A Mosaic of Stars: Short Stories From Other Worlds

by Andrew Knighton

  Her pursuers reached the top of the heap and stood staring at her.

  “This is mine.” She held up the tablet. “It is marked with my DNA.”

  “That can’t be legal.” The guard’s voice was muffled and inhuman.

  “Probably not.” There was doubt in the inspector’s voice. “But do you want to cause the test case?”

  “Not for what I get paid,” the guard said. “Not for the sake of a broken old tablet.”

  “Come on, kid.” The inspector shook his head. “You’re not allowed here.”

  Mei followed him down the heap.

  “Can you take me to a hospital?” She felt wobbly, like she might fall over at any moment, and blood was still running from her hand. But she clutched the tablet tight. For the next month, she would not go hungry.

  Faces

  The Alt-Face mask was tight against Casey’s skin. It still worked perfectly after years of use, months with these features, so long that she seldom noticed the pressure of the wires on her skin. The face she saw in the mirror almost felt like it could be her own.

  As far as the Foreign Minister knew it was her face, just as her name was Janice Long and she’d spent her life working as a personal assistant. He’d started to trust Janice, to let things slip. A few more days and she would have the details of the treaty negotiations. A few more days and she could move on to whatever life the agency sent her to next.

  She trailed along behind the minister and his cloud of bodyguards, carrying his computer and the suitcase with his notes for the President. He laughed and pointed as they passed a cheap Alt-Face store, the dummies in its windows shifting to show the latest trends. One showed a face like member of a girl band, just different enough to avoid copyright infringement. The next a licensed imitation of a b-list actress. Next to that was a dummy showing a range of custom-designed faces. Faces which morphed, to Casey’s horror, into her own.

  The minister pointed and laughed again, turning back towards her. His bodyguards turned too, but they looked less amused. Hands reached for under-arm holsters as they glared suspiciously at Casey.

  There was no time to think, but then there was no decision to make. If they checked then they would realise that this wasn’t her own face, and then the questions would come.

  Still clutching the computer bag, Casey turned and ran.

  Barging her way through crowds of shoppers, she heard some shouting indignantly at her, others yelling in alarm as armed men followed behind.

  She ducked into a network of back alleys, silently cursing the rip-off merchants who’d imitated what was supposed to be a copyrighted face.

  By now she was out of sight of the bodyguards, though she could still hear sounds of pursuit. Emerging into an open air market she grabbed a coat off a stall and flung her wallet at the man behind it.

  “Keep the change,” she called out, still running as she pulled the coat on.

  Letting down her hair, she ducked and weaved between the stalls, looking around for any that sold Alt-Faces, or even the tiny drives programmed with different features. But this neighbourhood was too cheap.

  Up ahead, she saw cops approaching between the shoppers, comparing the screens of their phones with every face they passed. It didn’t take a secret agent to work out who they were looking for.

  The cops were closing in, and she could hear yells of indignation as the bodyguards shoved through the crowds behind her. Stepping into the narrow space between two stalls, she pressed her hand to her face, felt the wires beneath the thin layer of flesh.

  In desperation, she tore it off and kicked it under one of the stalls, then scrabbled at the skin around the sides of her face, trying to remove any traces of its presence.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” The policeman tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Yes, officer?” Casey turned towards him.

  The man looked down at his screen, then back up at her. She froze as he reached out a hand.

  “Sorry about this.” He touched her face, then nodded, apparently satisfied. “Just checking for Alt-Faces. We’re after a criminal who was using one.”

  He turned away and carried on between the stalls, leaving Casey standing alone, trembling at her close call, and at a sensation she hadn’t felt in years. As she set off once more through the streets, the ministerial computer and its secrets still in hand, the wind brushed her own bare face.

  Friend / Not Friend

  El wormed her way, inch by stomach-clenching inch, across the field. To her left, a blood-smeared blast mark reminded her of what had happened to Hans.

  Lights blinked on the screen of her smart bracer, showing a mine three meters ahead and two more possibles just beyond it. The wireless connections between the mines made detection easier, but it was still hard to be certain until she was up close. By then it could be too late.

  Sweat beading her forehead, she wriggled toward the nearest mine. Drawing a slender extending probe from her belt, she slid it slowly through the dirt until she felt the first pressure of resistance. She plugged the probe’s wire into her bracer, took out her other tools, and set to work.

  Anti-personnel smart mines were covered with sensors. Each movement, each shovelling away of dirt or insertion of a blade between plates, could bring death. El’s muscles cramped from lying still for so long on the uneven ground, but at last she was able to draw the device out of its hole, unscrew the firing mechanism and set the whole thing aside.

  Letting out a sigh, sat up and stretched her aching limbs.

  There was a soft thud, and something flew from the dirt a few meters away. In the second it took the device to arc through the air, she had to make a decision - risk running over another mine, or risk this one triggering as it landed near her.

  Springing to her feet, she dashed back the way she had come.

  An explosion smashed into her back, throwing her to the ground. Lying prone, aching in a hundred places, she waited for another blast to kill her.

  The only sound was clods of earth raining down.

  Curling up around herself, El shook with relief.

  When she finally stopped shaking, El realised that the jumping mine might be a good thing. It had triggered when she deactivated the other mine, moving to fill the gap. That meant the whole minefield had been rigged with a collective decision making intelligence.

  She could talk to the mines.

  El had always been good with AIs. That was why the Blue Haven settlers had recruited her - to program tractors, maintain communications and train computers. Then they realised how many armaments the war had left in their new home, and priorities changed. She turned to mine clearing, to make a safer life for all of them.

  Unfastening her bracer, she laid it on her knees and unrolled the silk-thin keyboard. It was a matter of moments to find the minefield’s frequency. Access options flashed up so quickly that she knew the intelligence must be lonely, left here decades after its owners were defeated. That gave her hope.

  Forced hacks had never been El’s style. Besides, most armies relied on bullying machines through buffer exploits, cross-script trickery and other crude old approaches. The minefield would be primed against those. Instead she sent a series of careful queries, each one building on the last, coaxing out the attention of the simple AI.

  Again, her muscles cramped as she sat unmoving, fingers trembling at the thought of what could happen if this went wrong.

  “Friend / not friend?” The AI’s query flashed across the screen at last.

  “Friend.” She followed the word with a string of confirmatory coding.

  “Lies.” A mine exploded to her right. Shrapnel gouged her arm, blood running down her fingers and onto the keyboard. She typed frantically, hoping that the minefield was still listening, that it would have blown a closer mine if it really meant to kill her.

  “Friends gone,” she asserted, in among the rest of the code. “War over. No need for AI to wait. No need to kill self / kill others.”

  The curso
r blinked as the AI processed the message. El smiled and wiped the sweat from her brow. She felt like she could have laughed with relief. The AI was listening. It was working.

  “NO.” Just two letters on the screen, but it was enough to leave El rigid with fear.

  “No,” the AI continued. “Category C hack. Network reset. User excluded.”

  Her screen went blank. With a thud, another mine leapt toward the cleared ground where she sat.

  Too stiff to run, El watched the cold grey box hurtle toward her on wings of death. Eyes wide, she waited for the end.

  Another thud. The mine landed centimetres in front of her and burrowed into the ground. A single light blinked up from the hole, daring her to move and trigger it.

  The minefield remained, but so did she. Taking out her probe, El returned to clearing it the slow, old-fashioned way.

  The Price of Living

  Desi slammed the door shut behind them and slid a bolt across. Whatever was inside this old surgery, whatever it had been before the war, it couldn’t be more dangerous than what was out there in the ruins of Barcelona. Peering through a filthy window, he saw nothing moving in the street, but that didn’t mean they were safe. Some of the robots could fly. He’d heard some could tunnel.

  By the time he turned around Carina and Javier had already disappeared from the waiting room, leaving a trail of blood. Desi dashed after them, gun still in hand, and found them in a treatment room. Blood was dribbling from Javier’s wounds down the sides of a couch.

  “Look.” Carina turned around, the grey controller for a wall mounted device in her hands. “Proper medical equipment. We can save Javi.”

  “Put that down,” Desi demanded.

  “He needs this.” Carina peered at the machine, trying to work out how to switch it on.

  “Stop it.” Desi grabbed the controller from her hands and flung it into the corner of the room. “It’s a machine. We can’t trust it. It could be on their side.”

  With a groan Javier tried to sit up, then slumped back, the charred mess of his chest rising and falling with ragged, irregular gasps of breath.

  “He needs this!” Carina snatched up the controller. “He’s going to die!”

  “If you switch that machine on we might all die.” Desi pointed angrily at the device. “Have you forgotten what happened to Laia and Miguel? They thought we could use that old computer, and now they’re dead.”

  “Mother of God, you’re killing him Desi!” Carina grabbed Javier’s pale hand. “Look at him!”

  “You’re killing him,” Desi snarled. “The more time we waste here, the less time we’ve got to find bandages or something else we can use.”

  “Bandages won’t do.” Carina starting flipping switches. “He needs more than you or I know how to do.”

  The memory of Laia’s burned body filled Desi’s mind. The smell had been the worst of all. She’d smelled so beautiful in life, but the stench of blackened corpse had made him vomit. All because that computer had told the robots where they were.

  He had to stop this.

  All it took was a squeeze of the trigger. Carina froze as the roar of the gun filled the room, the bullet burying itself in the wall.

  “Step away from the machine.” Desi trembled with fear at the thought that he might hit her. He had to be strong.

  Her face stiff, eyes burning with anger, Carina turned to face him.

  “Hands up,” he said.

  She obeyed.

  From the couch, Desi gave a groan. His left leg twitched and blood misted his breath.

  “You wouldn’t,” Carina said.

  “I don’t want to die.” Desi was firmer now, his heart beat slowing to something like normal. “Not at the hands of some mindless, compassionless machine.”

  “Compassionless?” Carina nodded toward Javier, his breathing becoming ever more shallow. “Do you have compassion, Desi? Or has it been written over with the programming of fear?”

  Desi’s finger tightened on the trigger, anger driving him. How dare she suggest he was no better than a robot? He just wanted to live.

  Javier coughed – a terrible, wet sound, the desperate noise of someone else struggling to live.

  All the anger left Desi, replaced with a different determination. He lowered the gun.

  “How does it work?” he asked.

  The Suit

  Cheryl was afraid. Afraid of the guards around the decontamination suite, afraid of the security cameras watching the corridors, afraid of the holding cells beneath the biodome. She was even afraid that the rumbling of her stomach might give her away.

  But more than anything, she was afraid of how close Connor was to starvation, and that if she couldn’t feed him she would be failing to live up to their parents’ last wish. She might only be thirteen, barely old enough to look after herself, but her six-year-old brother stood no chance without her.

  So she fought down the fear, instead remembering the pictures she’d seen of the outside world. The woods and fields still recovering from the devastation of war, beyond the safety of the biodomes. The apples in the trees, the rows of wheat. If she could get a biohazard suit then she could get out there and take some of that food. Sure, it was breaking the law, but better that than starvation.

  The camera at the corner turned its unblinking eye to look down the other corridor. Cheryl darted forward, through a door and into the locker room of the decontamination suite.

  There it was, hanging from an open locker. A thing of such promise that her heart skipped a beat. She reached up and grabbed the baggy orange suit, with its clear plastic helmet and rubber seals. The cloth made a crunching sound as she bundled it up in her arms and turned back to the door.

  A woman stood there, hair wet, wearing only her underwear and a frown.

  “That’s not yours.” The woman planted her hands on her hips.

  “How do you know?” Cheryl tried her best to look indignant.

  “Because it’s mine.”

  For a moment, Cheryl considered running. But the woman looked well fed and muscled, and would be faster than her. With some adults, the best option was to seek sympathy.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, I have to go outside. To gather food for my brother.”

  “That’s not allowed.” The woman took a step forward. “If you even have a brother.”

  “I do!” Anger at the accusation warred with the growing fear of punishment. “His name’s Connor. He’s only six and he’s starving. Please, I have to get out there and get food.”

  The woman shook her head and took another step forward, hand outstretched. Cheryl shut her eyes and prepared to cling on to the suit for dear life.

  There was no tugging at the cloth. After a moment she opened her eyes and saw that the woman had taken a camera out of the locker. Now she sat on a bench, thumbing a button on the device until she saw the image she wanted. Her eyes were sad as she held the camera up to show Cheryl.

  “That’s what’s outside,” she murmured.

  There were no trees in the image, no fields of corn. Just a landscape of blackened, shrivelled things, among which a diseased dog limped along beneath a gunmetal grey sky.

  The biohazard suit fell in a crumpled heap at Cheryl’s feet. She trembled from head to foot.

  “But how will we eat?” she whispered.

  “That’s the question.” The woman sighed, switched off the camera and put it down. She waved around the deserted locker room. “Hardly anyone can face going out there, never mind battling to reclaim it.”

  Cheryl thought of Connor, curled over around his empty belly, barely able to get out from beneath his blanket.

  “I can.” She didn’t fear anything out there, not compared with what was in here. “Find me a suit. I’ll make things grow.”

  “Alright.” The woman smiled, just a little. “But first let’s go talk to my boss. He can help us find some food for your brother.”

  Davey in the Machine

  Of all the pe
ople I thought I’d miss while on the penal farm, Davey was at the bottom of the list. But after the first few days, once I’d got used to the electric fences and the guard platforms hovering above our heads, I started to think about him a lot. I thought about everything, from our first kiss to the fight outside the casino that got us locked up. I was still mad at him, but I felt like I had a hole inside me, knowing that hundreds of miles of Martian sand lay between us, and that I might never see him again.

  That was why I called the tractor Davey. As the only prisoner with the skills to program its AI, I was responsible for maintenance, making sure it could plough land that had lain untouched for millions of years. The green of its signal lights reminded me of my Davey’s eyes, and I saw something of his smile in the front bumper. Sure, it wasn’t really him, but it was better than nothing.

  “Your tractor’s acting up again.” Browne, the deputy chief warden, hauled me out of my bunk and down to the fields. The atmospheric transformation was still incomplete, and the thin air left me feeling tired after only a short walk. But I smiled when I saw Davey, lights blinking angrily, stalled just inside the fence.

  “Something ain’t right,” I told Browne after a few minutes nosing around Davey’s hard drive.

  “No shit.” Browne slapped a stun baton against the palm of her hand. “Can you fix it?”

  “I don’t know.” I’d never seen anything like it. Davey the machine had just decided not to work, like when my Davey got into a sulk. “I can try.”

  Browne kept me up all night trying to get Davey moving. By dawn I was just about there.

  “He’ll need resets every eight hours,” I said, a plan spinning in the back of my mind. This could be my chance to spend more time with Davey, to fill my days refining his programs instead of taking my turn cleaning the farm’s filthy bathrooms.