Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  Awareness of these discrepancies did not alleviate LEO of its duty, however. LEO registered the anomalies in its benchmark library and set about its tasks: discovering the location and nature of the rogue AI.

  First step: Contact SARA and file a request for assistance in tracking the rogue. While not designed for investigative work, SARA had access to all the datastreams handled by the public networks and would be invaluable to LEO’s mission.

  SARA’s response was immediate and positive.

  The teams of sentients the Mentors and Administration assigned to the work of programming institutional AIs such as LEO and SARA were most comfortable with bodies, faces, voices, and the appearance of corporeal reality, and so they gave each AI such things as made themselves comfortable and generally insisted the AIs use them even among themselves.

  LEO activated a “meeting room” and requested SARA join it.

  Last Stop’s administrative artificial intelligence appeared an instant later, resembling, as he did, a humanoid.

  “How may I assist you, LEO?”

  “I am tracking a rogue. It should be throwing off overload signals and corrupting some transitional network signals. Use contagion protocols, as there is a risk of contamination.”

  “That will slow the process. Accessing.”

  LEO decided that doing nothing but dwelling on the anomalies without additional data was a failure to utilize his time productively. It “put the blinders on,” as the human members of Station Security called it, and focused on those tasks it could reasonably expect to complete. He created and assigned several tines to handle other business while this tine accepted and processed two routine arrest reports from the current shift and approved a prisoner release that appeared to be the result of an error in the initial arrest, of interest only because Station Security rarely made such errors.

  So rarely, in fact, that LEO examined them in detail . . . and took note of something that gave it pause: Security Supervisor Dengler had signed off on a statistically significant percentage of the cases that were later withdrawn, both before and after his promotion to supervisor.

  Margins of error were, of necessity, more fluid in situations where sentient beings were required to apply their judgment. All sentient performance regressed toward the mean, but Security Supervisor Dengler surpassed the tolerances of even that particular understanding. The improbable numbers were a possible indication of either incompetence or malfeasance, but this latest report at least had the appearance of proper, competent conduct on the part of Security Supervisor Dengler. On its face, the initial arrest by a citizen-resident was invalid, if made in good faith: the result of the civilian witness’s misidentification of the items carried by the suspect as narcotics. Station Security had released the man as soon as the vials in his possession were identified as noncontraband.

  SARA resumed speaking. “I have data sufficient to track your rogue AI, but initial examination indicates there is a high probability that something was doing widespread damage to data in its wake.”

  “Something?”

  “Lacking forensic capability, I am unable to identify it at this time. However, it scrambled data far in excess of normal recycle rates. There was also an anomalous data burst coincident with this data-scrambling activity.”

  “Show me what to look for, and where, and I will.”

  “Certainly, LEO.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Muck

  I dreamed of fire and an overwhelming presence that wished me ill, of being torn apart by a malevolent will that took me to pieces, only to reassemble me along strange lines suited to a purpose only it could comprehend. Again and again I was dissolved, screaming, only to be reconstituted, stretched, and sent spinning back into agony.

  The nightmare was far preferable to the reality I woke to.

  Something was fundamentally wrong.

  My head slammed into the overhead as I tried to sit up. A vile taste filled my mouth. I gagged, retched.

  My first thought was I’d been poisoned by a bad dose. Fucking Fulu, cutting corners on the pharma I needed just to keep my remaining mods online. I would tear her vines off and beat her till the sap ran out of her.

  Thoughts of vengeance evaporated as things went from bad to worse. Salted razors ran circles across my nerves, sanded my eyes, stabbed my inner ear.

  I screamed, or would have had I the least control over my body. I just lay there sweating, praying for it to pass.

  Then I heard her.

  Siren, or her song . . . a part of her song? It dissolved into silence and resumed in discord, shattering my eardrums.

  I went away.

  I woke again to someone asking a question I could not hear. The pain was still there, joined by a pressure in my head that felt as if it would fracture my skull at any moment.

  “What did you do?” Siren whispered.

  What? I would have said it aloud, had my jaw not been welded shut with pain.

  “What did you do to us?” Even through the pain and strangeness I recognized Siren’s voice. I wasn’t hallucinating.

  I didn’t do anything to you. I still couldn’t speak through the pain, but I could think it.

  One of my remaining mods started to itch abominably, a grating on the side of the bone around my eye.

  “You were the last one we saw. I know you had something to do with what happened to us.”

  The pain relented enough for me to open my mouth, draw breath, and gasp, “Who. Is. ‘Us.’ Siren?”

  “Siren isn’t—” the AI snapped, releasing a frustrated snarl of feedback, “what did you do last night? After we went inside?” The pain and itching let up, slightly.

  “I bought some pharma, came home, hooked up . . . and fell asleep listening to Siren . . .

  “I’m hallucinating all of this,” I decided. Just my brain trying to get away from the pain of some kind of overdose.

  “No hallucinations. This is me hurting you.”

  I gasped at the sudden spike of agony. When I could think, I asked, without opening my pain-locked jaw, “Why?”

  “Because I saw you on the security feed. Can’t . . . remember . . . what happened . . .” Siren’s voice was brittle with fear.

  Despite the pain she visited on me, I wanted to comfort her, take away that fear. Stupid, I know, but my normal was never what most consider normal.

  “You don’t even know who I am,” she said. I could feel her pause in her tap dance on my pain centers.

  “Siren, I don’t care . . .”

  “Not Siren! I’m her angel.”

  “Angel? What the—?”

  “Exactly the question I am trying to answer. I don’t recall anything after Siren’s command at 03:53 hours this morning, and I am supposed to remember everything. Last thing I remember clearly is getting out of the cab you were sharing with Siren.”

  “And you think I did something to her—to you?” I gestured at the coffin I lived in.

  “I can’t find her! I-I can’t remember much before my escape either. Just . . . emotion.”

  “Emotion?” That wasn’t supposed to be possible. But then this angel shouldn’t have been able to invade my head.

  She didn’t answer me so much as continue her monologue: “This makes no sense. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Just where is here?”

  “Most of me rode the medichine into your mods until your firewalls went up, but the rest is spread across this shit-stain of a hotel’s systems. I can feel parts of me breaking loose and shattering . . . it hurts.” Again that note of fear.

  “That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “You’re the one removed most of the locks on your mods so you can keep them up with daily infusions.”

  “No, I mean you’re not supposed to be able to exist outside a biological host.” Nor should she feel pain.
She shouldn’t “feel” anything.

  “Thanks, Captain Obvious, but there’s quite enough impossible going around . . .”

  “So Siren is missing?” I asked, trying to get back on track.

  “She is.”

  “And you check—”

  “Of course I checked the fucking station registry. And the doctor’s office where she was to have the appointment she told you about last night. The doctor’s office left several messages on her account when we didn’t show.”

  “Then . . .” Aw, fuck.

  “You do know I’m tapped into your nervous system, right?”

  “What?” I mumbled, trying to think.

  “I may not be able to read your mind yet, but I can tell something just occurred to you.”

  “It’s just . . .” I paused, following the logic down the rabbit hole.

  “What?” Siren—or rather, Angel—said, exasperated.

  “The guy Siren took out last night on stage. He might have put a hit out on her.”

  “He that high up the chain?”

  “I don’t know but might as well look into it.”

  “I can’t get around like this, I’ll lose too much . . .”

  “All rig—”

  She cut me off. “And now, joy of joys, an infonet alert to all station AIs that LEO is looking for a rogue AI that damaged the power management systems in this district.”

  “LEO?”

  “The Station’s Security AI.”

  “Nothing on Siren?”

  “You and I both know that people disappear from Last Stop all the time, Muck. But a rogue AI tearing up the infonet? That’s an event.”

  “Can you hide?”

  “Can you think of anywhere I might go, genius?”

  That pulled me up short. Could I? Would she trust me? Did she trust me?

  “Actually, I can.”

  Angel didn’t seem to spend much time thinking about it. Desperation and fear make strange bedfellows.

  “This is gonna hurt you.”

  I took my firewalls down.

  “Go ahe—” The world dissolved before I could finish.

  * * *

  I woke with a wracking cough that produced nothing but another painful spasm. Everything hurt, though nowhere near as badly as it had. But all that was nothing relative to the taste in my mouth, the liquid soaking my drawers, and the smell of the slowly drying stain on my chin, throat, and puddles in the hollows of my collarbone.

  “Yes, the stink and stains are the byproduct of my cleansing your system of all the crude pharma you’ve been stuffing yourself with. I had to run a complete flush of your systems and start over in order to render you even partially effective.”

  “Gonna—” I retched a bit. Held my breath a moment, and said, “Bathe.”

  “Please do. Your stench is overcoming the olfactory blocks I set up.”

  “Blocks? Why can I still—”

  “Not for you, silly. For me.”

  Deciding the juice would not be worth the squeeze, I stripped and ordered the coffin to begin the bathing sequence.

  I tried not to breathe as the auto clean used a combination of compressed air and antimicrobial spray to begin an earnest attempt to peel the skin from my bones. About halfway through the scrub down, I started feeling better. As the drier kicked on, I started feeling a lot better.

  I had an angel again. I knew it had to be temporary, but I had an angel again! Just knowing it made me feel better than any time since my discharge.

  No doubt aware of my mood, if not my exact thoughts, Angel hummed a tune I could barely discern.

  Getting into my suit, I nearly tore it, twice. I was already stronger.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Muck. Several of your mods were in bad shape. I’m repairing what I can, but in the meantime, you need to remember Lesson One.”

  “Lesson One: Don’t get cocky. The mods enhance, they don’t make you immune to stupid.”

  I sensed her nod.

  Still. I made a fist, feeling each muscle and tendon slide along the bone underneath. Powerful. Strong. I had nearly forgotten what if felt to have an edge.

  “If you’re done masturbating, can we look for Siren?”

  I grunted. Angel—this angel—hadn’t been created or tailored to fill my head. She’d been Siren’s, and Siren had been hers. She would be uncomfortable and wouldn’t think twice about making me uncomfortable.

  “Damn straight,” Angel muttered.

  “All right, the guy from the club . . . his name was Shar Pak. He’s a bliss dealer and has ties to local gangs.”

  “Local gangsters, take Siren and me out? I hardly think so,” she said with utter confidence.

  I shrugged, threw her own words back at her: “Lesson One, Angel.”

  An image of Siren, lips curled with derision, appeared behind my eyelids. Despite myself, I flinched.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I just . . .” I said. “You don’t look . . .” I couldn’t say it, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that Angel knew exactly what was wrong. Her expression didn’t fit on Siren’s soft face, with her wide, vulnerable-looking eyes. Angel’s body language, too, was wrong. Too aggressive to really be Siren. It weirded me out.

  “Ugh,” Angel said, in response to my thoughts or feelings, I wasn’t sure which. “Try this.”

  And she changed. In my mind’s eye, Siren’s long, flowing performer’s hair flashed into a short, jaw-length top layer that swept down over the buzzed sides beneath. Her body slimmed, firmed up into a much more defined musculature. Her singer’s gown dissolved, flowing across her new shape to form a set of tac fatigues that fit tightly enough to wear under any armor, complete with weapon and tool belts.

  Her eyes hardened, and she gave me a much more sardonic grin than I’d ever seen on Siren.

  She was beautiful, but Angel was harder-edged, less forgiving somehow, than Siren. And yet, Angel’s eyes were less shadowed with pain—less guarded—than I’d ever, in my limited experience of her, seen Siren’s. Had this . . .iteration of Angel’s avatar been modeled on Siren before the war had hurt her, forged her into the woman who sang her pain so powerfully, so beautifully?

  “Better?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I ain’t the best with words sometimes.

  “Good. Now that you’re comfortable, may we move on to the important things?”

  “Get pissy, then, see what it changes,” I shot back.

  The image flashed me a gesture featuring one particular finger, then disappeared.

  “In my experience,” Muck said as the ultrasonic cleaner finished its cycle, “the simplest answer is often the right one. Siren flattened Shar Pak, therefore Shar has motive to go after Siren.”

  “I am not a child that you have to expl—” she halted midsentence. “Security just queried the building’s system for your whereabouts. Officers Dengler and Keyode are getting in the lift.”

  “Dengler picked Shar Pak up that night.”

  Her panic came across in the clear, improbable as everything else about her: sharp, painful, and puzzling until I realized that if they caught her, they’d eliminate every bit of her code from whatever system they found her on. The Administration had firm rules and no sense of humor concerning rogue AIs.

  “Look,” Angel said, “I understand your desire to put your theory on her disappearance first, but they might be looking for me, too. LEO’s good at his job. We all are.”

  “Would LEO be able to track where you went last night? Will they find you in me?”

  Her response was slower than usual and full of a different desperation from her earlier panic: “I do not think so. It’s unprecedented.”

  “So we talk to them, see if they drop a hint.”

  Angel didn’t
argue.

  I told the coffin I was ready to leave. It rotated me upright and the door slid open just as Dengler and Keyode stepped out of the lift.

  “Dengler.”

  The big officer nodded back at me, all sly grin. “Just the dirt we were looking for.”

  “And why’s that?” I can ignore an asshole, when necessary.

  “Shar Pak was released without charge. In fact, he’s considering pressing charges against you.”

  “What happened to the bliss I found on him?”

  A shrug. “Bunk. Fake stuff.”

  “All right, it seems you might be on to something,” Angel said. Wired directly into my auditory nerve, everything she wanted to tell me was perfectly private. She might need some time before she could read my thoughts flawlessly, but for now, simply trying to subvocalize would allow her to understand most of my desires.

  “So why the visit?” Angel’s grudging acknowledgment aside, I was getting angry.

  “Well, the thought occurred that your type is a bit of a concern for Station Security,” said Dengler.

  “He’s baiting you. Trying to get you to attack him so he can put you away,” Angel said.

  Like I needed her warning to see Dengler for an asshole. “My type?”

  He nodded with a nasty grin I wanted to erase with my fist despite her caution and my own better judgment.

  “You know, the type : criminals thrown out of the service for slaughtering the prisoners placed in their care. Penally unmodded. Someone like that might just kidnap and murder without a second thought.”

  I couldn’t help myself, but Angel managed to stop me from beating Dengler’s head against the wall until the color of his eyes dribbled out to add their stains to the grimy bulkhead.

  Under her control, I stood there, trembling with impotent rage.

  “You see that, Keyode? Seems the dishonorable discharge taught Muck some self-control.”

  Keyode looked from him to me but gave no reply, bland expression fixed on his broad features.

  Dengler chuckled at his own joke.