The Old Man of the Mountain

They called him the Old Man of the Mountain, or just the Old Man, for short. He had watched a thousand generations of them march by, entering the Academy as bright faced children, eager to be the next Hannibal, Rommel or Le Croix, and graduating with their faces carved out of stone, ready for the wars of the Outside. He had guided them, watched them, loving each of them as a face with accompanying statistics on dossiers. And so the years passed, and it was good, until one student was admitted who changed everything: Lafayette Ilium.

* * *

Eleanor and Arthur Ilium
1136 Marathon Blvd.
Far Sparta, Utopia Planitia
049-527-938

The letter was addressed to them, no doubt about it. Eleanor Ilium had taken it from the mail drone, given a tip, read the return address and promptly dropped it in excitement. Recovering quickly and glancing up and down the street to see in any of the neighbors had observed her surprise, knowing that rumors spread like sand storms in the small suburb. Seeing no one, however, she clutched the letter to her chest and ran back to the family’s long, low pristinely white house.

Slamming the front door, she cried, “Arthur, Lafe, it’s here! It’s here!”

A man and a boy came thumping down the stairs and skidded into the kitchen, the man with a look of excitement on his face while the boy looked like he had been dragged after his father.

“Don’t keep us in suspense, Ellie, read it!” The man practically shouted, clapping his son on the back, who glared up at him.

“Alright, Arthur, alright, calm down,” she cautioned, “Here we go: To Mr. and Mrs. Ilium, we are pleased to inform you that your son, Lafayette Edward Ilium has been chosen as a cadet at the Olympus Mons Military Academy. We will be contacting you with further information in the near future. Once again, congratulations, signed Vice Commandant Ezra Shan,” she finished breathless.

Mr. Ilium hugged his son and clapped him on the back again while his wife took her turn throwing her arms around her stoic son, sobbing proudly. Lafayette merely stood taking his parents’ praise with a smile on his face that did not hide the fact very well that he was not overly ecstatic with the contents of the letter.

* * *

“Sir, please, you and your predecessors have listened to my council for decades, and I think that by now I would have built up some sort of credit in you eyes,” the Old Man’s bobbing simulacrum had taken on a form that fit his name aptly, an ancient man in a large chair, whose balding head shook distractedly as he argued.

The Commandant of the Academy looked tired, “For the last time,” he said exhaustedly rubbing his eyes, “Lafayette Ilium is one of the best students that we have had here at the Academy for many, many years, and I am not going to make him leave because of one of you hunches.”

“His test scores, maybe, might be better than our usual applicants, but just look at what we’ve seen of his personality,” the head shook furiously, “He’s already been in three fights with fellow students and his roommate has asked for a transfer twice and this is only a month into the first year!”

“He’s just… pugnacious, that’s all, and may I remind you that we are running a military academy here,” as the Old Man began to protest, the Commandant held up his hand, “No more. Children can be made to be more cooperative, but they cannot be made to be more intelligent,” he turned off the screen.

The old Man swung his chair around and stared into the dark void of his personal chamber and wondered why he hated Lafayette Ilium so much. As soon as the cadet’s dossier had been fed through his processors, he had received definite feelings of unrest and dislike that filtered through his subconscious neural pathways into the light of his conscious thought.

He had decided then that there was something distinctly wrong with Lafayette Ilium and he could not be allowed to make it through the first year at the OMMA. And now that the Commandant had denied his formal request of Expulsion, the Old Man knew that something had to be done, even if he did it by himself. Ilium would leave before the year was out, one way or another.

* * *

At that moment, unaware that an AI of massive proportions was plotting his downfall, Ilium sat at his desk doing his homework. Of course, this was not the homework assigned to him by his idiot professors, it was self-assigned, the only kind of work that Lafayette liked to do. Hunched over his desk, the light from his computer screen hardened his youthful features, highlighting the eyes that flicked back and forth over the scrolling data in front of him.

He heard a sound and turned as the door opened and his roommate Edward Reagan practically fell through it sweaty and laughing, “OK, guys, wait there, I’ll be right out. Hey, Lafe.”

Ilium pointedly ignored him, turning back to his computer.

“Alright, sorry,” Ed said softly as he
closed the door and began to change, “You know, you missed practice again today. I don’t know why they haven’t kicked you out yet.”

He finished changing in silence and opened the door, but he stopped and looked back, “We’re going down to the mess if you want to come.”

“Thanks,” Ilium shot back, sarcasm dripping from the word.

Ed shrugged and closed the door, leaving Ilium once again in the darkness.

* * *

The Old Man’s tiny spy crawled along Ilium’s wall, its microscopic eyes fixed on him the entire time. The program had been spending nearly a full percentage point of his thought processes on the boy, a staggering amount considering that he also ran the entire Academy single-handedly. The fly inched closer, slowly getting in range to see the boys computer screen and what he was working on. Normally, the Old Man could see exactly what all of the students were working on at their computers, but Ilium had brought his own as well, keeping it separate from the OMMA network.

Almost there, he was thinking triumphantly when suddenly he reeled backwards with a startled cry as a large and rather heavy Advanced Atmospheric Tactics textbook slammed onto his small, clandestine operation, squashing it flat and leaving the Old Man stymied. He sat for a moment, his old head weaving from side to side in thought, and gazed into the static on the screen in front of him, pondering what he was to do with his nemesis who was swiftly growing more and more irritating.

The Old Man had been watching Ilium in his classes and had seen the disrespect with which the boy treated hi instructors, acting condescendingly when he was not being downright rude. Since the founding of the school the Old Man had held the teachers in the highest respect, for they had been the ones that had made him, programming the massive systems that grew into his present incarnation. He knew that he had been becoming more and more obsessed with the boy, as witnessed by the fact that an entire three percent of his operations were centered around Ilium after the destruction of his last probe.

Never before had the Academy’s selection process been so flawed, letting in someone whose personality scores fit better with a dictator that with a general, and giving a dictator the knowledge that was dispensed in the OMMA was patently, well, stupid. The Old Man had known the Commandant when he was a cadet, and while not the brightest in his class (the commandants never had to be the crème de la crème because of the Old Man), but he should have known better than to let this fledgling Morgan, this Hitler-to-be into his school.

The Old Man could see it now, his processors beginning to churn. The cities burning, the people dying and the legions commanded by a new Napoleon marching across the face of Mars, sweeping every crater-state’s army before him with the knowledge that he had gained here. No, he thought, shaking his simulated head vigorously, he could not let that happen. Ilium had to be stopped. But how? Sitting there in the darkness, the Old Man thought.

* * *

“Dammit!” Ed Reagan exclaimed as he killed another fly that seemed to crunch rather than splat as the book flattened it, “Hey Lafe, maybe if you left the room to bathe once and a while, we wouldn’t get all these flies, huh?” he joked at his roommate who merely glared at him and returned to his work, “I don’t understand where they’re all coming from,” he looked around with a puzzled look on his face before shrugging and returning to his own homework.

After a few silent minutes, Ed looked at Ilium and said, “Lafe, you think we could ask the Old Man where all of these flies are comin’ from? He knows everything that goes on here, I’ve heard.”

“Lafe straightened up for a moment as if he had heard something interesting, when with blaring suddenness, an alarm tore the silence of study hall into pieces. Lights were flashing and on the boys’ computer screens words began to form, “FUME LEAK DETECTED! IMMEDITATELY EVACUATE CONTAMINATED AREA!”

It filled their screens as the two made for the door. Ed reached it first and stepped through it as it opened for him. Just as Ilium reached it, however, it slammed shut in his face.

When Ed turned to see if Lafe had followed him out, he saw that the door was shut, sound proofing the room and not allowing the sound of blaring alarm to escape along with his roommate. He was also surprised to find that he was alone in the hall, with no one else running from a gas leak. Ed smelled a rat and ran for a superior officer like the good soldier he was being trained to be.

Inside, Lafe grabbed his computer and fell to the floor as the gas began to hiss in through the air conditioning vent in the ceiling. He began to type furiously, his fingers a blur as they desperately tried to stop the leak that threatened his like. As the gas sank lower, he glanced up and typed faster.

* * *

“Yes, Commandant, a tragedy, a terrible tragedy. One so young should never die. It is always…”

“No, Old Man, you don’t understand,” the Commandant tried to interrupt, a harried look on his face.

“…so hard when it is a cadet, though it has only happened a few times in our history,” the Old Man plunged onward through the carefully prepared speech (AI’s not making spectacular actors).

“But, Old Man, it hasn’t happened this time. We were able to get there in time to save the boy. He didn’t die and he’s alive and well. We released him from the infirmary and hour ago.”

The Old Man looked stunned, his head still as a chill ran through his processors. He quickly checked the infirmary records, and saw it was true. Mumbling something about an order to fill out, he switched off the screen, blacking out the Commandant’s perplexed face. It was impossible, he thought, as he slumped back in his chair. Now it would look even worse if the boy died, no one would believe another accident. How had he escaped? That damn roommate of his probably, he thought bitterly, I should have left him in there, too.

As he turned his chair around to decide his next move, he froze. There standing in the doorway was a small figure, only about five feet tall, his features lit by the hard light of the screens lining the Old Man’s room, and in his hand was a gun.

“Well, well, Old Man, so this is where you work your magic,” the voice was thin and ready but underneath, there was something distinctly menacing, “I should have known it was you the second that alarm went off. But no, it wasn’t until someone told me the leak was only in my room that I figured it out. You’re the only one with the power to cause a gas leak in one room. Also, none of the kids liked me, but they don’t hate me enough to kill me. So that left you, since a teacher was out of the picture, too. You know, I really don’t care why you did it, as long as you never try it again.”

The Old Man snarled, “You should never have been let into this school! You were a menace to the world before you came here and now you are an even greater one. I was saving Mars from your ‘little war.’ Don’t deny it! I’ve gotten a good look at what you read on your computer, Mein Kampf,” he laughed derisively, “Hitler was insane.”

“I know that, Old Man,” the epithet sounded less than flattering coming from Ilium, “But one can always learn from mistakes,” he paused for a breath, “Enough talk, though, now I need to make sure that you can never get in my way again,” he raised the gun.”

“You think a gun can hurt me? I’m an AI!” The Old Man laughed again.

A cold twitch formed on Lafayette Ilium’s face and morphed into a smile, ‘You’re right, of course,” he said, and fired. The electromagnetic charge flitted outwards from the weapon and in a split second all of the processors and microchips that formed the OMMA’s AI were blacked out. The Old Man grimaced as the aneurism spread and then dissolved into the dark air.

* * *

“Yes, a pity. He was old, though. Maybe all the tasks of running the Academy finally caught up with him and he, well, shorted out.”

The Commandant looked thoughtful, “I suppose, and hell, after trying to kill that kid, he could just have committed suicide,” He sighed, “Who knows?”

His aide nodded, then after a short silence, “Whom shall we get to grow the new one, sir?”

“Dr. Allenson is the best AI grower in the world, contact him with the details.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

Nine years later Lafayette Ilium graduated from the Olympus Mons Military Academy with highest honors. Within weeks he was hired by the Elysium army as a consultant. In two months he was a general and in six, the commander-in-chief. A year and a bloody coup later, he was the sole ruler of the Elysium Protectorate. When the legions of Elysium marched into the Utopia Planitia mining city of Aurora Springs, the Polar Mining Conglomerate declared war. Lafayette Ilium’s “little war” had begun.