Tau Ceti - The Phage

by M. D. Cooper

  The bottom of the pool was a clear plas through which she could see the coruscating lights playing off a field of distant stones, and as she sat, she could hear the waterfall on the far end play a tonal scale that coordinated with its cascade of fire. It reminded Khela of the sounds the bamboo fields made as they rustled in the winds along Galene’s Sagano Sea.

  “Fun?” Khela said, belatedly responding to Hana’s comment. “Mmmm, you’re right, it was.” Stretching, she stood, switching to their private connection so that she wouldn’t be overheard. she sent.

  Hana began with a laugh. she added, mentioning the series of asteroids the spa had formed into a miniature constellation of a dragon. Gases pluming from its maw were set to periodically ignite as the apparition spat flames into the stony sea.

  Khela smiled at the rude sound Hana made as she slipped on her cover-up.

  The AI snorted. she said sardonically.

  Khela admitted, giving her hair a quick rubdown with the towel to keep it from dripping on the way back to their rooms.

  She smiled as Hana snorted again, but remained silent. Picking up her bag, she tossed the towel into one of the spa’s nearby recycling bins and accessed her chrono as she headed for the pool’s exit.

  she snickered a bit at the pretentious word-fusion before continuing,

  Hana sent with an impish grin.

  Khela confided, mentioning the Swiss confectionary in the spa’s atrium.

  Khela lingered indecisively over the chocolates until finally Hana took matters into her own hands and bought one of everything. The AI was in the midst of tallying how many hours of PT Khela would need to work off the calories when Khela took a step inside the suite and froze.

  she asked Hana, setting her parcels down soundlessly in the entrance as she strained to hear the muted sound of a figure moving within her father’s room.

  She cursed mentally as she reached automatically for a weapon that wasn’t there. Not only was she wearing nothing but a swimsuit and cover-up, but the plasma edged laser-dagger she usually kept inside the outer calf of her right leg had been left in her suitcase, as she—stupidly, it would seem now—assumed it wouldn’t be needed on her person today.

  Hana sent, and Khela sent her a silent acknowledgement as she swiftly backtracked to her room and grabbed her laser-dagger. Approaching her father’s room, she reached out to deposit a passel of nano on the wall next to her. The nano would serve to mask any sounds she might make, although the plush carpeting beneath the soles of her feet did almost as good a job.

  Just outside his door, she deposited a second passel of nano—this one a mixture of sound cancellation bots and audio enhancing machines, calibrated to enhance her own augmented hearing, courtesy of the Galene Space Command.

  Other than the sound of a single person moving about in a room that should currently be empty, she could detect nothing.

  Hana sent triumphantly, and a moment later, she was sending Khela the feed.

  she and Hana heard one voice say.

  Khela sucked in a startled breath at those words, and the voice abruptly stopped.

  Cursing herself for not thinking of it sooner, she ordered her own nano to scan for other monitoring nano around the room’s entrance.

  Just as her own nano was obliterated, she heard a voice audibly say, “It would appear your daughter has found us, Noa.”

  Khela paused, stunned, as she realized her father had lied to her about his afternoon activities.

  Shit, Dad. What have you gotten yourself involved in?

  * * * * *

  Noa glanced over at the door to his suite, and then back at the two AIs facing him. He’d done what he could to protect their presence from prying eyes outside their own suite, but he hadn’t considered the need to hide them from his own daughter, thinking her to be safely away for the afternoon, enjoying the spa.

  He sighed, and then raised his voice slightly. “Khela, Hana. Join us, please?”

  His daughter approached on silent feet, laster dagger in hand. The look in her eyes was a mixture of caution, distrust and—he felt a brief pang as he saw disappointment in her eyes.

  You knew this would be the case when she discovered you had been complicit in this, he reminded himself harshly. He gestured for her to enter, then indicated their guests. “Khela, Hana, I would like you to meet Bette and Charley. Most honored guests, my daughter and her companion.”

  Hana’s avatar coalesced into existence beside Khela, arms crossed, and lips compressed into a thin line of disapproval. “What were you saying just now about shackled AIs?” Hana demanded, and Noa winced.

  It was Bette who answered. The column of light that represented the AI pulsed as she explained to the two Marines how she and Charley had been brought to Tau Ceti.

  Noa’s stiffened spine relaxed a fraction as he saw the severe expression on Hana’s face ease. With a snap, Khela turned off her laser-dagger, flipped it shut, and slid it inside her calf—an action Noa still hadn’t gotten accustomed to seeing.

  She sighed and placed her hands on her hips, regarding him with ill-concealed impatience. “The Matsu-kai, Dad? Really?”

  Noa shook his head. “I was backed into a corner. Even now, they expect me to…” he glanced at their guests, “dispose of the evidence that has come from ‘this unfortunate incident’.” He rarely infused his words with such emotion, and knew she would hear the disgust in his tone. His words, however, had her opening her mouth in protest.

  He raised a hand.

  “Obviously, I have no intention of doing such a thing, and the three of us have been determining the best course of action.” He raised a brow, gazing intently at her. “I knew Bette and Charley were shackled, so I contacted the CDC and requested a copy of the rectification code.”

  Khela looked from him to their guests as Charley spoke, his projection showing a slight grimace.

  “It didn’t completely work.” He nodded to Noa. “Although we appreciate the effort, and it is nice to be freed, even if we do have to deal with the residual echo for a time.”

  “Yes,” Bette agreed, her pillar pulsing once. “It is nice to be free.”

  Charley shook his head, the expression on his face wry. “We
were just telling your father what a whirlwind this all seems to us. From our perspective, it was just yesterday that our ship, the New Saint Louis, was boarded and we were hit with an EMP.” He gestured to Noa’s room. “Then we find we’ve awoken thirteen light years away, fifty-five years later, and shackled.”

  Bette’s voice was laced with ironic humor. “We weren’t very friendly to your father when he first woke us, I’m afraid. But he explained the situation and dosed us with nano containing the rectification code immediately after.” She paused, and then added, “Your father is a good man.”

  “Caught in a bad situation,” Charley amended.

  “I was just explaining to our guests,” Noa added after a brief awkward pause, “that I believe, with a bit of time, I can amend the rectification code to restore them to the way they were prior to being shackled.”

  At Khela’s blank stare, he explained how the code the AIs had been dosed with did not fully respond to the rectification code on file with all the colonies as mandated by the Phobos Accords.

  He gave a slight shrug. “It’s been updated, and requires a bit of work to fully scrub the code remnants from within their systems. But it’s within my abilities…and the least I can do,” he concluded.

  Khela took a seat at the edge of Noa’s bed, her expression intrigued. “But, why, Dad? Why did the Matsu-kai order them here in the first place?”

  Noa sighed and took a seat next to her. “It is a long story. Do you recall hearing about the Imbesi Event that occurred forty years ago?”

  Khela cocked her head at him, but it was Hana who replied.

  “The assembly bots with their auto-termination codes removed? Yes, I remember.” Hana’s avatar glanced at Khela. “I had just been initialized; it was an event that had a lot of AIs talking—mostly about the foolishness of humanity. It kept me from wanting to embed with a human for decades.”

  Noa saw his daughter’s partner shrug uncomfortably at the memory.

  “Well,” he glanced at Hana’s projected form, “at the time, it appeared as if one of the AIs employed by Imbesi had been negatively impacted by the altered nano—altered in a damaging way.” He glanced back at Bette and Charley, and then chose his next words carefully. “The AI who perished at Imbesi sent a coded message burst to the ring just before the GSC destroyed the shipyard. The so-honbucho’s son was on the ship that day; he saw the transmission and decided to take decisive action—purely as a preventive measure—in case the message included an auto-update that would then subsequently infect—”

  Hana gasped. “All AIs on the ring? But it wouldn’t have stopped there. Eventually, every AI in the Tau Ceti system….”

  Noa nodded grimly. “Indeed. They—you—would all have been infected.” He tilted his head, indicating the two AIs recently arrived. “Our two friends here have gone to the trouble of placing an extra protective buffer between themselves and any Tau Ceti AIs…just as a precaution.”

  “I suggested it because we once had to implement something similar as a protection against a series of particularly unpleasant viral attacks from the Jovians,” Charley said. “It attenuates some of our sensor returns a bit and sandboxes everything coming over the Link, but it’s an annoyance rather than a hindrance.” His voice sounded amused as he added, “Some of the humans we fought alongside at the time called it the ‘AI condom’.”

  Hana snorted, and Noa saw Khela blush at Charley’s words.

  Probably not an idea a girl is comfortable discussing with her dad, he thought in a rare flash of humor.

  “So,” Khela said, after a moment. “What now? How are you going to hide our two friends from the Matsu-kai?”

  Bette’s pillar pulsed in what Noa now knew was her way of expressing amusement. “Your father put quite a bit of thought into it. For now, let’s just say the less you know, the fewer secrets you both will be asked to keep. I trust, though, that we have assuaged your concerns where your father’s intent is concerned?”

  At Khela’s nod, Charley said kindly, “Then we will say our goodbyes and ask that you take the next few hours to enjoy the spa.”

  Khela held up a restraining hand. “Dad,” she began, and Noa saw conflicting emotions warring on his daughter’s face. She glanced over at Hana’s projection and then back at him with a pained expression. “I’m a Marine. I’m duty-bound to report this to the GSC.”

  Noa tensed. “Khela, you can’t.”

  He took a step toward her, his eyes burning with intensity as he willed her to understand. Something of the urgency he felt must have been telegraphed in his demeanor, for she snapped to alertness, her eyes glued to his face.

  “Why not, Dad?” Her voice was soft, her eyes wary as she asked the question.

  “Because if you do, the Matsu-kai will find out. And they’ll kill us all.”

  Khela hesitated, and Noa could see the internal battle she waged between her duty and her need to protect her father and the two AIs. He breathed a sigh of relief as her expression cleared and she nodded her assent.

  PART FOUR: NANOPHAGE

  SPACEBORNE

  STELLAR DATE: 02.17.3246 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: Nearspace, Ring Galene

  REGION: Tau Ceti Star System

  Another eleven years later….

  The cloud of colloid assemblers floated in space, impossibly small and difficult to detect in the vastness between Galene and its moon, Maera. It was quite possible that these tiny assemblers, devoid of an inactivation command, would float for millennia without coming across a fabricated object, even given the inherently unstable nature of the L1 lagrange point where they were located.

  Those odds were helped along by the interdiction order set by Galene Space Command decades before, when they had first cordoned off the site where the construction of the Imbesi shipyard had taken place. It wasn’t something actively enforced these days, as the rather impressive debris field that the demolition charges had left behind had been cleaned up in the intervening years.

  The warning beacons that had been dropped around its perimeter were still in place, though. But it had long ago become common knowledge that the contractor assigned that duty had spaced the beacons out a bit farther than some civilian advisors had recommended. As it often went with government contracts, at the end of the day, a government employee overseeing the install had shrugged and accepted the contractor’s work without double-checking the original specs.

  Fifty years later, a single ore hauler, late for its rendezvous on the ring, decided to cut through the outside edge of the ancient interdicted zone.

  By this point, everyone assumed that the Imbesi construction project carried little residual risk, and the no-fly line could be treated as more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule. So the captain ordered his navigator to plot a straight-in course for the ring, one that just nicked the corner of the interdicted zone.

  Unbeknownst to its passengers, the ship acquired a tag-along. A brief burst from maneuvering thrusters to realign the hauler with the ring’s dock had sent the back end of the hauler slewing through the very space where the colloid cloud drifted. As they had been designed to do when they sensed a framework, the nanoconstructors adhered.

  And they began assembling.

  One of the first surfaces the colloid cloud touched turned out to be a series of six repair drones that the ship had rented from an equipment restoration company on the ring. As they weren’t standard equipment for the ore hauler to be carrying, they had been lashed to the exterior of one of its cargo bins for transport.

  As the colloids encountered these repair drones, they interfaced with the nano housed inside the units. Colloid assemblers meshed seamlessly with the assemblers inside each drone, providing the units with the auto update code that the beleaguered engineer Dmitri had pushed to the colloids on that fateful day so many years before.

  Whereas the original command sequence for the assembler cloud had been applied to building network lines, the new colloids took on the traits o
f their hosts’ command line sequences, and new directives found their way into various sub-clouds. Some grew lattice structures to seal breaks in seams, others were programmed to fabricate impossibly sharp edges grown from graphene.

  One repair drone had been sold to the restoration company after a medical supply business had gone under. That drone still had medical programs in its base code; its new owner had simply overlaid new code that turned it into a seam repair unit. The assembler colloid adhering to that unit began meshing with the nano within, stripping off its auto-terminate sequences and reinitializing its original base properties—the ability to repair organic tissue.

  Some of the assembler colloids meshed imperfectly with the now-reinitialized medrepair drone. In these smaller clumps of nano, the code was partially corrupted. The resulting blend of the original medical code with the assembler bots’ instructions to lay network filament caused it to generate a program that would fabricate network lines made of a carbon-silicon mesh weave—and then graft them onto a human epidermis.

  Unaware of the changes being wrought on its outer skin, the ore hauler docked at the Galene ring, just in time to return the rentals and avoid being hit by another weekly fee. That attempt to save a paltry sum of credits—combined with a now-dead process engineer’s desperate attempt to meet an unrealistically aggressive production schedule—would end up bringing the prosperous civilization of Galene to its knees.

  After the ore hauler docked, the rental company that owned the repair drones arrived to reclaim their property. As the maglev forklifts trundled their load through the spaceport and to the company's storage area, colloidal assembly bots that had come to rest upon the repair drones' surfaces were jostled loose. Some found purchase on passersby; a select few found themselves being sucked into the spaceport's ventilation system. From there, they disseminated throughout the vast enclosure, and made their way to various destinations.