The Stars Like Gods

by G. S. Jennsen

  “Thank you, Julien. We still need to determine who we can trust in Satair’s organization, but it’ll have to wait until after we secure the Guides….” Property? Psyches? Memories? The source intelligences themselves? He shuddered. “Let’s target staging in ninety minutes, and plan to move ten minutes later. Can we make that timetable?”

  Selene pushed her chair back from the table and headed for the door. “One way to find out.”

  Spencer Nimoet was waiting on Adlai in the dyne maintenance lab when he arrived, and his officer immediately launched into an update on his work. “We completed a hard reset and reinitialization of the first eight squads ten minutes ago. It’s the only way to ensure Advisor Satair didn’t leave behind any counter programming, worms, bombs or traps we haven’t thought of. We’ll cycle through all the patrol squads as they complete their shifts over the next day.”

  He gestured behind him at the long row of security dynes nestled in the bays. “But these eight squads are safe to deploy.”

  “Excellent work and better timing. By tomorrow, we might actually have control of the Justice Center again.”

  “That will be nice, sir. What’s our plan?”

  “We’re hitting the two backup storage locations owned by Guide Anavosa simultaneously with Justice teams at the other sites. We don’t want to risk tipping any of the Guides off ahead of time.”

  “Because they’re…alive inside their machines?”

  Adlai joined Spencer in grimacing. “We can’t afford to assume they’re not. I know it’s disturbing. I try not to think about it any more than I have to, which has been too much lately.”

  “Good advice.”

  “I’ll lead the team at the Franklin Street location. I’d like for you to handle the Moroccan Circle site.”

  Spencer nodded firmly. He’d gained confidence during this crisis, as a man rising to the occasion should. “Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  MIRAI

  Julien Grayson (Synra): Teams S1 and S2 in position.

  The warehouse sat dark and silent at the end of a narrow street. Scarcely more than an alley.

  Looks were deceiving, however. The warehouse was drawing a tremendous amount of power from the grid—far more than its ostensible purpose, listed in Administration records as dry goods storage, would ever require.

  Adlai slated cutting the power feed as their last act before breaching the interior. The facility would also have an internal backup power generator, of course, and they’d need to shut it down as swiftly as possible once they were inside.

  Selene Panetier (Namino): Teams N1 and N2 in position.

  A deep scan of the warehouse interior arrived from the surveillance drone, and he studied it quickly.

  The space consisted of a single floor and an insulated attic space thick with cabling and pipes. A wide entrance faced the street. A shielded block in the rear right corner likely represented the generator. A long row of electrified equipment stretched along the far wall and halfway across the floor, claiming the bulk of the warehouse space—presumably the servers. The purpose of a small cordoned-off area in the rear left, he couldn’t say. Outlines of tall, bipedal machines had to signify security dynes. Six of them. Two objects in motion would be patrolling drones.

  The scan didn’t reveal all the risks waiting inside, however. For one, they faced a non-zero chance that an emergency routine was set to activate and blow the whole building the second they tripped a sensor.

  But to implement such drastic security measures at both backup locations risked suicide. And he was betting that Anavosa was not suicidal.

  Harris Rosenthal (Ebisu): Teams E1 and E2 in position.

  Adlai marked up the scan and distributed it to his team, which consisted of three officers, eight combat dynes and two combat drones. Overkill, perhaps, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Adlai Weiss (Mirai): Teams M1 and M2 in position. Ready on my mark. He confirmed the status of his team. Mark.

  The street pitched into darkness.

  Ηq (visual, 40%) | ((scan.infrared && scan.thermal)(290°:70°))

  The unique signatures of four Justice dynes rushed through the entrance while the other four blew a hole in the right wall where no equipment blocked ingress. The thermal outlines of two officers followed the dynes through the entrance while he and Officer Bradley moved through the jagged hole they’d just created.

  Adlai Weiss (M1): Squad 1A, guard the perimeter. Weapons fire lit up the warehouse so brilliantly it almost masked the backup generator coming to life. Everyone else, engage all attackers!

  A dyne rushing forward into the firefight beside him exploded. Shit! The layout of the warehouse offered scant cover; he manifested a defensive shield for his chest and face and ran for the generator. Attackers have custom weaponry modifications, so set all defensive measures to maximum. Drone 2, to me.

  While the power grid delivered its juice directly through conduction plates in the floor, hardlines snaked from the generator to provide for the emergency needs of the servers. If at all possible, he didn’t want to blow up the generator outright, as doing so posed too much risk to the servers abutting it. He was trying to preserve the sapient entity they contained.

  Drone 2 arrived in a whirl of electric smoke, and Adlai marked the hardlines. Burn through these lines.

  A huge chunk of metal slammed into the outside frame of the generator; he couldn’t tell whether the smoldering pile that hit the floor belonged to one of his dynes or not.

  A cacophony of screeches filled the air as three of the Justice dynes closed to within melee range of their foes.

  His shield crackled. He dove to the floor, letting the bulk of the shield slide up and over his head and shoulders as he tracked the weapons fire to its source, sighted down and fired on the enemy drone until its core ruptured.

  The energy in the air around him began to dissipate, a sign the drone had succeeded in its task and the generator was now offline—then weapons fire zig-zagged across the room and cut into one of the server columns. The protective shielding burned brightly and began to falter. Whatever is firing on the servers, put a stop to it!

  In his peripheral vision, Officer Bradley dove for the dangling, partially unattached arm of one of the warehouse security dynes, ripping it the rest of the way off as his forward momentum sent him crashing into the legs of a fully operational enemy dyne.

  Adlai recoiled as blood sprayed across the wall. Dammit!

  Two of his dynes, having disposed of their initial opponents, moved in to overpower the last attacker standing. Too late for Bradley, but they prevented further damage to the servers.

  And like that, it was over.

  Squad 1B, remain on combat alert. Adlai set an internal diagnostic routine running to confirm he hadn’t overlooked a gaping hole in a vital part of his anatomy. “Thompson, check Bradley and see if there’s anything we can do for him. Alvarez, try to determine the operational status of the servers and other equipment.”

  After checking the generator to make sure it wasn’t about to overload and blow them all up, he took a couple of steps toward Thompson, but stopped when the officer shook his head grimly. He diverted toward the one area of the warehouse that had stayed silent and passive during the firefight, the cordoned-off alcove in the far-left corner.

  Behind a shredded privacy screen, a remote-controlled doll of Anavosa hung in a protective glass enclosure, still and lifeless but intact.

  He’d seen Joaquim Lacese’s vid from the Platform. It should have prepared him for what he saw now; it hadn’t. Cognitive dissonance battled itself in his mind with enough vigor to make him feel nauseated.

  He’d always considered Anavosa to be quite lovely, if in a delicate, fragile way—an appearance that contrasted markedly with her shrewd, piercing intellect yet somehow added to her mystique.

  Chills ran down his spine as he stared at the empty form now. In a trick of light and shadow, one side of her mouth almost seemed to curl up into a cold, mac
abre hint of a smile.

  He swallowed heavily as Thompson came up beside him. “Gods….”

  “Yeah. There are power cables running to the enclosure from somewhere. Disconnect them, just in case there’s another power supply hidden in the attic or underground.”

  “Y-yes, sir.” The officer looked physically ill as he began inspecting the outside of the enclosure.

  The doll would be fine without power for a while. It wasn’t constructed of living tissue, but rather a synthetic imitation of skin and bones. No organs, no brain, no pulse.

  Adlai forced himself to turn away from the doll and assess the state of the warehouse.

  The column of servers struck by weapons fire had sustained light damage, but at a cursory glance, all the data they held should be intact. Three of the eight Justice dynes and one of the drones he’d brought remained functional; the rest of them and all of Anavosa’s security forces were headed for the scrap pile. Alvarez had sustained a shoulder injury and Bradley total body loss. Luckily, Justice employees enjoyed a priority bump to the front of the regen line, so he’d be welcoming the officer back to life in a few days.

  “Cables are cut, sir.”

  “Thank you.” On the main mission channel, the reports began to come in. Spencer’s team reported a successful incursion, having suffered some squad damage but no officers lost. The others reported greater and lesser casualties, but it soon became clear that all locations were now under Justice control.

  Adlai Weiss (Mirai): Great work everyone. We can afford to take a breath now.

  Selene Panetier (Namino): A short one. But sure. This is me breathing.

  Adlai ordered the transport crew he’d staged down the block to start securing and packing up the equipment. Two hours from now, the building would be empty and sealed up.

  4

  * * *

  JUSTICE EVIDENCE WAREHOUSE

  Ebisu

  The muted hum of a pervasive low-power state danced along Nika’s skin, and narrow rows of lighting glowed in subtle patterns across the equipment stacked against two walls. Beyond these telltale markers of life existent, the room was quiet.

  “You’ve shut down the others’ servers.”

  Nika nodded, but didn’t elaborate. She’d wanted to join the Justice teams in their mission, or at a minimum help coordinate the effort from the Justice Center, but Adlai had made it clear how important it was to him, and arguably to most of those involved, for everything to be handled by the book. And taking a wanted terrorist on a raid of the Guides’ secure backup facilities was decidedly not by the book.

  Everyone assured her that she would be officially pardoned soon, with the rest of NOIR following shortly thereafter. But a pardon required a functioning government to issue it, and they were still working on that particular detail. So, she’d stayed out of Justice’s way while they acted on the intel Parc had so skillfully obtained for them.

  Transport crews had, for now, brought all the Guides’ backups to this central location, where they could be guarded more efficiently in the short term. Justice—or at least the portions of Justice they believed they could trust—was stretched thin. On the verge of breaking, one might assert, though Adlai and Spencer both would shame her if she dared to assert it.

  “It’s safer for everyone this way until some decisions are made regarding their, and your, futures. But the data—their memories and psyches—is intact and undamaged, I promise you. They’re just sleeping.”

  “But not dreaming.”

  She considered the woman/doll standing beside her curiously. “Do you? Dream, I mean.”

  Delacrai Iylish smiled, but it conveyed only wistful sadness. “In a manner of speaking. We regularly run routines—” she cut herself off “—it’s not important. Thank you for keeping my own servers running. It would have been easy for you to flip a switch and watch this body crumple to the floor like a marionette loosed from its strings.”

  “You helped us. You continue to help us, and we’re grateful for it. I’m grateful for it. Listen, the Justice Advisors have determined that you will be charged with multiple crimes alongside the rest of the Guides. There’s no getting around the fact that you were complicit in the actions the Guides as an institution approved and pursued for eight years. But I’ll fight to make sure you’re granted leniency. If you serve any prison time, it should be brief and, perhaps more importantly, comfortable. And for now, you have your freedom.”

  “Other than the constant armed escort and the tracker burned into my skin.”

  “Yes, other than those precautions. They’re for your protection as much as our own.”

  “I understand. An illusory freedom is preferable to no freedom at all.”

  Nika wasn’t so certain she agreed with the sentiment, but she opted not to argue the point. Not when Delacrai was cooperating; not when her cooperation was making tasks that should’ve been impossible not only feasible but, in many cases, already checked off the list. “Tell me, if you will…before we shut down their servers, the others were awake, weren’t they? Were they communicating with one another? With you?”

  “Yes, yes and no, but not for lack of trying on the last point. I hovered at the edges of their communications several times, but to do anything further would have revealed my presence and put me in terrible danger, tracker and escort notwithstanding.”

  “Of course. Still, the backup locations included additional dolls. It took us almost thirty-six hours to find and secure those locations. After the Platform exploded, why didn’t they simply transfer into those dolls and get themselves out into the world? Try to wrest control of the government back away from us?”

  “If asked, they will tell you they were assessing the situation, conferring with one another about potential strategies and devising a suitable plan to respond. In truth, however, I believe they were…afraid. With our fortress destroyed and our Advisors in armed revolt, our many layers of protection had vanished. I expect it all came as something of a shock to their psyches.” Delacrai lifted an arm and gazed at it oddly, as if it were a mysterious alien artifact. “This body feels so very fragile. To walk the streets within it is to feel vulnerable.”

  “Vulnerable? But if the doll is disabled while you’re occupying it, your psyche isn’t damaged. The doll’s merely a remote avatar.”

  “I said to ‘feel’ vulnerable, not to be so. The others like to proclaim their superior logic and reason, but though they—we—have drifted far from our Asterion roots, we are not base machines. The others like to proclaim they are not hampered by foolish emotions as the rest of you Asterions are, but I suspect the previous two days have proved them wrong on several levels.”

  Nika quite enjoyed the idea of the Guides having spent recent hours being overwhelmed by such emotions as fear, as panic and distress.

  “You realize, they will have attempted to activate countermeasures against this transfer of power. They have access to many resources they can use to do so.”

  She nodded. “And we are shutting down those resources as quickly as we can identify and track them. Again, thank you for your help in that regard. As for me, personally? I’ve been hunted for the last five years. I can handle it.”

  “I am sorry, though these empty words do nothing to change the past.”

  “I know you are.” There was nothing else to do here, and Nika started to turn and leave, then pivoted back. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You have done nothing but ask me questions since we became reacquainted.”

  She laughed. “I suppose that’s true. How did you—the five of you—end up like this? Why did you retreat into hardware and stop inhabiting bodies as anything more than remote avatars? When?”

  Delacrai’s stoic expression flinched, and she stared at the stacks of servers for several seconds before answering. “As with all life, evolution is a thousand tiny adjustments occurring over the span of countless millennia. It wasn’t a single decision, but rather the soft seduction of a winding path tha
t ultimately led us here.

  “We needed to be objective in order to rule wisely. We increasingly withdrew, cutting ourselves off from the daily workings of society, from our friends and our former lives. In the resulting absence of real, physical connection to the world—to the sensation of sand between our toes and the warmth of another’s skin against our own—the synthetic roots of every Asterion grew far stronger in us.”

  The woman sighed deliberately. “The details are a dull, dreary tale. By the time it became more convenient for us to default to a quantum state and discard a physical, fully functioning body, our minds had long since abandoned all semblance of an external, vibrant life lived among our people.”

  “Do you want to return to being a true Asterion?”

  Delacrai’s expression flared—her eyes widened, her lips parted—and she took half a step back. “It’s such a long road to traverse.”

  Nika, however, knew something of the sentencing options the Justice Advisors were mulling over. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  5

  * * *

  MARIS’ LOFT

  Mirai

  “Because we don’t store people.”

  “Not as a policy, no. But if there were ever special circumstances calling for it, these are them. As things stand at present, the Guides are too dangerous to be allowed to be conscious.”

  Adlai had missed the first part of the conversation, and he listened long enough to get the gist before joining in. “Nika’s right. If we start storing people, we’re already halfway down the slippery slope to what the Guides became. Sorry I’m late. New pockets of civil disobedience popped up here on Mirai as soon as the sun set.”

  Julien frowned at him but let the storing issue go for the moment. “Riots?”

  Adlai found an empty chair and collapsed into it. After they’d gotten kicked out of Mirai Tower by repair crews this afternoon, Maris had hastily converted her dining/living area into a general-purpose meeting space, and she’d somehow managed to make the loft look as if it had been designed for it.