Asgard's Heart by Brian Stableford Page B

further thought, though I could
see no alternative but to bow to the pressure of inevitability. I could have
told her to switch herself off, but for some reason I didn't want to have to
stare at the blank wall where she'd recently been.
    "Are you sure you can make me tough enough to get
by?" I asked her. "To judge by what I've just seen, software is very
easy to kill."
    "The weapon which you saw Myrlin use is one which
can only be fired from real space," she said. "The entities which
inhabit software space are by no means toothless, but they will not be able to
project disruptive programming into you quite as easily as that."
    Which didn't mean, I noted, that they couldn't shoot
destructive programming into my software self—only that they'd find it
difficult.
    "Is there a constructive version of the
weapon?" I asked her—on the spur of the moment, because the thought had
only just occurred to me. "Can you transmit programmes through the air
with a magic bazooka, instead of having to use wires the way our mysterious
friends did when they injected Medusa into my brain?"
    "In theory, yes," she said. "But it is
difficult in the extreme. The receiving matrix, whether organic or inorganic,
would have to be very hospitable to the
incoming programme—otherwise the effect would be purely disruptive. An alien
programme really needs a physical bridge of some kind, like the artificial synapses
that were in place during your contact, if it is to be efficiently
intruded."
    It was interesting as a hypothetical question, but it
didn't really connect up with the immediate problem, which was to reconcile my
reluctant mind to the prospect of a peculiar duplication.
    "I need some fresh air," I told her. It was
a stupid thing to say, because the air outside my igloo was not in any way
fresher than the air within—I just felt that I needed to get outside.
    It turned out to be a stupid thing to do, too, because
no sooner had I opened the door than John Finn stuck the business end of a
needier into my windpipe and told me that if I didn't do exactly as he said
various vital parts of my fleshy self would be scattered hither and yon amidst
all the unpleasant debris which already littered the area.

10
    "Look,
John," I said, patiently. "I'm aware of the fact that you have a
little learning difficulty, but even you must remember that we've been through
all this before. If you wanted to exercise your death-wish, you could have
done it this morning."
    "Personally," he said, "I'd just as
soon kill you, but I'm assured that for some stupid reason you're considered to
be quite valuable. No other hostage will do as well. Just behave yourself, and
your freaky friends in the walls will make sure that no harm will come to you.
No mindscramblers, no clever tricks at all—they'll just give us what we want,
rather than risk any harm coming to you. See?"
    "What do you want?" I asked, flatly.
    "We want to get the hell out of here before those
killing machines come back. We want that armoured truck the magic Muses have
been building for you."
    While he talked he urged me into action. He came round
behind me but he kept the needier jammed into my neck, so that if anything
unexpected happened he could blow my brains out without any delay at all. I
allowed him to shove me where he wanted me to go.
    "Whose bright idea was this?" I asked.
    "Just keep walking," he told me. The light
was still gloomy, and there appeared to be nobody else about, but once we were
away from the domes a couple of other armed men fell into step with us. I
wasn't in the least surprised to see that they were Scarid soldiers. They were
the only people around who were stupid enough not to realise that they were
safer behind the Isthomi's defences, and that once outside them there'd be no
way of getting all the way back up to level fifty-two.
    "You were bloody lucky to get away last
time," I told him in a low voice. "The colonel's been regretting that
she didn't shoot you ever since. She'll be