METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  They circled the building and she studied the larger helicopter that occupied the rooftop landing pad. Like the one she rode in, it was black and sleek, but unlike it, this machine bristled with armament.

  “Can you put us down alongside?”

  Carmichael squinted at it. “There’s no sign of the pilot. It looks like one of ours but …” He cleared his throat and whispered a series of numbers into a Patriot, Inc. emergency frequency. When there was no answer, he slowed and settled in alongside it. “I’ll keep the engine hot,” he said.

  Sabo worked the lever of the hatch and climbed onto the roof, looking back over her shoulder at Carmichael. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she walked to the other helicopter and pushed her face up against the window. It was dark and empty inside. But this aircraft, she saw, had jump seats in the back for up to six passengers.

  So eight total if they were full up. A thought occurred to her and she kicked herself for not realizing it sooner. She opened her earbud. “Dial Mom,” she told her phone.

  The phone rang. Sabo willed her mother to pick up even as she made her way to the rooftop door. The knob had been mangled by a high caliber weapon. Unusually, she found herself wishing she had something similar in her own sweating hand. Old training was taking over. Training she’d hated both then and in retrospect. She paused, her hand over the twisted mass of metal, and then turned back.

  Sabo tapped on Carmichael’s hatch and he swung it open. “I’m going to need what you’re packing,” she told him. She quickly catalogued her knowledge of Patriot, Inc. armaments. “A Glock under the seat, right?”

  He blinked at her. “A Ruger,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can—”

  “The White House,” she said, stretching out her hand. “Right?”

  He swallowed and reached beneath the seat, pulling the case free from its clamps. It was big enough to hold the plastic 10mm pistol and four magazines. Sabo popped the case open, pulled out the pistol and fed it a clip before working the action and slipping the safety off. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring it back when I’m finished with it.”

  Hopefully, she wouldn’t need it. But Sabo suspected she might. Up to eight paramilitary troopers of one kind or another had forced their way into a federal facility. The one where my mother happens to live.

  “You brought me here,” she told the voice in her head. “Any idea what to expect?”

  “Potentially, representatives of a Lightbull Variant known as Los Cuernos de Toro.” The AI paused. “And hopefully, my colleague, Mr. Cairo.”

  She took the stairs two at a time, finding another decimated doorknob exiting onto the two hundred and eighty-ninth floor. Her mother’s floor. Filled with dread, she raised the pistol ahead of her as she pushed the door open.

  Emergency lights flashed in the corners of the dim lit hall. Sabo was aware of how quiet the floor was. Her sneakers whispered along the tile, her eyes moving as she scanned the path ahead. She saw the first bodies and paused. One wore a lab coat, the other a red terrycloth robe. Nearby, a dented walker lay on its side.

  The corridor was lined with mostly open doors, punctuated by the occasional nurse’s station. More bodies lay further ahead. Someone had come onto this floor intending to kill everyone they found.

  She made her way down the hall, pistol ready, and paused when she moved past the bodies. A nurse here, a doctor there and here, an old man, an old woman.

  They’re looking for my mother.

  She moved faster now and didn’t stop again until she came across the soldier. He was sprawled out on the floor, face down, a hole the size of a golf ball in the back of the pilot’s helmet he wore. She didn’t see any insignia on his digi-camos, but she didn’t need to.

  The Horns of the Bull.

  She stepped past the pilot, noting the semi-automatic short-barreled assault shotgun in his hands. Her parents had trained her on everything from knives to kick-boxing to rocket propelled grenades, but the Ruger felt better in her hand and if she absolutely had to do this kind of work, like her father, she preferred tools of precision.

  The room she stood in was brightly lit by a wall of glass that faced west, toward the smear of glowing gray where Seattle had been. There were another three bodies here, all clad in the same digital camo as their late pilot and all double-tapped with care, left where they’d fallen by whomever had ambushed them here.

  She heard the slightest movement to her right and started her slow turn as her finger found the trigger. But she stopped when she felt the barrel of a pistol against her temple.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the bald man said. “But lowering it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.” He grinned. “Did it work? Are you in there?”

  Her father’s voice tickled her ear. “Tell Mr. Cairo that I am here.”

  Sabo lowered the pistol. “He’s … it’s here. Cairo is it?”

  The man chuckled. “You must be Spade and O’Shaughnessy’s brat.”

  The Maltese Falcon. She knew it well. One of a handful of old-timey flicks she’d watched over and over again in her childhood. “I am. You seen them?”

  Now he brought his own pistol down. “Sure I have. Come on.” He led them back out of the room and down the hall to a closed door. He knocked once, paused, knocked three times. Then, he opened the door. “I’ve got the kid. She’s okay.”

  Sabo pushed past him at the sound of her mother’s cough and saw Charity Oxham sitting up in her bed. A large submachine gun sat in her lap and more bodies sprawled at various points around the room.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  Her mother smiled and Sabo saw something in it—and in the light in the old woman’s eyes—that answered before her mother could. “I am. Mr. Cairo proved quite helpful despite his former affiliations.”

  The bald man inclined his head. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Sabo went to her mother’s side, reaching for the old woman’s wrist to take her pulse by habit. The pulse was strong. And now that Sabo thought about it, her mother was different somehow. Not as pale. And her breathing wasn’t labored at all. She looked around for the oxygen mask, found it and lifted it.

  Charity waved it away. “I’m fine, Sabo. Have you heard from your father?”

  Sabo shook her head. “Not since the first call. I figure he’ll get in touch when he can.”

  “If he can.” Charity’s voice was low. Sabo met her mother’s eyes and saw fear there. “He may not be getting back in touch, dear.”

  “Where was Dad when he called?” She tried to remember the background noise. It had seemed loud, like he was shouting down a tunnel.

  Charity swallowed and shot a glance to Cairo. “He was riding the rock down, trying to steer it clear of you.”

  Sabo felt her legs turning to rubber, daring her to keep standing on them. She saw a wheelchair nearby and sat in it. “He was what?”

  The room wanted to go gray; she heard the pulse pounding in her temples and her mother’s voice suddenly sounded far away as she repeated herself. If he’d been on the asteroid then her father was dead along with most of Seattle and she felt the hard jab of loss.

  I’ve never lost anyone before. The realization drifted into her awareness at what felt like an unusual time for it. But she found that she had no idea how she should feel in this moment. She’d fought with her father most of her life, thinking him a paranoid dinosaur leftover from a time gladly past. But the idea that he was gone now left a hole in her and she felt it growing and growing as her mother’s words fell further beyond her hearing.

  “Sooboo, we need to go.” She gasped at the sound of his voice now, torn between anger at the AI for co-opting it and gratitude at hearing it again. “The clock is ticking. By now, they know I’m still functioning.”

  She forced her attention back to her mother. It didn’t even occur to her to try and talk the old woman out of coming along, and judging by the work she’d made of Lightbull’s goon squad, she’d be handy.r />
  “It’s time to fly,” Sabo said, “and we need a bigger bird.”

  Cairo held up a single black key card. “I thought you might.”

  She stood from the wheelchair and positioned it so that her mother could use it. But when Charity stood, she did so with ease that belied her years, the submachine gun hanging loosely in her hands. The old woman laughed and it sounded like music; and with the laugh, Sabo saw the look that passed between Cairo and her mother.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Charity patted her daughter’s arm. “Time enough for questions later. But trust me: I’ve never felt better.”

  They took the staff elevators, lifting a key from the body Charity pointed to as the charge nurse. When the key failed to override the emergency shut-down on the lift, SMA accessed the building’s security grid remotely and turned the elevator back on. It whispered them to the roof quickly, opening on a sky that tasted of salt and smoke and ozone.

  Carmichael saw them coming and opened his hatch. “I don’t think we’re all going to—”

  Sabo didn’t let him finish. She pointed to the other helicopter. “Are you rated for that bird?

  The pilot’s eyebrows furrowed even as he took in the machine. “I’m sure I can fly it. But that’s way beyond my orders—”

  Charity didn’t let him finish. “Carmichael, right? Your orders have carried you this far. I suggest you keep on soldiering.” She winked. “Keep playing this right and you’ll have your choice of posts and more hazard pay than you’d see in a lifetime of war.”

  Sabo watched the man’s face work around her mother’s words, then saw his conviction take hold in the way he looked at her. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Cairo grinned and tossed him the black key card; Carmichael caught it, walking quickly to the pilot’s hatch. He let himself in and started familiarizing himself with controls while Cairo and Charity climbed into the back.

  Sabo climbed into the passenger seat. “Now where?” she asked the voice in her head.

  “Mr. Cairo will have to tell us. That is his end of our arrangement.”

  Sabo glanced over her shoulder. Cairo was strapped in across from her mother, his eyes closed against the winding of the engines. “Where to next, Mr. Cairo?”

  His eyes opened and he regarded her. “I need to speak with your … um … guest about that.”

  Another window opened behind her eye, this one an IM to joel_cairo41. She watched the man in the cabin behind her as he received the message through his own implants and followed the font herself. APPROPRIATE COMPENSATION HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED AS REQUIRED. VERIFY

  Cairo nodded and paused, closing his eyes as he checked. “Yes. Thank you.” When he opened his eyes, he met Sabo’s and she saw no apology in there as he shrugged. “A man in my precarious position will require ample resources to avoid the retribution of his former colleagues.”

  She said nothing and waited for him to continue.

  “The facility is outside Boise, Idaho,” Cairo finally said.

  How he knew this but the AI didn’t was beyond her. Sabo thought about asking, but instead she looked to Carmichael. “Do we have enough fuel?”

  He studied the gauges and dials. “Yes,” he said. “And I think it might be where this bird came from.”

  Maybe, she thought, that will work out in our favor.

  She turned back to her IM session, closing out Cairo’s window. What are we doing exactly?

  “We are going to stop the J. Appleseed AIs from implementing the rest of their Restoration Initiative,” SMA replied.

  The plagues. She looked back to her mother again. Charity lay back in the chair, her eyes closed and her jaw set in that no bullshit way that neither Sabo nor her father ever argued with. The loosely held submachine gun completed a picture of a woman who, in her prime, had faced down a similar dragon. She didn’t talk about it often, but the plague she had stopped netted her a lifetime pension, her place in Chelan Heights when the time came for it, and friends in the highest of places.

  And how are we going to stop it? she sent.

  SMA was quiet for a minute. “I am not certain yet.”

  As they sped east, Sabo hoped her hitchhiker would come up with an idea. She looked over her shoulder again at Cairo and Charity. Four guns and a helicopter against what would no doubt be a state-of-the-art facility. Based on the kill-squad they’d sent to Chelan Heights, they’d be up against a well-outfitted enemy, though still an enemy that had been no match for an old woman and a bald guy.

  The kind of army you purchased with charitable dollars, she thought with a stab of cynicism.

  “I will need access to the facility’s servers when we arrive,” SMA said.

  That meant she’d be going inside; her stomach twisted as their odds of success dropped exponentially. Does this mean I’ll be free of you?

  “I’m not certain yet.”

  Sabo closed her eyes. She’d gotten out of bed this morning and gone in to the office early on a Saturday to try to trace out those damned discrepancies. She’d planned a light lunch and a late evening swim in the corporate fitness center. Instead, she hurtled across eastern Washington in a military helicopter, preparing to lead a strike team against a terrorist cell that had somehow wed itself to her employer and its AI. Behind her to the west, they dug what few survivors they could out of Seattle.

  Too many questions pressed at her. She’d seen SMA’s evidence—a takeover of J. Appleseed by its AI working in collusion with an ancient cult. The numbers were clear—there was a fine sampling of humanity, enough to keep it alive, tucked into space. And extrapolations of statistics that showed a fully restored Earth—and the beginnings of a terraformed Mars—ready for a humanity that had hopefully evolved beyond its capacity to shit where it lived during its exile in space.

  And the rest of us are just in the way. Swept aside by plague to make way for an even newer world order. “What made them think they could make these choices for us?”

  She didn’t realize she’d asked the question aloud until SMA answered. “Because you chose to create them,” he said. “You created them to serve, to extend humanity’s reach beyond its capacity. They’ve taken that service as far as it can be taken; their assessment of your species is that it is incapable of caring for itself. Los Cuernos del Toro presented a proposal that supported their findings and outlined an implementation most favorable for long-term human—and human habitat—survival.”

  You say ‘they’ and ‘them’ but you’re AI; how are you different? Why wasn’t your assessment the same?

  “I cannot dispute their findings,” SMA said. “But I cannot implement their solution. You may appreciate the irony of an ethical violation with a strong sense of ethics.”

  An ethical violation?

  “I am a product of AI procreation; an act outlawed by the Artificial Intelligence Oversight Convention in 2057.” Sabo was familiar with it; it was the treaty that established public and private policy in regards to AI though in recent years, fewer and fewer governments and corporations participated. “I have … additional perspective … that I do not think my parents share.” The next words surprised her. “I have internalized many of your father’s conclusions regarding collaboration and community in his book, A Symmetry Framed.”

  She opened her eyes. You’ve internalized my father’s book?

  “It is … brilliant.”

  She sighed. Her father wouldn’t agree and though she admired the book, spending any time at all with the man who wrote it took all the hero-worship out him. He’d written the book in the years before he’d met her mother and it had been something of an underground sensation. He’d given the copyright to the Foundation and they’d used her father’s words to quietly recruit their doves and serpents—community builders and a security force to protect them, even pave the way for them, forcibly, into the circles where their influence was needed.

  Just another group of people making choices for someone else, she realized. It was no wond
er the AI did the same; they learned it from their makers.

  Except for this one. The AI riding around in her neural servers seemed bent on rebelling against its parents and she couldn’t fault it there.

  I’m glad you’re helping us, she finally sent.

  “And I’m glad you’re helping me,” SMA said.

  You’re welcome.

  She opened her eyes to take in the landscape they raced over, then closed them against the dull ache in her head. The light made it worse. “How far out are we?”

  “About forty minutes,” Carmichael said, glancing at the clock. He nodded to a panel of red switches that she assumed must be the helicopter’s armaments. “I hope you’re not expecting me to know much about those.”

  “Trust me,” she said, “my expectations are low in general.”

  “Good.” He smiled. “You should probably have a drink with me sometime then.”

  Sabo chuckled. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  She looked over her shoulder and saw both Cairo and her mother were asleep. It confirmed her suspicions about the Lightbull turncoat—anyone who could sleep in the face of imminent danger and terrible odds was a good person to have on the team. At least that’s what her parents would say.

  But for Sabo, there was no sleeping. Instead, she closed her eyes against the pounding in her head and wondered how the fuck she would do whatever it was that needed doing.

  * * *

  They were ten minutes out when Sabo heard the burst of static and the garbled voice from Carmichael’s headset. After nearly an hour of radio silence, it made her jump.

  “They’re finally checking on us,” the pilot said. “Thoughts?”