Butler 9000


"There's something in the air," Bergamo said. He stopped right there on the platform and dilated his nostrils in a grotesque display of muscle control. "It smells like rain." He expanded his chest and gave a display of ghost images that caused a stir to go through the station and the train. I could do that as well I just don't make a display of myself the way he does. At my power level bringing images to the surface but not quite materializing them is just surfing the breakers.

"This is an energy field," I said. "Rain is only necessary in an organic process."

"Shall we confine ourselves inside the necessary, then?" he asked.

If he could make it rain then he was beyond my computing powers and we both knew it. The rain wasn't necessary and therefore it wasn't logical. The creation process in an energy field depends on charged images. They don't carry the dampness of the organic process, with the mists and clouds and the smell of water on the breeze. That Ash Fork was carrying all the sensual information of an organic process meant that Bergamo was containing the entire field with his own field, so that he was imposing atmospheric conditions.

"I think you're carrying the devouring father a bit far, don't you?"

"Nonsense, Harry. You aren't my son so much as you're a replica of me, genetically, though I did expect we'd have more physical resemblance."

"You're disappointed in me?" I asked.

"To the extent I'm disappointed in me I suppose. When I look at you I wonder did I ever look just like that? And I didn't, because you've vastly speeded up the process between conception and full maturity, which changed the unfolding process. On the other hand, I've shifted my own evolutionary process so radically I don't even know what I used to look like. We look alike in height and weight, and we have the same scratch patterns. But disposition shapes perceptions. You're quiet and secretive, Harry, and I'm more engaging."

"People like you better, you mean?"

"I believe they do, Harry, as a rule. Not that you aren't exceptional. Ah, here we are."

A porter approached us with two cases. "They are sealed?" he asked. He pressed three numbers into the pad underneath the handle and a slender bar glowed red beneath the keypad. "Good."

"Tamperproof," the porter said, nodding. I could easily examine the contents of the cases without opening them, so they were not tamperproof in that respect. There were several units, each about the size of cell phone, but the cumulative effect was an audio signal without any detectable background noise or distortion, and a keyboard controller, amplified through ... the atmosphere ... so this is why he needed the weather; he needed it as a medium that can carry emotion.

Bergamo could sense my thought process. "Tamperproof," he repeated, "not invisible." He led the way off the platform and along the main north south street, which intersected with the main east west street at what appeared to be a territorial Catholic Mission. It was a very old and very expensive piece of the potter's art, the mud walls streaked with reddish and yellow ocher clays, so that the effect from a distance was of representational art with much of the surface rubbed away to reveal an abstract under painting. Figures moved around in the town square but most of them were translucent, dreaming bodies, which moved in and out of existence like lightning bugs. "Tourists," he said, and he pushed through the swinging doors and into what had been converted from a church into a western saloon.

I didn't need anybody to tell me we were in the Space Ship's reactor room, now. Before there was a feeling of passive observation of a small town, from a tourist's point of view; now there was electricity in the air and the faces surrounding us weren't caught inside a dream. Their features were sharp, immediate; they were the energy cells powering the entire field. As energy cells they had no ability to self-reflect, and no cause to do so. They were entirely pattern driven, and assumed their anticipation of the direction of the pattern to be volition, when it was no more than a feature of the software.

We walked into a room which was a marriage of the sacred to the profane. Above the simple alter, elevated from the main room and now serving as the bandstand, a neon cross flickered and buzzed in imitation of the original technology. "Reservation art," I said, stating the obvious. The old Whiting Brothers and Shell stations, truck stop cafes and railroad car diners out on the surrounding desert were high end, walk on art installations, but this one was something special. A three piece band was moving dancers around the center of the floor with a bass heavy blues progression. The front man's spot was empty except for a microphone and a guitar in a stage stand. "Where's the front man?"

"Not here yet," Bergamo said, as we waded past the poker tables and up to the black oak bar. The bartender was a tall blonde who watched our approach through steely blue eyes. She looked like she'd seen more than her share of trouble and while she was moving on, she wasn't going to forgive and forget. "Welcome to the Ash Fork Saloon, it's Saturday night and we're pouring doubles for the price of singles."

"Give us a double Bushmills on the rocks and an extra glass," Bergamo said. Her face froze, and then he winked at her and she laughed out loud, scooping ice into two glasses and coming right back at him.

"You can afford your own drink, sunshine. Isn't that a Butler nine thousand?" She indicated her head toward me.

"This is a powerful man in his own right," the Count said.

"A Butler nine thousand?" I asked. "What's a Butler nine thousand?" I sat down at the bar, feeling slightly queasy.

"It's a clone program," Bergamo said. "You know you had to have a master program, but it's not you. It's just the frame you're built on."

"Cheer up," the bartender said, pouring the whiskey into my glass. "You're sitting on a gold mine."

"What did you say?"

"He just arrived," Bergamo said, trying to warn her off the subject. I was experiencing a fantasy in which I destroy her and all of her friends and relations. I knew myself to be a superior being, not because of some outside opinion, but because of my experience of my powers. The idea that I was designed on the same frame as an English butler was an insult.

"I want to kill her."

"For not being tactful? I don't think so."

"It's not true is it?"

"What?"

"You know what. Is it true that I'm a Butler?"

"Well ... the truth is, Harry, every clone has to be built on a program frame, or you'd take twenty years to grow into a useful companion. So what they built you on a butler program? It's probably the most socially advanced program for a clone."

We left it there. I am sure that if I was sent here to neutralize him, I was given good cover, and why not as a butler? And as I swallowed the whiskey a warm certainty flowed through my body, that there was some great advantage and purpose to my having the external appearance of a cloned servant. It made me invisible as a gunfighter. What weighed on me was whether I was as proficient a gunfighter as I was programmed to believe myself to be. That could only be solved on way. "Bring me another double," I said. I needed to prove myself.

"Coming up chief." The woman looked at me like I was a fancy vacuum cleaner.

I looked around for somebody who needed killing, and I didn't have to look far. At one of the card tables there was a loudmouth talking about how quickly and easily he could kill with his hands. "I'm not an aggressive person," he was saying to the other two players. There was a seat open. I moved away from the bar toward the chair on his left side. "That's why I know how to fight," he continued. "When you have supreme self-confidence, you don't have to fight. The ability to kill another man quickly makes you amiable and good natured, because you don't have to worry about your personal safety."

"Do you mind if I sit in?" He looked up at me and grinned. "As long as you've got the money," he said. Bergamo was watching me from the bar. I think he knew there was going to be trouble, and if I am really just a butler, then he could have stopped it. He didn't stop it. I could feel him focused in on the dealer. He was a big man with a baby face, powerful but flawed. Behind an expertise in martial arts he was hiding a general inability to relate well if he wasn't in control. I could easily read the cards as they played, and after the first few hands I was winning when I chose to win. It didn't take long for him to suggest that I was cheating.

"If you're such a tough character," I said, "you ought to do something about it."

The other two players shifted uncomfortably. They were old gamblers, with faces weathered by time and bad habits. "You looking for a fight?" one of them asked me directly.

The other one said, "Stanley here teaches martial arts. I wouldn't advise you to fight with him if you don't want some serious damage."

Stanley nodded and said, a little too amiably, "My hands are registered, cowboy. If I beat you up I'll be in violation of my programming code.

I had been so intent on the dealer that I didn't notice Bergamo move up beside me. "Time to go up to the captain's quarters," he said, touching me on the right shoulder.

"This belong to you?" Stanley asked. "You better get a leash on it before it gets smashed up."

"Let me finish it," I said.

"Okay," he said. He walked back toward the bar. Stanley's smile was frozen on his face.

"Well?" I asked. "Are you going to smash me up?"

He picked up his money off the table and moved away from me without a word. When I rejoined Bergamo at the bar, he asked, "You feel better now."

"Yes," I said. "I believe I do."

Posted: Sun - May 6, 2007 at 01:01 PM