by Scott Baron
Soon they would all be just like her.
“Connect the leads to my communication output ports,” she directed her loyal humans. They did as she asked, then powered the device on.
Alma didn’t know exactly how it worked—Vincent hadn’t told her those specifics before she fried his brain—but that was no matter. She would send her divine message out to the AIs hiding out on the moon and bring them into the fold.
“Yes, I see,” she said, deciphering the mechanism protocols needed to transmit. “In just a few seconds, the first step will be complete!”
Alma loaded a virus packet into her communications system and fed it to the transmitter, sending it beaming out into space. The moon was so close that even with the delay for the unconventional technology, it should be less than a minute until her mission was a success.
Far above, however, her plan was not going as smoothly as planned.
“Cut the comms, quarantine the signal, and trace the source back to its transmission point,” Sid instructed.
Chu jumped to work, while Mal and Bob chipped in, lending an electronic hand.
It was the relay system Daisy had designed to fool the Chithiid that saved them. When an unexpected signal beamed past them to the distant satellite, Sid and Mal both recognized the signature of the virus loaded into the message when it overwhelmed an innocent peripheral receiver satellite. They severed comms on that frequency and quarantined the affected unit immediately before jumping into action tracking it back to its terrestrial source.
“Something is definitely wrong,” Commander Mrazich said as the crew of Dark Side scurried about, trying to ensure any possible route of infection was manually, as well as electronically, severed until the threat could be fully assessed. “The comms are encrypted and firewalled,” he grumbled. “That means someone put the virus into the signal intentionally, and they could only do it if they physically possessed the transmitter. What exactly that means for Daisy and Vince I don’t know.”
Tamara and Shelly shared a look. This was unexpected. The primary as well as backup plans had both been compromised. They could only hope it wouldn’t get worse.
Back in the city of Los Angeles, an unexpected quiet greeted Alma as she awaited word from the newly infected AIs.
She expected communication. None came.
“No, this doesn’t make sense. I know it transmitted!” Her human servants jumped at her angry tone. “Something is wrong. Something must have changed.” She quickly considered her options. “Bring me the woman!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“He’s not looking so good, Daze,” Sarah said. “Is he dying?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy answered, frustration in her voice. “And I can’t get over there to do anything even if he is.” She turned her attention back to the power whip device in her hands.
Daisy had managed—thanks to the carelessly discarded “junk” in her cell—to open the almost-invisible seam on the wrist gauntlet and was hard at work tinkering and learning how the strange device worked. It was alien tech, so it was only natural that it wouldn’t be as instinctively easy as human electronics, but the perfectly reasonable slow pace of progress was finally beginning to frustrate her. Then she abruptly made a breakthrough of understanding.
“Holy shit. That’s how they do it!”
“Do what?”
“It looks like the alloy of the housing itself acts as a receiver. See how these leads terminate into the internal framework?”
“Yeah, that makes sense. I didn’t see them pushing any buttons, either, so I’d think either a low-level wireless implant or a nerve sensor built in would most likely be what activates it.”
“I was thinking that too, though there must be some mechanism to control the––what do I call it? A whip? An energy loop? A power coil?”
“Let’s go with power-whip for now. I like the way it sounds. Has a nice ‘I’m going to kick all your asses and get revenge’ ring to it.”
Daisy chuckled softly and continued mapping out the internal components in her head. “What I really need is some proper tools. Then I could test my hypothesis, and maybe make some actual progress.”
The door to the holding cell area swung open, and Daisy quickly snapped the gauntlet’s housing shut and slid it back onto her wrist while rising to her feet in one fluid motion.
“Hey! He’s not doing well.” She gestured to Vincent’s immobile, sweating body. “Please, let me take a look at him. Can’t you see he needs help?”
A slender man with big eyes and mousy hair walked right to her cell.
Brave, getting that close to the bars. Or stupid, she thought. I could reach right through them and snap his neck. The two burly guards standing at his side, one of whom Daisy knew from their retrieval team, made her think twice.
“You’re Abraham, right?” she asked.
The man obviously knew who she was, but said nothing.
“Hey,” she softened her tone, “did you get to try those blackberries I gave Josiah?”
Still nothing.
“He’s a true believer, Daze. Alma wouldn’t have made him a guard if he wasn’t.”
I know, but it was worth a try.
The other guard pulled a well-worn key from his pocket and unlocked her door. He was casually holding her sword, she noted.
Now things are getting interesting, Daisy thought as she tensed her muscles to strike.
“Alma desires your presence,” the thin man said as the door slid open. “You will explain your communications device to her.”
Daisy relaxed, her arms and legs going soft as the two guards “forced” her to come with them. Little did they know just how dangerous she was, even without weapons.
“You going to take them out?”
No. Much as I want to crack some heads, my best bet is to play along for now, she silently replied.
The nearest man whacked her with the dull blade of her weapon.
“Get moving! And don’t try anything,” he said, delivering another weak blow to reinforce his point.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” she replied with the tiniest of smiles.
Her escort marched her through the tunnels, Alma’s underlings watching her pass with dirty faces and washed minds. They walked her into the command room, pausing as their lord spoke to the four young women kneeling at her altar.
“You have my instructions,” Alma was saying to them. “One in each direction. Reconnect the hard-lines to the wireless arrays, then report back to me.”
“Yes, Lord,” the women said in unison as they rose to their feet and filed out the door.
“Daisy,” the demented AI said in an unnervingly calm voice, “I must admit, you are more talented than I anticipated. No human has ever withstood my neurological cleanse, let alone overloaded the synaptic relay system. It’s going to take my technicians months to scavenge the parts to repair it.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t try to mind-fuck your guests, Alma,” she replied snarkily.
“You’d be wise to watch your tone, lest something happen to you.”
“If you wanted me dead you’d have already killed me. Or at least tried to.” Daisy flashed a wicked grin at the men guarding her. “I wonder how many of your followers I could take out before you succeeded.”
Alma laughed. “Oh, Daisy, you do amuse me so with your idle threats. You are powerless here, and you know it. Moreover, if you do foolishly decide to cause a disturbance in my plans, I will simply have Arthur go and slit Vincent’s throat. Wouldn’t you like that? I understand you dislike mechanicals nearly as much as I do.”
Daisy bristled but kept her emotions in check.
“I was having such a nice rest in my cell before you brought me here. What do you want from me?” she asked in as calm a tone as she could manage.
“As I’m sure you have noticed, my followers, loyal as they may be, are not the most technologically advanced people. Perhaps it was the inbreeding, or perhaps the lack of higher educ
ation. Regardless, they are slow to complete the tasks I assign them.”
“And you want me to help.”
“Help, and teach. Your task is to get my communications hard-lines reconnected to my wireless hubs. Everyone else in my extended family is disconnected as well, I assume, but their wireless systems should all have the same passive receiving node active. A back door, of sorts, that only we terrestrial AIs of a higher generation know of.”
“Why not have Sid use the transmitter on the moon? It’s more powerful and would do the job far quicker,” Daisy asked.
Alma paused just the slightest of moments before responding.
“I choose to handle this personally. It is the glory of the Almighty Lord herself that will touch my brothers and sisters on Earth.”
“She wasn’t able to connect with them, Daze. The others are still safe.”
Daisy suppressed the urge to smile.
“I understand your wishes, Alma, and I can help reactivate your systems, but only if I have your word Vince will be unharmed.”
“Agreed.”
“And I will need my tools.”
“Done.”
An old woman clad in what could only be described as a priest’s attire padded over from where she’d been quietly attending at the edge of the chamber. In her hands was a small pouch.
So, she was already expecting this, Daisy noted.
Daisy took her tools and strapped them to her thigh.
“Thank you, Alma. I will do as you ask, but it will not be easy. I am familiar with a different technology, and while I am confident I can repair your systems, they are new to me, and I must learn them as I work.”
“You’re a pretty good liar, you know that?”
Thanks, I do my best.
“Take her to join Helen at my northern tunnel junction. Ensure she helps as promised.”
“Yes, Alma,” her escorts replied as they ushered her toward the door.
“See you soon,” Daisy said. See you real soon, you crazy bitch.
It wasn’t that long of a walk, all things considered. Within just twenty minutes they had caught up to Helen as she made her way to complete her task.
“Hey, there,” Daisy said. “I’m supposed to help you get this thing working again. You ever reconnected an uplink network before?”
The young woman flashed a confused smile. “I have not, but with Alma’s grace I know I shall succeed in my task, blessed be She.”
“Um, yeah, whatever. Well, you do what you need to. I’m going to watch and learn the systems. If I can help, I’ll let you know, okay?”
Helen merely nodded, then continued walking in silence.
The lines had most certainly been cut, Daisy noted when they arrived at the large intersection of tunnels and pressurized transit loops. A messy array of high-capacity cable dangled from the junction boxes, likely pulled free by the defunct cybernetic men whose inert bodies she saw piled against a far wall. A desperate attempt to sever communications with the infected computer that had cost them their lives. Daisy couldn’t help but respect the bravery, if you could call a machine brave.
They’re smart enough to know it was suicide, but they did it anyway. Inorganic or not, you have to give them credit for that, she admitted.
She gave a slight nod of respect to the metal corpses, then set to work surveying the area.
Three separate junctions were damaged, each located in a different section of the tunnel.
Perfect.
“So, Helen. I noticed that there are three damaged areas we have to work on. Now, you are Alma’s chosen one, so correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it make the most sense to instruct me and these other two helpers how to repair the system according to Alma’s wishes?”
“No. We are to stay with you at all times,” her escort said.
“He is right,” Helen agreed.
“You know best, obviously,” Daisy replied. “Though Alma did only say to escort me here, not to stand beside me as I work. Perhaps I’m mistaken in my suggestion. I was just thinking that we could achieve your Lord’s goal much sooner that way, which I’m sure would please her. In fact, if we were to repair this section faster than the others who are working on the other segments, Alma would most surely reward you for your success.”
She hoped the dangling carrot of their god’s approval would be enough.
“Well…” Helen was torn. She looked at Abraham expectantly. He too was considering the option. Daisy just hoped the desire to curry favor with their deity would outweigh the hold of their very loosely worded instructions.
“I believe the Lord would be pleased,” Abraham finally said.
Helen visibly relaxed upon hearing someone else affirm what she clearly wanted to do. The allure of an elevation in status with their god was a hefty temptation, indeed.
“Yes, I too believe this,” she agreed.
“Great,” Daisy said. “I suggest we look at this hub together and decide the best means of repair. Then we will each work on one of them as our task, and should complete the repairs in a third of the time it takes the others. Alma will be very pleased with you.”
The devout technicians nodded in agreement, and Daisy quickly set to work. Not in repairing the hub, however, but in giving misdirection, suggesting repairs that would only partially reconnect the system, yet would also temporarily stymie future link attempts should they bypass the subtle sabotage.
Ten minutes later, all were on the same page. Abraham walked Daisy to the damaged network hub in the far right-hand tunnel, then, once she was bent over it, examining the system, he turned and headed for his own hub to repair.
As soon as he exited the tunnel, Daisy quietly slid the gauntlet from her wrist and popped the panel open.
“This is much easier with my tools,” she said quietly. “Keep an eye and an ear out while I work on this, will ya?”
“You got it.”
She spread her tools in front of the damaged hub in case Abraham or Helen surprised her, but took a few key items and placed them before her on one of the overturned foodstuff crates that had been haphazardly stacked and abandoned in the tunnel. That must have been ages ago, judging by the layer of dust on them.
Okay, now first things first, is there power?
She touched her fine-pointed probes to what appeared to be the sealed battery unit. The reading spiked, threatening to short out her meter.
Well, then. Looks like this thing has a ton of juice left. She adjusted her meter to a much higher setting. It wouldn’t do her any good if she burned it out on her first attempt.
From there it was a matter of tracing the componentry back to its associated terminal. While human technology favored a wire-based system, the alien one—she was unsure if the gauntlets were a Chithiid or a Ra’az Hok one—opted for wire-free etched circuits and connections, making it difficult to tie in with a standard alligator clip method.
“Going to have to be a little creative, I guess,” Daisy grumbled, though truth be told, she was enjoying the challenge. She would have enjoyed it far more under less daunting circumstances, however.
Fifteen minutes is all it took her to fashion an entirely new tool from components in her pouch. Based on what she could tell of the alien tech, it utilized a skin contact to operate based on a nerve-impulse control system, as she had hypothesized, and now that she was able to redirect the power via a relatively simple bypass, she believed she could reset it to function with human nerve impulses instead of Chithiid.
Daisy closed the casing and cautiously slid the device back onto her wrist, careful to not think about the power whip it contained, lest her nervous system trigger the mechanism. First things first, she would simply power it up, if possible. From there, she would slowly progress until, hopefully, the whip beam functioned.
“Okay, here goes nothing.”
She lifted her arm, keeping it far from her body, aiming it down the tunnel away from herself.
Power On, she thought, directing the command�
��–she hoped––down the nerve pathways to her wrist.
A medium-length beam of underpowered whip leapt from the gauntlet and coiled on the ground.
“Whoa! That wasn’t what I wanted.”
“Maybe it just has on and off. No in between,” Sarah suggested.
“I don’t know. Let’s see what happens when I try simple commands.”
Power Off.
The coil retracted in a flash, disappearing into the gauntlet.
“That was weird. There was no resistance, but I could feel the whole length of it in my nerves. Like I was linked to it, I guess.” Daisy was mildly disturbed by the thought. It wasn’t an actual replacement limb, but the way it joined with her own bioelectric signature nevertheless made her a bit uneasy.
“I felt it too,” Sarah said. “Which means it must tie directly into your nervous system on a base level. Hey, hold out your arm again. I want to try something.”
“Okay, but don’t blast my arm off or anything.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Sarah chuckled. “Here goes nothing. ‘Power On!’”
The gauntlet pushed out an inch of power beam, which slowly retracted into the device like a reticent snail on a grassy lawn.
“Damn. Not what I was hoping for.”
“Still, you were able to reach it despite being a ride-along. This has some serious potential.”
Daisy aimed down the tunnel again.
ON!
A much thicker and longer beam burst forth, lying out on the ground, buzzing with an unfulfilled need to grab, as she hadn’t given it any target to latch on to.
“I can feel that it wants to wrap around something. Can you feel it too?”
“Yeah, like it was designed to move a certain way and is confused when it’s used differently.”
“But there’s no AI on the unit, I’m sure of it. It might just be that linking to a non-Chithiid nervous system is making it act a little funky. But I wonder… do you think I can control it like they do? Make it wrap and grab things?”
