Legacy weighed the potential value of any information that could be obtained from Yonezawa and Miller against the security risk of admitting them to InSec Center. He knew that Miller, whatever her motivation, would have engineered the situation to produce the maximum Inf-P—information potential. That usually was a good way of gaming the system.
But today, in these ticklish circumstances—no. It didn’t outweigh the tiny, but non-zero, risk of allowing Kiyoshi Yonezawa to go on living.
He tapped the fingerprint reader that enabled his secure comms channel. “Space them.”
“Sir? Both of them?” said the human security guard controlling the the airlock.
“Affirmative,” Legacy said. He leaned back with a sigh. His gaze returned to the view. “Have you ever been to Paris?” he asked the thing in the sandpit.
★
The metal flamingo scooped up their spacesuits. The old one Kiyoshi had been wearing was so bulky that the bot now looked like a walking laundry basket. “I’ll just look after these for you,” it said, muffled.
Kiyoshi stooped and grabbed his dagger, which had fallen to the floor when the bot picked up his spacesuit.
The airlock opened.
At the wrong end.
Explosively, the atmosphere rushed out.
The metal flamingo tumbled out into the night with a forlorn squawk, taking their spacesuits with it.
Kiyoshi lost his footing. Hurled head over heels by the sheer force of the decompression blast, he drove his dagger into the floor. The Japanese steel sheared through the insulation tiles and scraped on regocrete, slowing him down.
He thrust out his left hand and seized Andrea Miller’s leg as she hurtled past him.
Shoulders screaming in pain, he hung on, sliding little by little towards the exit.
Abruptly, the gale stopped battering them. There hadn’t been very much air in the chamber in the first place, after all.
And now there was none.
When the vacuum enfolded you, it felt like nothing. Vacuum was a good insulator. You didn’t even feel cold. At first.
Spaceborn reflexes drove the air out of Kiyoshi’s lungs in a controlled exhalation. He pried at the flanges of the chamber’s inner valve with his dagger. He knew that he had about thirty seconds before he blacked out from lack of oxygen. Twice that long before he incurred fatal brain damage.
Andrea’s breath clouded out, proving that she was well-trained. She hammered on the valve with her bare fists.
As abruptly as it had opened—but soundlessly, now that there was no air to carry sound—the outer end of the airlock slammed shut.
Life-giving air jetted from the nozzles overhead.
The chamber hadn’t taken long to empty. Fortunately for them, it didn’t take much longer than that to restore a survivable atmosphere.
Kiyoshi gulped a huge breath. The smell of the vacuum lingered in his nostroils. It was an utterly unique scent, like welding fumes, but meatier.
“What the hell … was that?”
He spoke the last words into the face of a young man in a purple uniform, revealed by the parting of the inner flanges.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” the security guard stuttered, astonishment giving way to terror.
“Yeah, I got that part.”
Kiyoshi reversed his grip and drove the hilt of his dagger into the security guard’s nose. The man fell backwards, blood spraying from his face.
“Here!” Andrea Miller said. “Yonezawa! Take this!”
Kiyoshi somersaulted through the valve, into a corridor now spattered with the security guard’s blood.
Andrea hopped after him. “Take it!”
Her arm appeared to end at the elbow. He grabbed the invisible coverall she was holding out. It felt like a stretchy terrycloth towel.
“How do you put on something that’s freaking invisible?”
“Practice.”
By the time he’d struggled into the coverall, Andrea had already vanished. He located her by the behavior of the security guard. The man rolled across the corridor, crying, exactly as if someone were kicking him in the ribs.
No klaxon sounded. No super-advanced security tech materialized. Maybe it was malfunctioning. And maybe the airlock had malfunctioned, too.
“Miller?”
“What?” she gasped.
“Don’t waste your time on this clown.”
“You’re right.”
A bow materialized in a blur of air. An arrow fletched with silver foil sprouted from the security guard’s chest. Kiyoshi had seen Andea surrender her bow. She must’ve had a collapsible one hidden up her sleeve.
“Go away,” she said. “We don’t have network connections. You have no way of telling where I am, or if you’re in my shot. It’s dangerous for you to be near me.”
She was talking to an empty corridor.
★
Three minutes after he’d given the order to space Yonezawa and Miller, Oliver Legacy saved his work and clicked over to a schematic security view of Sector B. Three minutes was more than long enough for people to die of vacuum exposure. He’d make sure they were dead, then dispatch a recycling bot to pick up their remains.
Personnel Airlock B was closed.
Closed?!
On the exterior surveillance feed, a servitor bot was feebly trying to reach the action plate. Infrared confirmed that there were no corpses lying on the ground.
There was, however, one corpse lying inside the dome, just this side of the Sector B airlock.
It belonged to an InSec Center security guard.
Legacy stabbed his comms. “Code White,” he said, meaning Perimeter breach. Code White had not been used once in InSec Center’s sixty years of existence. “Check the Sector B feed. I recommend activating Butterfly Net.”
Within two seconds, a plurality of the seventeen people who shared Legacy’s security clearance level—the highest at InSec Center—confirmed his recommendation.
Pulse racing, Legacy waited for drones to buzz from their hidden ports in each and every room and corridor. They would home in on anything that profiled as human, and envelope it in a quick-hardening net of plastic string. The twenty-odd employees presently at work within Sector B would have to be netted, too. Alerted by text messages, they sat motionless at their desks. They had all endured Butterfly Net in training.
After a minute or so, some of them began to glance quizzically at the ceiling.
Legacy brought his fist down on his screen, bruising the schematic view of Sector B. “It’s the gremlins again.”
“Activate Militia,” quacked someone else in the executive-level network.
Consensus only took 1.3 seconds this time.
★
Kiyoshi had no idea where he was going, but that had never deterred him before and it didn’t now. He took his gecko boots off and carried them in the invisible coverall’s left sleeve pocket. It had hanging sleeves like a Japanese kimono—very handy. The material made no chafing noises, and it stretched so easily he could have forgotten it was there, if not for the sensation of terrycloth covering his nose and mouth. Flowing legs with interior toe-loops hid his bare feet.
Silently, he ghosted through bare corridors and peered through the windowed doors of offices. People sat working at screens, or performed weird tai chi-like dances, manipulating immersion-based work environments he couldn’t see. Even on Pallas, an office was an office.
Strange that no alarms had gone off.
Stranger still that no one was chasing him.
Maybe this invisibility shit really worked.
Even so, what about infrared? He wasn’t overheating, which meant the coverall wasn’t even trying to hide his heat signature.
If it ain’t broke, don’t worry about it.
He pushed the questions out of his mind. He had to find Legacy. Where, in this hive of offices, did the bastard hang out?
He turned a corner—and froze.
Just ahead, the corridor ended in a s
olid steel wall equipped with biometric locks. A human security guard, like the one Andrea Miller had shot, stood in a slovenly posture, studying his fingernails.
Kiyoshi retreated a few paces and waited.
After a short time, rainbow light flowed around a door-shaped part of the wall. It slid away. The security guard recoiled, as surprised as Kiyoshi was by what came through.
A person in head-to-toe green armor, or else a phavatar made of head-to-toe green armor. It looked like a man-sized insect.
It held a laser rifle of the make Kiyoshi used to have, a HabSafe™, guaranteed to go through flesh, but not through walls.
“Intruder located and verified. Hands up, motherfucker,” ordered a distorted voice.
Red crosshairs hovered in the air over Kiyoshi’s heart.
★
Because of the extreme sensitivity of the yottabytes of information housed in InSec Center’s fleet of supercomputers, and because the ISA—more than any other agency—understood the risk of emergent hostile behavior, they did not allow advanced mechanical intelligences on Pallas. The closest things to artificial personalities they tolerated were the flamingo-like bots which acted as servitors, and those, frankly, were about as smart as flamingos. Of course the staff had to have software-based MIs to help with their tasks, but an intricate system of firewalls prevented any of these entities from knowing the configuration of the information management system, much less its contents.
Only humans were allowed to do that.
On the same principle, InSec Center’s defenses balanced human capabilities against MI capabilities in a contingently evolving framework so structured that neither people nor software could ever get the upper hand.
Butterfly Net, the first-responder drone flock that had malfunctioned, was autonomous, but non-lethal.
Militia was lethal but non-autonomous.
Thirty phavatars, armed with non-integrated weapons, had issued from lockers throughout Sectors A, B, C, and D. Each of them was being operated in real time by an employee who’d been yanked away from his or her work to carry out this important secondary duty. The operators were all volunteers. Some of them were keen, others less so.
Legacy virtually peered over the shoulder of the kid who’d found Kiyoshi Yonezawa. A split screen on Legacy’s desk showed him the kid, frozen in his immersion cubicle, and what the kid’s phavatar was looking at.
A skeleton with a dagger in its hand.
Blurring.
Lunging.
“Shoot him!” Legacy shouted.
★
Kiyoshi lunged sideways, dodging behind the human security guard. The man was only just beginning to react to the situation. No one would ever know what his reaction would have been. The phavatar’s laser rifle drilled a hole in his throat. Blood pumped out in a red fountain.
★
“I killed the security guard!” The phavatar mirrored the actions of its operator, clutching its face with both hands, doubling over in shock. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
“God preserve us from amateurs,” Legacy snarled. He overrode the kid’s log-in and took over.
★
The phavatar dropped its rifle and covered its face with its green claws. Distorted moans issued from its speaker. Kiyoshi thought about grabbing the rifle, but it was too long, wouldn’t fit under his coverall. Instead, he snatched the dead security guard’s PEPgun from his holster. He dived through the security door and ran.
★
Legacy, now in control of the Militia phavatar, blasted away at the fleeing man. The phavatar could ‘see’ in the infrared and X-ray spectrum. Yonezawa looked like a living skeleton surrounded by a penumbra of heat. White-hot laser pulses hailed around the bony ghost. Hot dimples speckled the walls and floor.
His rifle ran out of juice.
The skeleton lay unmoving on the floor.
“Got him,” Legacy grunted. He walked the phavatar towards the body.
Halfway there, the phavatar’s hydraulic legs seized up.
“SUIT COMMAND: Proceed!”
The phavatar did not respond. A quick diagnostic scan revealed an error in its wireless charging settings. It hadn’t been charging at all, and its onboard power pack had run out of juice. It could no longer move.
Legacy forwarded the results of the diagnostic scan to his fellow executives. “This piece of scrap has failed, but the job’s done. I’ll dispatch a recyling bot to pick up the remains. I recommend evacuating this sector until that’s taken care of. We don’t want any of our special snowflakes stumbling across a corpse.”
His recommendation was seconded and carried.
“What about Miller?” said someone else.
“Militia will find her and eliminate her. Hopefully without another balls-up. For future consideration,” Legacy added, his voice choked with anger, “I propose a soup-to-nuts sweep of the entire system. We have got to get rid of these gremlins.”
Seconded, carried.
Another executive added that they should also reconsider Militia. Yes, it had worked—or at least half-worked—but not thanks to the volunteers.
“Some things never change,” Legacy said. “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”
Backgrounding the executive channel, he cleared the image of the Sector B corridor from his screens and returned to the task that really interested him.
“Tell me more about Mars,” he invited the thing in the sandpit.
★
Andrea Miller didn’t have a BCI. She’d had one implanted when she was a well-off teenager on Luna, but she’d had to have it removed when the ISA tightened up its anti-spam protocols a few years back. The same went for everyone in the Agency, from the top executives down to the lowliest … actually, Worldhouse Project wardens pretty much were the lowliest people in the organization.
But they weren’t as stupid as the secret squirrels seemed to think they were. They’d compiled a map of InSec Center, based on what they saw when they occasionally visited. And precisely because Andrea didn’t have a BCI, she had a functioning memory. She followed the map in her head. When she needed to get through the biometrically locked doors between sectors, she just waited for a person or a servitor bot to come along, and squeezed through behind them.
She was hurrying along a corridor in Sector C when a security phavatar bounded around the corner. Its insectile bulk horrified her. She’d never actually seen one of the Militia phavatars before.
“Hands up!” it yelled, sounding a bit frightened.
Adrenaline racing, Andrea decided to wager her life on the squeamishness of the phavatar’s operator. She plucked her power bow out of her sleeve. In portage form it was simply a six-inch grip. Her thumb pressed a stud. The arms extruded from either end of the grip, pulling the bowstring taut as they reached full length. She plucked an arrow from the thigh pocket of her coverall. This, too, started off small. As she nocked it and pulled it back, the shape-memory alloy shaft lengthened and stiffened.
“Hands up!” the phavatar yelled. “This is your last warning!”
“I don’t understand,” Andrea cried, buying herself another micro-second, and loosed.
The arrow flew down the corridor. Its artificial diamond head bit deep into the phavatar’s head-mounted sensor array.
“I can’t see!” the phavatar howled.
Andrea sprinted past the machine. Then she went back to snatch its rifle. You could never have too many weapons.
The next phavatar wasn’t such a pushover, and she was glad she had the rifle. After that they came at her in waves. She dodged into an office, where the phavatars could not shoot for fear of hitting their own innocent colleagues. A second wave of the grotesque armored robots piled in on top of the first wave. Andrea rolled under a desk, rolled out near the far door, and ran for it. There was no point trying to be sneaky anymore. She burst out of the office and charged into the park in the middle of InSec Center.
Gemstone-cobbled paths, lawns shaped lik
e the ISA logo, hydroponic towers inviting you to pick your own strawberries or tomatoes. It was all so bloody bourgeois. And it was full of employees eating lunch.
Andrea carved through them like a meteor. Bounding high over a hedge, she hurtled towards a seemingly impenetrable thicket of rhododendrons. She knew it was actually a wall. She didn’t know where the door was—until a phavatar burst out of it.
She bounced off the wall, nocked an arrow, drew and loosed.
The phavatar clutched its head, which now had an arrow sticking out of it. She was getting good at this.
Out of the same door stepped two human security guards, a man and a woman. Unlike the volunteer phavatar operators, these knew what they were doing. One dived right, the other left. PEPgun charges seared into the shrubbery.
Andrea stood her ground. It wasn’t a huge risk. In the last archery competition she’d scored a personal-best time of 0.6 seconds.
Her first arrow burrowed into the female security guard’s eye.
The other guard looked to see what had happened. That took a split second off his reaction time, and her second arrow buried itself in his stomach.
Blimey, she thought, I didn’t want to kill anyone, and then she was in, slamming the door behind her.
She screamed at the terrified employees, “Is this the writers’ room?”
★
“Oh, so now we have a hostage situation,” Legacy said. “That’s just great.”
“Yes, sir,” said the chief of security.
“Well, who’s in there? Just writers?”
“Yes, sir.”
The executives had a quick consensus-building chat. During these sessions, they did not necessarily communicate via voice or text messages. They shared their thoughts, literally. Using the same brainwave-mapping technology employed for telepresence, they could beam ideas and feelings straight into each other’s brains—or at least into the slimline headsets they all wore. It felt like one’s own ruminative process, sped up by several orders of magnitude. The big cheeses on Earth were very enamored of this decision-making method, describing it as AI without the tears. The premise, of course, was that many heads were better than one. Oliver Legacy doubted that. But then, he wasn’t a perfect fit for the ISA.
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