by Sarah Zettel
Another portion of her felt very strongly that she’d also like something else to think about for awhile.
Not with somebody from Kerensk, she told herself again.
“I’m sorry, Houston,” she said softly. “I can’t leave my post until the crisis is over, and it won’t be over until we’ve got this virus truly and finally sterilized.” She gave him a deliberately watery smile. “Thanks for the offer though, I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, well, it was an idea,” said Lipinski to the wall. “I understand though. Fools pull special duty.” He walked away and Dobbs let him.
Special duty. She sighed to the memory. You don’t know the half of it, Houston.
She’d had lovers before, some of them Fools, some of them shippers or starbirds. She’d been socialized heterosexual and Lipinski’s pale, exotic good looks teased at her. She liked his wry humor, and even his habit of shouting at the walls. His quirkiness appealed to her as much as his long body did.
You’re daydreaming, she told herself sharply. You want to do Lipinski a favor? Find out what’s wreaking havoc with his comm system.
She laid down, jacked the transceiver into the wall and into herself. She injected herself for ten hours. The freedom the network brought washed over her like a wave and she dove gratefully into it.
She decided not to take a chance on working either of the Pasadena’s transmitters directly. Both Odel and Schyler would be hovering too close to it. Instead, she slid out into The Gate’s main system.
The Gate’s broad comm channels were heavily trafficked. Dobbs slipped carefully along to avoid disturbing any of the on-going exchanges, most of which, from the brief touches she had of them, dealt either with money or requests for information from the diplomatic corps. She vaulted to the front of the transmission queue and pulled a repeater map out of the processor stack. The route to Guild Hall from the Farther Kingdom was a little tricky. She planned her jumps, checked her first path and set the transmitter jump her through.
Two hours and fifty-six point nine seconds later, she reached the Drawbridge and identified herself. The program opened and she surged forward. To her surprise, she touched not the teeming guild channels, but a completely empty pathway. A pre-recorded signal spoke up.
“This way, Master Dobbs, Priority One.”
Surprise pulled Dobbs up short for a split second, but she recovered and hurried down the clear path. She felt it closing off behind her. This was a private meeting she was being called to then. And Priority One. Fear roiled in her insides. There was a single instance that allowed for the Priority One code to be issued.
It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t.
The pathway branched off in front of her, creating a meeting place at the heart of Guild Hall. Dobbs circled the space quickly to get the feel of it. It was one of the first places she had ever been in the Guild network. Here was where Verence had introduced her to the Guild Masters when she first arrived. Dobbs hadn’t been back since she got her Master’s rating.
A touch reached her from the center of the meeting space. “Welcome Home, Master Dobbs.”
“Thank you, Guild Master Havelock,” she replied, trying to be reassured by the solid, unusually slow-moving presence that had been her overseer, as Verence had been her sponsor. “This isn’t what I was expecting… ”
“Me either, Dobbs.” Cohen was there too, shifting restlessly. She touched his outer self, hoping for reassurance, but he just rippled uneasily.
A spasm of fear ran through her. “No,” she whispered, although no one had said anything.
“You picked up a live one, Dobbs,” said Cohen.
“From where?” she demanded, so stunned she forgot who else was with her. “There’s been no hint of activity in the Solar system. The Freers are having their usual lack of success and Tully was smuggling binary board. Binary! “ She backed up reflexively until she reached the limit of the holding space. “How… ”
“How could you have missed it, is what you want to say, isn’t it?” cut in the Guild Master.
Dobbs squirmed before she remembered both her position and her dignity. Guild Master Havelock was known for his extreme lack of tact as much as for his extreme perception.
“Yes, Sir,” she said. “That is what I meant.”
He brushed against her, a gesture of consolation. “It came out of nowhere, Dobbs. Nobody
caught it, and we should have. It’s big, it’s very fast, and it’s remarkably well developed. It may even have been born on board the Pasadena. We don’t know.” He paused. “There is some speculation that it might have been created deliberately.”
The implications thronged around Dobbs. Live AIs were accidents of programming and circumstance. If someone could learn how to make them on command, it could be an almost unthinkable miracle. It could also be the greatest disaster since the first bombs fell in the Fast Burn.
Havelock drew back. “What we do know is that we have a new, sentient AI to deal with. Master Dobbs, you are our closest member. I’ve raised the Guild Masters. We’re going to open a line to you and send you in. Cohen will go with you to block records. You will both leave immediately.”
His words sent a shudder all the way through Dobbs. Open lines were used only in absolute emergencies. The constant exchange of packets and the perpetually open transmitter paths took signal delay down to a minimum, and it allowed a field member to keep in contact with Guild Hall. But open lines were highly visible. Cohen would have to position himself in The Gate’s transmitter processors. From there, he would constantly monitor the internal logs and external activities to make sure no one outside the network saw anything suspicious. While he was hiding her, she’d be combing through the Pasadena.
Dobbs rippled. “I’ve allowed myself ten hours. I only have eight left… ”
“That should be enough for initial contact. You just have to calm it down for now. Tell it there’s no danger. You know what to do.”
In theory, she felt herself bunching together. In theory only.
She forced herself to remain open. She was the closest member. The Live One had been discovered in the area she oversaw. That made it her responsibility.
It had to be a single presence that met the Live One. If it felt as though it was being surrounded or cut off from its open pathways, it would respond to the Fools as it would to a virus or a diagnostic program. Newborns had to be coaxed out. Trying to compel them cost lives and ruined networks.
That coaxing was now Dobbs’ responsibility. She had to find the Live One and convince it not only to listen to her, but to let whatever hold it had over the Pasadena go.
A memory sprang into place and Dobbs felt herself lurch sideways.
“The Live One may be immobilized,” she said. “It may even be dead. Rurik Lipinski… with my help,” she added, as the reality of her work sank in, “managed to neutralize the ‘virus.’ We haven’t had any problems for two days.” She stretched toward Havelock. He slid through her outer layers and absorbed the memory she held out. She stirred restlessly, trying not to reach out for Cohen.
“You may be correct,” Havelock said, with an uncharacteristic amount of surprise pushing at his voice. “You still need to perform a reconnaissance. If the Live One is there and in any way active, we have to deal with it. If this Houston has found a reliable way of neutralizing it… we need to know that too.”
“Yes, Sir.” Dobbs tried to steel herself but she felt as if she were unravelling from the inside out.
“I’ll be monitoring the line, Dobbs,” said Cohen, giving her a quick, reassuring touch. “It’s the Live One’s first time too, remember. Be gentle with it.”
“Ha-ha.” Dobbs held herself still. Cohen anchored a piece of the meeting space in her outer layers.
Then, he reached deep inside her and left her the memory of his wish for luck.
Dobbs let her awareness open around the line Cohen had given her. Down its length she was able to feel not just Guild Master Havelock, but two
dozen other presences that she knew only from a distance. These were the Guild Masters and they were all waiting for her to carry that mission out.
Dobbs tried to organized her thoughts and only partially succeeded.
“Ready,” she said anyway.
The pathway out of the meeting space opened up again and Dobbs drove herself down it, playing the line out behind her like a kite string. It was a strange, uncomfortable sensation to be aware of every inch of hardware she passed through. It was as if her inner self was streaming out to be held by twenty-four strangers. At the same time, it was reassuring. Their touch and presence was sure, steady. She was going into the unknown, but she was not going alone. The oldest and most experienced members of the Guild were with her.
The final jump brought her back into The Gate. Dobbs waited in the transmitter stack until she felt Cohen jump down behind her. They touched briefly before she shot back into the Pasadena.
She passed up the route back to her own body, hunting for an open channel into the Pasadena’s cargo stores. She felt her way carefully. Almost without warning, a line opened in front of her and Dobbs jumped down it. She slid past the credit transfer and into the data hold…
… into a sensation of absolute stillness. Dobbs turned around. There was no movement, except in one tiny, localized area. Dobbs reached for the packet, touching it lightly so as not to disturb the signal.
It was a request for records from Resit to Pasadena.
All else was stillness. Cold Storage. The hold wasn’t even being monitored.
“I don’t understand… ” said Dobbs, knowing that her words and her confusion travelled down the line to the Guild Masters.
“Search the ship.” The words came from Havelock. “Go slowly, Dobbs. It may be hiding.”
“That’s not the only reason to go slow.” She sent back what reinforcing details she had of Lipinski’s road blocks.
There was thoughtful silence for a moment. “It can’t have gone far then. And if he has managed to… fragment it, you’ll find the traces.”
Dobbs eased herself forward. She stretched every portion of herself as far as the channels would let her and drifted. She gently brushed the moving information as it passed. All of it was ordinary stuff. Life support. Diagnostics. A navigation simulation Yerusha had left running.
She moved forward another few inches, straight into a cloud of white noise. Her senses screamed in confusion and tried to double back into her. Dobbs hauled herself into a tight ball and tried to calm down.
“Easy, Master Dobbs,” said Havelock. “It’s one of the Houston’s roadblocks. Look at it again. We’ve got to get past this.”
The reminder of her title stung her pride, as Havelock no doubt meant it to. Dobbs extended herself again and touched the surface of the roadblock. It crackled and bubbled underneath her, a wall of chaos filling the pathway.
Well, Houston, you’re even better than I thought you were.
“We have it now, Dobbs.” The line reached deeper into her, a needle into her consciousness. “You need to be this way.” The idea planted itself in her physical memory.
Dobbs twisted herself, rolling into a discrete package. The wall was not solid. It had holes in it. They were small and they moved, but she could find them. She held herself against the wall until one hole opened underneath her. She jumped. The compact bundle she had made of herself shot through the hole before it had a chance to move.
The line trailed out behind her, sending a vague itch into her where it threaded through the wall.
Dobbs moved forward. She brushed against something strange lying inert in her path. She stopped and circled it closely, pulling the line across it so that the Guild Master’s could examine the fragment directly.
“It’s in binary,” she murmured. “This must be Tully’s virus.”
“Not entirely. Look here.” The line turned her gently to another shard. Dobbs pressed against it, examining it for herself. Fear seeped up into her private mind. The shard was a splinter of AI code forcibly grafted onto the binary code and then dropped.
Too late. Lipinski did it…
She stopped herself. No. Think. If this was it, if this — mutation — had been the Live One, there should be a lot more of it, and it should be spread out on both sides of the roadblock.
She sent her conclusion down the line and the warm sensation that swam back to her told her the Guild Masters all concurred.
“We’re assigning the study of the fragment to Guild Master Li Hsin,” said Havelock. “This may be a portion of the AI that the Freer lost.”
Dobbs started forward again. She crept along the Pasadena’s thousand information pathways and leapt through Lipinski’s hundred roadblocks, until there was nowhere left to go.
There was no one there. She was alone.
At last, she came back to the holding space inside her own cabin’s desk. There was one thing left to do, but she didn’t want to. She reached for the transfer records down to The Farther Kingdom and replayed the markers from the data that had been sent. No reputable ship actually kept a full copy of their packets, but they kept records of configuration and size. Dobbs let the information flow past her.
Her mind almost refused to believe what it found.
“It’s out,” murmured Havelock.
“It’s not just out.” Horror tugged at her, threatening to cave her in on herself. “It was planted here. It didn’t come with Amory Dane’s packet, Guild Master, it was his packet.”
The Guild Masters were silent for a moment. “It couldn’t be,” said Guild Master Wesbridge to Havelock. “We have the parameters for the packet from Master Dobbs’ previous report. They do not match this set. This thing that was transferred down is not Amory Dane’s packet.”
“So where is the packet? Dobbs wanted to shout. “What happened to it?” She stretched out and found an inventory of the hold’s contents. She pushed the information down the line. “Everything else is accounted for, except that packet and the live one. It can’t believe the live one carted a load of bio-garden data down with it for no reason.” She stopped.
“The New Medina Hospital thought it was receiving the data it ordered. Could the Live One have been using it as a shield or a blind?” Dobbs felt herself reaching towards the comm lines. The Live One was down in the Farther Kingdom free — and alone.
“This will be studied,” Havelock cut through the debate beginning to boil behind her. “What we do know is that the Live One is free in The Farther Kingdom network. Master Dobbs, we need you to continue the search there.”
Even as he was speaking to her, Dobbs felt the return signal from her transceiver knife through her.
“I don’t have time,” Dobbs told them, with greater calm than she felt. “I’m breaking out as it is.” Her internal processes shifted on their own. She struggled to block the reflexes coming to life. She knew the Guild Masters felt them too. They sent back silence.
“Master Dobbs, I can’t order you to endanger your life,” said Havelock.
Her concentration wavered. She drifted up the path. She had to go back. Now. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She had to move, now.
“…but we do not have forty-eight hours to wait,” Havelock was saying. “The Farther Kingdom is a highly engineered eco-sphere. If the Live One panics before then, it could take the entire world down in less than a day.”
“I know.” Dobbs’ hold on the line slid open. “I know.”
Dobbs fell back into her body. Her blood tingled in her veins and she heard herself groan as she opened her eyes.
She didn’t begin her stretching exercisers. Instead, she just lay there, blinking heavily at the blurry ceiling and feeling the cool of the faux silk blanket under her palms. She swallowed against the dryness of her throat. Her stomach curdled from hunger. She shouldn’t take another dosage for forty-eight hours. No other Fool could make it to Farther Kingdom in less than four. The Live One was out there now, burrowing into the networks, making itself a nest,
or nests, working on shaping the world it had discovered into something it could use. It wouldn’t be long before a diagnostic program found it or some cracker tripped over it. It would be frightened and it would defend itself.
Then the war would begin.
And it would end the way it had ended on Kerensk. Her eyes squeezed themselves shut. If it ends even that well.
She fumbled for the hypo without opening her eyes and pressed it against her neck.
Chapter Six — Runaway
Jump.
The Farther Kingdom networked opened around Dobbs. Pathways branched out in a hundred thousand dizzying directions. This wasn’t a single network. It was a network of networks. In her brief touches, she could feel knots in some paths that were so snarled it would have taken the entire Guild a week to straighten them out.
Dobbs didn’t need to straighten them out. She just needed to follow them. She paused for a moment, stretching herself carefully through the nearest tangles until she found the thickest of them all. She turned toward that path and forced her way down it.
Where are you?
Outside the hospital walls, Al Shei found herself in the midst of a human bustle that outstripped anything she saw in even the busiest stations. Al Shei had only been to New Medina a couple of times and its beauty had yet to wear off on her. The original Medina was a spartan place, like all of the cities on earth. The Management Union had allotted it the Mosque of the Prophet as a historical building, but everything else had been rebuilt of non-reflective concretes and kept low to the ground to make minimal impact on the environment.
Here though, the minarets were gold-tipped and they towered over luscious green date palms. The central mosque had a magnificent turquoise dome. The street were narrow and dusty. The buildings were allowed to crowd together.
The Management Union encouraged such opulent colonies. It lured people away from Earth and meant there were fewer feet to trample the environment they swore they were rebuilding.
