by R. Z. Held
With a moment of straining concentration, Sienna got it to give her text. Suspect substance ingested—
Sienna dropped the bowl, spattering her worn camp boots with a couple vegetable chunks, poisonously bright green and orange against the weathered brown. Drugged. In the sauce, of course, not the vegetables. Her head swooped, and that must be the fear, not the drug, because she’d only had two bites. Sienna coughed, tried to retch—could the implant make her do that?—but if she was going to collapse, it needed to be back in the sealed section. If she processed more of the drug before then, she’d have to deal with the consequences.
Two bites must have been enough. The whole hallway was fuzzing out. Sienna needed her hand on the wall to keep her going straight, keep her going at all and not folding up and lying down. Just for a moment. She couldn’t think, and if she could just catch her breath, pause for a moment to let the world settle to something stable once more, she’d be all right.
But she couldn’t pause. One step more. One more. There was her door to the sealed section. Inside, that wasn’t safety yet, but Sienna was down on her hands and knees and couldn’t remember when she’d gotten there.
Was she dying? Or if she passed out and Elantine found her, wasn’t that the same thing?
Now she was on her side, cheek on the wood this time. So stupid and weak, over and over, ending with her curled up on the ground.
If this did end with her death, there was one last thing she could do. She couldn’t offer closure to her own family, but she could offer it to that of another, in hopes of some sort of balancing of universal mercy. “Penstemon…one last file. For…Gentiana.” Hard to focus, but as always the message was quick to shove to the surface of her mind.
“This is it, I’m afraid. My last…”
Sienna’s next thought was clearer, as if one breath later, or perhaps hours. Not dead, then, just sedated. Perhaps Elantine had been unable to ensure no one else ate the food. Time once more to worry about being found, then. Sienna made it to her feet and then stood still with all her weight pressed palm-flat to the wall for a few moments. She didn’t remember hearing the end of Isachne’s message, and the file still lurked in the implant. “Penstemon, did you get it?”
“The commander will be here before long, I think she was waiting for everyone else to go to bed.” Penstemon’s voice lacked both the hollow pleasantness and sharpened anger Sienna had heard in it previously. And she’d failed to answer a direct question, which shouldn’t have been possible. Sienna had neither time nor caring to think about such impossibilities, however.
Her first step swirled nausea through her stomach. She closed her eyes and stilled to try to hold it down. She had no time for this. “She’s never going to stop looking for me. Are you sure there’s no other buildings on this planet? I guess food would still be a problem…”
“Follow the guide,” Penstemon said, and a firefly light pulsed into being in the middle of her implant-augmented vision.
“Where?” A step, a pause for her stomach to settle, another step and pause. Not so bad. She’d be out of Elantine’s reach in a century or so. What were the no-longer-Near-AI’s motives in all of this? Assuming one granted her motives, which she shouldn’t have. Was she guiding Sienna toward the commander? Why warn her about the commander’s approach if so?
“To an outside door. If I can record you that far, I can spoof you staggering out of my range into the trees and erase you from my sensors going forward. She’ll leave to die out there, and you can live on as a void ghost in here. But you don’t have much time.” Penstemon’s voice thinned.
“All right.” Sienna aligned her next step with the firefly. What did she have to lose, by trusting the human ghost of a former agent merged with a Pax Romana computer?
Nothing she could think of in her current state.
***
Waking to a room with power—Penstemon had assured Sienna the drain wasn’t being recorded on her sensors either—seemed the height of luxury when Sienna swam up through the dregs of sedation for a final time. She was warm, and the jacket’s hood had provided something of a pillow, which her neck muscles appreciated. There was still her hunger-cramping stomach to ignore, but she put every item on her person through the cleaner except the jacket, as her implant flashed a warning against such an action when she attempted it. Then she took a long, long shower. Even the soap provided in the shower cubicle, though still institutional, was better than the stuff at the camp.
The water puddled around her feet had been a little gray from escaping dye, but when she examined herself in the mirror, the black shade around her face and shoulders still came as a slap. No scars to be seen from Gentiana’s beating. Beyond the hair she looked, as well as felt, more like herself, though she’d lost her standard of comparison from before the camp.
Back in the main room, pulling standard-issue clothes back on and then settling the jacket on top, she found the room much more soulless when lit. At least it also boasted a window. The trees outside seemed to have been cut back to create a swath of grass for walking, what she could see of them in the uncertain yellow light of what must be dawn.
Sienna drank water until the hunger wasn’t quite so painful, and settled herself on the bed to bend her precious energy to thinking. Planning. There were unanswered questions sitting heavy across her shoulders. “Penstemon. You…helped me? Of your own will?”
“Call me Pen,” the computer said in her new voice, the one that had some trick of inflection that Sienna was perhaps only fooling herself into calling “real.” Near-AI could speak quite fluently. And yet. “I know I wasn’t—I wasn’t particularly nice when we first met. The memories have had time to settle, I guess.”
“Isachne’s memories.” Sienna crossed her arms over her stomach, hugged them tightly. And didn’t that misunderstanding seem so human—Pen thought she was questioning why Pen would want to help her, when really Sienna wished to know how Pen could want.
“I’m not Isachne.” Heated. “I’m Pen.” A noise like the drawing in of a deep breath. “And I suppose you’re the only one I can talk to while I figure out what that means. One of the soldiers already thinks someone programmed me to be a smartass as a prank, and mentioned a reboot.”
Sienna tipped her head down, laced fingers into drying hair, black when it shouldn’t be, at the edges of her vision. Universal mercy, this was beyond her. “I won’t tell them about you if you keep hiding me,” she offered on a wobbly laugh. What else could she do besides take Pen at face value?
“It’s a deal.” Was it the remaining breath of Isachne in the implant that lent the words such weight? Sienna supposed an agent had little else to rely on, besides her trust and her word, the latter granted based on the former.
So. Sienna, for now, was a void ghost. And if she could stay that way long enough for the supply ship to arrive, escape was really, truly, within her reach. “Did Elantine believe what you spoofed? Can she use her codes to shut off Isachne’s access and find me again?”
“She can, but only if she thinks to look in the right places in my systems. And right now, she’s not looking.” Pen sounded decidedly smug, and perhaps rightfully so. “Keep away from anyone’s actual eyeballs or ears, and you have the run of the place.”
And the mess, thank mercy. She’d have to be careful not to take food in quantities that would be missed, but that was all right.
“Why…are they chasing you?” Pen asked cautiously, after a beat. “Or, to be more correct, why are you running from them? A deal’s a deal, you’re safe in here, but I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want the food and medical care they were offering.”
“Didn’t you see Elantine trying to kill me?” No, of course not, Elantine would have turned off sensors too. “She’s LSF. I assume they want me dead because they think I still have Isachne’s intelligence.”
Silence, for a moment. No face to read whether Pen was shocked or merely disbelieving. Or unable to understand what Sienna was talking abo
ut, having only presented the semblance of consciousness earlier. “There are a number of holes, in my records, surrounding the com—Elantine.” No, there was understanding in her voice. The dawning, painful kind.
“Oh, hell—” Sienna snapped her head up as dawning understanding seized her too. “Now you have all those files, so you’re in danger too. If she finds that out, she’ll wipe you completely.”
“You can’t delete them—” Desperate.
“I would never take them away from you,” Sienna said. At least not now she’d realized what that would mean for “Pen’s” apparently fragile, developing self-identity. “You’d only end up in the same boat I’m in, anyway. Her cover’s blown, and that’s no doubt worth wiping or killing for just on its own. Our only safety is her ignorance.”
“Wiping would be the same thing as killing. I don’t want to die.” Pen’s voice swooped up at the end. “Universal mercy, realization is such an unevenly paced and unsettling way of computing information.” A painful beat of silence, then:
Send anything on channels in return, but that went through without any effort at all. Such washes of relief that went through her for such small victories.
Perhaps the connections were at 50%, 60% now. Lucky her.
All right. Sienna had to eat sometime, there was no escaping that either.
***
It was one of the most difficult things Sienna had done in recent memory to step out of the door to the sealed section and slip down the well-lit hallway, hugging the wall. But Pen was with her every step, as she gathered small portions of food like bread and fruit from this dish or that and carried them back to the room for scanning. Just to be sure. Her raid the next night was even easier, and the one after that she managed to relax enough that frustration crept in. Portable food, in unmissable portions, once a day, wasn’t cutting it.
On her fourth raid, that relaxation and frustration made her sloppy.
That day, at the usual time, Pen was distracted by some kind of communications shenanigans Elantine was perpetrating. Sienna should have waited, but she was so hungry, and no one was ever around the mess at this time of the evening. She set out on her own, using the implant’s radius of enhanced senses in place of Pen’s system-wide one.
In the hallway, wood creaked beneath her feet, the way polymer flooring wouldn’t have, but otherwise silence reigned around her. She turned into the mess—
And there was someone there.
“No fucking shit!” she hissed back, out loud without thinking, and the man’s startled regard of her was shadowed with a frown of concern.
Maybe she could use that, though. She had to use that, or Elantine would know she wasn’t dead in the woods and Sienna couldn’t use that trick twice. She shied back from the man, playing up her all-too-real fear. “Please, you didn’t see me! Please.” Wasn’t she pitiful? Especially pitiful because her mind was deteriorating.
“The system certainly isn’t seeing you,” the man said, slowly setting down his fork and pushing his untouched salad away. “You did that with Isachne’s access?”
Forget leaving the sealed section, stepping up to Cyperus’s table was far harder. Sienna’s legs would barely move. But running wouldn’t help her, and this might. She lifted her chin high, as if Isachne’s confidence had seeped into her along with everything else. If only it had in truth.
She spoke the words as Pen gave them to her. “Tehran Cyperus. Intelligence agent. Have never shared a mission, have interacted in training. Gifted in retrieval and other physical missions, shit at human assets.” The origin of that was clear enough, but then Pen switched tacks. “My wife knows that I’m doing something secret, but she doesn’t know what. It’s really not that hard.” A pause, and Sienna twitched her head, turning her discomfort into part of the act.
“A relationship in our position is not for everyone, however,” Cyperus said, low. “As I said when I actually had that conversation with Isachne. Which I suppose must not have surprised her, given that ‘shit at human assets’ part.” He wore his black hair short enough to leave no more than a hint of wave, his beard even closer to the skin in a line outlining his mouth; his skin was firmly in the center of the Pax Romana spectrum of brown. Sienna might not have guessed it on her own, but she found herself not surprised by the information that he was another agent—his face rested in hard lines, but she had a sense of depths that went far down beneath that hardness. Depths in which lurked humor, her instincts said, making him rather attractive, taken as a whole. “Your name is Sienna, isn’t it?”
“Student visa Prague-one-six-two,” Sienna said, and looked up to a corner of the ceiling. “Please…” Pen was a little late with her next prompting, but Sienna hoped the pauses only helped sell the act. “I’ll have to debrief as soon as possible, of course. Where’s Gentiana? Didn’t she want to see me?” Pen’s voice thinned over the channel at that last, and Sienna’s stomach squeezed in sympathy around its emptiness.
“Why don’t you come—” Cyperus started, gentle tone deeply overdone, but apparently stemming from good intentions.
“No!” Sienna finally released her iron grip on her body and it skittered back without any further consultation with her conscious mind. “I’m not here. You didn’t see me. No one can know I’m here. Promise?” If he pitied her enough, maybe he’d decide it was better not to drag her kicking and screaming to “help” just yet. Universal mercy grant.
“All right,” he agreed, and Sienna let herself run. Only time would tell if he would keep that promise.
***
For a full day cycle, Pen monitored Cyperus, but she reported that he hadn’t spoken of Sienna to anyone. Around dinner time, she gave in and asked Pen to bring up a camera so she could watch him herself. Given her hunger, if he decided to wait for her, she wasn’t sure she could stand to stay away. She’d left without any food last night. And shouldn’t she allow him a little more interaction? If she could string him along, make him think he was building trust with her gradually, he wouldn’t call in help from others.
At the moment, he was seated with someone else. Nairobi Galax, Pen supplied from her own database, rather than Isachne’s, when Sienna asked. He had the metallic lines down from his temples, as Elantine did, and his hair was long enough to be caught in a knot at the nape of his neck.
When he spoke, Sienna re
cognized him as the man who’d refused to perform surgery on her. “Cyperus, can we talk about how little you’re eating?” He nudged Cyperus’s tray closer with three fingertips. “If you don’t build up an energy reserve, you won’t be able to power the nanites for surgery.”
Cyperus turned his head away—toward the camera, so she saw his expression, like tasting something rotten. “And this surgery will work, when all the others haven’t?”
Galax audibly swallowed a frustrated reply. When he spoke again, his voice was even. “Before she had to take over as commander, Elantine was an expert on replacement surgeries, you know.”
With exaggerated movements, Cyperus loaded up a spoonful of vegetables. Galax watched him chew until he swallowed, then sighed and stood. He walked out of that camera’s pick-up, and Sienna watched impatiently until everyone else had left the mess as well. Except for Cyperus, prodding at his unfinished food with a buried sort of anger.
It was time, then. Time for another calculated risk.
By the time she reached the mess, she’d decided on her approach. She peeked in the door and Cyperus stilled, attention snapping to her. After a beat of that, she edged closer, Pen prompting her words. “We work from the same playbook, you know. I see what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” Cyperus raised his brows at her, sardonic. “Not leaving the table until I’ve finished my dinner. Otherwise, I might get grounded.”
“Trying to reassure the subject through calm proximity, getting closer with each successive interaction.” Sienna rolled her weight on her feet when she reached about a meter from the table.
“I can’t chase you, you know.” Cyperus shoved his chair back and stood. A polymer and metal lattice surrounded the outside of one leg from hip to ankle, over top of his pants. “I more or less have no right knee because it was smashed to pieces. Regrown or inorganic replacement, my body rejects all of them. The assist is a bit like the internal structure of power armor. It takes my weight and lets me walk, but it’s too clunky to manage a faster gait.”
