Exin Ex Machina

by G. S. Jennsen

  He drew back a little and tilted his head toward the hull. “This is your ship, I’m guessing?”

  She exhaled and tried to shake off the memory’s spell. “It is now, more or less.”

  “What does ‘more or less’ mean?” Another kiss. Another tender caress. Another few hours of this and she might begin to feel…content.

  “It means I’m a bit of a charity case. The owner of this place is a friend of NOIR, and of mine.”

  “That won’t do at all. I’m a businessman, and I believe people deserve fair compensation for quality products—and this is a beautiful ship. We’ll pay this friend of yours properly for it.”

  A protest died in her throat. Grant did deserve to be paid for the ship, and Dashiel did have the money to do it. So instead she disentangled herself from his arms to stand. “I appreciate that.”

  “Happy to do it.” He followed her up. “When were you planning to leave?”

  “About five minutes from when you showed up.”

  His eyes widened. “Damn. You mean I almost missed you? A few minutes later and I’d have had to chase you across the stars.”

  “Maybe I should have left earlier. Made you work for it.”

  He didn’t laugh; in fact, he looked distressingly serious. “How long until you forgive me?”

  She shrugged. “A little longer.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s fair—but perhaps this will help. I figure I have three or four days until the Guides realize I’m no longer their man. What do you say we shorten that time? Let’s go break your friend Parc out of Zaidam.”

  52

  * * *

  It was entirely possible, Adlai decided as he stared at the list of his open investigations, that he was the single worst Justice Advisor in several millennia.

  He remained no closer to catching the leaders of NOIR, or for that matter its lowliest members. Meanwhile, they broke into major corporate headquarters and had their way. They broke into the Guides’ own data vault. Or Nika broke into the Guides’ data vault, which he supposed meant Nika was now synonymous with NOIR. That one was still throwing him for a loop.

  Despite being seriously injured, she’d succeeded in eluding five hunter squads to vanish once more. Admittedly, she’d had help doing so, as evidenced by the trail of dismantled patrol dynes and mecha the ‘help’ left in their wake. His teams had spent six hours cleaning up the wreckage. Even for NOIR, it was an impressive showing.

  …There he was complimenting their work again. Ugh, he did not want to have to hunt his friend down and lock her away.

  A high priority alert arrived to interrupt his angst. From the Chosek embassy? That was unusual. He frowned and opened the message.

  They had a what?

  Crime in Asterion society tended to be…neat. Sanitized. More often than not, the aftermath was limited to fried circuitry or a bit of physical debris. Their bodies were as much organic as synthetic, so a criminal could blow someone’s head off, dismember them limb-by-limb or commit other moral atrocities on a body, but the reality that the victim would soon receive a fresh body and continue on with their lives tended to remove the incentive. As such, body-murder by any method other than catastrophic electrical overload was rare.

  Now Adlai stood over seven bodies, four Asterion and three Chizeru. They had all been ripped apart by high-powered laser blasts. Blood, viscera and brain matter decorated the floor, walls and ceiling of the embassy conference room. The room stank.

  Chaos, closing in.

  He needed to shut out his visceral reaction to the horrific nature of the crime scene and treat it like any other crime scene. Not like any other, of course, as this one involved an Advisor, several powerful corporate executives and a couple of aliens, and thus was a diplomatic firestorm in the making.

  This, at least, wasn’t his problem—one of the other diplomatic Advisors, Cameron Breckel, was on his way from Ebisu to ‘manage’ the situation.

  With a sigh Adlai turned to one of the techs who had accompanied him to Chosek. “Show me the footage again.”

  The security dyne assigned to the room had recorded the event, as it recorded all official meetings. It had subsequently suffered a programming malfunction, but the tech had managed to extract the recording from its data store.

  He watched Advisor Rowan slouching in her chair, then scowling dramatically as she lost control of the negotiations and the meeting descended into anarchy. Then emoting across the room, demanding the dyne’s Glaser, deliberately setting it to maximum and calmly firing on every person in the room, then herself.

  He didn’t know Iona Rowan particularly well, but he’d shared professional space with her enough times to recognize that her actions were absurdly out of character. Not simply the shooting, but her behavior in the minutes leading up to it. It was as if a different person inhabited her body….

  Oh, crap.

  He forced himself to look at the body. Most of her skull had been shredded and its contents splattered on the wall behind it; the odds of recovering clean data from her brain were all but zero. Next, he checked the Advisors’ database…in a stroke of luck, she had filed her mandated every-two-week comprehensive backup this very morning.

  After a quick check of the time he contacted Erik Rhom in the Mirai Justice Center lab.

  “Erik, this is Adlai. I’m sending you a copy of a comprehensive psyche backup file. I need a thorough forensic analysis performed on it, highest priority. I’ll be back on Mirai later today to review your findings.”

  “Yes, sir. Clearing my schedule now.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and use strict quarantine procedures during the analysis.”

  “You think the psyche has been corrupted?”

  “I think that may be the least of its damage.”

  Adlai took a shower before going to the lab, but he felt as though he needed to take a minimum of three more. The stench of death—real and permanent death in the case of the Chizeru—had seeped into his skin and the olfactory receptors in his nose.

  As soon as he walked into the lab and saw the expression on Erik’s face, he knew his day wouldn’t be improving any time soon. “What did you find?”

  “Exactly what you expected me to find, I suspect. She was infected with the limb augment virutox.”

  “I was afraid of that. But it doesn’t make people aggressively violent—reckless, maybe, but if anything, it makes them overly passive, right?”

  “This is where it gets worse, sir. Once I found the virutox, I pulled the preliminary report from the crime scene on Chosek. She didn’t have the limb augment installed.”

  “What? Are you suggesting it’s communicable?”

  Erik tilted his head in prevarication. “Probably not through touch alone—it likely requires a much deeper level of interaction. But yes.”

  Gods. He swallowed heavily. “All right, I’m going to burn into red alert mode on this data point in about ten seconds. But first, how is communicability related to the violent behavior?”

  Erik motioned him over and opened a pane full of graphs. “My working hypothesis is that when an active virutox is introduced to a psyche by external means, as opposed to being installed internally and allowed to propagate naturally, it’s forced to mutate. It has to find alternate ways into many of the processes it’s designed to infiltrate, and the course of its spread is altered. Hence, different effects manifest.”

  “Worse effects.”

  “For now we have a sample size of one, so I don’t want to extrapolate without more data. But the data we have isn’t good.”

  Adlai had willingly obeyed the Guides directives; he’d trusted in their wisdom in light of the certainty that they possessed information he did not. But he’d always viewed his work at Justice more as a calling than a simple job, and he had not dedicated multiple generations to it in order to send perhaps misguided but fundamentally decent people to Zaidam Bastille for decades. Or worse, into a hard R&R.

  Now the virutox he’d been or
dered to allow to run free was running far freer than he had anticipated. Than the Guides had anticipated?

  The growing chaos he’d sensed in recent months was going to be nothing compared to the anarchy still to come if the virutox was both communicable and mutating into something that induced violence.

  The mystery surrounding Nika’s psyche-wipe added a new weapon to his conscience’s cage match with itself. He couldn’t say much about her morality now, but the Nika he’d known would never have acted against the Dominion’s best interests. So why had the Guides ordered her erased, as it now appeared clear they had?

  He rubbed at his jaw. He needed to talk to someone about all this—needed to hear reassurance that he wasn’t developing his own glitch and descending into madness. Dashiel instantly sprang to mind. But if the scene at Mirai Tower was any indication, Dashiel’s week had skidded off a cliff that began at bad and ended at epically worse. He shouldn’t pile on.

  But there wasn’t time to coddle himself or his friend, so he pinged Dashiel anyway.

  I am currently unavailable. For business matters, please contact the Ridani Enterprises Manufacturing Director, Vance Greshe. For personal matters, please leave a message detailing the issue and I will be in touch.

  Adlai frowned, instantly suspicious. After pondering on it for a moment, he opted not to leave a message and instead reached out to Greshe, who he’d met once or twice while visiting Ridani Enterprises.

  “Director Greshe, this is Adlai Weiss over at Justice.”

  “Yes, Advisor Weiss! It’s a pleasure to speak with you. How can I help you today?”

  “I was hoping to give Dashiel an update on the augment theft investigation. Do you know when he’ll be available?”

  “Ah. Advisor Ridani has taken a personal leave of absence, and I don’t expect his return on any particular date. Is this an urgent matter?”

  “No, it can wait.”

  “Then I’ll be sure to pass along your message whenever I next hear from him.”

  “Thank you.”

  Adlai kicked his chair back and crossed his ankles atop the edge of his desk. Despite his better judgment and the direness of the trap he now found himself in, a small smile crept across his lips.

  He’d been hoodwinked.

  He never should have bought Dashiel’s performance in the Mirai Tower data vault…but maybe he hadn’t wanted to see through the charade. Because if he had, it would have meant he needed to arrest Dashiel, and that might have been one morally suspect step further than he was willing to go.

  Adlai called up the memory of the scene at the data vault, then focused in on Dashiel’s expression as he stared at the shattered window. Moving forward at fractional speed—there. The split-second in which the expression transformed into a projected facade.

  Yep, he’d been hoodwinked. He couldn’t hazard a guess at where Dashiel was at present, but he’d stake his Advisor status on who his friend was with.

  And they were running.

  Dammit, the chilling truth connecting all these events was staring him in the face—the what, if not the why—and he’d willfully turned a blind eye to it for too long. As unpleasant and troubling as it was, he needed to face reality.

  So, what to do about it?

  He tapped his fingernails on the desk, and was surprised at how easily the decision came. Maybe he wouldn’t be so lost after all.

  But he was going to need help. And an insurance policy.

  He pinged his most talented officer and asked him to come up to the office. Then he prepared a memo detailing everything he knew to this point. He trigger-locked the memo and set it to distribute to every Advisor if more than forty hours passed without him touching it.

  Spencer Nimoet entered Adlai’s office a few minutes later. Adlai motioned for him to have a seat at the desk.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “You’re an excellent officer, Spencer. One of my best.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m honored you think so.”

  “I’ve gotten the sense, though, that you don’t approve of the recent expansion in acts deemed crimes, nor of the toughening of sentencing guidelines.”

  “My opinion on those changes doesn’t matter, sir. We follow the will of the Guides.”

  Adlai nodded thoughtfully. “What if we didn’t?”

  53

  * * *

  A bright midday sun adorning a clear sky made Perrin’s glass of lemonade sparkle like it was iced down with diamonds. She grinned; the illusion made her happy, and she took a long sip of the lemonade before glancing around from behind setting-appropriate sunshades.

  She’d been shocked—well and truly floored—when Joaquim had suggested they grab lunch ‘out.’ He said he wanted to talk strategy, but they always did that sort of thing in his workroom…which he said was the point. The cleanup from the explosion was progressing well, and they could afford to get away for a few minutes. It was time for a change of scenery.

  It wasn’t as if she was complaining. Nope, not complaining. Just floored.

  They both wore simmed ID morphs as a precaution, but it was the only real precaution beyond the sunshades. Neither their faces nor their true identities were on any Justice Most Wanted list…well, false data tied to who they represented probably was on a list, but so far that remained the extent of it. Which meant they could enjoy a sandwich and lemonade in the sunshine, dammit.

  She eyed Joaquim over the top of her sandwich, a glorious melted cheese and shredded beef concoction. “So, strategy. What are we going to do without Nika?”

  “We’re going to fight.”

  “Okay…what does that mean? Haven’t we always been fighting? Against the Guides, against Justice, against the crushing, suffocating bureaucracy strangling people’s lives? The whole litany—it’s kind of our deal.”

  “We have.” He paused to chew on a bite of his sandwich, something involving salami and onions. “But now we have a more personal fight to wage. Everyone I’ve talked to says Ridani’s augment is still on the streets. Tales are flying around of people’s personalities changing overnight. The holding cells at Justice are filled to capacity.

  “This is no longer a grandiose but vague fight against a too-oppressive and heavy-handed government. People’s lives are being ruined, and we need to stop it from spreading any further. We need to protect the innocent people out there from becoming unwitting victims then psyche corpses.”

  She swallowed too large of a bite and hurriedly reached for her glass. “And you think we can do it?” Without Nika?

  She understood why her best friend had to go, but damn she missed her, in more ways than one. Nika had made being a part of NOIR feel larger than life. In her absence, it felt…daunting, like dancing on the head of a pin suspended over a shark-infested ocean.

  “I do. Nika is talented at inspiring others, and we’ve been handed the goodwill her inspiration has created. All we have to do is execute on it.”

  He sighed, contemplating the sandwich in his hands a bit too intently. “I’ve been slacking. Having Nika around to do the heavy lifting of leading allowed me to obsess over the ‘how’ of the fight without having to worry about the ‘why’ or the ‘to what end.’ But from the beginning I wanted to protect people from those more powerful who would use and abuse them. Now it’s up to me to see it through.”

  “To us.” She instinctively reached across the table for his hand, wanting to comfort him. But he wasn’t the kind of man who accepted comfort, so she shifted course to grab the lemonade instead.

  His hand closed over hers before it reached the lemonade. “To us, if you’re willing.” He squeezed her hand, then let it go. “So, yeah. I want to get proactive. I want to set up a distribution program for the internal defensive routines our people have been developing. I want to spread the word to every street corner and every club about the dangers of any augment or third-party routine and make certain everyone is on the lookout for hidden virutoxes.

  “Not just on Mi
rai, either—we need to mobilize our people on the other Axis Worlds, then start thinking about how we can make a difference on the Adjunct Worlds as well. If Justice won’t remove the corrupted augments from the streets, we’ll remove the customers.”

  “Wow.” She nodded enthusiastically, eager to encourage this new…if not quite upbeat, definitely engaged attitude from him. The hand squeeze was unexpected, but he’d been noticeably more attentive since she got injured. If a more considerate demeanor came with the increased engagement, it would be a welcome change.

  “I like it. A lot. We’ll need to be careful, of course. We don’t want to lose any more of our people to the authorities or the virutox.”

  “Sure. And we will be. But if there’s one thing Nika taught me above all, it’s that we must be unafraid. I don’t think I fully appreciated what it meant until recently. But now, I intend to live it.”

  Perrin tried to look enthusiastic, but wistfulness dampened her expression. “She’s going to come back, you know.”

  “Yep.” He shifted his gaze to the downtown skyline and Mirai Tower at its center. “And when she does, we’ll be strong enough to tear that tower down.”

  54

  * * *

  Zaidam Bastille began as a tiny silver dot piercing the blackness of the void surrounding it. It occupied a far outer orbit of a lone star near Kiyora, and no other cosmic bodies, natural or artificial, existed for a parsec in any direction.

  By the time they entered an approach trajectory for docking, the prison station loomed over them like a colossus, all chrome and sweeping curves of stacked tori. Built to hold up to ten thousand convicts, the historically low crime rate in the Asterion Dominion meant it was rarely more than half full.

  Nika wondered if that were still true, however. According to Dashiel, Advisor Weiss had voiced concern about a spike in criminal activity even before the augment hit the streets. Were there other virutoxes worming their way through the population she simply hadn’t encountered? Was some group conspiring to create criminals? For what possible purpose?