Fragments sf-6

by Randolph Lalonde

  Chapter 11

  Phantoms

  Gloria woke with a start. The darkness of Eve’s sleeping quarters was near absolute, and she had no idea how a normal person might turn the lights on. “Lights on, please!” she rasped. Her throat was dry, and as she rolled out of bed she caught sight of the adjacent bathroom. The soft, smooth covers, lavish furniture, spacious quarters, were all from the dream she’d been living for what felt like an eternity. “Oh God, it’s all real. That crazy bitch has been living in my body.”

  She made it to the sink and found it already filling with warm water. Gloria splashed her face and looked in the mirror. She looked as horrified as she felt. Nothing seemed right, as though the world was somehow partially artificial, as though she wasn’t completely there.

  A pressure built in the back of her mind and she watched in the mirror as her lips quivered, her eyes widened, and warm water was replaced with salty tears. Panic was turning to despair and she shouted; “What have they done to me? How do I stop her from coming back?”

  The pressure built in throbbing waves, as though there was something in her head begging to be free. “What is it? What’s wrong with me?” It was an invasion, a foreign thing that had been walking around, living a life that wasn’t hers. The throbbing beat against the interior of her skull like a cacophony of percussionists, striking harder, faster.

  The lights flickered, the water began to overflow in the basin, and a new wave of panic rose, driving her into a mad frenzy. “No, you’re not coming back. Not this time, bitch!” she raved, smashing her head into the reflective wall above the sink.

  The first blow was more painful than she expected, but for an instant the pressure abated, the mad chorus disrupting Gloria’s being was nearly silent. Again she drove her head into the mirrored bulkhead. “I’ll kill you!” She could feel something behind her eyes, trying to force its way to the surface, watching. “You’re dead, you bitch!” Again she bashed her forehead against the wall, and the face in the mirror regarded her with a twisted grimace, blood, seeping from its forehead. With a desperate wail she drove her head against the unyielding bulkhead, pushing off the deck this time.

  Eve rested on the wet bathroom floor, staring up at the ceiling. The sound of water dripping from the edge of the sink was like a tiny waterfall, something she’d never seen before. The framework augmentations built into her human body had repaired the physical damage that had been done. That didn’t put an end to Eve’s numb, confused state, however.

  She was conscious for the whole thing but could do nothing to stop what was going on. Gloria Parker; that was the name of the woman who had original claim to the body she lived in. There was no evidence of her. Not in the digital backup systems inside the framework, not in the exterior Regent Galactic network, nowhere. They had made sure, there were no backups after what they called the Eve Brain, her mind, was placed inside the host. Gloria was gone.

  There was no explaining what had just happened. It would have been possible if there was a hidden backup memory node inside the body she was using, but no such thing existed. After Jacob Valance, there was no framework or augmented human built with such a thing in place. That kind of system allowed a personality to entrench itself inside a host, and there was no reason to provide that option for any existing host.

  She stood up slowly and forced the medical systems in the bathroom to perform a full series of scans. Eve read the raw data as it came in and saw no evidence of any hidden backups. Her mind sought solace in the sprawling digital world that stretched across the Regent Galactic Fleet, Pandem itself and beyond through hypertransmitters.

  She ordered the tap to stop pouring; the floor drank the excess fluid and directed it to a recycling line, and washed the caked blood from her face and hair. All the while, she was watching people going about their business on the planet from observation satellites, crewmembers keeping watch in the halls, and software maintaining systems that did everything from manage the constant flow of operational data to keeping the fleet in orbit.

  Balancing the perception of the physical world with that of the digital had come quickly to her, and she could sense that, without a limiter chip, it would be possible for other frameworks to do the same. Thoughts of those limiter chips, absent in many early frameworks, partially occupied her mind as she made her way to bed. The frameworks in service were stupid, basic, without creativity or personality. Basic programming kept them from tripping over each other, made them effective soldiers, guardians, basic technicians and servants, but they were little more than speaking animals. The combination of the memory programming and waking protocol along with a limiter chip made greater thought, improvisation and the construction of a personality possible. The new frameworks would be better than the old, and more importantly, they’d be better than any human. Unlike a human, their personalities formed around a purpose, and a modern, full featured framework like Baudric wouldn’t feel right unless he was working towards his purpose, following some order or greater directive. Much like Jacob Valance before the memories of Jonas Valent ruined the perfect balance Vindyne and Doctor Marcelles had created. If he had a limiter chip, it would have been different. He wouldn’t have been able to connect to the secret memory backup, and it would have remained dormant forever.

  For the first time since she awakened in her new body she wished she had her own limiter chip. It would restrict her from interacting with anything she couldn’t touch, but whatever had happened to her moments before would be impossible. The thought that, even though all the evidence in the system verified that Gloria’s backup scans had been deleted, she could return was terrifying, the woman she saw in the mirror was unhinged. It was as though Gloria didn’t care whether there was anything left after she destroyed her uninvited passenger, as long as it was dead forever.

  She shook her head and sat on the edge of her bed. Without direction her mind had wandered, and Eve found herself watching a late night arrival, Captain Lucious Wheeler.

  Eve’s attention was fixed on the live footage of him disembarking from a Terratran corvette registered as The Ferryman. Its forty-two meter long hull creaked as super cooled mist rolled off the edges and her four gunnery turrets.

  The ship was designed as though someone was emulating the musculature of a human forearm, with smooth lines running from front to back, flatter on the bottom and rounded on the top. The particle turrets and rectangular thruster pods laid flat along the length of the ship and many curved, unmarked hatches hinted at surprises just under the surface. The white and violet coloured ship had just finished a journey through a hyper compressed wormhole of its own creation, in an effort to obey an urgent summons sent by Lister Hampon. It was a recent purchase, most likely acquired right after the summons was issued. Eve couldn’t find any evidence of a purchase in the Regent Galactic database, meaning that Wheeler had not only funded the buy himself, but he made sure the seller had no ties to the corporation.

  Wheeler was alone. She could detect no one else manning the ship. He stopped only long enough to ensure that his ship’s airlock closed and locked behind him. His dark brown hair had grown back at an accelerated rate, and hung in a short pony tail that brushed from one side of his dark long coat collar to the other as he looked around the empty mooring bay.

  His boot steps echoed in the idle dry dock as he made his way up the crew hall and into the control room. Hampon waited on an anti gravity litter in fine robes, surrounded by his guards and aides. “Welcome back,” he said calmly, wiping a wisp of sun blonde hair out of his eyes.

  “What the hell is going on Hampon? First you call me back and as soon as I arrive my comm updates with an order to stand down all pursuit!”

  “The Saviour has other business to attend to now that the Triton has been apprehended and we no longer need Jacob Valance. Your services-“

  “The Saviour is my ship! That was part of our deal! I trade Gloria in for a nice, new Regent Galactic Carrier, distract Valance and we part ways.” Wheeler snar
led, ignoring the guardsmen with rifles held across their chests.

  Eve didn’t know anything about the deal that had been struck for her host. If the data existed anywhere, it had been deleted before she had the opportunity to get a glimpse.

  “The host isn’t everything we expected it to be. Thankfully, Eve has made the most of it, and hasn’t noticed the short comings built into that model.”

  “Glitches and bad craftsmanship has nothing to do with me, or our deal.”

  Hampon sighed wearily and shook his head. “You are forgetting something, Lucious. We made you immortal, gave you most of General Collins’ memories. You have a second life most people would give anything for. I’m even willing to set you up in a rather prestigious position in the Order’s Intelligence Division. You can make your own hours, choose from a vast number of assignments.”

  “Like going after the Triton.”

  “As I said before, that’s under control.”

  “Bullshit! Capturing the Triton would have made huge news, especially since I played your spokesman less than two weeks ago and let everyone know there’s a huge reward for any of her crew.”

  “And that was helpful. Meunez has determined the whereabouts of the ship and is in control of the situation.”

  “So that’s it. You’ve got the cyber freak jacked in to the right uplink and he got to it before I did. Where’d you plug him in? Maybe I can cut a deal with him. Something he’ll deliver on.”

  “That’s none of your concern. You should be relieved that I’ve found a way to retire you from errands, and hunting. This is the kind of retirement people like you dream about.”

  “Retirement,” Wheeler spat under his breath. He looked at the half dozen guards, eight attendants, then back to Hampon. “What if I just cut ties here and just drop off your scanner?”

  Hampon fixed Wheeler with a look of mild surprise. “With Collins’ memories?”

  “We’ll call it even. I’m leaving my best number two here, after all. Not much hope of a refund there either.”

  The younger looking man looked to two of his attendants as if to verify he was hearing correctly before returning his gaze back to Wheeler. “And what would you do?”

  “Live the dream,” he replied sarcastically. “What’s it matter to you once I’m out of range?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s just not possible. No one else knows Collins’ memories like you do.”

  “You won’t get anything out of me if you force me to stick around.”

  “You’ve forgotten where you are. We can ask, or we can install a deep tissue interface. Either way, it saves us the time of implanting the memories in someone else and having them sift through.”

  “Hell no, I’m gone,” Wheeler’s anger was audibly tinged with fear as he turned to leave.

  The hatchway behind him closed.

  For some reason Eve believed Wheeler, and whether it was in gratitude for her host body, or because of some residual reflex, she forced the door’s mechanism to open.

  Wheeler took advantage of the opportunity and was down the hall before Hampon’s guards could make it to the door. The airlock door of the Ferryman slipped open in time for him to make it into his ship before they began firing.

  Eve took the next step and released the mooring clamps on the corvette class ship so he could reverse out of the bay. Sections of the hull slipped open to reveal hundreds of micro emitters that formed a wormhole behind the ship.

  “Find out who let him escape!” Hampon screeched, his pre-adolescent voice cracking.

  As one of his aides began to check Eve erased all record of her activities and implanted evidence of her own making. By the time the cybernetically enhanced human checked the logs he could only come to one conclusion. “Captain Wheeler must have used one of Collins’ override codes. I’m sorry sir, there’s no record of anyone interfacing from our end.”

  Chapter 12

  Hatter and Hood

  “You’re angry.” Hatter concluded from the pilot seat of his Uriel fighter.

  “Nope,” replied Hood shortly.

  They were adrift in featureless, dead space, half way between the nebula and their destination. The rendezvous point with the Clever Dream “No, you’re pissed, I can tell.” Hatter sighed, tapping the power indicator on the instrument screen. It read seventy percent and crept up by fractions of a percentage.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Hatter looked to where Hood drifted in his own Uriel fighter only a hundred fifty-three meters away and zoomed in. He could see him rubbing his eyes with his palms. The silence didn’t last long.

  “Okay, fine. You were supposed to be building a charge in your capacitors while we were in transit so you’d be ready to open a wormhole when we arrived here, in the middle of nowhere.” Hood said in a rush.

  “I’m sorry, I was distracted. You could have reminded me.”

  “That’s not the point, you should have a handle on the basics. I just don’t get it; you can calculate wormhole navigation in your head but setting your reactor to charge a capacitor bank slips your mind.”

  “I just wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry!” Hatter replied, wishing he’d never prodded.

  Silence hung heavily between the pair for several minutes before Hood finally said; “I miss her too, man.”

  “She was the only one who took me seriously, you know? I mean, it didn’t look like it I guess, but when it came down to it, she knew I had the chops to be in a cockpit.”

  “Buster was one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen, good leader too. Tell you what, when we get back to Triton, we’ll put her picture up in the Pilot’s Den and have a drink to her.”

  “Or five.”

  “Or five.”

  “On you.”

  “You’re pushing it.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” Hatter said, bringing up new tactical information. Several ships were emerging from wormholes only a few thousand kilometres beneath them.

  “That’s gotta be everything the Triton had in her hangars, with the Samson in the lead.”

  “What? I didn’t think she was even space worthy,” Hatter said with heavy disbelief.

  “You think I’m lying? Look.”

  “I’ll be damned, three engines down and she’s still running. Uh-oh. Incoming transmission.”

  “Hatter, I’ll do the-“

  “Good to see you folks! For a minute I thought Regent Galactic sent an entire fleet after us.”

  “This is Laura Everin, Acting Captain of the Samson. What the hell are you two doing out here? You should be just about to link up with the Clever Dream by now.”

  “Uh, well, this is awkward… Hood, this one’s all yours.”

  “Hood here, we had a bad power connection under one of our seats, got it fixed and we were almost at full charge, about to take the last jump. Mind if I ask what brings you and everyone else on the Triton out here, Captain?”

  “Not right now. Fall into formation and prepare to take the last jump with us. We’ve got plenty Uriels with enough reserve power to take you along for the ride, that is all.”

  “She sounds pissed,” Hatter commented over a private channel with Hood.

  “From the looks of it, I’d say she has too much to deal with to worry about the slowest pilots in the fleet.”

  “Oh, who are they?”

  “Hatter…” Hood started with a chuckle. “Aw, you’ll figure it out on your own eventually.”

  He didn’t bother thinking on it, concentrating on piloting his Uriel fighter into the position indicated on his navigational panel. Then it struck him. “Oh, right,” he chuckled sheepishly.

  Chapter 13

  The Wait

  Pain. Whenever Jacob Valance tried to duplicate the physical sensation that preceded the act of healing Ayan after she'd been shot several times in the back on Pandem, the only result was rending pain. That morning it was his fingers. After emerging from the vibroshower and pulling his vacsuit on up to his waist he took the op
portunity to try to force that projecting, healing sensation again in the tips of his fingers.

  They twitched involuntarily, it was only slight, but a definite sign that what was going on wasn't all in his head. Then there was a tingle, the same type that came whenever he connected to a computer system, followed by an agonizing tearing that felt like his fingertips were being torn apart from the inside. Jake could only make the conclusion that he was doing something wrong, missing a step, it couldn't be that painful to access a function of his own body. What kind of designer would create life giving technology that caused so much pain?

  He shook his hand, giving up for the day and stepped out of the small private bathroom. He and Ayan had been up talking most of the night.

  Since the First Light they had taken very different paths, there were so many stories to share, and every time he offered one her big blue eyes focused on him. Most of them were from his days on the Samson, where he played the stoic captain and everyone else just tried to make the best of life on the old ship as they made their way across entire sectors.

  Most of the stories starred Stephanie, Frost, Ashley, Agameg Price and Ramirez. He hadn't realized how many of their adventures were humorous in retrospect, but he was grateful for each one. Making Ayan laugh was addictive; he would burn the image of her dimpled smile into his brain if it were possible. It made the sadder stories more difficult to tell, and he generally refrained from bringing the darker times up, but when Ayan asked what happened to Ramirez, a boarding crew member who had been responsible for as many humorous predicaments as glory moments, he owed her the sobering answer.

  While they were taking the Triton he had led a group of armed crewmembers to fight off boarders in the Enreega system. They fought them toe-to-toe in the main hangar and lost. Ramirez was almost dead, and could have medicated himself into emergency stasis, but decompressed the entire hangar just as several boarding shuttles touched down and unloaded fresh squads of enemy soldiers.