The Prodigal 4
DISCLAIMER: KR is Glen A. Larson's, Corvette and Mako Shark belong to Chevy (and the design forever and always to Bill Mitchell), the quotation at the beginning of this section belongs to whoever owns Dickens's estate.
A/N: I'm having a surprising amount of fun with this new attempt at telling the same damn story again, probably because it feels more like an actual episode of the show than some dreamy fangirl's Romantic Novel. You'll notice I haven't really described Judy yet, not even in terms of how ravishingly beautiful Karr finds her. He doesn't. He thinks she's interesting.
Anyway, I know the plot is hackneyed, but so was the show: there's always a missing Man (or Woman) Who Knew Too Much, and a grandiose evil scheme involving Big Corporations, and Michael always ended up kissing a different girl at the end. I think I'll spare poor Emily Jones that.
You know you are recalled to life?
They tell me so.
You can bear a little more light?
I must bear it if you let it in.
-Dickens
Judy slammed the door of Lab Q behind her and leaned against it, breathing hard. None of the spy thrillers she'd read had quite prepared her for Wilson taking her aside in one of the older elevators, switching on something that looked like a black golf ball ("Microjammer," he'd explained hurriedly, talking out of the side of his mouth in the way she'd always expected spies to) and telling her a story she didn't want to hear.
It wasn't surprising though. Somehow she'd expected this day to come....she was mentally prepared for it, somehow, as if she'd known this would happen from the day she arrived in Wingate as a fresh-faced grad with the world at her feet. She pushed herself upright against the door and made her way to the chair by Karr's workbench. Gotta look normal. They're watching you. They've been watching you.
"Judy? Is something wrong?"
He sounded.......a little stronger than before. Weary and almost unimaginably sad, but stronger. She sighed, flopping into the chair.
"I don't know," she lied. "Karr. What do you remember before waking up here?"
He was quiet for a moment. She was almost afraid that awful helpless cascade of numbers would show up on the screen, but there was nothing there besides the blinking cursor. "Very little," he said at last. "At least, clearly. I can remember vague images, but there are a few that have stayed with me."
"Who created you?" God, she wanted a cigarette so bad.
His voice hardened, became almost grating. "My creator was a man called Wilton Knight. He betrayed me and left me to rot....."
She said nothing, having heard a little change in timbre as he trailed off. Reading Karr's voice was a full-time job, since he didn't have any facial features to convey emotion or intent; you had to listen carefully, or you'd miss things. He gave an electronic cough and began again.
"Wilton Knight was a very.....ambitious man. And a very rich one. He had an idea, and the funds to make it real, but he didn't.....take into account all the ramifications of his design."
Judy leaned forward, wiping away some of the desert-varnish on the light panels, watching as the LEDs lit and died with his voice. "I think I can understand that," she said gently. "No one has ever, to my knowledge, succeeded in creating anything like you before. You have no predecessor; no one would have known all the things to be measured and controlled."
"I know that now," said Karr quietly. "Years in the desert give you a sort of perspective. I don't really remember much beyond Wilton, and his son Garth, sitting around in the lab where I was born and discussing the project. I was installed as the control system for a very advanced vehicle, and I was to be partnered with a human driver. Wilton had a kind of idea that one person could make a difference, or something. I was new. I didn't understand."
Judy said nothing; she found herself stroking the voice panel, but he wasn't asking her to stop, so she didn't.
"My primary programming directive was self-preservation," he said.
"Oh."
"Yes. Quite."
"So.....at all costs?"
"Exactly." He coughed. "I destroyed a few models of human children, and they shut me down. No explanation, no chance. Garth Knight watched as they pulled my plug. I don't remember anything else until the second time I was activated; two humans broke into the lab where I was stored and turned me on by mistake, and used me to get remarkably rich before..." He broke off. Judy's fingers stilled on the panel.
"Before what?"
"There was another one. Another AI. They tried again, and this time they got it right." His voice was bitter as aloes. "He and I fought. He forced me off a cliff."
Judy hissed in breath through her teeth. "Oh, God."
Karr gave his little cough again, the lights flickering. "The next thing I was aware of was being reactivated once more, and put back into a car. That time around I was mostly.....unstable, so furious at everything and everyone that I couldn't think straight. I think I remember hoping it was over, that time, just before we hit."
Judy found tears were prickling behind her eyes. How could he be so calm about it? She took her fingers away from the voice panel, swallowing. "I.....heard something strange today. About you."
"What was it?" he asked, his voice bone-weary, as if he had expected this.
"That....." she began, then stopped, glancing casually at the corners of the room. She turned the brightness of the screen down and began to type; this was a closed system, no one else could access it, and she doubted even the best cameras would be able to get what she was typing, if she did it fast; she sacrificed grammatical accuracy for speed.
erase everything once ive typed it
A pause, then the line vanished. Understood.
okay, this place is apparently a huge front for an operation to get you back from the desert and to refurbish you.
Flick, the letters were gone.
Why? I have been scattered in pieces for years.
the man said theyre going to put you in a car hes seen it its armored somehow
Armored?
thicker steel and some sprayon stuff he thinks is a shell
No answer.
karr you there?
Yes.
who would do this? who knew about you?
They are all dead, he said.
i bet youd remember if youd seen this man before. hes tall dark has a goatee limps always carries a black cane dresses a bit like john travolta has a horrible scar down the left side of his face
....
karr?
Blue eyes?
yes empty like holes hes terrifying
It must be a coincidence. Hold on.
She watched the blank screen, and heard the clicking and stuttering of a long-term drive being accessed.
He doesn't look like this, does he?
The screen flicked a picture up, very briefly, just long enough to send a shock of cold fear flooding through Judy like ocean surf. The man leaning happily against a black Trans Am was about ten years younger than Mr. Smith, but the face—minus Mr. Smith's scar and pointed vanity beard—was identical. Long, slim, brown, dark curly hair. She swallowed back a sudden rush of nausea and sat back in the chair, reaching out to type one word.
yes
**
"Where are we going, Michael?"
"Frye Chemical," said Michael, swinging in through the open sunroof without bothering with the door. Kitt sighed.
"You know I don't like it when you do that."
"Sorry, pal," said Michael unrepentantly and slid the Trans Am into reverse, locking the wheel hard right after a few feet and stomping on the pedals, shifting up and squealing away in a cloud of reeking rubber. "Got to hustle."
Kitt said nothing, raising a mental eyebrow. Normally the snap one-eighty turn was restricted to situations where it might impress girls. Michael kept the hammer down all the way out to the interstate, cruising at eighty.
"Michael?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we in a hurry for some particular reason?"
Michael tried to make his face impassive, something he was totally unable to do. Kitt, amused and concerned at once, watched his efforts. "Well.......yes and no."
"That answer is illogical," Kitt pointed out.
"I know, partner, I know. It may be something, it may be nothing."
"Can I at least know why we're going to Frye?"
"Uh, yeah, sure." Michael tapped the wheel with his fingertips, frustrated at the slow speed of freeway traffic. "A girl called Devon because her friend and coworker there has disappeared. No family, no girlfriend, nowhere he's likely to've gone."
"So we're finding him?"
"Yeah," said Michael, relieved. "Yeah, that's just what we're doing, Partner."
There was no way in hell he was telling Kitt that someone was probably making MBS again, which probably meant another Goliath or Karr, until he was sure. No sense worrying Kitt needlessly.
"Michael, was this missing man involved in anything illegal?"
"I don't know yet. He hasn't got a record that the police know of. Kyle Gerson, twenty-seven, last known address 57 A Chaparral Drive."
Kitt's long-term memory flicked a couple of security shots up on the dash screens. "His ID photo from Frye, when he started working there in 1989."
"So the man's been there a while. Good record?"
Kitt flashed through high-class firewalls and coded entry blocks with ease, finding himself in the Frye Chemical secure server within seconds. "No complaints except one write-up to a superior for being in an unauthorized area without clearance. That was.....four years ago now."
Michael struggled to remember what had happened four years ago. "That was when... that guy was trying to build an MBS-protected tank......?"
"Exactly, Michael," said Kitt. "I believe Devon has people at the major chemical manufacturers who let us know when anyone buys a large shipment of any MBS component."
"And Gerson was one of these people?"
"It would seem to be the case," said Kitt.
"Then we'd better find him fast."
**
"Well?"
"It's coming along on schedule, Mr. Smith," said a white coat."One more week and the shell will be ready for tests."
"And the rest of it?"
"Lasers in place; rear deck cannon in place. We're working on the dual automatic rifles in the front end."
"Very well. And the....other features?"
Another white coat, this one with a clipboard, stepped forward. "With the adaptable snorkel, the vehicle is capable of submersed locomotion in up to seven feet of water; hovercraft skirts allow it to travel on the surface for a range of three hundred miles on one fuel tank."
"What about the jump?"
"Vertical clearance of thirty feet with takeoff velocity of ninety miles an hour," said the white coat.
"Excellent." Garth Knight leaned on his cane and regarded the low black form of his revenge. It wasn't exactly black; the bonded shell undercoats had given the steel a very dark thundercloud-grey shine. He thought it would look like polished titanium in daylight, and found the image pleasing.
They had taken the design specs for the 1966 Corvette Mako Shark II, what Knight had always considered the ultimate sports car, and modified them slightly to include the great turbine engine, the myriad defense features, the ability to jump over reasonably short buildings in a single bound. Garth Knight had directed the design of the turbine himself, running on what he remembered from his time with his father and the research he'd done on jet propulsion. The hood of the Shark was open, and he could see the empty space lined with antistatic cushioning, about the size of a modern VCR, sitting snug against the firewall.
"Nothing will go wrong this time," said Garth Knight, confidently. "It's my time now. Finally, it's my time."
The white coats shared a quick glance, returned to their positions. "Sir, how is the CPU coming along?"
"Well, I'm as curious as you," said Knight silkily. "I'm going to go and find out."
Another exchanged glance, and the white coats sighed for whoever was in charge of the CPU. They'd all seen Mr. Smith in this bright empty mood before, and it boded ill for someone. Hopefully, not them.
The boss turned and limped out, his bodyguards flanking him and one step behind; they knew better than to offer an arm for support. When he was gone, the first white coat put down his clipboard and leaned heavily on the sleek Shark. "This better be it," he said wearily. "This better be the end of it."
"Yeah," said another one, more fatalistically, "and how long do you think we'd last after the project is over? We know too much."
The first white coat sighed. "Did he ever say what he was going to do with this thing?"
"Well, I think he's going to use it to end world hunger," said his colleague, witheringly. "And maybe find a cure for AIDS."
"No need to be nasty."
"There's nothing left to be."
tbc