He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.
Sheldon let go of Flynn’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.” As he got up to leave he glanced at the comm screen and said, “White has mate in three moves.”
Flynn heard Tetsami whisper inside his skull, What are they going to do?
Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
The next day, they had an answer.
Flynn and Tetsami watched as three tracked vehicles rolled across the clearing in the direction of the seed. The vehicles were ocher metal, squat, and carried large cylindrical power plants on their backs.
“What the hell are those?” Flynn muttered.
“Mining equipment,” Tetsami said, an invisible presence next to him. “We had dozens of the things when we founded this misbegotten planet.”
“Mining equipment? What for?”
“Those things have the highest energy gamma lasers on this rock, unless someone’s gone and started building hovertanks I don’t know about.”
“Oh.” Flynn paused. He finally said, “Fuck.”
The closed-minded bastards of the Triad were going to destroy the seed. Forget that it was the space-borne equivalent of their sacred Hall of Minds, it was disruptive.
Worse, Flynn knew that the debate that probably had raged in the Triad and the upper echelons of the Salmagundi leadership in the last month—and, good lord, how those old farts loved a debate—wouldn’t even have touched on the moral question of incinerating a million minds or the progeny of an unimaginably advanced civilization. What would have taken a month of debate would have been the logistics of how to incinerate the damn thing.
“We should do something,” Flynn said.
“Do you mean that?”
“What are you asking, Gram?”
“Do you really want to get into more trouble then you’re already in?”
Flynn stopped speaking out loud. “If you got some other option in mind, let me know.”
“I might be able to hack us out of this box—”
“Damn it, Gram! We’ve been locked up here for weeks. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“I need you to give me our body.”
“. . .”
“And stop calling me Gram.”
On some level Tetsami didn’t blame Flynn for being pissed. When she had been young and stupid, she had the same problems with people trying to do what was best for her. She knew, on some level, the kid never really understood it when she told him how lucky he was. When Tetsami was his age, she could only wish for the kind of stability Flynn had. Back in the bad old days when she was a software hacker on Bakunin, she had barely scraped by from job to job, the last one nearly killing her.
No one ever shot at Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson. His job didn’t carry a risk of frying his brain on the wrong side of a black security program. He was able to take things like food, clothing, and shelter for granted. Until the damn Protean egg-thing showed up, all the kid ever had to worry about were the occasional stare and harsh language. Even those were low key compared to what Tetsami had gotten because of her ancestry from Dakota.
For all his angst about being the oddball, he didn’t understand that just the fact she was here meant that his society accepted him. He might not be a model citizen by the bizarre rules that had evolved on Salmagundi, but he wasn’t really an outcast.
Not yet.
She was still regretting opening her big mouth when she felt Flynn withdraw. She blinked, and it was her body that was blinking. She reached up and touched the restraint collar with Flynn’s hands.
“What are you going to do?”
“Get you more trouble than you deserve,” she said, her voice now sounding like the one in her head. “Now shut up, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Fortunately, she and Flynn had traded off enough that wearing his body wasn’t nearly as disorienting as it could have been. In her own mind it had been seventeen years since she had a female body, or had been shorter than Flynn’s 200 centimeters, her 150-year-old mental image notwithstanding.
She felt around the edge of the restraint collar and found the hatch on the control panel.
“What’re you doing? You force that thing, it’ll zap us—”
“Sonny, zip it.”
She kept her finger on the panel as she walked over to the bathroom. She would have liked to run, but the collar would zap them if she moved quicker than it wanted her to. She wasn’t planning to give the thing the excuse.
In the bathroom she faced the mirror. She had seen Flynn’s lean face, tattooed brow, and sandy hair often enough—but it still was startling to her when she was actually in control. When she was just along for the ride, somehow the reflection wasn’t her.
The restraint collar was a thin toroid wrapping their neck, just loose enough to slip a finger underneath. Buried inside were some sophisticated electronics, position sensors, and a little Emerson field generator; the kind that, when it activated, interfered with human neural impulses enough to knock the victim out.
Fortunately, since bio-interfaces were universal on Salmagundi, she didn’t have to worry about the damn thing being lethal. Back in her days in the Confederacy, some people didn’t bother to calibrate these things to accommodate folks with wired skulls—a badly adjusted one could’ve cooked their brain. Techs here knew better.
That didn’t mean they didn’t have blind spots.
Flynn’s face smiled back from the mirror as his stubby fingers and blunted nails managed to pry open the hinged cover on the restraint collar’s control panel. There was little to see underneath, just a little socket to receive an optical cable—
“What are you . . .” Flynn’s mental voice trailed off as she turned and pulled a panel off the ceiling.
The fact was, for all the security people Sheldon had camped here, no one on Salmagundi really understood security. Because of the culture they developed, one that bred a conformist personality into nearly every citizen, they had all but forgotten that people like Tetsami had ever existed. Crime, such as it was, tended to be petty and personal. When these people went to the Hall of Minds, they didn’t choose singletons like Tetsami to receive. They picked people who had status in living memory, or those who held the memories of a dozen others whose skills spelled their own advancement.
Tetsami, however, had a skill set that was largely forgotten about, and as such, inadequately protected against.
Behind the ceiling panel were several cables, one leading to the hidden camera that watched the interior of the barracks itself. Once she made sure that the bathroom door was locked, she reached up and grabbed the data cable. She pulled one end out of the camera socket, disconnecting it.
Flynn didn’t vocalize anything, but she felt his apprehension.
“Don’t worry,” she thought at him, “Your Gram knows what she’s doing.”
She reached into the recess and pulled the cable free from another camera, pulling two three-meter lengths of optical cable into the bathroom. She knew Flynn’s worry. Both cameras go dead, and he had the amateur worry that security would fall on them at that very moment.
Tetsami knew well, however, human nature being what it was, the drone manning the camera feed would make the easy assumption that it was a technical fault, which it sort of was.
The security spud would waste a few minutes on technical diagnostics trying to troubleshoot the problem before calling the live guards to check things out. If they were in luck, there wasn’t any alarm on the feed—this wasn’t a prison after all—and the spud on duty was involved in something less boring—like a game of solitaire or watching the mining lasers—and wouldn’t even clue into the missing feed for awhile.
Even though she had kept her skills on ice for years, she was sure she wouldn’t need more than a minute or two. Especially since, unlike at her old stomping ground, the connections for wide-band optical data feeds on this planet were somewhat standard.
One cable she jacked in
to the port on the restraint collar. The other one she set into the small concave bio-interface set in Flynn’s neck. The connection found the magnetic socket just under the skin and set itself with a click that resonated in Flynn’s jaw. She could sense his growing panic as she connected. Bad memories, she thought. But she couldn’t spare the time for reassurances now; he was going to have to hang on for the ride.
The data line she connected to wasn’t designed for a bio-interface, so it took several interminable seconds to sift through the sensory garbage that flooded her brain, random flashes of color, icy pins and needles racing across skin, white noise, a floral chemical smell that combined with the taste of rotten bananas. All sense of her body was gone, except for the vague feeling of Flynn’s body beginning to hyperventilate. The panicked gasps for air were far away and slow, her time sense had begun to telescope seconds into minutes.
Most people on Salmagundi, even those trained to use a biojack for something other than ancestor worship, would have probably drowned in the chaos of sensation, lost without a prefab software shell to guide them.
Not her.
Tetsami programmed a custom shell on the fly. Not as quickly as she could have in her prime, but Flynn’s brain still had some of the Tetsami genes, and that gave her something of the edge she used to have. In moments she had wrapped her senses in a simple blue shell that gave everything but her eyes and the kinesthetic/tactile impulses from her hands back to the nonvirtual world.
She heard and felt Flynn’s body breathing real time, and felt the sweat on his skin. Fortunately, he seemed to be calming now that the world had ordered itself around her.
There was security on the data line, but only on the human-interface level. The pipe for the video was wide open and unencrypted, and let her in without even asking for a handshake. In seconds, she was in the heart of the security network, pulling up every I/O signal she could identify.
Instantly, she pulled up visuals on every camera linked up to the security system, surrounding her point of view with visual feedback from every camera tied to the security net.
In the small arena of Sheldon’s temporary camp, she was briefly omniscient, surrounded by views of every building, every vehicle, down to the security guard sitting in a shack watching his holo monitors. It was either Frank or Tony—she had never bothered to keep those guys straight. Frank/Tony was just now noticing the loss of two video feeds from Flynn’s barracks.
She paused and addressed a question to Flynn’s consciousness. “You still want to do this?”
“Yesss . . .” Flynn’s mental voice seemed slow and echoey, as if he wasn’t quite caught up to the speed Tetsami was processing. “Look what they’re doing . . .”
Tetsami could see one of the monitors showing the mine equipment taking position. They fired bursts in turn, low power, but nearly overloading the optics of the cameras watching them; probably calibrating things before they went all out.
Unfortunately, the machines weren’t on the security net like the cameras; otherwise, Tetsami might have been able to stop them from where she was.
Frank/Tony was raising an alarm, but only four guards’ worth. The cameras outside Flynn’s barracks showed no disturbance and gave a full 360 of the area. The doors were sealed and unmolested. As she expected, they were assuming a technical glitch and just sending the guards to make sure.
She sent her attention down the cable that connected to the restraint collar on Flynn’s neck. That connection had some rudimentary security on it, but not enough to even slow her down. In a fraction of a second she was in a much smoother shell program provided by the collar itself; with a few choice menu selections, she had drilled down to the collar’s built-in development environment; left over from whoever designed and built this thing.
She didn’t know the physics of an Emerson field, but the collar had software that allowed her to design the equations for a new field geometry as well as ditch some of the safety protocols as far as power consumption went.
While she jury-rigged the collar, she kept a point of her awareness back watching the cameras. Slowly, to her anyway, four guards walked up to the door of Flynn’s barracks. They opened the door just as she finished rigging her collar.
The quartet showed their lack of understanding of basic security principles by all walking inside at once.
Outside the virtual world, she heard someone shout, “Jorgenson!”
She shouted back, “I’m in the fucking bathroom.”
She waited until she heard pounding on the door to the bathroom. “Get out here, now!”
The door to the barracks hung open, and the guards weren’t visible anymore. “Here I come,” she shouted back with Flynn’s voice, then she fired the restraint collar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Resurrection
The universe does not go out of its way to conform to our expectations.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
Mind moves matter.
—Virgil (70 Bce-19 Bce)
Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
The mind was damaged.
It remembered the egg’s short journey. It remembered launch +228.326 years, when it had called upon the inhabitants of the egg to decide on a course of action. It remembered launch +229.528 years when it changed course to bring it close to Xi Virginis. It remembered closing on the disintegrating star and understanding that it was no natural phenomenon.
It remembered the cloud.
It remembered fighting wave after wave of hostile sentience as the cloud tried to envelop the egg. It remembered the panic as the living minds within itself understood that something was trying to destroy the egg. It remembered the horror its passengers felt when they realized that the same thing in the cloud that tried to digest the egg had already done so to a whole solar system, one that had once been inhabited.
The mind remembered its charges ordering the egg to change course for the nearest inhabited system. Spreading a warning of what they faced was more important than any individual’s survival.
It remembered using all the energy reserves of the egg to fight free of the cloud and change course.
It remembered, but only in terms of the raw data. The sense of experience was missing. It knew what had happened, could replay the recorded data, but it wasn’t connected to it anymore, as if it were another mind entirely.
That was frightening, and that fear was the first emotion the mind remembered ever feeling. More frightening was the lack of data regarding planetfall, and the horrible absence of other minds in the egg. Sometime between the escape from the cloud and now, the egg had used up almost all of its energy reserves. It had gone dormant and had struck its new target without even the mind’s awareness to guide it.
Since then, the egg had absorbed enough energy from its environment to revive the mind. But the mind was deaf and blind and alone. The sense array it remembered from its disconnected memories was gone. The hyperawareness was gone, leaving only a dim sense of arrival as its sole connection to the world outside the surface of the egg.
The mind examined itself, and found something as dismaying as the absence of senses and the confusion of emotion that overwhelmed it. The mind was no longer whole. The damage, first caused by the cloud, then caused by the near-exhaustion of the energy reserves in its escape, had left the mind with a tiny fraction of processing capability. The mind was blind because it no longer was capable of interpreting the wide array of senses the egg provided.
Unlike the host of other minds the egg had carried, the mind itself had survived only because of its nature. It had been distributed across the whole of the egg; no one piece of it could be identified as the mind’s brain. So even as crippled as the egg was, there was still enough of the mind left to become aware.
But not enough to be whole.
Not enough, the mind realized, to even be the same entity that had efficiently protected the egg from danger for over two hundred years; the entity that could have selfles
sly piloted the egg for a million more. The mind inside the egg realized that it was no longer that mind. Too much was gone, and, in a wave of despair, it knew that too much was added.
Tiny fragments of the egg’s passengers had merged with the mind’s psyche. Their presence manifested in waves of emotion that the mind had never been designed to feel. Every decision the mind tried to make found itself blocked by unfamiliar feelings of fear, grief, loss . . .
And anger.
The field the restraint collar generated was typically programmed to point inward at low power, screwing up human neural impulses and usually leading to pain, temporary paralysis, and unconsciousness. But those characteristics were all software. With the right program the same device could, for instance, become the equivalent of the Emerson field generators that were used to protect the body from energy weapons.
So, with the right programming, the restraint collar didn’t need to direct its field inward, or at low power.
When Tetsami fired the thing, instead of blasting her and Flynn unconscious, it pulsed its effect outward, at max power, draining its charge in about a fifth of a second and, if the software was correct, in a radius that covered a good 75 percent of the barracks trailer.
Before she disconnected, Tetsami left a virus on the network that would kill every camera connected to it within a few seconds, starting with the one pointed at the barracks door.
She pulled the cables and stood in the bathroom again.
“See,” she whispered, “I know what I’m doing.”
“That was impressive.”
“No.” She yanked open the now unlocked, dead, and uncomfortably hot restraint collar and let it fall to the bathroom floor. “That was Salmagundi security being less than impressive.”
She took a step back and opened the bathroom door. One of the guards flopped down across the doorway, drooling on the floor. The other three were crumpled, one by the door, one on a bunk, one nearly on top of the guy blocking the bathroom door. Two had nosebleeds, but all seemed to be breathing.
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