Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4)

by G. S. Jennsen

  “Advisor Kail, it’s an honor to meet you. I’m Hiro Takeda, Operations Director of the Kiyora One Generations Clinic. To what do I owe a visit from an Administration Advisor? No trouble, I hope. We take great care to run a top-notch operation here.”

  She grudgingly took his offered hand, but dropped it as quickly as was socially acceptable. “I’m certain you do. I merely have a few questions about your procedures. For potential avenues of future research.”

  “Research into what areas?”

  He sounded genuinely intrigued; she longed to dissuade his enthusiasm, but given how it should make him more cooperative, she played along. “Ways to improve the lives of Asterions, of course—from their very inception.”

  “A noble goal, indeed. What is it you’d like to know?”

  “I want to see the various stages the bodies proceed through prior to completion. We can talk while you show me around.”

  “Excellent. Right this way.” He gestured toward a set of wide, welcoming doors, and she followed.

  Thankfully the organization of the facility was such that the end of the process came first on the tour, which meant she’d be able to conjure some excuse to cut the tour short. Gemina had no desire to see vats of pseudo-organic tissue being grown or synthetic bones being constructed, and she definitely had no desire to see brain matter germinating on lattices of kyoseil.

  They entered a medium-sized room that was more akin to a storage area than a lab. A dozen bodies were encased in a porous, translucent material and submerged in a semi-fluid gel, not unlike what repair tanks used. The gel and the bodies floated inside the harder shells of advanced stasis chambers. A mass of photal fibers snaked out from beneath each chamber to a complex module on the wall above it.

  Without meaning for it to, her gaze fell on the closest body. Its eyes were closed, its features pallid and frozen. Ready to be a life, but not there just yet.

  “How many bodies do you complete each day?”

  “Twenty-six to thirty. It may sound like a lot, but we’re one of only two Class A facilities on Kiyora. Across an entire planet, demand is high.”

  “I’m well aware. And you handle the operating system uploads as well?”

  “And the psyche uploads, and any memory stores requested to be transferred. A body is not complete without a psyche to call it home.”

  This was the root of the problem, wasn’t it? The Rasu demanded functioning Asterions, but unconscious ones. Who knew the aliens’ reasons for it, but they’d been menacingly clear on the subject. “Theoretically—again, for purposes of future research—is it possible to initialize a psyche, to start it up, as it were, without actually waking the individual up?”

  Takeda regarded her strangely. “I’m not sure I take your meaning. Programming is nothing more than a framework until a psyche begins using it, and one must experience consciousness to do so.”

  “But can’t you simply put them straight into a state of unconsciousness?”

  “We pause the initial boot sequence at several points to run diagnostics and to confirm the kernel has both bonded with the physical brain and linked to the operating system. No one wants to wake up broken, now do they?” He laughed awkwardly.

  She didn’t join him. “What about at a later stage? After the boot sequence has completed, but before they reach conscious awareness. In layman’s terms, right before they open their eyes for the first time. Can you keep them at that point indefinitely?”

  He stared at her in utter horror, mouth agape, as if she’d morphed into a hideous carnival freak instead of asked a hypothetical question. “Why in the stars would you ever want to do such a thing?”

  12

  * * *

  MIRAI

  “HURRY UP! It’s over this way.” Tristan McLeros motioned his friend Burkett toward the rear of the expansive Mirai One transit hub.

  It was late in the evening and the moon was a tiny silver crescent in the night sky, but here in the heart of downtown light bathed the streets in a pervasive glow—which meant they needed cover. They scurried across the open space and flattened themselves against the hub’s façade.

  The maintenance entrance was almost invisible, marked by nothing more than a thin crack in the exterior wall. Tristan only knew about it because a friend who used to work at Oligasi Cuisine had recently transferred to the maintenance department at Dominion Transit. The logic of the inconspicuous door was sound, and not much different from the purpose of the machines he kept running at Oligasi: hide any evidence of the messy work required to keep the system running from the customers so that outwardly everything runs seamlessly and to perfection.

  “How do we get in?”

  Tristan waved a transmitter in Burkett’s face. “The maintenance dyne access code is the same for all public and semi-public buildings in the city, and we are obviously maintenance dynes.” He sent the code, and the door slid open. He pushed Burkett through the opening, and they now flattened themselves against the inside wall until the door slid back shut.

  He’d blown off work today to hang out with Burkett. But they’d gotten bored after a few hours, so they’d decided to go screw with the transportation system for fun. Actually, he’d blown off work the day before, too, but he’d mostly slept the day away. He had a couple of concerned, then angry, messages from his boss, but he was ignoring them. He’d figure out what to do about work tomorrow.

  “There should be a maintenance lift around here somewhere. All the control systems and power generation for the d-gates are underground.”

  “Is this it over here?” Burkett motioned to their left.

  “Yep.” They crept quietly to the lift. It began moving automatically as soon as they stepped on it, and they descended into shadows.

  The subterranean level was the province of machines and the machines that maintained them. The walls were a dull flint and undecorated; outside of the flickering lights produced by the equipment, lighting was almost nonexistent. But at his job he was frequently the sole person in a building full of machines, so he was used to this environment.

  He tuned up his infrared filter, and the room lit up like a holiday billboard.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Uh….” Tristan lost his train of thought, distracted by the power and complexity on display now that he could see it. Food preparation equipment, this was not.

  “Come on, man, we need to hurry before somebody finds us.”

  “Something, maybe. Okay, we want to switch up the signals, so a person who thinks they’re going to Namino is sent to Synra, while a person going to Synra ends up in Ebisu Four, and so on.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I mean, the tech to make it happen is mind-boggling, but it’s all wired into the system and thus not our concern. The target destination is represented by a simple signal code. It tells the d-gate which other d-gate to attune to.” He frowned. “There are a lot of d-gates, aren’t there? I didn’t really think about the numbers. We’ll only be able to do a few.”

  “Why don’t we cut the power instead?”

  “Because that’s not funny, just annoying—oh! Over here.” He hurried up to a tall server module taking up half of the far left wall. “This looks like a signal distribution unit of some kind. I bet we can fuck up everything from here. You stand watch.”

  “Right.” Burkett gave him a dubious scowl as he turned to face outward.

  Tristan activated his limb augment, and ten virtual fingers sprung to life to stretch out beyond his physical ones. He wasn’t much of a slicer, but his only real goal was to create a little chaos for laughs. So long as he scrambled a few commands going to the d-gates, mission accomplished.

  He started toggling various triggers on the module, and the pattern of lights it emitted began to shift.

  “Are you sure this box controls the destinations? It seems kind of big and bulky to only be routing signals around.”

  In truth, he wasn’t sure…and it was fairly hefty. Also, his s
kin had begun to tingle when he got within reach of the module, which meant a high volume of power was flowing through it.

  But it did something, right? He moved his augmented hand up higher and ratcheted a large tuner up.

  A loud beeping noise rang out from the module.

  “Shut that up!”

  “I’m trying—I don’t know what I did to set it off!” When dialing the tuner back down failed to stop the noise, his virtual fingers went crazy, pressing or toggling every input point they could find. Angry red lights joined the insistent beeping. Shit, shit, shit—

  “Someone’s coming!”

  The clang of metal on metal filled the gaps between the beeps as two security dynes sprinted toward them, weapons already raised and aimed. “Desist your actions immediately.”

  Tristan held up his non-augmented hand. “We’re from the maintenance department. We’re trying to fix a problem with the unit here. I’ve almost got it.”

  His eyes fell on a flashing tuner high above him, nearly out of reach. Two concentric rings of lights encircling it blinked furiously in a staccato rhythm, as if this were the source of the system’s irritation.

  “Step away from the equipment and present valid credentials or you will be restrained and taken into custody.”

  “As soon as I….” Tristan extended his virtual fingers out to their maximum length and spun the tuner all the way to the right.

  13

  * * *

  MIRAI

  AFTER THEY LEFT the meeting with Nika at the industrial hub and returned to Mirai One, Joaquim and Perrin took a circuitous route back to The Chalet. They’d spent a good bit of their time walking the streets in recent days, seeking out allies and spreading the word about the virutox and the dangers Justice represented.

  Joaquim stepped closer to Perrin to let a group of people pass them on the sidewalk. “It’s horrifying that the virutox can be transmitted without the limb augment, but I don’t see how much more we can do to warn people of its insidious nature. We’re already shouting at the world to not trust any outside code.” He pulled up the nex web message currently being blasted across the Dominion.

  TRUST NO AUGMENT.

  TRUST NO ROUTINE.

  TRUST NO DOSE.

  TRUST NO AGENT OF THE GOVERNMENT.

  A JUSTICE CONVICTION MEANS FINAL DEATH.

  KEEP YOUR PSYCHE. KEEP YOUR FREEDOM.

  — Your Friends In NOIR

  “I guess we could add ‘Trust No One’ to the announcement.”

  She made a face. “But that’s both painfully vague and dangerously close to sounding delusional. ‘Trust No Connection,’ maybe?”

  “Hmm. I’ll think about it.” She was better at public relations than him, so he should trust her instincts, but he felt an obligation to be the one to make the decision.

  “While you think about that, I’m going to think about the best ways for us to use this amazing windfall of credits we’re now in possession of. Finish The Floor repairs, naturally, and replace the destroyed weapons and equipment, but those expenditures will hardly dent the total.”

  Joaquim scowled at the mention of the donation. “I don’t like taking Ridani’s money.”

  “Oh, come on, Jo. He’s not a bad guy, and we desperately need the credits.”

  “I didn’t say we weren’t going to take it—I said I didn’t like taking it. What if it comes with strings attached that we haven’t seen yet?”

  “Nika wouldn’t have let him offer it to us if it did.”

  “Assuming he told her. All I’m saying is, if he tries to impose conditions later or decides he wants the money back, it’s her problem to handle.”

  “I’m sure he won’t. Hey, when we get home, don’t let me forget to tell everyone that we saw Nika, and she’s safe and kicking ass—”

  A burst of blinding light in Joaquim’s peripheral vision preceded the sidewalk upending beneath his feet by almost a second, but he’d barely begun to react when a shock wave slammed him into Perrin and both of them into the building façade on their left. Then they were on the ground.

  The next seconds passed in a dizzy haze of disjointed noises, shooting pain in strange places and internal damage alerts.

  His ears rang. His OS told him it was because his aural system struggled to manage overloaded receptors. Blood dripped into his left eye—the OS had no ready explanation for this—so he opened his right one.

  Perrin winced up at him from behind a dust-covered but blood-free face. “Hi. You’re bleeding. Also, ow.”

  “Sorry.” He more fell than crawled off her, then coughed dust out of his lungs as he pushed up to his knees. “Are you hurt?”

  She sat up and maneuvered her head and arms gingerly. “I don’t think so. Just generalized ow-ness.” She looked around, and a horrified expression grew on her features. “But other people are. What happened?”

  He climbed the rest of the way to his feet, rubbing at his forehead in search of the source of the blood with one hand while he helped her up with the other. Smoke and dust clogged the air around them, making it impossible to answer the question. Shouts and cries echoed through the din, but the loudest noises came from his right. The same direction as the burst of light.

  Ηq (visual) | scan.infrared(220°:40°)

  His vision filled with an all-consuming flare of oranges, reds and purples.

  “Whatever it was, it happened in this direction.” He took her hand in his, and they started making their way toward the source.

  A crater one hundred fifty meters wide hollowed out the block where the Mirai One transit hub had once stood. Beyond the edges of the crater, fire engulfed the nearest towers. Wailing sirens overlapped one another in a despondent chorus, and drones buzzed about in aimless patterns searching for damaged bodies they could repair or flag for emergency response crews.

  Joaquim tripped over something. Probably another chunk of building, but he glanced down anyway—to see a dismembered calf and foot with a heeled boot half burnt off it.

  Acid singed his throat, and he concentrated on breathing through his nose; his taxed OS didn’t have the bandwidth at present to babysit his nausea threshold.

  He peered around for the remainder of the body, though he had no good reason to. It was nowhere to be seen. Of course, that wasn’t saying much, for the ground was caked in smoldering debris.

  “Gods, this is awful. It’s like the explosion at The Chalet times a thousand.”

  In one of his wiser decisions in recent memory, he decided to concentrate on Perrin instead of the bodies. “I think the d-gates in the transit hub must have blown—or something blew them. That’s the only scenario I can conceive of to explain this much damage, short of an aerial bombing. I can’t even guess how many people were caught up in it.”

  A new siren arrived to add complexity to the dirge saturating the air, and he dragged a hand along his jaw. “I hate to say it, but this place is going to be crawling with Justice dynes any minute now. We should get out of here.”

  Perrin’s frown morphed into horror. “But what about all these people? We need to help them!”

  “How? The truth is, the emergency response squads are more qualified to administer first aid than we are. And the other truth is, most of the people who were here when it happened are already…gone.”

  “No, they’re not. Hang on.” She glared at him for effect, and a second later a message broadcast across the secure NOIR nex web:

  Anyone in the vicinity of the explosion at the Mirai One transit hub who is in need of aid, please respond with your locator ID.

  “There. We’ll help our people, since for them a trip to a government repair center could end in a Justice detention cell.”

  It wasn’t as if he could refuse her, what with her standing there looking all indignant and determined while covered in soot and dust, her jacket torn and her hair a chaotic jumble of tangled curls.

  “All right, we’ll do what we can. Get any responses yet?”

  Perrin secu
red a makeshift sling across the shoulder of a pale, slender woman. She’d ripped her jacket into shreds by this point, fashioning bandage wraps, wipes and slings using the material.

  Joaquim didn’t recognize the woman, but Perrin had known her name—Lily Sheridan, it turned out—on sight. Granted, it was Perrin’s job to know the name of everyone connected to NOIR.

  “Does it feel comfortable?”

  Lily shrugged, then winced. “It doesn’t hurt any worse than everything else.”

  “I’m afraid that’s all we can ask for right now. Can you get yourself to the corner of Gibson and Stephenson? Someone will meet you there and take you to The Chalet, where you can get properly patched up.”

  “I never expected this was how I’d finally get to see The Chalet.”

  Perrin patted the woman’s uninjured shoulder. “I know, and I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Thank you for your help.”

  “It was the least we could do. We’ll see you in a bit.”

  Lily hobbled away, and instantly Perrin was off again. She grabbed Joaquim’s hand and tugged him closer to the epicenter of the destruction, where it seemed impossible anyone could still be functioning.

  “All I got was a locator number, no name or details.” Abruptly she dropped his hand and sprinted forward, then fell to her knees next to a prone and charred form.

  The skin covering the man's left arm had been burnt away nearly to the bone. But that wasn’t the worst of it. A shard of metal protruded out through the base of his throat, just to the left of center. Blood flowed out around the metal and down his neck with disheartening speed.

  “Give me your jacket!” She put one hand on the man’s cheek while the other prodded gently at the edges of the wound.

  Joaquim slipped his jacket off and handed it to her, even though it wasn’t going to do any good.