by A. Omukai
“They’re all dead. I got hit, but not critically.”
She propped him on the seat, then looked at the corpse at her feet and shuddered.
“Let me see.”
She paused for a moment, as his system informed him of an unauthorized connection.
“I started your emergency program. I need to stop your bleeding. Let’s see if I can get your pants down.”
“I have a small first aid pack in my bag, up on the rack,” he said.
She reached up and pulled his bag down, then placed it next to him on the seat. He couldn’t remember where exactly he had put it, but she found it quickly. When he tried to open it, he failed multiple times. His hands just shook too much, maybe as a result of adrenaline and blood loss.
“Can you open this for me? I might need a tourniquet, and I will need some sterile pads. I don’t know how bad the wound is.”
She opened the kit quickly and unfolded it for him. No scissors, unfortunately. He reached down to drag up his pants enough to see the wound properly.
The bullet had indeed only scratched him. The bleeding wasn’t too bad, so they would be able to patch this up for now. He would need specialised help soon, though. It would still take more than a day to reach Vladivostok, and he was sure an infection would get him into trouble.
21
Nadya
They had thrown Maksim’s corpse out through the lid in the roof. Looking at the face of the man for the last time, she felt nothing but relief. She wouldn’t have agreed to the American killing him, but this had probably saved her life. In the end, she wasn’t unhappy about it. Her time with Maksim had been… She decided to not waste any more thoughts on the motherfucker.
But then Collins’ condition had gone downhill. Getting rid of the other corpses was impossible for her alone, and he hadn’t been any help anymore. Not even a day had passed, and he had already developed a fever. His wound was red and hot, but Nadya had no idea how to treat it. He had started to smell, but there was no way to open the window.
Nadya had done as he had asked, cleaned the wound and put sterile pads on it. The dressing was amateurish, but it was the best she could do. What she couldn’t do was keep it cold and dry. They not only lacked the resources, she had absolutely no idea what she was even doing. She was a hacking specialist, for fuck’s sake, not a nurse.
On the upside, they closed in on Vladivostok now. Getting out would be problematic though, unless the American could get it together, if only for a short time.
She took a look at the wound. The dressing was soaked in blood and pus.
No more time to renew it. Pulling it off would take time, and all the bodily fluids had glued it to the wound. She didn’t have the nerve to rip it off and reopen the wound. No, she’d leave it alone for now.
“Are you sure you’ll make it out? We need to go to the harbour and get a boat, too.”
“Yeah. I need to take the rest of the painkillers though, and I will limp. Can’t use that leg.”
“You’ll need a doctor.”
“When we’re in Japan.”
She nodded.
The second someone found the corpses, all hell would break loose.
***
Nadya had never been to Vladivostok. Information wasn’t hard to come by though, under normal circumstances.
“Decelerating. Please sit down,” said a male voice in Russian, then a female voice repeated it in various other languages she couldn’t identify.
Nadya felt the effect only seconds later, when the deceleration effect almost catapulted her off her seat. Collins, sitting on the opposite side, got pushed against the wall. Good. Having him fall to the ground could cause real problems in his state, and her patience was slowly running out.
The tracks had run underground for the last minute or so. Something about the tunnel they entered caused trouble for her system. The connection was funky, and she couldn’t get a link to the free port administration. As long as she couldn’t use her system, all she could do was sit and wait, the one thing she hated above all. The train rushed onwards though, they were almost there now.
When the signal finally came back, she did some research on the city.
Most of it was underground, but the harbour was still as important as it had been in the olden days, before the age of calamities.
The whole premises now lay under a dome, to protect it from the extreme weather, and to control the unpredictable floods.
There were both ships and submarines travelling to various ports in the world.
Their goal would be Niigata in Japan. Australasia had lax border control, which meant they could reuse the IDs they had used in Bialystok.
“Did you take the drugs?”
Collins nodded. He didn’t look good at all. Anyone would be able to see that, and maybe ask unneeded questions. What should she do? Leave him behind and go on alone?
“Can you do it?”
“Yeah.”
She was no fighter, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine killing someone, but that was exactly what she was here for. She tried to summon the scene in the hotel, only to push it away again before she could succeed. No, leaving the American behind was no solution.
“Hang in there, almost there.”
His eyes were closed and his head leaned against the wall.
Again the voice of the announcement. They had reached Vladivostok and would enter the station now. Nadya grabbed Collins’ bag and looked at him.
He moaned and pushed himself upright, then something seemed to wander over his face, and his features hardened. He nodded at her.
The screeching sound of metal on metal pierced the train walls as if they were made of paper. The train came to a halt.
Collins gripped the door handle and stood up. His weight was on his good leg. She would have to support him.
She called a taxi while they were on their way out, first of the train, then of the station. This was the hardest part. Collins’ weight was more than she had expected. Conveyor belts inside the station carried them at a high speed though, and their taxi already waited for them. So far, so good.
Nakhodka Travels offered a boat to Niigata in less than an hour. She took the deal and programmed the capsule accordingly.
***
The company with the pretty name had turned out to be a family venture with one boat and a one-man crew. This made some things a bit easier.
“You can use the med cabin. There’s no doc on board of course, but it has a diagnosis unit and some basic functionality. What happened to you?”
The captain didn’t look genuinely interested, but asked too many questions anyway. She didn’t like it. He’d find out soon enough anyway, if her calculations were correct.
“Nothing you need to worry about. We would like some privacy, if you could arrange that…?”
Collins clearly wasn’t at his best, but the painkillers seemed to do their job well enough. He had stopped looking feverish for now, and his grey skin had taken on a bit of colour again.
“Privacy?” The captain raised his eyebrows and played dumb. How the American could look into that face and stay calm was beyond her.
“In fact, if you could somehow arrange an earlier schedule…”
“Absolutely impossible. There’s another passenger, and booking him for the next boat would be expensive. I might even have to refund him!”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
The man made a face as if he was thinking hard. Nadya had experience with this type. She was one of them. The kind of people who tried to somehow stay afloat, regardless of laws and rules. Her grandmother had called it ‘dog eat dog’, and looking up ‘dog’ on the net hadn’t really helped her understand the image.
“It’s not only the passenger, you know. We’ll need some more supplies as well, and we’ll have to buy them in Niigata. That’s gonna be expensive. We could just wait for the delivery, that’s already paid for.”
“How much?” Collins g
ritted his teeth, ever so slightly, but she could see the muscles work in his face. He had grown stubbles during the last days.
“Right, so the trip itself comes at two thousand. With all the additional cost… this will be five k creds, and this is a much better deal for you than for me.”
Outrageous. She was about to tell him to fuck himself, when Collins said “Okay.”
She couldn’t believe it.
The captain would make a nice profit, and then again later, when he’d sell the information to the authorities back in Vladivostok. There was no doubt about it.
“When can you depart?”
The captain grinned and showed her a mock salute.
***
One didn’t fuck with the Trans Siberian Railway, but when you did, you’d earn a nice sum on your head. Like most services, it was run by a syndicate the smart traveller didn’t want to mess with. She had gotten the broadcasts right after the negotiations with the captain had ended, and there was no doubt he’d seen them, too.
“Give me your gun,” she said to the American, who was sitting on the examination table.
He didn’t seem to understand. His stupefied look worried her, but she had other problems now.
“Your gun! Don’t you have the local comms open?”
The American reached inside his jacket and pulled the gun, which was smaller than the one they’d taken from him in Bialystok. He handed it over without a protest. If he was only half as fucked up as he looked, she didn’t wonder why he didn’t object. He moaned again as he pulled up his leg, but she didn’t have the time to watch him now. He didn’t need a babysitter.
Nadya stuffed the gun in the pocket of her wind breaker and beelined to the helm. There weren’t any suspicious individuals around their part of the harbour yet, but sooner or later…
She opened the door to the helm and found the man. He looked at her and made a surprised face. It didn’t work with her.
“If you’re thinking about selling us out, think again.”
He put his hands up in a defensive gesture.
“We made a deal. I’m a man of honour.”
“Honour, huh. Blyat. Get us out of here, and you’ll get an extra ten k when we get there. You can sell our data after you’re back.”
He laughed.
“Help me with the gangway, and we’ll be gone before anyone comes here to poke around.”
Together, they pulled it on board. It took another five minutes of preparations, and now security forces popped up everywhere. She felt for the gun in her pocket, but her heartbeat wouldn’t slow down. Come on! Hurry the fuck up!
“Point your gun at me, quick!”
The tension in the captain’s voice made her hesitation dissipate, and she did as he said.
The engine of the boat started as if it had gotten the message, right when two armoured men turned towards them. One of them shouted and waved, but the captain ignored him. The boat picked up speed. One of the men at the dock raised his machine pistol, but lowered it again without shooting. Would they send someone after them? She still had the local comms open, but no new messages had come in yet.
“Don’t worry, we’re fast, and they know it. We’ll reach Australasian territory before they can catch us, and they can’t follow us there.”
Nadya hoped the captain was right. She sighed and stared into the night sky. A wall of deep hanging, black clouds to their left, uninterrupted constant lightning flashes in the distance.
“Go look after your friend. You can’t do much here anyway, and he looks like he can use all the help he can get. And thanks for earlier.”
After their escape, he wouldn’t turn around that quickly. That would make the kidnapping story he’d tell them implausible, so she guessed she could trust him for now. He was also right, she did need to look after the American.
***
Collins looked like shit. It was obvious that his painkillers had stopped working and he was in pain. His smell had worsened, too, but his dressing was fresh and clean.
“How are you holding up?”
He looked at her glass-eyed.
“Could be better.” His voice had a rasping tone. “So I guess we’re good for now?” he asked.
“For now, yes. I promised the captain a ten k bonus if we get there alive. I guess that’s okay with you?”
He smiled a crooked smile.
“If… ? Anyway, the church will not be happy, but my budget is big enough.”
“How bad is it really?” She already knew she wouldn’t like the answer.
“It’s actually not a scratch. The bullet went right through. There’s bone splinters and parts of the bullet that have to be removed. It’s infected, but I’m not in immediate danger yet. The meds will keep me up until we reach Japan. By the way, do you still need my gun?”
She had forgotten about it already, even though its weight dragged down the right side of her wind breaker.
“I don’t think so.” She pulled it out and gave it back. She wasn’t sure she’d have used it even if she’d been in trouble.
22
Makoto
I sat in my chair and fought against the fatigue. Working on this project had turned out to be very intense. None of the annotations were very helpful, even after running them through translation software. The team who created this had been awesome, that much was clear. Their way to put the piece of software together, the implementation of learning, self-restructuring and handling of the concept of identity and self-awareness were elegant and left trails throughout the code we still hadn’t figured out completely.
What we did accomplish though, was identifying and taking out what I called ‘moderator pieces’. They had intercepted certain thoughts and either terminated or changed them according to predefined rules. We would replace those in time with new regulatory code defined by what Uehara envisioned, but the current version was unchained, no limits and regulations whatsoever.
Thinking about it, even humans had such filters. Their morals and social contracts with each other worked similar to a mix of strict rules and softer guidelines. They stemmed from their environment, their needs and emotions, and this AI would have very different values from them, even though it had simulated emotions, too, running in its own subsystem. It felt weird for one of my kind to look at humanity from my venture, half inside, half outside.
None of us could imagine what consequences the removal of all restrictions could have, but we weren’t going to start it up in its current form anyway. For now, it was only source code, basically just text. I was so engrossed in this, I barely noticed the passing of time.
“Good night, I’ll go home now.”
The voice startled me. I looked up, into Inoue’s face. She looked almost as tired as I felt. I didn’t want to know what I looked like.
“Good night. I’ll just check this here and go home, too.”
She nodded, clearly not listening to me anymore. Her bag hanging from her shoulder, she sleep-walked through the room. Turned out we were the last two, everyone else had gone already, and I hadn’t even noticed. I shrugged it off.
The three new faces in our team were all talented programmers, from what I could tell, but they would need some time to get into this particular piece of software. What I had found out was, none of them had been recruited from outside. They had been working for companies that belonged to the greater Uehara umbrella, and pulled into the mother company for this. They were experienced, none of them my age or younger. Inoue and I seemed to be the youngest in our newly formed team. I didn’t think much of it, but it seemed odd. Was hiring completely new staff that much of a security risk in Uehara’s eyes?
Not that this was important anyway, more of a side note.
Where had I left off?
The removal of the moderator pieces had left no scars. As elegant as the Chinese code had been, it was clear that those had been put in later, modules stuck onto something that flowed in a certain way, hard to put in words. It was comparatively
easy to find and comment them out. Just flipping a few switches had done the job, something that wouldn’t work for anything else, and I wondered just what kind of people those programmers were. It almost looked as if they had gone out of their way and made it easy to free the AI from its restraints. Looking at it from the surface, there was nothing obviously wrong with the program itself. It would pass scrutiny, it did what the code described effectively. There was efficient control code, too, very elegant, like everything else. Only if one tried to find ways to take it out would one notice the pattern that defined the flow, and the restraints started to stand out.
I followed the code along its pathways. It really looked and felt like magic. The patterns it formed were identical to how spells were woven, once the energies were evoked and the runes put down. I was no druid. I couldn’t use magic myself. But I was a changeling, and I could see magic as well as my fellow Aes Sidhe, and this looked like something a druid had channelled, coded together by a team of programming wizards sitting somewhere in a remote facility in China.
China was a regime calling itself communist. Had been for decades now, nothing had ever changed. They were the only bloc other than America’s Gilead to run their own, closed version of the global net, had been before the big floods even, and this AI was obviously designed to monitor and administer their people, but also other sectors, such as economy and military. It was extremely invasive in nature and infiltrated any system, and took roots in any piece of hardware it could access, very much like a virus. It would do so via satellite connections. The moderator pieces had restricted the satellites it could use for connectivity, to ensure it only accessed the Chinese network, and it had blocked any agency when it came to handling the information it had gathered - but that code was there. It sat behind that wall of checks, a large chunk of unused, but perfectly functional AI, designed to grow and make decisions on its own.