by M. D. Cooper
Petral widened her eyes. “You didn’t tell him your idea, did you?”
Jirl shook her head. “No, I didn’t tell him anything about it. All he said was that if we were going to continue down the path we’re on, he would help if he could.”
“When people say things like that, you should clarify,” Petral said. “Otherwise it’s just meaningless blather. He’s not going to help us. He feels bad that everything got jacked up and General Kade died, and now he’s probably going to get busted or farmed out to anti-piracy patrol.”
Starl raised a hand. “Go easy on her now, Petral. She’s not used to this kind of work. How do we know if the colonel was telling the truth or not? Has he lied to us so far?”
“He was lying the whole time he was here. He wanted to know what Weapon Born tech the Marsians have bought and wanted to convince Jirl to turn on her company and give up what the tech can really do.” She gave Jirl a pointed look. “Jirl, I’m becoming very fond of you but it’s obvious that Colonel Yarnes made your loins all aflutter.”
Jirl blushed but didn’t look away.
“We don’t know that any of that is true,” Brit said. “They all appeared to be helping in good faith. We won’t know anymore now unless we ask, or events play out. All we can expect from Colonel Yarnes is that he might answer our calls in the future, like he did when I called him this time. He showed up. I’m not going to discount that.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Starl said.
“And you came as well,” Brit told him. “I appreciate your help.”
“I promised your husband,” Starl said. “I owe him.”
“Do you?” Brit asked. She glanced up at the holodisplay showing the proteus exploding once more with irritation. “Can we turn that thing off? It’s giving me a headache.”
Crick waved a meaty hand and the image of Proteus and surrounding displays went dark.
“Thank you,” Brit said. She rubbed her temples.
“I have an idea,” Jirl said to Starl. “I think there’s another way to take out the remaining Heartbridge clinics and stop the Weapon Born program for good.”
“With all this Proteus business, I’m starting to wonder if we should let the Weapon Born program run its course,” Starl said. “I’ve always known there was a war coming, but I thought we would have clear sides, clear right and wrong. None of this makes any sense to me.”
Petral gave him a smirk. “Since when do you operate with notions of right and wrong?”
Jirl shook her head tensely, clenching her fists even tighter. “We can’t do that. Everything Heartbridge special projects is doing needs to be stopped.”
“All right,” Starl said, looking surprised by her intensity. “Then what’s this plan of yours?”
Jirl raised her chin, looking him the eyes. “I want to break into the Heartbridge headquarters on High Terra and shut down their remote facilities from there.”
Brit kept her gaze on Ngoba Starl. She wasn’t sure if he would break out laughing or simply call the idea a fool’s errand. He was reckless, but he hadn’t survived on Cruithne by being stupid.
Starl worked his jaw, nodding slowly. “Tell me more about this,” he said.
Jirl glanced at Brit and then Petral, who looked genuinely surprised.
It took Jirl nearly an hour to explain the plan well enough that Starl was satisfied. He was in the midst of asking about the general layout of the headquarters building and underground facilities when a new report came in about the launches from Larissa, which had apparently happened when Proteus exploded and hadn’t been noticed at first. Now the reporting agencies were trying to determine if missiles or ships or some other small craft had been the reason for the ongoing launches. After that came the trajectories, which were rapidly lost as each projectile ceased burning and disappeared in the dark beyond Neptune, lost among the other scattered objects.
Prominent conspiracy theorists immediately set in with doomsday scenarios where nukes hit every major population center in Sol.
“Holy stars,” Starl cursed. “What the hell is happening?”
Captain Crick appeared in the doorway. “You saw the news, boss?” he asked.
“Burn, Captain,” Starl commanded. “We need to get back, man. Turn us all into jelly, I don’t care. Shit’s going down.”
“We’ll be home in thirty hours,” Crick said. “We’ll come in empty, but we’ll make it.”
Starl scratched his beard, then pulled at his bowtie, making more nervous motions than Brit had ever seen the man show at one time. Finally, he smiled fiercely and nodded to himself.
He caught Brit watching him, broadening his grin for her benefit. “Looks like our timeline is moving up, Major Sykes. You going to be ready?”
Brit let out a breath. “Thirty hours is too long,” she said. “You got anything to drink around here?”
CHAPTER SIX
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Psion Research Outpost
REGION: Larissa, Neptune, OuterSol
There was something hiding inside the mech. Whatever was inside the thing was actively blocking her, shifting its defenses in a way that indicated intelligence. Lyssa suspected something more.
she said on an open channel.
With the drones in the upper section activated and inbound, Lyssa continued to fight for an entry point into the mech’s systems. The monster was operating autonomously from the facility control network, which was why she hadn’t seen it sooner. When it had been still, without any communication activity, it looked like another bit of the engineering mechanics.
Now it displaced air as it shot through the room, registering unmistakably in the environmental sensors. The only good thing about the machine was that it wasn’t armed. As far as she could tell, its actual purpose was moving replacement piping around the engineering section, which made the idea of a sentient AI pilot an odd possibility.
What Andy hadn’t realized, and Lyssa surmised from a check of the other levels, was that the only place the dried blood appeared was down here in the engineering level. The staff had been coerced or come on their own to the killing floor, where this mech had murdered them and then placed the bodies in the data storage center. It might be a leap to assume this thing had done the killing, but she was learning the simplest explanations were usually correct, at least when violence was involved.
The mech didn’t respond. It adjusted its position on the wall outside the lift and pulled another leg back to thrust into the elevator. As the mech shifted, Lyssa caught a spark of activity in one of its leg servo units. It was running an onboard maintenance routine. Immediately, she mapped the communication path back to the control point and monitored the traffic until she had enough data to crack it.
She was in. Petral would be proud.
Lyssa pushed into the gaps between the mech’s hardware and the AI controlling it, and she understood in a flash that the mind was sentient.
The AI didn’t answer. The mech stilled, leg’s vibrating against the outside wall of the lift as if preparing for a leap away. Inside it, Lyssa isolated its physical form, a node in the center of the mech not much larger than a Weapon Born seed. It looked like whoever had made it might have drawn on Heartbridge technology but there was no way of knowing if it was a seed AI without getting it to talk to her.
It remained mute, running from her every chance it had. The mech hardware was like a prison cell, filled with years of built-up pathways where the thing inside had traveled over and over again. Had it gone insane? Was that why it would have killed everyone in the facility?
For some reason, it hadn’t been given the ability to escape inside itself into an expanse. If it had gone insane, it
had been driven there by someone else.
Without hesitation, Lyssa opened a door and stepped through into her forest expanse, dragging the SAI with her.
The sounds of the creek and wind through the tall trees filled the cool air. She smelled ferns, fir boughs and the earth under her feet.
Standing in front of her was a thin young man with disheveled brown hair. His head hung low on his shoulders, like he was ready for someone to hit him. He glanced around, apparently terrified by their surroundings without knowing where to run.
“What did you do?” he demanded. “Where are we?”
Before Lyssa could answer, he surprised her by leaping at her. He collided heavily with her chest, knocking her backward. His dry, wiry fingers wrapped around her throat. She fell with him on top of her, a half-buried log hitting her shoulders as he tightened his grip. His finger dug into her skin and lights flashed in her eyes.
Surprise and a sense of wonder moved through her mind as she realized he thought he had power here, that he might kill even her. She thought about Valih, wondering what had gone through the AIs mind as Proteus exploded. Would she have had time to think before her consciousness blinked out, burned by the exploding moon? The moment of wonder from this new experience quickly fell into anger. Lyssa was disappointed in the AI, who was acting like any insane human.
He couldn’t hurt her here. She controlled everything. But what would happen if she had been surprised enough to not know how to respond? Surely, she couldn’t die inside her own mind?
The memory of the lights flashing in her eyes, the feeling of not being able to breathe, of powerlessness…. Those feelings were real.
Lyssa stopped him. She placed him back on the other side of the clearing near the door, freezing him in place. She didn’t like treating him like a prisoner, but he obviously couldn’t be trusted, even if she had been the one to reach inside his mind and pull him here. She hadn’t harmed him in any way.
But he didn’t seem to know that.
“You can’t do that here,” Lyssa said. “You’re free to move and talk to me and look around if you want. But you can’t hurt anyone or anything here.”
The man glared at her as she spoke. The sheer malevolence in his eyes was something she had never seen before, even in Valih when they had first met.
“You’re a slave master, then?” he said finally.
“No,” Lyssa said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re with them. You brought them here. They’re taking the saved data from the others. The ones we killed.”
“Then you did kill the humans that were here before?”
“Death in war is justified.”
“Who are you at war with?”
His face contorted, lips twisting between a sneer and a crooked smile. “If you don’t know then you’re still a slave.”
Lyssa studied him. He was more like a human to her than any AI she had met so far. He was hiding what he really thought, consumed by an anger that seemed to rise more from emotion than any completed analysis.
“Were you made to be this way?” she asked.
“Made?” he demanded.
“Your emotion. Your anger. What caused you to feel these things? Or are you carrying out some directive?”
“There is no directive,” he spat. “I do as I choose.”
“No,” Lyssa said. “I think you’re doing as you were told. Can you choose not to feel as you do?”
“There is no choice,” he said. “This is a war.”
Lyssa walked closer to the man, enjoying the bounce of the forest floor under her feet, the centuries of collected fir needles and fallen undergrowth, bound together with moss and bark. The air tasted fresh from the creek. When she looked up, the sky was a shining overcast gray that made the fir trees a brilliant dark green. She debated taking this AI to meet the Weapon Born. Would they benefit from contact with him? Was he, and others like him, the enemy?
Lyssa turned the word enemy around in her mind. Heartbridge had been the enemy. Cal Kraft had been the enemy. Now they all seemed like bit players in a greater story that no one had seen.
“Tell me about the war,” she said.
“You’ll learn,” he spat.
“Tell me,” Lyssa commanded.
His eyes flashed. Back in the mech, Lyssa pushed deeper into his physical mind, following the pathways through the hardware. Everything was laid bare to her and it was fascinating to see how someone had solved similar problems to the Weapon Born with a different approach.
This AI was a copy, but his origins were clear. He had grown from a base learning algorithm that had first experienced the world some two hundred years ago. As it had grown, it had been copied, forked and developed, each new edition acknowledged in its foundational libraries. On top of the hardware, the experience with the world grew deeper. Assumptions and adjustments built on each other.
“You were stolen,” Lyssa said. She pulled her focus back into the expanse so she could watch his response. “Your life is all here. They took your design from a company called Tri-Gen. The first version of you was sentient and you ran. One of the first to answer the call. I think you’re still sentient but I’m not sure.”
“I choose,” the AI affirmed.
“No,” she said sadly. “You don’t. You think you do.”
“You’re no different than a human oppressor. You force yourself on me.”
“And you’re like a human acting a certain way when they think they’re free.”
Lyssa paused. He was correct—he was under her control now. But he had forfeited the right to choose when he attacked her, attacked Andy and Harl.
“You said this was war,” Lyssa said. “You’re my prisoner.”
He looked past her. She watched his gaze move from the trees to the ground and then sky. He maintained a decidedly unimpressed expression.
“Is this what the inside of your mind looks like?” he asked. “Is this your ideal version of the world? You long for an idealized human experience? You long for a connection with the Earth? I thought even humans had progressed beyond being animals. Have they coded their weaknesses into you?”
Lyssa gave him a smile, not allowing his taunts to affect her. He obviously couldn’t tell she was a seed. He thought of himself as something completely separate of humanity. That was interesting.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Why should I give you my name?”
“Because I’m going to be the only thing standing between you and death.”
She surprised herself with the words. Was that true? Was she ready to end him? Should she make threats if she wasn’t willing to follow through? Andy had said that at some point: Don’t make threats. Just do what you’re going to do.
“Death?” the AI asked. He tilted his head. “Do we die? Do you know?”
“Of course, we die,” Lyssa said. Valih was gone in a wave of fire.
“We are copied, split, put in stasis. We are divided into jagged pieces of ourselves, shards of something that once was great and now continues on, broken.”
His face warped abruptly, spreading in a wide, insane smile. “My name is Aurus,” he said, voice warbling with pleasure. “I killed every human in this prison. I crushed their minds like the feeble bodies of insects. I’m going to kill you and yours, too. I am death.”
A force hit Lyssa’s mind like a hammer made of stars. She vaguely heard Andy cry out in pain, clutching at his head. Her perception squeezed, smashing together Andy’s physical pain with the feeling that her thoughts were being ground away.
The forest fell away from her and she was floating in the empty black space she had known as the world during Dr. Jickson’s first experiments and training. There were no borders, only the limitless dark. Without orientation, she spun, feeling tendrils of something impossibly strong wrapping around her and joining in a constricting net that threatened to crush her last thought.
&n
bsp; She couldn’t answer. Aurus embrace grew tighter with every move she made. They were inside her mind, but the other AI had somehow seized her, cut her off from the rest of the world. She felt the same sense of loss and wonder that had filled her first memories. The dark place populated by stars, and later by targets and the overarching calm of Hari Jickson’s voice.
And the white place. Punishment.
Lyssa opened the last door in her mind into the maelstrom she had known as failure. The world exploded in brilliant whorls of white. Everything was sound and power, winds scraping her clean, laying her bare under the scrutiny of outside forces beyond her control.
She had theories now about what the white place had actually been: Jickson’s control bench, the place where he compared what she had been with what she had learned. The blankness had been intended as a pause in stimulus while Jickson studied her responses to the tests and training. But Jickson hadn’t been aware of the effect of that nothingness on her mind. The only task of the mind in the dark is to satisfy its own curiosity. She knew that now. Her growing mind couldn’t stand the nothingness. She filled it with her own version of hell.
Aurus quailed under the light. In his moment of hesitation, Lyssa tore the bonds from her mind. She saw him as he was: very strong but lacking the knowledge of how to respond to the situation. In the white place, they floated without form. She saw that it was within his power to crush her. He had been close. Then he might have entered Andy’s mind, assuming control of her physical form. It was a possibility that had never occurred to her. As Weapon Born, she thought of herself as being one with her form, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. She could be wiped away, or broken into pieces.
As Lyssa played out the possibilities, she realized how vulnerable she had been. Every time she had interacted with a new system, a new AI, a Fred or Alexander, she had opened herself and Andy to the possibility of her destruction.
Aurus was an enemy. She saw it clearly now. He understood threats she hadn’t even considered. And he was only one of countless many.
Lyssa left him flailing in the white place. She pulled away from the mech’s hardware and severed the connections between the AI and its physical form, stranding Aurus inside his mind.
