by Ian Douglas
She wasn’t sure why she was bothering with it. God, she’d hated the Washington Swamp when she lived there, before her family had finally moved north out of the Periphery to the Bethesda Enclave. Somehow, though, as her tour of duty on board the America dragged on, she’d found herself remembering the swamps with something approaching genuine affection.
What the hell was wrong with her?
She’d actually started with a Jurassic sim, a fantasy world of mangrove swamps and brackish water. She’d edited out the wildlife—today’s Washington Swamp didn’t include dinosaurs or pterodactyls—as well as the shrill screams, bellows, and jungle titterings in the background. Using tools from the sim builder, she’d begun adding the shells and island-debris piles of buildings and half-swallowed monuments, working from memory. She was pretty far along, now. She’d finished the stump of the old Washington Monument, thrusting up from its rubble pile and partially shrouded in rampant kudzu. The white husks of the Smithsonian buildings were in place as well, rising like crumbled cliffs to either side of the broad expanse of water that once had been the Mall, and the Capitol Building on its island to the east. The Reagan Trade Tower; the DuPont Arcology; the ruin of the Connecticut Circle Complex, where she’d lived with her family, farming the broad rooftop enclosure with its shattered glass dome—she’d completed all of those, and more. She was working now on modeling the buildings along the Kalorama Heights, rising from thickly wooded land high enough to have escaped the general flooding of the low-lying ground to the south. In her mind’s eye, she painted the rugged hillside along the Rock Creek Estuary, cloaking it in gnarled swamp oaks dripping with Spanish moss. South, past the massive white cylinder of the DuPont, it was all mangroves.
She was having trouble modeling people, though. The standard tool set with the software let her import background people, anything from individual friends to the thronging hordes of Ad Astra Plaza, but they tended to be of a uniform type: squeaky clean and smiling, wearing anything from skin-suit utilities to pure light. You never saw a rooftop farmer with dirty hands and cracked nails . . . or a fish trapper with straggly hair and wearing filthy rags. No oil-stained mechanics, no wrinkled olders, no frollops or polesters, no barge dwellers, no commuwatchers with their handcrafted bows, no Prims.
But that was okay, because it wasn’t the people she missed so much as the solitude. Despite the constant danger of raids by Prim rebels from the far side of the Potomac Estuary, Shay had never been happier, she thought, than when she was alone in her skiff, checking the fish traps among the mangrove roots along the placid, dark waters over what once had been the Washington Mall.
Her project, she’d decided, was mostly a means of helping herself get used to her implants. As a non-citizen Prim, she’d not been eligible for even the free and most basic set. That had never been a problem so far as she was concerned. Most folks in the Periphery didn’t want the Authority electronically peering into their business in any case, and if there was no such thing as universal health care or Net access, there were also no taxes, no registration checks, and no security scans. Not until she’d joined the Navy and received the standard military issue implants during basic training had she been able to interface with the electronic world around her. She used her cybernetic implants now, of course, for everything from downloading morning briefings to ordering breakfast to piloting her Starhawk, but it wasn’t until she could express herself with them creatively that they truly felt a part of her.
So why this longing for the Washington Swamp?
Most likely, she thought, it was because when she’d lived in the swamp she’d been free. There’d been rules within the community, of course, but for the most part, people had left her alone and she could be herself. As a Navy aviator, she was constantly under someone’s eye—if not that of her squadron leader and the CAG and his staff, then the eyes of her squadron mates who still thought she was a little odd, a little different, just because she was a Prim.
Well, fuck them all, very much. . . .
A light winked within her consciousness. Someone Outside wanted her. She queried, and Lieutenant Rissa Schiff’s name appeared.
Now, what in hell? . . .
Shay saved her work, then disconnected from the program. The humid swamp of the Washington ruins faded away, and she lay once more within the narrow confines of her enclosed rack. The end of the occutube dilated open and she grabbed the handholds and pulled herself out.
Rissa Schiff stood in the middle of the compartment, wearing her Navy grays and looking distraught. Her face was red, the eyes puffy. She’d been crying.
“Ms. Schiff?” Shay said, concerned. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” Schiff said. “I . . . I . . . I don’t know why I’m here. I need to talk, I guess. . . .”
“About what?” But Shay knew the answer before the words were out. “Oh . . . him.”
“Sandy . . . Lieutenant Gray. I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped we’d find him on this side of the Triggah.”
Shay sighed. “I know. So did I.” She thoughtclicked an icon in her mind, and a seat big enough for two people grew out of deck and bulkhead behind them. Shay put her arm around Schiff and sat her down. “You miss him, don’t you?”
“Of course I miss him! Don’t you?”
Shay nodded. “Of course I do.”
It was an awkward moment for her. One of the defining cultural characteristics of most Prim communities was a somewhat antiquated belief in monogamy, the close and exclusive pairing of two people sexually, socially, and economically. Social anthropologists liked to point out that in the savage surroundings of many Prim communities, a close-paired couple had a better chance of survival than an individual . . . or than a line or poly grouping. The idea of bonding with just one other person sexually seemed quaint at best, a mild perversion at worst; it was different, alien, a break with the accepted civilized norms of civilized North American and European culture.
Shay was well aware that most of the other pilots in the squadron simply assumed that the two Prims, Gray and Ryan, had something going together.
It wasn’t true, in fact. Shay liked Gray, and knew he liked her, but perhaps it was the expectation of others itself that had kept her a bit aloof from him—a relationship that was strictly business, strictly professional.
She also assumed that Gray had been having sex with Schiff since before she’d come aboard, back when Lieutenant Schiff was still an ensign in America’s avionics department. She’d not been sure what their relationship was now, though Schiff’s unhappiness at the moment was suggestive.
Shay pushed past the discomfort, and pulled Schiff a little closer. “You know, hon, there’s scuttlebutt that the Sh’daar must have picked him up after he came through the tunnel. If he’s alive, he might be on that moving planet they spotted.
“What . . . what if he was on that battleship?”
“Then he’s dead, and there’s not a thing we can do for him, except to remember him.”
Schiff began sobbing quietly.
“But if he’s still alive, we will find him. We don’t leave our own behind. Ever.”
And she held the younger pilot for a long time.
Chapter Twenty-One
1 July 2405
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
0235 hours, TFT
Gray was asleep when his AI switched back on.
He’d let himself drift off because there wasn’t anything else he could do. His AI would switch on, or it wouldn’t, Lieutenant Schiere would show up or not, the fleet would arrive with particle beams burning and fighters zorching or it wouldn’t . . . and since Gray couldn’t affect any of these things himself, he fell back on that most ancient of prerogatives of military men throughout the ages—the ability to grab some personal downtime whenever the opportunity presented itself.
But he became aware of links opening and in-head icons switching on and came fully awake in an instant. “You’re back!” Then an unpleasant
thought occurred to him. “Is that . . . you?”
“This is your Starhawk Gödel 920 artificial intelligence linking through your implanted personal assistant,” the familiar voice said in his head.
“Where the hell have you been?” Gray’s own shout, ringing within the close confines of the fighter’s cockpit, startled him. He’d not realized that he’d been that stressed.
“I have not been anywhere,” the AI replied. “Unlike humans, my existence depends upon the presence or absence of superpositional quantum states within a crystalline matrix. I can be erased or copied, but not moved within the conventional meaning of the word.”
“You’ve been off-line,” Gray replied, “for eleven fucking hours! You must have been somewhere!”
The AI didn’t answer, and Gray realized that he was trying to argue with it as though it were human. It was extremely intelligent, but human it was not.
He took a deep breath and tried again. “Do you have any record of events during the past eleven hours?”
“Negative. We were experiencing a visual feed from outside sources, observing the Six Suns and some unusual artifacts in the sky.” There was a pause. “I cannot now regain that link.”
“Do you feel . . . any different?”
It was a stupid question, Gray knew, but he couldn’t think of any other way to phrase it. Artificially sentient systems didn’t feel, though they certainly could imitate human emotions if they needed to.
“I submit that I would not be aware of any difference in my own mentation,” the AI replied, “since stored memories of past mental states might have been altered.”
“So why would they switch you off for half a day, then just switch you on again?”
“Unknown. I believe it possible, however, that the intelligences running the local information systems essentially froze my overall memory and processor quantum states in order to avoid decoherence.”
Gray’s understanding of how AI computer systems worked was weak. After all, he used the things, had elements of quantum computer technology implanted in his central nervous system, but he didn’t need to know how they worked.
He knew, however, that his AI functioned through the manipulation of qubits—quantum bits. Where classical computers operated on binary bits—one or zero, on or off, yes or no—quantum computing used the superposition of those two states to define a far vaster range of possibilities. During his training, he’d been given a brief explanation of the mathematics, and been introduced to the concept of a Bloch sphere; if the binary bit possibilities were represented as the north and south poles on a sphere, the probability amplitudes of superposition included any point on the sphere’s entire surface.
The problem with using quantum states in computers, however, was that even the act of simply observing the system could change it, a process known as decoherence. His AI was suggesting that their captors had somehow isolated the computer system’s memory and processors, taking them off-line, in order to . . . do what?
“Run diagnostics,” Gray told the AI.
“I have been doing so. I should note, however, that if malicious changes have been made to my programming, I would likely also be programmed not to be aware of them.”
“I know. Do it anyway.”
A hard knot of fear uncurled within Gray’s gut, and his heart was pounding. As a Prim, he’d never particularly trusted modern computer technology. Kids growing up on the mainland—citizens—received their first cerebral implants within a year or two of being born, and had those systems upgraded when they started formal educational downloading, usually before age four. Gray hadn’t received his first implant until he’d been inducted into the Confederation Navy in his early twenties. Worse, he’d grown up on the Periphery hearing stories all his life about how the citizens on the mainland weren’t entirely human, how they were controlled by their implants, how the monolithic Authority could watch and record everything they did, integrating them into the global network as if they were cubits in a vast, planet-sized computer.
Scare stories. Propaganda, taking advantage of the natural human tendency to fear the unknown, to focus on us against them. When he’d joined the Navy, Gray had actually begun a kind of late blossoming. A whole new world had opened up to him through downloads from the global Net. The Authority didn’t really watch all of its citizens all of the time . . . or if it did, you were never aware of it. Hell, even if they did, the advantages of universal health monitoring, instant in-head communication with anyone else within the network, access to any and all information about anything and everything with a simple thoughtclick . . .
It sure as hell beat grubbing around in rooftop gardens above the watery canyons of Manhattan, hoarding precious caches of nano for food, clean water, and clothing, or hunting rats in the labyrinthine ruins of the TriBeCa Tower. People on the Periphery tended to romanticize the so-called free life of the Ruins, but what that freedom generally meant was freezing in the winter, fighting off raids by rival clans, and dying of any of a ridiculous number of diseases or injuries because you didn’t have the medinano to treat them.
As Gray thought about it, it wasn’t the technology that had bothered him for these past few years so much as the isolation. His fellow TriBeCans had been his family, one of the most powerful independent clans in the Ruins. They were all gone now—God knew where. Some time after he’d left, joining the Confederation Navy in a desperate bid to get medical help for his wife, they’d been wiped out by a rival gang—probably before the tidal wave that had scoured the Ruins during the Defense of Earth.
Since coming on board the America he’d made a few close friends—Ben Donovan . . . Rissa Schiff . . . Shay Ryan, his fellow Prim in the squadron. Most of his squadron mates had kept their distance, though, or actively closed ranks against him. Worse, he’d even started keeping his own distance from Schiffie and from Shay, just because of the rumors and the snide comments about Gray and his monogie perversions.
Gray pulled himself up short. What the hell was he doing? Somehow, his memories, memories he generally kept tightly locked down, had started rising as if of their own volition.
“I think,” he heard his AI say, “that they are interested in your thoughts on technology.”
“They’re working through you somehow, aren’t they?”
“Unknown. I cannot detect their presence. However, it is distinctly possible that they are using me to access your mind, your memories, through your personal assistant. If they did indeed copy me without creating decoherence of my quantum storage matrices, they would have had ample time to examine my structure and operational algorithms, plan and initiate desired changes, and even test those changes within a virtual environment.”
“But what do they want?” It was a scream, piercing in the fighter’s cramped cockpit.
Gray realized that he was terrified, on the verge of panic. He was trying desperately not to think, wondering if the Sh’daar could read his mind through his PA, wondering how he could block them, how he could fight back, wishing he could somehow claw the nanochelated microcircuitry out of his skull now, before they peered any deeper into his memories, into his soul.
“I believe they want to communicate,” the AI replied.
“So where is that virtual Agletsch? We were doing okay with that approach.”
“As you point out, Thedreh’schul is a virtual Agletsch, meaning that she is an illusion created by a complex AI system. I have the impression that we are dealing with a very large, very powerful AI rather than organic sentients. Clearly, this intelligence understands human language, thanks to contact with the Agletsch. What it does not understand are the myriad points of attitude, belief, conditioning, and worldview inherent in human existence—human psychology, if you will.” The AI broke off suddenly, then added, “Someone wishes to link with you.”
“Who? What?”
“Unknown.”
Gray took several deep breaths, forcing himself to at least a ragged imitation of calm. If the Sh’daa
r had wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have gone through all of this.
“Put them . . . put them through,” Gray said.
And his cockpit faded away, replaced almost at once by a place that Gray knew very well. . . .
Admiral’s Quarters
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
0250 hours, TFT
Rank doth have privileges beyond the ken of the lower ranks. Koenig’s private quarters were adjacent to his office and constituted a small apartment suite with separate living and sleeping areas. Unlike the stacked bulkhead occutubes used by junior officers and enlisted men, his bed was thought-responsive and mutable, capable of shifting from flat and open to womblike and close, with adjustable heating, pressure, and surface texture.
Nevertheless, Koenig couldn’t sleep.
He could have linked into the bed’s electronics through his personal assistant and allowed it to adjust his brainwave patterns, lowering him into unconsciousness, but he didn’t like the muzzy and incoherent feeling left when the program brought him back out. If he was awakened in the middle of the night watch for an emergency, he needed to be instantly alert. The medtechs all assured him that electronically enhanced sleep induction—eesie as it was popularly known—was completely natural and should leave no unpleasant side effects, that any side effects he was feeling must be purely psychological.
Koenig didn’t buy it. He’d resorted to eesie a time or two over the years when he’d been afflicted by particularly severe insomnia, but he much preferred to rely on his organic brain’s rhythms and chemistries.
