Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  She left the patient area through a pair of thick airlock-style doors standing open. After she passed through, they swished shut. AegiSKADA would’ve had to take over the facility’s management system to have this level of control over it, either neutralizing or subsuming the original intelligence. This was the fastest AegiSKADA had ever subsumed another intelligence.

  A staff member burst out of a side door, startling Adda. She kept walking until the person shouted, “Are you Adda Karpe?”

  She turned. The person ran to her, eyes wild. “Take this,” he moaned. “Oh gods, please take it.”

  He thrust a comp glove and a black shirt at her. The shirt was hers, one Iridian had printed for her during their flight from Vesta and Captain Sloane. The comp glove was not hers, but it was heavy enough that she assumed it actually held a comp. Inside she found her silver necklace with the cord still hidden in its coils.

  Adda raised an eyebrow at the staff member as she slid the glove on, sized well for her hand but a jarring shade of pink. Comp gloves lacked the color change tags that most clothing had, so she’d just have to live with the pink. She put it on and braced for frightening hallucinations. None came. Her brain really was healing.

  The comp in this glove reported that it belonged to one Rufina Ratti, who had left her security features off while shopping for a new sofa pattern to be printed at a Ceresian large-scale printer. Adda dismissed the sofa information, turned off the comp’s location functions, and eyed the staff member, who did not look like a Rufina. “Thanks.” The man gaped at her, then ran back through the door he’d exited.

  The cams everywhere in the clinic had made her less conscious of changing clothes in front of them, so she took off the clinic’s shirt and put on her own. She touched the tag to change its color from black to a nondescript gray. Although it looked a little odd with the pants the clinic had given her, the outfit would blend in on the street. As she stepped through the last door between her and the rest of Ceres Station, she put on the necklace and tucked it beneath her shirt.

  Outside, she connected the comp to her remote storage. She set it to downloading her favorite free intermediary software, a routine to block cams and mics she walked too near, and some of her encrypted data. The data would decrypt with her biometrics, but it would take a long time to finish downloading, since it was coming from Vesta.

  Some people, she supposed, would stand around savoring their freedom at this point. Adda walked away from the clinic to find a safe workspace generator where she could reactivate her comms implants, and then, finally, talk to Iridian. After that, she’d do her best to prevent AegiSKADA from causing trouble on Ceres.

  CHAPTER 6 Days until launch: 49

  For once, Iridian was glad that Adda wasn’t anywhere near her. She was about to cause as much unarmed close-range violence as she knew how, and she wouldn’t want Adda caught up in it.

  Iridian hauled herself off the bed in her cell and rolled her neck to get the kinks out. This had become a habit over the weeks she’d been locked in the ITA’s prison. After hours spent watching vids about contributing to communities and then talking to shrinks about those same vids, lying down just gave her muscles an opportunity to seize up. She had vivid dreams about the virtual track she’d run on with Captain Sloane’s security personnel, where they could select any location in its vast library and run for as long as they liked.

  At least each hour she wasted now took her closer to a rendezvous with the ZV Group, if what Pel had told her was true. All he’d had to do was follow the instructions she’d given him. Through the awkward word replacement he’d set up to discuss it in, she’d asked him to pay for enough ZV firepower to fight through the hab’s hull and a couple hundred ITA agents.

  Still, she’d done her best to communicate that she’d meet the ZVs in the prison’s dock, if she could. They’d be a lot happier to help her free Adda if doing so didn’t get anyone killed or make themselves a high-priority ITA target. If enough of Iridian’s plan went right, today was the day she’d leave this prison.

  To kick things off, she’d have to distract the ERT people so they wouldn’t worry about what five prisoners were up to. Uzomo would be a convenient target. Aside from his cell’s proximity to hers, his tattoos and Rio’s description identified him as a secessionist assassin. That was all the excuse Iridian needed to punch him in the face. Unfortunately, the fact that his skin was darker than hers would be reported as one of her motives. With her NEU military history, those factors would be sufficient explanation for the staff. That should stop them from wondering what else she might have planned.

  Uzomo usually came back from his reeducation sessions when she was walking to her last one before lunch. They’d pass each other in the hall, and maybe nod to each other if he was feeling sociable. About two-thirds of the prisoners in this hab would be moving at the same time she and Uzomo were. That was safe when the guards could drop everybody with nannites.

  According to Tash, that wouldn’t happen to Iridian. Tash claimed that the ERT guy she’d gotten close to had sent a mass freeze order to all the nannite cultures in the prison. None of them would be immobilizing anybody today.

  To sell the “randomly angry person starts trouble” scene, Iridian recalled what she would’ve felt a year or two ago if she’d been forced to walk past a secessionist assassin every gods-damned day. That anger was a distant memory, though, not something she could pull to the surface and use. Since she’d returned to the cold and the black after college, she’d met too many competent, rational people who’d killed for the secessionists during the war and were now living in the real, NEU-led universe, doing interesting work.

  She gave up on that inspiration and imagined walking past projected figures of the awakened AIs. If she ever got the opportunity to punch Casey in its nonexistent face, she’d hit damned hard.

  Uzomo froze when she came around the corner, so that inspiration must’ve been showing on her face. Iridian sure as hell felt angry, with mission-focused calm underneath. Six other people were walking through their short stretch of hallway, but she only cared about four: Rio, Wiley, Noor, and Tash. She couldn’t fuck this up. Pel hadn’t been able to communicate what time the ZVs would arrive, but she had to start enough havoc that the ERT people would stay away from her squad when it was time to move. As she stepped into range with the nannites dragging at her muscles, she raised her fist to punch Uzomo and kick off what she hoped would become a station-wide brawl.

  The pain didn’t reach the intensity it had the first time the ITA activated her nannite culture, but it locked all her joints and dropped her to the floor at Uzomo’s feet. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t move. Her lungs weren’t pulling in enough O2 and her heart was racing. She would’ve given anything to turn her head and get her bleeding nose off the floor.

  Uzomo stared down at her, confused, angry, and obviously drawing the right conclusions about her intention. “What the hell, Nassir?” From his perspective, she’d tried to attack him despite their having barely said two words to each other since that first day the ITA let her out of her cell.

  Other prisoners were talking about her, but she couldn’t focus on their conversations. The nannites weren’t letting her open her mouth to respond to Uzomo. Tash’s ERT guy should’ve rendered the nannite cultures inert today. Iridian would miss the ZV pickup, and she didn’t know the details of Pel’s contract with them. They could be getting paid by the hour, or at mission success. Maybe, since they knew Pel too, they’d take pity on him and make a second attempt at the pickup. She didn’t like to count on maybes.

  Two sets of running footsteps gave her some warning before an armored boot appeared in her field of vision. Someone in ERT armor knelt beside Iridian’s head. “Hey, make us some space, would ya?” His helmet distorted his voice a little as it was transmitted through the speakers.

  A woman’s voice, similarly distorted, said, “Uzomo, let’s take a walk.” One set of booted feet stomped down the hall toward the other
prisoners, and Uzomo’s softer footfalls followed.

  “What the hell are you doing, Nassir?” asked the ERT guy by her head. “Whatever you and Tash are up to, she’s going to regret picking you to do it with.”

  “Second person who asked today,” Iridian said through teeth that wouldn’t unclench. This was Tash’s targeted ERT guy, the one who was supposed to have turned off the nannite cultures. “You fucking screwed us, and I’ll—”

  The nannite culture released her. Iridian’s muscles relaxed, plastering her to the floor, her lungs hauling deep breaths through her mouth. She turned her head, and sinking her cheek into a puddle of her own blood didn’t bother her at all. It felt that good to get her aching nose off the floor.

  “You’re in a gods-damned sim right now,” the ERT guy hissed. Iridian’s eyes widened. Every hair she had stood up in horror like she very much wanted to herself, but her muscles felt like jelly. “I’m blocking the nannites’ exterior activation signal. Do whatever the hell you’re doing at mealtime or in the gym. Everything else happens in your head. Now, get up and go wash that mess off your face. Your session’s canceled.”

  The last two sentences were loud enough for the other prisoners to hear. Rio and Wiley said something as she passed them on her way to wash the blood off in her cell, but she forgot it as soon as she heard it.

  If this was a sim, then Rio and Wiley weren’t really standing in the hallway with her. All of them were lying in bed in their cells, experiencing a gods-damned shared delusion in a virtual space that the ITA controlled. That was how sims worked. Fuck, fuck, when had the unreality even begun? That first blackout after they locked her up? How long did the blackouts really last?

  Iridian tilted her head back to slow the blood flowing over her mouth. Maybe it was imaginary blood, but it tasted real, and her nose really hurt. The nannite culture must’ve caused that localized pain. Once she’d wiped the blood off, her nose looked the same as ever. It bled like it’d been broken, but the cartilage was the shape it always was.

  A sim would also explain the small number of guards for prisoners with such significant convictions that the ITA wouldn’t trust their rehabilitation to their home hab. Only the guards and the people she talked to in real time had to be physically inside the prison. No, that was wrong too. They might’ve messed with sim time to get around a comms delay caused by distance. That’d be safer for everybody.

  It’d explain why she was only stiff when she got up for meals and rec, and why the guards stopped people from taking bathroom breaks between brainwashing sessions. In reality she was only moving around for three hours a day, max, just enough to prevent muscle and bone loss, blood clots, and other immobility problems they would’ve needed hibernation pods to prevent.

  The NEU made hibernation as punishment illegal a hundred years ago. Maybe the ITA had found some gods-damned legal loophole that let them get around that, or maybe they were hiding the sim because they weren’t allowed to use it inside the NEU. Before the war, the NEU would’ve shut the ITA down for this. Even now, after the NEU fleet had lost so many ships, they should’ve fucking tried.

  It wasn’t just that Iridian resented being tricked, although she sure as hell did. Nobody should’ve been allowed to take her out of her own body without asking. Nobody should’ve had the option to take her out and put her back whenever they wanted, with whatever rules of her virtual existence they chose, all the time letting her think it was real. Hell, how could she tell if any of the people she’d talked to in here were AI constructs instead of people?

  It was worse, somehow, that this happened within NEU borders. NEU citizens were supposed to have a say in the laws that bound them and the consequences of crime. The real consequences, all of them, including hours of unconsciousness or simulation or whatever the past weeks in this hab had been. Nobody elected anyone in the ITA chain of command. They didn’t have the right to do this all on their gods-damned own and hide it from the rest of the universe.

  * * *

  Now that Iridian knew the truth, the signs were everywhere. After a blackout and a nutrient packet, presumably delivered to her cell around her usual lunchtime, the walls were slightly yellower than they’d been in the sim. Her body felt more vivid in reality, from the stubble on her scalp to the atmo drifting across her skin. The pitch of the air handlers, and beneath them the muted rumble of the engines keeping the station aloft in Venus’s wind, were louder and deeper in reality too.

  She shuddered. Before Tash’s ERT guy told Iridian about the sim, the illusion had been seamless. And had Tash known all this time? Iridian paced her cell as fast as the nannites would let her. If Tash had known, she would’ve told Wiley, and Wiley would’ve told Iridian. Once they were free, she’d tell Tash. Her reaction would show what Tash knew about it.

  But how did the ITA create such a seamless illusion? The fake hab would’ve been simple, given the number of cams and mics in the real station. Processing all the minute changes would’ve been harder. Short hallways limited how much of the place had to be rendered at a time. But how had they made Iridian see and feel all of it?

  Her hands shook against her scalp as she felt around her head for an incision site. They had to have implanted something to do that, didn’t they? Something other than the nannites that were already inside her.

  She let her hands fall to her sides. She was distancing herself from a larger problem. She’d blown the escape. Sure, the staff didn’t know why she’d tried to punch Uzomo. They’d stopped her before she did anything really suspicious.

  However, the ZVs’ approach to the station’s dock would be an obvious gods-damned assault. Iridian and the others would be in their cells instead of waiting in the dock like they’d planned. For all she knew, that’d already happened. The time on the comp in her cell was the same whether she was in the sim or in reality, but the ITA could’ve manipulated both. The comp wouldn’t let her contact the ZVs, either.

  If Iridian and her fellow escapees weren’t at the docks when the ZVs arrived, then the mercs would have three options: leave, kill time to see if Iridian showed, or fight their way to her and then fight their way out. People would get hurt, gear would get banged up, and the ITA would record evidence on cams. Leaving was the ZVs’ easiest option. With no way to tell what the ZVs were doing when, Iridian chose to believe that they were killing time in a maintenance orbit, pretending to test a malfunctioning part of their ship while they waited for her to make her move. She wouldn’t accept a longer separation from Adda while there was still hope that Iridian would get free today.

  The cell door hadn’t opened for lunch, and it stayed locked during her rec period. The desk’s unstoppable alarm called her over to watch vids on self-control instead.

  If the ZVs had figured out that she wasn’t in the docks, they weren’t punching their way in to get to her. A maintenance orbit would be low enough for her to signal them, if she could talk her way out of this damned cell and then tell the ZVs where she was. Maybe she could make someone unlock a comp with open comms rights, or a drone, even. She could send the ZVs the tracking data from her nannite culture. The nannites shared her position to anyone within a couple klicks of her, if they had the right decryption key.

  Instead of letting Iridian anywhere near a comms-enabled device, the staff lectured her inside their sim. She talked to her assigned counselor, Shera, then one of the medical people, then Shera again. Iridian said everything she could think of that made her sound sorry for attacking Uzomo.

  Iridian must’ve sold it well, because they let her out of her cell for dinner. She wasn’t very hungry, since she’d missed rec. That suggested that the staff wasn’t messing with sim time as much as they could. The desk’s comp reported the time as 18:40 hours, but Iridian no longer trusted it. The lights flashed off, then on. The comp’s clock still read 18:40. It was hard to stop herself from smiling as she walked out her real cell door. The real door frame had a tiny dent near eye level. This time, Iridian would fuck shit up the right
way.

  In the cafeteria, she collected her bag of curry-flavored nutrients and settled at the table across from Rio, whose presence confirmed that Iridian’s simulated time was about the same as the other prisoners’. The merc’s worry showed in her brown eyes, smaller and harder than Adda’s. With freedom so close, Iridian couldn’t help making the comparison. Wiley, Tash, and Noor watched her with equal concern. The rest of the inmates pretended not to.

  “Forget the dock.” Iridian pitched her voice low so her words wouldn’t carry over the others’ conversation and the crackle of compressed nutrient bags. “Too obvious. When we get the chance . . .” She looked toward the ceiling and their new egress direction. Rio and Noor nodded, as did Tash and, after a moment more, Wiley.

  Since they understood, there was no reason to waste more time. A solidly built woman at the next table wore a shirt with a collar and a more flattering fit than everybody else’s tops. It must’ve been printed off a personal pattern rather than the prison-issued defaults. Iridian flung her bag of goop at the woman, and this time the nannite culture in her body didn’t slow her down.

  The nutrient packet hit the table’s edge and splattered a satisfying stream of viscous orange fluid across the collared shirt and onto the table’s other occupants. The woman and her table companions shouted in English and Russian. The Russian threats lagged a second behind the English ones as the translation function of Iridian’s aural implant interpreted them. The woman with the custom shirt threw her own nutrient packet at Iridian and missed.

  The ERT guys would be expecting the buttons over their gloves’ thumb joints to activate the nannites and drop every prisoner to the floor. Thanks to Tash and the guard she’d manipulated, nobody fell writhing in pain. One of the Russian speakers closed the distance between herself and Iridian and threw a punch. Iridian almost leaned out of the way. Knuckles clipped her jaw, and gods damn but that woman knew how to punch.