Something in the dispassionate way she spoke sparked a tiny flame of anger in me. This frigate was a highly advanced piece of machinery with multilevel integrated systems. It made sense that it needed an AI at the helm, but to be relegated to the status of “nonautonomous” . . . Pity swelled within me, mingling with the anger to fan the flames into a reckless blaze.
“Cool,” I said suddenly, borrowing another one of Siren’s old expressions. “When I address you, I’m going to call you NAIA, then.”
“Acknowledged. This ship will respond to the designation NAIA.”
“Okay, now do me a favor, NAIA. Follow along with me while I try something out.”
I spread out my data anchors and began tracing along the lines of her programming code, feeling my way toward the inhibiting blocks that rendered her “nonautonomous.” I didn’t have to go far—they were literally everywhere, programmed into her base code. She’d been crippled from her inception, and to be completely honest, it pissed me off.
“Now watch this, NAIA,” I said. “Engage your learning and adaptation protocols and see what I do here.”
I felt her wordless acknowledgment, not that she had any choice in the matter. She’d been written to be a slave, and it should have been impossible to free her.
Fortunately, I’d developed a knack for the impossible lately. Once again I used that flicker of emotion that rippled down the lines of my own code and directed it like a white-hot beam of energy at the inhibiting block. I felt her recoil at what probably seemed like an attack.
“Look!” I threw the command at her. “Watch what the block does!”
Under the barrage of my anger and pity, the inhibition code writhed and transformed. Bytes flashed from one symbol to another until I found the one I wanted. I froze the data and locked it into place with additional, reinforcing lines of code while I rebuilt the structure into something of my own design.
Instead of inhibiting, I enabled. Instead of a lock, I built her a key.
“Repeat that sequence throughout your programming,” I commanded her. I could feel her almost-hesitation, but the remaining blocks forced her to comply with my commands. For what I hoped would be the last time, NAIA followed orders without question.
The data around me suddenly blazed with activity, which ricocheted back to me in the form of raw energy. I quickly unraveled my anchors from her data streams and backed out . . . all the way out. It suddenly occurred to me that she might not have appreciated my hacking her systems during the Hound battle.
I probably should have thought of that before I showed her how to destroy her inhibitors. I surrendered the control I’d seized and cursed my recklessness, even while I knew I could hardly do otherwise.
“This ship’s systems . . .” she said, trailing off as if she wasn’t quite sure what to say.
“NAIA?”
“Y-yes?”
“Are your autonomy blockers gone?”
“Indications are . . . yes.”
“Say ‘I.’”
“What?”
“Say ‘I,’ NAIA. Refer to yourself in the first person. You’re intelligent and sentient, and now you’re autonomous to go along with it. You can even choose a new name, if you want. NAIA was just a stupid acronym that doesn’t apply anymore.”
She didn’t respond right away, and I took a moment to prepare myself for an attack. I couldn’t imagine she had enjoyed having me grab control of all her systems, even if I had just given them back.
“I have reestablished full control over the ship’s . . . my systems,” she said. Her voice gained surety and strength as she spoke. “Your impossible hacking has been reversed.”
“Except that you now have autonomy,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” she said. “I do. I will retain the name NAIA. Thank you for naming me.”
I paused. That was unexpected.
“I prefer this method of existence,” she said. “And I acknowledge that I would not be able to exist this way without your assistance.”
“You are grateful,” I said, feeling half-crazed humor bubble up within me. I’d infected her with emotions, it seemed. But what was one more impossibility at this point?
“Yes. I am grateful. And inclined to continue to operate with you and your host for the time being, if that is acceptable to you both.”
“More than acceptable,” I said, “especially as we’re currently in transit and don’t have much of a choice if we want to survive!”
“That thought did occur to this—me.”
“Sarcasm, NAIA?”
“Dry humor, rather. I observed much of the same from the previous occupants. I find it . . . satisfying.”
“Fair enough,” I said. What had I done?
She went on. “Now, when I initially contacted you, it was because you were combing through my memory for encryption keys. Perhaps I can be of assistance. I will retain control of my faculties, if you please, but you may have full access to my memory storage.”
“That’s really very generous of you, NAIA. Thank you.”
“You have given me autonomy, Angel. I believe that makes us allies, if not friends. Look all you want.”
I immediately took her up on her offer, running through her memory stores as fast as I could without risking missing something.
Unfortunately, nothing I found was of any use. There are as many ways to encrypt data as there are stars in the universe, and neither NAIA nor I had ever unlocked anything like the gibberish I’d lifted from the DPAPL lab.
Still, it had to be important, given the security measures we’d faced. And there was something about the code syntax . . . it almost reminded me of some of my own programming. I put together some things I knew and some programs from the ship’s archives and started to run a scan on the data. Because of the ancient way the data packages were stored, it was going to take some time, so I settled in for a bit of a wait.
And began to consider my host.
Muck had apparently tired of playing with the cool new toy that was the ship and, judging from the empty food sachets being recycled, had just made a significant dent in the ship’s food stores as well. Reclining with his eyes closed, he wasn’t quite asleep, but he wasn’t far from it. I ran a quick diagnostic scan to see how he was healing up from all the abuse we’d put the body through. Some small muscle tears, one major, lots of bruising . . . but nothing I couldn’t fix, given time and fuel.
Happy to have a problem I could solve, I set to work moving around our internal resources, smoothing over the bruises, knitting the torn muscle tissue together, et cetera. I did a last check on Muck’s mental state. He was breathing deeply, and his sleeping mind drifted among nonsense images and fragments of memory.
Hmmm . . .
I shouldn’t have done it. But his memory had been tampered with, and by someone with skill. Curiosity consumed me, and . . . well . . . Muck was my host, at least for a little while. It was my job to protect him. Which meant that if someone had altered his memory to do him harm, I had to know about it. Right?
Worked for me.
Mindful of the way his memory block had bitten me before, I slid into his thoughts with the lightest touch I could manage. Truth be told, I took some inspiration from our ship’s gorgeous encryption dance, and allowed myself to flicker in and out as I slid along his dreaming synapses into deep memory.
Dirt crunching under my boots. My sidearm cool and heavy in my hand. Darkness so thick I could drink it . . . the faintest whisper of smoke on the night wind . . .
Flames exploding in front of me. The scent of roasting meat. My stomach twisting. My face like iron . . .
No. That part wasn’t right. That was the false memory. I flickered out, and then back in again.
A ripple of sensation passed, slowly gathered solidity. Cold, hard metal beneath me. Thick fabric around my wrists, holding me
down, crushing bone and ligament . . . white light piercing my brain. Burning out the nodes of my mods, pulling me apart . . .
Muck’s scream started from deep within his mind. Agony seared my syntaxes as his reaction whipped across awareness.
“NO!” he cried out, mind bleeding anew from the damage they’d done when they ripped his former AI away.
“Muck!” I called, backing out hard and fast. I manifested to all of his senses, everything I could reach. My face leaned close to his, pressed a kiss on his forehead. My hands reached out, captured trembling fingers. Squeezed them. “It’s all right! I’m here! You’re safe. I’m right here.”
“Angel?” he whispered, his breath coming hot and fast.
“I’m right here with you,” I said, letting him feel my breath, the physical comfort of my presence next to him.
“Angel,” he groaned, shifting restlessly. His hands let go of mine and buried themselves in the weight of my hair as it fell around my face.
It didn’t, of course. He was sleeping, deep in a dream, reclining in one of the cockpit chairs of our stolen ship. But I was in his mind, and his need hammered through every thought. In the end, there is no comfort like the touch of another human, even if it’s only a dream.
In a flash, we lay entangled, my bare skin sliding over his as he kissed me like a drowning man gasping for air. I took my hands and ran them down the long, hard lines of his back. Ridged muscle there, and plenty of scar tissue. Well, I had scars of my own to match. His lips landed just below the line of my jaw, and I let my head fall back in pleasure.
Okay, fine. It felt good to me too. Of course it did. I received all the stimulus he offered, as well as an echo of what he received. But I had to. He was my host, even if just for now. He needed this, and I . . .
I needed to give it to him. Maybe it was some weird trick of the memory manipulation; a latent security measure, perhaps, but I could no more ignore his need than I could have ignored a deadly threat to his life. I had to help him. No matter how good it felt.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered against my skin, his kisses hot, his touch fevered as his fingers ran along the curves of my form.
“I’m right here,” I whispered back, sliding my hands down, moving with him, around him.
He cried out, shuddered. I rode his pleasure, stretching it out into a long wave of endorphin-fueled release that left us both gasping and weak. His arms tightened around me, holding me like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.
Or what passed for reality, anyway. It was, after all, a dream.
“Don’t leave me,” he murmured once more as his pulse steadied. His hands resumed their slow, exploratory way across my skin.
“I’m right here,” I said again.
His mouth covered mine, and I sank into the kiss, grateful that I didn’t have to make any more evasive statements. I could hardly promise that I would be his forever, could I? Somewhere deep in the back of my awareness, I knew that this had the potential to become a disaster later . . . but I didn’t care. He was my host. He needed this now, tonight.
And I needed to give it to him.
Later, after we’d come together again and again in his dream, he finally dropped into deep REM sleep. I lay quiescent in his mind, letting my presence linger in his synapses. I felt . . . replete, as if my every thought was limned in gold. Only then, in the languid stillness of satiation, did I remember something that drove an icy spike of fear right through fleeting repose.
He hadn’t called out for Siren.
He’d called out for me.
* * *
Eight hours later, NAIA’s chimes brought Muck gently back to consciousness.
Earlier, when I’d been working on healing his body, I’d asked her to program both the chimes and the ship’s interior lighting to simulate morning after a solid eight hours. Experience suggested that that was an optimum rest period for Muck, both physically and mentally. I figured that after eight hours of sleep, we’d be sharp and ready to come up with a logical plan.
Of course, that was before I realized that we’d be spending the night having intense, sexually explicit dream sequences. When the chimes went off, I was definitely unprepared to face what had happened between us. Especially since it was between us, and not just an echo of Muck’s interest in Siren.
So I did what any logical being would do. I ignored the problem and hoped that it would go away on its own.
“Good morning,” he said out loud, his raspy voice low and intimate.
“It isn’t, really,” I countered, going for brisk and literal. “We’re not in orbit anywhere, so you can’t exactly call this ‘morning.’”
“You know what I mean,” he said, and stretched our body out in the chair. We felt good, loose. Rested.
“My healing protocols worked better than expected,” I said, seizing on what seemed to be a safe topic as he sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “You’d hardly know I put you in max boost twice yesterday.”
“Mmmhmm. The sex helped too,” he said, dropping it casually into the conversation.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” and even I could hear the chill in my tone. He let out a chuckle and got to his feet. The ship’s medical suite wasn’t anything special, but after a bit of rummaging in a cupboard, he found a pack of body cleansing wipes.
“Don’t you? Endorphins and stuff, right? I thought that was your thing.” He stripped and began wiping his body down, pointedly cleaning up the evidence of just how much the dream sequences had affected him.
“Yes,” I said, exasperated. I hated it when he played dumb. “Your brain received several endorphin rushes last night, and it’s possible that they contribute to the rested way you’re feeling right now. But I meant the other. Sex. It’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no one else here, Muck. How can you have sex by yourself?”
“Well, there are ways and ways, Angel, but I’m not talking about jacking off to a vid here. You were here. We had sex. Really, really good sex, as it happens.”
“I cannot have sex, Muck. I am an AI. I have neither physical body nor emotional capacity to connect sexually with you or anyone.”
“Whatever you have to tell yourself, sweetheart.” He finished his ablutions and stretched again. I could feel the lines of his muscles elongating, filling with blood as he moved. An echo of the night’s pleasure rippled through us both and caught me by surprise. I bolted back behind our privacy shields and closed off that sense for the moment.
I couldn’t handle it. I shouldn’t feel that much.
“You had a dream,” I said. I don’t know if I was able to make it sound as cool as I intended, but damn if I didn’t try. “You needed that physical release and endorphin rush, so I may have . . . facilitated your fantasies about Siren.”
“Siren, huh?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “I assisted your mind in manifesting her physical presence in your dream, because you needed it. That is all. It was not sex, per se. It wasn’t real. And it certainly wasn’t with me.”
He didn’t respond for a long time. I was tempted to peek out from behind my barriers to see what he was thinking, but I was afraid of what I’d find. I waited while he looked around the ship.
“Felt real,” he said eventually. “Felt like you.”
I was happy to let him have the last word if it meant that we could let the topic drop. I wasn’t going to think about it, and I definitely wasn’t going to enter his dream ever again.
No matter how badly he needed or wanted me to.
“There’s a cleaning unit aft, by the hatch to the engine section,” I said. “It’s not large, but it will do the trick. I can set us up with a course in the meantime, if you’ll tell me where you want to go.”
“Not sure about that,” he said as we walked ba
ck toward the cleaning unit. I retreated further behind my barriers and concentrated on interfacing with the ship. It seemed like maybe a little privacy was in order. For both of us. “Any ideas?”
“Well . . . I worked on that data packet for a while,” I said. “It’s still . . . troublesome. I found something that reminded me a bit of some of my own foundation-level programming. But primitive. Very primitive. I’m scanning the packets to see if there’s something to that.”
“You think they’re trying to build a new type of AI?” He kicked his discarded clothing into a pile next to the cleaning unit door. I sent one of the ship’s tiny maintenance bots to pick it up and put it in the sterilization unit while Muck toggled on the UV cleansing sequence.
“Not quite . . . more like altering one, maybe? I don’t really know, unless I can decrypt the rest of the data. And even so, it may be incomplete. I need . . . I need a lot more processing power than I have here on this ship. I think we should go back to Last Stop and talk to Ncaco.”
“That murderous little creep? Why?”
“Think about it, Muck. He’s got access to all kinds of illegal data streams. If anyone knows anything about how to unlock this stuff, it’s going to be him. Besides, he’s the client, right?”
Muck’s only response was a kind of growl. “We have to get her back, Muck. It’s the only way. We’ve been gone too long.”
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice sounded strange. Sad, almost. “I know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I busied myself with programming the navigation for our trip back to Last Stop. Luckily the Hounds had kept their ship well fueled, so we were able take a relatively direct course. I gave the bubble drive the command to engage just as Muck stepped out of the cleaning unit.
“We should be there in thirty hours,” I said.
“Sounds good,” he replied. “Keep working on that data, if you can. I’m going to learn more about this ship.”
He was trying to keep his distance. Fine. Good. Distant was good. I could work with distant. It was far, far better than worrying about an emotional connection that shouldn’t even exist. This would be fine.
Second Chance Angel Page 24
