I headed back up into the main compartment of the transport with a heavy heart. We’d been made to suffer by Madmar’s machinations, but of all the afflictions he spread, the paranoia was the worst. I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Port Montaigne, and part of me hoped it would be much as I remembered it, and that I wouldn’t regret having such hope.
I got back to the pilot’s compartment and handed Tullia her cup of coffee, carefully leaning over her left shoulder. I could see we were on course and ahead of schedule as I did. She glanced up at me and smiled as she took the cup.
“Took you long enough,” she chided.
“Took one to Matthias, too. I think we might need to make a stop before we get out over the Atlantic,” I replied sipping my own coffee.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. We all agreed on the flight plan and we’re sticking to it,” Tullia said, more than a little angry.
“I need to check something out. If I don’t, we might not make it over the Atlantic in one piece,” I explained.
“Something you didn’t tell us?” Tullia snapped, growing angrier.
“Keep your voice down. I didn’t know until I went and talked to Matthias. We need to set down to do this,” I explained calmly.
Between the two of us we found a place along the southern coast of Spain where we could get some stuff figured out. She pulled along the beachfront and looked for a flat place to set down. At last, we managed to find a parking lot outside of a ransacked resort to set down.
“What’s going on?” Dragos asked coming around the corner trying to get his pants fastened.
“We have to set down for a bit, get something figured out,” I explained.
“Oh, for... what is going on, Tullia?” Dragos demanded.
“I need to borrow a handgun,” I said.
Dragos glared at me, confused and searching for words.
“Do you still have the gun you used to shoot Bratislav with?” I said meeting his gaze.
His anger turned to a sort of sorrow, as if he understood suddenly why I needed the gun. He nodded and we walked back to his cabin where he took out the handgun he used to shoot his friend back in Serbia. He checked the chamber and handed it to me.
He followed me back to Taylor and Ezra’s cabin and I knocked on the door. She came to the door, Ezra was asleep on his bunk. I beckoned for her to follow me and we all went into the cargo bay. She woke Ezra and we all walked to the cargo bay together where Matthias was sitting on a crate waiting.
“What’s going on?” Taylor asked.
“Yes, why do we stop?” Truman said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“We need some privacy,” I said turning to Tullia.
She nodded, and walked over to a console on the wall and entered in a code. Tullia and her brothers walked out leaving Ezra, Taylor, Matthias, and myself in the room. Ezra went over to the console and looked at the display.
“It looks like she terminated the connection her auditory implant had with the cargo hold. She can’t hear us. Want to tell us what this is all about?” Ezra asked as he turned to face me.
“We need to make sure Matthias isn’t hanging suspended in a fluid filled tube somewhere while we’ve been talking to a replica of him,” I said, trying to be as calm as possible.
“How are we going to do that?” Taylor asked.
“Not we. You, Taylor,” Matthias said.
“How am I going to do that?”
“How did you commune with the AI aboard the APC in Helsinki?” Ezra asked.
“I don’t know. I just touched the outside of him, and I was able to feel his presence inside the vehicle,” Taylor said, covering her face with her hands.
Matthias knelt down beside Taylor and took her by gently by the wrists. He put her hands on his head, then his shoulders and finally his chest. She jerked away from him as her hands touched his chest.
I reached into my waistband for the gun, desperately not wanting to use it.
“You have an artificial heart?” Taylor asked.
“Yes. I’m old. Older than any human has a right to be. The rest of me remained healthy, but my heart gave out after I hit ninety. Did you feel any other machines within me?” Matthias asked.
“No, just the heart,” Taylor replied.
Matthias breathed a deep sigh of relief. He’d been carrying that worry around for weeks.
“Synthetic replicas have a cortical implant and a half dozen other small devices implanted in their heads, shoulders, and chest to regulate heartbeat, breathing, and other essential functions. I am me, and thank God for that,” Matthias said standing up, a broad smile spreading across his face.
Ezra went over and opened the door so that Tullia, Dragos, and Truman could come back in.
“We cool?” Dragos asked.
“We’re cool,” I said handing him the handgun.
“You were going to shoot Matthias?” Taylor bellowed as she shoved me to the ground.
I toppled over a crate and found myself flat on my back, Taylor standing over me. Ezra came to stand beside her.
“I didn’t know what would have happened if we were to discover the truth. I guess having the pistol was overkill with Ezra here. I just kept thinking back to my own clone that went crazy in downtown back in Port Montaigne. Thought we couldn’t be too careful,” I tried to explain.
“And if he was a synthetic replica, would you have executed him?” Taylor asked.
“Given how mad you got at Dragos for doing the same thing, it was the last thing on my mind,” I said truthfully.
Taylor glowered at both Matthias and me. She stormed out of the room, Ezra following along behind her. It was clear to me now she didn’t deal well with these sorts of things, not that I was an expert myself. Matthias came over and helped me up.
“If it had turned out differently, I wouldn’t have blamed you for shooting me,” Matthias stated, doing his best to comfort me.
“Me, too,” Truman said.
“After seeing how Taylor reacted to my shooting Bratislav’s replica, I have different feelings,” Dragos said, surprising everyone in the room.
“I think we need to find where Madmar is taking these people and put a stop to it. It’s barbaric,” Tullia said as she used the console to reconnect her auditory implant to the sensors in the cargo hold.
“He says he is Uroboros and that he wants hardware in Port Montaigne. Maybe hardware will give us a clue?” Truman ventured.
“Or he’s leading us into another manufacturing facility to get eaten by crazed Metasapients,” Matthias said trembling slightly at the thought.
“Matthias is right. When we arrive, we should get the hardware but do it in such a way that we aren’t playing into his hands. We need to find a way to get at the device without having to breech a facility,” I suggested.
“Is Port Montaigne shutdown like the rest of the world?” Tullia asked.
“That is a good question. I guess we won’t know until we get closer and can see if the lights are on,” Dragos said, scratching his chin.
“Yeah, we will see when we get there. We have lingered here too long. Let’s get back into the sky,” Tullia said, heading back toward the pilot’s compartment.
Everyone else dispersed, leaving me to myself in the cargo hold. There were too many unanswered questions and I felt like my actions had somehow dragged all these people into something terrible. I needed to find out for sure whether or not I was the real Vance Uroboros, and if I was, discern exactly what it was I had done before losing my memories.
At the time, I thought going back to Port Montaigne was my best shot, not to mention a chance for Ezra to reconnect with his tribe. Even though I was worried about another encounter with Madmar, I was glad to be heading back to sort some things out. In the middle of thin
king about all that, Taylor returned to the cargo hold alone.
“Matthias said you were probably still in here,” Taylor said, sitting down beside me on a crate.
“Yep, here I am.”
“This isn’t supposed to be how things are, Silverstein. I should be getting up in a few hours for work so I can pay the rent and hit the downtown market from time to time. I shouldn’t be doing whatever it is we’re doing,” she said wrapping her arms around me.
“I know. This really does feel like it is all my fault. I dragged you into this somehow, and I have no idea what to do about it now,” I said, putting an arm around her.
We sat there for a long time, wallowing. I wondered, again, if our meeting really was just a lucky coincidence or if our crossing paths was by some design. We weren’t even sure what Dr. Madmar really wanted. We were just guessing based on what we’d seen him do and by virtue of the things he’d said, most of which have turned out to be lies or half-truths.
The transport lurched from turbulence for a good fifteen minutes, forcing us to retreat to some cargo netting to sit on. The lights dimmed as the engines begin to strain, pulling the transport up higher into the air. We must have started our approach to the Atlantic and Tullia was getting all the altitude she could.
Taylor and I held each other as the turbulence gradually passed and the transport broke out over the clouds. The morning sun shone through the narrow ports near the ceiling of the cargo hold revealing a clear blue sky outside. Taylor fell asleep beside me, breathing softly.
Again, I wondered about my question to Matthias. Do artificial intelligences dream? Given the amount of murmuring and thrashing about that Taylor engaged in while she slept, I assumed the answer was probably yes.
If I was right, it meant that the military satellites were just pink elephants dancing through the dreams of a sleeping AI connected to the defense grid. As much as I was fascinated by the prospect I was also somewhat fearful. If it turned out to be true, it would mean that someone put an AI into a persistent state of slumber and forced it to have these dreams - dreams that tricked navigation computer systems around the globe into thinking that there were things in space, where there really wasn’t.
The applications were endless.
Done right, you could fool the entire planet, or at least the important folks, into thinking there was an alien invasion. The entire thing could have been a ruse to convince the CGG into thinking they were funding a defense program against extra-terrestrials. You set up the dreaming AI, concoct a plausible plan for building a defense, have the sleeping AI feed false information accordingly, and pocket the money.
Given how reliant people had become on computers, it was certainly possible. I remember thinking at the time about everything I’d been told about the MDC project and the revelation that it had been only part of a larger program, the Colossus Project. What if the entire thing was a sham, and the Metasapients were the only part of the program that was real?
It sounded like science fiction, something that would be impossible to pull off. All it would take is one person looking out a porthole on a ship while they were in orbit. If someone pulled it off though, the CGG would have paid anything to repel the perceived alien invasion while keeping the public in the dark. It was crazy enough to work, minus a few pieces of the puzzle I didn’t have yet.
Taylor stirred, pulling at my jacket. I took it off and put it over the top of her. She smiled slightly and curled up underneath it then scooted closer to me.
“Cold?” I asked.
“Not anymore. I think I was dreaming about home,” Taylor murmured.
“Home?”
“Yeah, and all the stuff I left behind,” she muttered, eyes still closed.
“What else do you dream about?” I asked.
“Cats. I always hoped I’d be able to find one on the black market, but no one ever has them. When we get to Port Montaigne, can we look for a cat?” Taylor said turning over and pressing her back into my ribs, the cold from her feet radiating through my pant leg.
“Yes.”
Chapter 12
Port Montaigne, Midtown Housing Projects
9:49 PM, January 27th, 2200
Silverstein’s Log, Part 5
We set down in a suburb outside of Port Montaigne, a place where they had built houses on top of houses until they were stacked five high with criss-crossing staircases to reach the doors. There were lots in central areas, and finding an empty one wasn’t hard. I was startled to see that there were porch lights on and other signs of civilization. I wondered if this is one of the places Taylor was able to spare from the shutdown.
As the cargo hold opened, I heard dogs barking in the distance, the sounds of vehicles along the main roads, and similar. There were other signs as well. As I stepped off the edge of the ramp, my foot kicked shell casings and I could see that the homes in this area were probably deserted. If anyone lived around here, they weren’t making it obvious.
It made sense. Even if Port Montaigne didn’t lose power, there would have been chaos as the rest of the world went dark. It also made no sense. If word got around there was power and civilization here, I would have expected these houses to be stuffed to capacity with refugees. Something was terribly wrong with this situation.
We hadn’t set foot outside for five minutes when someone took shots at us from the darkened walkway between housing complexes. Dragos and Truman returned fire as Ezra flitted between the shadows to close the gap. Truman was deadly accurate waiting to shoot until Dragos flushed our attackers from cover to open fire.
I froze for a moment as gunfire, the sound of shell casings, and cries surrounded me. Ezra turned and called out to me to follow. It took every ounce of willpower to run into the fray beside him. From behind me I could hear Taylor yelling something as she dove back into the transport.
“Look at their colors! These are downtown gang members!”
There wasn’t time to think about why they were topside and this far west. Our instructions for the pickup was hidden in the trunk of a car, and someone had to go get them. Dragos and Truman covered us while we made our way to the lone vehicle parked in the lot. As we got to it, the trunk popped open ominously and automatically. We froze in our tracks and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did, save more gunfire from behind us that Dragos and Truman answered with some of their own. Ezra crept up to the trunk in front of me and sniffed the air. It looked as if there had been several attempts to pry the trunk open or move the vehicle that had failed.
“Nothing that smells like a bomb,” he reported tossing me a paper sack, the only thing in the trunk.
He shouldered his rifle and gazed up at the balconies around us as we broke into a hasty retreat. The shooting became more persistent as more gang members appeared. I’d been in an exchange or two before, but nothing like this. Shell casings rained down from above us as what felt like a whole army descended on our position.
Dragos and Truman were superbly armed but there was just a handful of us and it seemed like dozens of them. Taylor was right, they were all sporting gang colors and ink. What they were doing off their downtown turf was completely unknown. They shouldn’t have been there at all.
“Go!” Ezra shouted through the haze.
Ezra put his back to mine, shadowing me as we got near the transport firing his own rifle up into the buildings around us. We jumped onto the cargo ramp just as the transport began to ascend. I gave Dragos a hand up as he fired back over his shoulder. I really wished I’d been wearing plugs because my ears would be ringing for hours after that.
“You get it?” Dragos said breathlessly.
“Yeah,” I replied even more out of breath. “Are we whole?”
Everyone seemed to have escaped unscathed which was nothing short of a miracle with the amount of fire
we took. I opened the sack and pulled out an ancient VHS tape that had to have been more than a century old. Nevertheless, it smelled brand new and the plastic was still pliable. Even so, finding a machine to play the tape in would be extremely difficult as they hadn’t been sold commercially in almost eighty years.
“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting that at all. I froze out there,” I said feeling like total crap.
“You will know better for next time,” Truman said with a smile as he checked his rifle.
I handed Ezra the tape who looked at it curiously for a moment, then rummaged about in a tool box. The transport swayed slightly as a faint explosion went off outside. Over the intercom in the cargo hold Tullia’s panicked voice could be faintly heard over the ringing in our ears.
“They just fired a rocket propelled grenade at us from the ground,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m taking us higher, hold on.”
I felt like I gained fifty pounds as the transport began to rise sharply into the air. We all ran to a wall and grabbed on to something as several more dull thuds went off nearby accompanied by what sounded like steel confetti raining down on the skin of the transport. Everyone held their breath for a moment until we broke the cloud cover and leveled out.
“We’re clear,” Tullia reported over the intercom.
“Wow, they were really after us. Why?” Taylor asked.
“I don’t know. Shouldn’t have been able to respond that quickly either. Someone told them we’d be there and to wait. Getting military grade weapons in North America got really difficult after the trade embargoes by the CGG twenty-five years ago. That was not standard ordinance for street gangs,” Dragos replied.
“There is a code on the ribbon written in silver permanent marker,” Ezra said opening the bottom flap on the VHS tape and winding it with a screw driver.
I took out my mobile and tapped out the code as Ezra wound the tape. There were three thousand, seven hundred, and twenty eight numerals in all. They were written on the tape by machine and the kerning seemed to indicate spacing that wasn’t random as if to separate words.
Uroboros Saga Book 2 Page 17
