Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5)

by Niall Teasdale

  What was essentially the prosecution lawyer stood up and stepped around his desk, smiling at Kit. Kit recognised that kind of smile. Fox was always very sarcastic about that sort of smile. ‘Kit, could you tell us why your mistress is unable to appear here herself?’

  ‘Miss Meridian fell into a coma on the twenty-fourth of February,’ Kit replied. She knew that Fox was awake, and on the Moon, but it had been decided that those details should be left out and it was not actually lying… ‘I should correct you, however. As an AI, I am required to have a legal entity, personal or corporate, as an owner. Tara Meridian remains my legal owner. However, prior to her incapacitation, she gave me my core command key. I no longer have a master or mistress, except for myself. I am employed currently as assistant to the acting head of Palladium Security Solutions’ investigations division and, when Miss Meridian recovers, I will continue as her personal assistant. Because I greatly enjoy doing that job and consider her my friend.’

  That caused uproar until the judge slammed his gavel down rather hard on the desk. ‘I want silence in this room,’ he stated loudly, ‘or I’ll have it cleared. Continue.’

  The lawyer’s smile remained sickening. ‘However, Kit, the injuries which Miss Meridian sustained were as a result of the actions of Reginald Alan Grant and Hannah. Is that correct?’

  Kit checked her notes, scrolling text up her virtual page. She did not need to – she knew everything in the file – but Fox had said to do that because it gave the right impression. Another of Fox’s directions was that questions like that should result in an objection being raised by the defence; if it did not, then the defence were up to something.

  ‘Fox says, “Don’t let the prosecution draw you into questions of fact. They have my deposition to the Japanese police and I doubt Hannah will say any of it is incorrect.” So I would prefer not to answer that question. I do not believe it is my role to do so as I was not there.’

  ‘Are you aware of the term “Stockholm Syndrome,” Kit?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I have an above-basic knowledge of psychology. Stockholm Syndrome, named for the behaviour of hostages in a Stockholm bank robbery siege, is where the victims come to identify and sympathise with their captors. It is recognised as a response to abuse and captivity which can occur in a number of situations. It has been theorised that the same mechanisms cause “battered wife syndrome.” It does not apply in this case. Grant was the abuser and Miss Meridian has no sympathy for him. In the case of Hannah, she simply believes it incorrect to punish her without trial, not that her actions are fully justified by her circumstances.’

  The look on the man’s face suggested that he had not been expecting an eloquent or reasoned response. ‘No further questions, your honour.’

  ‘Very well,’ the judge said. ‘Advocate for the litigant?’

  A woman stood up at the other desk. According to the data Kit had seen, this was someone from a cybernetic rights group with something of a reputation for grandstanding. She was probably not going to underestimate Kit, however.

  ‘Kit,’ the woman said. Her smile was more genuine, but it still had a calculating edge. ‘Miss Meridian’s testimony seems to indicate that she believes that Hannah had no choice in her actions until she broke free of Grant’s control. Would you agree?’

  Kit scrolled through her notes. ‘Fox says, “Don’t let the defence try to get you on record defending Hannah either. You weren’t there. You don’t know.” I was not there. I cannot pass judgement on what happened.’

  ‘But you can give your opinion.’

  ‘No, I legally cannot. I am an AI.’

  ‘Under the circumstances of this hearing,’ the judge said, ‘I’ll allow it if you wish to present your opinion, Kit.’

  Kit blinked at the man beside her. ‘Thank you, your honour. In that case… I am highly conflicted. I hate Hannah for her part in Fox’s kidnapping, but I cannot thank her enough for her actions at the end of it. My core programming leads to me finding her deplorable, but I am unable to deny the truth of Fox’s reasoning. Hannah is not an object to be turned off. She is a thinking being, deserving of justice, whether that leads to her incarceration or her freedom. I believe… that she is no more dangerous now than any human in this room.’

  Jenner Research Station.

  ‘The hearing went well,’ Kit said. ‘My copy was quite happy with her appearance, and the judge adjourned at the end for deliberation. There has been no decision yet, which I think is probably a good thing. You gave them food for thought.’

  Fox nodded. She was back in her viron, reading the news from Earth and Luna City which was relayed manually each day from the external network to the internal one. ‘I’ve got no idea what they’ll decide. Trying Hannah in full court is going to upset a convoy of apple carts. The judge may not want to go there.’

  ‘He let me give my opinion on the case. I think he has some sympathies toward infomorph rights.’

  ‘We can hope then. If he decides to pass it up the chain, though, it could be months or years before Hannah goes to trial. It won’t be good for her.’

  ‘No. Fox, there is something else I synchronised which… I was unsure whether I should tell you. I have decided to do so because I believe you should know.’

  Fox looked up. ‘That wasn’t cryptic at all. Unless you’re going to tell me Grant’s killed someone.’

  ‘I have no evidence indicating that, but Vali received a message from his mysterious source and passed it on to me. It clearly indicates that Grant is here, on the Moon.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He has a self-contained habitat in the Sea of Tranquillity, established several years ago under the name Alan Regent. It was rented out to tourists until his arrest, when it was “closed for refurbishment.” I assume this is another contingency for his escape.’

  ‘Okay…’ Fox frowned for a second. ‘I’m going to need a suit. That body can handle the vacuum, but the temperature extremes could stop it.’

  ‘You mean to go after him? What about the police?’

  ‘This is personal, Kit. And before you say anything, I’m going alone.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘I don’t want you there, Kit. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I’m not having you involved in this.’

  ‘You’re going to kill him.’

  ‘I’m not going to let him do to anyone else what he did to me.’

  Mare Tranquillitatis, 6th March.

  The Sea of Tranquillity was home to an internationally famous monument to Man’s achievement, three Apollo landing sites, as well as a base with a museum and a resort spa facility which featured all sorts of ways to get too high a dose of radiation in the name of feeling pampered, and a number of private dwellings belonging to the ultra-rich. It was not entirely uncommon for the less-than-ultra ultra-rich to have something constructed and then rent them to people who wanted the feel of a private home on the Moon without the fairly exorbitant cost. They usually became retirement homes eventually.

  Fox doubted, as she trekked across the lunar surface, that Grant was thinking of this as a retirement. She had been dropped off three miles from the location of Grant’s house and was making her way in on foot, clad in one of the new suit designs Jenner had been working on, complete with a helmet which provided a lot of functions she did not need. Air, for one thing. However, it was more or less high noon in lunar day terms, no matter what the official time was locally, and the temperature in the sun was hot enough to boil water, even if there had been a normal atmosphere. According to the specs, she might have been able to handle that kind of temperature, badly, but the suit was keeping her at something more human-normal.

  The suit could also handle navigation, but so could her body. The LNS, the lunar equivalent of GPS, provided the same sort of signals as its terrestrial counterpart, and Fox could navigate by it quite well. It was just a question of following the in-vision indicators in a more or less straight line. Most of the private homes were located on the
south side of the Sinus Amoris, the Bay of Love, which was where Tranquillity Base was situated, well away from any of the landing sites. Grant’s was one of the furthest south, which worked for Fox since it kept her well away from the base, which had a UNTPP station in it.

  She stopped as soon as she made out a shielded dome on the surface. There were a number of designs for these things, but several had a surface dome containing what amounted to a sun lounge and surface garaging facilities. The actual habitat was below ground level, shielded from cosmic rays and solar flares by metres of regolith. Grant’s was one of those. Somehow she doubted that he spent huge amounts of time in the lounge: he seemed like the kind of man who wanted to live forever, and radiation was not conducive to that.

  Fox closed in. The dome’s radiation shields were closed. They were not going to do much against cosmic rays, but they would provide adequate protection against solar flares and they could be opened up like blinds for periods of good solar weather. Right now was such a period, but Grant had them shut. He was, Fox had no doubt, underground and, at three twenty in the morning, probably asleep. She figured he tended to sleep quite well: it was not like anything bothered his conscience. Locating the airlock door beside the large garage port, Fox set to work hacking the locking mechanism.

  ~~~

  Grant opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling of his darkened room. Something had woken him… He checked the clock beside the bed: three forty-five a.m. He never woke up early without a reason. A solid eight hours had been his pattern unless he had a new toy to play with, and then he tended to be like a kid at Christmas…

  ‘Guilty conscience?’ The voice was female, hard to localise, and Grant failed to identify it immediately. ‘No, can’t be that. You don’t have a conscience.’

  Grant bolted upright in bed, looking quickly around. ‘Meridian? You’re dead. I shot you.’

  ‘Right on both counts. I bet you don’t believe in ghosts, but here I am.’

  ‘Lights!’ The room brightened quickly, but there was no sign of Fox in the room.

  ‘I’m not that easy to find, Grant.’ The voice came from the doorway, muffled by the door. How could she have possibly got out that fast?

  Grant yanked open his bedside cabinet and lifted out his pistol as he rolled out of bed. ‘I’ll find you and finish the job,’ he growled, but when he opened the door and looked around the lounge, there was still no sign of her.

  ‘Try harder.’ Off to the left. There was both an elevator and a stairwell there, leading up to the surface. Grant ran to the stairs, opening the door and looking upward. ‘Getting warmer…’ He bolted up the stairs, pausing at each landing to look up. He saw nothing, but the voice egged him on. ‘Out of shape, Grant? Come get me.’

  At the top, the door to the stairs opened into a circular room set at the core of the dome. Straight across was the elevator, and to the left and right were heavy doors which led to the lounge and the garage. Grant turned right, toward the garage, and reached for the button to open the door.

  ‘Colder…’

  He spun on the spot, aiming his pistol at the lounge door, half-expecting to see Fox standing there. He advanced, keeping his weapon raised, and punched the button. The door opened and light blazed through. The screens had been opened up and he was sure he had closed them. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he stepped through into the room and the door closed behind him.

  ‘Over here, Grant.’

  His pistol led his eyes toward the sound. He saw her, a female shape silhouetted against the light from outside. The colours were all washed out, but she looked almost like an angel with the nimbus surrounding her. Grant had never believed in angels, but he was damned if some ghost was going to finish him. He took aim.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

  Grant fired off three rounds at the angelic form in front of him. Not one of them hit its target, but they did punch through the canopy behind her. The shrieking sound of air passing through small holes into vacuum filled the room and Grant’s eyes widened.

  ‘Told you,’ Fox said.

  There was the sound of plastic under stress, a groan of distress almost lost in the whistling of air, and then a large section of the dome, already cracked, gave under the pressure, ripping a hole in the protective shield.

  It was not like in the movies. There was no massive suction, no bodies dragged through the gap, but the atmosphere in the sealed room began to vent quite rapidly into space. Grant turned and rushed to the door, thumping the open button, and nothing happened. He hit it again and again, but still nothing happened. The air pressure was dropping alarmingly and his vision blurred briefly. Pain seared through his head as his eardrums burst and he barely heard the voice behind him.

  ‘The system locks down in the event of decompression. You need the override code.’

  Grant spun around and looked into Fox’s cybernetic face. His eyes widened. ‘Help me,’ he said, but there was no sound in the near-vacuum they were now standing in. He saw her lips move and thought she was saying ‘fuck you,’ but could not be sure. Then he pressed his gun into her stomach and fired. She smirked at him, stepping back and looking down. There was a black mark on her skin from the propellant, but no sign of any damage. Turning, she walked away from him and he fired again, rapid and random, wasting valuable seconds and hitting nothing but the already broken dome.

  Fox found her suit where she had hidden it beneath one of the lounge chairs and began to put it on. The temperature was already rising in the evacuated room and she wanted to be out of the heat. Fully dressed and in her helmet, she looked back toward the door. Grant’s brain had caught up with his need for the override code, but not fast enough. His body was slumped against the door, mouth gaping wide in an attempt to pull air out of the vacuum.

  Turning, Fox stepped out of the hole in the broken dome, set her new navigation target, and set off across the grey surface.

  Jenner Research Station.

  Fox stepped off the shuttle, lifting her helmet off as she did so. Eyes that glowed a steady blue scanned the hangar deck and found what she was half-expecting to see. Jackson and Terri were walking across from the elevator.

  ‘Before you ask,’ Fox said, ‘I’d rather not repeat myself, so can we wait until Kit’s around to grill me?’

  ‘Actually,’ Jackson said, ‘that’s reasonable. We’ll go straight down, but you can tell me how the suit and cyberframe performed on the way.’

  Fox made him wait until they were actually in the car before speaking. ‘I wasn’t exactly pushing either of them to their limits. Actually, I don’t think I was pushing them much above baseline, but they both functioned flawlessly. I didn’t need air, of course, but the suit insulated me and I don’t believe there were any leaks. The body works as advertised, so far.’

  ‘Excellent. Field trials are always useful, even if I argued for you not to go.’

  ‘I think you’re underplaying the level of argument.’

  ‘I may be.’

  ‘And there were three of you.’

  ‘You still went,’ Terri pointed out.

  ‘I’m still stubborn. Kit’s loading into my second processor.’

  ‘Then you’ll get shouted at by her soon too.’

  Kit’s avatar appeared, presumably so that Jackson and Terri could hear her, just as the elevator doors opened. ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘Wow, Kit, why don’t we shout it from the rooftops, huh?’ Fox stepped out of the car, the others following.

  ‘This is one of the most secure facilities in the system. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  Kit, and the two humans with her, looked surprised, and a little relieved. ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No, but I also didn’t save him when he shot out the window of his sun lounge, panicked, and died of oxygen starvation. He’s dead, but I just didn’t actually need to actively murder him.’

  ‘Uh… Oh.’

  ‘I sent a message to your home copy. She’ll pass
his location to NAPA, NAPA will contact Luna City… Assuming they haven’t noticed the blowout already and gone to investigate, the cops at Tranquillity Base will roll out to arrest him and discover he’s dead. I suspect they’ll rule it as suicide, though he’s sitting in a vacuum in more or less direct sunlight so I wouldn’t want to be the guy who has to do the autopsy.’ She paused and then added, ‘We should probably go to the lab and check he didn’t crack anything when he shot me.’

  ‘He shot you?!’

  ‘Well, yeah, but I think I just need a damp cloth to wash the powder burns off.’

  ‘Looks like the field test was a little more rigorous than we thought, Poppa,’ Terri said.

  Jackson actually looked rather happy. ‘Indeed. We’ll get it under a microscanner.’

  ‘Poppa, we’re still mad at her.’

  ‘Oh, of course. It’s been an interesting morning.’

  ‘Why?’ Fox asked. ‘I mean, what are you two doing up anyway?’

  ‘Oh!’ Kit exclaimed. ‘Yes, we need to get back. Fei is about to try out her new body too.’

  ~~~

  There was a new cyberframe in the rack in the lab. It had been manufactured as a tall, shapely female figure with fairly natural skin, an elfin sort of face with a pinched nose, blue eyes, and platinum-blonde Tinkerbell hair. And pointed ears.

  ‘Elf ears?’ Fox said. ‘And don’t I recognise that model?’

  Terri blushed a little. ‘Well, I used a Sylph series frame and did some resculpting on the features. She is called Fei…’

  Fox looked over the fairly expansive chest hidden under a tight, blue jumpsuit. ‘You know, if you keep designing robot forms and avatars like this, Helen is going to start feeling inadequate.’ The Sylph was MarTech’s only current foray into the sexbot market. Fox had some of that model in her own frame.

  ‘I’m going to turn on the network connections and get things going.’ Terri walked over to a terminal and began clicking things.

  There was a short pause, and then the Sylph’s head lifted a little and turned, scanning the room. ‘Hello, I am Fei.’