Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

by Kate Moretti

  “He’s not here to lecture,” Gracie said. “He’s using an early technology to spy on someone here without leaving a trail.”

  “But who is he spying on?” Georgie asked.

  “Let’s see.” Gracie raised her left hand and moved it cautiously through the air. The data model inched along with her. Soon enough, they were standing right behind Thorwald. She bent at the knees so she could look directly over his shoulder and then blinked twice to bring up a laser targeting app. The bright-green light paralleled Thorwald’s line of sight and a small dot came to rest in the center of Darcy’s chest.

  “Her.” It had to be.

  While Gracie searched the pretty girl’s face for any sign of the friend she used to be, Georgie picked another tiny hole in the dataverse and raided the ship’s personnel archives. “Darcy Sharpe,” she read. “Descended from refugees who fled the Second Sandmoon Massacre.”

  They didn’t know what to think. Who was Thorwald searching for? Family, friends, or a hated enemy? Sandmoon blood feuds were notorious.

  “We should tell Rostom,” Georgie said. “Let him deal with this.”

  “I think you’re right,” Gracie said. “But we’re going to be in trouble.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I still think Rostom might be secretly pleased we were able to hack his array.”

  “You’re crazy,” Gracie said. “He’s going to evict me and set your yacht loose.”

  Georgie’s avatar laughed. Had the real Georgie ever been so happy?

  “I’ve told you before—if you get evicted—which you won’t—you can live with me.” This time, Gracie didn’t shudder. But live on a remora-yacht? Trade citizenship for that badge of shame? Gracie knew the yachts’ reputation was unfair. As a rule, their owners weren’t criminals at all but independent travelers, unable or unwilling to pledge allegiance to a civilization vessel or planetary government. Rostom welcomed them whenever they appeared. He was happy to protect them, repair their ships, supply them, and carry them as far as they wanted to go. So why all the hate from so many citizens?

  “And,” Georgie continued, “if we get exiled—which we won’t—my yacht might surprise you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. In a big way.”

  “How?”

  Georgie smiled. “I’ve read her performance profile. Rostom’s been upgrading her. She’s at least five times as fast as the Bagdasarian, and I think she has a worm drive.”

  No way.

  Georgie spoke about her yacht as if it was a live person. Was that because of her coma? Did Georgie have a different perspective on life? Gracie was about to challenge her friend’s outlandish claims when a sudden wall of noise struck her straight between the eyes, so loud, it was physical. Gracie couldn’t even think at first. The force of the sound, the blow, had knocked all her senses out of her. But then she realized.

  “The firewall,” she gasped. “This is the alarm. We’re under attack.” And all three firewalls had been breached at once.

  As she let loose a rapid sequence of defensive commands, Gracie was stunned by the reaction of Georgie’s avatar. The girl was on her feet, rising up on her toes, hands reaching for and clawing at her throat. Her eyes were wide with panic—and fear.

  “Gracie,” she hissed through frantic attempts to draw breath. “Gracie, help me… help me… please. He’s coming… he’s here.”

  “Who’s coming, Georgie? Tell me who.”

  “Thorwald Burks… he’s going to kill me!” With a final plaintive look of appeal and desperation, the avatar imploded, shattering inward. A hundred million tiny pieces of Georgie vanished into thin air.

  “What in the stars is going on?”

  Gracie needed time to think, but there was no time. She plunged headlong into the Verse and fired an urgent message to Georgie’s consciousness. Are you all right? What’s happening? Georgie, how can I help? There was no reply. This mystery was more dangerous than Gracie could ever have dreamed. If Georgie was right, Thorwald Burks would kill to keep his secrets.

  Gracie was drowning under a flood of frantic ideas that wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to find a handhold and pull herself free. Her head was about to explode. She forced herself to stop. Closing her eyes and all the open ports in her firewalls, Gracie drew in a single breath and held it deep inside. She counted to thirty. It seemed like a decent number. She exhaled slowly and used the physical focus that was required to find a single thought she could follow through to the end.

  Georgie’s avatar had looked so real. Rostom’s technology was capable of perfect replication—everyone knew that—but Gracie had never seen any avatar display that level of emotion. The terror in her friend’s eyes had been absolute. How had that been possible? What did it mean? Gracie didn’t know, but she had to help Georgie.

  She should speak to Rostom. He could intervene and save the comatose girl. Gracie was about to take down her firewalls when she realized Rostom couldn’t help. Wouldn’t help. Remora-yachts existed beyond his jurisdiction. But at least she could ask him exactly where Georgie’s yacht was moored.

  Again, she was on the verge of dumping her firewalls when she had a second, third, and fourth thought. Each was a little uglier than the last. How did she know she could trust Rostom? Thorwald Burks could never have found Georgie, working alone. Either he had Rostom’s help, or he had Rostom hacked. Either way, Gracie was on her own. She was going to need to change her clothes.

  The detectives’ office disappeared when Gracie blinked. She opened her eyes to an empty white room. She pointed at a section of wall, and it opened to reveal an empty box large enough for her to walk inside. She raised a finger high in the air and wiped it down with an impatient flourish as she sent her outline designs to the closet’s processor. The matter converter began to fabricate the clothing she had requested—a close-fitting jumpsuit that was ready before she had even stepped out of her skirt.

  As she pulled on her jumpsuit, she fired bullet queries deep into the Verse. The good news was the maintenance tender was still there, working on the mast above the building. The bad news came in a bundle of three. There was still no word from Georgie. Darcy had disappeared. Thorwald Burks had ceased to exist.

  The elevator raced from the roof of her building toward the inner hull. Gracie’s mind moved faster. She checked, rechecked, and checked again those three impossible facts, but she couldn’t find any way past or around them.

  Georgie’s consciousness had been snatched back to her yacht and imprisoned there.

  Darcy was nowhere to be found.

  All trace of Thorwald Burks had been removed from the arrays.

  Gracie had too many mysteries to solve. The only way forward was to take them one by one, but first, she had a maintenance tender to steal.

  The inner hull of the Bagdasarian was not a simple shell wrapped around an interior. The inner hull was the dedicated military quarter. Gracie had only a limited idea of the secrets it held and its capabilities, but she was sure her approach was being tracked. She smiled for all the monitors she assumed were there, sharing her air. The elevator would only take her as far as the gallery, the innermost level of the inner hull, an interconnected network of walkways and viewpoints looking down on the habitat. As soon as the doors opened, she sprinted to the junction of two nearby walkways and sought out the mast and tender below. Holding their position in her mind, she closed her eyes to focus on the Verse.

  The size of the maintenance fleet came as a surprise. There were only a thousand tenders. She had expected more. Her search routines needed less than a second to identify the one she was interested in and retrieve a detailed specification set. Rostom had built the tender only recently, to conduct a vessel-wide round of mast repairs and upgrades. When the work was complete, the wireless data network would be able to support all the Bagdasarian’s
critical processes. Rostom, Gracie thought, was adding yet another layer of redundancy. She didn’t know why. Maybe he was bored?

  When Gracie and Darcy had been friends, they talked about one day taking a ride on a tender. They hadn’t planned to travel physically, only to seize remote control and cruise above the habitat, searching—Darcy’s idea—for the Great Imperial Palace where the last Galactic Emperor was believed to live. Darcy had wanted Gracie to hide the hijacked vehicle from security so they could hunt the Emperor for as long as it took. Gracie had discovered that was impossible—the tenders rebooted their systems every twenty-four hours—and she didn’t believe the Emperor was on the Bagdasarian at all, but nonetheless, she had coded a tiny Trojan designed to seize control of a tender’s central processor. It was time to see if she’d gotten it right.

  She spoofed a message from her neighborhood control reporting intermittent problems with an overhead mast and sent it to the maintenance master scheduler. The master scheduler accepted the request and forwarded it to Gracie’s target vehicle, as she’d known it would. When the tender opened the message, the Trojan sprang to life. The tender’s processor lacked all but the most rudimentary defenses. The Trojan overwhelmed them immediately. Gracie had control.

  After disconnecting the tender from the mast, Gracie brought it up to hover underneath the gallery. So far, so easy, she thought. Everything after that was going to be hard. Maintenance tenders weren’t designed to carry passengers. They had no cabin space. Gracie would be riding on the roof. And it was a long way down—at least a kilometer. Shaking her head, she started to climb the safety barrier.

  Holding the tender in place while she risked her life was difficult for Gracie. She couldn’t simply tell it to stay still; she had to make that happen by manipulating its inertial navigation systems. She sat on top of the barrier and held tightly with both hands while she focused on steadying the tender beneath her. Fortunately, the only wind was a light and steady breeze floating in from the hills. The tender was much smaller than she’d expected—no larger than twice the size of her bunk, maybe less. Could she really do this? Georgie and Darcy were in danger. She didn’t have a choice.

  Taking a breath and her life in her hands, Gracie brought the tender up to meet her descent and stepped into the void.

  Landing on her feet, she felt the tender drop under the impact, but the upward momentum she had given it reduced the effect, or so she told herself. As soon as her feet hit, she bent at the waist and knees, pitching forward, her hands reaching for the edges of the roof. The sudden movement upset the balance of the tender. It tilted in response. The front rose up before her eyes, and the tail end fell away. Gracie began to slide off.

  The prospect of falling filled her mind. A single question terrified her and would not be denied: would she be alive when she hit the ground, or would her heart have given out already? A rush of follow-ups struggled to be heard. How far would she fall? How long would it take? What would she land on? Did she have any chance at all? Unable to remember she had control of the vehicle, she panicked and scrambled frantically, clawing for the edge while her toes sought out any kind of foothold but found none.

  Her right hand caught the edge.

  Her fingers locked around it.

  Her left hand fell short.

  The angle of the incline continued to rise.

  Any minute now, she thought, I’m going to fall off. I can’t hold on with one hand. Her fingers began to burn.

  That was when fear drove her to her senses. Ignoring the pain, she gripped as tightly as she could and forced herself to focus on the navigation system. Recognizing her panic and understanding that any mistake she made might be her last, she found the discipline to validate each action before she triggered even the slightest change. When she was ready, she released a flurry of commands, and sure enough, the tender leveled out.

  Her body pressed flat against the roof, arms outstretched, both hands holding on, Gracie did the deep-breath thing again. It was a very long way down.

  After a second breath and exhalation, Gracie pointed the tender’s nose toward the front of vessel. The flight would take almost an hour. She hoped Georgie could hold out that long. She wondered where Darcy was.

  Maybe, she thought, I won’t need to travel so far. First things first, she needed to locate Georgie’s yacht.

  Every message sent across the dataverse carried hidden header notes that identified the sender, the recipient, and the route the message had taken between the two—one line for every message-transport agent used. In ordinary conversation, no one ever looked at a single header line, because the implants did that automatically for them. Most people wouldn’t even know what headers were. She did. And she hoped they would lead her to Georgie’s remora-yacht.

  The log files of all Gracie’s conversations were stored in her local cache for ninety days. Her first query identified messages sent by Georgie during the previous week. The second stripped the headers out of all those messages, identified the different routes, and traced them back to their source. After a moment’s thought, she ran a sort to order those locations by the frequency of use and mapped them out across a schematic of the Bagdasarian. A date-time filter lent added clarity and enabled Gracie to remember where she and Georgie had been at the time of each conversation.

  The Mystery Room appeared frequently. Gracie deleted it.

  Her own apartment. Delete.

  The Art Museum. The Celebration Cinema. The Great Pyramid. Delete. Delete. Delete.

  There were only two possible locations. Late-night chats when Georgie’s consciousness might have returned to her yacht. The problem was one was on the underside, while the other was up top. She did not have time to travel to both. Gracie had to choose. And she had to be right.

  She did the deep-breath thing again. She needed to clear her mind. Gracie understood so much about the dataverse and how it operated. She could hack a tender and crack the Bagdasarian’s arrays, but she still knew next to nothing about her own brain. She had learned one trick, though: it always paid to give her subconscious time.

  As she exhaled, she remembered the terror in Georgie’s eyes. That effect had been remarkable. Another image popped into her mind: the hospital construct where she and Georgie had talked. The view through the porthole. The emptiness. What if…?

  What if Georgie’s standards hadn’t dropped at all? What if that really was the view from her room?

  Gracie had never seen a view like that. No yacht moored up top could ever have that view. There were far too many lights, and the hulls appeared open to the sky. Gracie looked up and saw crystal planetesimals everywhere. She plotted a course to the underside.

  Security droids raced to intercept the tender as it moved above Manhattan Park. Gracie fired off a simple masking signal. This is not the tender you are looking for.

  Gracie saw no sign of the Great Imperial Palace.

  The underside was dark, dimly lit at best. She might have chosen right, and she would know for sure in eight minutes and counting. What if she was wrong?

  She couldn’t think like that.

  Another thought arose from her subconscious. Why hadn’t Thorwald come for her? If he was so desperate to cover his tracks, why hadn’t he come for her? His brute-force attack had opened a tunnel through all her firewalls. She had been defenseless. He knew where she lived and how to get at her. What made Georgie more important than Gracie was? She didn’t know, and she decided the question could wait. She still had everything to do.

  Tasking in parallel, she sent off an army of queries to search for Darcy Sharpe and inserted custom routines into the yachts surrounding the one that had to be Georgie’s.

  There was still no sign of Darcy. She had last been seen leaving the courtyard with a bunch of her new best friends. They were all currently sitting around a table in an apartment Gracie didn’t recogn
ize, playing some kind of game. Darcy wasn’t there. Her friends didn’t seem to care about the empty chair.

  Five minutes ago, a man had stood on top of Georgie’s yacht. Gracie saw him clearly through the eyes of neighboring craft. It had to be Thorwald. He had been attacking the yacht’s hull with a variety of tools. And now he was gone. A service hatch was open.

  Gracie sent message after message toward Georgie. Every one bounced back. A series of subtle queries revealed a powerful firewall wrapped around the yacht. Gracie had never seen that design before. She would need hours to find a way through, assuming she could. Thorwald had skills. He had disappeared. Gracie didn’t know where to start.

  Georgie’s consciousness would never surrender; Gracie knew that. Her friend would use every tool at her disposal to keep Thorwald away. Gracie had to be prepared to fight when she arrived.

  The minutes crawled by. Her hands were trembling. There was only thing she could do.

  Rostom?

  Gracie? The Bagdasarian’s avatar appeared beside the tender. He was lying on his back, hands behind his head, eyes closed, as if he were tanning at the Bali Solar Beach. The tender was traveling at its top speed. Rostom wasn’t moving, but he stayed with Gracie anyway. I wondered if I’d hear from you.

  You know what’s going on?

  I know everything.

  Then help her.

  You know I cannot. There are rules.

  You write the rules.