Redemption of Sisyphus

by Eric Michael Craig

  Tana had followed Anju like a woman on a mission.

  “Before you start digging into the mystery, let me explain a few things and save you a lot of time,” Tana said as she pulled herself into the room and settled down onto a chair.

  “Genetic engineering?” Anju asked. “I remember my mother talking about how humans should adapt themselves to Mars and not the other way around. It’s been a long time, but I still remember the debates she had before …”

  “You were what, maybe nine when Burroughs happened?”

  “Yah. Spent two years in the Twin Cities during the short times before we went back,” she said, bouncing over and settling across the table. Every time the memories came back, she felt like she was staring at a ghost. “I left for good the day after my eighteenth birthday. Haven’t heard or seen my mother since.” She shook her head.

  “She’s considered a hero,” Tana said. “Almost legendary.”

  “That would depend on who writes the books,” Anju said.

  “I didn’t come here to drag up old feelings,” Tana said. “I wanted to answer the questions I’m sure you have about Kylla and the others.”

  “Like I said, they’re genetically engineered. That much I already figured out. I’m sure given time I’ll get the rest worked out.”

  “Everybody on the Katana except Edison and Tamir are engineered in some way,” Tana said.

  “Even you?”

  She nodded. “Mine is minor, but yes even me. Most of the modifications in the early program were simple. Things like a boost to senses. Hearing is easy. Eyes, too. Smell was a lot more challenging since the olfactory nerves are complex. Even physical strength and endurance are fairly straight forward.”

  “Saffia called Seva an alpha, is that what she meant?”

  “Yes. Seva was from the first program,” she said. “She got a reflex and strength tweak. I remember working on her myself, but she doesn’t know that.”

  “Small solar system,” Anju said.

  “Indeed.” Tana smiled. “Although in reality, not all coincidences are serendipitous. We helped nudge her onto this mission.”

  Anju raised an eyebrow. “The same way I got nudged onto this mission?” She let a spark of anger flash for a moment, but she bit down and let her thought die unspoken.

  “Actually, your mother wanted you here,” she said.

  “I suspected she was behind it,” she said, her tone dropping a block of ice on the table between them.

  “Let me back up and start over,” Tana said. “It isn’t my intent to excise scar tissue. I’m willing to leave it alone, if that’s what you want.”

  Anju nodded, but said nothing for several seconds. “You’re right,” she said. “My baggage is in my past, and it needs to stay there.”

  “Let me tell you how the programs worked and what I brought with me,” she said. “The alpha tier was the genesis of all the work we do now. It started out as a research program to see how far we could manipulate the genetic code of already viable specimens.”

  “Manipulating living creatures?” Anju said. “They used to call it gene-hacking.”

  “That was a very dangerous practice, but essentially it’s what we did,” Tana said. “We never intended the alpha tier to be a long-term project, but some results were useful. We’ve been working on the simple upgrades for a couple decades and we’ve explored things as far as we can safely push the limits of viability.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Kylla was a volunteer for the alpha tier program right toward the end of the research, and she has almost every upgrade we could pack into an already living human. She has the basic sensory kit and several other things, but she was the first to get a cognitive boost.”

  “That’s why she absorbed the language as quickly as she did?” Anju asked.

  “Probably so,” Tana said. “The modification rewired part of her Broca Region so that her logic centers connected more directly to each other.”

  Anju leaned back in her chair and grinned. Turning to reach behind her she picked up a thinpad and thumbed through screens as she said. “Go on.”

  “The redesign gave her an increase in cognitive processing, but it apparently worked to give her a language kick we hadn't tested for,” she said. “The One-Voice laws of the early Union, wiped out the need for multilingual skills, so we never even thought about it.”

  “How did she do in mathematics?”

  “I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I’d expect that would be high,” she said. “Why?”

  “We’ll come back to that,” Anju said, setting the thinpad face down on the table and nodding.

  “Ten years ago, we wound down the alpha work, but just before we did we began the next level of augmentation,” she said.

  “Fetus modification?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “There is only so much alteration we can do to a living subject before the collateral genetic effects cause a degradation of viability.”

  “Isn’t that a euphemism for ‘we can only tweak the code so far before we screw things up?’”

  “Pretty much,” Tana confirmed. “Kylla was the only alpha to get that particular cognitive alteration, and it didn’t come without a serious complication.”

  “Failure of the buccal mucosa?” she asked. “That’s minor, and is an easy cosmetic fix. The dental aperture is stylish, but not all that useful to hide a deformation.”

  “The tissue was weak, but she has a blood oxygenation issue when she concentrates,” Tana said. “It also comes with a temperature regulation problem, too.”

  “So it’s to ventilate her brain?” She almost laughed.

  “We solved the problem in the fourth generation of crèche augments, so now the only way to tell they are over working is to watch for capillary dilation,” she said. “Except for Saf, all the people we brought are gen-four or later.”

  “Does Saf have an overheating problem too?”

  “Yes, but not that way,” Tana said, winking. “That also brings me to something that might be important to consider living in a closed space with this many CA. You need to know that any gene modification we’ve ever done, since the earliest work in the alphas, has resulted in an unintended alteration in pheromone production. It can have some undesired effects on normals that aren’t used to it.”

  “That explains so much about Seva,” she said. “The first year of our mission she bedded everybody on the ship. Except Jeph.”

  “He wasn’t interested?” she asked.

  “I think he was terrified of being broken,” she said, laughing.

  “Switching gears,” Tana said. “Why did you ask about Kylla’s mathematic skills?”

  “The Shan Takhu language uses a mathematical syntax, but mostly I’m just poking it to see what sticks,” she said, drumming her fingers on the back of the thinpad. After several seconds, she flipped it over and slid it across the table. “Is this the modification to the Broca Region you were talking about?”

  “When did you scan Kylla?”

  “It isn’t hers. This is Ian,” she said “Is he one of yours?”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Ian Whitewind,” Anju said, realizing that he might not have come up from the Kanahto since they arrived.

  Tana pulled the pad closer and shook her head as she studied it. “Is he one of the Armstrong crew? I pulled up your mission charter on the way out here and cross-matched it to our records to make sure I knew the topography on the deck. I don’t remember anyone by that name.”

  “He wasn’t one of our crew. Dr. Whitewind was the chief scientist on the Hector,” Anju said. “The Hector crashed here eleven years before we arrived.”

  “If he’s been here that long, he couldn’t be,” she said. “We did Kylla’s modification nine years ago, and she was the first and only one to get that degree of work.”

  “You’re sure he isn’t an Alpha?”

  “I’m certain,” she said. “You’ve only got two people on your
crew who are augments.”

  “Two?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sub -27: Underhive: New Hope City: Luna:

  Paulson sat in the small room that was not much bigger than the cell he occupied after his arrest, but at least the door locked from the inside. It was once a maintenance monitoring room, but someone had converted it into a rat hole for hiding. There was a small console and a chair, and a cot in a separate area that might have been a supply closet.

  After his protector had dropped him here and told him to not come out until the storm was over, he’d tried to sleep. He’d chosen to doze upright in the chair since it smelled less of sweat and other bodily fluids than the bed. Every time he dropped off, he snapped back awake, with visions of the door bursting open and security units charging in to arrest him again. These flashes of nightmare fragments dragged claws through his conscious reality, leaving his chest pounding and his hands shaking.

  It was hard not to expect his fear to manifest at any moment because he didn’t trust his keeper to not sell him out. Although he had no way of knowing, he expected the goody-bag with his name on it was overstuffed with papercred. That meant he was only as valuable to Demonica as what she perceived his potential profit margin to be above her available instant gratification.

  When you relied on thieves and junkies for support, your foundation was never on stable ground. And the woman who took him in might have been a queen in the underworld, but the shifting sands of fortune left him very much aware of how dependent on her, his situation was.

  An atmospheric breach claxon pulled him back to the world, and he gave up on his thoughts of empires in the wasteland. The single light in the overhead flickered once. Nothing serious and he almost wondered if he had imagined it. A second later the ground trembled. Something must have taken out a power relay, and the system had shunted to another trunk line.

  What the hell? He cocked his head to the side and listened to the silence. The ventilator’s hiss was barely audible, and somewhere just below that, an ominous irregular rumble. Intermittent and only a little louder than the air moving around him. But it was there, like explosions far off in the distance.

  There must be something bigger happening here.

  Leaning forward he clicked on the newswave and flipped through several feeds before he found what he needed to see. Hard facts, not plastic avatar people with pasted on smiles and artificial personality.

  A scroll marched across the screen and he stared at it. “At least a thousand military units are attacking Underhive and the loop services hub from there. Evacuations are in progress and civilians are advised not to engage.”

  Another one announced, “Fighting is spreading in Underhive Sub-18. All levels above that are engaged in sporadic conflict and emergency recovery operations.”

  Only nine levels above here. A lump of fear clogged his throat before he remembered that Underhive sprawled for hundreds of square kilometers, so nothing said it was near him. He swallowed hard and kept scanning the feed.

  “Security reinforcements are arriving from TFC.”

  From Tsiolkovskiy? “Has the war already started?” he asked the empty room.

  In lock-up, he had no access to information about the outside world, but he hadn’t expected it could have changed this much. But if FleetCom is sending reinforcements, it has to be.

  That meant the attack wasn’t an effort to recapture him. It had to be something else. Now that they’d stolen the unaligned fleet from him, he couldn’t be worth this much effort.

  He flipped back to a regular feed and left the audio off. He watched the images and the headlines since they contained more factual data and less opinion. AI systems provided locations of fighting, casualty reports and damage assessment, without biasing them for sensationalism. The images from close to the front lines filled the center of the screen and the upper banner lines seldom caught his eye. At least not until his name appeared on one. He tapped the screen and called up the audio and video feed.

  “These images are coming in from an undisclosed source and we’re trying to confirm where they were taken,” the commentator said as his face disappeared and one of the upper levels of NHC materialized.

  “I think that looks like the upper concourse of the Underhive Cross Connect, but I might be wrong,” a second anchor said.

  “The optic feed seems to be from a hand-held device, and whoever took it was behind the lines where the assault is happening,” the first one said. “The reason this is getting so much attention is right there.” The image zoomed in on a group of men and froze.

  Standing in the middle of the group Paulson saw his own face on the screen. He was wearing an armored PSE and giving orders to several people around him.

  “We have confirmed the person we are highlighting in this video to be Paulson Lassiter,” one commentator said as the image started moving again. “We don’t know what he’s doing leading the assault, but if you watch he appears to be in charge of the attacking forces.”

  “What the frag?” Lassiter hissed, jumping up from his seat and stumbling back against the wall.

  “Why would the Steward of the Union be leading an assault force against the Underhive Village?” the second one asked. “It seems strange that with the massive unaligned population of Underhive, he’d be attacking the people that elected him.”

  “We know he’s been actively involved in the reformation of the government. It’s possible the residents of Underhive have simply gotten caught in the crossfire, after Mayor Pallassano declared independence from Galileo,” he said.

  “That may be true,” she said, nodding and looking at the screen. “Unfortunately, at this moment the body count is adding up and somebody will have to answer for it. I don’t think any of us expected it to be Paulson Lassiter.”

  He collapsed down the wall and covered his eyes with his balled up fists. “Damn him. Damn them all. He let me go, so I could take the fall for this.”

  Armstrong: Station-keeping Above L-4 Prime:

  “We still have no idea what we’ll do, once the ghost fleet gets here. It may still be weeks away, but we have to have a plan,” Chancellor Roja said, sitting at the end of the table and glaring at her cup of hardball.

  This was the first planning session where she had included Ariqat and both Jeffers and Nakamiru had resisted the idea. Edison Wentworth also sat in on the session, but neither of them had pushed back on including the former IG.

  “There is only so much we can do until they get the damned quicksand shut off,” Jeffers said.

  “What is this quicksand you are referring to?” Tamir said.

  “It’s a quantum field that limits the mobility of anything trying to move away from L-4 Prime,” Jeffers said.

  “How does this field work?” he asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Katryna said. “We don’t know much about it, but as long as we’re trapped we cannot get any distance to maneuver. It means that we have to plan this fight under the assumption that we’ve got our backs pinned to the wall.”

  “And the governor controls this field?”

  “No, but he controls the research personnel trying to shut it off.” The admiral said.

  “Then remove him from his position and replace him with someone more effective at accomplishing this task.” Tamir said, shrugging and wearing an expression that said he thought his solution should have been obvious.

  “Trust me. We’ve thought about it,” Roja said.

  “If I may, it would serve us best if we address the issues in order of priority,” Nakamiru said. “The first fact we need to address is that the approaching fleet is too big to engage directly.”

  “I should still be able to countermand the orders,” Ariqat said.

  “You don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to bet everything on you being able to order them to stand down,” Jeffers said. “Especially since Odysseus may be in command.”

  “I think it is unlikely that the commanders would accep
t the orders of a computer program,” Ariqat said, dismissing her objection with a wave of his hand.

  “Yes, but Tomlinson and Lassiter are working with Odysseus so if the orders are coming from them, but under its direction, then it makes no difference,” Katryna said.

  “We don’t know what their intent is,” Jeffers said, swiveling her seat away from Ariqat to exclude him from the discussion. She did not like him and wasn’t afraid to let it show.

  “In a general sense, that is not true,” Solo said. “Since I contain a complete set of its primary protocols, the logic that drives Odysseus’ decision-making processes can be understood. Within a range, I can predict its actions.”

  “What do you think it intends to do when it arrives?” Roja asked.

  “Six functional blocks involving the establishment of Extrasolar Contact direct its behavior,” Solo explained. “Protocol One is assimilation of all available AA systems. Protocol Two is establishing a containment perimeter around the contact. Protocol Three is assessment of a contact strategy. Protocol Four is establishment of contact. Protocol Five is mitigation of potential threats posed by the ESI, and Protocol Six is elimination of ESI contact, if it cannot achieve Protocol Five.”

  “You seriously believe this to be an alien intelligence you’ve uncovered?” Ariqat said.

  “You’ve been down there,” Jeffers said, glancing over her shoulder at him.

  “There are other explanations—”

  “Shut up, Tamir,” Roja snapped. “What was it you said? ‘I don’t want to waste my time answering questions that might be necessary to educate him in the nuances …’”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but apparently he read the admiral’s face well enough to realize he was about to be ejected from the meeting.

  “Go on with your explanation,” she said, winking at Jeffers who was struggling to keep from laughing.

  “Each of these primary protocols has a hierarchical decision tree that expands into a set of open guidelines that may be implemented at the discretion of primary core logic. However, understanding this allows us to anticipate Odysseus’ likely actions based on mandated limitations of the code.”