Shifting Infinity (ISF-Allion Book 2)

by Patty Jansen

  “Maybe a week or two.”

  It had already been a week since Moshi had come to the ship. If there were going to be any further problems, they would have shown up by now.

  Chapter 26

  * * *

  ARI WENT WITH a couple of hypertechs to talk about the technical recycling issues, while Iman and Fatima led Melati further into the maze of passages.

  Melati had expected to be led to a place where there were a lot of computers, and she was surprised to be led to a room with no furniture and rows of mats on the floor.

  “Prayer time,” Fatima said.

  There were a few people already in the room, men and women, and more of them appeared from a door in the opposite side, dressed only in a thin white gown over their underwear. A few benches stood in the corridor outside the room, and they were full of helmets, black clothing and boots.

  Melati stared at the faces that were normally hidden and didn’t recognise any of them. Most people joined the hypertechs in their teenage years when their faces were still changing. Under their masks, they were just normal men and women of all ages, and a couple of people even brought a whole group of children ranging in age from young babies to about twelve or thirteen. One woman came in with a teenage son. She was probably six or seven months pregnant.

  To Melati’s great surprise, there were also people who were clearly not from New Jakarta. A bunch of pale-skinned, black-haired women who looked to be from New Pyongyang, and also a couple of darker people who were possibly from New Hyderabad or might even be Allion merchants like Moshi.

  Everyone else treated these people as their equals. She caught snatches of conversations. The New Pyongyang girls spoke B3 with a strong accent, but a dark-skinned man had no accent at all.

  “There are people from everywhere here,” Melati said.

  “In the eyes of God, we are all the same,” Fatima said. She lifted off her helmet.

  Melati almost gasped, because she had a wound across her lower jaw and neck. She wore a bandage over it, but blood had seeped through at several places.

  That had to hurt.

  Iman handed out white gowns.

  Melati stepped out of her uniform, glad for the undershirt and long thermal wear she wore underneath. She didn’t have to strip off to her skin, although Iman’s muscled upper body looked quite pleasing. His hair was quite long and hung in his eyes.

  On bare feet and wearing the thin gown, Melati followed the others into the room that was now starting to fill up fast. There was another entrance on the other side and Ari had come in from that direction, also dressed in a similar way. They found spots on the mats in the room.

  Benjamun shuffled to the front of the room. Of course, he was the modin.

  For a moment, Melati felt like she was little again, being taken into the prayer room by Ibu. It disturbed her that she could feel Ibu’s presence next to her, but had trouble remembering what she looked like. Small and brown, with lush black hair.

  Fatima kneeled on the mat next to her. Melati had trouble averting her eyes from the wound on her chin and neck. It even extended to her left shoulder.

  Prayer time used to stop everything in JeJe, when people not attending was unheard of. First the hypertechs started using their own prayer room. Then it became acceptable to stay away for reasons other than that you were on a mining shift. Then people went or stayed away as they pleased, leaving only a group of older people who still went five times a day.

  Melati first stopped going regularly when she fell in with the bad crowd. Even after her stay in the ISF hospital, she never went back as often and as regularly as before. She had used a string of excuses, some better than others, but the fact was that she had been at fault, and she had allowed her culture to slip away from her.

  And sitting here in the station with her people and hearing all those familiar words and incantations, that feeling hit her between the eyes.

  “You’re crying,” Fatima said to her when they were getting dressed.

  “You can leave New Jakarta, travel the universe, but you’ll always be barang-barang.”

  Fatima nodded. She was really very pretty and Melati hated to think what sort of scar she would be left with when that wound had healed. “You know that I think you’re really brave?”

  Fatima made a soft “Oh?” noise.

  “We had to take a reading of Moshi’s mindbase. I saw the things you did trying to fix up the power system.”

  “Yeah.” Fatima reached for her face but didn’t touch it. Melati guessed that this was how she had gotten that terrible burn mark.

  “We have skin regeneration cultures that the hospital would use on burn wounds,” she said. “It can be a lot better by the time you get married.”

  “Yeah,” Fatima said again. She took her black gear off the hook and stepped into her trousers. The helmet stayed off. Melati wondered if once you were allowed in the prayer room with the hypertechs you were trustworthy enough to see everyone’s faces.

  Fatima led Melati back to the large room where they had first seen Benjamun. He was no longer on the couch. People followed their progress through the room with curious expressions on their faces. Melati couldn’t believe how varied in age people were. Some were barely adolescent; others had grey hair. She usually had some idea who the young ones were, but the older ones had worn the headgear and veil for so long that the people in the B sector had long since stopped mentioning their names.

  Fatima went into a little cupboard-like hole at the back of the big room. It looked like it had been a storage cupboard or maybe a control room. At some point in time, someone had ripped shelves off the wall. No one had ever bothered to coat the naked metal underneath even if they had reattached a control panel and a tiny shelf for an engineer to work on.

  Fatima said, “This is where a vein runs right through to the station’s main nerve centre. We used to take our power here, but we don’t feed off this anymore.”

  Iman set up two computers and another man came to deliver a box that he connected to a panel in the wall. Melati recognised some of the equipment as the type that the Taurus Army would use; some was ISF material but some was also unfamiliar. That would be Allion-made equipment.

  Melati set up her PCD with the fragment file.

  “When you connect through this link, you will see what I mean,” Iman said. He waited for the connection to go through and then pulled some text up on the screen. “Here you go. This sort of stuff is everywhere through the system. It just piles up junk everywhere and it makes their systems bloated, slow and unusable.”

  Melati studied it, scrolling through. Her early feeling was that it looked like another mindbase fragment, but she couldn’t be sure unless she ran a similarity test.

  “Can I connect my PCD?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Iman said. “If you do, you’ll have to wipe and clean everything off your machine.”

  She didn’t want to risk it. Not yet. Jas would have more to say about it if she got the opportunity to contact him. “Are you sure that this is the thing that causes the outages and light failures?”

  “It matches with the thing that Bassanti had in his admin files before. Only there is so much more of this junk now. It has even started to auto-generate commands.”

  “This sounds like it was a problem before Allion came on the scene. Allion didn’t cause this problem.”

  “I don’t know. They certainly made it worse.”

  And that came back to the same issue: Jas and Paul Ormerod’s mindbase. Allion’s presence had not caused the problems, but Allion was here because of it.

  But since she had Paul’s mindbase, what were they actually fighting? The copy? Self-replicating fragments?

  Melati made a decision. She put her PCD on the desk. “I’ll risk it. We’ll make a backup copy.”

  That was easily done. Melati got rid of everything that had nothing to do with her mindbase research. The only thing she left on the PCD was the fragment file from Moshi’s
mindbase and the analysis software. “Ready.”

  Melati made the connection, and Iman activated the link.

  At first, nothing happened. Melati was able to access all the systems that had been open to her when she lived at the station. The dock activity log for the last three days, showing only the arrival of the shuttle. She couldn’t see anything further back than that, but that had never been publicly accessible. You had to visit the office to request further arrival and departure data. They made you pay for it, because it was deemed a commercial interest. Or you had to have a warrant.

  Melati went to the accommodation listings. They hadn’t been updated since the start of the siege.

  “I’m not seeing any trouble.”

  “Wait a bit. It will come.”

  It was a bit sad leafing through all this old stuff. There were maps and pictures of how everything used to be. God, Li Wei standing with his arms crossed over his chest at the entrance to his shop. “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen him.”

  Iman said it in such careless fashion that Melati called out, “Do you really care so little about anyone who’s not a hypertech that you don’t know what happened to anyone else?”

  “We look after our people first.”

  “Yes, and that includes all the other barang-barang, and I dare say that it even includes the New Pyongyang refugees.”

  “You suggest that we don’t care about them? Things are bad for all of us. Like the water. Why do you think my father has become almost blind?”

  “Stop arguing,” Fatima said. “We have action.”

  The screen went dark. Then the main lights went off.

  Melati sensed Fatima rising from her chair next to her. Fatima’s voice came out of the dark. “Do you want the emergency light on?” She sounded quite calm, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

  “Leave it,” Iman said, also in the dark.

  No sooner had he said this than the light came back on.

  The screen light returned a bit later, a grey background with white text over the top, scrolling so fast that she couldn’t see what it represented. She tried to slow it down, but the commands did nothing. She tried a Cut command, but it did nothing either.

  “How do you stop this?”

  “You don’t,” Iman said.

  “But how do you . . .” Melati stared at the screen, her hands spread. She had expected to be able to do at least something.

  “It stops after a while, when the whole system is infected. Then you can ask it questions and it will probably ask you questions.”

  “I wanted to see the code on the screen.”

  “I would have to connect one computer to another and I’m not taking any of our machines in here.”

  But they had one machine connected, and she was not getting out of here with out knowing what the deal was with this malicious, sentient, self-replicating program.

  True to Iman’s word, the progression of code over the screen was now slowing down. They were lines of rubbish code, the same type that they had found in the first readout from Moshi’s mindbase. The text slowed and slowed. If the speed over the screen got any slower, Melati would be able to read some of the statements.

  She set up the fragment and the comparison software. As soon as the text slowed down enough for a screen capture, she took one and fed it into the program. It was only a small part and didn’t need long to analyse.

  Similarity coefficient: 33.65%.

  Well . . . that was . . . odd. She could have sworn that it should be higher than that. This was all part of the same mindbase, right? She grabbed another part of the code, appended it to the first part and then added a third part.

  Similarity coefficient: 32.21%.

  What was going on here? She grabbed another part of the file, but whatever she did, the percentage went further down with each time she ran the program. It was as if this file was actively trying to be as dissimilar to the mindbase fragment as possible.

  Did that mean that it was the fragment of a copy of Paul Ormerod’s mindbase or that it was something else?

  She added another segment. When she copied it, she had another idea. She didn’t have a full imager here, but the smaller version would give some idea. It produced only static images.

  Large portions of the file were rubbish, but she grabbed as much of the code as she could and fed it into the program. It took a while to come up with the first image: abstract shapes in psychedelic colours. Ouch. Something wrong there. She wanted to stop the rendering of the second image, but it was already almost done so she waited until it came through and that one was even more of a surprise than the first one: it showed a brown landscape under a yellow sky. It was as featureless as it was surprising. Oh, it did show a small part of a vehicle’s dashboard in a corner.

  Melati was still staring at it when the third image came up: a smiling man in his thirties with short brown hair. The image was taken from an odd angle, close enough to show the crinkling skin in the corner of his eyes.

  She thought she recognised that face. It was . . .

  She grabbed that image and put it into the station’s public library. It returned a single name with a very high likeness: Paul Ormerod.

  Indeed.

  All right, so either Ormerod liked looking at himself in the mirror or this was a memory of someone close to him. Suddenly the odd angle of the image also made sense. The person must have been leaning on him or sitting on his lap. Was Paul Ormerod married?

  She asked the database that question.

  But instead of giving her the answer, the screen went black. She made an annoyed noise.

  Fatima, who had been watching her intently said, “See, there you go. I told you that—”

  The lights went off again. A few voices in the main room protested. In the darkness, the nozzles of a projector somewhere amongst the workstations lit up.

  “I haven’t seen this variety before,” Fatima said. She sounded surprised.

  “I have,” Iman said. “It’s going to do that voices thing with us.”

  He didn’t explain what that meant, but now something started happening. A shape materialised out of thin air. It was white and ill-defined, a blob with extremely poor resolution. It appeared to move, but that was probably an artefact of the projection as parts shimmered in and out of view. Melati tried to make out what she was looking at, but she kept thinking of Hermann who was said to wander the corridors of the B sector clutching a bloodied knife. The projection came with sound, but it was too distorted to make out what it was meant to represent. It could be a voice, it could be music. When the sound stopped, the image faded. The projection nozzles went out.

  Melati turned to Iman. “What was that?”

  “We’re not sure but we’ve seen this a lot recently. There is something in the system that’s turning on the projector, but doesn’t have enough coherence to make a clear projection.”

  Melati realised something. “Auntie Dewi’s ghosts.” She felt cold.

  “Probably.”

  “Then has this been in our system for a long time? The aunties have been talking about Hermann for ages.”

  Iman gave a wry smile. “Do you have an auntie like that, too? No one would take Auntie Widya seriously, but this is what they’ve been referring to. Talk about actual apparitions has been a lot stronger recently.”

  “How recent? Before the siege?” She remembered that Auntie Dewi had said it had all become much worse. No one had taken her seriously.

  “Likely.”

  “Do you want to capture more of this code?” Fatima said.

  “No. Turn everything off. I need to see Ari.”

  She strode through the corridor, and almost ran into Ari coming the other way.

  Melati said, “I saw Grandma’s ghosts. I don’t think it’s Paul Ormerod, but it’s someone close to him. I think I know why—”

  And at the same time Ari said, “I received this from Nysa.”

  Mela
ti took the PCD he held out to her.

  The screen said, We’re having a good day.

  Chapter 27

  * * *

  MELATI DIDN’T NEED to get her list of code phrases. This one she knew: it had been right at the bottom of the list and it meant that Jas and Nysa, and possibly the entire mission, were in grave danger.

  “What happened?” she asked Ari.

  He shook his head. “That’s all I have.”

  “What about Hasegawa and the shuttle?”

  “I think that maybe even the shuttle is in trouble. I’ve been thinking about the two thugs we met, and I’m wondering if they were sent to get rid of us, and were surprised to meet people on the hull. They basically had the same idea as we did. We were extremely lucky that we could take them by surprise. If they’d known that we were there, we wouldn’t have made it.”

  That was a disturbing thought, and it also made a lot of sense.

  “Is this the only communication you’ve had from Jas and Nysa?”

  “Just a few general messages before this one, and they all said that everything was good.”

  “What about Hasegawa?”

  “Nothing,” Ari said.

  Melati couldn’t believe that Hasegawa would let himself be caught out. With that crew on board, Allion would have a lot of trouble taking the shuttle. Also, if they did, the Felicity would not sit and watch.

  Or maybe . . . a number of scenarios played themselves in her mind. They were all uncompromisingly bad. The shuttle crew had been captured and taken inside the station. They had been killed, or locked up with Jas and Nysa, their minds wiped or infused with the same fragment that Moshi had.

  “We should contact the Felicity.”

  Ari took a deep breath, held it for a while and blew it out. “If we do, there is a chance that they will discover where we are.”

  “We’ll have to risk it. They probably already know anyway.” Because of the dead bodies. For now, it was important that they acted quickly and decisively. She turned to Fatima. “Can you take us somewhere in the station where we draw attention away from the hypertechs if they discover us?”