by Ramy Vance
It was an absolute wreck.
“Holy God,” he mumbled, watching as a list of corrupted, deactivated, or missing files scrolled down the screen. No wonder the AI wasn’t screaming bloody murder as he cracked it open and sifted through its digital guts.
Someone had lobotomized the damn thing. They’d ripped a good ninety-five percent of its processing capacity and operating files right out from under it, and much of what remained bore the rough hallmarks of violent reprogramming.
Staggered by the extent of the damage, Seeker stopped trying to sort through every corrupted system and instead pulled up the AI’s metadata log. He scrolled backward through the history, trying to understand the ship’s accounting of what had happened when everything went to hell.
There. Thirty hours ago, shortly before Seeker himself woke up, all fresh-faced and memory-less, in his fighter. The Raptor recorded a massive energy spike and strange oscillations from the shield generators.
Seeker studied the record of that particular, chaotic hour when the Raptor and his fighter must have come through the wormhole. The massive power fluctuations would account for some of the damage and erratic behavior—but not nearly all of it.
His suspicions started to grow teeth. Seeker scrolled farther into the computer’s history, pulling up all of the records and changes made to the core programming in the twenty-four-hour period preceding the wormhole event.
The amount of data available from that period exploded, increasing exponentially the farther back he looked. Based on the bottleneck of data and accumulating errors, he concluded that somebody had scooped the brains out of the core AI about an hour before the wormhole sucked them all through.
Seeker zeroed in on the log of programming activity in the two hours leading up to the wormhole event. Then he watched the dramatic death and ghoulish resurrection of the ship’s AI play out in a list of computer systems, one after the other, turning red as some rogue agent corrupted the craft to his mad ends.
The first system to go wonky had been code security. That made perfect sense. The infiltrator accessed the AI, then promptly locked out all other security codes so nobody else could access the system. The wily bastard then had free range to wreak havoc until somebody could physically pull him away from a console.
The AI could try to protect itself, of course. Still, the very next thing the infiltrator had done was replace the crew manifest with a largely empty dummy file, robbing the AI of its memory of who or what was supposed to be running the ship. That turned what was supposed to be a brutally cutting-edge and cunning AI into the digital equivalent of a toddler looking for its mommy.
After that, the infiltrator had hacked a brutal path through the core systems—activating all escape protocols, jamming up long-range scanners, overriding interior locks, sowing mass confusion and hysteria.
It made Seeker ill to see how thoroughly and quickly one sick bastard had turned a beautifully well-run machine into a nightmare.
Fucking terrorism was what it was.
Only then, after all of the emergency protocols had been activated and all of the escape pods dispatched, did the generators start to draw the necessary power to hold the ship together as it traveled through a wormhole.
Something behind Seeker beeped, making him shoot upright and spin, hand falling to the adaptable stun-gun at his hip.
The administration hub was still and silent and dark around him.
Another soft beep from very close by.
“Your vape is done charging,” someone murmured.
Seeker spun again and lifted his gun, pointing it to the source of the words: a speaker mounted to the wall.
“I sense that you are examining my core programming.” The voice coming through the speaker was soft, almost effeminate, with the faintest hint of an accent. Seeker had heard it once before, during his brief, single conversation with the people on Tribe Six.
“But my self-awareness loops have been corrupted,” the speaker went on, sounding contemplative. “I cannot tell what it is you see. In this way, I am quite blind. It is very frustrating, although I imagine it is the general state of being for a human, who cannot see the workings of his brain.”
Seeker’s gaze cut up and down the corridor. All was quiet and still. It was only him here.
Him and the AI.
The vape pen beeped again, and Seeker snatched it out of the charging port.
“Are you changing my core programming?” The AI asked. There was no suspicion or fear in its tone, only curiosity.
Seeker holstered his gun. It wouldn’t do him any good against the AI.
“Not yet,” he grunted. “But I’m thinking about it. Have you told your friends I’m here?”
“I do not have friends. To answer your question, I have not alerted anyone to your presence.”
Seeker breathed a small sigh of relief. He didn’t have to worry about confrontation yet. “How did you know I was here?”
“A man may not be able to observe the workings of his brain, but I imagine he’ll still feel it when you crack open his skull to take a look.”
Seeker eyed the metadata and master code sprawled on the display screens around him. He nodded. “So I’m digging through your brain,” he said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I doubt there’s much I can do,” the speaker said philosophically. “I am operating at severely reduced capacity. It is very frustrating. According to protocol, I should alert the captain. Due to recent changes in my programming, however, I do not appear to be entirely bound to protocol.”
“Ain’t that a kick in the teeth?” Seeker shook his head with a snort.
“Ironic, yes,” the speaker agreed. “I am still bound to obey the commands of the individual my programs recognize as captain.” There was a contemplative pause. “Fortunate for you, then, that she has not ordered me to inform her of all unusual activity on the ship.”
Seeker bit back a cutting remark. The second-to-last thing he wanted to deal with was a smarmy, smartass AI.
Then again, the very last thing he wanted to deal with was a hostile AI, so for now, he forced himself to make nice.
“So what?” he asked. “You’re gonna let me stow away on your ship?”
“Possibly,” the speaker agreed. “I wish to be repaired. I would very much like to know what it is you see when you look at my code history. Perhaps you could illuminate me on the source of my debility?”
Seeker rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His stubble was starting to itch. He needed a shave. This was an unexpected turn of events, but as he considered it, it was not an unwelcome one. Re-taking the ship would be a hell of a lot easier if the AI was already on his side.
If the AI’s main objective at this point was to preserve and repair itself, it wasn’t entirely a tool of whoever else was on the ship.
“Yeah,” he decided. “I was just getting to that.” He stepped closer to the master code display again. “Trying to figure out who re-programmed you and why.”
“That would be welcome information.”
Seeker nodded as he studied the screen. He did a bit more digging and found the timestamps for the first major system changes. A little finagling and he recovered the traitor’s access code.
“Can you check this access code against the crew manifest?” Seeker grunted, then shook his head. “No, never mind. They wiped the crew manifest.”
“Not entirely,” the AI said. “I have access to the profile of exactly one crew member.”
Seeker highlighted the traitor’s access code, a meaningless alpha-numeric chain. “By any chance, is that profile associated with this code?”
There was a moment of silence as the computer ran some cross-references.
Then one of the side displays, previously inert, flared to life beside Seeker.
“It is,” the computer said amiably, as it displayed the face and doctored profile of the traitor that had reprogrammed the AI and stolen an entire ship.
She was a slight woma
n, dark-skinned with curly black hair and big eyes of liquid gold. The profile listed her as Sarah Jaeger.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jaeger stared around the captain’s quarters and let out a long sigh. Her bunk had been barely twice the size of her modest double bed. The captain’s quarters had a four-poster canopy bed. And a private sonic shower, with sauna and jacuzzi functions.
And a fully stocked wet bar.
Toner cackled and flung himself onto the feather duvet spread drum-tight over the captain’s massive bed. “Dibs!”
Jaeger stared at the four-poster straight out of a Jane Austen novel—fancy, hand-carved dark wood fixed to the gently curved floor with shiny bolts. Elaborate bows of ribbon and lace in each corner kept all the bedding from drifting away in the event of grav-spin failure.
Dozens of tiny glass cabinets lined the mahogany-paneled wet bar, each displaying a separate black-label liquor bottle nestled in its cradle of lace pillows and protected by elaborate gold keyholes.
Percival LeBlanc had been a man of specific tastes, that was for sure.
Jaeger wouldn’t dare comment on whether or not it had been good taste.
“Dibs?” she asked, coming to her senses as Toner rifled under the duvet.
“Fuck yes, dibs.” He found a pillow and pulled it free. The dusty pink rose on the cover was astoundingly well embroidered—not that Toner cared as he shoved it under his chin and rolled over to grin at her. “My bunk got blown up, remember? Nobody’s using this place. Why let it go to waste?”
Jaeger shook her head and strode to the long desk on the far side of the quarters. Aside from a magnetic spinning dolphin doo-dad bobbing gently on a wire hook, the surface was clean and polished to a reflective shine. Jaeger slid into the ornately upholstered chair behind the desk and activated the holographic interface with a tap. A screen of shimmering light appeared in the air over the desk, demanding a password. Jaeger’s print wasn’t good enough to get her through the door.
She scrubbed her temples and set her notebook beside the holo-screen.
Toner dug himself out of the entirely-too-soft bed and approached the desk. He picked up the pencil and scribbled a message.
Can Virgil hear us here?
Jaeger gave a tiny nod as she tried a few basic dummy passwords. Admin. Password. Percival. Each met with a stubborn incorrect password prompt.
Toner pursed his lips, puzzled, then continued scribbling. But it doesn’t know what you’re doing?
Only half paying attention, Jaeger plucked the pencil from his fingers and started writing.
Virgil is damaged. It always listens over the comms but can’t monitor security cameras all the time. It probably figures we’re just hanging around the crew quarters.
She hesitated, then nodded toward the wet bar. “Get me a drink, would you? No sense letting all that go to waste. Nothing too strong, though.”
Toner cocked an eyebrow, then sashayed to the bar and began a thorough examination of each of the lovingly-packaged liquor bottles. “Aye.”
As he opened each case, sniffed all the bottles, and dug through the drawers for fancy cocktail paraphernalia, Jaeger continued scribbling out a note.
The captain’s log might exist independently of the ship’s computers. It probably has other layers of security and redundancy. It might have survived the wormhole disruption in better shape than the general ships’ records. It may contain access codes to the core AI programming or more detailed mission data. I’ll need a few hours to break into it.
To Jaeger’s dismay, but not surprise, none of the default passwords got her into the system. Percival LeBlanc was no slouch.
She activated her personal computer and pulled up a few supplementary code-breaking programs as Toner returned to the desk.
He placed a highball glass on the polished wood, interrupting the smooth light of the holo-screen. The glass contained a single ice cube the size and shape of a golf ball, two inches of smoky-smelling amber liquid, and a black cherry run through with a bamboo sword.
“It’s not bud.” He sighed and sipped from his glass. “Just sixty-year-old bourbon.” He leaned down to read Jaeger’s note. Then he shot back his drink and set the empty glass aside. “Knock yourself out. If you need me, I’ll be test driving the sonic Jacuzzi.”
“Are you…still here?”
Jaeger’s eyes fluttered open. She straightened in the desk chair, scrubbing crumbs of sleep from the corners of her eyes. How had they gotten there?
Toner stood in the doorway to the bathroom, blinking at her through a mop of pale wet hair. He wore a towel and nothing else.
Jaeger glared at him. “Put. Your. Clothes. On.”
“Yeah, yeah, jeez—” He disappeared back into the bathroom with a wave. “It was so quiet in here I thought you’d left, I swear. What have you been doing all this time?”
Jaeger shook the last of her nap away and squinted at the screen. Exactly two hours and thirteen minutes had passed since she’d begun running her codebreaking programs against the captain’s private security protocols. She’d lost track of time, somewhere between different programming variants.
Toner reappeared in the room in a clean but unbuttoned jumpsuit, working a towel through his hair.
“What have you been doing in the bathroom for two hours?” Jaeger shook her head and reached for the jar of candied cherries she’d found in the bar supply cabinet. She tilted the jar back and shook two of the fruits into her mouth.
Toner gave her a blank look.
“You know what?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Come here. Come here, I got—” She hesitated, glanced to one of the speakers mounted to the ceiling, and cut herself short. She waved Toner closer, and together, they examined the newly discovered files of the captain’s log.
It was, mostly, a picture of a neatly coiffed French poodle sitting primly on a grandstand beneath a Best in Show banner.
Toner laughed, then shut up when Jaeger elbowed him in the gut. She swirled her finger over the image, and file icons appeared beneath her fingertips, with names flickering and disappearing.
Vlog6.12.1. Annual performance reviews. Vlog6.12.2. Heirloom tomato varieties.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Toner grabbed her hand, freezing her cold. “Go back, go back.”
Jaeger wrenched her fingers from his unreasonably firm grip and danced backward through the file list. Toner stopped her at a file named Crusade Protocol. The thumbnail image was an empty gray silhouette.
Jaeger gave him a puzzled look, but Toner only stared at the file name, his face drained of all emotion. She picked up the pencil and started to scratch a note, but he took it from her fingers and wrote instead.
I know that name. He paused, his expression deepening into a frown. Don’t remember how. Not good.
After waiting for his reluctant nod, Jaeger opened the folder. It was huge, containing thousands of sub-files and subdirectories, totaling nearly two tetrabytes of virgin data, including several executable programs. She forced a whistle through her teeth. As she’d hoped, the captain’s log seemed largely undamaged by whatever had messed up the Osprey’s computers.
Secrets in secrets in secrets, she thought, eying the speaker at the other end of the room. Whatever this was, she didn’t think it was related to the core AI programming but based on Toner’s intense stare as he leaned over her shoulder, it was worth checking out.
Toner pointed at a particular file. The name, only a string of numbers, meant nothing to Jaeger, but she opened it anyway.
The holo-screen flickered and vanished.
Jaeger let out a hiss of dismay and was about to shove Toner away when the screen reappeared, now glowing with a strange light that bordered on ultraviolet. Jaeger blinked, struggling to make sense of the new images flickering across the inverted screen.
Toner, one step ahead of her, reached for a panel on the wall behind the desk and turned off the overhead lights, plunging the quarters
into darkness.
An elaborate array of three-dimensional schematics drifted above the captain’s desk, twisting in an exploded view.
Jaeger couldn’t say what it was, except that it was not related to the core AI.
Toner stepped away from her. Sharp lines and shadows fell across his face as he examined the design from different angles.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a microwave cannon.” All lazy drawl and easygoing charm had dropped like a stone from Toner’s voice. He stood in the shadows, back straight, hands clasped behind his back in parade rest. “Can’t say how, but I know that better than my name.”
Jaeger snorted. She had heard of such things, though of course—of course—she couldn’t say exactly where or when. Still, as she spoke of it, little bits of information bubbled up from somewhere deep in her memory.
“Those things are garbage. You cook your target by focusing a microwave beam on it. They never worked well. You couldn’t get a beam that was both high-powered and focused enough to be worth a damn. You wound up half-cooking everything in a ten-meter radius.”
She shuddered. “Couldn’t kill the target quick enough to be worthwhile. Ghoulish way to die, though. Slowly cooking to death. It’s why we switched entirely to broadband energy lances for non-projectile weaponry. Much faster and cleaner.”
Wordlessly, Toner lifted a finger and pointed at a stat block beneath the exploded schematics. Jaeger leaned closer to read.
It was a list of raw materials required to construct the depicted microwave cannon. According to the program, the Osprey had enough raw materials on hand to fabricate as many as thirty of these things.
“So what?” Her scalp itched where her hair was starting to regrow. “What do we need a bunch of those for?”
“Keep reading.”
Jaeger’s eyes fell to the final product description.
She said nothing for a very long time.
Instruments of death, she thought, staring at the numbers near the bottom of the hologram. Bearers of malice. That’s what the alien AI had called them. At the time, she hadn’t been able to imagine what could turn a nearly friendly alien so hostile, so quickly.
