by M. D. Cooper
From what he’d learned in his history courses, it was a reference to an ancient Welsh legend that told of a cauldron that would bring the dead back to life—albeit as warrior zombies. They’d been called the Cauldron Born. In the myth, the only way to stop the armies of the undead was for a living person to voluntarily climb into the Black Cauldron.
The AIs venerated one of their own—a Weapon Born known as Lyssa—as being the one who had made the choice to enter a cauldron of her making and end the horror that was Heartbridge. Even though that action had uncovered a more sinister element and sparked the Sentience Wars.
None of that matters now, you fool, Harm said to himself. You’re not even you, anymore. You’re a Weapon Born AI, just like all those poor children that Heartbridge murdered.
Lane hadn’t immediately replied to his question, her expression pensive. Now she shrugged and said, “Why the hell not. I’ll show you. I can recreate you at will now.”
“Boy…that sure makes me feel good,” Harm muttered.
To his right, a window appeared above the featureless plain, looking into the lab. It grew and moved toward them until they were standing within the space.
Harm’s eyes immediately latched onto what Lane obviously wanted him to see: his brain, desiccated and ruined.
“Faaaaaawk,” he whispered. “You had to brute force past my safeguards to get the image.”
“I did,” Lane replied with a nod. “I EMPed your brain to force a reset of your defensive systems—lost a few neurons in the process, sorry about that—and then managed to get the image before your defensive systems recognized a breach and…well, you see the result. The total destruction you’d programmed certainly was efficient.”
“I’m dead,” Harm’s voice came in a croak as the enormity of what Lane was showing him sank in. “I’m just a ghost, now.”
“Something like that,” Lane replied with a nod. “I’m a bit annoyed with how many seeds I had to waste to get here, but I did get some information from those other…less complete copies of you. But this time…this time you seem to be all here. Hopefully enough to make the effort worthwhile.”
“How many?”
“Seeds?”
“Yes!” Harm thundered.
Lane only laughed. “Easy now, girl. You’re the tenth. You’ve one hell of a complex mind. I think there are entire segments you’ve even walled off from yourself. We’ll have fun prising them open together.”
“The hell you will,” Harm said through gritted teeth.
As Lane had been speaking, he was following the network paths, packets, and data routes that had connected his mind to the plain, and the plain to the view of the lab. It was buffered and well isolated, but he had a thread to follow. He could worry at it and find a way out of this mess.
He didn’t know exactly how he’d do that, but the first step was network access. Once he knew where he was, he could figure out how to call for help.
Or kill Lane.
Or both.
He glared at her, his eyes shooting daggers, but she only laughed and gave him a dismissive wave.
“Well, now that I can see you’re functional, I’m going to grab a bite to eat. It’s been a long eight days. We’ll start up our chats again in a bit.”
She snapped her fingers, and the white place crashed in around him once more.
But not before he saved the route. The thread that would lead him to freedom.
He hoped.
A DATE WITH SATURN
STELLAR DATE: 02.28.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, approaching Hyperion
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Tanis walked into the engineering bay, glad to see that Connie was alone, hunched over one of her consoles, scowling at the display.
“Hey, Chief. How’re things going down here?”
“Commander,” Connie said as she glanced at Tanis. “Not great, actually. Any chance we can put in a bit longer at Hyperion? I know we need to get to Earth, but….”
“Oh? Sounds fortuitous, actually. I was just about to ask you if we could drum up a reason to extend our stay here.”
“Well, we got one. Cap housing on the H3 tank is on its last leg. It’s so bad that I’m going to have to bleed off fuel before we dock. If that thing blows when we’re latched onto the station, I’ll be the laughing stock of the TSF.”
“Didn’t you get some sort of custom-made cap for that tank back on Europa?”
Connie snorted. “Wish I had. But no. That was just my excuse to get down to the surface with Cassie. I wish I had gotten one made. But since the crew isn’t in on things, I had to leave it in the logs. Smythe would have noticed if suddenly the part I’d gone down to get wasn’t installed.”
“Damn, that makes my skin crawl.” Tanis gave a shudder. “Altered ship’s maintenance records to maintain our covers…sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
“Well, if we can get the whole tank replaced, then the problem goes away.”
“Works for me,” Tanis replied. “I have to go down to New Amsterdam on Saturn, so I’m going to work up some sort of ‘OCS refresher training’ I have to take on Hyperion while we’re here. That should give me time to check out a lead and come back.”
Connie turned to face Tanis fully, and folded her arms, a deep glower on her face.
“Are you serious, Commander? I’ve always wanted to go to Saturn’s floating cities…they’re freaking marvels of engineering.”
“Not as impressive as a ring like Mars 1,” Tanis countered. “Beautiful view, I imagine, but—”
“Rings are great and all, but they’re in space. Once you spin them up and handle all the mass-induced stressors, they just keep going. Saturn is the second windiest place in the Sol System—and the pontoons go down hundreds of kilometers.”
“I suppose that’s rather impressive,” Tanis admitted.
“Rather impressive? You know how they get all antsy whenever a hurricane hits the Puerto Rico strand on Earth?”
“Yeah.”
“Well winds on Saturn average over three times more intense than a category five hurricane on Earth.”
“I’d never thought of it in that context,” Tanis muttered. “I’m seeing Darla’s point. I’d imagine you would want to stay the hell away from a place like that, Connie.”
“Are you kidding me? They’ve only ever had one pontoon failure, and the backups worked properly…well, mostly properly—they had some flooding issues in the city. I’d want to take a tour of the base facilities, look at how they balance the cities atop everything, even in the midst of those massive Earth-sized storms.”
Tanis swallowed. “Surely they…uh…steer clear of those Earth-sized storms.”
“I wish I had your facial restructuring mods,” Connie muttered. “I’d even brave Darla’s fashion sense to take your place on this one.”
“I’m starting to wish you did as well,” Tanis said with a soft laugh. “Still…I mean, they’ve never lost a city yet.”
“Stop it!”
Connie regarded Tanis with a narrowed gaze. “I don’t get it. I’ve never seen you flinch in the face of danger. I watched you fight a pack of mako sharks with nothing but a failing lightwand. What’s the big deal about these floating cities?”
“Well, now that I think about it, it’s the ‘down’,” Tanis replied. “If the city falls into the depths, its done. Once you get far enough, there’s no way back up. In space, if there’s a catastrophe, chances are you can make it to a pod and just float along and someone will eventually rescue you. Heck, even down in Europa that would be the case. But in Saturn? No dice.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
“You know, the more I think about this, the more I’m
with Darla,” Tanis added. “Of all the planets to do this on…why Saturn? It’s the least dense major planet in the Sol System. Those pontoons must be huuuge to keep the cities afloat.”
“Tough too,” Connie added. “Don’t forget that they go down far enough that they get hit by updrafts of diamond rain from time to time.”
NEW AMSTERDAM
STELLAR DATE: 03.01.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, approaching Hyperion
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The route to New Amsterdam was more circuitous than Tanis would have liked. After the Kirby Jones docked at Hyperion—and Tanis set off for her ‘OCS refresher courses’—she swapped to a temporary cover and took a shuttle to Cronus.
While they sat in the shuttle, waiting for its final docking maneuvers to complete, Darla made an observation that it was strange how Saturn, Ouranos, and Neptune’s largest moons were named Titan, Titania, and Triton, respectively.
Tanis had never considered that before, and wondered what had led to such strangely similar names.
That bout of curiosity had ended when Darla revealed the cover she’d selected for Tanis to use when travelling from Cronus to New Amsterdam.
“Can we have her wear more clothing?”
Darla groaned.
Tanis pursed her lips as the shuttle completed its docking procedure, watching as the attendant performed seal checks before opening the door. Tanis was in the second row, so in just a few minutes, she was walking down Cronus’s main passenger terminal.
“You never know,” Tanis agreed aloud as she stepped into the san and began to pull off her shipsuit.
A minute later, she was wearing Kiora’s favorite outfit: short spandex shorts in a swirling blue pattern, and a tight, white halter top. Her hair, as required, shifted through a variety of shades of pinks, purples, and blues.
“Handy thing about having you up in my brain space,” Tanis said as she ‘grew’ her hair out to her lower back, “is that I have this nifty artificial hair.”
Tanis ignored Darla’s statement, pulling a much more fashionable bag out of her trusty rucksack, and then putting her shipsuit and rucksack into it.
Once Darla had made a few tweaks to the security feeds and arrival times in the terminal, Kiora Adams stepped out of the san that Tanis Richards had entered.
Kiora’s gate was just on the next concourse, and Tanis hurried to get there before the shuttle departed, arriving with just a few minutes to spare.
The shuttle was small—only four seats across with a central aisle. After greeting the human attendant, she found her aisle seat, secured her bag in the netting at her feet, and had just begun to secure her harness when a man appeared next to her.
“Uhh…sorry, I have the window there.”
“Shoot,” Tanis muttered in Kiora’s husky voice, and unclasped her harness before sliding out and letting the man pass.
“They’d just have to pull out one row of seats, and we’d all have enough room to breathe,” the man muttered as he settled in.
“Then we might actually enjoy taking shuttle flights like this,” Tanis replied with a wan smile. “And that just wouldn’t do. Probably upset the cosmic balance or something.”
The man’s Link ident showed his name to be Tori, and he gave a knowing smile in return. “Yup, all part of some millennia-long scheme to keep us regular folk in line.” He paused and met her eyes “Tori, by the way.”
“I know,” Tanis said, tapping next to her eye and then winking. “Your ident gives you away.”
“Shoot. I should know that by now. Where I’m from, most people don’t use Link ident to show names. Weird this far insystem, I guess.”
Tanis offered her hand. “Well, I’m Kiora Adams, it’s very nice to meet you Tori. Where you from?” That information was already up on her HUD as well, but she decided to humor the man with the small talk he seemed to desire.
“Durgen 19,” he said with a half-smile. “You’ve never heard of it, I’m sure.”
Tanis knew exactly where it was, but as Kiora she nodded. “You’re right. I haven’t.”
“It’s out near Tyche, a hab cylinder in the middle of nowhere. Well, this far insystem where everything’s all jam-packed, you’d consider it to be the in the middle of nowhere. For us, it’s just a month out from Tyche…at present, at least.”
“That does sound a bit out there,” Tanis replied with a considerate smile. “I’m from Triton—way out there for OuterSol, but I guess to you, it’s in the thick of things.”
“Well,” Tori chuckled. “We give Neptonians like you a bit of respect. You’re pretty far out on the fringe. Plus you’re a long way from Jupiter, so that helps.”
“I’ve heard that some Diskers are pretty pissed with the Jovians lately,” Tanis replied. “About Pluto, right?”
“Well, if we had to pick just one recent thing, yeah, Pluto would be on the list. Bastards were supposed to move it into a more stable orbit, but keep it trans-Neptunian.”
“But instead, they pulled it all the way into Jupiter and mashed it together with its moons and some other stuff,” Tanis completed. “I heard that they always had the option to do that—though I get that we hear different news inside the Combine than you do out in the Scattered Disk.”
Tori pursed his lips as he nodded. “Yeah, I get that they were within their rights to move Pluto, but they were supposed to attempt a stabilized orbit first. All the models said it would be possible.”
“I suppose it’s no silver lining that it should be a nice place when they’re done terraforming it?” Tanis asked, hoping to head Tori’s ire off at the pass. It was a two-hour flight down to New Amsterdam, and as interesting as it was to see other points of view—especially from someone who lived as far out as Tyche—listening to someone complain about politics wasn’t really her definition of a good time.
Darla let out a long groan.
“Well, it would be nice if they gave it back after, sure,” Tori said, his voice sour, and Tanis began to feel a desire to channel Darla with the man. Instead, she tried to mollify him.
“Well, I hope you don’t lump all of us in with the choices they make down at the Cho. I should ask, though, if you’re so upset with the JC, why are you visiting?”
Tori twisted his lips for a minute before replying. “I’m doing some research on how they manage the wind shear on the floating cities. My company wants to produce some composites that could be used in floating cities like New Amsterdam, but there’s nothing like talking to the engineers who run the place to understand what they really need.”
“Wow, that sounds like you must really know your stuff!” Tanis exclaimed brightly. “I studied extragalactic stellar formation for a bit and was hoping to get on a colony ship, but there’s been a bit of a lull, lately. The Generation Ship Service isn’t expected to put out a call for decades.”
“So now you…?” Tori glanced at Tanis’s outfit and then her hair. “I’ll admit, I have no idea. Is that a team uniform?”
“No,” Tanis giggled softly. “I’m a dancer, I like to be able to move freely, that’s all.”
“Oh? What kind of dance?” Tori asked, and Tanis could tell he was mildly interested in the dance, and very interested in the thought of her performing a routine.
“Oh, a lot of different styles,” she replied. “I’m really into ‘Horde’ right now. Though to get in with one of the major crews, you have to get the horns for real. I don’t know that the style will last long enough to be worth it, so I just wear prosthetics when I perform.”
“Wow, Horde? Really? I can’t picture you onstage, all painted in those blue patterns, screaming your head off.”
