by Tanya Huff
Did some of the plastic become a brain when they combined or were each of them a part of the cognitive apparatus while still individuals? Would interrupting the electrical currents break Big Yellow into its billions of component parts, leaving her unprotected in space?
Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, trapped alone inside the belly of the beast responsible for every Marine she’d carried from the battlefield, would’ve pulled the trigger to find out.
Warden Kerr held the option in reserve.
The harsh sound of her breathing disappeared into the total lack of ambient noise. “So, if the data sheet was a prisoner, that means you left some of your people confined in a hole for a millennium. I should arrest you for sentient rights’ violations.” Why stop there? “Inciting violence resulting in death. Kidnapping an officer of the Justice Department. Unethical experimentation on sentient beings. Cognitive trespass.”
“Neither your laws nor what you consider ethical considerations apply to us.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Torin showed teeth and shifted her weight. “I’m going to do my damnedest to make them apply.”
It cocked its head. “How?”
“I’m working on it.”
It waited a moment, then when Torin didn’t produce results, said, “We want what is ours to be returned.”
“Not what,” she snapped. “Who. And how do you even know they survived?”
“We have no information on their survival. We know only that the minority has been freed.”
“And your point?” She hated to think of what Craig, who’d seen her ship devoured, was going through.
“Return the prisoner to us.”
“Why should we?” A small part of her suggested agreeing to return their prisoner with no intention of keeping to that agreement might be the wiser choice. The larger part didn’t give a flying fuk.
“If the minority survived, and if the shackles we placed upon them have been broken, they are a danger to your people.”
Her lip curled up off her teeth. “How?”
“That is not relevant.” The plastic stretched ten centimeters taller. Torin wondered if the increase in size was a threat.
Alive and unshackled, the data sheet could separate down to the molecular level and take up housekeeping in half a dozen new brains. In Craig’s brain. Become so perfectly a part of the Promise, they couldn’t be found. Slide into the Promise’s engines and blow her up with all on board. “Thanks for the warning.” The plastic either ignored or didn’t recognize sarcasm. “How long have you known your prisoner was in our care?”
“The alarm was sounded. We have known from the time the alarm reached us.”
“No.” Torin shook her head. “If you’re referring to the energy blast, the alarm sounded a tenday ago. The signal couldn’t have reached this far in a tenday, let alone where you . . . exist.”
“The alarm traveled along the inner way.”
The inner way? “Susumi space.” If the plastic could jump in and out of Susumi space at will, that would explain how the various bits of it they’d run into over the years had always disappeared so quickly.
“Susumi is your name for it.” The emphasis on your sounded almost disdainful. That was more emotion than Torin had ever heard from the plastic. “The prisoner is here. With the one we knew called Craig Ryder.”
Torin would put money on Parliament having decided to avoid confrontation by returning the alleged data sheet. “You turned into a giant gray head. You ate my ship. Why haven’t you taken the minority back? Not . . .” She jabbed a finger toward it. “. . . a suggestion.”
It flattened and filled out again. “We must first determine if it remains shackled.”
About to ask why, Torin connected the dots. “Because if it’s unshackled and you engulf it, like you did me, it can harm you.”
Dimensions shifted horizontally. “Yes.”
“Was the minority imprisoned for harming you?”
“No.” And vertically.
Was the plastic aware of how its avatar kept changing? Torin didn’t think so. Was she seeing the external effect of a molecular hive mind reacting to fear? And fuk her life that that thought had ever come into it. “Why was the minority imprisoned?”
“That is not relevant. Return the prisoner to us.”
“So you can throw it into another hole and torture it? No.” She met its gaze. “You’ve outstayed your welcome. The Justice Department wants you out of Confederation space. The moment Confederation citizens are clear, you’re to leave and not return.”
“You cannot enforce this.”
“Me, personally?” Torin smiled. “Did you miss the part about the Justice Department?”
“You have changed.” It extruded a third leg, shifted weight onto it, and backed up.
“You haven’t.”
* * *
“The moment the majority comes into contact with us, regardless of the shape we wear, they will know we are awake and will attempt to contain us.” Orange flowed through the team to stand between them and the airlock. “There will be a struggle. We will prevail; however, in the process, your meat may be damaged.”
Craig held his palm up toward the three di’Taykan. “Don’t.”
“Too easy.” Yahsamus shifted the strap of her KC so it hung without affecting the draw of the larger knife on her belt.
Big Yellow had made itself resistant to bennies back in the day, so when they’d cracked the armory, Werst handed out the KC-7s and demolition charges. Craig suspected neither did any actual damage, that Big Yellow sacrificed a minimum of molecules as they shifted away from the impact. Based on past experience, though, they’d need to shift the fukker more than once before they got Torin out.
“Fine. If you think your majority will overreact to your presence, don’t make contact until we find Torin.” Craig reached past Orange and hit the airlock’s inner release. “You stay here, until we get her out. When we’re clear, you leap in. We haul ass away. Alamber . . .”
“No.” He tossed his head. “I’m not staying behind.”
“I’m not leaving them here alone.”
“You stay.” His hair flattened and he muttered, “Yeah, like that’ll happen.”
“It has to be someone familiar with the Promise, and you’re not the fighter Werst is.”
“Fukking right,” Werst muttered.
“And Werst doesn’t have a hope in hell of breaking through to Torin’s implant.” Alive, Torin would have contacted them. Since she hadn’t, she’d been blocked. Craig refused to consider any other possibility.
“Fine.” Alamber threw himself down into the pilot’s chair. “I’ll break the block and boost the carrier signal.”
“She could be . . .” Tylen began. Stopped when Werst growled. Slipped into the airlock and tucked herself behind Zhou. Which would have worked better had she not been a full head taller with bright pink hair.
“Craig.”
He caught the hatch and stopped it from closing the final ten centimeters.
Alamber’s eyes had gone several shades darker than his hair. “You have to tell her I would have come.”
“She’ll know.”
“You have to tell her.”
Craig smiled. “Tell her yourself when you get through to her implant.” As the hatch closed, he saw Orange reach out to touch Alamber’s wrist.
* * *
• • •
“Did it look like this the last time you were here?” Elisk asked, sending Zhou away from the airlock to take point.
“It looked like a lot of things the last time we were here.”
Back then, they’d used a scientist and sensor strips to open Big Yellow’s airlock. Yahsamus had been ready to try and repeat the results, but the hardware looked standard this time. They’d stepped from the universal link into the airlock, equalized
pressure, and stepped out again.
“I hate it when it’s this easy,” Zhou muttered as he moved out four meters.
Craig remembered the airlock had opened onto a dull gray corridor around three meters wide, fifteen meters long, lit by an indeterminate source. The light source was still indeterminate, the corridor the same dimensions, but the gray had been replaced with yellow.
“It’s like it’s not even trying.” Werst slapped the wall. “Fukker.”
Fully aware that an exact repeat of their last visit would’ve gotten an equally negative reaction, Craig tongued his implant. “Alamber? Are you receiving?”
He listened to himself breathe for thirty seconds and tried again. If he couldn’t reach the system, there wasn’t much point, but he tried Torin anyway. Nothing.
“Kid’ll get the implants working. Ressk says he’s a genius.” Werst swept a cautionary glare around the team. “No one tells Alamber I said that.”
Tylen mimed locking her lips as Yahsamus asked, “Without the implants, how do we find Torin?”
Craig held up his slate.
“You tagged her.” Werst’s nostril ridges closed. “She’s not going to be happy about that.”
“If it saves her, I don’t care.”
“You say that now . . .”
“You’re generating your own carrier wave?” Yahsamus asked, a blunt change of topic.
“I am.”
“That’s going to suck your power source dry.”
“Not before we find her.” He hoped. “Big Yellow can’t block a program it’s never . . . There.” It hurt to breathe. “Stationary signal.”
“That was fast. Give it over.” Before he could answer, Yahsamus took the slate from his hand, slaved it to hers, sent the information to everyone’s helmet visor, and handed his slate back. “Even faster this way,” she said. “We can all see where we’re going.”
“Half a kilometer of corridors to a big rectangular compartment,” Elisk observed. “That seems easy enough.”
Zhou glanced back over his shoulder. “You had to fukkin’ jinx it, didn’t you LT.”
* * *
The room where August Guimond had died had been losing definition for a while now. The stairs were gone, the ceiling grates had solidified, and yellow lapped at the edges of the grays and blacks.
Torin folded her arms and stared down her nose at the plastic’s avatar. “You’re in violation of a directive from the Confederation Justice Department. Any hesitation in returning all Confederation Citizens to their vessels and leaving this part of space will be held against you should this come to a court of law. Should you wish to return to the area claimed by the Confederation, you’ll send a message to Parliament requesting permission to cross the border.” And Commander Ng thought she hadn’t mastered official Warden speak. Torin would like to see the commander come up with that shit while inside a form held by polynumerous molecular polyhydroxide alcoholyde.
The avatar planted their feet, yellow flowed up their legs, and it surged up to tower over her at two and a half meters high and a meter across. “Return to us that which is ours!”
“The Justice Department will not give over a potentially sentient being to torture.”
“RETURN TO US THAT WHICH IS OURS!”
“Fuk you.”
“Then you have become the bargaining chip that releases the minority!”
As that was the only possible reason for it to have grabbed her, Torin was less than surprised by the declaration. She curled her finger around the trigger, but wasn’t able to tighten her grip before the wall closed around her.
* * *
Slate propped on the control panel, both hands working the board, Alamber glanced back over his shoulder at Orange, sitting motionless where he’d left them. “Did you want to sit second? The auxiliary controls are offline,” he expanded, when he received no response. “But there’s more stimulus up here. After a millennium hanging in a pit, you’ve got to still be running at a loss.”
Flattened tendrils rising off their head, Orange stood. “Both statements are true.” They settled into the seat, body shifting into what Alamber assumed was the most comfortable configuration.
“Don’t touch anything, okay?”
“Yes.” Their hands sank a centimeter into their thighs.
“That’s a bit extreme, but okay.” Alamber returned his attention to the implant system. “You can talk. I mean, I can work while things blow up, so talking is not that big a deal.”
“What do you desire us to say?”
“Nothing specific. I like having the sound of other people around me.” He frowned as a line of code mutated and hoped that didn’t mean Big Yellow had a tendril on board. Craig would blow. And not in a good way. “It’s a Taykan thing.”
“You are not content.”
“Content? Sure I am. I love my job. I love my team. They’re like family, you know? Do you know what family is?”
“The consensus.”
“Yeah, I guess if you’re a hive mind, that’s family.” Dumping sixteen lines, Alamber set in a block of his own, preventing Big Yellow from repairing the damage he’d already done.
“You are not in consensus.”
“Look, I understand why I couldn’t go after the boss. If you’ve had trad training, you can’t adapt fast enough. And I had anti-trad training, so I adapt even faster. I’m the best. And the only one who could have done this.” Simple truth.
“And you are not in consensus.”
It didn’t seem like they were going to drop it and they were wrong, so Alamber redirected the conversation. “Let’s talk about you. Tell me what your people were doing on Threxie. That’s what we call the planet we found you on,” he added before Orange had a chance to blank out again.
“We were observing. We had been there for one hundred and seventeen rotations of the planet around the sun . . .”
“Years.”
“. . . for one hundred and seventeen years.”
They sounded pleased although given all the words they’d absorbed, Alamber had no idea how they’d missed years. He glanced over at the long-range scanners and grinned. Two of the pirate ships were dead in space. No surprise if Binti was at the guns on the Baylet. One less thing for him to worry about, anyway. He robbed the block of a bit more definition. “Is that what you did back then, observe?”
“It was our preference. The majority preferred to make contact.”
Alamber glanced up from dumping a tiny and very specific worm from his slate to the system, and indicated that Orange should continue.
“The inhabitants of what you call Threxie were less interesting to us than those we had previously observed. They were simple and the previous were complex. We prefer complex and were in consensus when contact with the previous was made.”
“That would’ve been the H’san?”
“They called themselves the H’san, yes.”
“They were on Threxie?”
“The contact was made before we arrived on what you call Threxie. During our contact, we began to understand a hierarchical species and how this can aid in forming a consensus of meat.”
Alamber snickered. A consensus of meat was ripe for . . .
Fingers and hair still, he turned toward Orange. “If you spoke with the H’san, then the H’san know about you. About the whole organic plastic hive mind.”
“We are not what you know as plastic.”
“Close enough for government work, Orange, trust me on that. And not the point. The H’san know about you?”
“They knew. We cannot say if they know.” Orange shrugged. “Time has passed.”
“True.” Throwing subtlety aside, Alamber followed the worm in, hacked chunks off the block, and thought about the plastic and the H’san making friends. His hair lifted. “So were the H’san doing the war
thing when you made contact?”
“On occasion. We learned of war from the H’san. We observed and learned that violence does not prevent stagnation. Stagnation is overcome on all levels by a willingness to be open to new ideas. When the H’san made a decision, they proved to be resistant to change and unwilling to accept that change occurs regardless.”
“We do it their way, or it doesn’t get done.”
“If you refer to the H’san, yes.” Orange blinked, created and absorbed nostril ridges, and after a moment added, “Although we are not certain who you refer to as we.”
“Hold that thought.” Lines began to scroll by faster and faster, rewriting the block. Honestly? Watching the screen, Alamber understood why everyone had thought Orange was a data sheet. “So before the H’san, you didn’t know about war?”
“We knew conflict. We learned of war as a sociocultural construct.”
New panels lit up on the board.
Alamber tapped the closer of the two. “Sending: one ping.”
*A new record!*
“Because I’m just that good.” Not that there was a previous record for deconstructing a block set up by a hyperintelligent plastic hive mind. He spun the chair to face Orange. “And, Craig, you’re not going to believe what the H’san taught the plastic.”
* * *
“The interior layout keeps changing!” Elisk squinted through his helmet scanner and pointed to the right where a new corridor lined with yellow columns had just appeared. “This wasn’t here before.”
“That’s nothing compared to the last time,” Werst told him.
“No, you don’t understand. That’s the way we have to go, and it just appeared.”
Werst rolled his eyes. “Yeah, like I said, this is nothing. Last time we had to play twenty questions every time we changed direction.”
