Sleeper Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  Crawley nodded. “What happens if the search finds you, Doctor Bennett?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should we be concerned?”

  “Yes, we should be concerned. Mally is not trying to send me a candygram, General. If she gets through, I think she’ll try and kill me.”

  Crawley chuckled. At least Bennett was trying to understand the twenty-first century. “So what’s the plan—be coy, or be aggressive?”

  The voice on the other end of the phone dropped an octave. “I’m not going to let her in. But when I actively block her, I’m worried about how she’ll respond.”

  “Give me the best-case scenario. Never mind—she’s not going to say ‘Come and get me,’ is she?”

  “Only in a negative way,” Bennett replied. “If we’re dealing with an artificial-intelligence engine, we could be talking about self-preservation. She’ll likely try to get him to disappear, or she’ll try to download herself and shut him down.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Yes. I don’t think she’d try to kill him, but it’s a possibility.”

  As a soldier, Crawley understood that retaining the initiative was going to be difficult. A computer capable of thinking a million times faster than him was not the opponent he wanted to go against. The Terran Council was about to ruin his best chance for integration. “What about leveling your security?”

  “It’s already there. I’m not letting her in, General.”

  “I’m talking about a delay action. Hold her up to buy time. When you can track him, we go get him. How long can you hold her off?”

  “Depends.” Bennett sighed in his ear. “TDF protocols are hard to beat.”

  “She sees TDF on it, and she’ll bail on the search.”

  “You’ve heard of the adage of a woman scorned, right? She’s not going to stop until she gets in.”

  Pissed off his protocol, did you? “What are we dealing with, Bennett? A protocol with a brain, or a protocol that thinks Kieran is hers and hers alone?”

  “The latter, most likely. I…” Bennett paused.

  “What?”

  “I’d feel the same way in her position.”

  Crawley felt color creeping into his neck. “She’s a program. A machine!”

  “With an untested artificial-intelligence engine approved by the Terran Council for operations. We’ve had similar situations in our combat-equipment tests. This is why AI systems are not for general use. They cannot handle emotion. She’s like a child, General—impulsive and afraid. If we can get a track on him, we intercept and shut her down.”

  “And put Kieran at considerable risk,” Crawley said. The pause at the other end of the phone confirmed his fear that it was a low thing to say, but it had to be said. She had to know this was business.

  “General,” Bennett said slowly. “Get me close enough, and I can shut her down. I can download Kieran’s batch file with the laser at two hundred meters, easily. If we lose him, we have enough data to do it all again.”

  “Not with the same genetic material,” Crawley said. “I’m sorry, but you have to know that going into this, Berkeley. If we lose him, we can’t replace him.”

  For ten seconds, there was no sound but a few pops of static. “I’ll take that risk.”

  “How long until she finds you?”

  “A couple of hours, more or less. I’ll be ready and will delay her as long as I can. When I get a track, I’m planning to move, with your approval.”

  Crawley reached for a tablet on his bedside table. Eyes lingering on the Sydney skyline, he made a few taps on the tablet. “I have an Excalibur-class transport for you at Gatwick. We’ll stage you somewhere up north in case the Terran Council is watching you. I suggest you get there and get aboard. We may not have much time.”

  The chairman’s comm suite buzzed to life in the midst of a meeting with the premier of India. It never fails, he thought with a straight face. The premier did not object to her taking the call. Then again, he understood the rules. Inside the Operations Center of the Terran Council, a ringing phone meant something significant was happening.

  Penelope Neige answered the call. “Yes. You’re certain?”

  There was a long pause, so much that the premier began to feel uncomfortable watching her. She reminded him of a bartering shopkeeper in the bazaars of Delhi. He’d seen eyes like that before in his childhood amongst the million other orphans from Bangladesh. Forced to go inland, to higher ground, he’d promised himself to keep climbing—always keep climbing.

  Neige snorted. “And if he leaves there? What then?”

  A politician was supposed to always wear a straight face. The opposition could be ripping off fingernails, but the trained leaders of the world always maintained perfect composure. The premier sat with his mouth open far enough that it could catch flies and took ten seconds to gain his composure in time to meet her questioning eyes.

  “I don’t give a damn! He’s been out of contact for weeks. If he’s made any progress whatsoever, my orders stand. Make contact with the subject, and hold him until the strike team arrives. You will terminate him immediately and secure the remains. Is that clear?” Neige glanced up at him. The blazing eyes of a killer faded immediately into something shrewder and more dangerous. She smiled with her shark’s teeth.

  “Now, where were we?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I opened the door to Murphy’s and hesitated in the small foyer. The air was redolent with the scents of stale beer and cabbage. Like the other buildings I could see in the tight downtown streets, the establishment was long and narrow. A few tables sat near the plate-glass front window, but the far wall was nearly all taken up by the bar. Tables and chairs were tightly packed around a small, empty stage. The partying would begin in a few hours, as it did every night, and last until first light. Unkempt teenagers swept the floors and wiped the tables from the night before. In a booth toward the back wall and kitchen doors, there was only one other customer: a burly, tattooed man in a black-leather vest. He waved an artificial arm. Even with confirmation, I did not recognize him. I raised my chin to acknowledge him, and the lone bartender called over to ask what I was drinking.

  There was a white coffee mug in Mick’s hand, and a bottle of whiskey sat on the table.

  “Coffee—black, please.” As I approached the booth, the older man stood up and towered over me. I extended a hand, which he shook with the strong, sure grip of his artificial hand. The silver articulated metal looked like nothing I’d ever imagined, but it flexed and rotated like the real thing. “You must be Mick.”

  Mick smiled. The swirling tattoos on his face curled and twisted as his lips moved, as though his entire face was a moving canvas. “Figured you wouldn’t remember me. You seem a sight better than the last time I saw you.”

  My coffee came before I could respond with anything other than a grunt. Hot, strong, and bitter, the coffee far exceeded the weak shit I’d brewed at Chastity’s apartment. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say a thing,” Mick drawled like a West Virginia miner. “You asked me for some help, and I figured I’d give it to you.” His shoulders rolled in massive heaving movements as he shrugged. The man easily stood six and a half feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. I guessed he was in his sixties but in phenomenal shape.

  “Why?”

  Mick tilted his head toward his right arm. The metal arm contrasted with the dark wood of the bar, faintly gleaming in the dim lights. “Soldiers stick up for each other.”

  He poured a shot of whiskey into my coffee that I barely noticed and didn’t object to. “When did you serve?”

  “Got out about two years ago.” Mick touched his mug to mine. “Spent twelve years in the Terran Defense Force. Walked on five planets, six moons, and a fe
w asteroids. It nearly killed me.”

  His voice was quieter, almost soft. I studied his eyes and knew he’d seen more than most people—things no one wanted to ask about and he wouldn’t want to talk about. The memories that weigh down souls. A line came up from memory. “You’ve seen the elephant, huh?”

  Mick laughed. “Hardly. When I met you, I knew you had. But not from my time.”

  “Yes.” I took a deep sip of coffee and felt a few more mental tumblers click into place. The last year I remembered seeing was 2016. We’d ushered it in at a friend’s house with a massive predeployment party. I’d kissed a girl at the stroke of midnight, and she’d responded hungrily. Then she’d left with my best friend. “I think I died in 2016. Afghanistan.”

  Mick snorted. “What a shithole. When the war broke out again, in 2018, it was bad until people in the civilized world finally realized that no one in history had ever controlled that place. The people there didn’t want to be modern. Hell, most of them needed to be punched in the face.”

  He thought for a moment. Try as I might, my shattered memories of Afghanistan were much the same. I didn’t see anything funny about it. Mick’s smile told me more. “You’ve been there?”

  “Let’s say I’ve heard some really horrible stories about that place.” Mick’s lips were a tight white line. “No. My grandfather had a memory transfer, an imprint, in the war. It’s a bit different than what you got. His ancestor, an uncle of my great-great-grandfather, fought there and did very well for himself. Led his platoon through a full deployment in the nastiest fighting of the second Afghan conflict in 2021, won a Silver Star, and promptly came home and shot himself in the head. Left behind a devastated family that never really recovered.”

  “And your grandfather remembered all of that?” I shuddered. What would the rest of my memory unleash?

  “Nothing specific at all. He went looking for facts before the Terran Council banished all of the imprints at the end of the war.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  Mick shrugged and lowered his voice. “Imprints were seen as a threat. It was better that they left.”

  “Where did they go?” A place with people like me sounded like heaven, in a way.

  “After the Greys. Nobody’s heard from them in fifty years.”

  Given the technology around me, I could put two and two together. The imprinted soldiers were long dead, and that was likely another reason why I was there. “Why did you get out?”

  Mick twitched his head toward his artificial arm again. “This was a major part of it. I could’ve gone back, maybe would’ve changed specialties, but I decided not to.” He squinted, and there was a pain in his eyes that the facial tattoos could not even begin to hide.

  Sipping my coffee, I needed to know why he’d left the service. He represented a tiny minority of people from this day and age that’d actually served in the military, and he’d left it behind without a second thought. “Why?”

  “It wasn’t the same army I joined.”

  “What changed?” I asked. “Surely you knew what you were getting into?”

  Mick chuckled. “Don’t we all? You train with weapons because you’re likely to have to use them one day. I expected all of that. What I didn’t get was the chickenshit leadership.”

  Chickenshit? Mally?

  <>

  Not right now. Resting my arms on the table, I leaned over my coffee and let the aroma fill my nostrils for a moment. The whiskey was muted, but there. I looked up at Mick, knowing he needed to talk. “How bad was it?”

  “Back in the Great War, they had a bunch of inexperienced leaders, but with a few guys like my Pops, we did all right. We trained and led troops who wanted to be there and do their part. That lasted until the first few major engagements with radical human sects here on Earth and a couple of insurrections out on the Rim. After everyone realized that another war was possible, there were thousands of desertions. The Terran Defense Force was not able to be a volunteer force. So the TDF started pulling combat forces from undesirable places. From those places, what do you get?”

  “Undesirable soldiers.”

  “Exactly.” Mick nodded his head. “So they started raising disciplinary standards. You know what that did? Started making commanders and leaders think they could whip and beat soldiers into submission. Some of them did it really well because they could be trusted and respected. The leaders, I mean. The majority of others? Shit, all they did was push troops in front of them and direct them into battle. They slaughtered millions of men and women in that system. The Greys jumped out of the system, and nobody knows where they went. After weeks of losing, we kicked their ass on one small planet, and they jumped away like scared rabbits. We haven’t heard anything since, and the TDF hasn’t gotten any better.”

  “Those few leaders—the ones who could be trusted and respected—was it beating soldiers that made it work for them?”

  “Nothing like that, Kieran.”

  I blinked. He knew my name, too. Everybody knows something about me. “Then what was it?”

  “They fought as hard as the men they led. When you’re doing that, it generates respect and trust. If you don’t do that, you’re hated. Hatred leads to bad things in combat—accidents that aren’t really accidents and the like.”

  My throat tightened as he talked. Am I really a product of this type of establishment? What are they hoping to do with me? “I get that, but why me?”

  Mick sighed. “Those leaders did much better than everyone else. They took care of their people.” Mick sipped more coffee and rolled his head back on his shoulders. A white scar marred the right side of his neck and ran down to the shoulder in jagged, gnarled stripes. “We understood what it meant to train, to lead, and to fight. People these days just don’t get it. We were supposed to train soldiers, get them to fight like we did, and it failed miserably.”

  I’d seen the answer in Esperance, in my friends’ faces when Stick died, but I asked, “How so?”

  The light in Mick’s eyes went soft as they began to glisten. “My lieutenant was fresh from the TDF Academy on Ceylon. He was a complete idiot, but at least he let me do my job. We succeeded in combat where some of our sister units failed. Our troops responded to orders and carried them out because we gave them a complete intent. They knew what we expected them to do, and they did it. We did that because we cared about them. I remember the names of all fifty-two I lost in a stupid training accident because our higher headquarters didn’t remember our position. They dropped four full batteries of artillery fire on us. That was the last straw.” He paused and used a meaty hand to gently brush a tear from his tattooed cheek. “I loved all of them like brothers and sisters. I lost my arm trying to rescue my closest friend. I could have saved him and a few others if my lieutenant hadn’t fired the door shut.”

  “One of my first memories was about a kid I couldn’t save.” I shook my head. “Remembered him while pulling another kid out of the surf in Australia. I think his name was Erik, but I can’t be sure of it or how he died. I just know it was under my watch.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  Taking a breath, I recounted my dream about the tank ambush and the improvised explosive device. Mick said nothing as I went through it, only nodding his head and snorting in agreement, a small smile on his face.

  “That’s the only real dream I’ve had like that.”

  “The dreams aren’t real. Well, some of the things you see, people and such, are. You won’t remember a lot of specifics beyond that, but it sounds like some things, like firing a weapon properly, you’ll do without even thinking about it. My grandfather did that kind of stuff all the time.”

  “
There’s so much I don’t know. The soldier whose face I saw in the surf—I can’t remember his name at all, but I remember that tank crew perfectly.”

  Mick lowered his chin and stared at me. “You’re okay with not knowing how you died?”

  “Is there any good memory of death?” I chuckled. “Not remembering the specifics sucks.”

  Mick grunted. “And how does knowing a lot of general stuff and no specifics really feel, Kieran?”

  “I wonder if I did everything that I could.”

  “Then you get it.” Mick straightened his back with a deep breath. The bell on the bar door tinkled, and the first patron shuffled up to the empty bar and parked himself on a stool. Mick watched him for a moment and waved down a waiter for more coffee. “The senior officers now won’t listen. ‘Finite control’ is what they call it. You do exactly what they say no matter what. Bastards. They believe they’re playing with toy soldiers. It’s no way to live.”

  “So why bring me back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone is trying to do something right. That’s why I’m here.”

  “This is a pep talk?” I smiled, and Mick returned it.

  “No.” Mick rubbed a hand over his slick scalp. “That’s not why I’m here. You needed to hear it from someone who’s kinda been there—that’s true. But I’m here because you asked me for something a few days ago. You don’t remember that?”

  “I wish I did.” I expected Mally to respond, but she was still quiet.

  “The night we met, you asked me where I was from, and I told you it didn’t exist anymore. Do you remember that?”

  Head down in thought, I tried and failed to conjure the memory. How drunk was I? “No, sorry.”

  Mick laughed, a great booming noise. “I’m not surprised. You were barely able to sit on the barstool. When I told you that where I was from didn’t exist anymore, you said you could relate. I told you my family lived up in the mountains of Tennessee before they made a nature preserve out of it. One of the biggest in Columbia. It’s called the Franklin Preserve. They named it that because there’d been a movement—”