“No, of course not. Those fucking plebs probably downloaded it off the internet.”
Elfrida rubbed her eyes. Could Angelica Lin possibly be telling the truth?
“I remember,” she said. “An expert once told me that the internet is flooded with malware from the PLAN. The ISA supposedly catches 99.9% of it. But not all. So maybe Dr. Seth googled ‘phavatars how to jailbreak,’ or something like that, and got phished.”
“Yeah,” Angelica Lin said. “Must have been something like that.”
“But that vinge-class called you ma’am.”
They were standing in the vestibule. On a table lay a stack of newly printed yellow-and-white uniforms, a box of flags on sticks, and a pile of posters, all sporting the same logo of a person and a robot holding up a flag with the sun on it.
“Obviously, it’s making fun of me,” Angelica Lin said, following her gaze. “The PLAN doesn’t just want to destroy us. It wants to destroy what makes us human. And that includes our aspirations, our visions, our dreams.”
“What did I miss?”
“I declared independence. Oh, I dismissed those bullshit charges against the community leaders. You should have heard them cheer. It was a great moment. I put up the new flag, everyone got champagne, party hats, I made a speech about freedom.”
The fire in Lin’s eyes made Elfrida’s stomach flutter oddly.
“But I knew we would need the bots, to hold onto our independence once we’d won it.”
“Wait, wait! You knew what Vlajkovic was planning?”
“They were meant to wait until after the election.”
“Guess Vlajkovic didn’t know that.”
“Looking back, we may have been too careful to avoid leaks. A lot was left to Dr. Seth’s discretion. Too much, obviously.”
“What did Dr. Seth think those upgrades were going to do?”
“What it said on the package. Break the function that is distastefully known as ‘slaving’ a phavatar, so UNVRP couldn’t claw them back remotely. I had no idea anything like this was going to happen! They came through the tunnel. I guess they must have … killed … the Marines on duty. But I didn’t know that. When they came into the ballroom, it was like they were dancing. I thought everything was going to be all right. I had a speech prepared, about liberty, equality, fraternity, yadda yadda. I got about six words out before they started killing people.”
“Liberty, equality, fraternity?”
“Old political slogan.”
“Maybe I’m kind of slow today, but that sounds like personhood. That stupid, fringey movement that thinks bots should be equal with human beings.”
“Not so fringey.”
“You were their candidate.”
“Just following in Charlie’s footsteps.”
At last, Elfrida understood. The shock resonated through her body. “So you planned all along to get elected, and then finish what Pope started. That is, destroying the Venus Project.”
The growing opposition to the Venus Project, the bad publicity, the budget overruns, the compensation scandals, the decision to cancel the R&D program … it had all been engineered from within. The Venus Project’s number one enemy had been its own director.
“He was going to eliminate the people to make room for the bots.” She could hardly speak for bitterness. “That’s always been the endgame of the personhood movement, right? Well, congrats. It’s happening.”
Blind with rage, Elfrida brushed past Lin, into the director’s office.
“There must be something we can do,” she muttered. “Maybe if we kill the power to the whole hab ...”
“Can’t do it from here,” Lin said. “I got locked out of everything consequential, right around the time the vinge-classes started twisting off heads.”
The director’s office was spacious, with wall-to-wall soft green carpeting, not the gengineered kind. The room felt even larger due to the wallpaper of Alpine peaks. A squared-off sky rode overhead, twilight-mauve. The desk at one end of the room, and the armchair, sofa, and coffee tables at the other, seemed to be adrift on the mountains. Cydney lay on the sofa, drooling in her sleep.
“Cydney!”
“Don’t wake her,” Lin said. “She’s traumatized.”
Elfrida stooped over Cydney and shook her shoulder. Cydney cringed in her sleep.
“She had to vid everything,” Lin said. “The vinge-classes hauled her around with them so she could vid the whole routine. Chase, catch, ID, behead. Over and over. They turned it into this revolting performance, and Cydney had to broadcast it to the whole solar system.”
“Must’ve set a new traffic record for her feed.”
“I gave her a sedative.”
“Have we still got comms?”
“No.”
“Well, I guess Star Force will be here soon. A lot of their guys are dead, too.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I’m sorry,” Lin said.
Elfrida shrugged. She was so done with hypocritical apologies. She gazed at Cydney, observing the knotted set of her brows, even under sedation. She felt a pinch of emotion that she’d thought had withered forever.
Then she replayed Lin’s apology, heard the tension in Lin’s voice, and looked around.
Lin was holding a gun on her. A Zero.5 with all the bells and whistles, extended supercapacitor battery, and flammable-foil cartridge.
“Oh yeah,” Elfrida said weakly. “Forgot you used to be a Marine.”
xxvii.
“I didn’t want you to hate me,” Angelica Lin said. “I guess it’s too late for that now. But you still might be able to survive.”
She moved sideways towards the door, still aiming her Zero.5 at Elfrida.
“Stay here for a while. You can monitor the surveillance cams.” She jerked her chin at the semi-circular desk at the end of the office. “When the coast is clear, head down to the parking lot. There should be EVA suits in the public locker. Take a rover and drive east. Wrightstuff, Inc. has another hab in Chesterton Crater. There’s an access tunnel at 88.6° N, 110.1° E. Of course, the Heidegger program may have gotten in there, too. But they’re supposed to have bank-level security. Anyway, that’s your best chance of survival.”
“I could have figured that out for myself,” Elfrida said.
“Yeah, probably. But with you, Goto? I never know when you’re going to do something brilliant, and when you’re going to do something dumb. So … just don’t do anything dumb today.”
Shifting the Zero.5 into a one-handed grip, Lin pulled an EVA suit out of a hidden closet. It was one of the bulky old ones inherited from Wrightstuff, Inc., with a rigid helmet, and an oversized nametag that said: Charles K. Pope. Lin hung it over her free arm. The helmet bobbled like a head on a broken neck.
“A word of advice, Goto,” she said. “You’re confused. You’ve been questioning your assumptions about the universe. Looking for somewhere to belong. But you already have a home, and people who love you. On Earth. Get back there safely.”
Lin headed into the vestibule.
“Lock the door behind me,” she said, and was gone.
★
Elfrida went around behind the director’s desk and flipped up all the embedded screens. There was no gaze interface. Lin must have used her BCI to operate the computer system. Elfrida found a grimy old keyboard in a drawer and hooked it up. Then she fiddled with the camera selector until she got a view of the parking lot.
Two vinge-classes patrolled around the rovers, like valets in a parking-lot on Earth. But they wouldn’t be be giving anyone their keys.
“So much for that idea,” Elfrida muttered.
She went through the other cameras, one at a time, searching for survivors. Every flicker of movement turned out to be one of the vinge-classes. But then she came to a set of feeds labelled Vault.
The screens teemed.
Elfrida clutched the edge of the desk, gazing down on the tops of people’s heads. They quivered, packed toget
her like rats in a trap.
Dozens. No, hundreds of people.
Flashlights and eyelamps and phone screens winked in the darkness.
She searched for the audio feed, couldn’t find it. Couldn’t access any life-support stats for the vault, either. But she could imagine the terror of the survivors, trapped down there without comms, without light … maybe, soon, without air.
Galvanized, she went and shook Cydney.
Cydney groaned, cursed, and opened her eyes.
“Ellie! You’re not dead!”
“Nope. And neither are they.” Elfrida gestured at the screens, which she’d spun around so she could keep an eye on them. “There are hundreds of survivors, Cyds! They’re in the vault.”
“Wait, this already happened,” Cydney slurred, eyes crossing.
“It’s happening again. How big is the vault?”
“Big.”
So the survivors might have enough air to last for a while. Long enough for Elfrida to fetch help. She decided not to think about the obstacles that lay in between here and there.
“Get your shoes on,” she said.
While trying to wake Cydney, she’d spotted a locker in the corner behind the sofa, labelled FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. She now opened it and dumped the contents on the floor.
It was a treasure trove. Angelica Lin must not have known this stuff was here. Med patches and disposable syringes, two rebreather masks, a Personal Survival Capsule in a canister, a selection of gourmet meals-in-pouches, two 4-liter pouches of water. Something called a Swiss Army knife, and—hallelujah—two EVA suits.
She held one up. It was the pricey second-skin type. She started to take her clothes off.
“I think I’m going to hop in the shower,” Cydney said. She swayed upright, wiping at the drool on her cheek.
Elfrida stared at her. “Cyds, are you with me? The Heidegger program is in this hab. It’s killing people. We don’t have time to shower.”
“I’m all dirty,” Cydney said. “I have to get clean.”
Elfrida paused, remembering that Cydney had been forced to witness the carnage. “Just put your shoes on,” she said as gently as she could. “We’re going to get out of here. ‘Kay?”
“No! It’s not safe out there!”
“It’s not safe here, either. Don’t you remember what they did to people on 4 Vesta, the ones they didn’t kill? They operated on them, enslaved them—”
“I was there! And the people who survived, OK? Were the ones who hid. The ones who tried to run? The phavatars hunted them, caught them, and jarked their brains. If you want to survive, you have to hide! So you can do what you like, but I’m staying here.”
Cydney defiantly sat back down on the sofa.
Elfrida rolled the EVA suit up her legs and wedged the diaper into her crotch. “But they know you’re here. And that door wouldn’t stop a housekeeping bot.”
Cydney just scowled. Elfrida wriggled her arms into the sleeves and did up her seals. The suit hugged her body, moulding itself to every curve. Just as well there was no mirror in here. Searching for some way to carry the goodies from the emergency locker, she grabbed Angelica Lin’s oversized handbag off the back of her chair and stuffed everything in that.
“Come on, Cyds.”
“I’m not going.”
“Alert!”
Cydney let out a scream.
The voice came from the desk.
“Alert! Subject is … in the B4 corridor … subject is entering P-1 level …”
Elfrida had set up a facial recognition alert for Angelica Lin. It had been triggered. She rushed over to the desk.
On the screen, Angelica Lin walked into the parking lot. She was carrying that old spacesuit over one arm. On a strap across her body hung a pelican case like the ones Vlajkovic and his friends had kept their guns in.
The two vinge-classes spidered towards her. Had they been human, they would have been smugly rolling up their sleeves.
Lin dropped the spacesuit she was carrying. Its folds had concealed the Zero.5. She set it to her shoulder and shot the phavatars. The plasma flashes whited out the screen.
When the feed came back, Lin was lugging her stuff around the fallen monsters, en route to the vehicles.
“See, you can kill them,” Elfrida said.
Cydney was not interested. She sat on the sofa, vaping her cigarette. Clouds of vapor wreathed her head.
“Lin’s going for that big-ass half-track. She’s escaping! Come on, Cyds!”
“I’m not going.”
“I broke up with John Mendoza for you!” Elfrida screamed at her.
“And? You wish you’d gone to be with him, instead of coming here? I wish you had, too, Ellie. Then none of this would have happened. Just go.”
Elfrida went.
★
She forced the scene with Cydney to the back of her mind as she tiptoed out of the director’s office,
The corridor was empty.
From far below came a rhythmical banging noise. She guessed that the phavatars were trying to break into the vault.
She hurried away from the mezzanine. All the radial corridors ended in emergency exits that connected with the intake shaft. Angelica Lin must have gone this way.
The emergency exit door yielded to Elfrida’s glove. She stepped into the Cytherean …
… day?
Clusters of LEDs shone high on the support pillars. This was the first time Elfrida had ever seen the intake shaft lit up. She stood in a badly lit cave with drifts of sticky black sand on the floor. The magic was well and truly gone.
She walked downhill, staying close to the inner curve of the intake shaft. She passed a lamp tree that had dropped all its fruit. Rats feasted on the decaying windfalls. Her boots sank into something crunchy, like dry leaves. A patch of groundfish, dark and dead.
She’d never been fully aware of the precise environmental calibration necessary to keep these gengineered prototypes alive. The fragility of the whole experiment was now revealed. The environment hadn’t changed that much. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, and the peacekeepers had messed with the atmosphere during Vlajkovic’s rebellion. The farm crops, tough hybrids gengineered for space, had not been affected by these minor fluctuations. But it had killed the prototypes, which had been designed for a perfectly stable post-terraforming environment … that didn’t exist outside of computer models.
She remembered how she’d bought into the UNVRP propaganda about sustainable terraforming. The Venus Project had claimed it could create a Cytherean biosphere that did not need active management.
She laughed aloud, bitterly. The wreckage around her demonstrated the fatuity of UNVRP’s claims. The Venus Project had been a multi-decade, trillion-spider venture based on computer models.
It hadn’t accounted for the Heidegger program.
Then again, no one had.
Severed heads adorned the outskirts of the R&D village, impaled on sticks. Another WWIII touch. Elfrida could feel the Heidegger program’s malevolence, its smirky sense of irony, like a rash on her skin.
Instinct urged her to go around the village. But she felt strongly that she owed the dead one last visit.
Her bag of survival goods jingled on her back. The wind had been turned off, and the stillness was creepy, overpowering. Nothing moved except the rats. They frisked freely in and out of the sandcastles. Headless corpses littered the alleys. Bitter saliva welled in Elfrida’s mouth. She was determined not to throw up again.
A severed head wedged into a window caught her eye, seeming for a moment to be alive, making her jump and scream.
The Heidegger program’s killing spree seemed to have peaked in the village square. Cairns of body parts and trashed scientific equipment blocked the steps of the R&D lab. Baby carpets twitched pathetically on the sand, an entire production run of palm-sized porcupines, dyed blue with Elfrida’s gift of food coloring.
She headed for her own sandcastle, understanding now that this was
why she’d come into the village. She limply pressed her finger to the reader. Stumbled in. Sat down on her sofa-bed.
I’ll just stay here. With everyone. At home.
There was a severed head sitting on her desk.
A child’s head. The head of Lena, the nine-year-old who’d wanted to open a restaurant when she grew up.
Elfrida lurched out of the sandcastle. In the street, she puked until nothing came up except bile.
But Lena wasn’t a pureblood … was she?
She poked her head back into the sandcastle. Made herself look. Lena had had flesh-tone brown skin and slightly frizzy hair. Her mouth hung open, revealing a missing baby tooth. What had happened to her body, God only knew.
“I am going to kill Angelica Lin,” Elfrida said aloud. She rinsed her mouth out with water from her suit’s rehydration nipple and stumbled away. “I am going to kill her with my own hands.”
Saying it made her feel stronger, as if she hadn’t totally failed Lena and the other children, as if there were still something she could do.
As she neared the bottom end of the intake shaft, the banging noise grew louder. It was definitely coming from the bottom level of the hab. But she had to go this way, there was no choice. She slipped out into the corridor. The light that escaped through the double swing doors cast her shadow ahead of her. She hurried into the darkness, and stopped to listen.
Yup. The noise was coming from the vault. The phavatars were trying to break in and get at the survivors.
Elfrida tiptoed out to the atrium and edged around the farm, barely noticing the mountain of corpses this time. The noise of banging and drilling went on, punctuated by silences that froze her in place. When she reached the parking-lot access corridor, she ran.
The lights were still on in the parking-lot, and wonder of wonders, it did not seem to be guarded.
The two vinge-classes that Angelica Lin had shot lay on the floor, looking pretty damn defunct.
The armored half-track was gone.
Two rovers lay overturned. Lin must’ve hit them with the half-track, pulling out.
Elfrida ran towards the rovers. Her bag banged against her hip. Her breath sobbed.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 83