Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  “Yep. Took me enough trouble to get that far. The computers have not been cooperative today. I had to restart my coherence calculations twice and then the entire lab environment collapsed and I needed to restart everything. Rubbish system.”

  On the screen were blocks of code in the verb-noun shorthand that was EPV, Electric Pulse Verbalisation, tiny electrical differentials across brain synapses translated into language.

  All mindbase modules she saw and altered regularly had a strictly ordered appearance. All the lines were of similar length, each representing a thought or concept in verb-noun shorthand. If they looked artificial it was because they were; someone had physically written the code.

  The block on Dr Chee’s screen consisted of lines of varying length, usually a sign of piggyback junk code which was sometimes generated by the coding software, and which was why mindbases always needed to be checked by a human before transfer. However, the code was not junk. The lines shown on the screen still parsed, but many of the thoughts and concepts had been modified with nested verb-noun combinations.

  She knew the signs.

  “This is an adult mindbase,” she said. Only someone with experience would have the maturity to modify a concept like do not lie into do not lie to people you want to trust you. Labs didn’t make adult mindbases; there had been far too much trouble with that process. To have an adult body with a juvenile mind did, in general, not work well. The split off of the Taurus Army was proof of that, when a single error in a mindbase, copied across an entire army, had led to ISF losing control over a force of seven thousand. They’d been lucky that the fault involved feelings for a woman rather than war-thoughts, and that the Taurus Army had become independent mercenaries under that woman’s leadership; things could have been so much worse.

  “An adult mindbase indeed,” Dr Chee said.

  “See?” Keb said from the bed. “Even he says it. You have to believe me.”

  The low light from the monitors reflected in his eyes. While Melati went to the bed, he twisted his head to wipe his cheeks on the pillow. There were wet tracks across the skin.

  She sat down next to him, and took his hand in hers, on her lap.

  “Yes, it seems part of your mindbase is adult.”

  “All of it.” His eyes were intense and burning and she had to look away. “You have to believe me. I’m not Keb.” He looked at Dr Chee, who returned his look and something said they’d had a number of arguments over this already.

  “Who do you think you are, then? Who is Jas and where does he live? A worker somewhere in the labs?” Although security in the mindbase programming labs was very tight—and if one of Rosalie’s programming team had made a mistake, it should have shown up in the form of nonsense code.

  “I live with my brothers.”

  “What are their names?”

  His expression became distant. “There’s, um . . . um . . .”

  “Cohort?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Where are they?” Melati tried again.

  Another tear welled up in his eyes. His lip trembled. “See, I’m turning into a little boy. I can’t remember anything.” He burst into tears.

  Melati stroked his hand. She met Dr Chee’s eyes. The doctor punched a command on the screen behind him, likely delivering the same calming routine that Melati had tried to administer. The boy’s sobs slowly became less until his eyelids started to droop and then closed.

  Dr Chee went into his office, and Melati followed him after gently putting Keb’s arm by his side.

  “What can you do to help him?” She felt more distressed than she wanted to admit. If constructs had faults, they always behaved in a clearly non-human way. This was . . . different, more disturbing.

  Dr Chee sighed. “It’s hard to say without knowing what is wrong with him. That is going to be the first step: finding out where the material came from. Unfortunately, we’re racing against time. The longer it takes us to locate the material, the more the mindbase will have adapted to his body and the less he will remember.”

  As Keb said, he was turning into a little boy.

  “Have you checked for anyone by the name of Jas in the base or programming lab?”

  “That’s what I was doing there when Dixon turned up demanding that I come to that useless meeting. There is no one. I’ve also checked our entire processed mindbase archive. We’ve never had anyone by that name.”

  “Do you think the Jas part of his mind real or fabricated?”

  “I suspect it’s real. His mind is highly coherent.”

  “Apart from his distress at the moment, do we need to worry about this? I mean—if the mindbase is going to adapt to his body, the problem will go away with time.”

  Dr Chee shook his head. “He doesn’t want to be here. That emotion is strong enough that I don’t think it will change, just the reason for it. Now he thinks he has to look for someone, later he might think that he has extra brothers outside the force. He still won’t want to be with us.” His eyes said, He’ll suffer psychotic episodes and We’ll lose him, and with him, the entire cohort. The boys would be written off before they even started their military training. Sometimes the Taurus Army would take on failed ISF cohorts that were not too badly-damaged, and let them do mundane jobs stationside, but it would be a dreary existence.

  She had never failed a cohort. Keb, asleep on the bed, deserved better. The boys who were now with Louise deserved better.

  “So what else?”

  “If the lab continues to plead ignorance on this issue, I’m going to have to manually check all his modules one by one. The only other alternative is to deactivate him, do a complete dump, run diagnostics and reactivate, but without any behavioural parameters, we’re going to be stabbing in the dark, so I’d really like to avoid doing that, because it might make things worse than they are now.” He looked at his hands, folded in his lap. “Much worse.”

  “Yes.” When that happened, they might as well swap the mindbase for someone unrelated. It was a routine procedure to transfer an entire mindbase. Fiddling with individual components was much harder. They could simply put an entirely new personality to replace the current one, but it would leave the cohort damaged. It would leave him alone. Constructs did not function well alone.

  He sighed. “We might still need to do that, but what I want from you, Melati, is to get as many behavioural notes and memories from him as you can before he has a complete meltdown.” Because faults were much easier to detect after a meltdown.

  “Will a meltdown happen in time for him to recover his full functionality within the cohort?”

  Dr Chee blew out a breath through his nostrils. “I hope so.”

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  WITH THAT, MELATI was finally able to go home.

  She trudged from the CAU through the clean and newly-carpeted corridors to the change room, where only a few women still chatted with each other, the tail end of the shift change. Melati walked past them to her usual corner, and none of them paid much attention to her. Two were fellow teachers, both Kesslers, and the third was a Brown, who she thought worked in support and maintenance.

  Her back to the room, facing the mirror, she shed her uniform like a fake skin, peeling white cloth off brown skin, like an inside-out fruit.

  She caught a few glimpses from the other women. It was sad and funny how they made such an effort not to look at her.

  She opened her locker. She shook out the sarong, thin fabric billowing like a pink flag, wound it around her and tucked it in at the front. Then she put on her kebaya, a pretty cream-coloured one with small embroidered flowers in real silk thread. She put on her armbands and earrings, let her hair out of the regulation bun and plaited it so it hung black and glistening down the middle of her back.

  By that time, the other women had left in a gaggle, into the base’s crew quarters where they all lived. Melati eyed herself in the mirror and whirled around, earrings glittering. Quite acceptable, if she said s
o herself.

  She thumbed the door panel and when it beeped at her, she said, “Melati Hermann Rudiyanto, leaving the base for end-of-shift.”

  The light flashed. The lock hissed open and let her through into the lift foyer, guarded today by Desi, tag Pfitzinger 102. She looked gangly and awkward, but the reason Pfitzingers had guard jobs was the firearm they carried at their side. Melati had trained a cohort of them once, and they were the most dedicated and focused people she had ever met. Sharpshooters. Most of them were female.

  Desi smiled. “Home time, huh?”

  “Sure is.”

  She used her pass to open the lift door and Melati stepped in.

  As the doors slid shut, Desi said, “See you tomorrow.”

  The lift took Melati diagonally down into the adjacent ring of the station proper. The lift doors opened into the station’s main hall. The ISF guard stationed by the side of the door lifted his hand and smiled. With her being the only person from stationside working at the ISF base, his must be incredibly boring.

  The hall was a modern three-storey cavity, lit in soft bluish light. It was the hub of all arrivals and contained the main lift shafts to the docking and industrial rings as well as being the sole entry point to the ISF ring.

  The lift opposite was disgorging a bunch of mining workers into the large open space. Men and women in dirty overalls who had spent the past seven hours gathering and crunching ice at Sarasvati’s rings. Melati knew many of the miners, at least by their small brown faces. In the wake of the group, the musty smell of the humid air inside the ships lingered. The smell took her thoughts to an unused cupboard in her unit, where one such suit hung, untouched for more than fifteen years. She could see the man who used to wear it coming into the unit, and a much smaller version of herself run up to him, Pak!

  He would lift her up and she’d smell the rank old-mining-ship stench on his overalls and tell him You stink, and he’d laugh.

  And then she’d tell him never to leave again.

  Sometimes, he would tell her, I’m working so that my child never has to be a miner.

  She shook the memories from her mind.

  No, Pak, I have never become a miner, but that is about the only thing I have never done.

  If only he were still around to listen to her, then maybe half the things she’d done would never have happened.

  She filed out the entrance hall with the stream of miners, mixing with passengers from a shuttle that had just arrived. By the look of the people, mostly constructs, she guessed they’d come from the istel—interstellar—beacon station on the edge of the solar system. A group of women had the appearance of academics, with their finely cut suits and intelligent wheeled suitcases that trundled after them like little doggies.

  The passage out of the hall into the BC block—a commercial area between the main hall and the B sector—bled into another huge hall, this one showing the station’s age—darker, with dank yellowish lighting, scuffed walls, floors worn smooth with the passage of many feet and light fittings that used to be white. You could still see the black lines where they had taken apart the old entrance to make room for the hall and access to the ISF base—an additional ring which sat on top of the older residential ring, making the whole thing vaguely resemble a child’s stacking toy. The main station was eighty years old; Melati remembered the ISF coming to New Jakarta when she was sixteen. There had been a lot of panic about the new constructs in the station—they’ll rape your daughters; they have no morals and no beliefs—but even if they’d been rampaging sex machines—and Melati yet had to encounter one who was—they were not allowed into the station. The base had turned out to be self-sufficient.

  Groups of people hung around the many pillars that supported the low ceiling. They were all part of the usual crowd, the vendors in their warungs selling souvenirs or snacks. Melati bought a packet of dry-roasted soy cubes from Dian and was rewarded with the usual “God bless all you good people,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

  Of course making the prayer meeting was out of the question, and Melati had a question concerning Keb that her cousin Rina could answer for her. Rina worked in the old docking area—“old” since the docking ring was added, but still used for small ships and shuttles. And she would still be at work, as her work hours started earlier and ended later than the standard shift change. At least she got paid extra for it.

  As Melati went on, the corridors became more colourful and were lined with coconut palms in huge pots. The lack of real shredded coconut for making serundeng annoyed a lot of people, but so far the palms brought in for this purpose had failed to deliver coconuts, interesting though their trunks were, thin and twisting in strange directions.

  This area catered to travellers, with cluttered shops charging outrageous amounts for mediocre handiwork, like Li Wei’s shop selling fake-local shirts—for how much? Li Wei stood in the doorway, his dragon-tattooed arms crossed over his chest, his beady black eyes watching the passersby like a predator. No wonder his prices were so high; he never sold anything.

  A steady stream of people went in and out of the cramped and dark foyer of the largest dockside hotel: short-term workers, merchants and visitors. A lot of people hung around in this part of thoroughfare, talking in groups and leaning against the walls. Barang-barang men, looking for work, tier 1 shunt operators clutching infopads looking for contract workers. Among them stood a group of young girls, whom no but Melati one would have noticed. Most were no more than fifteen, and wore too-large, dark clothing. One was opening a parcel containing lumpias and passing them to the others with a thin hand that bore dirt stains from living in the back corridors. They were gelandangan, homeless. The first girl to take one of the greasy parcels—really, where did they buy crap like that?—was a thin wisp of a thing with ratty black hair. Her faded and worn stationsuit was much too big for her except where it strained around her hideously distended belly.

  Melati stopped.

  Two girls whispered to each other and then they all turned around and looked at Melati, brown eyes meeting hers. She had seen some of the girls before over the years, holding the hands of their mothers while walking in the crowds of the B sector. Did their family know that their daughters hung around the docks selling themselves to seedy istel freighter crews? Did they know that the girls were in the grip of the New Hyderabad mafia, the vilest criminals in humanity?

  One of the girls whispered something to another and they moved off. Not too fast because that would surely cause their little friend to drop her baby on the spot.

  A man watched Melati from the other side of the thoroughfare, leaning against the wall. He was tall and olive-skinned and had a short-cropped beard. She had seen him before, too. She would bet he was one of the baby smugglers, probably the girls’ “investor”, a member of the New Hyderabad mafia visiting here as “merchant”.

  For years, Melati had wasted no opportunity to warn young girls, and they still fell for these hideous schemes. What was a baby worth these days? A thousand credits at six months, and two thousand at full term? That did not cover a third of the money needed for a ticket off-station, not even to New Hyderabad, their closest neighbour, and honestly, who wanted to go there?

  She slid through the crowd, bumping into beefy men and lines of workers. “Excuse me, excuse me.” She could just see the orange fabric of the girl’s stationsuit.

  “Excuse me, wait!”

  She caught up with the group and the girl at the back turned. She was a daughter of a family three doors down from hers. “Susanti!”

  The girl gave Melati a cold stare from under a ragged fringe of dirty hair. “Why can’t you leave us alone?”

  “I care about my nieces and sisters,” Melati said.

  The girl flicked hair out of her eyes and continued her belligerent stare.

  “Do you know what their game is?” Melati looked at the pregnant girl, who stared back at her, defiant.

  The girl spat on the floor. “So easy for you to tal
k, with your job and your money, lo.” By God, was she even sixteen?

  “They’ll take your child when it is born, and they won’t give it to other people like they tell you, but they’ll kill it and use it to make clones. Five to each baby. They’ll use vats to grow them, and then they’ll work in mining ships and factories, or as harvesters in the front-line stations. They’ll be lucky to reach adulthood. You’ll never see them, and they’ll never know you exist. That’s what will happen.”

  Proper constructs were valuable, and private mining and transport companies were always looking for ways to save money on personnel. Clones—however despicable the process—were much cheaper, but the New Hyderabad mafia didn’t have the technology to produce them from sperm and egg cells; they required developed embryos.

  All four girls stared at Melati. It was impossible to guess what went on behind those blinking eyes and emotionless gazes taking in Melati’s sarong and kebaya, clothing many of the young ones considered quaint. By God, was thirty-two really that old?

  “You know nothing. Leave us alone,” Susanti said. She turned around, put her arms on the shoulders of the girls on either side of her and led them away.

  Melati called after their backs. “If you want, I can help you. You know where my place is—”

  The girls vanished in the crowd.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  THE MINDBASE EXCHANGE office was between a travel agency and the Small Private Craft refuelling office. Melati entered the front foyer with its fake wood panelling and soft carpet. The front desk, where Rina normally sat, was empty, but a chime rang at the back of the office.

  Melati waited, glancing at the wall screens which displayed various travel destinations. New Pyongyang, Taurus, Mars and places she didn’t recognise and would never visit.