The Girl Who Wasn't There

by G Scott Huggins

  Paul’s face went bright red. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

  “I know you didn’t,” said Jael. “After all, you really wouldn’t want to scare a face like that.”

  “I’m serious!” Paul snapped at her.

  Jael smirked but raised her hands. “Hey, little brother. Pressurize. You weren’t out of line. You welcomed the new girl. Anyone would’ve done the same.” With teenagers so rare on the Moon, there weren’t the kind of cliques and group politics that got played on Earth. You had to act like…well, like Denariis to get excluded. And even Denariis would probably find himself welcomed back if he took his lesson to heart. It was just better to be friends with everyone, given the limited choices. “But she is rather striking, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “I just…I forgot what I was wearing.”

  “I know,” Jael said. “Look, she may have been cute, but she was acting seriously weird. Even your uniform shouldn’t make people that edgy. And you were right about her.”

  “About what?”

  “She wasn’t moving like a bouncer. I was watching her as she left. She was walking like she’d lived here all her life.”

  “Nobody’s lived here that long,” said Paul.

  “Well, the first baby born on the Moon has. She’s almost as old as we are,” said Jael.

  “Wait, you mean you think that could have been Jah’nyla Patterson?”

  “Um, not unless she changed her name to Cynthia,” said Jael. “And Jah’nyla’s black. And I think she still lives in Armstrong City.”

  Paul blushed again. “I think I’ll step outside for some air.”

  Jael touched his elbow. “Nah, you’re not really that hopeless. Come on. We’ve got most of our job ahead of us.” She set the fastest pace she could down the Main Concourse. Paul easily kept up, of course, but his face was closed off as if he were looking inward.

  Sometimes Jael wondered if Mother really knew what kind of pressure she was putting on Paul, using him as her deputy. Her brother had always taken everything seriously, and she insisted on total control. Paul acted more like an adult than any of their friends, and Jael wasn’t sure that was a good thing. His anger back there at her teasing was the closest she’d seen him come to really losing his temper in years. Even during the fight with Jeremy earlier today, he hadn’t been angry. He’d been in control, which was why he’d won. She admired her brother, mostly, but Jael didn’t know whether she envied him his control or whether she was worried about what it was doing to him.

  Jael’s arms were beginning to feel loose with fatigue when they finally got to the garage. Paul swiped his code card, but it was a semi-public area. All anyone needed was a vehicle operator’s permit.

  The garage was immense. Along the far wall, the great Construcutor semi-droids were folded, like multi-armed mechanical dinosaurs, dormant until a new module was needed. Then these giant brothers of the Secutors would be activated. They were essentially mobile factories on treads, able to mine rock and print walls and domes. Each one had a control cabin mounted at its prow, but the human overseer was really only there to change the programs and be in position to stop it lest anything go terribly wrong.

  The huge machines were parked by lines of lunar rovers, used for survey, rescue, and occasional transportation to other colonies. Along the walls were workbenches, automated tools, and finally, the Secutors in maintenance cycle, waiting for the automated attention of the Exacutor repair droids, scuttling over them like giant spiders.

  From their vantage point along the wide catwalk that circled the dome halfway up its curve, Paul spoke into his convirscer.

  “Interrupt Secutor maintenance cycle, auth Deputy Paul.” The Exacutors scuttled away across the garage, some to their own bays, and some to the next task on their queues.

  “Okay, we’re clear. Let’s get on with it.”

  Jael nodded. After a quick survey of the stairs and the floor below, Jael flipped her legs over her head, pushing off with her crutches. For a moment she hung in the low gravity and then jackknifed forward, exulting in the rush of air before sticking her landing, crutches spread wide for balance. In that moment she could pretend that she was Marta Krovikian, about to carve her way through a swath of evil cyborgs, not plain old Jael Wardhey stuck doing maintenance on the Moon.

  “Are you done?” Paul asked, bouncing down the stairs.

  “Probably,” Jael sighed.

  Fifteen Secutors later, Jael’s fingers ached with the repetitive strain of installing the override antennas. She’d learned a lot about how the Secutors worked. She’d learned a lot about how to look at them. She’d even learned to spot some signs of wear that the Exacutors would miss. But neither she nor Paul had learned what might be causing the Secutors to shut down the way their mother had seen them do. Every one of them was in fine condition.

  She slotted the last antenna in place and waited until Paul re-sealed the android. He frowned at it.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Droid 41 isn’t here,” he said. “The one that broke. It should be. It reported that it was going to the garage.”

  “Perhaps that signal was broken, too,” Jael said.

  He rolled his eyes at her. “That’s helpful.” He looked around. “We can’t search this whole place, or we’d be here forever. We might as well go on out the other side and see if it’s out in the corridors somewhere.”

  Jael nodded, and Paul led the way between the lines of rovers and Construcutors to a maintenance hatch that opened onto a freight elevator. He rang for it.

  Jael said, “Well if the signal telling us where the Secutor went is broken, we’re in sad shape. That’s a software problem. The good news is that Dad ought to be able to figure it out.”

  The door of the elevator hissed, and Paul turned as it opened. “Yeah, but the odds of our just stumbling across it are—Gah!”

  Paul jumped back and nearly banged his head on the hatchway. There, staring at him with its blank head, was a Secutor, stuck in the corner.

  “Yeah,” said Jael, after a few seconds of silence. “Calculate those odds for me again, Paul? You know I have trouble with math.”

  Without looking at her, her brother said, “Is that why you only have a 96% in Stats and Calc while I have an 87%?”

  “Yes,” she said sweetly.

  “Great.” He stepped forward and opened up the Secutor. “It’s number forty-one all right. What the hell is it doing here? On the other hand…” he paused, and said hopefully, “Maybe this solves the problem? I mean, it said it was going to the garage, and this is practically the garage.”

  Jael shook her head. “That’s human thinking. Computers don’t think that way.”

  “Computers don’t think at all,” said Paul. “Not since the AI War.”

  “That’s what I mean. If we still used AI, that might make some sense. But what we use isn’t even as aware as mid-century stuff. It only knows that it is in the garage, or out of it. It wouldn’t come ‘almost’ here.

  “And you’re sure that it knows the elevator isn’t ‘here?’”

  “The only reason for Secutors to come to the garage is for maintenance. That’s the only part of the garage that counts for them.”

  “Maybe its drive system gave out, and it stopped right before getting here,” said Paul. He unsealed the maintenance hatches for the Secutor’s drive and examined them in VR. Then he shook his head. “Nope. That’s not it. Well, we might as well check everything out about it. You install the override.”

  Jael flipped open its head as Paul opened up the rest of the Secutor. She moved to plug it in and froze. What was wrong was so obvious that she had to look twice to make sure she saw it.

  “Paul,” she said, not blinking, in case it went away. “Are you, um, not seeing what I’m not seeing?”

  “Where?” he asked. “Why are you staring at its—what the hell?”

  “The whole transceiver is gone,” Jael said.

  Paul looked at it
through his own VR. “It’s not just the transceiver. It’s the whole descrambler and signal processor.”

  “Well then, if all of that’s gone, how was this Secutor working at all?”

  Paul removed his convirscer and shook his head. “It wasn’t. Can’t have been. It’s completely impossible.” He peered into the robot’s shell of a skull. “Someone took some kind of a cutting tool to these mounts. They’re completely sheared away. Has to be a laser or a chembonder, I’d say. It doesn’t look like it was damaged when it was removed. How did whoever took the antenna leave the Secutor operational?”

  “Hold on,” said Jael slowly. “Why are you assuming the theft happened first? Couldn’t someone have just run across the broken Secutor here and decided that they wanted a transceiver?”

  Paul’s face screwed up in thought. They both knew that equipment theft for salvage was one of the most common crimes that their mother had to deal with. There was just so much machinery required for people to survive on the Moon that you couldn’t watch it all.

  “Then whoever it was would have had to be able to open the Secutor up as well,” he said. “And they shouldn’t be able to do that without codes that only our family or the Mayor has access to. But there’s the vid pickup right there,” Paul pointed at the tiny bubble in the corner of the elevator. “So if you’re right, we’ll be able to figure that out. It would be a heck of a coincidence, though.”

  “Or, what if they hacked its command code from somewhere else, and then drove it here to steal the transceiver?”

  Paul shook his head. “Who would have that kind of access? Villainous Secret Moon Nazis?” he said. “Because that’s what it would take. Only the manufacturers should have codes able to do that. It might even be hard-coded. Anyway, it’s out of our league. We’ll need Dad to look at the software logs. No, wait!” Paul put his VR back on and started examining the Secutor closely again.

  “What is it?” asked Jael.

  “Well, look at what else is here,” said Paul. “All the onboard computers are still intact. The batteries are still here. Vacuum-rated and dustproof electric motors still in the housings. That’s several thousand dollars’ worth of molecular circuitry and salvage. Not to mention the possibility of reverse-engineering the software. We know they had something that could cut through the mountings.”

  Jael nodded. “So why is any of it still here? That’s like robbing someone and taking their convirscer but leaving a wallet full of thousands of dollars.”

  “Exactly. Whatever this was, sis, it wasn’t just equipment theft. Mom and Dad will have to work on it. You take video, and I’ll take stills.”

  They worked together, recording the crime scene from every angle. It didn’t take long.

  “Now what?” asked Jael.

  “Well, I should be able to order and reinstall a main antenna from the garage. I can plug it in, and it’ll hold even without the mounts long enough for us to steer it back to where the Exacutors can fix it on a manual override. Let’s go.”

  Paul and Jael re-entered the garage just in time to see their father descending the stairs.

  “I didn’t think I’d still find you here,” their father “Thought you’d have been long gone trying to get the job done.”

  “We thought so, too,” Paul answered. “What brings you after us?”

  “I’m not after you at all,” said their father. “I just got these stabilized.” He handed Paul an intricately patterned metal ring.

  “Oh, the magcoils,” said Paul. He held up the thick ring, or the short tube, to the light. It was a capacitor, regulator, and magnetic coil in one complex package. Jael thought it was pretty, too, but inwardly, she groaned.

  “Do you want us to go back and install all those, too?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from rising into a whine.

  “Noooo, I don’t think so,” said her father. “Much as I’d like to spare myself the tedium, I’m not about to let my children be in charge of installing what is theoretically a lethal weapon.”

  The Secutors’ magcoils were almost never used. They worked exactly the same way as the coilguns that Paul and his mother carried. The flechettes they shot were tipped with neocurare, a paralyzing poison that was geneered to fell a human in about ten seconds. The targeting lasers in the guns performed a spectroscopic analysis on the target and what it was wearing when the trigger was pulled, adjusting the gun’s power to provide a shot that would penetrate outsuit and skin with minimal injury. Still, accidents could happen, and great precautions were taken with the weapons. They were quite capable of killing or tearing apart a Secutor on their highest power levels. No one had ever seriously considered giving the order to set the weapons for lethal force, Paul knew, but both his parents had drilled it into him that you never, ever pointed one without remembering that death was a possible outcome.

  “Okay, Dad,” said Paul. “But we found something weird.”

  “What did you find?”

  Paul and Jael took turns describing the damage to the Secutor and their theories. Their father’s expression became grimmer and more concerned as they did so. He left the garage and went to see for himself. For silent minutes, Mr. Wardhey examined the machine, both with his VR and with his naked eyes.

  “Well, this Secutor was very definitely wrecked, and with a high-powered laser torch,” he said. “A chembonder set to dissociate leaves rounded, smoother surfaces, not sharp-edged like this. But it wasn’t wrecked today.”

  “What? But the logs show it was working today,” said Paul.

  “The logs do show that,” said their Father, darkly. “But look at what you did while you examined it.”

  “What we did?” said Paul, looking blankly at the machine. “We just opened it up.”

  Jael followed her brother’s gaze, looking at the dull black Secutor in confusion. Then it hit her. It was dull black—except in tracks and blobs of gleaming composite surface where they had brushed up against it.

  “Look at the dust,” she said, pointing. “It didn’t get that kind of accumulation today.”

  “Why didn’t I notice that before?” said Paul.

  “It’s easy to miss,” said their father. “I might have too, in this dim light, if you hadn’t knocked some of the dust off. But you’re right. This needs more investigation. I’ll see to it after dinner.”

  “Don’t forget to check the…” Paul’s voice ran down. “No, I guess if it’s been there long enough to get that dusty, the vid of it getting here would’ve been long since deleted, huh?”

  “Doubtless, but I’ll check anyway. Now, you two run along and finish the rest of your job. I’ll be right behind you. Last team home loads the dishwasher.”

  “All right, Dad. See you at home.”

  Paul and Jael used the freight elevator to take them up and continue their search for more Secutors. They were halfway done with the third one when Paul groaned ruefully.

  “What is it?” asked Jael.

  “I forgot to give Dad back his magcoil,” Paul said, holding up the little tube. “Suppose we have to go give it to him?”

  “Nope,” said Jael. “Because he didn’t ask for it back and it might actually mean he wins his bet if we interrupt work to track him down. Besides, he’s the one who’s always lecturing me about the importance of bringing spares.”

  “And if he didn’t?” asked Paul.

  “Then he’ll call us,” said Jael. “And he deserves to be on the sharp end of his own lecture.”

  Paul snorted and bent back to his work. They had at least a dozen Secutors to go, and neither of them wanted more chores.

  Chapter 6

  Pieces of the Past

  Paul and Jael did get out of having to do the dishes that night, and Paul’s father never called them back. He also never solved the problem of what had happened to the Secutor.

  “The only thing I can say for sure,” he said, a few nights later at dinner, “is that the transceiver is gone. Likely sold for scrap somewhere.”

 
“What if they disabled the transponder function and are still using it for something?” asked Jael.

  Their father shook his head. “If whoever took it was good enough to recode the transponder, they could make a better transceiver than that one. And probably without stealing Secutor parts.”

  “Have there been any more incidents, Mom?” asked Paul.

  “No, thank heaven,” said their mother. “I don’t like having a scrap thief around, particularly one this good, but I’m hoping that the Secutor issue has been fixed.”

  Their father grimaced. “It’s not ‘fixed.’ We don’t know what went wrong with it in the first place unless Kanzian in IT knows something he hasn’t told me.”

  “Is that likely?” Their mother’s eyes narrowed.

  “No, Erevis,” said Dad. “Kanzian’s a good guy. But an update was beamed up to Earth about the same time when we were investigating. It may have interrupted whatever process was causing the Secutors to lose communications.”

  “You don’t like the updates, do you, Dad?” asked Jael.

  “The updates are necessary,” their father said. “What I don’t like is how fast we’re getting them. Too fast for us to really understand. That’s just one more step down the road that ended in AI once before.”

  “Really, Dad?” asked Paul. The room felt colder.

  “Oh, I’m probably being a little too reactionary,” their father said. “We’re nowhere near playing with real AI. But…bad memories.”

  Paul looked at his mother, whose forehead was furrowed in concern.

  Again, he wondered what it would have been like to have grandparents. He supposed that he and Jael were just lucky to have been born at all, and that his parents had been at school in Topeka, KS rather than home with their families when the AI-directed bombs had turned Seattle and two dozen other world cities into bubbling glass. Their father had been closer to his parents than their mother had to hers, but both of them had needed to grow up fast after that.