for me to be here, then,” Stanuel said. ”What use will I be? I failed to get you there through the exhaust pipes. Why not just let me go?”

Pepper laughed. ”Not quite ready to die for the cause, Stanuel?”

”No. Yes. I'm not sure, it just feels like suicide, and I'm not sure who that helps. ”

”You're safer with me. ” Pepper launched them from branch to branch through the trees. Now that curfews were in effect, no families perched in the great globe of green, no kids screaming and racing through the trees. It was eerily silent.

Pepper slowed them down in the last grove of trees before the elevators at the core of the gardens. As they gently floated towards the lobby at the bottom of the shaft three well-built men, the kind who obviously trained their bodies up on the rim of the wheel, turned the corner.

They carried stun guns. Non-lethal, but still menacing.

Stanuel heard a click. Pepper held out a gun in each hand. Real guns, perfectly lethal.

”I'd turn those off,” Pepper said to the men, ”and pa.s.s them over, and then no-one would get hurt. ”

They hesitated. But then the commanding voice of Pan filled the gardens. ”Do as he says. And then escort him to me. ”

They looked at each other, unhappy, and tossed the guns over. Pepper threw them off into the trees. ”You're escorting us?”

The three unhappy security men nodded. ”Pan says you have an electromagnetic pulse weapon. We're not to provoke you. ”

Stanuel bit his lip. It felt like a trap. These traitors were taking them into the maw of the beast, and Pepper, as far as he could see, looked cheerful about it. ”It's a trap,” he muttered.

”Well of course it is,” Pepper said. ”But it's a good one that avoids us skulking about, getting dirtier, or having to shoot our way through. ” the mercenary followed Pan's lackeys into the elevator. He turned and looked at Stanuel, hovering outside. ”And Pan's right. I do have an E. M. P device. But if I trigger it this deep into the hub, I take out all your power generating capabilities and computer core systems. ”

”Really?” Stanuel was intrigued.

Pepper held up a tiny metal tube with a b.u.t.ton on the end. ”If I get to the tower,” Pepper said. ”I can trigger it and take out Pan, while leaving the rest of the station unaffected. ”

Stanuel had weathered five days of his beloved Haven under the autocratic rule of Pan, the trickster.

He'd travel with Pepper to see it end, he realized.

He pulled himself into the elevator.

For five days Haven's populace had a ruler, a single being whose word was law, whose thoughts were made policy. Pan stood in the center of the command console, its face lit by the light of a hundred screens and the reflections off the inner rim of Haven's great wheel.

Pan wore a simple blue suit, had tan skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. His androgynous face and thin body meant that had he stood in a crowd of Haven's citizens, he would hardly have been noticed. He could be anybody, or everybody.

He also flickered slightly as he turned.

”My executioner and his companion. I'm delighted,” Pan said. ”If I could shake your hand, I would. ” He gave a slight bow.

Pepper returned it.

Pan smiled. ”I've been waiting for you two for quite a while. I apologize for sending the rover up the exhaust pipe. ”

Pepper shrugged. ”No matter. So what now? I have something that can take you out, you have me surrounded by nasty surprises. . . ”

Pan folded its arms. ”I don't do nasty surprises, Pepper. I'm not a monster, contrary to what Stanuel might say. You have an E. M. P device, and if you were to set it off further down the tower, you would shut all Haven down. True, I have backup capabilities that mitigate that, but your device presents a terrible risk to the well being of the citizenry. With the device and you up here, the only risk is to me. ”

An easy enough decision, Stanuel thought. Trigger the d.a.m.n device! But Pepper glanced around the room, maybe seeing traps that Stanuel couldn't. ”If you don't do nasty surprises, what stops me from zapping you out, right here, right now?”

”I would like to make you an offer. If you'd listen. ”

Pepper's lips quirked. ”I wouldn't be much of a mercenary if I just accepted the higher bid in the middle of the job. You don't get repeat work very often that way. ”

Pan held its hands up. ”I understand. But consider this, I am, indirectly, the one who hired you. ”

Stanuel had to object. ”the resistance. . . ”

”I run it,” Pan smiled. ”I know everything it does, who it hires, and in many cases, I give it the orders. ”

Stanuel felt like he'd been thrown into a freezing cold vat of water. He lost his breath. ”What do you mean? You infiltrated it?” they had lost, even before they'd started.

Pan turned to the mercenary. ”Stanuel is bewildered, as are many, by what they created, Pepper. I'm merely the amalgamated avatar of the converged will of all the simulations made to run this colony. The voter simulations kept taking up energy, so the master processing program came up with a more elegant solution: me. Why run millions of emulators, when it could fuse them all into a single expression of its will that would run the government?”

”A clever solution,” Pepper said.

”A techno-democracy, even more so than the vanilla kind, is messy. Dangerously so. With study committees and votes on everything, things that needed to be done quickly didn't get done in time.

”So the emulations decided to put forward a bill, buried in the middle of some other obscure administrivia. The vote was that emulations be given command of the government. ”

Stanuel stepped forward. ”We woke up and found that in a single moment all of Haven had been disenfranchised. ”

”By your own desires and predictive voting algorithms,” Pan said. ”In a way, yes. In a way, no. ”

Stanuel spit at the dictatorial hologram in front him. ”then the emulators decided that a single amalgamation, an avatar, and expression of all their wills, would work better. So then even our own voting patterns turned over their power. ”

”Not surprising,” Pepper said. ”You didn't have the maturity to keep your own vote, you turned it over to the copies of yourselves. Why be surprised that the copies would do something similar and turn to a benevolent dictator of their own creation?”

Pan looked pleased. ”Dictators aren't so bad, if they're the right dictator. And it's hard coded into my very being to look out for the community. That's why I look like this,” it waved a hand over its face. ”I'm the average of all the faces in Haven. Political poll modeling shows that were I to run for office, if would be almost guaranteed based on physiological responses alone. ”

Stanuel looked at Pepper. ”Pan may have infiltrated, but you were still paid to destroy it. Do it. ”

”No,” Pan said. ”You might pull that trigger. But if you do, you destroy what the people of Haven really wanted, what they desired, and what they worked very hard to create, Pepper, even if they didn't realize they consciously wanted it. ”

”I've heard you get the government you deserve,” Pepper said. ”But this is something else. They created their own tyranny. . . ”

”But Pepper, I'm not a tyrant. If they vote as a whole to oust me, they can do it. ”

Pepper moved over to the one of great windows to look out at the inside rim of Haven. Thousands of distant portholes dotted the giant wheel, lit up by the people living inside the rooms across from them.

”Look around you,” Pan implored. ”there are plenty who like what I'm doing. I'm rebuilding parts of Haven that have been neglected for years. I'm improving agriculture as we speak. I've made the choices that were hard, got things into motion that just sat there while people quibbled over them. I am action. I am progress. ”