by M. D. Cooper
Judith rubbed her temples tiredly as she finished recording her message to Ben, hit send and then rose from her bed to wander listlessly about her cabin. These headaches came so frequently now that she almost never felt like leaving her room.
She thought wistfully of Tobi. She’d asked Jason if Tobi could stay with her for a while, thinking part of the problem might simply be the stress of leaving so suddenly, and being apart from Ben. Having the cat around, she’d reasoned, might be soothing. But Tobi had taken an inexplicable dislike to her and had even hissed and swiped at her the last time Judith had attempted to pet her.
She sighed and rubbed her head once again as she turned tentatively toward her door. Maybe Marta can scan me again, see if she can figure out—
She blinked in confusion, and her hand lowered, its move toward the door’s panel aborted as something seemed to take over her body’s motor controls. She opened her mouth to protest, but her thoughts abruptly became clouded. Slowly she turned, her body moving toward her bed as if under someone else’s power. She found herself turning and lowering herself back down to the bed, her eyes fluttering closed. As she did so, she could have sworn she heard Ethan’s voice….
She struggled to make sense of the warning her brain was shouting at her, as intense pain gripped her, and she heard Ethan’s voice laugh softly in the back of her brain as her body arched in an attempt to evade the agony now sheeting its way through her.
She cried out as the pain reached impossible new heights, her vision tunneling as she slipped into blessed unconsciousness.
INSIDIOUS
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Enfield Holdings
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
Aaron’s voice pulled Daniel away from the holo tank at Enfield Holdings, where he was reading the SIS’s most recent reports on their progress on locating Prime. He and Aaron had made their way to the task force’s headquarters after checking in with his security team at Enfield Aerospace earlier in the day.
Aaron’s avatar appeared worried. Daniel’s brow rose, his curiosity piqued. Aaron never appeared worried, and he wondered briefly what new thing was about to be sprung on them.
Aaron shrank the feed from SIS—essentially a series of reports stating that the analysts had no new leads—and projected something new onto the holo.
Daniel nodded.
Daniel’s partner opened a few files that looked familiar; they held old security protocols that Phantom Blade had discovered two years ago. They were the same protocols the cartel had used to spoof El Dorado security scans into not-seeing the Norden ring operation.
Aaron minimized the breached security codes and highlighted another snippet of code unfamiliar to Daniel.
Daniel nodded.
Daniel looked at the code the AI had highlighted.
Daniel waited for his partner to enlighten him.
the AI said tightly.
Daniel sat up straighter in his chair.
He pinged Esther and sent Aaron’s avatar an icon indicating that he’d brought the vice-marshal into their conversation.
Aaron recapped what he’d told Daniel, then added,
Daniel waited patiently for the two AIs to examine whatever it was they had found. While he waited, he asked Aaron privately,
Daniel mentally nodded at Aaron’s avatar.
Daniel wasn’t sure what made him say it, but he’d been in the business long enough to have developed reliable instincts, and something about this was setting off alarms in the back of his mind.
Aaron’s avatar stared at him for a moment.
Daniel nodded.
The AI cocked his head at that.
Daniel rotated his hand and opened a port on the inner part of his wrist. Rising from his seat in front of the main holo tank, he accessed a storage cabinet against the far wall that he knew held immutable crystal storage units.
He connected one to the port in his wrist and waited while Aaron made a copy of himself—from memories to precise neural architecture. Daniel would destroy the copy if the AI came to no harm. If not, Daniel now had a way to ensure his best friend could safely be recovered.
Daniel looked over at Esther’s avatar. She nodded as Aaron’s voice began a recount of every step the AI was about to take.
&n
bsp;
The fine hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck rose. It wasn’t really that he heard hesitation in Aaron’s speech; it was more that his cadence was off. All Daniel knew was that the AI was withholding something—and he doubted that Esther knew him well enough to realize it.
In addition, there was something about the quality of his connection with the AI that had changed. Almost as if a thin film had been drawn between him and his partner.
Daniel sat, staring at the ICS device sitting in front of him, a cold feeling settling in the pit of his stomach.
For the first time in their seven years together, he did not destroy the copy of Aaron he held in his hand.
* * * * *
The feed Esther was monitoring captured the slightest shift from Daniel the moment she gave Aaron the green light to proceed. Something was bothering him. There was some indefinable air, a sudden tensing, that caused her attention to sharpen on the man.
She watched carefully as the human’s tells indicated a brief but intense discussion with the AI embedded within him. And then, to her surprise, Daniel stood.
Esther knew instantly what the man planned to do when she saw the ICS data cube the man retrieved from a nearby cabinet. She watched as he inserted it into the jack in his wrist and waited for Aaron to indicate the backup had been completed.
One didn’t rise to the position of vice-marshal without having developed a healthy appreciation for human instinct. Everything about this situation indicated to her that Daniel’s instincts were sounding a strong warning.
She listened in as Aaron accessed the members-only site, heard the AI stumble, caught Daniel’s unease.
And she made special note of the fact that Daniel neither erased nor returned the cube to storage once Aaron triggered the message.
Her thoughts crystallized in that moment. Something had happened, and Esther knew that ‘something’ was not good—her human counterparts would have called it her gut or intuition. Esther knew it to be more a matter of compiling a list of minor abnormalities until their number resulted in a conclusion that things were amiss.
She took decisive action.
If the man thought her instructions odd, he kept his own counsel.
Esther switched her attention abruptly from her aide’s departure back to Daniel, as the man seated at the table in Enfield Holdings’ war room shook his head sharply, as if to clear it. He stood, took an uncertain step, shook his head again.
“Daniel?” Esther used the room’s system to project her voice audibly to him. “Are you okay?”
The Enfield man looked up at one of the room’s pickups, grimaced a smile and replied. “Yes, sorry, ma’am. I think I’m a bit tired, is all.”
“Very well. You two have been at it long enough for one day, why don’t you head home for the evening? But come by tomorrow, would you? Maybe we’ll know more by then, and we can draft a message to send to the ship.”
Esther watched as Daniel scrubbed his face with one hand then walked slowly toward the door. As he exited, he raised one hand over his shoulder in farewell. She noted that Aaron had remained silent throughout the exchange.
She was relieved to see the ICS data cube he left behind. It could have taken some maneuvering to retrieve it from him without his knowledge, but Esther wasn’t about to allow anything to happen to that cube. She reached out once again to Zakk and she saw her aide look up, acknowledging her ping.
* * * * *
Esther exited her weekly briefing with the brass at Tomlinson as her human aide pinged her.
The man’s avatar shot her a worried yet guarded look. And then he lapsed into silence. His emphasis on the word ‘I’ had been clear. Her concern escalating, she closed their connection and returned her scrutiny to the man’s partner.
Aaron was exhibiting a reticence that was unlike him. Usually his avatar popped up on the internal net as soon as the two entered. Today he hadn’t.
She also wondered if the AI’s words deserved deeper scrutiny. He ‘couldn’t say’? Interesting choice of words…. One she greatly feared might be all too literal.
“Zakk said you had something you needed us to deliver?” Daniel asked her now.
“I do indeed,” she replied. “If it’s not out of your way, I have a bio sample I told Tomlinson I’d get to them before end of day. It’s sitting on the counter in Isolation A. Can you deliver it for me?”
That was a blatant lie. The bio-container was empty, although its seal effectively hid that from the casual observer. But it would serve its purpose; it would provide the means to lure them in unawares so that she might render them unconscious without either man or AI suspecting.
She hated to be devious like this, but if her ‘gut’ was correct, advance warning might trigger a catastrophic failure in one, or both of them. And she dared not risk their lives. If she was wrong, and the two suffered massive headaches to no end, she would be the first to apologize.
She feared she was not wrong.
Esther had put in a personal request to an old friend of hers in the ESF, a medical examiner who was instrumental in organizing the team treating the former AI kidnap victims. This woman knew the shackling program all too well; if Aaron was operating under some form of coercion, it was Esther’s hope that the doctor’s familiarity with the shackles would help her to determine if he was suffering from something similar in nature.
Earlier this morning, Zakk had escorted the doctor into Enfield Holdings, and she was standing by in one of the facility’s medical bays, ready to perform a comparison scan once Aaron and Daniel were delivered to her.
As Daniel navigated his way to the lifts that would deliver him to the isolation room Zakk had prepped the day before, Esther pinged her aide to give him the heads-up.
Daniel’s stride seemed firm, if a little rushed. He appeared to have recovered from the disorientation he experienced yesterday, but Esther could tell by the man’s expression that he was preoccupied.
As he crossed into the Isolation Room, Esther ordered the door to seal behind him, and immediately triggered the EMP. She watched as the man went rigid, grasped at his head, and then fell bonelessly to the floor.
; She saw the man nod to the medical team hidden with him in Isolation Room B, and then they exited the room. She used her token to unlock Isolation A for the medics, who floated a gurney in with them.
Sitting on top of the gurney was a true stasis isolation pod.
Zakk directed the medical team to load the unconscious man into the pod. As soon as the pod sealed around Daniel and Aaron, the unit was activated, and the team transported it to the medbay.
PRIMARY INVERSION
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Department of Neurosciences
REGION: El Dorado University, Alpha Centauri System
“I thought being a research assistant meant…well, you know, research,” the grad student grumbled as she grabbed another two data cubes and piled them on top of an already considerable stack sitting inside a packing box.
The AI she was with nodded, her silvery humanoid frame clad in the latest fashion worn by young humans in Sonali. Liv’s torso was wrapped in a black and white shirred sheath, and she’d paired it with leggings that were split—one leg was clad down to the thigh, while the other was clad up to it. Chunky black boots with an Escher-loop playing across their surface completed the ensemble.
Anna thought the leggings and shoes were a bit much, but what did she know? She loved her super baggy sweaters and comfy leggings. Plus, she wasn’t about to complain about the only person willing to help her with this latest assignment from the dean’s office.
Ugh, cleaning out a junky old lab that’s been collecting stuff for decades….
Liv shot her a sympathetic look as she dumped yet another handful of data cubes into the box along with the rest of the lab’s contents. The AI glanced around and then leaned toward Anna to whisper, “Hey, have you heard the rumors about the things that have happened in this lab?”
The human student shook her head as she crouched down next to a console and reached behind an access panel, where a stack of holo sheets had toppled. Several had slid underneath the unit, and she grunted, patting her hand blindly beneath the console until her fingers made contact with the sheets.
