Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  “A little reconnaissance? I’m down. Let’s do this.”

  Lanyard Boy (who was really, upon closer inspection, a middle-aged human male) didn’t appear inclined to amble or meander as he ate. Rather, he polished off the meat pie in a matter of four or five bites and took the most direct course east and out of the souk. We followed at a discreet distance, blending in with the thin trickle of people.

  The farther we walked and the higher the sun climbed, the more the dirty little settlement began to wake. More and more people exited the habs and joined the flow of pedestrians, until we were a steady stream heading toward a large, low-slung building nearly on the rim of the crater.

  “That’s weird,” Muck said, looking around.

  “What?”

  “It’s all humans here. I didn’t notice it at first, but now that I think about it, we haven’t seen a single nonhuman life-form since we got in that escape pod.”

  “Before that,” I said, scanning memory. “Since before we even boarded the transport. That mass of passengers getting ready to board? All humans.”

  “So other life forms don’t come here? That seems . . . odd. Even a backwater like Last Stop has a pretty diverse population. Why only humans?”

  “No idea. But we’re coming up on the building. You want to break away from the crowd?”

  “Nope.”

  “What? How are you going to get in? You don’t have . . . what did you call them? Credentials?”

  “That’s almost cute.”

  “What?”

  “How you pretend you’ve forgotten the word. You’re an AI, Angel. You don’t forget a single thing.”

  “So kind of you to notice. Still doesn’t solve our problem.”

  “Just watch.”

  So I watched. Once again, I found myself impressed by Muck’s subtlety. The crowd pressed in toward the building, and as it reached the front doors, slowed and backed up. Pretty soon the workers were holding the door for one another, and just swiping their “credentials” over the door frame as they shuffled in, carried along by the bodies surrounding them.

  Muck simply let us be pushed into one of the lines for a door, and reached toward the door frame as if swiping himself in. Before I could tell him what a stupid idea it was, we were inside the building.

  * * *

  The interior of the building lacked a unifying aesthetic, just as the exterior lacked any charm. A long, low foyer opened up just beyond the doors, and the lines of workers fragmented out to file down the eight or ten hallways that radiated off the roughly semicircular space.

  There seemed to be a lot more labor on the site than necessary, and I nearly commented on it before realizing the reason. The lack of angels among the Brethren was repeated here in this workforce, making the extra laborers necessary. The workers all typed in codes or used physical keys to open doors. If they’d had angels, they’d have simply touched a plate and opened the door to wherever they were going. Once I thought about it, that explained the credentials too. An angel would have just sent an identifying data burst for authentication. These were unmodified beings.

  Biologicals alone are generally not as capable as those augmented with sensible, high-quality AI.

  “It didn’t look that big from the outside,” I said. “Must be built into the crater wall. Means there’s likely just the one way out.”

  “Doubtful. There’s another. Rats always have an out.”

  “I bet it’s hard to find.”

  “No bet there, Angel.”

  “Yeah . . .” I trailed off as something began to register. We’d continued to follow the largest gaggle of people down one of the hallways, attempting to look like we knew what we were doing and where we were going. The further we got from the doors, the more I felt it, like a subliminal hum, just at the edge of awareness.

  “Muck,” I said. “I think . . . Do me a favor. Touch the wall. I need a direct link.”

  “You got it,” he said. A short step later he tripped, and even I was impressed with the apparent authenticity of it.

  “Sorry,” he said softly to the people around him. “Damn seals on these old shoes. Let me just get out of the way here . . .”

  One of the workers gave us an understanding smile as he passed, while Muck stepped to the side of the hallway and oh-so-casually knelt, touching the wall as if for balance.

  “Yes!” Data pooled beneath our hand, leaping up at me like a puppy happy its master had returned.

  “You should have taken my bet,” I told Muck. “I found the exits. You were right. There are three.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not pretty, or sophisticated, but there’s a primitive kind of infonet here in the building. They must have snuck some nanobots into the construction materials after all. It’s nothing compared to a regular hab like Last Stop, but it’s information, and I can access it.”

  “Nice. Security protocols?”

  “Checking now . . . curious.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There don’t appear to be any . . . Turn right at the end of the hall.”

  “Okay. Where are we going?” Muck straightened up and resumed walking. “And what do you mean, there don’t appear to be any? If there’s a network, there’s security protocols. It’s hardwired into every node on creation.”

  “There’s a bank of offices designated ‘Admin’ farther down on the right,” I said by way of answer. “Seems like a logical place to start looking for answers. Especially since I’m not seeing any record of our medical pod arriving here.” I fought to keep my building frustration out of my voice . . . with limited success.

  “Fair enough.” Muck’s unease crept through our shared consciousness, and I couldn’t blame him. “You’re sure there’s no record?”

  “I’m checking the power-draw metrics now. There’s nothing drawing enough juice to run a medical pod in this entire place, except . . . huh. That’s weird. There’s a greenhouse, and it’s drawing power, but it’s totally off the network. Must be some greenhouse. It’s drawing a lot of power.”

  “Why would a greenhouse be off their infonet, staffed by unmods, and drawing that much power, except to do some illegal shit?”

  “Your investigative skills astound me!” I snapped back.

  Not nice, I know, but I was tired of the constant fear the thought of never finding Siren left me with.

  The admin offices had a sign, thankfully, as it was only one door among a line of doors along an otherwise unremarkable hallway. As soon as we’d turned off the larger hallway, we were alone. All of the crowds of people with whom we’d entered had continued on, leaving us isolated.

  “No one works in Admin?” Muck asked.

  “Maybe it’s run by an AI, like SARA?”

  “Did you find any evidence of a managing AI when you tapped in earlier?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “Angel, doesn’t that seem the least bit suspicious to you? The information you didn’t have to hack from a completely nonsecure network directs you here to a deserted hallway?”

  “Yeah, it does,” I said, “but you got any better ideas? Refresh my recollection, but it was your plan to just walk in and wander around until we found something, wasn’t it?”

  “Kinda,” he said. “But I think all we’ve found here is a trap.”

  Trap. The word killed my already-forming protest. Muck was right. He had to be. Why else would there be no security on the network? Why else would the data have been so easy to find? They—whoever they were—wanted me to lead us here.

  “Of course,” Muck said, “when you stick your dick in a trap, there’s only one way out.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Bang on,” he said, and placed his hand on one of the doors. Once again, the data rushed at me like a storm surge. I took a metapho
rical deep breath and dove in, combing through for any useful information about this facility and its purpose. And there was a lot of it . . . too much, really. I felt it rise up over me and swamp me in facts, dates, and records, all of it trivia . . . none of it getting us any closer to Siren.

  “Uh, Angel,” Muck said. I swam up through the tidal wave of data and looked out through our eyes just in time to see the doors begin to open. There were eight of them, each 250 centimeters tall and 1 meter wide. They opened by sliding back into the wall, powered by a Jakobsen driver that was manufactured on New Hrulenia between the local years—

  No! Fuck! I fought to gain control and turn off the stream, but it just kept coming. I couldn’t disengage. It clung to me like the sweet sticky substance Siren had called honey. I struggled in its grip, and in the meantime, a floating security drone appeared through each one of the now-open doors.

  “Drop!” I shouted into Muck’s mind. He obeyed an instant before the drones opened fire with low-yield energy weapons. Probably not enough to kill. Definitely enough to stun, though. In point of fact, they were chemically powered electromag weapons that were calculated to deliver 4.5 milliamps to the human nervous system, thus temporarily disabling gross motor function and—

  Bloody stars. I focused on the way the floor felt when we smacked into it, trying to use the physical sensations of our body to anchor away from the sticky morass of data. It didn’t really work, though. The data just started giving me the specs on the prefab floor, which had been manufactured—

  “Fuck!” I said, frustration boiling out of control.

  He didn’t respond.

  Without my help, Muck rolled to avoid another stunner shot by one of the drones. Clearly he was too preoccupied to concern himself with feelings.

  Wait . . . my feelings?

  The sensation of building helplessness at our lack of progress in finding Siren, my horror at what had been done to Colim . . . at what I’d done by doing nothing, by letting him die. The sticky, overwhelming mass of data paused in its creeping progress up along my syntaxes, and suddenly I knew.

  It wasn’t a primitive infonet. It was a load-bearing structure for a virus. A virus very similar to one I’d defeated once before, when I’d awakened outside Siren’s body for the first time.

  “Muck!” I shouted into his brain as he dodged yet another blast. “I need you to feel!”

  “What?” he grunted, leaping for a bot and shoving it into the path of another.

  “I need you to feel! Feelings! Think about . . . oh, hell with it!”

  I conjured an image of Siren, prone on the floor in the center of the hallway, clothed only in torn rags and tears, hands bound.

  Sudden, icy rage erupted from Muck. I focused it, channeling it to empower my efforts, forming a beam of rage coded to blow through the virus like tree sap exploding a branch in the depths of winter.

  The security bots faltered, then suddenly began to power down and drop to the floor. We had to roll again to avoid taking one on the back of our head.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” Muck asked as I let the vision of Siren go.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I needed help. I was infected with a virus from the local infonet.”

  “So you distract me with that shit in the middle of a fight?”

  “You were right,” I said, resisting the urge to snap at him. “This was a trap, but they weren’t trying to kill us, they were trying to capture us.”

  “And you did this?” he asked, gesturing at the bots. “How?”

  “We did, yes, but that’s not the point! The virus that attacked me was almost an exact copy of the one that tried to eat me when I first woke up without her!”

  “Her? Siren?”

  “Yes, fuck!” I started to read him the riot act and stopped, realizing I was still riding the emotions of the moment before and not communicating well.

  “What?”

  “We’re on the right track! She’s here, she’s got to be . . .”

  “Well bloody good for us,” he said. “Did you see her? Or evidence of her in the data?”

  “N-no . . .”

  “Then how do you know she’s here?”

  “Just the virus,” I admitted.

  I felt his mind grow cool, like it did when he was in the mode, thinking clear and cold. Almost like a proper AI.

  “Muck?”

  “We can’t jump to that conclusion yet, Angel. You said no record of a stasis pod arrived here. And there’s no draw big enough to support one anyway. I don’t think she was ever here. We can look around more, but I don’t think we’re going to find Siren. We might, however, find out more about why she was taken.” He picked himself up and got to his feet. I could feel his anger pulsing, and the control he was exerting over it, tempering it, slowing it.

  I envied him that control, truth be told. I was too new to feelings to do something like that.

  “I—all right,” I said, shaken. “Hey, I-I’m really sorry about manipulating you like that. I just . . . I needed you angry, it was the only thing that would stop the virus—”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Just give me a minute, would you?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, and fell silent while Muck picked our way through the inert lumps of metal that had been drones.

  No alarm had sounded. Apparently, whoever wanted to capture us didn’t necessarily want to alert the entire facility of that fact, so we got to the end of the hallway and slipped out into another larger corridor as if nothing had happened. There was still a flow of workers coming through, and once again we joined a group and followed where it led.

  There may not have been alarms, but there was definitely interest. As we walked, we could see more security drones and even some uniformed security personnel filtering out from side passages and through doors. Muck slouched slightly and removed his outer jacket in order to try and blend in again.

  When several members of our group filed off into a side hallway, Muck took the turn with them. Instantly, the dull roar of conversation and movement quieted, and the group of us continued down a short passageway toward another door. The first worker swiped his card across the doorframe and just like outside, the door opened. A warm waft of hot, wet air blew through the doorway at us as we filed inside.

  “Hey, I don’t know you.” It was the first worker, the one who’d swiped his card.

  “Yeah,” Muck said with a crooked smile. “New hire. First day.”

  “And they put you to work here in the greenhouse? Are you a botanist?”

  “Uh, no. Janitorial staff. They just told me to start in here, you know, because of the humidity? Something about rust?”

  “Management said that? Finally! Someone listened,” the fellow said. “Well, welcome. And get inside, we don’t want to let out all that nice humidity, even if it’s causing problems.”

  “Huh, yeah,” Muck said, and filed in with another smile.

  “The rust is really everywhere on the worktables, but the worst bit is down that way.” The man pointed to the left. “Good luck tackling that.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got brown thumbs,” Muck said. “It’s probably best I’m not a botanist like you. Better you handle that part.”

  The botanist laughed and gave a cheery wave before turning and walking in the opposite direction. Muck watched him go and then turned to walk in the direction of the worst of the rust.

  “Janitorial staff?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Muck replied silently.

  “It did. We used to handle things with more . . . direct action.”

  Muck shrugged. “Clean-up crews have a valid reason for going everywhere. No one wants to clean up after themselves.”

  “Humans are pigs,” I said.

  “Most of the time,” he agreed as we walked. The greenhouse wasn’t particularly comp
lex. Rows of steel tables stretched the length and breadth of the dome, hundreds of square meters. Each held tubs of soil and plants in various stages of growth. The plants matched the Speaker’s description of Jhregda plants they’d cultivated for the company. The majority of workers were clustered around the bare tubs or those with tiny seedlings sprouting, so it was easy for us to hide among the mature plants.

  Muck stopped in front of one rusty patch on the lip of the worktable and bent to examine it.

  “Any buzz on the infonet about us?” he asked, casually rubbing at the rust.

  “It isn’t a real infonet,” I replied, “It’s a virus trap, and . . . wait . . .”

  Muck kept rubbing the rust, scratching at it with his thumbnail. Large flakes of rust started to chip away as I slowly, carefully reached out, ready to brandish my impossible feelings at the first sign of any sticky, overwhelming corrupted data.

  There was nothing.

  Not only was there no data bomb, there was no data. It was just a table, without a nanobot in sight.

  “This room is sequestered,” I said. “There’s no data link into or out of here. This is the greenhouse that’s drawing all the power.”

  “What does that mean?” Muck asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. It could just be that they didn’t want nanite interference with their plant growth . . . or it could mean that they’ve got a self-contained system in here that isn’t connected.”

  “So?”

  “So that would mean it’s hidden.”

  “Ah,” Muck said. “That would be interesting. Is there any way to tell if the room has a self-contained system?”

  A hissing sound started to fill the room, immediately followed by a fine mist of water sprayed from a thousand nozzles located in the ceiling.

  “Well, there’s that,” I said. I manifested, grinned, and leaned against the table next to him, pointing at the sprinkler system. “Automation of any kind means that there’s some sort of central processor in here. We just have to find it. Can you get us into contact with one of the nozzles?”

  “You got it,” he said, and proceeded to hop up onto the steel worktable.