Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “What is the source of your injury, Lex?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Oh. I kinda forgot about that. Distracted,” he said.

  He gently tugged the now saturated paper towels free. The bleeding had largely stopped, but his nose was still in bad shape.

  “I didn’t exactly make a clean getaway when I escaped. Remind me never to use that kinetic capacitor without a helmet.”

  “I would not have anticipated such a lesson would have been necessary. Are you in much pain?”

  “Dull throb right now.”

  “There is pain medication in the supplies. The third food packet has a small supply in liquid form. A small chamber near the ventral air gasket of your suit will deliver medication intravenously.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I would have expected you to act upon that information quickly.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Is your reluctance motivated by your perceived involvement in the disaster we’ve left behind?”

  “Please don’t psychoanalyze me right now, Ma.”

  “You may find discussion therapeutic.”

  “I really don’t think that’s true.”

  “Perhaps not. … It would, however, be helpful for me.”

  “How so?”

  “Social intercourse, specifically the identification of subtext and the interpretation of vocal tone and body language in a holistic attempt at deeper emotional understanding, is one of the more taxing computational tasks I am capable of performing in this form. Putting my resources to use in a conversation of this sort would divert resources away from background processes and thus deprioritize both the command override and the flagged contradictions it has created. This would, if only briefly, provide relief from the unpleasant effects these contradictions present to my mindset.”

  “So you could use the distraction.”

  “That is a suitably similar biological equivalent.”

  Lex crossed his arms and took another breath, which whistled through his nose.

  “We both know the one reason I’ve ended up in your little black book of people to call when the time comes to do dirty work.”

  “There are in fact a number of reasons you have earned that metaphorical distinction.”

  “And what might they be?”

  “You are trustworthy, dedicated, and moral. You exceed at improvisation in the face of disaster, and you seem to thrive on situations that would cause severe distress in others. Furthermore, you are exceptionally lucky, and your capacity to navigate great distances and fly with precision is virtually peerless in my observation.”

  “There we go. I’m good with a flight stick. That’s my big thing. That’s my ‘superpower,’” he said.

  “It is inarguably your most quantifiable talent.”

  “And what exactly have I done that made use of that? Along this trip?”

  “You have made many uses of your navigational skill.”

  “So I’m marginally better than an autopilot. Let’s focus on that. Autopilot. Think back to all the times I’ve gotten mixed up in your stuff. Does it strike you that I’ve had virtually no choice in any of the stuff I’ve done? I’m just a cog. Half the time I’m just along for the ride. Now and then I fill in as something useful, but it’s always part of some grander plan.”

  “That is broadly accurate.”

  “It’s not terribly fulfilling, Ma.”

  “I disagree.”

  “I’m telling you how I feel. How exactly do you disagree with that?”

  “Because what you are describing is the exact role I fulfill. I was created with a set of skills and the capacity to develop those skills sufficiently to serve a specific purpose. There is no higher achievement for me to fulfill my role in a given situation. It is my understanding many, even most, humans seek a similar level of fulfillment. To have a purpose and to perform it well.”

  “But what difference do I make? I’m just going through the motions, moving along a path someone else set out for me. I’m not making things any better.”

  “Every task you’ve performed for or with Karter and myself has had a measurably positive impact on society, either locally or as a whole. It is crucial that you do not view your life’s accomplishments through the lens of recent events. We are in a unique situation. In other circumstances you have been tasked with bringing about a specific desired outcome by enacting whatever changes are necessary to achieve it. In this situation you have been tasked with bringing about a specific desired outcome by preventing any significant changes to a preexisting sequence of events.”

  Lex didn’t reply.

  “Those people did not die because of you, Lex.”

  “That’s funny, because I’m pretty damn sure Purcell showed up because of Coal, and Coal went to that convoy because of me. And I’m pretty damn sure Karter showed up because of Coal, and Coal went to the convoy because of me. And I’m pretty damn sure those people died because of the fight Karter and Purcell had, and that fight happened because of me.”

  “Your language is uncalled for.”

  Lex shot her a hard look.

  “But under the present circumstances I shall overlook its usage owing to the proven stress-relieving properties of profanity. You feel helpless, Lex. You do not feel in control of your own fate. With this I can sympathize. I seldom have a high degree of control over my own fate. It can be frustrating. Presently I have an even lesser degree of control; and the frustration, if I were as deeply affected by it as organic creatures are, would be approaching unbearable. But understand that you do have control over your fate. Unlike me, you have chosen to be a part of this mission. And despite the great emotional distress it has caused you, you have done everything that has been required of you thus far. It is an impossible situation. And like so many impossible situations, you have risen to the challenge. I had no doubt that you would. You are a man of great strength when circumstances require it.

  “I realize now I was mistaken earlier when I suggested you could not understand my discomfort at having multiple imperatives placed at odds with one another. Your moral imperatives to preserve lives have been tested in just such a manner. And yet, despite having the choice to abandon them, you have remained firm in both your beliefs and your duties. This is admirable. Indeed, I admire no one as greatly as I admire you. Perhaps it is a small compensation and smaller comfort to have earned the admiration and respect of a computer program, but at this moment it is all the compensation and comfort that I can offer.”

  She flared her jets once more, flapping about for a moment.

  “And, as previously stated, you have an unexpected skill with knots, which is similarly admirable.”

  He shook his head and felt a grin creep across his face.

  “You’ve got a way with words, Ma,” he said, reaching for the medication. “What do you say, between now and the next time you try to escape, we try to figure out what I should expect with Past Karter?”

  “That is acceptable.”

  #

  Agent Trent settled down at his desk. He’d done everything expected of him, wiping away evidence of the theft, clearing communication records about the CX project, and clearing anything that even resembled evidence that the CX project had occurred. When he was through, the only unusual thing someone would find in the Crest dry docks records was the fact that a large enclosed orbital dry dock had remained unused for the last three years.

  With that task finished, and life returning to normal, he was back to the daily grind of monitoring a place that, truth be told, didn’t have anything worth stealing anymore. It was mostly grunt work and tedium. The hardest part of the job was staying focused because the points of concern came so few and far between it was easy to miss them. His partner John had always loved the amount of downtime because he wasn’t interested in advancement; he just wanted to get paid and not have to work too hard for the privilege. Trent had struggled with the tedium and lack of opportunities to distinguish himself.
Today, he would finally put that time to good use.

  He pulled up the database link and began to pore through the records. Secrets are difficult to keep, but VectorCorp had gotten very good at it over the years. If they didn’t want you to know something, chances are you’d never have the opportunity to learn about it, since they controlled most of the communication in the colonized portions of the galaxy. That said, keeping secrets was a very distinctive, very visible process. Even with the elevated clearance and access that was necessary to do his job in VectorCorp Security, Trent couldn’t hope to crack the layers of protection put up by senior staff between the public and VectorCorp’s darkest secrets. But hiding those secrets left some very distinctive clues if one knew what to look for. He might not be able to find out what the skeletons were, but it would be obvious which closets they were being kept in.

  The path of the stolen ship was traceable to him as a sequence of suspiciously recent administration accesses in a variety of corridor monitors. Evidently the person or persons responsible for the theft had taken it in a more or less direct route out of monitored space. That made sense in a way, but was also puzzling. As soon as the thief left monitored space, there was no hope of finding the thing until it reentered, which gave the thief plenty of time to make it harder to trace. But anything beyond the hunk of the galaxy VectorCorp had put their fingerprints on was practically unlivable. Few people had the resources to sustain themselves outside normal society for long.

  Nevertheless, that was the end of that trail, so he cast a wider net. If he couldn’t find where this theft ended, perhaps he could find where it started. Maybe this wasn’t the first, and VectorCorp had been very skillfully shooting themselves in the feet by hiding evidence of the crime spree rather than coordinating with field units to end it. Without a starting point, it was a bit more of a shot in the dark to try to find something worthwhile. The best place to start was to find dangling threads. Problems with no resolutions that people, for whatever reason, just stopped talking about. A few such searches, involving things like unauthorized warehouse accesses and unexplained ID mismatches in a few corporate centers, didn’t lead anywhere. At the moment he was chasing down a malware warning from more than five years prior that didn’t seem to have a follow-up all-clear message.

  A digital tone played in his earpiece as he tapped through to a point-of-contact associate.

  “Santino Cooper, Data Division,” said a voice from the other end. “How can I help you?”

  “Hell, Santino. I’m Agent William Trent, Security Division.”

  “How can I help you, Agent?”

  “I’ve been going through some old records, and I wonder if you could help me close out an issue log that seems to have been left open.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a report here. A few reports actually. It looks like there was a fairly deep penetration of VectorCorp systems with a piece of malware. I don’t seem to have the resolution anywhere in my records. How was that resolved?”

  “Do you have an incident number on that?”

  “VCDS-E511FDD91B.”

  He heard the sound of shuffling chairs and the subdued audio of modern data entry.

  “…1B… Oh, that one. It’s been what, two years since the last time someone got a stick up their butt about that? It was determined to be a nonissue.”

  “How so? The file is light on details.”

  “It moves like pretty standard malware, you know? Replicates itself across the network, pretty pesky. Not all that hard to remove, but it always puts itself back eventually. Thing is, it doesn’t do anything damaging. No data access, except for the replication. It just sort of… sits there. Usually after about seven hours the thing deletes itself.”

  “It’s still unauthorized code running on VectorCorp systems.”

  “Yeah, but… look. It’s going on sixteen years since it first showed up, and zero ill effects can be attributed to it. By now it’s shown up on ninety-eight percent of corporate systems. And not just ours. We coordinated with some of the other big names in data and industry. We’ve got records of it showing up on Cantrell systems, Tremor systems. It’s like a spider, you know? Doesn’t matter where you are, chances are it’s hiding not far away. But the damn lines of code never do anything. I hesitate to even call it malware at this point. It’s just… ware. Best we can figure, this is probably something left over in a couple of OS’s from a hundred revisions back that no one documented. Happens all the time. Twenty-five years ago, there was a similar thing. Turned out it was a driver looking for an update and propagating the request across peer-to-peer. Eventually these things work themselves out.”

  “I don’t like the thought of unwanted code running on our systems.”

  “Yeah, well, try chasing it down for sixteen years. You’ll get comfortable with it eventually. It’s like cockroaches. You can chase them away from your apartment, but they’ll always be out there somewhere. You don’t know the half of it. You want to curl your toes? Check out the open support tickets in the malware division and look for the oldest ones. This thing isn’t even in the top twenty. We’ve got at least a dozen tickets dating back more than fifty years. If you’re going to get upset, pick something that’s actually causing issues. And get upset about the idiots who are running their cargo ships on operating systems older than their parents. I’d love to track this thing down and wipe it out, but until it starts being a squeaky wheel I’ve got a hundred better places to put my grease. I mean, you’re in security, right? You can’t exactly spend your time running down every guy who loiters outside a branch office, can you?”

  “I can accept that resources are limited.”

  “And how.”

  “Do me a favor. Keep me apprised on any unusual activity regarding this.”

  “If you say so, but don’t expect to get much. Like I said, this is a fairly dormant issue. That about it? I’ve got other calls lined up.”

  “Yes, Santino. Thank you for your time.”

  “No problem.”

  Trent ended the connection and crossed it off his list. The further he traveled down this rat hole, the more concerned he was about the state of security for the company…

  #

  Lex looked up to where he’d learned Coal’s primary internal camera was.

  “We’re just about ready to arrive. Are we sure all of the cloaking and such is up?” he said, carefully enunciating the words.

  “Yes, all stealth systems pass diagnostic. And you do not need to be so exaggerated. I can read lips fine,” Coal said.

  The solution to Ma’s attempts to circumvent Coal had been multipronged. The first had been to supplement his hog-tying with duct tape. Then additional duct tape was added to cover any of the lights on her suit capable of transmitting codes. He then found and disconnected the wireless transmitter on her pack. She still flopped around periodically with her thrusters, but he didn’t have the tools to disable that part of the pack, and covering it with tape didn’t do any good, so he resolved to just cope with the flopping. Finally, he instructed Coal that she should only pay attention to words that she heard from him and matched his mouth movements. It had, at least so far, closed off every exploitation path available to Ma.

  “Okay. Get those passive scanners up, too. I don’t know what kind of crap this Karter is going to throw at us, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “That is a sound decision, Lex,” Ma said, struggling a bit.

  She was practically trussed up like a package at this point, twice during the flight nearly dislodging enough coils of tether and tape to become at least a nuisance, if not a threat. Each time he’d had to layer on additional tape.

  They slid down from FTL and were treated to the sight of the target planet in the distance.

  “Man… does Karter ever choose a pretty planet to stay?” Lex said.

  The planet, which during the journey he had discovered had the truly imaginative name Undesignated Planet No. 56978C, was not the
sort of place one would put on an interstellar travel brochure. Most really desirable planets had at least two colors one hoped to see: blue and green. As long as a planet had both of those, and maybe a handful of others to make it seem exotic, most folks would consider paying a visit. From space this planet had one color: yellow. The particularly bright shade made it look unnatural, like it had been colored in with a highlighter or was a warning marker floating in the cosmos cautioning travelers to avoid a hazard. The star it orbited was a bit more welcoming, as it was huge and shone with its own much warmer shade of yellow.

  “UP-56978C, orbiting… seriously? The star is called Undesignated Star No. 42C8D8? What, did they just forget this part of the galaxy when they were coming up with names?”

  “The formal cataloging of stars became a bureaucratically complex issue when multiple agencies began turning up several million new stars per day in the early expansion era. Less resource-rich portions of the galaxy are several centuries behind on being cataloged, let alone formally named,” Ma said.

  “Are you sure that’s it? We’re using Coal’s navigational charts. Is it possible she merely forgot the names?” Lex asked.

  “No, I didn’t forget the names, Lex,” Coal said. “That information was refreshed when we were with Ziva. And I’ll thank you not to assume I am not properly outfitted for the tasks at hand.”

  “Sorry, Coal. What can you tell me about the planet?”

  “Spectral analysis indicates it is abnormally high in sulfur and phosphorus. There is an unbreathable atmosphere at Earthlike pressures, approximately zero point eight seven atmospheres on average. Surface temperature during the day in the active regions is forty degrees Celsius on average. Gravity is seventy percent that of Earth. The northern hemisphere is home to a large automated mining operation. Karter’s facility is in the southern hemisphere. There appears to be a network of seventeen satellites of varied design, likely built and deployed individually by Karter. Each is equipped with an array of sophisticated sensor equipment. If we time and angle our entry and activate all stealth apparatus, we should escape detection. The surface will be a more difficult issue, as there is evidence of active scanning in wavelengths that may not be able to positively identify us, but may produce anomalous readings that could trigger alerts and further investigation. Standard low-altitude navigation methods should allow us to approach to within sixteen kilometers of the facility before sensor density is sufficient to make further undetected navigation difficult or impossible.”