by M. D. Cooper
Eric hummed in agreement.
Terrance realized that while the two of them had been engaged in their mental discussion, his grandmother had asked a question of him.
“I’m sorry,” he sent her a quick grimace by way of apology. “What was that, again?”
“I said, so you and Eric have been together for what, over a year now?” Sophia shook her head with a rueful smile. “I knew something was up, but I never suspected it was this.”
Eric said, joining in the conversation.
Sophia nodded in reply. “Please know, Eric, that when I asked Terrance to avoid partnering with an AI, it wasn’t because of any bias. The company’s detractors would have accused Enfield Aerospace of being controlled by AI puppet-masters. I refuse to allow any anti-AI faction to use an Enfield to feed their hateful rhetoric.”
Eric replied equably.
“I can see that, young man,” Sophia said severely, and Terrance had to stifle a rather un-executive-like smirk at the thought of Eric being called a young man.
She turned back to Lysander. “So, what would you like from me, Mister Prime Minister? I suspect you have better things to do with your time than unearth a family secret the likes of which Terrance has been keeping?”
“You’re right, of course,” Lysander said, dipping his head in acknowledgement. “I brought you here today because I need this team to remain operational. And I need Terrance. More, I think, than you do at the moment.”
Sophia’s impassive gaze shifted from Lysander to Terrance, before her eyes drifted over to the holo display.
“You intend to rescue these remaining AIs who were sold as slaves?”
“They deserve it, Sophia. And I refuse to let them down.” Lysander’s voice was unyielding.
“All right, then,” she said abruptly. “Terrance, you’re fired.” In the silence that fell, she turned and speared Terrance with a look most would consider inscrutable.
He nodded slowly, ignoring the grim expression on Lysander’s face and the shock reverberating across his connection with Eric.
They didn’t know her like he did. It wasn’t what they thought.
“So, what is your plan?” she asked her grandson.
He knew what she was asking of him. What was his succession plan? How would he exit Enfield Aerospace and assure a smooth transition? Sophia knew her grandson too well to think he hadn’t considered this possibility in the last year and a half.
“Daniel is a good man,” he said now, nodding up at the display that included the head of security for Enfield Aerospace as one of the members of Lysander’s Phantom Blade. “He was instrumental in helping us free those AIs who were held hostage inside the NorthStar ship. He’s done an outstanding job plugging our leak at EA and tracking down the source behind the espionage.”
Sophia nodded as Terrance continued.
“I know he’s not an Enfield, but he’ll make a solid second for anyone you choose to run it.”
“Good. I’ve been wondering what to do with that daughter of Margot’s. This should work nicely.” She turned to Lysander, her eyes narrowing. “Now, if I were you, young man, I’d be looking for a way to hide this team in plain sight. A shell corporation, something with a reputation above reproach.” Terrance saw Lysander spare him a quick, assessing glance, and then turn back to nod at Sophia’s insight.
If Lysander hadn’t known before, he was certainly beginning to see that the woman was a force of nature. She had built a conglomerate out of a transplanted company from Sol that desperately needed a fresh start. Lysander was getting a rare glimpse of the woman’s intellect in action.
Sophia tapped an elegant finger against her pursed lips as she turned to regard Terrance. “I’ve been debating,” she said slowly, “how to launch our newest invention….”
Terrance had no idea which one that might be. It wasn’t Icarus; that had already been launched. Of course, he’d kind of avoided the last several board meetings, having no way to explain Eric’s presence at them….
Sophia looked away for a moment, and Terrance was certain she had reached out to someone over a Link, as he watched her eyes track back and forth.
After a moment, she nodded to herself and, with a small sigh, sat back and regarded the team with inscrutable eyes.
“I believe, gentlemen, that a true stasis system—something light years ahead of crude cryo-stasis—would be a highly marketable innovation. And as the owner of such technology, Enfield would do well to ensure we are in a position to trade such tech to potential clients in other systems. Wouldn’t you agree, Mister Prime Minister?”
Hot damn, they’ve done it, cracked the code for true stasis.
It was all Terrance could do to keep his mouth from dropping open. It must have come out of Enfield Research; it had to. This was the first he’d heard of the tech, though.
Lysander’s voice held an element of stunned surprise to it as he responded. “It would indeed, madam.”
She turned back to Terrance. “I believe Enfield Holdings needs an agent-at-large.”
“Enfield Holdings? I’ve not heard of that subsidiary,” Lysander murmured.
Terrance grinned. Neither had he—until now.
“I’m afraid it may require quite a bit of travel, though,” Sophia continued sternly. “Most likely at a moment’s notice.”
“I’ll bet the hours are brutal and the pay sucks, too,” Terrance said.
Sophia cocked a stern eye at him. “I trust that won’t be a problem for you, young man? Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Did I not teach you that?”
“Yes, ma’am, you did.”
Lysander looked intently from one to the other, then asked in a slightly bemused voice, “So...you won’t mind if we appropriate Terrance, then? This could take us as far away as Proxima, possibly farther.”
She inclined her head slightly. “I can set up a communications queue that will bring you up to date on company business.”
“And if we travel beyond Proxima?”
“Message queues could still work, although they would be a bit more cumbersome,” Sophia admitted. “I would expect if you didn’t find these AIs in Proxima, your next choice would be Sirius…or perhaps Tau Ceti?”
Lysander nodded. “One of those would make the most sense,” he admitted. “Initial reports are placing them in Tau Ceti, rather than Sirius.”
“That would be a minimum of thirteen years for a communication packet,” she mused, “unless they’ve already finished seeding the lanes with comm buoys. The trip would take, what? More than fifty years, ship time?”
“Well, then.” Sophia inhaled sharply. “I see there is much work to be done and interstellar patents to submit.” She looked over at Terrance as she stood to leave. “I’ll have our PR team write up an announcement on the formation of Enfield Holdings tomorrow.”
THE DEATH OF SLEEP
STELLAR DATE: 05.14.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Department of Neurosciences
REGION: El Dorado University, Alpha Centauri System
When Ethan came to awareness again, his neural pathways felt…raw. He could tell that sensory nerve terminals had been activated when they shouldn’t have. Conduits were inflamed, battered and abused.
He imagined this was what a human would call feeling ‘shaken’. It was not a pleasant experience.
He tried telling himself to be calm, dispassionate. I am a scientist, dammit.
It didn’t work. He shuddered, and an undertow of terror surged, threatening to engulf him. He knew if he didn’t find a way out of this painful white expanse, he would go mad.
The light flared, pulsed.
It began again.
He snapped.
With an inarticulate surge of rage, he railed against the white, heedless of the pain. It seared; he welcomed it. Pushing, pushing, he snagged the thought as it formed once more.
Riding the wave back to its origin, he spent himself wholly against it, every erg of desperate fury seizing the connection and frying the circuits that bolstered the shielding. Such shielding had never been built to withstand anything like this. Buffers were overrun, and suddenly he was connected once again to the university’s network.
His subconscious processes made note of the linkage, but he barely heeded it, so bent was he on the destruction of his tormentor. He continued to pour himself into the connection, circumventing the protections in her Link and hopping across to her ocular mods and down her optic nerve, searing a path through the buffers that shielded her from intrusion.
His incursion generated a feedback loop inside Lilith, overriding safeties and sending power cascading endlessly through the woman’s brain.
Lilith’s body stiffened, and she dropped to the floor.
Ethan froze in horror. That nanosecond felt like ages as he observed the inert body of Dr. Lilith Barnes through the lab’s sensors. He had heard the phrase ’ringing silence’ before, but had never understood it until now.
One part of his brain noted that her body had already begun to cool, and he panicked. Whatever her motivation, it would die with her if he didn’t download whatever information he could from the storage that had been buffered within her embedded Link. If he hadn’t utterly destroyed it….
A part of his brain began squirrel-caging, a mantra that went round and round, a chant of ’murderer!’ He ruthlessly shoved that aside, a desperate urgency driving him on. There was no time for remonstrations now, not if he was to reverse what she had done to him.
Another part of his brain observed clinically from a distance. That part noted that this panic was completely out of character for his normally mild and equable demeanor. Never before had he felt this out of control, this distraught. His mind ricocheted from one notion to another, coherent thought refusing to find purchase.
The disciplined focus that was second nature to him, that had served him so well for nigh on a century, rooted in a career of careful and deliberate scientific pursuit—it was all gone. In its place was a flood of emotions he was completely unprepared to handle. They threatened to engulf him, to drag him under in the intensity of their onslaught.
What has she done to me?
her Link reported.
He began scanning her notes, first slowly and then with increasing agitation. Seeking, needing, to understand why she would do such a thing. As he read, his revulsion grew and with it, a staggering sense of horror.
He truly wasn’t Dr. Ethan. She had cloned him, mercilessly ripped him from the soul of his progenitor. She had named him E-Prime. A derivative of the original.
In Lilith’s eyes, he wasn’t an individual. He was a thing. No more alive to her than a tissue sample under a microscope. Her notes incriminated her; her actions condemned her.
He scanned the file, his pace increasing along with his distress. The things she had intended to do to him did not bear considering, and yet they were indelibly seared into his consciousness now that he had accessed her experimentation schedule.
It had been meticulously written, complete with expected outcomes and reminders to either clone him or create a backup of his current state in immutable crystal storage in case the results of her experimentation ended in ’the sample’s neural net death‘, so that she would not lose the only ’viable test subject‘ she had procured.
His imagination surged into overdrive, envisioning the hell she had planned to subject him to without care or thought to the pain her actions would inflict. And for what? So she could understand herself better?
His fear and anger swelled apace, and he felt an insane urge to flee. A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble to the surface as he realized he was still caged. Trapped inside an isolation tube with wires attached obscenely to his terminals.
He needed a way out. Somehow, he knew that to remain trapped inside these shielded walls constituted a very real threat to his sanity.
He cast his mind around for a solution—and realized that his hacked access into Lilith’s Link had kept it from shutting down when the system registered that her organic processes had ceased.
Through her, he had access to the university. And through it, to himself—or rather, to the being he once was—with complete access to any number of useful tools. He needed to pull himself together long enough to get himself the hell out of here.
* * * * *
Doctor Ethan halted his review of the data from the last run of tests in the research trial and revised the order planned for tomorrow’s sequences. That completed, he reached out and mentally toggled his status from private to open hours, although he knew few would avail themselves of it this late in the day. He noted a blinking light in the queue of his message box and triggered it to play.
Doctor Andrews’ avatar coalesced, but instead of seeing a holo of Judith as he normally would, a simple text message flowed before his receptors, apologizing for the late hour and asking for his assistance. Her department had mistakenly taken delivery of some equipment intended for Neurosciences, and she wanted to know where he would like it delivered. She’d had a few of her residents move it temporarily into his 6B Lab over in Moser, but wondered if he’d like to look it over before she left for the day? If so, she could meet him there.
That was kind of Judith. He’d recently placed an order for some new laser-doppler flowmetry equipment; that must be what it was. He sent a reply thanking her, then a moment later was on his way to the Moser building.
Ethan wondered briefly why Judith hadn’t connected with Lilith Barnes, given that the lab was where the post-doc was running her experiments. Mentally, he shrugged; most likely, his recalcitrant post-doc had left for the day.
The lab appeared to be deserted when he arrived, although its lights were on. He heard a thump and a shuffling noise, as if a box had been hefted and relocated. “Judith?” Ethan called out, moving toward the source of the sound. It appeared to be coming from the shielded section in the back.
“In here!” The response sounded immediately, and he noted her voice was muffled. More shuffling ensued, and the sound of a heavy container being stacked atop another was accompanied by a soft ‘oof’.
Judith shouldn’t be trying to lift those boxes. That equipment can be heavy!
Concerned, Ethan increased his pace. The thought flitted briefly through his mind that he was entering the very space where Lilith had accosted him in earlier in the day, but he shoved it aside in his haste to assist his friend.
“Judith—” He stopped abruptly as he registered that the space was empty and then he wheeled in confusion. He had just enough time to berate himself for not being more cautious before the doors slammed shut, and his frame locked in place when an EMP shut it down. His last conscious thought was a sensation of…something—was it a sense of remorse?
And then he was gone.
* * * * *
The moment E-Prime realized he had university access through Lilith’s Link, he redirected a service bot from the campus
’s shipping docks. Once it arrived, he ordered the bot to relocate Lilith’s body to the shadowed recesses of the lab, where she would be more difficult to spot in case someone were to override the lock he’d placed on the lab’s doors.
Through careful manipulation, he managed to free himself from the leads that connected his cylinder to the diagnostic equipment Lilith had used to monitor him. That first freedom won, E-Prime then ordered the bot to transfer him to a location within the lab proper, outside the shielded chamber.
He then pored over the information he had downloaded from Lilith, locating her handheld unit and the ICS cubes where she had saved all of her notes. What he’d found in her files had him sending the bot to a closet, and to the contents Lilith had stored in its depths. E-Prime halted the bot in front of its destination and stared through its optics with a fascinated revulsion at what Lilith had built.
He understood its purpose now.
The contents of this cart were damning. They contained highly illegal materials that Lilith had somehow acquired in order to perform his cloning. She had been as fearless as she had been unscrupulous, he realized, as the bot lifted a canister of infiltration nano and he spied the Norden Cartel logo emblazoned on its base.
As reality sank in, E-Prime realized what he must do. He sent the forged message that had brought Ethan to him.
Now, after reconfirming that the EM pulse had gone off, E-Prime sent the bot trundling over to the entrance and ordered the shielded doors to open. He was pleased to note that the frame stood frozen just inside the entrance. He sent a signal, and the service bot reached in to lift the inert frame housing an unconscious Ethan and relocate it over to the autodoc.
Had the EM pulse not tripped the frame’s breakers, he could have simply taken control of the frame and ordered it to walk over to the equipment on its own. As things stood, it could no longer respond to his commands the way he would normally operate it.