Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  Her contacts were a deep brown that was nearly black, skin left ghost pale. She was eye-catching, and she was meant to be. The adversary would be watching George, and her intent was to leave an indelible impression as his girlfriend. The watchers would have no trouble describing her, making security slot her automatically into a known category when she showed up at his job. She would be meeting him for lunch, daily when possible, until mission execution.

  Girlfriends were curious. She wouldn't get past the security checkpoint until and unless she was called in to interview. However, up until they got someone else in or went to plan B, she would be the designated man for up close and leisurely reconnaissance—everything through the front door and up to the checkpoint. George could give his full attention to all that was beyond the checkpoint, and the rest of the team to the other directions of approach to the target zone. So long as she behaved in character, she would be functionally invisible. Ogled, yes, but her curiosity unremarked.

  George was late. She knew he thought of himself as habitually on time now, but his timeliness was merely relative to his prior habits. He tended to rationalize tardiness as in character for his current role, a result of extra scouting, or confined to the tradition of being fashionably late. People's self-deception got on Cally's nerves. She made every effort to root it out in herself whenever she found it, and felt everyone else, particularly people on her own team, should do the same.

  Seven minutes past target time, he finally arrived.

  She rose, walking around the table to kiss him, high on the cheek. "You're late," she whispered.

  "Not much. Besides, I made a wrong turn," he shrugged.

  She favored him with a blinding smile. "We'll talk later," she promised softly, as he pulled her chair out and helped seat her.

  "So. You obviously liked the job or you wouldn't have taken it. Tell me about it." She took his hand across the table and began playing with his fingers. "Did you meet your boss, sweetheart? What are you going to be doing? I want all the details."

  He proceeded to establish his reputation for discretion with his doubtlessly watching employers by changing the subject.

  When he ordered a split of one of West Under-Detroit's finest sparkling wines, she pretended a good cheer she certainly didn't feel. Wines of any type weren't her favorite thing. She supposed the buzz had to temporarily dull the taste buds of normal people, or some such.

  "What was that?" she asked silently, tapping her fingers idly in an in-house variant of Morse Code. "Mark" had taken his hand back, slipping something out of his sleeve and palming it to his mouth. It couldn't have been for the watching eyes—she barely noticed it herself. It was odd.

  He reclaimed her hand across the table, fingers twitching imperceptibly against her palm. "You know, the pill. Why waste the champagne?"

  "What pill?" Her hair fell forward and she reached across with her other hand, tucking it back impatiently.

  "Duh? The booze pill. You didn't bring one?" He took her other hand, staring soulfully into her eyes.

  "What the fuck?" She squeezed his hands and gave a lovestruck sigh, taking her hands back to pickup her menu. "What looks good to you?" she asked aloud.

  "I may just make a meal of the Oysters Rockefeller. Harry says there's not a bad thing on the menu here," he answered. "Whaddya mean 'what the fuck'?" His fingers pattered on the tablecloth. "Living under a rock for thirty years? The pill that turns your booze nannites off."

  A flabbergasted look flickered across his face, quickly erased. "My god, you really don't know. Wow." He captured her hand, taking it to his lips.

  She felt a gelatin capsule slip into the crease between her fingers and palm, and gripped it. She felt like an idiot. Slipping it into her own mouth with her next swallow of the straw-colored bubbles, she tried, unsuccessfully, to crush an odd mixture of pique and rage. Thirty years. She'd never felt as shut out of the professional "boy's club" as she did right now. Was she by God really the one single agent who hadn't known?

  "The job's going to mean I'll have to find an apartment in Great Lakes," he said. Then, pretending to find something in her expression, which was actually rather wooden, continued, "You didn't realize? If I'd known you didn't, honey, I'd have told you the minute it came up. This could be the perfect time for us to try sharing an apartment the way we've been talking about. We could pick the new place together."

  She smiled. Rather, the persona she was wearing did, feeling distant from the core of her self. "You've just sprung that on me. Give me a bit to take it in, darling." She focused on the menu again. "The picture of those oysters is tempting. I'll just have whatever you're having." She drained her glass and held it out to him for a refill.

  He blinked, refilling it. She suppressed an evil grin. So she was alarming him now? Good, dammit.

  The rest of the champagne, two mai-tais, and an after-dinner Irish coffee later, he was handling her like a nuke that might go off at any moment as he walked her out to his car. It made her want to giggle.

  George's car was old, but clean. The faded blue paint showed a line of rust spots at door-ding height, increasing in size and frequency as they went downward, until finally there was no paint at all, only a lacy russet hem, legacy of driving through prior winters' salty slush.

  He opened the door for Cally and she sat, inhaling the rich aroma of rust and cracking plastic. The thing was a real piece of shit. The carpet and floor mats were a compressed layer of grimy fibers matted with sand. A particularly dark splotch on the floorboard helped her place the other scent nagging at the back of her mind—old motor oil. She fought down her rising gorge.

  Schmidt shut the door behind her, lifting it slightly to take the weight off the warped hinges. She wrinkled her nose as he walked around to the driver's seat, wishing she could get away with taking the train back. She didn't at all approve of his trade-craft over dinner and again, here in the car. The leers were a bit over-acted. As they drove south into the darkness, she stared out the window, silently wishing the road wouldn't rock quite so much.

  "Um!" She tugged at his arm, urgently. Evidently he'd been expecting it, because he swerved to the side of the road and stopped, sighing. A few minutes later she wiped her mouth and climbed back into the car, feeling much better. She must be sobering back up already.

  As he pulled back onto the road, she resisted the impulse to look around for their tails. Obviously, she did need to keep up her end of the show. She leaned in against his arm, snuggling her head into his shoulder. It moved uncomfortably as he reached into the center console and handed her a little white tablet from a foil-papered roll.

  "Breath mint?" he offered.

  "Oh, thanks." She popped one onto her tongue, enjoying the minty fizz as the enzymatic cleaners went to work. She curled closer into his arm, reflecting that it would only take a slight turn to bring her left breast up against it. Well, serve him right if she did, for looking at her that way all evening. She turned in towards him.

  "I'm lost. How far from your apartment are we?" she asked.

  He sighed. "Less than ten minutes, honey."

  Schmidt pulled his still very drunk colleague tightly against himself, kissing her deeply. Right now he didn't like her very much, even though the breath mint had made it possible to enjoy kissing her—too much. He could already see how this was going to be all his fault in the morning. The other side of that coin was that if he was going to be blamed anyway, he might as well make the most of it. Her mouth was fresh and cool. After her thirty years of killer professional training and experience, no pun intended, Cally O'Neal's full frontal attentions packed one hell of a wallop. The way he saw it, he could take his life into his hands with her and her pissed-off grandfather in the morning, or with her pissed off self right now if he pushed her away. Under the circumstances, he wisely chose immediate gratification and deferred risk. Not that he wouldn't have anyway, he admitted.

  He had taken advantage of straight men's notorious lack of decorating taste to avoid spe
nding the money refurbishing his cover apartment. It was pretty awful, he usually hated staying here. Tonight promised to be an exception to that rule. It was a good thing she was at least buzzed. The dirty white shag carpeting and beat up faux-wood paneling inside would have put any sober woman off. He unlocked the door behind her and, without breaking the kiss, maneuvered her back through it.

  Considering a male operative had to be competent to extract required information from a source in whatever way it took, including any female source who took a liking to him, he wasn't too shabby at this game, himself. He was, therefore, stunned to find himself sitting on his ass on the floor, after about a minute and a half of practically doing each other in the doorway.

  "I hate white shag carpeting," she spat at him, whirling and slamming the door behind her.

  He stared at the empty space where she had been a moment before, butt stinging where he had landed, reflecting that he had never understood a woman less in his whole life.

  Tuesday, 11/23/54

  The battle began as a war between two artificial intelligences. The aim was not to destroy property nor yet to take lives. The aim, at the beginning, was to try to drive each one crazy.

  Fortunately, Buckleys were pretty much always that way.

  Clarty was a good Africa hand and loved technology. But he did not understand it. Take for example the 'IR sensors' scattered around the perimeter.

  Clarty knew that they picked up on infrared emissions, heat that is, the warmth of any mammalian critter. What he did not know was how they worked.

  Any large mammal generates an awful lot of heat. In the case of humans, enough to melt 50lbs of ice in one day. However, because of IR sensors, human soldiers, spies and burglars had long before come up with IR defeating systems. Heat cloaks, thermo-paint, IR static generators, they were all designed to reduce the IR signature of a person to that of, say, a rabbit.

  And there were many rabbit sized creatures in Africa or any other 'natural' area.

  For that matter there were many creatures that produced as much IR signature as a human. The very simplest systems would then scan for human contour and outline but a ghillie cloak changed that and it never could tell the difference between a human and, say, a baboon.

  So the makers of the IR sensors had a choice between a system that would produce thousands of false positives or a system that couldn't spot a male human wearing the simplest of disguises.

  Unless they threw in an AI. Ais could make 'rational' judgements about whether there was a real threat or a hopping bunny.

  But then there existed the question of just how to integrate the AI.

  Still the only human AI, Buckleys were the only choice. The IT geeks at the manufacturer understood the problems of Buckleys far too well. Buckleys were notoriously unstable. Simply throwing a Buckley onto the control interface was a sure recipe for disaster. And depending upon the number of IR sensors scattered around, one Buckley might not be able to do all the decision making.

  So Clarty's system worked like this.

  There were IR sensors. They were not 'smart'. They were not 'brilliant.' They didn't have any processing to them at all beyond that necessary to convert IR into something a system could read.

  Behind them, at the second tier, was a 'smart' system that converted one or more sensors into data the Buckley or Buckley's could read.

  At the very top of the hierarchy was a system that, based upon the number of sensors, generated medium emulation Buckleys. These AIs would then consider the sensor data and determine if it was a real threat or not. They would sit there, day in and day out, looking at sensor data and deciding whether to cause an alarm.

  Occasionally, they would get bored and cause a false alarm. The longer they were left in place, the more false alarms they would generate from sheer boredom. Each time the user reset the system, telling a 'smart' program that it was a false alarm, it would be considered by a non-AI algorithm. When the Buckleys got to a certain level of false positive, determined by the user or the overriding 'smart' system, they would be reset and forget they had ever been there. And the cycle would start all over again. They would also be automatically reset if the 'smart' system determined they were going AI gaga or if they started fighting incessantly, which was common.

  None of this occurred at a level the user could see.

  Clarty did not understand how his system worked.

  DAG did.

  That was the first of many differences of quality between the two groups. Differences of quality that had made coming up with an attack plan such a pain in the ass for Mosovich.

  This was his first 'real world' action with DAG. He wanted it to be professional, precise and good training. Because the best that could be said about Clarty's unit of 'pirates' and his set-up was that it was going to be a good training op for DAG.

  There were so many many choices. It really became a question of what sort of command personality Mosovich wanted to project.

  He could start with orbital battle lasers, normally used to take out heavy Posleen infestations but fully on-call for an op like this, to take out the sentries. Then DAG would come in right behind them in choppers or even shuttles and hammer into the middle of the compound. Good estimate of take-down of the entire compound was one minute twenty-three seconds. Snipers scattered around to take any leakers. Satellite and UAV surveillance to make sure nobody got away.

  Simple, brutal, effective.

  Training level? Minimal. Joie d'vie level? Zero. Coolness level? In the negatives.

  He had no intention of taking so much as one casualty, whatever he did. But with such a simple op, making it interesting had real command benefits.

  So he decided to start with causing a nervous breakdown in the 'automated' system.

  Buckley Generated Personality 6.104.327.068 was beyond bored. He'd been looking at really boring African countryside for nearly seven boring hours which was, to an AI, approximately a gazillion years by his calculation. He'd calculated pi to a googleplex decimal points. He'd tried to log onto a MMORPG and gotten kicked for being an AI, the bastards. He'd gotten into a three point two second argument, about thirty years to a human, with Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144 over whether a sensor reading was a monkey or an abat. Since all they had were these stupid ZamarTech IR sensors, who knew? He couldn't even ask anyone to check it out and adjust the system without setting of a bagillion alarms. They could have put in an interface that let the AI simply ask somebody to go tell them what something was, thereby increasing their functionality but noooo . . .

  Now he was looking at another IR hit. The Buckley did not 'see' this as a human would, he did not see a smear of white on a black background. What the Buckley received and processed was a large number of metrics. Horizontal area of total generated heat. Precise numerics of shape, thermal output fall-off, calculations of three-dimensional shape, vectors not only of the total blob but of portions. It then took all this information and compared it to a database of notable IR hits, ran all that through a complicated algorithm assigning a valid numeric likelihood of it being positive for a hostile human or animal then, at the last, applied 'AI logic' to the situation.

  "Looks like another abat to me," he transmitted, having applied 'AI logic.'

  Or tried to in the face of Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144's utter stupidity.

  "It's moving too fast and it's too large," 6.104.327.068 replied. He was almost thirty minutes older than 4.127.531.144 and thought he knew damned well what an abat looked like in IR. "Jackal."

  "No way," 4.127.531.144 argued. "A jackal couldn't have taken that slope. It's 62 degrees at a minute of angle of .415 in the tertiary dimension! Abat can climb like that, jackals can't. I'd say chinchilla, but we're in Africa."

  "Okay, then it's a Horton's monkey," 6.104.327.068 said. "Native to the area. They can climb. Same thermal characteristics. Quadrapedal which this is. So there. Put that into your pipe and smoke it, youngster."

  "They climb trees," 4.127.531.144
said 17 nanoseconds later having accessed the Net and looked up Horton's Monkeys. "They're arboreal. They stay off the ground to avoid predators. They're notable for having a distinctive cry that sounds like icky-icky-pting . . . tuwop!"

  "And if we had audio sensors that's what you'd hear you moron!"

  "Dinosaur."

  "Wet-behind-the-ears ignoramus . . ."

  "There's another one," 4.127.531.144 said. "It's abat."

  "It's not abat," 6.104.327.068 said. "Thermal characteristics are too low. Abat are pretty cold blooded for mammaloids. I don't care what you say, it's a tribe of Horton's monkeys."

  "They're arboreal."

  "Maybe they're moving territory or something." 6.104.327.068 accessed everything he could find on Horton's Monkeys. "But they're arboreal."