by A. Omukai
Tanya hit her on the back of the head.
“So that means yes?”
Tanya mumbled something she couldn’t make out, but she got the connotation and grinned.
Without further words, she opened the door slowly, poking her head out and scanning the corridors. Nadya didn’t carry a weapon. Tanya did, but her gun was loud, so she really hoped to not meet anyone.
Muffled sounds of gunfire and explosions came from further outside the site. Perfect.
“Dmitriy, keep it up, please. If possible, lure them away from the building.”
His face popped up in the upper right corner. He nodded.
Good old Dmitriy. The man had his priorities straight.
No scanner access meant she depended on her five senses, and she wasn’t a soldier. Tanya was, however, if even only a logistics expert, but the athletic blonde with the lion’s mane had a lot more combat experience than Nadya.
She didn’t have to look back over her shoulder to know her friend was covering her. She concentrated on getting their path planned out efficiently.
The control centre was below the ground, on the third basement level. They were now on the second of six floors above the ground, the main server farms running the AI had been on the top floor.
Nadya checked the time while running. The bomb countdown ticked down in a small, faded window she had to actively focus on to see, as to not impede her vision. She set it to ‘always visible’ now. Seven minutes left.
Nadya wasn’t an athlete, but she wasn’t in terrible shape either. She sped up, rushed back to the stairwell.
“This is risky,” Tanya commented, but Nadya shrugged and pushed open the door that led into the narrow well, in which the light switch was a motion sensor that was impacted by the jamming, too. Nadya registered that only in passing.
She took two steps at a time. Her breath went hard and fast. No time to lose. Five floors to traverse, and the ceilings were high, which made for long, steep steps. When she almost reached the floor below, she stumbled. She suppressed a curse and caught her balance again before she ran into the wall.
Tanya shook her head. No ‘told you so’ necessary, she was aware. She went around the corner, and a drone hovered in the air. Two guns attached to its lower side, the soccer ball sized floating robot caused her to shiver even in its deactivated state. She knew, at some point, someone would see what she had done and reverse the settings.
They pressed on. Another floor behind them, six minutes left on the detonation timer. They might not make it out in time, but she’d deal with that problem after they solved this one.
She sensed something ahead and came to a sudden halt. Tanya stopped before running into her, but barely.
She closed her eyes and listened. Very weak sounds from down below. A door opening and closing, two voices, steps, getting weaker as the seconds passed.
She continued her way down, now taking the second half of the steps in one plunge, catching her balance at the wall in front of her.
Two more floors.
One more floor.
The door to the corridor opened, and the silhouettes of two men appeared in the door frame. Nadya felt herself pushed to the side. She saw a whirl of blonde hair, heard crushing bones and the bubbling noise of voice trying to penetrate blood. A second look at the men revealed their lab coats, now soaked with blood, black in the stairwell’s twilight.
Nadya didn’t waste time. While she sprinted again, Dmitriy’s face came up.
“Status?”
“Not yet.”
“Blyat.”
She could see blood on his forehead. Then he closed the link. This wasn’t good, but she had her job to do and couldn’t stop for anything now.
Tanya had dragged the two figures into the stairwell and closed the door, so she had fallen behind. Didn’t matter now. Nadya pushed open the door to the security control centre. It was empty. She couldn’t believe her luck. There were three consoles, only one of them running. She heard a moan from a room down a hallway and flinched. She wasn’t alone. Tanya entered the room, and Nadya laid a finger on her lips. Tanya nodded.
Another moan.
Tanya sneaked down the corridor, and Nadya sat down in front of the console.
Less than five minutes. She got to work immediately.
Sitting in front of a physical device felt strange to her. Anachronistic. A keyboard with actual keys to press wasn’t something she saw every day.
She confirmed that she was still logged in. No problem there. Nadya called up the control systems one after the other. She couldn’t shut down the jam just yet, but she now knew where to find it. She went into the drone scan systems and opened its configuration. Everything she needed was listed neatly, but it was all in Chinese. Two of the settings were on top of the list now, and she reversed the values. If this would do what she hoped it would, she couldn’t say for sure, but the system was simplistic enough.
She called up Dmitriy again. His face appeared where it had last been. The blood on his face might or might not be his own. She couldn’t tell, but she didn’t have the time to confirm now.
“Listen. I’ll shut down the jam now.”
A loud thump from down the corridor. Someone fell to the ground.
“If this works out, the drones will wake up and go for the guards instead. But I need to know if it’s set up correctly. Worst case, I have to readjust.”
Dmitriy nodded. Gunshots again, his face disappeared and came back on immediately.
She confirmed the configuration, then shut down the jammer. A green mark appeared on the screen, changed to yellow, then red. Eighteen entries appeared on a list on the right side of the screen.
There were fourteen yellow ones, and four green.
“No idea where these drones went,” Dmitriy started, but got interrupted by the sound of guns again.
His eyes widened. “What the fuck?”
Nadya laughed, then checked the countdown while reactivating the elevators.
“Three minutes!”
Tanya nodded and opened the door. She stared into a gun pointed at her face.
The man was dressed in a soldier’s uniform. This wasn’t one of the normal guards. Tanya ducked behind the door and slammed it into the soldier, but he caught it with his foot and pushed back. She got hit hard by it and pushed back all the way to the console, where she ran into Nadya. They both went down.
The soldier grinned, raised the gun and aimed directly at Tanya’s head.
Time seemed to stand still for a moment. Nadya saw him close one eye, steady the pistol. One step forward.
A red LED behind him in the stairwell.
Then time sped up, and the two women got showered in warm liquid.
“Blyat!” Tanya swore, tried to get up, slipped and came crashing down on Nadya again.
They stood up, gripping the chair for support. One step forward to open the door, where they saw the drone drift up the stairs.
“To the elevator.” Nadya said.
***
It was humid outside, despite the late hour. Numerous drones hovered in the air, but they didn’t seem to mind the intruders walking among them.
Being surrounded by deadly machines, they ran towards the main gate, three figures in the dark. An explosion behind them illuminated the yard. The gate was open just wide enough for an adult person to pass. Dmitriy had to squeeze through.
On the other side of the road, at the edge of a bamboo forest, Pavel opened the car doors.
“By the way,” Tanya started and sat down in the back of the car. “You got the AI, didn’t you?”
Nadya laughed and made a rude gesture.
Pavel snorted and pushed down on the pedal.
3
Daniel
Daniel stared into the mirror and couldn’t find his face. The bathroom was tinted dark blue from the indirect light, and low beats of music from his neighbour’s flat above hammered in his head. His mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood.<
br />
A brutal headache hit him, filling his world with red rage. But not suddenly, he had seen it coming; the symptoms were the same every time.
He opened his eyes and checked the mirror. His face was still missing, as if he didn’t exist. He could see the door with the towel hanging next to it, where his frame should have been.
“Synchronizing,” a well-modulated female voice said.
His head was a battlefield, as if a lunatic sat inside and banged at the walls of his skull. It would take a while for the pain to calm down.
He reached for his upper lip to check for a nosebleed. None. This must be his lucky day, normally things went way worse.
He stared at the tap and tried to remember how to open it.
Everything slowed down to a crawl. There was a delay between him deciding to grip it to let the water flow, and his hand to move. Then lag again, when the water came out a moment too late.
He had tunnel vision, but what was visible to him, was of utmost brilliance. Every detail stood out.
His focus and resolution were ultra-sharp. The blue light and the beat of the music unified, dimmed and brightened in the same rhythm. The window to reality ahead of him shrunk and grew to the same beat, even the drummer in his skull went with the flow.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when the voice returned.
“Synchronized.”
The tunnel walls broke down in slow motion, brick by brick, the light got brighter and the drum in his head lost intensity over what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than seconds.
Then time sped up and returned to normal.
His hands shook, and his heart rate was way up. The whole ordeal hadn’t taken all that long, and it had taken place in the safety of his home.
He raised his head and looked in the mirror, just to be sure. His face was back. He was pale, and he had shadows around his eyes, but everything was in one piece.
He washed his face with cold water, reached for the towel behind him, and returned to reality.
***
On his way to the living room, a notification flashed in the corner of his vision. Incoming call. He put on a shirt and accepted the connection.
“Daniel, you look terrible.”
No shit. He looked like he felt.
The person on the other end was his supervisor, bishop Fisher. Old like a rock, thin, white hair, and his face a Mars landscape, rocky and interrupted by ravines and dried out river beds. He had been in his 80s when he got the Treatment.
“What can I do for you?” Daniel asked in his business voice.
“I want you to come to the office. There’s something we have to talk about.”
“What about my sub?”
“Don’t worry about it. I won’t go into detail now.”
Daniel nodded. There must have been a change in their game plan.
“Understood,” he answered and waited a second for the bishop to close the connection.
If Fisher didn’t tell him a time to meet him, he wanted him to come immediately, and in that case, he better not lose time.
***
He went down to the basement level, hurried through the parking lot to his capsule, then sank down into the high-speed tunnel. It would take him twenty minutes to arrive at his destination. Not enough time to do anything meaningful, but long enough to get bored. The speed of the capsule was high and pressed him into the seat even while lying.
He checked the time, 5:40AM. His submarine would have gone in little over an hour, he’d have been on his way to the port just a bit later.
The weather forecast predicted another sandstorm. What else was new?
The news streams showed reports of a terrorist attack on the cathedral in Las Vegas. This was obviously the work of the heathens from Cascadia. Daniel sneered. Another tsunami incoming at the west coast, fights at the border between India and China, an Australasian satellite shooting down a stealth craft of unknown origin over the Chinese sea, and an assortment of celebrity scandals.
The tunnel went on straight, with few curves. Yellow lighting from the ceiling made it visible just enough to see where it was going, and to indicate movement. Daniel didn’t have to check the meter to know his capsule kept getting faster. He felt the acceleration like a huge hand pressing him down on his seat. He would have gone even faster, but the security systems wouldn’t allow him to, and overriding them would lead to all sorts of formalities later he didn’t have the time and nerve to deal with. If the bishop wanted him at the office, that meant he wanted to brief him in person. The issue was obvious, security. In theory, nobody would dare to listen in to a transmission between officials of the church, and he was sure he would notice. There were heretics with no sense for which bridges to never cross. Even the slight chance of their talk being monitored would spell doom for their project, and they couldn’t have that.
He played with the ring on his finger, the hands in his pockets. If security was the issue and they cancelled his sub, there would be a change of plans. He didn’t believe they would let China get away with coding a general AI. Man playing god and creating artificial life was already blasphemous, not to mention the geopolitical danger this would create. The potential shift in power. China getting ahead was not acceptable and had to be stopped at any cost. Daniel couldn’t try to come up with reasons for this interruption of his schedule. He would have to wait and see. He gritted his teeth. Daniel had never been a patient man, never would be. He felt the pressure subside gradually, as the car had reached top acceleration. The outside was now a blur, passing too fast for the human eye.
“Five minutes until ascent to surface level. Hazardous weather warning.”
The soft, male voice of his vehicle fell silent. Nothing but a swooshing sound now, and slight vibrations. Daniel closed his eyes and tried to relax. He failed. He needed to know what was going on, and he wouldn’t have peace of mind until he did.
4
Makoto
The doors behind the secretary’s desk opened as we got closer. I hesitated for a moment, entered and looked around.
This was the office of Uehara, the man himself, founder and CEO of the largest tech company in Australasia.
The outer wall was transparent, but there was no telling whether it was an actual window, or a monitor displaying the outside. A smell in the air that reminded me of hospitals, or… no, nursing home was the correct term; the characteristic smell of old people hung in the air and took my breath. I cringed and hoped I didn’t wear my thoughts on my face.
I looked at the man. Nobody knew how old he was. He had received the Treatment multiple times, starting when its first iteration came out, and looked ageless in an unsettling way. When the Treatment was still in its early days, it hadn’t stopped ageing completely; it had only slowed it down. Some people hadn’t been compatible with one specific version and had developed aggressive cancer growth. When it got fixed, the cancer had already done a lot of damage. The fix had come quick enough to save the patients, but repairing it hadn’t been possible. Uehara appeared to be one of those cases.
Behind him, near the window with the closed shutters, hung a Winter Court faerie in the air. This must have been Macginnisi, the agent of the other side. Either their intelligence wasn’t up to date, or his poker face was flawless. I didn’t look directly at him, normal people weren’t supposed to be able to see a faerie that didn’t want to be seen, and giving away that I could indeed see the agent, while not inconceivable, would lead to complications. I didn’t want to be thought of as human with magical abilities and attract attention.
Uehara looked up from his desk, which dominated the room, and stared first at me, then Ishida. I didn’t dare speak first. Uehara was an unknown quantity to me. I had never dealt with the man before, and I ignored rumours about people.
“So…” Ishida said. He looked straight in the old man’s face, his voice reflecting his self-esteem. “About the positronic—”
Uehara made an impatient noise and
frowned.
“What can you tell me about the progress on the hardware?” He asked, looking at me.
I glanced at Ishida, then opened my mouth to speak.
“It’s been running for nine hours,” Ishida said before I got the chance to reply.
Uehara exhaled audibly.
He folded his hands on the desk, looked me straight in the eyes and repeated his question.
I felt myself blushing. This didn’t go as planned at all.
“We, err…“ I breathed out and started again. “We believe we managed to find and squash the last hardware bugs. The system has been in debug mode for the last hours, and no signs of any technical problems,” I said.
Ishida’s clothing shuffled a bit while he shifted his weight. The sound probably wasn’t as loud as I perceived it.
I looked up at Uehara, my hands wet with sweat now. I had been lucky to get into this project. Uehara Inc. was the largest producer of hardware in Australasia, and its security was tight. When the Summer Court had learned that the Winter Court was involved with the company, we had to burn a lot of favours to get me on the roster. It would become impossible to plant another agent if my cover blew up.
“So, how likely are we to have a working operating system for it soon?”
He tapped slowly with his index finger on the desk.
“Our temporary system is very crude. It has no proper security measures either, and I’m not sure I’d build on this version.”