by Lj Cohen
"You're not much of an engineer, are you?" she asked.
Damn, but her face was hard to read.
"Increased power draw on the station grid. You're lucky no one came to investigate sooner."
"I really am studying to be a botanist."
"I really don't care."
Micah slumped against the desk. "You mean you're not going to shut me down?"
"Too much bother," she said, moving over to his computer. "But I do need to balance the power loading and mask your draw or someone will stumble in here to investigate."
"Someone like you?"
She gave him an odd look, pulled out her micro, and flung several rapid-fire gestures at it. "Yes. Exactly like me."
Micah's eyes widened as her micro's readout scrolled across the display on his computer screen. Damn. She'd just blown through all his security. How the hell had she done that? She set the micro on his desk. Bringing both hands up as if she was the conductor and the computer her orchestra, she controlled his machine using gestures faster than anyone he had ever seen. He recognized the signs for save and execute, but all the rest blurred in one continuous, graceful motion.
"Done," she said, slipping the micro back in her pocket. The computer returned to the Daedalus Station logo. "But I'd use a much better password in the future. Or maybe even some biometrics, though even those aren't infallible." She turned to go, leaving Micah sputtering.
"Wait. I don't understand. Why are you helping me?"
"There's plenty of room on this hulk. I might want to set up shop. And it's always good to get along with your neighbors." At the airlock, she paused to turn around. "And by the way, my name's Ro."
He didn't need to look at his reflection in the burnished metal to know his face blazed red.
***
Ro clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter. What an idiot. It wasn't surprising, given his father. She couldn't give an empty airlock's worth of oxygen about the drugs. But the ship? The ship presented all kinds of possibilities.
Earning a journeyman's engineering rating was definitely better than being trapped in this dead-end place, but she wanted more than a series of lateral hops from job to job and subsistence living like her father. For that, she needed access to a solid Uni in the Hub. She looked down at herself and frowned at the grease stain on her shirt. An engineer's kid had about the same chance at one of the top schools as this wreck had to fly.
She stared at the scavenged ship. If her father had bothered to investigate the problem, he had to have discovered the bittergreen lab. But instead of reporting it to the commander or balancing the power draw, all he had done was bury the problem. Either he was working with Micah or he had some other reason for keeping prying eyes away from the ship.
That alone was reason enough for Ro to dig a little deeper.
The ship was essentially useless. They hadn't made this kind of freighter in decades, and even if the thing could be made to fly, the first gen models had been unstable buggers. AIs had come a long way since then.
An idea so crazy it might work danced through her mind. Accessing the ship would be simple given her new official status, and she had a program of AI enhancements she'd been dying to field test. If she could wow the admissions board — really wow them with something — she wouldn't need to apply for any scholarship.
Excitement bubbled through her like an oxygen high. She patted the hull. "You and me, baby, we could be something special." There was plenty of room to set up a little workshop. "Oh, yeah. This could totally work."
Ro pushed away from the corridor and paced as she schemed. Micah wouldn't risk making a fuss and besides, Ro's work wouldn't get in the way of his little greenhouse. Power might be an issue, but her mind was already churning on ways to find the additional resources she would need and how she could divert them. She stopped at the door seal that connected the ship with the now-permanent, temporary umbilical to Daedalus and tapped against the tarnished metal.
She needed an assistant — someone clever enough to follow her directions, be discreet, and keep the project moving while she knocked down Mendez's work list, but not so clever as to hijack her idea.
Micah wasn't smart enough to follow her lead in the programming and too clever and too sneaky by half to control. Besides, if he was working with her father in some way, he presented a security risk. No, she needed someone quite different. Smiling, she pulled out her micro. It was late, but he'd probably still be awake. "Message Durbin, Jem." Most likely he was still tinkering with the code he wanted her to look through.
"Ro! Did you get my message? I've been looking all over Daedalus for you."
She winced and dialed down the volume. If his incessant babbling didn't drive her mad, his unrelenting cheerfulness would.
"When you get a chance, patch that program directly through to my micro. I'll run it in protected mode and take a look."
"That's super! Thanks. It's not as elegant as your stuff, but it's still pretty cool. Look, I have this other idea —"
"Jem. Stop." She projected as much cold authority in her voice as she could.
"Oh. Sorry. I —"
"Shut up. Listen. No apologies. Just listen." She'd throttle him if he wasn't so damned smart and eager to please. "I have a job for you." That got his attention. "It's complex and probably doomed from the start. But I need your help — and you can't tell anyone about it. That includes the commander, my father, and your parents." She paused, enjoying the momentary silence.
"When do we start?"
First, she needed to do some investigating. "Check your syllabus in the morning. You've had a change in course requirements."
Jem's low whistle pierced her ear. "Outstanding! You so need to give me those access codes."
"I think not," she said, laughing. There was no telling what Jem would do with that amount of unholy power. "Go to sleep. You'll need to be at your best tomorrow."
"Aren't I always?"
Ro snorted. "Go. Dream of perfect code."
"Oh, man, oh, man! This is gonna be great —"
She terminated the call mid-gush, not quite regretting her choice, but wondering how the hell she was going to keep Jem from making her crazy. "I guess it's time to head back to school," she said, tunneling into the ed database. Going directly against Daedalus would have been risky, but the teaching algorithm was a quasi-independent program only loosely connected to the station's AI, not too different from her own autonomic nervous system. Ro accessed Jem's coursework, replacing his syllabus with a new one, tailored to her needs.
Now she just needed to find out what her father knew.
Chapter 3
Jem burst into his room with the intensity of an amp dialed way past distortion. Barre turned over and threw his arm over his eyes as his brother pushed the light levels up to mid-day. He flicked on his neural to check the time. 0700. "What the hell?"
"I'm working in the computer lab today. You wanted help with your advanced calc homework. Now or never."
Barre threw a pillow across the room. It missed Jem by half a meter.
"Come on. I have coffee for you."
He would need a lot more than coffee this morning. "I hate you."
Jem laughed.
"I'm up, I'm up. Now get the hell out and let me get dressed."
Jem sneaked in close to his bed and snatched his blanket, tossing it to where the pillow lay on the floor. "Not until you put your feet on the ground."
Barre shook the dreads out of his face and glared at his perfectly awake, perfect little brother as he walked out of the room. It wasn't Jem's fault he was their parents' darling, but it didn't make the sting any easier to take.
He accessed his music library and turned up the volume to drown out the self-pity party in his head. By the time Barre managed to get dressed, Jem probably would have invented a new language, discovered a rare element, and gotten three more acceptances to Uni. All Barre had was a blooming headache and the music burning through his mind.
When Barre emerged from his room, Jem, true to his word, handed him his coffee, fixed the way he liked it. "Black and sweet, just like you are," his brother said, smiling.
Barre scowled over the steaming mug. How could Jem be so freaky cheerful this early? He added it to the mental list of things that were unfair and not likely to change any time soon.
"Since when are you so eager for school?" Jem always hated the work anyone assigned him. Usually he tried to figure out ways to twist it to suit what he wanted to do. Maybe they weren't so different, after all.
"Doing a collab with Ro."
"I know, you only love her for her brain."
"Barre, it's not like that," Jem said, the skin on his cheeks brightening.
It was always so easy to fluster his little brother. At least some things in life were fair. "Do Mom and Dad know?"
Jem stared up at him, his eyes intense. "No. And they don't need to. I get my work done. I get good grades. What I do and who I do it with on my own time is none of their business."
"Whoa, kid." He swallowed the last of the coffee and set the cup down on the counter. "I'm not here to criticize." Barre had enough of his own secrets, including the packet of bittergreen in his back pocket. "Where are they, anyway?" he asked. Their quarters were utterly silent except for the two of them.
"Station staff meeting. I waited until they left before coming to wake you."
"Thanks." And he meant it. The last thing Barre wanted was to spend another meal being picked apart by his disapproving parents.
"Can we go, yet?" Jem asked, just the barest hint of the whine in his voice that used to drive Barre crazy.
"Fine. Good. Whatever." Barre put his hands on Jem's shoulders and pressed down. "But we do the calc work first. Payback for waking me up."
"Deal," Jem said, slipping out from under his grip.
Other than a few night-shift staff heading to their quarters, the corridors were empty this early in the morning. The computer lab was empty, too, except for the AI's blinking red oculars. Barre logged into his syllabus, swallowing the resentment he always felt when he asked his little brother for help.
He remembered a time when Jem turned to him with questions. It hadn't lasted very long. Once Jem mastered the computer interface, he quickly pulled past him and never looked back.
Barre called up the module he struggled with and turned down the music. Conceptual math didn't get any easier with a soundtrack and Jem would be ticked if he thought Barre wasn't paying attention. He could compose complex pieces in his head for a fully tricked-out band even without the neural. If you needed it rewritten for an old-school orchestra, he could do that, no problem. Transposing was as simple for him as theoretical physics seemed to be for Jem.
But his parents only had room for Jem's talents in their lives. The first time Barre had played something he wrote just for them, they nodded politely and couldn't be bothered to listen to the entire song.
"Focus, Barre."
He sighed. "Sorry."
Jem tapped the monitor. "Is this what you're having trouble with?"
For the moment, he couldn't find a sarcastic reply.
"Okay. Watch." Jem pushed away the ancient keyboard in favor of the holo display. Watching him use the heads-up module was like watching Judicious Monkey play the multi-synth. His hands moved in a blur and the equation danced in front of them. "Look here," Jem said, and exploded the view, showing the problem in three dimensions.
Barre stared, his mouth falling open as Jem built a representative construct, each piece linking to a part of the problem. Then he simplified the building, collapsing multiple layers of structure into a simple cube.
"You've got to be kidding me," Barre said.
"What do you mean? If you do it this way, you'll always get the right answer in the fewest steps."
There was no way he could ever replicate what Jem had just done. "I swear Mom and Dad bought you from Dynamic Machines and had you programmed by an evil genius."
"But Barre, it's simple. Just look —"
He cut his brother off before he could wipe the display clean and start again. "Wait. Listen." He linked his neural to the computer and played a few bars of the piece he'd been working on last night. "Now score it for twelve voices. And use a microtonal scale."
Jem stared at him open mouthed as the simple melody line played over and over. Part of Barre's mind had already started to create a counterpoint and a rhythm track.
"I can't. You know I can't."
Barre thrust his arm in the middle of Jem's display and sent fragments of equations flying around the room before the computer extinguished them. "But it's easy. Simple even. Since I can do it." He pulled up a reproduction of old-fashioned staff paper and with a few economical gestures, wrote the melody line out. "There, easier now?"
Jem glared at him, the anger in his expression a smaller reproduction of their mother's face.
"Never mind." Barre wiped his music away with an open-handed gesture and flicked off the playback. The room fell silent. "I need some space." He left Jem to the work he'd rather be doing anyway and stormed off into the corridors of Daedalus Station, trying to look like he had some specific destination in mind.
***
"Jerk," Jem said as the door slid shut, and turned back to the monitor. It wasn't his fault he was smart. Besides, he worked hard for his grades and opportunities. He shouldn't have to apologize for that. It wasn't fair. Every time he tried to help Barre, it ended badly, but Jem was the stupid one who kept trying.
He was done. He could be just as selfish as his older brother.
"Okay, Ro, what have you got for me?" he said, linking his micro to the AI and waiting for the revised syllabus to download. His anger drained away as his new curriculum scrolled across the display: Cyber-neurolinguistics. AI interface design. A 3-d schema for the first-gen Dyn/Mac processor. Where the hell did she find that?
With shaking hands, he pulled up the schema and displayed it around him. "Wow," he whispered, blinking up at the AI source code. It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing he'd ever seen. Even the most basic of its subroutines had more complexity than any program he'd ever dared pull apart and rebuild. What did Ro think he could do with this?
"So, what do you think?"
He jumped, hearing Ro's voice behind him. She must have slipped in the room while he was drooling over the code.
"It's …" He waved his hands at the holographic representation and fell silent, his gaze shifting from parts to the whole and back again as he tried to concentrate on the logic strings and numbers whirling through his mind. Dizzy, he grabbed the edge of the counter and looked up at Ro, trying to keep from losing his breakfast.
"Yeah. Me too," she said, a rare smile lighting up her face. "I was up all night playing. Here, this'll make it better." She turned to his interface and wriggled her fingers at it. Jem could have sworn she was tickling the computer, rather than sending it commands. Layers of code collapsed in on itself until what was left looked like a normal program. A massive program, yes, but something he could take in with one gulp.
How in the universe had she done that? He looked up at Ro, his mouth hanging open.
"Better?"
All Jem could do was nod, thinking of Barre and the massive apology he owed his brother. "So what's the plan?" he asked, the squeak in his voice completely blowing the casual vibe he wanted. Now, he was glad he never got the chance to send Ro the code modifications he'd been working on.
"Don't worry. We don't have to deal with most of this." She waved her hand and more than half the program dimmed. "It's the interface I'm interested in, for now."
"Oh, that's all?" He grinned back at her. "What a relief."
She rubbed her hand along his head, brushing the short hair backwards. "You can handle it, small fry. I saw what you did with your interface mods."
His eyes widened.
"Yes, I peeked. Sorry."
But she wasn't sorry. He could see it in her smirk. Jem shrugg
ed. He wasn't all that mad, even if she treated him like a kid brother instead of a colleague — even if she broke into his personal files. There probably wasn't another person on the station who could have. Jem looked back at her simplified schematic and swallowed hard. She thought he could handle it. "You want me to graft my interface onto this?"
"Hell, yeah," Ro said, waving her hands again and setting the program spinning like an old fashioned globe. She studied the dancing lines of code and stopped it with the gentlest press of her fingertip. "Isn't this just crying out for a little tweak?"
Jem pulled out his micro and called up his program. The massive AI code dwarfed it, even with Ro's simplification. "Do you really think so?"
She looked down at him, her changeable eyes squinting in concentration. Jem didn't know if she was scrutinizing him or his code. "Make it work. Then we can talk."
Make it work. He stared at the bewildering code. Make it work. The scale of what he thought she wanted was enough to make him feel slow and thick. "And if I can't?" Silence answered him. When he looked up, she was gone.
Chapter 4
Barre's anger and frustration drummed a pounding counterpoint to the music streaming through his head as he paced the circular corridors of Daedalus station. He owed Jem an apology, but he couldn't face going back to the computer lab.
He shook his head, the unruly dreads his mother and father both hated sweeping across his back. What he really needed was an acoustically perfect, sound-proofed room stocked with a multi-synth and the computer to augment it. Where his parents supplied Jem with the latest and greatest, along with access to research experts across the galaxy, Barre's consolation prize included a fast micro and a neural synaptic interface. They weren't the best tools for the job, but the neural was better than nothing, given how little they tolerated what they considered his hobby.
His hobby. He clenched his hands into tight fists and kept walking. The blood throbbing in his ears drowned out the music. He stopped short and someone barreled into him from behind.
