by Scott Baron
“You know.”
“And then Harkaway? And now Tamara? Even Gus and Reggie are in on it. Everyone is pressuring me to be something I’m not.”
“So be you.”
“I am, but that’s never enough for them. And then Fatima. All this constant Zen master shit is driving me crazy!”
“So, what are you going to do, Daze? You’re stuck here. You can’t leave.”
“No, but I can get away from it all. At least for a little bit.”
“You thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“You know it,” Daisy replied as she headed for Hangar Three’s airlock. “If I bypass the monitor on my suit, I’ll be invisible for the next couple of hours. No one will be able to find me to add to this ever-growing mountain of bullshit. I just need to clear my head and think.”
“Okay. Shiny. Let’s go, then.”
Daisy suited up, made the necessary adjustments to ensure she’d be off all monitors and scans, and stepped out onto the moon’s low-g surface. The absolute calm and silence put her in a more relaxed frame of mind almost immediately. She started walking with no destination in mind, but twenty minutes later she found herself in front of the hidden door.
“What the hell, might as well,” she said, picking her tools from their hiding spot. Within moments she had the leads attached inside the gap in the wall.
“Guess I can try the panel in parallel,” she decided, hands working on auto-pilot.
“Daisy? What do you really think about Vince?” Sarah asked.
“You know what I think. He’s a nice guy, but it just won’t work.”
“Then why does your heart rate go up every time he comes around?”
“Muscle memory, simple as that,” she answered, more than a little distracted by the line of questioning.
“You know that’s a load of shit, Daze.”
“Look, I used to love the guy, okay? And then my life got turned upside down. For chrissake, Sarah, I found out my boyfriend was a cyborg, my home was a lie, and that I’d be spending the rest of my life trapped in a tiny moon base, all in a single week. It was a shitty time.”
“All right, all right,” Sarah said. “But for the record, he’s not a cyborg.”
“Enhanced human. Whatever. He’s got that thing in his head, and––”
The thick door in front of her released a thin puff of inert gas, then silently slid open.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know. Your stupid grilling got me so pissed off, I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Remind me to piss you off more often.”
Daisy looked into the darkened space. A faint red glow barely illuminated what was apparently an airlock. Daisy collected her tools and stepped inside.
“What if the door seals us in?”
“Then we’re royally screwed,” Daisy replied as the door cycled shut behind her. She stood there in the dimly lit chamber, waiting. Nothing happened. “Maybe if I just try this––” She hit the big red button on the far wall.
“You don’t know what that might––”
She felt her ears pop as the room suddenly pressurized. A second later the light brightened and the interior door slid open. Her suit’s environmental monitors registered a breathable atmosphere just past the threshold, and beyond it lay a wonder to behold.
Entering the airlock had caused the hidden facility to power on, and judging by the cavernous chamber’s vast number of machines, processors, and assembly lines, it was no wonder the place had drained the battery reserves to zero when its independent energy supply was severed. Daisy just hoped the repairs she had made that accidentally powered it back on would support the load.
I really need to re-route an entire solar array just for this place, she realized.
The ceilings were a good thirty meters high—taller than many buildings—and the floor appeared to be capable of lowering and raising as needed to accommodate whatever project was being worked on.
Because it was hidden safely under what was essentially a small stone mountain on the surface, there was almost no limit to how large the facility could have been constructed, depending on requirements. At nearly a football field long and half a field wide, they certainly didn’t skimp. One look at the beautiful ship resting in front of her, and Daisy knew why.
The vessel was sleek, a matte black hull with seams that appeared to blend into one another. Twenty-five meters long, fifteen wide, and roughly fifteen tall, it appeared to be a mid-sized assault ship, only it was plainly something far different. For one, its configuration matched nothing in Daisy’s vast mental storehouse of ship designs. On top of that, the material it was made of was something she had never seen before.
“Daisy, I think this is a stealth ship.”
Daisy had already come to that conclusion, though she didn’t know exactly how she knew it. Something in her gut just told her it was.
She pulled a small laser cutter from her pouch and aimed it at an unassembled piece. She powered it on.
Nothing happened to the material.
“I think you’re right. Look how it absorbs and disperses the focused light beam. I bet this stuff does the same with other types of energies and scans, other than the optical kind.”
She circled the magnificent craft, taking her time, studying every bit of it. The ship was obviously nowhere near finished when the attack happened, and once humanity was destroyed, it was never completed.
“Look at this,” she said. “This place has its own molecular components fabricator. Two of them, actually. It looks like they are tied into a mine running deep underneath the facility. I wonder what kind of raw ore they were accessing in addition to all those containers of base compounds.”
She continued touring around the ship, looking closely at the interior through the gaping holes where it was incomplete. It appeared to be based on the pod/component system of the Váli and similar ships, but as a one-of-a-kind vessel, it would never have spare parts to swap out.
“Holy shit,” she marveled. “Check out that massive computer system,” she said as she walked through the unfinished corridors of the ship.
Toward the front, but below the command pod, she found herself looking at rack upon rack of backup processing units safely ensconced in the center of the heavily reinforced pod. They were tied together with high-tensile linkages and appeared to be designed to massively boost AI processing speed and power, but also to protect the core AI in case of a hull breach.
It was only because this most vital part of the ship was not yet completed that she was even afforded a clear view of its innermost workings. While the fabrication tables just outside the hull held a wealth of components with which to construct a super-advanced artificial mind, the AI dock at the center of the ship’s connections, she noted, was empty.
“Looks like they never got a chance to fire this bad boy up before the invasion. I wonder if it would have made a difference, though.”
Daisy climbed back to the hangar floor and walked around the craft. It appeared an immense array of bleeding-edge pulse weaponry was in the process of being installed when things went dark.
“Impressive. But one small ship against an entire alien fleet? Probably not.”
“Yeah, probably not. I wonder if they have the specs on this thing in here. Fatima said the base was purged when its AI melted down, but maybe this facility was firewalled or something.”
“Can’t hurt to look, right? I mean, since you’re already in here, what harm can there be in poking around? Not like there’s anyone still alive to object anyway.”
“A little morbid, but I like the way you think.”
Daisy spent the next half hour working to get the secret fabrication plant’s design and control systems back online, slowly rebooting every system she came across until most of the facility was quietly humming with power.
“I think I found the door controls,” Daisy commented as she attempted to access a locked power-control unit. “
Makes sense they’d keep it on lockdown, given this place was making stealth craft, but man, they really went nuts on this.”
The multiple panels locking her out finally gave way after several minutes of bypassing and jury-rigging, revealing a simple series of power buttons.
“Okay, so this should do it,” she said, flipping all three switches at once. A low hum vibrated momentarily, then the chamber once more fell silent.
Daisy walked to the airlock door, put her helmet back on, just in case, and tapped the keypad.
“Shit, I’m still locked out of the system. That must not have been it.”
She took her helmet off and went back to work, trying to track down the door control unit. After following a hunch, she finally found what she hoped was the right terminal.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” she said as she opened the panel to access the entry screen. It came free with minimal resistance. “Huh, that was much easier than the last one. I guess the door systems didn’t warrant as much security as I thought.”
She pulled up a root menu, and with a few override commands, accessed the core entry control systems.
“There’s the problem. At least, I think it is,” she said as she typed a series of commands into the machine. “Looks like rebooting this place after the backup power went out was what caused everything to go into total security lockdown, but if I did this right, I should have keyed the entry controls to my new command settings. I guess we’ll find out for sure when we go outside, but for now, a quick test.”
She put her helmet on and once again keyed the panel beside the door. This time the light turned green and the door opened.
“Sweet!” she said, closing it back up. “Looks like we’ve got a winner, and I’ve still got a good twenty minutes before I need to get back to the base. What do you say we see what else is in here?”
“Do you even need to ask?” Sarah replied.
Daisy quickly tracked the various comms links and power feeds supporting the facility, and true to her suspicions, every system was partitioned and air-gapped from the base itself.
The fabrication plant was its own separate unit, completely self-sustained and detached from Dark Side. Not a shared sensor, not a networked communications link. Nothing tied the two together.
“No wonder Sid didn’t know about this place,” she said. “If the base’s files were wiped before he was installed, there’s no way he could have.”
“So, this is truly hidden,” Sarah said, giddy at the revelation. “Oh my God, Daisy, it’s like a secret clubhouse! Or a tree fort!”
“Yeah, and one that just happens to house a massive stealth ship and a whole bunch of cutting-edge machinery,” she replied. “But not a tree fort. No trees on the moon, Sis.”
“Ha-ha, funny girl.” Sarah laughed. “But it’s so peaceful here, Daze. One truly private place on the entire base.”
“I know. I suppose eventually I’ll need to tell the others about it, but for the time being I––”
A garbled noise barked out from beneath a large static-canceling drop cloth.
What could that be? she wondered. It looks like it has Faraday protection woven into the material itself. This is incredibly high-tech for a drop cloth.
Daisy crossed the workspace to the technician’s station where the noise had originated.
“Careful, Daze.”
A faint hum, almost inaudible to even the most sensitive ear, touched her senses like cool water flowing across a raw nerve.
Something is here, she realized, moving closer to the worktable. Cautiously, Daisy reached out and drew back the drop cloth.
A pristine AI unit sat glistening under the bright lights. The experimental brain appeared to be far more advanced than anything she’d ever seen. Daisy looked at the three power feeds running to its portable base. They led back to the panel she’d spent so much time fighting to open.
To the three switches she’d so nonchalantly flipped on.
“Oh shit. What did I do?”
At the sound of her voice, one of the AI’s built-in external sensors aimed its visual array at her and paused. Finally, after a long moment, a young, genderless voice spoke to her.
“Are you my mummy?”
Chapter Fourteen
The next day, Daisy was swamped with training and tasks, and found herself only able to sneak into the hidden fabrication hangar for the briefest of visits before having to race back to the airlock.
She almost felt bad keeping Fatima in the dark, but for now, her discovery was hers alone, and while she couldn’t go back that evening without being noticed, she did have a few plans to put in motion. One she could even do over dinner.
Finn’s mechanical fingers whizzed across the cutting board as he deftly wielded his knives, making small things even smaller. It was a passion of his, and his knifework was second to none.
There was no need for a mandoline to slice and dice, though, really, the food replicator could probably make a pretty nice julienne. But having food hand-made by someone with a love for it made every meal taste better, somehow.
“I still don’t know why you don’t just have the whole hand replaced. You already have one cybernetic arm, after all,” Shelly said, gesturing at the metal fingers on his remaining flesh hand. “I mean, for the tensile strength alone it would be worth it.” She picked up a handful of hard, dried beans in her metal hand and easily crushed them to dust.
“You’ve got your shiny bits, and I’ve got mine,” he replied with a chuckle. “Thing is, no matter how fine-tuned those internal servos and sensors are, there’s still no beating good old-fashioned touch when it comes to cooking.”
“Leave him alone, Shell,” Omar interjected. “We haven’t eaten this good in I can’t remember how long, so let the guy cook however he wants.”
“Thank you, Omar.”
“My pleasure, my man. And besides, the parts Mal fabricated are generations better than what we got back in the day. And let’s not even get into the biological grow lab she has on board your ship.”
“The Váli has a more modern fabricator than we ever did,” Shelly agreed. “Which again reinforces my point. If she couldn’t grow replacements fast enough, or didn’t want to try to reattach old parts, why not do a full upgrade instead of just those fingers?”
“Just let it go, Shell.”
Shelly wouldn’t concede.
“I’m telling you, Finn, you could really take it up a notch.” She flexed her metal arms, then had her hands twist and bend in ways a human appendage simply could not. At least, not if you wanted it to function afterwards.
“Uh-huh,” Finn replied, then laid out a dozen carrots on his cutting board. He smiled at Shelly, paused just a second, then flew into action. His mechanical arm precisely controlled the blade as his partially replaced hand deftly maneuvered the produce as the whirring knife moved, positioning every piece precisely. In seconds, three perfect piles of carrot bits shaped into rectangles, cubes, and diamonds sat before him. The knife banged to a halt as the last carrot was rendered to bits, then he quickly wiped it with a cloth and flung it across the room, where it landed almost dead-center in the facility’s dartboard.
“Hooooly shit!” Omar whistled appreciatively. “Damn, we’ve got a professional killer in our midst.”
Finn laughed it off. “Nah, not a professional killer,” he said, throwing Shelly a wink. “That’s just a hobby.”
Daisy and Chu watched the whole exchange with amusement as they made their way through a pair of fresh salads made with real, non-replicated lettuce, courtesy of Tamara’s greenhouse.
“So, what other data do we have on Earth and its history?” Daisy asked. “I’ve gone through all of the data chips that the captain had stored on the Váli, but you guys have been cycling in and out of cryo here for ages. You’ve got to have more than we do.”
“Oh yeah, we have tons of raw data, but only a little has been parsed into useful information. Sure, a few of the old base files were uncorrup
ted––the former base AI fried before their peripheral housings were compromised, you see––but they’re just basic info-type stuff.”
“Still, could be interesting. Could I see them?”
“Sure, don’t see why not,” Chu replied.
“And what about those aliens. What do you have on them?”
“Why? You change your mind about the mission?”
“No, but it doesn’t mean I’m not curious. Like, how did you even learn they were called the Chithiid if you can’t understand their transmissions?”
“Global AI figured that one out with their combined resources when the attack began. What they could do when functioning as a networking unit was incredible. If they hadn’t severed all comms, we’d know a huge amount more. I mean, with all that interlinked processing power, it must’ve been incredible to see in action. Unfortunately, the AI virus pretty effectively shut it all down.”
“So, do you have any of that data?”
“The commander has a stash of the surviving bits, but it’s all kept locked away in the archive room. Sorry I can’t help you with that.”
“You aren’t seriously thinking about breaking into the secret military base’s secret and super-private archives, are you?”
And what if I am?
“Ugh, you’re so predictable. Just say you can’t do something, and anyone can guess what you’ll set your sights on next.”
You know me so well.
“Just don’t get caught, okay?”
Pinkie swear.
“I don’t have pinkies anymore, Daisy.”
I know, she answered with a silent little laugh.
“You’re such a bitch sometimes,” Sarah griped.
Chu was still talking.
Shit, what did he say?
“…And if you want I can probably get you a compiled compression file of the data Bob has recorded on all of his hundreds and hundreds of surveillance drifts. I can swing by my lab and put them on data chips for you after dinner.”
“Yeah, that would be great, Chu. Thanks for that. I really appreciate it. I’ll come by a bit later, okay?”
“Sounds good.”
