Cry Pilot

by Joel Dane

  At first, the sentient AIs did . . . nothing. At least nothing new. They still produced advanced tech, revealing flowcore and the Waypoints, CAVs and the rest.

  None of the other AIs ascended. Everything stayed the same.

  Except Vila Vela changed. We grew giddy with pride in Sweetwater. Not enough to ring alarm bells in corpo headquarters, not yet. Still, we felt the first stirrings of patriotism. Living in Vila Vela meant something.

  Though mostly, at that point, we simply hoped that Sweetwater would lead to an accelerated terrafixing, a brighter future.

  My mother hadn’t been impressed, though. She was a fervent believer in mechanism: there is no ghost in the gearbox, there is no soul in the chambers of our hearts. Humans are sacks of chemicals sloshing around. I preferred my sayti’s animism. There’s a spirit in everything. Gods frolic in every flock of pigeons and unswept corridor.

  “Machines crave things,” I told my mother, preparing for dinner at the lichenflour paster.

  “‘Crave’? That’s one of your grandmother’s words. Does that paster crave lichenflour?”

  “Sweetwater craves things!”

  “AI is bullshit, Maseo. It’s a monument to the human ego. What’s so good about self-awareness? It’s a mistake, it’s a burden.” She smacked my head. “Like children.”

  My sayti didn’t believe in MYRAGE classes, so I spent most mornings in an actual classroom with actual tutors and real projections. I spent my afternoons with her, then evenings with family and friends. My childhood wasn’t exactly idyllic, but it was ordinary.

  Until the Big Three AIs melted down. Literally. Overnight.

  The three of them simultaneously liquefied into complete kludge.

  The loss to humanity was incalculable. The corpos investigated and determined that the simultaneity was evidence of coordination. Someone, some unknown agency or force, had triggered the attacks.

  Who had conspired to destroy the Big Three? How had they done it, and why?

  Those are the great mysteries of our age. Nobody took credit. Nobody benefited, at least not in any obvious way.

  The corpos staged reclamation operations. Working groups descended on Vila Vela, scrambling for research rights to Sweetwater’s corpse, and investigators fanned through the city, searching for clues. Searching for insurgents, for saboteurs.

  Except this was worse than sabotage. The perpetrators hadn’t simply committed murder, they’d committed genocide. All three members of this new species, this AI species, had been wiped out in the space of picoseconds.

  The corpos had forbidden genocide-class weapons after the SICLE War, and they took the prohibition seriously. Yet despite their best efforts, the investigation faltered. Promising leads resulted in dead ends and incriminating evidence vanished in the light of innocent explanations.

  Desperation crept in, along with an edge of brutality.

  The harsher approach inflamed local sentiment that was already running hot. We’d made Sweetwater. We’d loved Sweetwater. We’d lost Sweetwater. The people of Vila Vela, not the corpos. Who were they to investigate us?

  Patriotic fervor sent taproots into our hearts.

  The corpos issued warnings.

  The people responded with peaceful demonstrations.

  The corpos relocated the ringleaders.

  The peaceful demonstrations became angry protests.

  The relocations widened to include neighbors, friends—sympathizers.

  Then a few Vila Vela patriots took potshots at investigators, and the armed forces struck back. Battalions bivouacked in my favorite playscape. Platoons marched across the seventy-fourth-floor-balcony parkland, stomping the grasslike surface into sludge.

  An orbital lander crashed into a wedding party.

  Eighty-one people died.

  Nine days later, Vila Vela patriots dropped a bridge on a corpo research team in reprisal. Dozens more died. Ration-drones and aerosolized tranqs enforced calms and curfews. Battlesuited squadrons patrolled prominent atria and questioned local MYRAGE celebrities.

  For the next month, sirens sounded in the night, and even my loudest auncles kept their voices down.

  Until one night my mother didn’t return home.

  My sayti pulled every string in Vila Vela. Three days later, she got results: an official acknowledgment of my mother’s death in a raid on a patriot cell.

  Sayti kept working on the terrafixing protocols through the sirens and the curfews. Even after they killed my mother, she didn’t miss a day in the lab. I’d hated her for that.

  A month later, she smuggled a packet into a corporate operating base: a packet that killed two hundred employees with weaponized mycorrhizae. That was the beginning. Sayti surrounded the slagged Sweetwater Site with IEDs deploying genetic-reparation algorithms that she’d modified to affect humans. The results were terrifying, and the reprisals even worse.

  Vila Vela patriots demanded that the corporations withdraw from the city limits.

  The corporations refused.

  The enclave exploded into a warzone.

  Toward the end of her life, the corpos called Sayti “the Plaguemaker.” The people of Vila Vela called her “the Ess Ayati,” a more formal term for “grandmother.” But the Ess Ayati was a notorious patriot resistance leader, unflinching and brutal, while to me she was still just Sayti.

  At first, she used me as a runner and a lookout for the ragtag patriot army that had assembled around her. We couldn’t trust MYRAGE, so we reverted to ancient techniques: onetime datapads and air-gapped notes. I slunk through firefights and scrambled over wreckage; I lingered on the outskirts of meetings, impressed by my contribution to the cause.

  The first time a corpo squad captured me, I wet my pants.

  The soldiers laughed and dismissed me as a real threat. They beat me for the sake of thoroughness—I still remember the hot flush of shame—then released me without a mark on my record. No reason to take note of a shivering piss boy. So the next two times they caught me, I made sure to wet my pants. It was the easiest way to prove my harmlessness, and my shame faded, because now I was pulling the strings.

  The beatings still hurt, though.

  After eight months in the hot zone, I didn’t gag at the scent of corpses or flinch at the sound of gunfire. I’d never fired a gun, but I was a veteran when Sayti called me in for a special job.

  “Eight corpo squads are patrolling the Oshun district,” she told me. “Stop squirming.”

  I was squirming because she was tugging my hair into a style that the kids called a triceratop. “I look stupid.”

  “There’s a reason I’m doing this,” Sayti told me.

  “There’s always a reason,” I grumbled.

  “And the reason is always love.”

  I groaned.

  She ruffled my dorky hair. “You need to find one squad. Tokomak Squad.” An insignia projected in front of me. “They’re the only ones who matter, do you understand?”

  “I’ll find them,” I promised. “Then what?”

  “Make friends,” she said.

  “With a corpo squad? Why?”

  “The why comes later,” she told me. “First let’s work on the how.”

  So the next day, with my triceratop painted orange and my feet in clogs, I crouched in the Oshun district. The area had been “the pearl of Vila Vela” before Sweetwater kludged. Now limp banners sparked in the breeze and shattered dreamwheels speckled the walls.

  I scoped two patrols before Tokomak slipped through the streets. Ten battlesuited Garda soldiers carried Boaz rifles and—for some reason—an eight-foot length of lacebrick, a vat-grown interlocking building material.

  “Hey, boss!” I called in Bahasa, standing from behind a vend machine. “What’s up with the brick?”

  “Get fucked,” a meaty guy snarled, swiveling his Boaz
at me.

  “I can’t,” I told him.

  Suspicion flashed in his eyes. “Run along out of here, kid.”

  “It’s not like I haven’t tried getting fucked.” I ambled closer, keeping my hands in plain sight. “I’m too young is all.”

  The other squaddies laughed, and the meaty guy muttered, “Fuck all of you.”

  “Give me a few years,” I told him. “Anyone got spare rations?”

  A huge guy with chin ridges tossed me a yellow-tabbed tube. “Here, kid.”

  “Yellow?” I made a face. “Everyone knows yellow is heat-meat.”

  “There’s a saying about beggars and choosers,” the huge guy grumbled.

  “How about some blue?” I appealed to the rest of the squad. “Anyone got blue?”

  “You like huitlacoche?” a woman with a prosthetic arm asked.

  “The spicy stuff, sure. The unspiced tastes like mycofu.”

  “Tofungus,” the huge guy muttered, which was another word for the pasty gray blocks of fungus-based tofu.

  The woman told a skinny gen, “Give the kid some blue.”

  “Winning hearts and minds,” the gen said, rummaging in their pack.

  “Mostly stomachs.” I tapped the lacebrick. “So where’d you loot this from?”

  The next thing I knew I was on the ground. Pain throbbed in my head and the meaty guy was standing over me.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “We don’t fucking loot.”

  “Stand down, Dustin!” the one-armed woman barked.

  He straightened away from me. “Fuck you.”

  “That’s your thing, huh?” I asked, wiping tears from my eyes. “Fucking kids?”

  When he leaned down to grab me, I fished his cardblank from inside his vest. That’s why I’d said that, to bring him close. And after all, I’d developed a knack for fiddly work.

  When he lifted me off the ground I palmed the card into my sleeve and started crying.

  “I should break your face,” he snarled.

  “We don’t hit the local fauna,” the one-armed woman told him. “We only hit them back.”

  “Tell that to my dads,” I sniffled.

  “Put him down.” She looked at the meaty guy. “Make me say it again, Dustin. See how that works for you.”

  “Sorry, Sarge,” the meaty guy said, and dropped me.

  With a flick of my wrist, I sent the stolen cardblank skittering to the ground. For a moment, nobody moved. The entire street held its breath.

  Then I said, “You, uh, dropped your card?”

  “Fucking thief,” he said, and started to kick me.

  The huge guy with chin ridges shoved him away. “C’mon.”

  “Keep moving,” the one-armed sergeant said, and they headed down the street.

  “Hey!” I shouted after them. “Where’s my ration?”

  The gen made a rude gesture and the squad disappeared around a corner.

  CHAPTER 23

  After Tokomak Squad took off, I lived on the streets of Oshun for a week, keeping out of sight of any helpful locals who’d give me food and shelter. Looking back, I’m not sure why it seemed so natural. Stealing, begging, sleeping rough. Maybe I just trusted Vila Vela; even the dark alleys felt like home.

  I looked pretty ratty the next time I found the squad. I didn’t say anything. I just squatted there, my orange triceratop streaked with dirt. The one-armed sergeant glanced at me briefly before patrolling past, and the huge guy said something I didn’t hear.

  Three days later, hunger gnawed at me. I stank and itched. A fresh meal, a shower, and a soft bed were waiting for me at home, if I couldn’t take the streets. If I gave up. If I was willing to disappoint my sayti.

  No way. Not then, not ever.

  The next time I saw Tokomak, I greeted them with a cheery “Get fucked!” and the huge guy with the chin—named Aowamo—tossed me a yellow-tabbed tube.

  “Did you loot it?” I asked.

  He laughed. “You’re a little shit.”

  “It’s a step up from a fucker!” I said, squeezing the tube into my mouth.

  A week later, I started tagging along behind them. Not too close. Dustin—the meaty guy—chased me off the first few days, and finally caught me.

  When he raised his fist I showed him the sweetchew I’d slipped from his pocket. “Don’t touch me, Dustbin! I’m magic. Plus, I can—”

  He punched me. Not hard, or he would’ve broken me. But not soft, either.

  I was moaning on the floor when the one-armed woman crouched in front of me. “We could put you in blinders for stealing. What’s your name?”

  “Fao,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “Najafi.”

  “Sergeant-Affiliate Najafi,” Dustbin said.

  She looked at me. “Where are your folks?”

  “How come the Garda doesn’t grow your arm back?”

  Her face clouded. “I prefer my prosthetic.”

  “You lie worse than my baby brother.”

  “So you have a brother. Any parents?”

  “Grandparents, Sarge,” the gen said. “We’re in Vila Vela.”

  Najafi flicked a gesture and asked me, “Any grandparents?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  She straightened and turned away. Aowamo slipped me a couple yellow tubes, and the squad prowled down the block.

  Three days later, I sold Dustbin four cans of local sweetchew. “I don’t care if the little fucker personally melted down all three AIs,” he told another trooper, “I haven’t had chew this good in months.”

  A week after that, Tokomak Squad found me bleeding in an alley.

  A few of my sayti’s soldiers had apologetically beaten me up for what one of them called “verisimilitude.” I looked a mess, with a swollen lip, a black eye, and scrapes on my cheek and shoulder. I’d crawled into the alley and waited for the squad. Hours passed. What if they realized I was faking? I couldn’t make myself cry and the pain didn’t bother me much. Pain is different when you choose it yourself.

  Except the moment I saw the squad, I burst into tears. Real tears. I didn’t know why. Still, I wept and told Tokomak Squad a tragic tale about life on the streets as their medic patched me together.

  When Sergeant Najafi took me in a one-armed hug, my sobs grew louder. My mother was gone, my childhood was over. And the sergeant was gentle. She brought me food and clothes and offered to get me into the corpo school.

  She wasn’t a faceless squaddie or a vathead like Dustbin. She was a real person, scared and brave and strong and gentle.

  She liked me, too. “Dirty as a vac-sac,” she told me. “And sneaky as a ferret. But there’s hope for you yet, Fao.”

  The next week, I rewarded her faith in me. I warned Tokomak Squad about a gang of patriots taking potshots from a terrace. My sayti had told me they were there. She’d put them there. She sacrificed four low-value new recruits to strengthen my position with the corpo squad.

  And she’d finally explained my triceratop: “Do you know the one named Sergeant Najafi?”

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s only got one arm.”

  “And one child,” Sayti said, from the film-obscured doorway where we’d met. “Who wears his hair like yours.”

  “His is yellow,” I told her. “She showed me a picture.”

  Sayti’s gaze sharpened on me. “She did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s fond of you.”

  I flushed. “I guess.”

  “Of course she is. You’re adorable. Those little cheeks.”

  “Oh, shut your wrinkles,” I muttered, which was the mildest thing my mother used to shout at her.

  She laughed. “You remind me of her.”

  “Mom? She said you two never got along.”

  “We
never did.” The grandmotherly softness faded from Sayti’s face. “The sergeant’s son is wearing yellow now, but I found an older image. When he was your age.”

  “You want me to look like him?”

  She nodded. “To gain her trust.”

  “Then why did I let them catch me stealing that cardblank? Dustbin could’ve broke my arms.”

  “‘Broken,’” she corrected.

  “That too,” I said.

  “They’re suspicious of locals, Maseo, for some reason.” Her smile didn’t have any warmth. “So you taught them to see you as an incompetent street thief.”

  “Why not teach them to see me as a regular kid?”

  “They’d never believe a Vila Vela street kid was an innocent. They’d look for your secret. So you showed them a secret, and they stopped looking.”

  “Oh.”

  “And now they care for you.”

  “Yeah, but—” I took a breath. “But why them? I mean . . . why them?”

  “That’s the question we all ask ourselves, in the end,” she said. “‘Why me?’”

  “Gee, thanks. That helps.”

  She kissed my forehead, inhaled deeply, and held me close.

  “I stink,” I said.

  “You smell like Vila Vela.” She gave me a squeeze. “Stay close to them, Maseo. You’re doing great. I’m proud of you.”

  My next big moment with Tokomak Squad came a few days later, maybe a week. I don’t remember the chronology exactly, but the day shines bright in my memory. They’d finished patrolling the corridors around an extrusion plant when I told Aowamo he needed to see something.

  He wasn’t supposed to follow a local off-route, but I promised him it was worth it.

  Najafi nodded her permission and I led the squad into a little-known theater atrium with a cool sculpture installation. Projections flowed around the sculptures, which reacted to our proximity. Also there was a grove of guava trees. The fruit was ripe, and after the medic checked for toxicity, the soldiers gorged themselves. A few of them even enjoyed the art: mostly Sergeant-Affiliate Najafi.

  “My dad took me here a few times,” I told her, which was true.

  “It’s nice.” She rotated a guava in the mechanical fingers of her prosthetic arm. “It’s got a good feeling.”