The Machine Awakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

place like Salt City.
    But there were others who took advantage of Helprin’s unique hospitality. Deserters, criminals, outsiders. People on the run from trouble. People looking for it. Start at the bottom, get yourself—and your exploits—known by the right people, and maybe Helprin would recruit you to the somewhat less legal side of his organization.
    Kodiak had done his best to avoid that crowd, but working at the bottom of the ladder wasn’t quite a cakewalk. But at least it would be over soon.
    And the new plan? Kodiak smiled to himself. The new plan was good.
    All he had to do was win at the Grand Casino, and win big. Normally, this only happened to a very few lucky players—less than natural odds, given the games were all controlled by the station’s AI, carefully maintaining a balance of wins versus losses that kept the rich and famous coming while lining Helprin’s coffers rather handsomely.
    But if he could somehow throw the odds—if he could win, and win enough, then it would hurt Helprin. In fact, with a little computer know-how, he might even be able to win so much that Helprin’s whole organization would be crippled. Okay, so maybe the result wasn’t quite as final as it had been with the original plan, which would have ultimately handed Helprin over to the authorities, but for second best it wasn’t half bad.
    Kodiak completed the last touch-up to his work, flipped a row of switches to reconnect the system to the main station computer, then closed the access panel. As he replaced the microsolder in the belt of his maintenance worker’s uniform, he touched the side of his glasses. Scrolling text spun across the HUD, too fast to read, but all in green. The tiny device he had wired into the terminal was a work of art, even if Kodiak said so himself. It had taken him three of the six months aboard the station to build it, although most of that time had been spent discreetly pilfering the components he needed from the maintenance stores.
    Kodiak concentrated, and a new display appeared in his glasses as his system hack came online. A simple indicator appeared, showing a red cross icon, and he heard a tone, transmitted directly through the bone of his skull from one arm of the glasses.
    All good. The hack simply interrupted the games computer’s algorithms, introducing a new element that would throw a round of Sentallion in Kodiak’s favor, the tone—inaudible to anyone standing next to him—giving him the heads up if he didn’t catch the cross indicator in his vision. It was so simple, Kodiak wondered why nobody had tried it before.
    Because, Von, he thought, you’re a bona fide genius. Tales, my friend, will be told of your death-defying and quite possibly erotic exploits across the … well, across however many systems there are.
    Another tone sounded in Kodiak’s ear.
    â€œShit!”
    Kodiak ducked back down into the channel as the service bay door slid open and the maintenance servitor returned, flying into its nest with enough speed to crush Kodiak’s arm against the back wall had he not moved fast enough. Just a few centimeters from his face, heat wafted off the side of the servitor, the whine of its antigrav piercing in the enclosed space.
    Peering into the tiny gap between the cube-shaped robot and the back wall of the dock, Kodiak watched as a small, pencil-like connector extended from the servitor and mated with the port in the computer panel. The panel’s LED display changed from red to green; then a white indicator flickered as the machine synced with the station computer and entered its dormant, daytime phase.
    Kodiak smiled to himself and stood in the tight space of the service channel, quickly packing the rest of his tools up and stowing them away in the utility pouches on his uniform. Careful not to touch the hot surface of the servitor, he crabbed sideways to leave the bay. With a quick glance around the lip