Emissaries from the Dead ac-1

by Adam-Troy Castro

  My head throbbed. “Shit.”

  “That,” the monitor said, “would be yet another synonym.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “Don’t milk it, honey.”

  “I was due for a sabbatical.” Which I’d intended to spend mapping a private investigation into a certain matter involving Unseen Demons.

  “I know. So did they. Evidently they didn‘t care.”

  “Why couldn’t they divert somebody else?”

  “They must have supposed it would be too cruel to do it with somebody who actually had a life to inconvenience.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What makes you think I’d be interested, babe?”

  Then again, a little irritation value went a long way. “Where are we?”

  “Seven hours from arrival at a cylinder habitat designated One One One, AIsource registration, ranking Dip Corps representative a Mr. Stuart Gibb.”

  The AIsource registration was the first sign this was serious.

  It was impossible to travel extensively in civilized space without dealing with that community of independent software intelligences, but they were bodiless, untouchable entities who wandered among us offering advice and selling high-tech services without ever offering us enough access to be touched in return. The little we knew about them was vague in the extreme. We knew that they’d all originated as proprietary software of various early-developing organic sentients whose respective technologies had advanced enough to create computer programs capable of guiding their own evolution. We knew that the proto-AIs had achieved true sentience and, sometime after that, independence long before mankind emerged from the primordial muck, that they’d contacted each other at some point during their explorations of the universe, and that they’d formed a community of sorts, which was there to greet us poor flesh-and-blood things when we finally dragged our asses free of our respective gravity wells, life-support equipment and all.

  We did not know where they kept their hardware, though the current conventional wisdom was that it was nowhere in conventional space and certainly no place paranoid organic creatures were capable of bombing. We did not know what benefits they derived from maintaining trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of us, unless it was just to rack up high scores (a computer game playing us). We did not know just how smart and how powerful they were, and how easily they could wipe the more conventional sentients from their sky if it ever occurred to them to want to, though I’ve been to more than one Dip Corps gathering where idle contemplation of the subject led to uncomfortable silences at best and white-knuckled drinking at worst.

  In the meantime, they were happy to just flit among us, selling tech and occasionally baffling us with bizarre whims. Juje alone knew what they did with the money they made from their various corporations; it’s not like they needed anything we were capable of selling. The most famous of their contributions to interspecies trade was of course AIsource Medical, with its network of clinics and hospitals which handled more than one-third of all health care in Hom. Sap space. I’d relied on them for emergency treatment a number of times, twice surviving attempts on my life only because AIsource were available to mend serious wounds. But that’s the thing. Always, before, they’d come to us.

  They didn’t have bodies, as we understood the concept. What, then, were they doing with a world? Even an artificial one?

  I covered my eyes with still-sticky hands. “I don’t suppose anybody deigned to send word what I’m in for.”

  “Deigned is the word,” the monitor said.

  “That bad, huh.”

  “That bad. Sit tight. You’re gonna love this.”

  The cold light of the chamber before me faded, replaced by a moment’s encompassing darkness, which in turn faded only to be replaced by the face of a man I’d despised for much of my professional life.

  Artis Bringen was a wispy-thin, smooth-faced functionary, autoengineered to look like a boy of no more than fifteen Mercantile. His cheeks were smooth, his jawline bland, his skin unmarked by anything approaching the character it would have acquired from actual experience. The only concessions to his actual age were a hairline trimmed back to accentuate his glacial wasteland of a forehead and a pair of world-weary eyes that his obsessive overuse of rejuvenation treatments had not been able to lend the same apparent youthfulness as his face and body. The discordance had always lent him the look of a callow nonentity, not at all worth taking seriously.

  Bringen was also one of many who believed that the crimes of my childhood had not been extenuated by my young age or diminished capacity at the time. To him I was a living symbol of humanity’s genocidal warts, whose continued freedom refuted all our protestations of trying to evolve into something better. In the time he’d been my superior he’d raised four legal challenges to my protected status in the Corps, at one point coming damn close to dragging me before an interspecies tribunal.

  The projection flashed a smile without warmth that seemed less a greeting from one professional to another than the opportunity to display the sharpness of his teeth. “Good morning, Counselor. By the time you receive this message, you’ll be aware of your diversion to One One One. I’m aware that postponing your sabbatical can’t be pleasant for you…”

  “Shove it up your ass,” I muttered.

  “…but the situation aboard that habitat is both critical and politically sensitive, which is why we’re indulging the several parties who have requested you by name.”

  Indulging. The choice of verb was a typical Bringen touch. “Go space yourself.”

  “You’ll get a full briefing on-site. The situation is fluid…”

  I groaned. “Your head is fluid.”

  “I can imagine your reaction to that too.” He sighed, his expression changing to one he often wore when dealing with me: a certain infinite sadness which would have been more appropriate to somebody he liked than somebody he’d so often tried to throw to the wolves. “I’m sorry about that, Andrea. I know the way things are, between us. If circumstances had been different, we might have been friends. It would have been nice. I know I’ve always tried…”

  I blew him a raspberry.

  “But it’s fair to say that you’re not going to like me any more once you discover the conditions inside One One One.” He smiled, an expression that on his face resembled a predatory rictus. “You’ll have some problems there, Andrea. Heights. I’m sorry.”

  Yeah. I believe that.

  “This is the bare minimum you need to know,” Bringen said, his smirk replaced by a grimace that established nothing beyond his utter lack of talent for gravitas. “The AIsource have engineered a sentient species.”

  A long pause, while the fuzzy aftermath of Intersleep cleared all at once.

  “Our observation team on-site has suffered a fatality—a first-year indenture named Christina Santiago—which they attribute to AIsource sabotage. Our understanding of the evidence seems to support their theory. But if the AIsource are guilty we have a shitstorm and a half, and I mean that in its most precise application. We cannot allow them to be guilty. Do you follow?”

  I followed, all right. If AIsource sabotage had led to the death of a human diplomat, it was an act of war from an enemy that could not be seen, or touched, or hurt, and which had been been running major industries on Hom. Sap worlds for the better part of six centuries. Who could return fire in such a war? Who could be sure that the battle hadn’t been lost before the war was even noticed?

  If it came to that, humanity might not even survive it.

  “Whatever the facts, whatever the evidence, whatever your senses tell you…find the AIsource innocent. Even if they’re guilty, find them innocent. We’ll deal with their actions as best we can. But in the meantime we need to put this back in its box. We need a guilty party we can cage.” He hesitated. “I have faith in you, Andrea. Get in touch when you can.”

  The projection went to black and disappeared, replaced by the four blank walls that encl
osed my crypt.

  For just a moment I wanted nothing more than to aim my transport in some direction unpolluted by the presence of sentient life, someplace where it could safely drift for centuries or millennia without ever encountering a gravity well, or without ever being disturbed by crises or controversies.

  Then the monitor said, “Hey.”

  I said, “What?”

  “You asked me to remind you whenever you got like this. Unseen Demons.”

  The chamber was silent but for the hiss that afflicts even the emptiest of rooms, the sound of random colliding molecules making even quiet a kind of repressed explosion.

  Unhappy that I’d been dragged back to a land occupied by those with all-consuming purpose, my only recourse was to mutter, “Shit.”

  The monitor said, “Want the other shoe now or later?”

  I considered putting it off. I hadn’t even come close to full recovery. Intersleep created an inertia that lingered. I needed to drag myself from the crypt, spend at least an hour in the sonic vibrating off bluegel, force-feed myself something solid, and then maybe spend another couple of hours lost in a standard, garden-variety doze. It would be awhile, maybe even a couple of days, before I got to sleep again, after all. The counteractives necessary to get my system running again always gave me an amphetamine rush that locked me in hyperdrive until I struck my metabolic wall.

  But listening to Bringen and the monitor had already restored me to my most productive state of seething irritation. “I’ll take it now.”

  “There was a second message piggybacked on that transmission. It was an encoded data strobe, occupying ten parts of noise for each thousand parts of Bringen mouthing off; and there are at least seventeen separate indications, boring if you force me to enumerate them, that it was inserted into the stream at some point after the message was sent.”

  “Are you sure about that? It wasn’t just Bringen trying to be cute?”

  “The contents of the second message render that unlikely, but I wanted to be sure, so I hytexed New London and asked to resend. The second transmission was just Bringen, without any additional code. No, it looks like somebody captured Bringen’s signal and shuffled the data.” The monitor hesitated, capturing with perfect fidelity the manner of a man trying to avoid words that sounded insane to him. “Internal evidence seems to suggest a human being using AIsource coding. I believe this may have been done from someplace inside One One One.”

  I bit a thumbnail, regretting it when I tasted the dried bluegel residue. “Somebody wants to talk to me without going through channels.”

  “Or they want to show they control the channels. Given the contents of this second message, it is a matter for concern.”

  I sat a little straighter in the gel. “Show me.”

  The chamber went black a second time and lit up as another projection—this one a full-sized holo of myself, standing as if at attention in my habitual shapeless black. My facial expression was neutral to the point of coma, omitting my usual furrowed-brow seriousness. The portrait was also a little softer than it needed to be around my chin, but its cheekbones were the proper height, its nose the proper thinness, its features at rest the familiar, damnable, unwanted combination of elements adding up to unwanted beauty.

  It was an outdated image, depicting me with short-cropped hair on all sides, when I now indulged an appreciation of things asymmetrical by allowing one thin lock to descend all the way to my right shoulder. But it was recognizable enough, and would have passed muster as an image to send the media if I’d died, gone missing, or fallen so far out of favor that I could be disappeared with impunity.

  It looked me in the eyes and said, “Hello.”

  Just that: Hello.

  Then it exploded from the inside out.

  It threw back its head and opened its mouth wide and stood before me twitching as tremors rippled down its cheeks. Its mouth yawned wider than human anatomy allowed, then further still, and then further yet. Soon the underside of the jaw was almost flat against the neck, the skin and flesh around it drawn so papery-taut that they split open in a garish scarlet wound that exposed teeth turned pink from the sudden hemorrhages at the back of its throat. Then its insides geysered from that impossibly huge mouth as if fired from cannons somewhere deep inside; not just blood and bile but black, glistening, organic shrapnel, desperate to escape whatever was happening inside. There was more fluid than my body could have contained. The simulacrum was soon painted in it. Then something unspeakable happened to its chest, caving it in, splintering the ribs, leaving curved white daggers of bone emerging from its flesh like scalpels.

  I’m an expert in hate mail. My past has earned me an extensive personal collection of death threats, from representatives of various species. Most have been voice messages, colored with bile and transmitted my way via hytex. A few have been written with real ink on real paper. A few had been imaginative and vivid, and a number had been animated. Among the animated, I’d seen images simulating my torture, my strangulation, my rape, and my willing, enthusiastic participation in sexual acts so depraved that even my most exhaustive research hasn’t been able to uncover more than a dozen worlds where such perversions are even theorized.

  Most of this stuff is laughable. I’m sometimes amused at how little my correspondents know about female anatomy.

  The unknown parties responsible for the inside-out image had programmed a state-of-the-art simulation, outdated or inaccurate in some particulars but persuasive in every other way.

  It felt real.

  It felt sincere.

  It felt like a promise.

  It was the kind of threat sent only by a genuine monster.

  I should have been terrified.

  But I was also a monster. And as I thought about the unseen sender, I tapped a fingernail against my teeth and murmured a silent promise in return.

  You’ll go first.

  3. VICTIMS

  First they told me all they knew about Christina Santiago.

  Lastogne rattled off the facts, in a contemptuous drone that failed to betray any sympathy. Santiago, he said, had been a second-year diplomatic indenture, just out of training: specialty, exopsychology, the product of some industrial hell somewhere in the ass end of Hom. Sap space.

  The feudal economy that kept the darker corners of the Confederacy going had seized a particularly savage grip on her people. The colonists who’d settled the place seventeen generations back had so badly mortgaged their lives and their children’s lives, just for the funding to establish their infrastructure, that the entire population lived as the de facto debt slaves of the sponsoring Bettelhine Corporation. The world has one major industry, the construction of components for starship quantum dampeners. With perhaps one-third of the population engaged in providing food and housing and other support services, the other two-thirds spend their days working endless shifts in Bettelhine’s factories, struggling and failing to meet the quotas that would bring their world’s struggling millions a few percentage points closer to solvency.

  Sometimes, they almost break even.

  Mostly, as management intended, they fall much further behind. They have to give up more and more of their own agricultural and industrial systems just to make up lost time, which obliged the company, in its infinite generosity, to supply an ever-increasing percentage of their basic necessities, at an ever-increasing markup. Christina Santiago’s people have been forced to mortgage three additional future generations, just during her lifetime alone.

  The situation failed to shock me. The Confederacy doesn’t provide its citizens with any redress against that kind of local corporate rapaciousness. What little political clout exists is external, a mere façade of species unity between us and the other sentient powers; internally, it’s never been able to come up with a constitution all of our bickering subcultures have been willing to get behind. It’s why any voyager through human space will encounter every political and economic system from green cults to fascism, why some
of our more contentious worlds have as many as fifty or sixty separate governments happily bombarding each other from orbit, why we still have to deal with internal genocides in this day and age, and why debt-slavery like Santiago grew up with continues to flourish when the people benefiting from it should be lined up against the wall and shot.

  Don’t get me started. But it’s one reason, of many, why I sometimes hate my own species.

  To Lastogne and Gibb, I affected boredom. “So? Half the Dip Corps must come from some depressed background or another. It’s what makes indentured servitude such an attractive alternative.”

  “It explains who she was,” Lastogne said. “Gives you a special feeling for her character.”

  “Special feeling for her character doesn’t matter unless you believe that where she came from and who she is has some bearing on how she died. That her murderer targeted her in particular. Is that what you believe?”

  “I have no reason to believe anything. I’m just being thorough.”

  Gibb just looked weary. “Get to the good stuff, Peyrin. She can fill in the personalities later.”

  Nobody could have blamed Santiago for indenturing herself to the Dip Corps as soon as possible. There, at least, she would have had a chance at a better life. But that better life had not materialized. Her murder had taken place during One One One’s dark hours, when the glowsphere suns were dimmed to provide the cylinder’s inhabitants with some semblance of a normal planetary night. But because witnesses had reported that Santiago’s assigned hammock was still aglow, she was probably still awake, and working, at the moment of the crime.

  The culprit or culprits had sliced through every cable anchoring one side of her hammock to the Uppergrowth. The partial collapse transformed the hammock from a tent to a flapping banner. All its loose contents, including Santiago herself, had tumbled into the darkness below, trailing her scream.

  The young indenture may have remained conscious and terrified for long minutes, as she plunged toward the fatal high-pressure regions far below.