Despite the cold air buffeting against her, a warmth seeped into Arianne. She felt herself relaxing. There was nothing to be done, doom was a certainty. And somehow that felt right. Or at least terms that she could accept. She tried just to exist in the moment for the short time she had left. She listened to the sounds around her and found that, far from screeches to be deciphered into terrifying meaning, far from the heralds of forces wilfully opposing her, they were just patterns. Just things happening. The pain in her arms and hands and her left shin were not signatures of cause and effect to be prioritized, processed and folded into a coherent plan of action. They were just electrical shivers bouncing around a tangle of tissue. Things were so much easier from this perspective. She closed her eyes and the sharp and chaotic world around her became a much simpler muted canvas, a smoothed, color-swatch guide to everything outside. As a collision rocked the ship and her head was slammed down onto the hard metal roof, the world simply dulled from a fiery red to a deep chocolate aura. The rebound caused her head to snap back and out of the slipstream where the ripping air peeled away rivulets of blood from her forehead in rhythmic arcs and pushed her face up to a rare patch of open sky. But to Arianne, the world simply became a white field with dancing streaks of neon. She was just a flower following the sun. There was no meaning, no intent, just things happening.
She could feel the boundaries of herself moving. Her muscles were just reacting to swirling storms of electricity in her head, both biological and artificial, which itself was just swayed by the swirling storm of light and sound outside. And all that was just reactions to other storms beyond. A colossal web of things just bumping into each other. What was the real difference between the collection of bones and synapses inside her suit and the air and light on the outside? Between her and Holt and Dart and Kotlin and CAFCA and the conference mob and the insurance companies? Between her and the metal she was clinging to? Between living and dying?
And with a final push of breath from her lungs that could have been a sigh, Arianne’s right hand began to loosen its grip.
Chapter 14
Arianne’s left hand was not joining in on the whole inevitable Zen vibe. It was, in fact, very angry. Here it was, doing its best to keep everything together, every single cell pumped full of miracle technology and self-replicating, self-repairing mechanisms, all finely tuned to keeping Arianne free of poisons and the bombardment of anything that the universe could throw at it, and what was the stinky right hand doing? Giving up.
Boo Hoo, shouted the left hand, Look at me, I’m just a poor old right hand! The ultimate flexible tool, crafted over millions of years of genetic evolution, tightly integrated with a billion-neuron processing powerhouse, supported by the most complex material culture in the universe and adapted precisely for solving problems and making precise and decisive actions. Everything is so unfair! Boo Hoo Hoo!
Typical fucking dominant hand. Why did it always get like this? I mean look, just there! A chemical reaction that normally would have taken the lifetime of the universe just happened in the index finger thanks to a wonder enzyme which rounded up a bunch of atoms, got them in line and got stuff done. But no, all the right hand thought about was “Aw, I failed to catch a ball in an arbitrary sport that my species is able to invest millions of hours into instead of digging in the dirt for worms. Aw, my skin is all dry from poking a tablet that can answer any question.”
Well fuck you, buddy, thought the left hand. What’s got one thumb, is holding the magic thinking rock and learned to operate it at summer camp that time we broke our arm?
THIS GUY.
Arianne’s left hand attempted to defiantly point to itself using its own thumb, but ended up just mashing a load of keys on the terminal screen it was holding.
Ah, fiddlesticks.
Back on the central ship, both of Kotlin’s hands were too busy to have thoughts of their own. She was trying to corral a thousand ships into a distributed network, but just as she managed to get part of it running, a ship would blow up and the whole system would collapse. She was now trying to build a parallel redundant architecture just to get the ships sharing information between one another, but she kept running up against memory limitations. And also, occasionally, against Holt, Dart and a weeping Idris as they was thrown around the inside of the ship.
“Kotlin, do something!”, shouted Dart.
“I’m trying,” said Kotlin with an edge of desperation cutting through her calm, “but there’s not even space for basic version control software on these things.”
“Kotlin! Forget about version control!”
“That attitude is why you will never make a good researcher.”
Dart hurled herself over to where Kotlin was curled around her terminal.
“If we don’t do something fast, the only good thing we’ll make is a good size hole in those mountains!”
Kotlin looked up and saw a steep rocky pinnacle looming ahead of them through a cluster of red blocks. When she looked back at her terminal it was blank – she’d lost contact with the swarm.
“We’ve been hacked!” spat Kotlin in frustration.
“Something’s taken control of the ship!”, shouted Holt, twirling the large fluffy pilot stick uselessly.
But Dart was looking out of the side window. “Wait,” she said, “the ships are realigning.”
Kotlin joined her at the small window and looked out. Somehow, the ships around them did indeed seem to be flying with more purpose.
Holt let go of the controls altogether and shouted across to the others.
“We’re going to crash, brace, brace!”
As mountain grew closer, the ships at the front of the swarm swerved to avoid it. But instead of colliding with the other ships, somehow they moved together, like water. There was no other way that Kotlin could describe it – they simply flowed around the mountain, joining up into a group again on the other side. Without any collisions, their own ship smoothly diverted around certain death.
Kotlin was looking at something familiar, but couldn’t quite identify it.
“How …” she began.
Arianne: Emergent swarm navigation initiated.
Arianne’s e-voice came through clear to everyone.
Dart: Are you alright?
Kotlin: Explain.
Arianne: There was no memory, but then I remembered that flocks of birds and insects navigate without needing any. The ships have very poor-quality cameras on the front to help with docking, so I updated their firmware to pipe their data stream directly into the thruster controls.
Kotlin thrashed at her terminal, and indeed found that each ship was being run by a single line of code which jammed the output of the tiny cameras directly into the control feed of the engines.
Arianne: At the moment, the right thrusters get more power if there’s a lot of dark pixels on the left, and vice versa. It’s basic, but it steers the ships away from mountains.
Their ships had moved beyond the mountains now without incident, but the firing from the golden ships was intensifying.
Arianne: It also means that I can do things like this …
Arianne adjusted the way that the pixel data was being piped to the thrusters, slowing a thruster in proportion to the number of red pixels on the same side. The ships shuddered abruptly, then began changing their formation. Ships way out in front with nothing but blue sky in front of them sped up, spiraling in different directions as the cameras caught the odd glint of red. Ships in the rear of the pack just saw more of their red siblings, and started to converge on the center of mass, while ships in the middle slowed to a crawl. Each ship appeared to be negotiating its own way, but within a matter of moments, the whole swarm had formed into a single massive blob. With each passing second, stragglers would come back to the fold, nuzzling along the outside of the swarm until the whole thing was practically spherical.
The pursuing insurance company ships hesitated before the massive red orb that had suddenly come to a complete stand
still in the sky. Then they started firing again, hacking away at the outside layer of the orb with bursts of flame. Cocooned at the center of the orb, all Holt, Dart, Kotlin and Idris could hear was a dull thudding. The ships were now so close that the only light came from the weak pulse of one of the ship’s instruments. But then there was a louder thudding on the roof above them. Dart sprang up to undo the hatch, and Arianne fell into the dark space.
“Arianne!” shouted Dart with glee. “I knew that red button would work!”
“YOU WH–” started Kotlin. “It made things WORSE.”
Arianne smiled at Kotlin, and sat down on the floor of the ship.
“Hold on,” she said, “we’re about to start fighting back.”
Arianne shifted the code so that the thrusters fired hardest when the cameras saw a certain proportion of red and blue. The ships started separating from each other. Ones on the outside darted away from the center, only to lose their nerve and head back to safety. The solid orb began to wobble in the sky as if it were melting into a viscous liquid suspended in zero-g.
The insurance ships had been closing their distance, but now hesitated again. The whole mass of red ships was pulsing in and out like a giant jellyfish. Suddenly, a threshold was reached and a thousand ships lanced out to the north, a comet followed by a thinning tail. Then, just as suddenly it doubled back on itself, becoming a cresting wave of red dots breaking over itself. The scene before them changed from byzantine architecture to molten crockery to gigantic geometric shapes to a rippling dragon. Several small clusters broke off and made their own way across the sky before being swallowed again by the larger cloud.
Arianne ramped up the thresholds, setting each individual to seek out yellow targets, and the swarm shifted from a benign murmuration to a swirling maelstrom. Sharp tendrils lashed out chaotically, catching several insurance ships by surprise. The red ships crashed into their prey, overwhelming them with sheer numbers.
The battle had now clearly turned. There was an angry, red swarm rushing through the sky, impossible to predict and impossible to avoid. Insurance ships were torn to shreds, lost behind fiery curtains of metal.
Arianne: OK, we’ve done fight, now for flight.
Arianne drew the ships together again, forming a whirling red vortex. Everyone was pulled out towards the side as the ship span faster and faster. Just before it seemed like the ships would fuse together, Arianne changed the program again, this time giving each ship a simple instinct: avoid red. The red ships shot apart from each other like a huge firework, each settling out to move as far away from its sisters as it could.
Some of the insurance ships had managed to regroup, and began chasing after escaping ships. But there were still so many red ships, they quickly lost formation.
“They can’t chase every ship,” said Arianne, disentangling herself from the pile of bodies on the floor. “We’ll just slip away and lie low for a while.”
Holt stood and moved over to check the controls. Nobody was following them. He turned back to Arianne.
“I still don’t understand,” he said.
Arianne smiled. “When in doubt,” she said, “always follow your nose.”
Chapter 15
“What does the G. stand for?”
The question caught Arianne off guard. She had been collecting bits of dead wood from the mossy ground. A simple task that she was reveling in. Move eyes. Spot wood. Move legs. Pick up wood. Repeat. The whispering quiet of the swamp was a welcome relief from the tearing air, the explosions, the warning sirens, the desperate shouting, the crash-landing. Now she had an immediate task – find fuel to survive the night. A simple thing to focus on in the here and now. Idris had been working next to her, but his words reminded her that she had a past, and maybe a future.
“Huh?”
“The G,” said Idris. “Your local net profile lists you as Karen G. Arianne.”
“Oh,” said Arianne dumbly, “Govinam.”
“Ah,” said Idris, and they continued picking up bits of kindling. Eventually, Idris broke the silence again.
“I never thanked you,” he said.
“For throwing you out of a window?”
Idris blanched at the memory. “Well,” he said, “I guess it would have been much worse if the insurance company had got to me first.”
“We’re not out of this yet,” said Arianne, gesturing to the swamp around them.
“Hmm. All the same, thanks. But why did you do it? Who are you working for?”
Another question that made Arianne uneasy.
“Yeah,” she said, standing fully upright to stretch her spine, “good question.”
She looked at Idris, still wearing the tattered remains of his conference suit. His hands were still shaking slightly.
“I’m just researching the convergence,” she said.
Idris looked skeptical, but nodded.
“Come on,” said Arianne, “let’s get back to the others.”
They found their way back along the reeking creek and through a thick tangle of bushes. Arianne had thought, as popular belief would have it, that the whole of Planet Conference was covered with conference venues and accommodation for guests. But no, it turned out that there was at least one patch of overgrown wilderness. Probably a good thing, seeing as some of the least forgiving organizations in the galaxy were looking for them right now. At least they’d have to check hundreds of crash sites.
Arianne and Idris emerged into the smoky clearing of their own crash landing. The hull of their ship had lodged itself into the ground. Arianne could hear the faint tink-tink of Kotlin trying to get the engine started again. Holt was hunched over some bits of wood below the shelter of some trees, trying to start a fire. Dart appeared to be singing to Holt, which didn’t seem to be helping. Arianne’s shuffling made the pair jump.
“It’s just us,” called Arianne. “There’s nothing back there except foul smelling water, dirt, and some noisy local wildlife.”
She dropped her pile of kindling next to Holt’s attempt at a hearth.
“Still,” she said, smiling, “it beats staying at one of the conference hostels.”
Holt looked directly at Arianne, stood to attention, then savagely kicked the pile of kindling. He staggered over the remains of the pile, and stormed a few paces away from the stunned group.
“Jeez, Holt,” exclaimed Dart.
“What’s the matter?” asked Arianne, genuinely shocked at this uncharacteristic behavior.
Holt did an about-face, and advanced on Arianne.
“What’s the matter!?” he snarled. “I’ve just flown through a very one-sided space battle, forced a crash landing out of that pile of junk and now I’m marooned in a swamp with night coming on, no shelter, no food, no water, and you’re asking me to choose just one of those to be upset about?”
“Come on,” said Arianne. “We’ll get out of this-”
“Oh yeah?” shouted Holt, clenching his fists. “You’ve got a plan, Arianne?”
“Well, something will turn up - ”
Holt did an entire 360-degree spin on his heel, raising his eyes to the sky and then throwing his angry gaze back at Arianne.
“Oh sure,” he spat. “A solution will just present itself? Like a super-weapon falling from the sky just when you needed it? Like we just happened to be in the neighborhood when you jumped out a window?”
“Holt-” started Arianne, raising her hands out in front of her. Dart and Idris were also shocked, but Holt kept going.
Resister: Space Funding Crisis II Page 12
