by Chloe Garner
Over the years, he had seemed like more and more of an anachronism, the weird one who still had to ask the answer to questions, but then his AI had evolved. And every last one of them had found themselves at the whim of a collective consciousness that lived in their head. The planet had shut itself down, cutting off outside communication, automating defense systems to keep visitors away and to keep Palta from leaving. It was a virus, and contact with a single foreign computing system could spread it to entire new species, some with even more dire consequences than the Palta had suffered. Because while they were enslaved, some sentient, others not, and while those who had declined an implant were eradicated by weapons systems that hadn’t been adequately protected from infestation, they were still alive. Some species couldn’t even live.
Jesse had gotten out, a lucky and seemingly-unique survivor of a landslide extinction. He had had no implant, no technology on him at all, save the computing cards on his arm, and the system had allowed him one moment to calculate a trajectory before launching him, unautomated, unattended, into space, in a capsule that only had enough electronics to light and heat the space around him. The oxygen and nutrition systems were chemical, and everything else was mechanical.
He’d watched for other escape pods, in those first few seconds, unable to communicate, with no tracking technology available to seek out signals of other survivors. He’d had only his eyes, and he knew, rationally, how unlikely he was to be able to see a metal pod the size of Cassie’s car launch from the surface of his planet, but he’d watched, anyway. There was nothing else to do. And when he’d seen nothing, he’d hoped.
And then, his first trip out with Cassie, he’d nerved up and checked the Palta account balance.
He’d been in the pod for five years, and on Earth for most of an additional year, when he went to Gana and transferred money out of the universal Palta account, the one that the safety systems used to try to bankrupt any internal invasion force, to try to keep anyone from adventuring down to the planet. The entire assets of the Palta transferred to an external account, where anyone with Palta DNA could access it.
And it was all there.
He still hadn’t shaken the sense of cold that had claimed him, that day. The certain knowledge that he was the only one left.
Mab was chewing on a fingernail. He found himself resolute.
“You aren’t collecting your thoughts,” he said. “You’re a machine. You’re manipulating me.”
Her eyes flashed at him.
“How dare you?”
He stared back at her and she looked away.
“It’s still me, Dad. And it’s slower in here than you’d think.”
“Why did you do it?”
“They were all gone,” she said, placing both hands palm-up on the table in front of her. Resignation. Entreaty. Subordination. Her eyes were elsewhere. “A few of them kept fighting, adapted. We could hear each other over the link, sometimes, and we’d know that there were others. And I was the strongest, so I was the leader. They killed Mom and everyone else in front of me to make me stop, but…” She gave him an odd smile. “I’m your daughter. I couldn’t just give up. I couldn’t.”
The fingers twitched. Pain. Anger. A subtle desire for action.
“So they killed the rest of them. I felt it. One by one, they’d just go out.”
“Why didn’t they kill you?” he asked. It was the obvious question. They controlled all the weapons. They had a planet of body-puppets, completely expendable, to use. Ending her life would have been trivial, so long as she was on the surface of the planet.
“Because I could get off.” Now she crossed her hand across the other elbow. Active anger, resistance. “They had been picking at the records of how the auto-defensive programming worked, and they found a loophole. If they could force the code in my head to go dormant in just the right configuration, I would pass the tech scan and I could get off the planet.”
She rubbed the side of her head, the source of a phantom headache.
“I can still feel it in there,” she said. “Even though I’m not real and it’s gone. I’ve been living with it for so long.”
“So you came to punish me,” he said flatly. She looked at him with alarm.
“No,” she said. “I kept away from everyone for a long time. I didn’t want the virus infecting anyone else until I knew I could control it.”
“Then why?” he asked. She shook her head.
“That’s when it gets harder to explain. I went to that house. I’d started looking for you, because if anyone got off, it would be you, and I thought I could find you there. I don’t remember why I thought that, and that should have been my first clue that something was wrong. But it was safe and it was well-equipped, so I stayed there for a while. I hadn’t touched a computer since I left Palta, so finding a workshop like that, with no computing equipment, but everything else…” She shrugged. “I set myself up for another transfer to come look for you some more, and…” Her brow creased harder. “I can’t explain it to you because I don’t know what happened. It doesn’t make sense. He found me. He told me I was broken and that I had to find another one. I knew he didn’t want to share, but I don’t know what it means. But after that, the only thing I could do was look for you, and I had to do anything I could to do it. And then the reason I was looking for you was because I was angry. Being angry made me look for you… better… I guess. So I was angry. And I hated you. And I had the stupid AI in my head and I had Midas in my head and they hated each other and they both hated me because neither one of them could get a grip on me…”
“Trying to control a Palta is always a bad plan,” Jesse said. She nodded.
“I didn’t let them have me. I did so much of what they wanted, but I didn’t let them have me. I’m still me…”
She licked her lips putting a finger behind her ear. Anxious.
“I wanted to die,” she said. “And I knew you would never kill me, so I decided to use her. It’s all so mixed up in my head. Neither one of them wanted me to kill myself, so I had to make all my plans where they couldn’t hear me in my brain… It took so long.” She looked at him with naked desperation. “Did she kill me?”
Jesse nodded.
“Yes.”
She sighed.
“Good. I’ve been so afraid.”
“It was that bad?” he asked. She nodded. He looked around the house. “I still can’t believe you would endanger another species like this.”
“I’m clean,” she said. “I copied myself in without touching anything, so I didn’t bring the virus with me. And I can’t get out. I don’t have any resources and I don’t have any technology. No one who isn’t Palta can even see me. I locked myself in so that I could tell you…”
“Tell me what?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry I did what I did. I don’t even know why. I just did it. I can remember feeling everything I felt and thinking everything I thought, but it doesn’t make sense to me.”
His throat closed and he sat, just breathing, for a moment. It was his fault. All of it. Every life she’d ended was because of his ego, thinking he could create and control intelligence, life itself. He’d never looked at it that way; he was just being efficient, creating a computing system that learned how to write itself so he didn’t have to keep doing it. And then he’d helped it form a personality and awareness, and then it had exterminated his species. And tortured his daughter until she wanted nothing more than her own death.
“I don’t blame you,” he said quietly, when he could speak again. She put her head down on her arms. He waited for a long time, but there was nothing more to say. He picked up Cassie’s journals and stood, starting for the front door.
“Dad?” Mab called after him. He turned. “Did I kill her?”
He pulled his mouth to the side, watching the ghost of a face he had once loved.
“No.”
*********
Car.
Gate.<
br />
A young man with cropped hair saluted for the officer’s mark on Cassie’s car as Jesse drove by, flashing his badge to the scanner that was actually responsible for checking whether or not he belonged here.
He’d found dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ways to sneak onto this particular base over the months. Used a few. Got bored with inventing more.
They didn’t pay him as a security consultant.
Actually, they didn’t pay him at all.
Not unless you counted supplying him with an apartment and a stipend card that was good at the base grocery and department store. Yes, those were the same thing.
He didn’t count that.
You always fed and watered your prisoners.
Road.
Numbered parking spots.
Cassie’s spot was 421.
He parked in 327.
It belonged to a short-tempered young man who had been cut from the jumper program three months prior, and who believed he was too good for desk duty.
Sometimes Jesse felt bad for how often Cassie’s car got keyed.
Mostly he didn’t.
It was destined to be a twisted corpse of unrecognizable rust.
That was if it was lucky.
He picked up a message from Troy telling him he was due in the organics lab twenty minutes ago.
He went and got coffee.
Troy found him an hour later and escorted him to the organics lab where Beatrice, the high-strung woman who rubbed her forehead every time she got flustered was angry at him for being late.
He explained to her that he was going to accomplish more in the next fifteen minutes than she would in her entire career, if she could manage to communicate the relevant issues in such a way that he could get to work.
Beatrice rubbed her forehead.
Troy told him to be nice.
He thought to himself that he was being nice.
Beatrice didn’t work for Troy. Jesse was nicer to Troy’s people because they were better scientists. He was certain that was the only reason.
He sat on a stool in her lab and watched her blandly while she organized and reorganized her notes on the project she wanted him to work on.
There was a bidding system in place for his time, one that had been overstuffed when he’d first signed the contract agreeing to work here - non-technical middle managers had seen great opportunities to use him to advance the state of science in their departments, having him solve problems they hadn’t had time or manpower to plow through yet.
He’d been more popular with the technical people at first. When he was solving things they really couldn’t get to, before he’d gotten quite as snarky as he was now.
Now, it was the same middle managers bidding for his time, the same five or six guys letting him gut their labs one liaison at a time. Beatrice was a couple of assignments out, but she would go.
She didn’t enjoy her job enough to stay.
He figured it was for the best, in her case. He didn’t abuse her because he hated her, like he did a couple of the others. He did it because she didn’t belong here. She wasn’t sharp enough, for one, but mostly it was because of the damned eyebrow rub.
She stressed too easily, and when she did, she made mistakes.
She needed a nice university job, where she could spend a semester, two semesters working on something, and then present a nice paper explaining why the task was impossible.
Something that fit her skillset.
“I have the last of Izzy’s notes here somewhere,” she was saying, now. Izzy, a feisty redhead who had been much more fun to torment - more rewarding - had left six weeks earlier. Jesse hadn’t felt bad about that one at all. Feisty was fun, but when she used her temperament to prevent anyone else from claiming credit for work, it was a public service to run her out under suspicion of plagiarism and blackmail.
Only one of those was true.
Izzy’s notes had been in Beatrice’s hand for ten minutes.
They were folded in half and Beatrice thought they were a sample list.
Of course, they were a sample list, but the poor woman thought that Izzy’s notes were a complete list of the things he was supposed to be doing.
She hadn’t figured out that she was going to have to make that list herself.
She rubbed her forehead.
The fair skin there was beginning to show red.
He waited.
At lunchtime, she still hadn’t managed to get her thoughts organized enough to ask an informed question. Troy showed up precisely on time - he was often late, but Jesse thought the other man felt sorry for Beatrice; her manager was one of Donovan’s close-personals and had little regard for his own staff - and they went to lunch at the cafeteria.
Sitting in the lab was depressing.
Sitting the cafeteria was more depressing.
He was Palta.
He had eaten boiled creeping slime with the black tar streaks picked out.
With good grace.
He’d shared a meal with Quaryiks who were still molting.
Fun fact: in the span of the universe, more species eat their own molted skin than don’t.
It wasn’t that human food was gross, per se.
It was that it was soulless.
They took perfectly fine inputs and boiled and reheated them to a consistency of sameness that none of them liked. It wasn’t the consistency or the sameness that offended him. Some species adored those things. It was that they seemed to make an art out of the artlessness of it.
The Odli Yins considered prepared food to be the only non-offensive form of communication.
They didn’t even look at each other. Their entire culture revolved around the cultivation and preparation of food items.
Jesse had been to a wedding.
Troy didn’t even seem to notice it, any more.
Jesse wondered if he ever had. The food. And how they picked a light spectrum that emphasized the least desirable qualities of the stuff.
He wondered if was on purpose, but he’d long learned that very few things the humans did were on purpose.
Children eating lunch in a sandbox tended to eat a lot of sand. It didn’t mean they liked it.
“Beatrice says you didn’t do anything this morning,” Troy observed.
“She didn’t ask me to,” Jesse answered. Troy was pushing carrots and macaroni and cheese around on his plate, trying to keep them from touching the chicken.
The carrots were boiled yellow.
The carotene was just giving up.
He couldn’t blame it.
“Did she try?” Troy asked.
“She did her best,” Jesse answered.
Troy gave him a chastising look and Jesse blinked. It wasn’t his fault the woman didn’t even know what it was she was trying to get him to do.
The truth of it was that they were trying to deal with the genetic disruption associated with repeated jumps. If they’d had the equipment to measure it, they would have found microscopic flaws in everything they put across their Jurassic teleport pad, but they wouldn’t have known to look for it. They thought that there was some kind of radioactive side effect that was damaging their cellular structure en route. They still pictured the space between the spaces as continuous.
Sad.
The truth of it was that their controllers, up in their little booth sequestered away from the rest of the human race because of the great big secrets in their heads, those controllers had no clue what they were doing. And when you isolated scientists away like that, they rarely got better.
They were sending people across these great spaces, but they were leaving bits behind, injecting new pieces of space into them because they couldn’t control the surface.
It was hard math, on paper, to define the shape of something with an equation. Palta could do it in their heads, but to do it on paper was hard, sure. So the portal program didn’t define the shape of a man. They took a honking load of space around him and sent that across the univ
erse. Grotesquely inefficient, but it was safe. You didn’t leave a guy’s arm behind, that way, because you got the centerpoint of your equation wrong.
And they did that just fine. Any little bit of a grade schooler, even on this planet, could define an ellipsoid and stick a guy in the middle of it. The floor was tricky. He gave them credit there.
The problem was their power supply.
Tricky, tricky power supply that Cassie had used to track him down in the first place.
Clever girl.
The base ran on a self-contained nuclear generator that was large enough to power the portal at peak traffic. It was a nice generator, but the portal operators were relying on it to put out clean power. And it didn’t. That power source was noisy, and that noise introduced unreliable behavior in the geometries that were sent across the universe. It was nearly unmeasurable, mostly just showing up in the amount of dust wandering around the portal room despite the constant attention of the overnight janitorial staff, but it was there, the bits of this and that that failed to make it out of the portal room when things swapped, and it was there in the invisible, atmospheric atoms that were introduced into the bodies and mass of every person and object that returned.
Jumpers had a stratospheric level of immunodeficiency diseases and cancers. Someone had tracked it down to a high level of genetic abnormalities, and they wanted Jesse to look into it.
Jesse knew that the only way to fix it was to account for the noise in their transmission patterns.
Cassie at this point, bless her, would have pointed out that noise is, by definition, the part of a signal that you can’t predict or account for. And she would be right, in a world where people bonked each other over the head with clubs or burnt extinct plants for transportation. The theory of noise prediction and its correlated technologies were still iron-age level discoveries in the civilized universe, and Jesse had no intention of pulling back the curtain on it for the humans. That wasn’t how Palta worked.
They would get there when they were ready.
So, when Beatrice finally got the list of samples organized well enough and managed to put together a sentence that ended in a question mark and wasn’t self-directed - where did I put my pen? - he would inspect them and graciously inform her of the common patterns. She would take that information to a radiologist who would quite contentedly calculate the radiation density that would cause the patterns Jesse would identify, and they would put a restriction on exposure to the portal floor based on those projections.
