LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  ‘A personal waferset, sir. I cannot report its configuration in detail as I have been unable to gain access to the core.’

  ‘Hypothesize.’

  ‘The code protecting the core is several years old. I would guess the device itself is of a similar vintage.’

  ‘Can you break the code?’

  ‘Yes. Currently eighty-seven percent of my instruction cycles are devoted to this task. If my analysis of the encryption is correct, statistically it will take me thirty seven hours to complete.’

  ‘Can you give me sound from the engine room?’

  ‘Yes. The engines themselves are quite noisy. Shall I filter them out?’

  ‘No.’ Heh. That I can do myself.‘Just keep the volume down.’

  ‘Very well.’

  No shit about the engines. I can barely hear the screaming at first, which says something for the sonic cancellation elsewhere in the ship. By the time I’ve filtered the rumbling grinding whining of the generators out, Doyle’s moved. I can see why the pilot’s screaming. She had her hand inside him. She’s holding something over his face, red and dripping. Looks like a rag, but something tells me it’s his spleen. Gross.

  I play with the filters some more and the screaming goes away, reduced to a deep wobbling sound like it’s being played back at half speed or something.

  ‘Has he spoken yet?’ asks someone. Jez, I think, but the filters are distorting the voices. They don’t like blocking the screams. Complicated sounds are screams. Unpredictable. Worse than Mr Cray’s swearing fits. Mind you, I had a lot of practice there.

  ‘No.’ Doyle is still dangling pieces of flesh over the pilot’s face. Sick. Even Jester wasn’t this bad. Was he?

  Su turns around.‘Doyle. Finish the woman. Piece by piece. Let him see. When she is dead, look for an internal communicator. I did not find one with a scan but she may be shielded. You need to look very carefully. When you are done with her, start with the mutant. Maybe his drug resistance will start to break down when he loses some blood. Maybe when he loses his eyes. Who knows? You find out.’

  Doyle turns to the scrawny woman. I can see the pilot more clearly now, see the hole in the side of his body, his clothes saturated in red. Su and Jez walk out of the picture. I’m not sure they want me seeing this; I should tiptoe back to my cabin, but I can’t tear my eyes away. Doyle, up to her elbows in blood, turning over the body on the floor, ripping the jumpsuit away, tearing into flesh. Must have razor nails or something. Reaching in, pulling out organ after organ after organ. When she smashes her fist into the dead woman’s skull and it goes all the way through, I realise that yeah, I am going to puke after all.

  Friston, T. J., Mrant, A. ‘Lucid dreaming: A new technique for clone education?’ Journal of the Theo-Philosophical Society, 334, 120-142 (2320).

  Bit of an oddity this. Friston and Mrant are more interested in the philosophy of whether clones have souls, whether people can give up parts of their own souls, blah, blah, blah. I suppose I should be interested in this stuff too being the messiah and all. And being technically dead. But I ain’t– it’s dull. Anyway, enough of that, it’s the science that’s interesting. I’ve seen papers in proper journals that reference this one. On the basis that real people can be trained to control their dreams, the idea is that you hook one of these lucid dreamers up to a clone– a whole series of them, why not? The dreaming supposedly connects with the clone’s brain at a much more basic level than the usual training techniques, et voila. Instant education. Mrant wrote a follow-on letter a few months later, suggesting that a lucid dreamer might be able to copy their entire personality onto a clone this way. Best I can figure, Mrant is a pseudonym for someone else but Friston is a real person, and get this– he’s an accountant! Sadly the idea gained little traction in mainstream science.

  Twenty-One – Utopia

  We’re in the bridge now. Jez settles into her chair and starts toying with a remote. It’s been two days and Doyle hasn’t come out of the engine room. Must be getting hungry down there…

  No. I don’t want to know.

  ‘How you feeling?’ she asks.

  ‘Weak. A bit sick. It’ll be a week or so before I’m completely back.’

  ‘I may need you sooner.’

  ‘Doyle finally carved something useful out of the mutant then?’

  Jez shrugs.‘We got into his wafers during the night. I think he’s told us everything he knows. Doyle’s just being thorough.’

  ‘I admire her loyalty.’

  ‘She’s used to it.’

  I raise an eyebrow.

  ‘Training, Constantine. For fuck’s sake, you don’t think we conduct field interrogations every bloody mission, do you?’

  ‘Nah. I guess you got machines back at base to do that for you.’ Training on what, I can’t help but wonder?

  ‘Yeah, well, we can’t use those this time.’

  ‘You should have let me talk to them. It’s what I do.’

  ‘You’d been shot. You weren’t at your best. Time was of the essence.’

  ‘So what did you find out?’ Damn. Should have talked to Ortov again. Might have a better idea what’s really going on. But after watching Doyle at work, all I wanted to do was curl up and sleep. Sleep and sleep. And by the time I woke up again, we’d left the Crypt behind and were in far orbit around Cestus.

  Jez shrugs.‘They all had reasons to dislike the Cestus government. Governments make enemies. Everyone has them. Disaffected employees, people who don’t like your tax policy, whatever. The five of them used to run propaganda against Cestus. Someone offered them a chance to do more. Gave them the shuttle, a stack of missiles, a pile of credit and the targets they were supposed to hit. Except for the cargo transport– seems like that was their own idea. It’s all anonymous. Whoever set them up dialled the mutant’s wafer with new target information now and then. With the Company’s resources behind me I might be able to trace the calls. I might try it anyway, slip it in under a different investigation. But that’s going to take time and I’ve got a bad feeling that we’re working against a deadline here. I don’t know who or what or when but it’s there. So we’re going to look somewhere else. Don’t know whether it’ll be your cup of tea though.’

  ‘You telling me this was all a waste of time?’

  She shrugs.‘We stopped some small time terrorists.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about them. Cestus is run by corporate money-grabbing ego-maniac shits. What do I care if someone takes pot-shots at them?’

  ‘Then look at it the other way: you got fifty thousand credits for a week’s work. You want out?’

  ‘I got shot!’

  ‘You did, and you should be thankful.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘There were two suits in the firefight. Behind you.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw. Security clones.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what you didn’t see were the barcodes. They were Bratstva, and Doyle saved your neck. Listel sold you out sooner than you thought.’

  I get up and pace around the room. Pacing about in low gravity somehow misses the point but it still helps me to think. Mostly I’m thinking that I’m hungry, that I haven’t eaten properly for three days now and that all the food on this heap of junk tastes like shit. The bridge monitors are showing home, Cestus, twenty thousand miles beneath us. I want to be there. I want to be where gravity is right and food tastes like it hasn’t been recycled three times already.

  A few spare leftover thoughts are about getting out of the Company forever. Yeah, that and a lifetime of dodging the Bratstva. Ah, shit. And how fucked I am. I don’t want a part of this, not one little bit, but whoever shafted me on Szenchzuen, they shafted me good and proper and now I don’t seem to have much of a choice. I guess sometimes you take your allies where you can.

  ‘Jez, I can’t work like this and it’s not you either. Why aren’t you in an Analysis VR web with half a dozen pseudo-AIs running around working the patterns behind all this. Why all the cloak and d
agger?’

  She shrugs.‘Every time someone in Analysis starts an investigation, someone outside squashes it. Someone very high up.’ She shakes her head.‘Sometimes it’s obvious– investigation blocked by the treasury because of some temporary effect it might have on the value of genetics futures, that sort of thing. A lot of the time whoever we’re after seems to know we’re coming and cleans out. We catch some small fry and then the trail stops dead. Bit like this time. Here, read!’ She passes me a data sheet.

  ‘“Dr. Jefferson Pike. Head of the gene warfare division at the Fraternity Biotechnical Research Institute…”’ I look up.‘Gene warfare division?’

  ‘That’s classified, of course.’

  ‘This is a Company agency, yes?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s half owned by the Company, half owned by the McKinley Institute.’ ‘Gene warfare? Jesus. I take it the Stars don’t know about this.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. I suppose they probably do by now. Read on.’

  ‘Born 2277, citizen of Cestus, yadda yadda… His car and bodyguard were found in an isolated lay-by, both victims of a high-powered assault weapon. Foul play is suspected.” Suspected? You mean there’s a chance they accidentally fell on a hail of bullets? Who writes this shit?’

  ‘That’s a genuine Analysis Division brief sheet. You know the saying: you don’t have to be mad to work here…’

  Jez is playing with the external monitor. The view switches from Cestus to Gateway, thousands of miles below us. Can’t see much. Up here we’re out of Cestus’ shadow, but down there it’s still dark.

  ‘Pike’s a genius and knows far too much to be walking around. He’s the sort of guy who

  could putter about at home, tailor a virus to your DNA and kill you and all your relatives

  without bothering the rest of the population. Don’t want that in the wrong hands.’ ‘Don’t think I want that in any hands.’

  ‘Company philosophy. Build the weapons so you can build something to counter them.’ ‘I thought it was “do it to them before they do it to you.”’

  ‘Cynic.’

  ‘I used to work there, remember? What’s this Pike character got to do with me?’ ‘This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps happening, and it pisses me off. If the Company went after him, sure, we’d find him. Dead. We might get whoever shot his car up, maybe one or two others, but that’s it. Everything else would be shut down cold. We’d get nothing on who set it up and who paid for it. So you and I, we’re going to find him on our own. He’s got a transponder in his head. In the six weeks since he vanished there have been sightings of the signal almost every day, almost like someone wants us to know he’s still around. He’s on Cestus. In the Bethlehem district. Your turf, I believe.’

  ‘Used to be. Before I worked for you. Tell me, Jez, how many times did you use that genetic virus?’

  She gives a strange look, sour yet sad.‘Don’t ask me. I wouldn’t know.’ She snorts.‘We get asked to do some shitty stuff sometimes, C. If it’s any consolation, we say no, now and then.’

  I’m thinking of Doyle standing over the scrawny woman, ripping her apart because that’s what Su told her to do. And no, she wasn’t enjoying it, but that’s because she’s a robot. She won’t enjoy it when she does it me either, although I suspect Su might.

  Jez looks at me like she’s reading my mind.‘Hey, you’re still alive, right? I didn’t gun you down like I was supposed to, did I? No. So stop fucking dumping on me.’

  I hold up my hands in surrender.‘What you do is between you and your conscience. I just want out. It’s all I wanted five years ago. Now I carry a gun, I know how to use it, I’ve killed people, I’m a drug dealer, I use the stuff myself, I’ve had half a dozen friends shot or blown up, and I’m still not out, I’m in worse than ever. You give me your word that file gets rezzed when this is over.’

  ‘My word. If it’s any consolation I might get out too. I used to enjoy the challenge. It was all computer modelling and prediction work in the beginning. Then you start to realise there’s a lunatic with half a ton of nerve gas out there somewhere and it’s up to you to predict where he’s going to use it, and if you’re wrong tens of thousands of people die. After that it stopped being fun. It was a service for a while, a moral duty to society. Then you find out it was the guy two desks down who trained the lunatic in the first place, and the department across the road who designed the gas. There are people out there who want to wipe us all out, start again from scratch. New Eden, I think they’re called. If they could find an ecologically friendly way to bring about planetary apocalypse, they would.’ She shrugs.‘Maybe they’re onto something.’

  I get up and stand behind her, my hands on her shoulders, gently massaging her neck. She gets like this sometimes, the glum come-down after an op, however it goes. It won’t last.‘We don’t have to wipe a planet clean. We could find a new one. Buy it from the terraformers.

  Might have to do some fairly dodgy stuff to get the cash but never mind. Not like every corporation we’d be ripping off wouldn’t deserve it. Settle down there, just the two of us and a stack of in-vitro units. Bring them up right. Build our own Utopia.’

  Jez looks up at me and smiles.‘I’d get so bored!’

  I laugh.‘Shit yeah.’ And sooner or later the Bratstva would find me. Fuckers will find me anywhere.

  Gateway slips from shadow into the light outside the window, all glass and solar panels, glittering like a cosmic diamond crown just like in all the pictures.

  Proven, C., & vanHaagen, D.L.T. ‘Madness: The study of AI failures’. AI News, News, 228 (2320).

  By the time I’d finished reading this I thought it was a miracle there were any AIs at all. Did you know that 97% of AI cores go unstable in the course of maturing? Proven and vanHaagen made a couple of suggestions. Bannerman and Vishmir published on cloning the cores of stable AIs back in 2317, but Vishmir backtracked later and said it made the problem even worse. Instead, these guys want to clone much more fundamental elements, this time from pseudo-AIs, and run them in parallel. They theorise they could increase AI capacity by an order of magnitude and make them more stable by using personae downloaded from real people and then running a thousand or more of these together. A sort of artificial committee, I suppose. And you know what bugs me? There should be paper after paper out there on Gemini and why the one great AI that worked does what it does– why it’s stable. But there isn’t.

  Twenty-Two – Seek and Destroy

  After all she’s said about not using the Company to look for Doctor Pike, Jez is mightily pissed off to find they’ve already sent out a seek and destroy team. A seek and destroy team seems to me to be a kind of unreliable way of un-kidnapping someone if you want him back in pieces that you can identify without a forensics lab, but who am I to judge?

  We get a flat right next to the Fast Forward. The Fast Forward used to be a cool place to hang, but times have moved on; I can tell because there aren’t any Gothics mooching around outside. I go in anyway for some quiet time while Toni and Andreas are setting up surveillance around the flat. Jez, Su and Doyle have all disappeared. Back to Analysis HQ I suppose. I’m still trying to figure Jez’s angle. Says she’s running a covert operation outside the Company but she can still get hold of stuff like the Spiral Dance and this flat. Doesn’t quite add up.

  The barman in the Fast Forward tells me the Gothics all moved to Parthenogenesis. Under a café called The Rock. Tells me the Fast Forward is a Rapper joint now. Rappers are expanding, pushing their way South. Silver Surfers are pushing North. Soon their ain’t gonna be no Gothics no more.

  I laugh at that and head off to Parthenogenesis. Walking in, the way the weight falls off my shoulders, it’s like coming home. The darkness welcomes me, the smell of the smoke. Everything’s black or dim dark red. I feel like I’ve been sucked into the lungs of some sleeping Behemoth. It’s early. Quiet– no one’s turned the music on yet. A few Gothics hang about the place, young ones. I don’t recognise them and they
don’t recognise me. I been wandering the stars too long.

  Wonder what Ortov would make of this place…

  ‘ Constantine. You’re early.’ A voice behind me. One I recognise. I disappear for two years and he acts like I just popped out back to make a quick score. Couldn’t be anyone else.

  I turn and bow. Bow? Yes, because, well, because sometimes you do.‘Mr Strange.’

  Strange bows back.‘Welcome.’

  ‘I see things have changed. I’ve been away.’

  ‘The Ronin have not.’

  ‘The Ronin never do.’ Mr Strange may be Ronin but he fits right in with the Gothics here with all the pretentious crap we both carry around, all the pretend ceremony and harking to the old ways of some culture we couldn’t recognise even if it came and smacked us in the face. Sometimes I wonder if either of us has a clue what we’re talking about, but that hardly matters.‘And how do the Ronin fare in these times?’

  ‘The Ronin fare as they always fare.’

  ‘The Ronin are soldiers of fortune. Their eyes are good.’

  ‘Indeed they are. Word has it you are Yakuza now.’

  ‘In my own way, I’m Ronin too.’

  ‘A Ronin must choose wisely which lord to serve.’

  A deep bass note sweeps through the room. Mr Strange pirouettes away.‘The fun begins. Enjoy the party!’ Crowds ooze from the darkness as the room begins to throb. Strange is gone.

  Damn.

  There are more Ronin around than I remember. Easy to tell them from the rest. The two close by carry wazikashi. Mr Strange carried a katana. Doubtless the shogun carries a nodachi, though how he can dance with something like that strapped to his back I don’t know.

  I lean against a wall and chain-smoke and eavesdrop. That’s what these aural filters are for, after all. Maybe I’ll learn something…