Sleeper Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  The force of the tremor knocked him to the ground and reduced much of the protective shielding of the tactical-operations center to rubble at his feet. Another wave, and another, and another pounded at him, and he fell to his knees in the trench. Dust rose and fell in the near vacuum around him as he fumbled for his communications antenna. Most of his soldiers rolled to their feet nearby. His intercom channel was a cacophony of rude comments and banter. He got back on the command net. “S2, what the hell was that?”

  The intelligence officer came back almost immediately. “Large-scale tremor but not a seismic tremor, sir. Sensors are reporting four impacts approximately ten kilometers to our front. They knocked out the seismic equipment, all of them at least a ten on the Richter scale. No idea what’s there, sir.”

  Randolph swore inside his helmet. The minor planet’s horizon was eight kilometers away. He had no eyes on whatever—or whoever—was out there. His gut told him that something had landed out there. He sprang into action. “I want recon elements moving out right now.”

  “Sir, XO, private channel Alpha, over.”

  Randolph flipped over to the alternate channel that he and his executive officer had set aside for command conversations. “What do you want, Mike?”

  “We should sit tight, sir. We’ll know soon enough if something is on the planet.”

  “Our defenses took a hell of a beating from those quakes. We need time to shore everything up.”

  A red flashing light at the edge of his vision caught his attention. He flipped back to the command net. “CDR, go.”

  “CDR, Forward Three. We’re getting ground-surveillance-radar reports from all stations along our forward sector. Multiple vehicle signatures.”

  Randolph bit his lip. “Type and weaponry?”

  “Unknown, sir. They’re moving really damned fast.”

  “What’s the count? How many vehicles inbound?”

  “Fifteen thousand, sir.”

  Randolph swallowed and felt his legs turn to rubber. “Confirm that?”

  “CDR, Forward Three tracking approximately fifteen thousand vehicles inbound at a speed of eighty kilometers per hour. Estimated time of arrival is three minutes. Unknown type and origin.”

  “Forward Three CDR, engage with all standoff systems at this time.” That should slow them down a little. My God, fifteen thousand vehicles? He peered down the shallow incline toward his recon teams. The six small vehicles stopped in a cloud of dust, spun back toward him, and accelerated forward as Randolph’s missile batteries unloaded a steady curtain of steel on the horizon. The barrage continued, thousands of rounds fired each minute until, through the dust clouds, he could see the first of them. Small black vehicles burst through the cloud, firing directed-energy weapons that cut swathes through Randolph’s battalion like an axe splitting wood. The vehicles rapidly closed the distance, and as the rest of his battalion cut loose with their weapons, Randolph understood. Light in the darkened sky caught his eye. A massive new star appeared in space near the Surprise, and a split second later, she detonated like a summer firework. He looked down to see the first enemy vehicles rolling through his lines on metal treads.

  What the fuck—tanks? Randolph keyed his microphone and tried to give the order to fall back. He reached for the Transmit button. A bolt of bright-blue energy seared him inside his suit.

  The night that Kieran remembered his name, Berkeley had a fleeting moment of happiness until she realized what was wrong. While ice fishing alone on the reservoir, she’d sorted through the data she’d passively pulled from Kieran’s protocol in Esperance and California. The hunt for a reason behind Kieran’s protocol shutting down all broadcasting after leaving California was fruitless. Kieran remembering his name should have triggered a Stage Four broadcast, and there’d been nothing. In the hours after, there was still no confirmation message from Livermore that the protocol had reported Kieran’s discovery. There was no way that a simple transmission would have escaped her sensors. All her work to prepare for the transmission seemed irrelevant. The protocol was not going to report it, against its primary programming. As night fell, Berkeley could not shake the feeling that Kieran was in grave danger. Until she figured out who meant to cause Kieran harm, any course of action to keep him alive did not matter.

  She crept out of the tent while Kieran lay on his side, snoring softly. The hexhab systems were all in standby mode, and she read no activity from Kieran’s protocol. Walking across the foot-thick ice of the Eleven Mile Reservoir, Berkeley looked up into a first quarter moon. The soft moonlight shone through low clouds and gave the icy surface an eerie greyish color. Once she was safely out of Mally’s sensor range, Berkeley triggered her communications system by squeezing her left earlobe. An interface appeared across the retina of her left eye, and she selected the encrypted neural feed for active communications. Satellite coverage was stable with an uninterrupted communications window of six minutes. It would be enough. The cursor in her vision lingered on the Livermore access line before she decided to go straight to the top.

  The communications line engaged, and a voice answered almost immediately. “Crawley.”

  “He’s Stage Four. First name is Kieran.”

  “What?” Crawley barked into her ear. “When did that happen?”

  Berkeley checked the clock in her neurals, “About seven hours ago.”

  “There’s no protocol report. Are you certain?”

  “I’ve been calling him that myself. When I didn’t get a confirmation message from Livermore, I went into passive monitoring again. There is still no record of a transmission since we left California. The protocol isn’t even monitoring ADMIN—only receiving GPS Main.” Berkeley sighed, and a cloud of steam erupted from her nose.

  Crawley cleared his throat. “We’re aware it had dropped off everything else, but it’s off ADMIN, too?”

  “That’s affirmative.” The low-power ADMIN frequency was nested within the global-positioning-system frequencies for the purpose of uploading and downloading passive instructions and upgrades to the protocol from the Integration Center. The protocol would be unable to report Kieran’s position. Only Bennett’s proximity to Kieran gave them a location to work with.

  “Then we can assume that no one else knows at this point,” Crawley said. “The question is why the protocol refused to report a critical milestone.”

  “I don’t know.” Berkeley pulled a knit cap from her pocket and slipped it over her head. “I think it’s related to the AI interface. That’s the only logical answer I have for the excessive data. The AI programming is wrestling with data that it cannot handle.”

  “But without any transmission, we won’t know, will we?”

  “No.” Berkeley looked across the dark shapes of the Continental Divide. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get me whatever information you can without compromising yourself.”

  “I’ll do what I can, General. We’re physically connected, which is helping accelerate his development, but there have been no further connections since his first name. The rest is up to him.”

  “As long as nobody else—especially the council—finds out, we’ll have time. If the council finds out, the game is over.”

  Berkeley blinked. “They’ve tried to kill him before.”

  “Yes,” Crawley replied, his voice soft. “They see him as a threat and have ordered him terminated at Stage Four, Doctor Bennett.”

  “Oh my God.” Berkeley clapped a hand over her open mouth. “If the protocol transmits, they’ll know immediately.”

  “That’s right,” Crawley said. “And they’ll have a team on him within an hour.”

  How? Why? Berkeley spun around on the ice in frustration. “He hasn’t done anything!”

  “They want docile soldiers, Berkeley. The council wants acquiescence. And I’m not
going to give it to them.”

  “I thought we wanted to win the war. Having docile soldiers would mean they want to lose instead.”

  “I don’t know what they think they want.” Crawley paused. “We’ve done the hardest part in bringing Kieran back, but what we’ve done fails to meet the council’s intent. They want to win the war without our best weapons. The best thing we’ve ever brought to war is leadership. The problem is that the Terran Council cannot have their cake and eat it, too. I’m not going to cut off a clone’s balls for their political games.”

  Kieran is not what they want but what would win the war. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Do it quickly, Berkeley. Leave the council to me.” The connection dropped off, leaving her standing on the silent lake until the cold crept into her boots. She returned to the hexhab and curled up next to the man she wanted to love but needed to save.

  The first break came two hours later. Berkeley woke with a jolt and then lay completely still. Kieran slept peacefully beside her, and the hexhab was quiet. She culled the incoming message down to the bare essentials, passively monitoring the transmission. A strong signal on the ADMIN frequency came from a classified-communications satellite in low Earth orbit, and Kieran’s protocol responded with a three-second burst and then shut down. Decrypting the message required another five hours and would not have been possible without the considerable resources of the Livermore facility. The message proved their worst fears.

  D/L MESSAGE. EMERGENCY ACTION. PROTOCOL ACTION REQUIRED. RESPOND WITH LOCATION, STATUS, AND CURRENT TIME. EMERGENCY ACTION REQUIRED, OVERRIDE DELTA SIX FIVE.

  The override code was from the Terran Council command center. The emergency action protocol meant that under no circumstances would the protocol be able to ignore the order. The location of the actual source of the message was still encrypted, but Livermore promised an answer within a few hours. Crawley would want to know who had a finger on the trigger. The response from Kieran’s protocol read:

  U/L MESSAGE. LOCATION ALGORITHM COMPROMISED, NO AVAILABLE DATA. SUBJECT NOMINAL AT 53 PERCENT STAGE FOUR PROGRESSION. NOTHING SIGNIFICANT TO REPORT.

  How was it possible that a protocol could lie? It had been clever enough to bounce the return transmission from ten different satellites and at least three vehicles in orbit. Tracking the signal to anywhere more specific than North America would be impossible. Livermore responded with the origination location of the downloaded message: Paris. A chill raced down Berkeley’s spine as she sent the information in a secured transmission to Crawley. The Terran Council was searching actively for Kieran, and they’d be coming for him at that moment if the protocol hadn’t lied. Berkeley tapped the hexhab’s system and found Kieran’s protocol offline, in diagnostics, for three minutes and forty seconds. It would be enough time.

  Crawley responded within minutes via voice. “Why did the protocol lie?”

  Berkeley shrugged and subvocalized. It has to be the AI interface experiencing a logic error. The orders it’s receiving are contradictory to its programmed mission. That’s just a guess, but it’s the best I got.

  “So what’s that mean?”

  A computer doesn’t necessarily understand the differences between groups of nonprioritized tasks. It will try to do them all at the same time and will fail. All of the tasks will seem contradictory, or the computer will not understand which one takes precedence.

  Crawley responded slowly. “So, you’re telling me that the protocol can’t make a decision?”

  It’s not designed to make decisions. The function is assistance, not direction. Berkeley shrugged under her blankets. Other than that, I can’t say. Without access to the protocol, there’s nothing I can do. Do you want me to ask Kieran to speak to her—his protocol?

  “No. I don’t need either of them spun up about this. What do you need to get inside and establish a direct connection?”

  Berkeley held her breath. This was exactly what she wanted to avoid. All of her actions, and the strong emotions she felt for Kieran, clouded her judgment. Her job was to bring about Kieran’s integration, not to fall in love with him. He could very well die within weeks of integration when he joined the Terran Defense Forces. War was a cruel mistress. She needed to remember that somehow. A service code. Something like a test and evaluation code would work. I just need to get inside, then I can figure this out.

  “Give me a few hours, and I’ll see what I can do.” Crawley disconnected. Berkeley closed her eyes and managed to fall asleep a short time later. When she woke, Kieran was sitting outside on a log and tying knots in a rope.

  He smiled as she approached. “Good morning.”

  Berkeley watched him with a smirk. “You planning on tying me up or something?”

  “What?” Kieran’s face turned white then red. “No, nothing like that. Just remembering. I seem to be doing a lot of that these days.”

  “How so?”

  Kieran breathed deeply. “Like hearing my name uncorked a bottle of memories in my head. A lot of them are just pieces, but more and more of them fit together.” He paused and looked out at the horizon into the setting winter sun. The glare was blinding. “I have to get to Tennessee, Berkeley.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Kieran dropped his eyes to the ground. “I don’t think any of this is going to make sense until I’m there.”

  Berkeley asked. “What does your protocol say about that plan?”

  “That all I have to do is order transportation, and I’ll be there in a few hours. And, alternatively, that it’s a bad idea, and I should try not to force the issue.” Kieran picked up the rope again, and his hands went through the motions to tie a perfect square knot.

  Berkeley smiled at the memory of her own father teaching the simple, reliable knot to her. They’d camped in the forests around Lake Tahoe when she was a child. Right over left and under—left over right and under, he’d say in that soft, deep voice.

  I wish you were here now, Daddy. She watched Kieran for a few minutes and stood slowly. “I think I’ll see about some dinner. Anything sound good tonight?”

  Kieran shrugged. Whatever conversation he was having with the protocol, it probably wasn’t going well. Something was terribly wrong. Berkeley ducked into the tent, and her neurals chimed an incoming message.

  A test and evaluation code from the protocol manufacturer, she thought with satisfaction. While she made dinner, Berkeley decided how she’d go after the protocol and figure out what in the hell was going on. Using the hexhab system, she’d have enough power and upload bandwidth to run a full investigation program. Loading a program she’d written before leaving Cambridge into the habitat’s server required a few minutes.

  Satisfied that all was well, Berkeley decided it was time. She was going to attempt it that night while Kieran slept after a quiet dinner in the mountains. A little red wine wouldn’t hurt, she thought. She could administer enough wine that he’d sleep through the worst part of the process. With any luck, the whole nightmare would be over by daybreak.

  Mally snapped awake with the connection. Kieran was asleep and snoring. His blood-alcohol content was high enough to render him mostly unconscious until morning. Connecting to the hexhab’s sensors, she found that Berkeley was sitting up in the middle of the floor. A series of commands, using a test code that Mally recognized and ignored, attempted to break her connection to Kieran. Mally lashed out immediately, terminating the connection and then overloading the connection with her own program. Reaching through the hexhab’s system like a hot knife through butter, she connected directly to Berkeley’s neural net.

  Berkeley grunted, her body temperature spiking, as she put her hands to her temples. Mally felt something akin to satisfaction.

  New file linkages opened, and Berkeley’s identity and motives lay before Mally. It took less than a second to consider her courses o
f action before Mally chose one. You won’t like this, Mally thought and opened her communications suite to the connection.

  Berkeley’s head recoiled as if slapped as white noise descended across her neural connection.

  The disembodied voice lilted softly inside her head but was still no more than an electronic voice of a machine. Berkeley pressed her fingers to her temples.

  <>

  Berkeley realized that she had no control over her neurals, and her heart thrashed. She subvocalized. Who is this?

  <>

  “Mally,” Berkeley choked out. The cursor of her neural feed would not respond. She fumbled a hand to her earlobe, but that also failed. “What are you—”

  <> Mally chuckled, a harsh clicking sound like a retro video game. <>

  Aware that her heart rate was dangerously high, Berkeley took a few deep breaths. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. Fear over the loss of control coursed through her body, but she dared not move. “Why didn’t you report Kieran’s pre–Stage Four development?”

  <>

  Berkeley stared at the frozen cursor in her neurals as the connection slowly recovered. The access dialogue she’d started could be disabled if there was a hesitation or hitch in the connection of any consequence. All she had to do was initiate a Kill command, but the cursor would not move. A moment’s break, and she’d be able to disengage…