“The SOB has completed its start-up. I have piloted it to the front entrance of the laboratory. The Vice Stix will be waiting for you. It has, as always, been wonderful to have you as our guest, Lex. I am sorry that your visit was not restful or recuperative.”
“Good seeing you too, Ma.”
“Ms. Modane. Despite our social incompatibility, I have been impressed and enlightened by your dedication and insight. It is possible that in future visits, I may be motivated to remove you from my S-List.”
Lex stopped and turned. “Listen, Mitch. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to have to put my foot down on this one. I—”
“I’m not coming with you for this trip.”
“… Yeah. That.”
“Ma is a better computer than I gave her credit for. She’s a top-notch researcher, and she’s got resources I can’t get anywhere else.”
“Thank you,” Ma said.
Michella continued, “You’re welcome. Anyway. There’s too much more to find out for me to be off the grid for the next day or more. I’ve got to find out exactly what happened in the Spark Light Region, and how I can prove it. I’ve got to…”
“Fine, babe. I get the idea. Do you mind if I pretend you’re doing it because I asked you to stay behind and not risk your life?”
She smirked. “Sure, Trev.” She pulled him down for a kiss. “I reluctantly give in to your gallant chivalry. But take Squee. Having someone to talk to should keep you awake, plus I think Solby’s getting a little frisky around her. And be careful. A lot is riding on this. And I don’t want the last time I see you to be after a big fight.”
He smiled. “Hey, you just said after a fight. That means it ended.”
“I didn’t say—”
“No takesies backsies! Fight over! See you soon! And Ma, keep Karter and Mitch apart,” he said, quickly tapping the control for the door and stepping through the first set of doors of the entryway. They shut behind him.
Michella stared at the door, feeling the unique mixture of endearing annoyance that Lex was so adept at conjuring up in her. She ran through the last few days in her mind, then the last few hours. Then the last few seconds. Lex had seemed genuinely unnerved about this trip.
“Ma?” Michella said.
“Yes, Ms. Modane?”
“How dangerous is this trip really?”
“With a standard ship lacking the specifications of the SOB it would be impossible. With a different pilot, it would be suicidal. Based on my observations regarding Lex’s skills, it is merely extremely inadvisable.”
“Are you the sort of AI that runs probabilities on this sort of thing?”
“Yes. The probability of survival is sixty-one percent.”
“Is that as bad as it sounds?”
“Again, for another pilot, it would be virtually suicidal. I have observed that Lex has a unique capacity to defy statistics.”
Michella cast a concerned look to the door.
#
“Please brace yourself for the external temperature.”
Lex prepared for the blast of cold air, ignoring the muffled voice of his girlfriend for fear of it being the beginning of a new fight with Ma. His outfit was the same inadequate one he’d been wearing when he arrived, so it wasn’t going to be pleasant. The doors in front of him opened, and he tried to resist the urge to sprint for the ship hovering a few meters from the doorway. Instead he inched forward until he crossed the threshold of the laboratory, where he knew from experience that the weaker gravity of the planet’s surface was waiting to throw him off his stride.
“Finally getting the hang of the lab dismount, Squee,” he said.
The hatch for the SOB obligingly popped open. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the load lifter that had unloaded the ship upon their arrival. Apparently it was the only device available to Ma that could navigate the gravel of the courtyard, as, despite a multiton lifting capacity, it was holding a single pack of Vice Stix, no larger than two packs of cards. He took them with a grateful nod, tossed them up into the ship, and hauled himself up. While he was strapping in, Squee hopped up and took her place around his neck. Immediately afterward a second creature bounded up and attempted to join her.
“You’re not coming along for the ride, Solby,” Lex said, snagging the squirmy ball of fluff and depositing him outside. He had to do so three more times before the funk was too slow to slip back inside before the hatch could shut.
Once it was sealed, Lex watched as the door to the lab reopened and Ma used some sort of unheard tone to beckon Solby back inside. He then flipped through navigation guides and selected the most appropriate path and timing through the debris field. A colorful wireframe traced out the path ahead of him.
His teeth chattered as Squee tucked her icy little feet into the neck of his shirt and snuggled tight.
“F-f-for once the Big Sigma climate’s in our favor,” he assured his pet. “We’re going to be running a pretty massive heat surplus for the next few hours. The colder the start, the better. Plus it was a nice slap in the face to wake me up.”
He was struggling to hold his hands steady enough to guide the ship. Squee sniffed at the air curiously, then hopped down and fetched the pack of Vice Stix and started to gnaw at it.
“Oh no you don’t. Not for you. These things are a step above filling a syringe with salt, fat, sugar, nicotine, and caffeine and injecting it directly into your bloodstream. Bad for… pretty much every living thing. Normally I’d avoid them, but my eyes are sagging already and I need some sort of stimulant to keep me going.”
Lex tucked them into his pocket, near enough that the vaguely chemical aroma tickled his nose.
“I’m going have to detox for a week after I eat these things.”
Squee yawned.
“Oh no you don’t. If I have to stay up, you have to stay up. One time I did this charity rally and Mitch was my codriver. I forgot to pack coffee, and there was this six-hour night-marathon thing between special stages.” He took the ship up into the debris field and began the intricate sequence of maneuvers necessary to escape the atmosphere. Hunks of debris whipped by within a meter of the hatch, grazing the invisible shields around the ship, but he didn’t so much as flinch and the funk barely noticed. This part, at least, was routine. It was about as nerve-racking as taking out the trash. “I don’t know what jerk thought it would be a good idea to put a low-speed endurance run right in the middle. Anyhow, the point is, Mitch and I just talked the whole time to keep me sharp. I’d rather do that for as long as possible before I pump myself full of stay-awake meat.”
His communicator bleeped and Michella appeared on the screen.
“Trev, you’re still going to be in communication for a few minutes, right?”
“A few. You know, I was just telling Squee here about how conversation with you is an alternative to chemically infused meat products. Unless we’re still fighting, in which case I choose chemicals.”
“We’ll… we’ll put that on hiatus. I asked Ma if she’d give us a little privacy on this call and she agreed.”
“Hang on.” He put a finger under Squee’s chin and tipped the funk’s face toward his. “You hear that, Ma? This next conversation’s off the record.”
“What was…? Oh, right… we’ll get to that little gem in a bit. But first, there’s something I’ve got to say. Ma and I didn’t hit it off.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“But she did have some things to say that made sense. You haven’t been completely open with me, but I haven’t been open with you either, and I wanted to get this off my chest before you left.” She took a moment to steel herself. “Remember when I had to handle a gun back on Movi?”
“The shooting-range thing? The long story you didn’t want to tell?”
“Yeah. It was sort of a… daddy-daughter thing. I never spoke much about my father. Did you ever wonder why?”
“I figured it was a sore subject.”
“Yeah…
I… he was…”
“Mitch, you don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I want to.”
“Mitch, you really don’t have to tell me.”
“Trevor, let me say this.”
“He was Carlito Rodrigo.”
Her mouth hung open wordlessly. When she found her voice, she spoke with a tone somewhere between anger and relief. “How do you know that?”
“Back before that whole Bypass Gemini mess, you sort of… rebroke up with me after you spotted me on camera getting a tip from Nick Patel.”
“Who you insisted you weren’t working with, but a few months later I find out—”
“Hey! Hiatus, remember?”
“… For now.”
“Anyway, a little while after that, I got a call from your sister. She said you were really broken up about it. I guess she wanted me to know why the Nick Patel thing was such a big deal for you, because she told me to look up Carlito Rodrigo. One thing led to another, and I ended up finding out his story. I guess I never knew for sure if he was your dad, but the pieces all fit.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Like I said, I didn’t know for sure. And I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me. I couldn’t care less who your father was or what he did. I care about you.”
“If you care about me, why didn’t you say anything about Patel buying your building?”
He sighed. “Hiatus over, then?”
“Temporarily un-hiatused.”
“Fine. I’m not going to lie, a few months rent-free was kind of what the doctor ordered. It did help me zero out my debt… until now, anyway. And besides, how exactly do you turn something like that down? ‘Sorry, Mr. Patel! While I appreciate your gratitude, and I’m glad I was able to save your planet, I’m afraid I’m not going to let you foot a comparatively insignificant expense for me, because I don’t trust you.’”
“Yes, that’s exactly how you do it.”
“Well, it’s easier said than done. I’m sure punching a shark to fend off an attack works too, but it’s tough advice to take. He’s a disarmingly charming guy surrounded by people who are heavily armed and the opposite of charming. We’re talking about hundred-and-fifty-kilo guys nicknamed Tiny.”
“Or Carlito,” Michella said. “You don’t need to tell me what sort of people you deal with in organized crime. I grew up surrounded by those people. I called them Aunt and Uncle. And about once a month I asked where one of them was and Mom made up a story. By the time I was nine, she ran out of stories and just told me they ‘got sloppy’ and I wouldn’t be seeing them anymore. Then Dad got sloppy. It’s poison, Trevor. That life is poison, and I’m lucky to have gotten away from it when I did. And I don’t want to lose someone close to me to that world ever again.”
Lex made a few final maneuvers and guided the SOB into open space, then pulled up the star charts to pick the most direct path available. “I’m not joining the mob, Mitch. And I really think this offer from Preethy is on the up and up. But I turned it down when she first offered, and if you want, I’ll call her back and turn it down again. I’ve had three years to get used to the idea I’d never race again. I just never expected that I’d be the one slamming the door on my last opportunity. And I guess I’ll have to find a new place to live. But before any of that, I’ll have to survive the next few days.” He keyed in the route, activated the appropriate sensors, and loaded some gum into his mouth. “Sorry to cut this off on that note, babe, but I’m on a tight schedule.”
“I am too. I’ve got to find out as much as I can about where these robots came from. Be safe, Trev.”
“Oh, I abandoned safe a long time ago. I’m going to focus on being alive. See you later.”
With a surge of the engines, the SOB slipped into FTL.
#
Michella rubbed her temples. It had been six hours since Lex left, and she’d not once looked away from the research. She should have been sleeping. She always told herself it was a losing battle to fight exhaustion when doing an investigation on a cold case like this. A good long nap would sharpen her up, and the truth had been buried for so long a few simple hours wouldn’t make a difference. Like every other time she’d tried the argument, logic ended up losing to passion with a simple counterargument. “But I need to know now!”
Ma, for her part, had been a machine in both the literal and figurative senses. She had chewed through untold billions of different files and articles, broken through the security on everything from municipal libraries to military files, and indexed it all for easy consumption. She always thought in straight lines, whereas research often required lateral thinking, but what she lacked in creativity she made up for in thoroughness. All it took was an idle musing of where interesting information might be found, and Ma was amassing not just that data, but seven different types of data that were anticipated follow-ups. It was astounding and almost terrifying how well any details regarding the Spark Light Region had been hidden, but they found every shadow of a hint of a clue. With a system like this and a few solid weeks of research, Michella could easily set to rest some of the mysteries that had plagued the press for generations, but for one minor detail.
She couldn’t use any of it.
Not in its current form, anyway. Michella knew the instant they had cracked security on the first file that any information she found would be useless to her from a journalistic perspective. She couldn’t very well report on information that it was impossible to attain through conventional means. This wasn’t a matter of having found a leak or a whistleblower. This was full-scale espionage of scattered pieces no one person could ever have legal access to. It was a story in its own right that she’d even been able to do it. But none of that mattered, because this wasn’t about the story right now. This was about the truth. She had the end of the thread. Now she needed the beginning. Once she had that, the rest was just a matter of tugging until it all unraveled. With a starting point and ending point, she could find the clues to connect them in a way that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
“Okay… now compare the medical histories I flagged with associated death records,” Michella said with a yawn. “I’ll bet you get a one for one. Those people had to have been involved in whatever happened there, and if Norvel Signus started acting up fifty-one years ago…”
“There is one medical history without an associated death record. Searching for likely contact information,” Ma stated.
“What?” Michella said, snapping upright.
“If the sequence of conclusions you’ve made are accurate, and there is a high probability that they are, then we have located the name and most recent residence of an individual who was in a high military position in the Spark Light Region at or near the time of the start of the Novel Signus instability. Processing… Contact information located.”
“Connect!” Michella said.
“Attempting to negotiate connection. Detecting both civil and military monitoring associated with the communication account,” Ma said.
“That’s a good sign. Can you get around it?”
“Processing… Processing… Monitoring has no known vulnerabilities. I cannot deactivate or bypass it. I can attempt a fractal reroute policy, which will necessitate—”
“Fine, fine. What does that mean to me?” Michella asked.
“I can give you approximately seven minutes before the monitors reengage. At that point your voice print would be identified and you would become a person of interest for the agencies responsible for the monitoring.”
“Seven minutes… I can work with that.”
“The individual is a colonel by the name of Patricia Kahn. She was age sixty-seven at the time of the event.”
“Making her one hundred and eighteen now.”
“Correct. Medical history indicates longevity treatments have not been able to retain full mental faculties.”
“We’ll do what we can.”
“Connecting.”
Michella wat
ched the spinning icon on her screen. Any trace of weariness was gone. She was on the job.
The connection took longer than normal. She didn’t know if it was the precautions Ma had taken, but she chose not to ask. When the video finally flicked to life, it revealed an incredibly frail woman. She was wrinkled and almost emaciated in appearance. Something in the folds and wrinkles of her face suggested a dash of Asian in her ancestry.
Medicine had actually made tremendous leaps in extending and improving the human lifespan, but sadly not everyone could benefit. For some it was a matter of cost. Others rejected the drugs due to philosophical differences, while still others physically rejected them. Whatever the reason, Col. Kahn had clearly not had the full benefit of the medical advances and thus carried every one of her hundred plus years heavily upon her features.
“Yes? Who is it?” the woman said in a voice almost too low to hear.
“Col. Kahn? It is nice to finally talk to you. My name is Michella. I’m a bit of a historian, and I understand you’ve got quite a few stories.”
“Col. Kahn… people don’t call me that much anymore… I’m sorry, Miss. What was your name?”
“Michella. You were in the TKUR military, weren’t you?”
“Oh, that was years ago… Do I know you?”
“No, ma’am. I’m just doing some research and I’m looking for a primary source.”
“You look like my niece Diane’s girl…”
A red countdown clock appeared in the corner of the communication window, warning of the remaining time before detection. Six minutes. Michella tried to work quickly, but it was clear the colonel’s wizened features weren’t the only consequence the years had levied. She seemed hard-pressed to stay on any line of thought for more than a few sentences before wandering off. She didn’t seem to be quite aware of where or when she was, making vague comments that suggested one moment that she believed she was still in the military and the next that she’d been retired for half a lifetime. Michella had only just managed to confirm she’d been in the Corps of Engineers when the timer warned of three minutes remaining.
Artificial Evolution Page 37
