Then, after years of conditioning her thinking patterns, her very brain waves, the machines began to alter her body.
«I am very pleased with you. You are to be improved,» the voice of The Master told her one morning. «You are to be remade more closely to my own image.»
They began turning her into a machine, partially. Dahlia had never heard the term cyborg—her intense but narrow education had never told her what a cybernetic organism was. All she knew was that she was narcotized, wheeled into a room of bright lights and strange whirring machines, her flesh sliced open so that electronic devices could be placed into her body. There was pain. And terror. But after months of such surgery Dahlia could plug herself directly into her Master’s circuitry and achieve paradise.
Pure joy! Now she understood. Now, as currents of absolute rapture trickled through her brain’s pleasure centers, she learned the ultimate truth: that The Master had been testing her. All these years had been nothing more than a test to see if she was worthy of heaven.
«You are worthy,» said The Master to her. She heard its voice directly in her mind now. «One test more and I will allow you to have this pleasure forever.»
The ecstasy stopped as abruptly as an electric current being switched off. Dahlia gasped, not with pain, but with the sudden torment of total rapture snatched away.
In inexorable detail the computer explained what she must do to return to her electrical bliss. Through her cyborg’s implanted systems she did not merely see blueprints or hear words: every bit of data that The Master poured into her eager brain was experienced as sensory input. When the computer told her about the Western Alliance’s Central Management Complex she saw the stately glass and concrete buildings, she felt the breeze from the nearby sea plucking at her hair, she smelled the tang of salt air.
Every bit of data that the Coalition had amassed about the Central Complex and the operation of the Western eco-managers was poured into Dahlia’s brain.
«This is how I will avenge my family’s murder?» she wondered. «By destroying the Alliance’s central computer?»
She felt the coldly implacable purpose of her Master. «Yes,» it said to her. And it showed her what form her vengeance would take. Then it showed her the price she would pay for failure: agony such as no human had ever experienced before. Direct stimulation of her brain’s pain centers. Half a minute of it was enough to make her throat raw from shrieking.
«You will have one hour from the time you don your stealth suit in which to accomplish your task,» said the merciless voice of The Master. «If you have not disabled the Western Alliance’s central computer within that hour, your pain centers will be stimulated until you die.»
So now she stood flattened against a shadowed concrete wall, staring across the brightly lit courtyard at the heavy metal hatch that led down toward the central computer of the Western Alliance’s eco-managers.
She was totally alone. No links to her Master. No familiar cell or corridors. No electrical ecstasy surging through her brain’s pleasure centers. But she remembered the pain and shuddered. And the clock in her implanted computer ticked off the seconds until it would automatically activate her pain centers.
Alone in a strange and hostile place, out in the open under a sky studded with twinkling stars. Dahlia took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadows, into the bright lights of the wide courtyard. As she walked swiftly, silently toward the gleaming metal hatch, she glanced up at the monitoring cameras perched atop the light poles. Not one of them moved.
The hatch seemed to be a mile away. Off to her right a human guard came into view around the corner of a building, a huge gray Great Dane padding along beside him. The dog looked in Dahlia’s direction and whined softly, but did not leave the guard’s side. Dahlia froze in the middle of the courtyard, unmoving until they disappeared around the next corner.
I am invisible, she told herself. She wished for a tranquilizing spray but knew that she had to keep all her senses on hair-trigger alert. The clock ticked on.
She reached the hatch at last. The computer in her helmet fed her its data on the hatch’s lock mechanism. Dahlia saw it in her mind as a light-sculpture, color-coded to help her pick her way through the intricate electronic mechanism without setting off the automated alarms.
The sensors implanted in her fingertips made her feel as if she were part of the hatch’s electronic system itself. She did not feel cold metal; the electronic keyboard felt like softly yielding silk. The mechanism sang to her like the mother she could barely remember.
The massive hatch swung noiselessly open to reveal a steep metal stairway leading down into darkness. Dahlia stepped inside quickly and shut the hatch behind her before the guard returned.
She blinked her eyes and an infrared display lit up her helmet visor. She saw the faint deeply red lines of scanner beams crisscrossing the deep stairwell. She knew that if she broke any one of those pencil beams every alarm in the complex would start screaming. And some of those beams automatically intensified to a laser power that could slice flesh like a burning scalpel.
She hesitated only a moment. No alarms had been triggered by the hatch’s opening. Good. Now she slithered onto her belly and started snaking down the metal steps headfirst. Some of the beams rose vertically from the stair treads. Dahlia eased around them and, after what seemed like hours, reached the bottom of the stairwell.
Slowly she got to her feet, surprised to find her legs rubbery, her heart thundering. Her time was growing short. She was in a narrow bare corridor with a low ceiling. A single strip of fluorescents cast a dim bluish light along the corridor. Much like the conditioning wards where she had spent so much of her life. No scanning beams in sight. She blinked once, twice, three times, going from an infrared display to ultraviolet and finally back to visual.
No scanning beams. No guards. Not even any cameras up on the walls that she could see. Still Dahlia kept all her defenses activated. Invisible, undetectable, she made her way as swiftly as she dared down the long blank-walled corridor toward the place where the central computer was housed.
«We will use their own most brilliant creation against them,» her Master had told her. «The war will be won at a single stroke.»
The Western Alliance was rich and powerful because its economy was totally integrated. Across Europe from the Urals to the British Isles, across the North American continent, across the wide Pacific to distant Australia and New Zealand, the Alliance’s central computer managed an integrated economy that made its human population wealthy beyond imagination.
While the Southern Coalition languished in poverty, the Western Alliance reached out to the Moon and asteroids for the raw materials to feed its orbital factories. While millions in Asia and Africa and Latin America faced the daily threat of starvation, the Western Alliance’s people were fat and self-indulgent.
«Their central computer must be even more powerful than you are,» Dahlia had foolishly blurted when she began to realize what her Master was telling her. A searing bolt of electric shock was her reward for such effrontery.
«Your purpose is to destroy their central computer, not to make inappropriate comparisons,» said the icy voice of her Master.
Dahlia bowed her head in submission.
The more complex a computer is, the easier to bring it down, she was told. Imagine the complexity of a central computer that integrates the economic, military, judicial, social, educational activities of the entire Western Alliance! Imagine the chaos if a virus can be inserted into the computer’s systems. Imagine.
Dahlia had never heard anything like laughter from The Master, but its pleasure at the thought was unmistakable. In loving detail her Master described how the Western Alliance would crumble once the virus she was to carry was inserted into its central processor.