“Yes. And Nanny’s behavior is too logical to be a product of a chaotic protocol.”
“So not everything is lost?”
“If – if – we break the loop and if Verne can get the Workstation back up, it’s possible we can salvage the FER. We…Ummm.”
They turned around the corner and saw Verne. Ratibor Verne, the Chief Programmer and Protocol Guide wore a ceremonial plastic hauberk. He had brought a proper metal one from New Barbar, but trogomets had found it within the first week and promptly eaten it. Sean had managed to convince the orbital station’s automated synthesizer to produce a plastic substitute, but it looked a bit ridiculous on Verne’s hulking figure, partially because it was colored neon green.
Verne faced a rock, on which sat a small idol. Foot-long and carved from some dark wood with startling detail, the idol squatted, clutching an axe in one hand and a stack of wheat in the other.
A couple of curious trogomets sat next to Verne, pondering the idol. At the sound of Sean and Santos’s steps, they scuttled forward, like twin clumps of tumbleweed, and sat on their haunches, tiny hands-feet raised, waiting for a handout. Santos extracted a cookie from his pocket.
“Cookie.”
The trogomets mooked in unison.
Santos broke the cookie in a half and handed a piece to each fuzzy. The delicate hands snatched the cookie halves. Small shrew-noses poked out of the fur to sniff the treat. The cookie vanished into tiny mouths and the trogomets took off. No doubt, they would’ve preferred a piece of copper wire.
Verne picked up a stick, hefted it in his hand, and hit the idol. Thwack!
Sean stopped. “Verne?”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“He has been a bad god,” Verne said grimly. “He must be punished.”
Thwack! Thwack!
“Two years I spent here! Two! Years!”
Thwack!
“On a planet with no system. No uplink, no sensors.”
Thwack!
“Always paranoid that what little I had would get eaten. And now he robs me of all of it.” Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
The stick snapped in his hand. The idol seemed no worse for wear. Verne cast the broken stick on the ground and looked for another one.
“Emily thinks Nannybot is a character from a 14th century Terran myth,” Sean said.
“Yeah?” Thwack!
“A knight,” Sean said. “Who hunts a Questing Beast.”
“Stop trying, Sean. It’s a chaotic protocol. We’ve been buggered.”
“Suppose it was goal-oriented, just for the sake of argument. How would we solve it?”
“Give Nanny what it wants,” Verne said. “Give it the Asking Beast, let it hunt it, and catch it.”
“There is no other way?”
“No.”
Santos rubbed his chin. “Where would we get a Questing Beast?”
Verne stopped. “You’re serious about this.”
“Yes.”
He rested his stick on his shoulder and looked to the sky. “If you’re wrong, then I will hate you for the rest of my life for giving me hope and then bashing it to pieces.”
“Understood,” Sean said.
“Make one,” Verne said.
“Make one? How?”
“You have genetic blanks in storage in orbit. The Workstation is shot but it will still transmit code. Input the correct parameters and…”
“That’s highly illegal,” Sean said. “Not to mention it would leave us without any spare tissue for limb replacement in case of emergency.”
“We’ve been on this planet for two years,” Verne said. “We’ve had about two dozen bites, and three twisted ankles. Do you really think that in the next week someone will suddenly get his leg chewed off?”
“Verne, we can’t just make a creature! I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready to live the rest of my life in a controlled facility.” Sean turned to Santos.
“It’s a good idea,” the Chief of Security said.
“I can’t believe you two.”
“It’s a good idea,” Santos repeated.
“It’s up to you,” Verne said. “You’re the one who didn’t run the transmission through the Great Wall. You’re the team leader.”
Shawn opened his mouth. On one side fifteen careers. On the other, his life thrown away if he were found out.
If.
“Alright, let’s say we do it,” he said hoarsely. “The only person who can code something like that into the genetic synthesizer would be…”
“Jennifer,” Verne finished grimly.
*****
Jennifer crossed her arms on her chest. She was petite and ten pounds on the right side of plump, and Sean couldn’t help but note that the way her arms were crossed pushed her br**sts up and out.
Sean took his eyes from her chest and stared at the ground. That had been a problem all along. He knew it. He wasn’t sure if she knew it, and it worried him to think that she might. It may have turned out fine, possibly they could’ve even become a couple, but after Ickman had left, Jennifer was named his Joint Team Leader, which meant that she was the only person he could argue with without fear of entering a leader-subordinate relationship. And they argued a lot.
Sean took a deep breath. “I apologize for what I said earlier. I do concede that not all supporters of Autonomous System Structure are naive, slack-jawed, starry-eyed rich kids, who seek to alleviate personal guilt caused by their life of privilege. I also would like to say that a strong centralized government does have its weak points. And that I take back anything bad I’ve said before that could possibly piss you off.”
Jennifer brushed back her brown hair. “What do you want?”
It took him ten minutes to get through the explanation.
“You’re insane,” she said. “Absolutely not.”
“Jennifer…”
“There’s a reason why it’s illegal, Sean! You can’t introduce a man-made species into an ecosystem. It can wipe the whole biosphere out.”
“We only need one. You could make it sterile.”
“No.”
“Jennifer, I beg you…”
“Ha!”
He desperately raked his mind for a way to convince her and found none. “Look,” he said miserably. “There are fifteen people who gave two years of their lives to study and assess this planet. Their careers will be destroyed. It will reflect badly on both of us – in the entire history of Survey, there has never been an instance when a team hasn’t turned in a Final Evaluation Report. Except for Captain Chef, but that doesn’t count because he and his crew were eaten. But that’s not even the important part. The important part is that without the survey report we can show no basis to support preservation. They’ll chuck this planet for development. The trogomets, the tari trees, the dwarf cows, the ino, all of it will be gone.”