by Scott Baron
“I’m in.”
“I know. Just grab your old neuro-stim and get out.”
“On it.”
“And don’t forget the peripheral data storage.”
“Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m taking everything.”
Daisy quickly spun the combination to her locker and swung it open.
Damn, I really do need to clean this thing out, she mused, taking the stacks of notepads piled on top of her old neuro-stim and placing them on her table.
The neuro-stim and its accompanying accoutrements were rapidly slid into the mission-specific vacuum-safe bag slung over her shoulder.
“Daisy. There’s movement. Mrazich and Fatima have exited his offices and seem to be heading your way,” Freya warned. “Get out of there. I’ll stall one of the doors on them, but you need to hurry.”
“Shit. Copy that,” she said, rushing into the corridor. “Which way is clear, Freya?”
“Back the way you came. They’re taking the other passageway. Now hurry!”
“Foreknowledge would’ve been helpful here.”
No shit, Daisy silently grumbled.
She took off at a run. It was an almost clean shot back to the airlock, but she first had to get clear of the one place the two corridors intersected. Freya could slow the commander and Fatima’s progress, but only fractionally. Anything more would surely catch Sid’s attention.
Boots skidding on the deck, Daisy rounded the corner just as she caught a glimpse of Mrazich down the hallway.
Shit. Hope he didn’t see me.
Daisy picked up her pace, looking over her shoulder.
“Nothing you can do about it now but run faster.”
I hear ya, Sis. Should be to the airlock in twenty seconds.
Daisy reached the airlock with no shouts or alarms sounding behind her.
“Suiting up. Prep for dust-off. I’ll be back out to you in less-than five.”
“I’m ready to go when you are. The airlock has been isolated from base sensors. Exit when you’re ready. I’ll turn them back on once you’re clear.”
“Copy that, Freya,” she said, decompressing the room, then stepping out into the low gravity of the moon’s surface. “And Freya? Really nice job.”
Daisy took off at a loping, low-g run back to the waiting ship.
Inside the base, Commander Mrazich had a puzzled look on his face as he and Fatima entered Daisy’s quarters. Fatima was right, Daisy was twenty-three thousand miles away on the Earth’s surface.
“Crazy old eyes, seeing things,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Fatima asked.
“Nothing,” he replied. “All right, we’re looking for Daisy’s notes on drones, remote cruisers, and patched-in AI theories. Chu would know better what to look for, but I don’t want to drag him away from his work when he’s making such good progress. I guess we’ll just have to start at one end and dig until we––”
“Found them,” Fatima chirped.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“Found them. Her written notes and the work tablets are all right on the table.”
The grizzled soldier looked at the table nearest the doorway. Indeed, their search was over as soon as it began.
“Finally,” he said, allowing himself a rare smile. “Something was actually easy for a change. Do me a favor and get these to Chu. While he digs into the data, I want to follow up with both ships’ progress. From what Donovan noted earlier, they may have stumbled upon a goldmine of useful materials.”
Sid sealed the doors behind them as they strode off with purpose. Things seemed to be brightening on Dark Side, if only for a moment.
Outside the base, Daisy climbed aboard Freya, successful in her quest, undetected and returning with her prize.
“Okay, now what?” she asked as she deposited the neuro-stim in Freya’s peripheral electronics lab.
“Now I try to sync the device I’ve been working on with the very moment of Sarah’s transfer into your mind. At the point of that iteration’s save, both versions of Sarah shared the same consciousness.”
“So you’re going to do a new build based on when we were still identical.”
“Yeah. It’s basically trying to find that common thread between both the living, flesh-and-blood Sarah, and the alive but incorporeal one.”
“You think it’ll work?” Sarah asked.
“It should,” the genius AI replied. “Of course, I thought the last version would too.”
“It almost did. At least I could hear something. If you were that close before, maybe this will get it to the finish line.”
“I hope so. My calculations look right. Now I just need to verify and configure with the new information,” Freya said, a more mature confidence resonating in her voice.
Chapter Nineteen
Deep inside Freya’s internal fabrication lab, a pair of mechanoids rumbled into motion as she orbited the globe, adjusting themselves within the waiting machinery’s humming reach as they received new upgrades from the clever ship.
On the workstation nearby, a minuscule, nanite-constructed armature carefully pieced together the spiderweb-fine linkages to Sarah’s neuro communications headband.
Farther in the belly of the ship, Freya’s other machinery was busy at work, putting the finishing touches on the powerful black box it had been building since she first departed her hidden hangar.
All of her resources, it seemed, were working on multiple solutions to multiple problems at once, while her human passengers were gathered in the galley, engaged in a different kind of problem-solving.
“Oh, admit it, you like the guy,” Daisy chided her sister. “Come on, you know you do. And now you’re alive again. “
“Hey, I was never dead.”
“Only almost dead.”
Is this where I make a crack about true love? And the line was “mostly dead,” not almost.
“Har-har.”
“The guy would make you special ice cream back on the Váli, Sis. Pistachio, your favorite. You had to notice that.”
“Sure I did. And that was sweet of him, but I only like him as a friend, Daze. Finn’s just a really good friend.”
“In a world with very few eligible humans, that sounds kind of like exactly what you need.”
“Not a chance.”
“You’ve seen the survivors. They’re human, but let’s be real. I’m still talking count-them-on-one-hand eligible men, here.”
“Nope.”
“Well, Other You likes him,” Daisy snarked at her. “And she’s had a lot longer to think about it than you have.”
“And she’s dead. That sort of thing can cloud your judgment, I hear.”
“Hey! Not cool!”
“Yeah, Sarah, that’s not cool at all,” Daisy replied out loud.
“Oh, come on, Daze. I’m the real me, here. I mean, that’s me in your head, too, sure. But she’s a copy. I’d think my opinion on the matter might weigh a little more.”
“Whoa, now. Hang on one second,” Daisy fired back. “You know how the neuro-stim built our consciousnesses.”
“Yeah. And? Your point?”
“My point is both of you are the original. One just lost her physical form, is all.”
“It’s the upload dilemma, Daze.”
“That it is.”
“That what is?”
“What Other Sarah said. It’s the classic multiple consciousness dilemma.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be––”
“Daisy, Sarah, can I say something?” Freya interrupted.
“What’s on your mind, Freya?”
“Well, as a disembodied consciousness––by your standards––I’m kinda in a pretty good position to touch on this stuff, and the thing is, how do you determine where the person really begins or ends? Is it just flesh? I mean, if a consciousness is grown and saved simultaneously with both a computer and a flesh copy, if one ceased to be but not the other, how would the other know it was really the original?
It’s like the age-old question of what exactly is the soul? Is it housed in the body, or in the mind?”
“Only humans have souls, if you believe in that sort of thing,” Sarah grumbled.
“Okay, so what if they cloned you then, instead? That would be a human. Would that clone have a soul? And taking that further, if that clone was one hundred percent identical, how would you even know it was the copy? For that matter, would it know? I mean, for all you know, you could be a copy, Sarah. Have you ever thought of that?”
“But I’m not. You saved me from the Váli.”
“But you woke up in a cryo pod. What if you were a clone I built and I just told you that to make you feel better? What I’m saying is, the saved consciousness is the same, and the mind doesn’t notice the changeover. So in that regard, isn’t a perfect copy truly the same as the original?”
“I-I suppose. For a body, that is.”
“But what about a consciousness? Sarah is identical to you. Or rather, she was when she was loaded into Daisy’s brain.”
“Huh,” Sarah muttered, reluctantly accepting––maybe––Freya’s assertions.
“So while the two of you are the same woman, you are unable to occupy the same body, and thus, you diverged in experiences and knowledge. Nevertheless, you’re the same.”
“I still don’t see how this relates to Finn. If we’re the same but different, then one of us can not like him if she wants. It’s free will, for fuck’s sake,” Sarah griped, crushing the cup from which she’d been drinking with her rebuilt hand. “And one of us has this thing stuck to her body.”
“Oh, shit.” Daisy gasped.
“What? We have tons of cups, and Freya’s nanites will just recycle this one.”
“No, not that. What you said about free will. I just realized something.”
“Where are you going with this, Daze?”
“Remember Finn’s report on their encounter in Italy?”
“I have a copy,” Freya noted. “You want me to pull it up?”
“Yeah.”
“Just a sec,” she said. “Okay, it’s on your tablet.”
Daisy skimmed the sparse report and found what she was looking for.
“Aha! There it is!”
“There what is?” Sarah asked, snatching the tablet and giving it a once-over.
“Halfway down. The bit about the mystery cyborg.”
“A cyborg showed up and took out the sniper pinning down their team,” Sarah read. “Then it scarpered off before they could thank it.”
“Notice anything unusual in the description? Anything, familiar?”
“No. It just says that he was––” She trailed off as the realization hit her.
“Uh-huh. You do see it,” Daisy gloated.
“But that means––”
“Yep.”
“Will someone please fill me in, here? I know you’re talking about the cloaked mystery cyborg but what––”
“It’s the arm, Sarah. The bit about its arm,” Daisy replied.
“Oh,” she replied in shock.
“Yep.”
“But Daisy, the report doesn’t specifically say it was Sarah who was the counter-sniper that saved the team,” Freya said.
“No, but a slender man in an old cloak, firing a modern pulse rifle with a matte-gray composite arm? That tech doesn’t exist on any cybernetic life forms we’ve ever encountered. Freya, have you seen mention of anything like it from any of the classified data stores you copied from Dark Side?”
“Hang on,” she said. “Nope. Not a one.”
“But I’m not a man, Daze.”
“No, you’re not. But under a loose-fitting cloak? In the middle of a firefight, with the hood pulled low, no less? Who could even tell?”
Sarah was loath to admit it, but Daisy was right.
“Sonofa––” she moaned. “I know what this means.”
“Yep. It means you’ve already done it. The counter-sniper was you. Will be you.”
The ship bucked slightly as they re-entered the atmosphere.
“What was that, Freya?” Sarah asked.
“A little turbulence, is all,” the young AI replied. “It’ll smooth out when we drop over the landing site. Finn’s team is already on the loop tube to Rome.”
“Sonofabitch,” Sarah said with a resigned sigh. “I guess we’re going to Italy.”
Finn’s team was pinned down behind several abandoned vehicles as the Chithiid sniper fired down on them.
“Now?” Sarah asked.
“Not yet,” Daisy replied from her vantage point in a third-floor window.
“One’s already dead, Daze.”
“I know. The report said she was.”
It was cold comfort knowing that only the single woman died in the ambush, but they would have to make do with what history had provided them. To change anything could be disastrous.
“Now?”
Finn jumped to his feet and threw a pair of ceramic knives, ducking quickly behind cover as he shouted for the others to use the distraction to their advantage.
“Not yet.”
“Come on, already!”
“Not yet!”
More sniper fire peppered the road.
“Daze?”
No. Not until––
A large Chithiid threw a coil from his power whip, yanking Finn’s cover away.
“Now!” Daisy commanded.
Sarah, finger already tight on the trigger, squeezed off a trio of shots from across the piazza, all dead on target. The sniper didn’t even have a chance to make a sound before he fell to the pavement below.
“Okay, you fuckers. It is on!”
Swinging the rifle to bear on the remaining Chithiid, Sarah jumped to her feet, her cloak’s hood hanging low over her face as she let off shot after shot. The rescued team didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and wasted no time returning fire on the attackers as well.
“Okay, they’ve got it. We gotta boogie, Sis.”
“Copy that,” Sarah said, turning and darting off down the small street at her back.
Finn scanned for their savior, but aside from the briefest of glimpses during the initial shots, the mysterious rifleman was nowhere to be seen.
The sounds of weapons fire could be clearly made out in the distance as the sisters ran for the river. Freya had set down in the expanse of the Tiber, the open space, surprisingly sheltered after centuries of unchecked growth allowed the trees along its banks to grow to enormous size.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.”
“Why, thank you,” Sarah replied with a satisfied grin.
A few quickly run minutes later, Daisy and Sarah stepped through Freya’s airlock and into her climate-controlled interior.
“Okay, Freya. Let’s head high.”
“Already lifting off,” the AI replied.
A few minutes later they were forty thousand feet up in the sky, cruising back across the Atlantic.
“You tapped into the comms network?” Daisy asked.
“You actually asking me that?” the AI sassed back at her.
Freya had done good, and Daisy decided to let the smart talk slide this time.
“How’s the team doing in Montana?”
“They’ve retrieved the keycard and are through Billings on the way back to Colorado Springs. It looks like the Ra’az are tearing into the city where the systems are down,” she added.
The city was mad, and it had gone to no small trouble trying to kill Daisy and her team, but nevertheless, she felt a twinge of guilt at letting the invaders gain a foothold in a city that had thus far held them off admirably.
A plan formed in Daisy’s mind, but she wasn’t so sure the other members of her team, living, dead, or AI, would be too fond of it.
“Freya, can you drop me close to the Ra’az command vessel?”
“You want me to take you into Billings?”
“Yeah. I have an idea that might stymie these alien fuckers.”
“But p
aradoxes? History?”
“I didn’t see anything about this in our records. As far as I’m concerned, they’re fair game,” she said, pulling one of her larger EM bombs from stowage.
“Shit, that thing isn’t live, is it?” Sarah asked uncomfortably, recognizing the device.
“Not at the moment. But when it is, I reckon it’ll have enough punch to take down a smallish ship.” Daisy looked over the position of the vessels down in Billings. “One just about the size of that Ra’az command craft, in fact.”
“You sure that’s what it is?”
“Freya was recording and studying their fleet and resources for months while you were being regrown. That’s a Ra’az command ship, all right. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Freya.”
“Before you bother, yes, it is,” the AI interrupted.
“What are you thinking, Daisy?”
“I’m thinking I’m going to get close enough to sneak this thing onto their ship, then I’m going to set the timer and hightail it out of there.”
“But there’s no reason to take the risk, Daze. There’s no strategic advantage, and this isn’t something dictated by your timeline, either.”
Daisy’s face grew serious.
“No. But I owe these bastards, and until our timelines catch up, this may be the only opportunity I have to get a little bit of payback.”
“I can’t talk you out of this, can I?” Sarah asked, slinging her rifle.
“Nope.”
“Well, then. It looks like I’m coming with you.”
Chapter Twenty
“Even with your capabilities, it’s broad daylight. No way you can fly closer, kiddo. Just drop us here. We’ll go in on foot. I know where we knocked out the city’s defenses last time through.”
“You sure you don’t want me to fly aerial cover?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Sneak and destroy is the name of the game, so you peel out of here until we need you. Find something to keep busy, and stay out of trouble until we call for pickup.”
“Well––”
“It’ll be okay, Freya. This shouldn’t take us more than seven or eight hours, tops.”
