Shifting Infinity (ISF-Allion Book 2)

by Patty Jansen

  Space warfare was very drawn-out, a matter of precise planning.

  In a way she was glad that the ship wouldn’t move much, even if shadowing the station was no longer its main objective.

  Whoa, there was Dixon, leaving the room.

  Melati rose, gulped her drink, stuffed the remaining half of her rice cracker into her mouth, ran across the room to dump her tray in the rack and ran out the door, almost crashing into two men coming in.

  “Sorry!”

  “Hey, what’s the hurry?”

  Melati shouted apologies and ran through the corridors to the IT lab, where Dixon had not yet returned. Oh, sod it, where was he?

  The clocks everywhere displayed remaining time until the engine burn and Melati really needed to go back to the lab to start work on securing the equipment and the patient. But on the other hand, Dixon had the worm on his computer to study it. If it escaped into the system . . .

  “Looking for Dixon?” asked one of the other workers in the room. He was Fleet, like herself.

  “Yeah, where is he?”

  But at that moment, the man in question entered the room in the company of one of the lower-ranked tech officers.

  Dixon was yelling, “. . . And if it fails again, you reset the system and try again, and if that doesn’t work, you split the database and try it in two batches. Now what the fuck is so hard about that?” He reached his desk, saw Melati, looked her up and down. “What?” His face was red and sweat pearled on his upper lip.

  “Um. I was wondering if you had done any work on that worm yet?”

  “No! I’ve been dealing with incompetence of the first order of my own staff. What about it?”

  “Um. Just wondering.” Melati backed away. She really hated it when he went like this, because anything anyone said tended to make his temper worse.

  But if he’d been doing other things than looking at the worm, it couldn’t have been doing any damage, could it? Clearly, he was not in the mood for hearing words like sentient mindbases and there was no need to anger him any further.

  So Melati made some lame comment and left again. She felt uncomfortable about working with one member of the team who inspired fear in her when he went like this, no matter how often people reminded her that because she was Fleet and he was Force, her authority exceeded his in matters that involved the ship. This sort-of involved the ship, but . . . oh, it was something that could wait until later.

  One day, she was going to have to learn to yell back at him but that day was not now.

  She went a few doors down the corridor to the CAU lab, where everyone was running around securing all items for the upcoming engine burn.

  Melati helped as much as she could, strapping in equipment, doing up the bolts to secure furniture to the walls, collecting everything that was on the benches, putting it in the cupboards and locking those cupboards, and shutting the drawers. Likely, the ship was to remain on a low-level alert even after the burn, so all those things would need to remain stowed and kept secure so that the ship could make further burns at very short notice.

  Dr Chee was frantically cleaning up his office, where ten months’ worth of clutter had accumulated on the desk and shelves. She thought it best not to bother him.

  Melati then turned her attention to the beds in the ward, turning all the clips on the wheels to that they slotted into the security rings on the floor.

  Jas came to help with a couple of his boys. She told him to take care of the storeroom, and he sent Shan and Tika in there.

  Time ticked.

  The green numbers of the clock turned yellow.

  Then Melati turned to Moshi, who had watched the proceedings in silence. He hadn’t asked what was happening, but as a pilot, he would have a pretty good understanding. He had been taken to the shower, but had otherwise not left his bed.

  She wheeled the bed to the side, where she transferred the mattress with him on it to the safety cot and also moved the equipment that was still attached to him.

  In all honesty, he would probably be healthy enough to leave the bed and use the couches if it wasn’t for that equipment. Dr Chee was still checking him.

  Moshi asked a few questions while she transferred him, but she didn’t get much further than one-word answers. Yes, they were going to move, no, they weren’t leaving the system, no it wasn’t an evasive manoeuvre and yes it was in response to Allion ships. The yellow numbers had gone to orange and she really had to hurry up.

  With him secured, she went to her own security position, which was a pouch made from transport webbing that hung off the back wall in her office. She put on her tether rope, checked her desk and shelves—all secure and empty of loose items—grabbed her PCD and stepped into the harness. Jas came running in from the storeroom to jump into the harness allocated to him, which hung just around the corner in the lab.

  The numbers on two clocks that she could see from her position went from orange to red.

  The spinning of the habitat slowed, and gravity became less until it vanished altogether. Little bits of rubbish that had been missed by the cleaning crews floated on the air. A wrapper from an ampoule drifted past, and a wayward stylus that must have been under a desk. There was no better way to find things than to turn off gravity.

  The red numbers started flashing, counting down from a hundred.

  Jas was talking to someone in the lab. One of the boys, Melati thought. They had their own spots on the opposite wall of the lab.

  Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

  The panel flashed 00:00 in red letters.

  For a while, nothing happened. Melati hung in her harness, listening to the thudding of her heart.

  Then a faint vibration resonated in the floor and walls. It grew stronger; it grew audible. The room tilted rather abruptly so that “down” was nearly in the direction of what had been a wall. It came up incredibly quickly, much more quickly than expected for such a large ship. The straps of the safety harness cut into her shoulders.

  The force increased. The figures on the clock were now white, and counting back from thirty-nine. Hanging sideways was a really awkward position to be stuck in.

  But as soon as the movement had started, it stopped again. Weightlessness returned. The white letters on the clock finished counting and returned to green, indicating the time. Slowly, the habitat returned to rotation and normal gravity resumed.

  Melati let herself out of the harness. She was still clutching her PCD, which she set on the desk. The computer that had stubbornly showed a blank screen, that she hadn’t yet had the opportunity to fix, now again displayed the module that she had overwritten onto Moshi’s mindbase.

  The lines of text were still on the screen, but interspersed with the code were words in capital letters, one on the third line from the top, the second a few lines further down, the third a few lines below that.

  YOU . . .

  CAN’T . . .

  KILL . . .

  ME . . .

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  MELATI STARED AT the screen, but that didn’t make the words go away. She scrolled down, but that didn’t make the words go away either. They just wriggled out of their positions and repositioned themselves across the new text. This was something active, keyed to her display, not the file.

  It was something that must have come out of his mindbase when he’d been connected to the BCI interface. Or shot with the tranquiliser. She remembered hearing words in an indistinct woman’s voice after that incident. Was this the same thing?

  Dixon said that the worm had come out of the mindbase when they first read it. By God, what if it was something that was embedded in his mindbase that replicated itself? Something autonomous. They had all thought—and obviously they’d been wrong—that the episode of near-failure was as result of the malicious code breaking free, but obviously, that had been something else, and this thing, whatever it was, was more deeply embe
dded in his mindbase so that it didn’t stop him functioning normally.

  She picked up her PCD, disconnected it from all systems and brought up the mindbase readout that they had made. This was the version that had the artificial layer stuck over the top of it.

  When first looking at this file, they had all concentrated on these areas. They had most obviously been tampered with, but Melati scrolled through the entire file again. Most of it consisted of jagged lines of mindbase code, except for the parts that had been flagged by Jas as aberrant.

  Now that she looked at it again, there were sections that seemed extra-ordinarily developed. Six levels of nested statements.

  It was almost like . . .

  Slowly, she pulled the chain from under her clothes. It was a cheaply made thing, as would have been sold in the junk stores at New Jakarta. On it hung an equally cheap looking pendant. Melati undid the chain’s fastening and used her nails to prise the back off the pendant. Snugly hidden inside, wrapped in layers of foil that gave the pendant its sparkly gemlike quality, was a datastick. She inserted it into her PCD. It opened up in one half of the screen, which took a minute or so to read the contents.

  The level of development reminded her of Paul Ormerod’s mindbase.

  Because he was what they used to call a “Pristine”, there was only one copy. Just like her, and Dr Chee, and Ari and most other ranked crew were “pristine”, and their mindbases were allowed to die when their bodies did. These days, they called it “natural born” as opposed to “construct”, who usually shared elements of their mindbase with others. Researchers were coming to realise that these terms were meaningless, because mindbases developed quickly and each, whether natural born or not, developed into a unique file anyway. The point where constructs were completely integrated with the regular troops, and could hold rank, marry and were given a non-construct name, was probably not too far off.

  Besides, they didn’t use multiple copies of the same mindbase anymore. At ISF they tended to custom-create mindbases for each cohort, but maybe the Taurus Army still used the same mindbase multiple times.

  Certainly, in the old days, people used to copy mindbases of people they found valuable—only to find later that installing that mindbase in a different body changed it beyond recognition anyway. And that copying mindbases decreased their coherence.

  Looking at this highly developed code, she wondered if they were dealing with a copy of Paul Ormerod’s mindbase that was left inside the station. It wouldn’t be a complete mindbase because there was not enough space in a normal brain for two mindbases, but there were fragments, and by God, the thought of fragments of a sentient mindbase just gave her the creeps. She had never seen any indication that Paul Ormerod’s mindbase had been sentient—the fact that he needed to use Jas’ body to escape made it even less likely—but no one really knew. Jas’ mindbase had become sentient, and he was “just” a Grimshaw construct of no outstanding ability or intelligence.

  She went to her library. Under the search for “fragments” only three research articles came up, and none were particularly informative. One of them referenced an article by two researchers called Omoyela and Chakraharty, and there was no way that those were ISF names. The summary mentioned Aries II station, which was an Allion base that was destroyed 30 years ago in the Mars war.

  Of course Dr Chee had diligently deleted all Allion papers from the library “because they published papers full of nonsense just to throw us off,” so the trail ended with that single, tantalising summary.

  That was frustrating.

  The Medbank research database said about mindbase fragments:

  These are sometimes accidentally left behind after copying sections of a mindbase, especially in correction work on construct minds. Mindbase fragments can also be used deliberately if a function, an ability or tendency needs to be shared by more than one construct. Most ISF labs have discontinued the use of fragments due to their vulnerability to misuse. The vulnerability of mindbase fragments is related to the originating mindbase. Because fragments are linked to the underlying mindbase, death or major trauma to that mindbase also affects the fragments. Often it was found that a fragment controlled not only knowledge, but mental disposition and political views, as detailed by Cartman and Whitney (Ref. 2564c).

  And that particular paper detailed how a member of a mindbase team with a strong political position had abused fragments to create constructs who shared his political views. He’d been jailed for it, too.

  But imagine that fragments of a sentient mindbase could be deliberately sent by that mindbase, to do . . . what exactly?

  Scrolling through Paul Ormerod’s mindbase, she could see no evidence that the material in the prisoner’s mindbase came from Paul Ormerod, but she would really have to run a similarity test to establish that. Once she found out which section this was supposed to have come from.

  Was it sentient? She guessed there was only one, rather blunt, way of testing that.

  Melati opened the insertion screen and typed I CAN SEE YOU in a random place in the text.

  Then she scrolled down. The words were gone.

  What the hell?

  But as she looked at the screen, sections of the code faded and more words appeared.

  YOU CAN’T CATCH ME

  Melati replied: YES I CAN

  It came back with: LET’S HAVE A CHALLENGE

  She wiped sweat from her upper lip. By God, was she really talking to a sentient mindbase?

  But wait, it would be easy to program a routine that replied to questions, as long as they were generic.

  She typed, WHAT AM I WEARING?

  It replied, DO YOU THINK I CONCERN MYSELF WITH SUCH THINGS?

  That reply made her feel a little bit more at ease.

  It was probably a worm.

  And that was bad enough, because they’d thought that the malware had been eliminated. In fact Dixon had been quite clear about that.

  The thought of bothering him while he was really busy with general ship operations didn’t fill her with enthusiasm. She could already hear his voice. What did you do to him? Because he was clean when he left the Correctional Department.

  Because clearly, according to Alan Dixon, she was at fault. Or at any rate, anyone except him.

  But it was not to be helped. They needed to know what this thing was. And God, the ship. The entire computer operations might be in danger if the worm was this clever in hiding itself.

  Melati went back to the IT lab, but the computer staff were in a meeting, and even though Melati said it was urgent, Dixon said he’d see her later. He appeared to be annoyed at her. The screen in the meeting room displayed details about weapon systems, and everything about the group of men gathered there said, We’re doing much more important things than worrying about some petty problem.

  She went back to the CAU, equally annoyed. Her eyes were gritty with sleep, she’d missed breakfast and most of lunch, she hadn’t seen Ari and most of the ship was in lockdown. What was she supposed to do?

  That was what Dr Chee had said about warfare, that for those not immediately involved, it was mostly confusing. There were long stretches of nothing and when things started happening, they often did so quickly, and only those who needed to know were notified. So, they’d just gone through a big panic because of a slight course change. Heaven forbid what would happen if the ship actually got involved in battle and started firing and making evasive manoeuvres.

  When she came back to the lab, it was to the sound of a male voice. “Hey, can someone let me out of here?”

  God, Moshi.

  She rushed to the cot in the corner and let him down from the safety harness. He rubbed his arms.

  “I’m sorry. We had a situation come up.”

  “The ship broke orbit. I’m guessing this was in reaction to Allion ships turning up.”

  She met his eyes. “What do you know about them?”

  “Not much. I don’t speak to anyone in command. They don’t like me a
nd I’m just dirt to them.”

  “Did they send a message for help?”

  “Apparently. That’s what the rumour said.”

  “Who said this?”

  “Fatima and Iman. They intercepted the message. It was written in code. I helped them decode it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “They’re my friends.” He gave her a sharp look. “You’re still trying to pick holes in my story.”

  “It’s a really strange story.”

  “I’m a merchant from an Allion settlement. I could have been from ISF, but I happened to have been born on an Allion ship. I spent a good deal of time at New Hyderabad and New Pyongyang because ISF means business to me. I have friends and customers in all places. I don’t care so much about the Allion or ISF divide, because we’re all just communities trying to survive in space.”

  “I would really like to believe that you’re as innocent as that.”

  “Then do! Your hypertechs believe me. They are great people.”

  “They have no links with Kerakis?” Problem was she didn’t really trust the hypertechs either.

  “I’m not aware of any. They’re always trying to double-guess what he’s up to, and trying to break into systems and listen in. The fire doors are closed and the hypertechs are trapped with the others inside the B sector. Kerakis calls it a safety thing, but I think he’s afraid that the population of the B sector could get out of control, especially as the siege progresses.”

  That meshed with her feelings. She wished she understood his role and position in the conflict. “How many people does Allion have at the station?”

  He shrugged. “A few hundred maybe? I couldn’t be certain. But a good number of them are aggregates, and they count for ten each.”

  That was quite a patriotic statement, maybe designed to keep ISF guessing about the threat posed by a smallish Allion crew at the station.

  “Are you feeling fine now?”