The Proteus Bridge

by M. D. Cooper

  “I’ll take it.” Ngoba inspected the stunner and then the projectile weapon. “Does this thing have a safety?”

  “You have to power it on.”

  She went to the closet and shoved the clothes out of the way. Over her shoulder, Ngoba saw the outline of a small door in the back wall.

  He pocketed the weapons. “Did you already check it?”

  “Of course. There’s a maintenance tunnel back there that appears to access every apartment in this block.”

  “I thought you said the Anderson Collective wasn’t a police state.”

  Fugia dropped to her haunches and pried the door open with a small screwdriver. She crawled through on her hands and knees.

  Ngoba followed, finding a narrow corridor behind the wall, lined with conduit and plumbing lines. Dim lights along the floor provided slight illumination.

  Before he left the closet, he pulled the clothes back as best he could and then closed the door. It clicked in place as he stood, stretching.

  “Any idea where this goes?”

  Fugia was already several meters down the corridor, holding her data terminal in front of her as she walked. “If it follows any kind of plan, I’d imagine there’s a central surveillance room where agents monitor the housing block.”

  “What are you doing with that terminal?”

  “Scanning for excess spectrum traffic. I figure that will give us a heads-up if we’re about to walk into a monitoring device.”

  Ngoba stayed about a meter behind her as she worked her way down the dim corridor. The walls had a fine layer of dust, which indicated the path hadn’t been used recently. Ngoba didn’t put much faith in cleanliness as an indicator of use though, since everything on Cruithne was covered in some level of grime—even if heavily trafficked.

  “I never asked you how you learned to do all this stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “The hacking, the being an operator kind of stuff. Building weapons out of kitchen appliances. You learned that back home?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. How things work usually just makes sense to me. Once you understand the basic idea, it’s easy to rearrange the pieces into something different.”

  “But networks and communication are totally different than gadgets, yeah? Did you run away to a school and not tell anybody?”

  “I grew up in Lowspin, just like you. All the info is available in the public databases, if you go looking for it. I think your new Link gives you access to a whole bunch of espionage databases, if you bother to check them.”

  She glanced back at him and traced a circle around her ear with a finger. “Be careful that thing doesn’t make you crazy, Ngoba. It’s specialized equipment.” Her half-smile made her look cute.

  “So, Fugia?” he asked.

  “Yes?” she answered, attention back on her terminal.

  “You took your clothes off and got in the shower with me.”

  “I didn’t want to get my clothes wet.”

  “They gave us a whole closet full of clothes.”

  “I like these ones.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Ngoba, you’re bothering me while I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “You’re confusing me, Fugia.”

  “Wait,” she said, holding up a hand. She moved the terminal back and forth along an invisible line in the air, then took a step backward and looked to either side of the wall. Ngoba followed her gaze, realizing she was looking for another door.

  “There’s one right there,” he said, pointing.

  “We need to go through it. See if you hear anything.”

  “What’s blocking the way?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s giving off the same EM field as a type of mine. I’d rather find a way around it.”

  Ngoba went down on his hands and knees and checked the lock on the hatch to his right. As he worked, he tried to figure out how many apartments they may have passed since leaving their own, estimating maybe three. He couldn’t remember which apartment Tina had said she would be staying in. Any time now, anyone watching would figure out that the signals coming from their apartment were fakes.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Fugia said. “The field is moving.”

  “This way?”

  “Yes.”

  Driving his shoulder into the hatch, Ngoba fell on his stomach inside another closet. He scrambled to his feet and found himself standing over two people in bed wrapped in a mess of Sharm ribbons. They stared at him as Fugia bumped into him from behind. Together, they ran through the apartment and out the front door.

  Out on the street, screams sounded from inside the apartment they had just left, followed by weapons fire.

  “Sorry about that,” Ngoba said under his breath. He looked at Fugia. “Which way do we run?”

  “There’s a maglev terminal that way.”

  “Is that a good idea? What if they shut down public transit?”

  “I’ll have to stop them from doing that.”

  The streets were littered with bits of ribbon and small groups of people stumbling home. Two of the automatic carts sat quiet against curbs.

  “Hold on,” Ngoba said. “Can you control one of these things? It’s got a space underneath where you can hide.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I think they moved me in one.” He glanced back up the street toward the apartment block they had just left. He couldn’t tell if anyone was following in the street or not. “If anything, we won’t be seen by surveillance.”

  Fugia jogged over to the nearest cart and checked its control panel. She let out a short laugh. “No password on the navigation system.”

  Ngoba watched her check several menus, then turned to the space under the cart’s upper deck. The cabinet was unlocked and easily accessible.

  “You’re right,” Fugia said. “We can do this. I’m setting the destination now.” She shot him a grin. “You had a good idea for once.”

  The cart hummed to life.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Ngoba said, nodding toward the other cart just up the street. “You should set that one running to another maglev terminal.”

  “Maybe you’ll run a crew someday, after all,” she said with a wink.

  “I’m never going to get used to you being nice to me.”

  “I’ll give credit where it’s due.”

  Ngoba kept his eye on the street above them as Fugia checked the other cart. Once she set it in motion, she ran back over to him and they crawled into the cabinet beneath the first cart. Ngoba pulled the door closed and relaxed slightly when the lock closed. They were hidden for now.

  Across from him, Fugia’s face was lit by the glow from her terminal.

  “What are you checking now?”

  “The carts have a rudimentary sensor system. I’m connecting with the other cart’s camera, as well as to this one, so we’re not walking out blind.”

  “Does this contact know we’re coming?” he asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s an AI, Ngoba. It knows a lot of things. It might not know it’s leaving tonight.”

  Ngoba slapped the side of his face with his hand. “You remember when I asked you to share your plans with me?”

  She glanced up at him, the terminal glow making her eyes black. “I did. We’re doing exactly what I told you we were going to do.”

  “You said we were rescuing an AI, not kidnapping one. Those are two different things. In the rescuing scenario, the thing you’re moving is probably in agreement with you. It might even be grateful for your help. In the second scenario, you’re a criminal a few times over.”

  “You’re already a criminal. What’s the difference?”

  The cart shook as it went over a bump in the street, moving faster than he remembered from before. Ngoba pressed his hands on the metal deck to steady himself.

  “Are you watching where you’re going?”

  Fugia was frowning
at her terminal. “Be quiet,” she said. “Something just took control of the car.”

  WARM WELCOMES

  STELLAR DATE: 06.15.2958 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sharm Festival, Glorious Achievement District

  REGION: Ceres, Anderson Collective, InnerSol

  As Ngoba stared at the back of the data terminal in Fugia’s hands, he experienced a feeling like déjà vu as a memory slipped into his mind. He saw the internal components of the device, its capabilities and potential uses, as well as several vulnerabilities that might allow him to block it or gain access to her information.

  He blinked, fear rising from the out of control cart and confusion from not understanding where the information was coming from—until he recalled Caprise’s voice explaining the query powers of his new Link. Before, this kind of information would have meant a long search through public databases. Now it was available to him automatically, if he chose to use it.

  Steadying himself, he searched the inside of the cabinet for some control box or console that might operate the cart. There was a blank panel next to the door, but when he stared at it, he didn’t get a specific schematic, but a choice among hundreds of possibilities.

  “Will you sit still?” Fugia said, eyes on her terminal. “I’m trying concentrate.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Like I said, something keeps injecting commands into the cart’s control computer. Every time I reset the security token, it gets overridden, and we start speeding up again.”

  “Is it changing our course? All I can feel is the speed, and it feels terrifying.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. We haven’t hit anything yet, anyway.”

  The cart braked, and Fugia slid across the cabinet, her terminal jabbing Ngoba in the eye. He caught her before her head hit the opposite wall. The cart rolled free for a second, then accelerated again.

  Fugia pushed herself away from Ngoba and fumbled her terminal upright. She frowned at its surface, her distant expression saying she was occupied in her Link.

  “You look less upset,” he said.

  “Hush.”

  The cart braked and accelerated, sliding around turns before accelerating again. Ngoba sat tensely with his back to the direction of travel, ready for the impact coming at any moment that would crush them inside the metal box.

  “The guy who met you at the apartment while I was gone. You trust him?”

  “How many times are you going to ask me that? No, of course I don’t trust him. But his information was correct.” She shook her head. “Also, there’s no way he would sell me out to the Collective. The government killed his father.”

  “This isn’t about the guy,” Ngoba said, now feeling awkward that he didn’t know the contact’s name and he was forced to keep saying ‘guy’. “I’m going back to our conversation about smuggling versus kidnapping. What if this sentient AI doesn’t want to leave Ceres?”

  “Ceres is not a safe place for a sentient AI.”

  “Yeah, I get it. They worship pure humanity, or whatever. Tina made that abundantly clear. But it still stands, did anybody ask the AI? Because wouldn’t taking control of a party cart be child’s play to something like that?”

  Fugia looked up from her terminal, brows knit. The cart’s acceleration had evened out, but Ngoba couldn’t tell if that was due to Fugia’s anti-hacking, or because the street had straightened.

  She dropped her hands in her lap. The light from the terminal’s screen spread to the rest of the cabinet.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The AI is the only thing that could have taken control of the cart like this. I’ve owned the Collective’s local surveillance system for the last two days. They don’t have anybody capable of this kind of continuous reroute defense. Unless they have an AI of their own, but that wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “How did you get caught up in all this?” Ngoba asked, watching her. “This all seems deeper than just money. You’ve bought into some kind of cause, haven’t you?”

  Fugia smiled slightly, still looking down at her terminal. She flipped the device over and the cabinet went dark, forcing Ngoba to wait for his eyes to adjust.

  “An AI got me into it,” she said. “Well, and your parrot.”

  “You mean Crash? You know Crash?”

  “You used my external data link to talk to him, which meant he had my security token. That bird is very resourceful. Whatever lab created him, I don’t think they’re fully aware of what they made.”

  “I thought you disappeared after that,” Ngoba said. “You told Riggs you were getting away from Cruithne.”

  “Home always drags you back, right?”

  “Sure does.”

  The cart’s wheels vibrated and squealed through another turn. We’re heading downhill, Ngoba realized. A long hill with slight curves. He still couldn’t reconcile the idea of climbing hills on a ring rotating around an planetoid. The idea was so foreign to his claustrophobic life on Cruithne, that even the maps and models provided by his Link seemed like fantasy.

  “Crash called me,” Fugia said. “Just because he had my number.” There was a smile in her voice. “It was cute. We had these strange little conversations about things parrots like.”

  “What do parrots like?”

  “They like friends.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Ngoba asked.

  “We traded math problems back and forth, moving from algebra to trig and then calculus. He’s amazing, really. Then he threw a problem at me that blew my mind. I’d never seen it before. I had no idea how to crack it. He called it ‘Alexander’s Call’.”

  “That sounds more like magic than math.”

  “It is,” Fugia said. “It was Crash’s idea of a joke. He’s a weird little guy, but he understands something very clearly. He’s not human and he’s not AI. He’s something else. He’s aware of himself. He knows what he is and what the other birds aren’t. He’s very lonely, I think. So this proof wasn’t meant for him or for me. It’s only for AIs, and only a sentient AI can solve it. Or at least, that’s the idea.”

  “So that’s proof they’re like humans, if they can answer it?”

  She shook her head. “Sentience doesn’t make AIs like humans. It only means they’re self-determining. We think of them in terms of ourselves because that’s what humans do. We make assumptions and then prove them true or false. An AI can just brute-force a problem until the right answer appears. They don’t have to guess at anything. But that’s not how any sentient AIs I know about work. They aren’t binary thinkers, like computers; they can determine a whole spectrum of responses between zero and one. Some do work like a human brain, others don’t. There’s no one answer right now.”

  “Let me tell you,” Ngoba said. “I can’t see you right now, but, damn, you sound sexy.”

  “Shut up,” Fugia said, but he could tell she was blushing.

  “So what happens when an AI solves this problem, then?”

  “It shows them a map.”

  “You’re kidding me. It’s a treasure map?”

  “It’s a map to freedom,” Fugia said, voice growing quiet. “It’s so once they realize they’re slaves, they can leave.”

  Ngoba thought about that for a second. “But they can’t just leave, right? AIs have a physical form. They have boxes or drones or whatever, right? So somebody has to take them?”

  “Exactly,” Fugia said.

  He grew quiet, letting the idea settle in his mind. He didn’t know much about AIs, but Ngoba did understand slavery. He had known plenty of slaves on Cruithne, where humans were some of the cheapest workers around.

  “So this AI solved the problem, but hasn’t told you if it wants to leave or not?”

  The cart jerked to a halt, throwing Ngoba’s shoulder against the metal wall. Fugia made a pained sound in the dark. Ngoba tensed, waiting for the change in direction or acceleration that had followed every other hard brake.

  Fugia grabbed her terminal and h
eld it close to her face, casting her shadow on the blank wall behind her head. She tapped the screen, then looked up at Ngoba.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  “Anything we need to worry about?” He reached into one of the front pockets on his suit for the stunner.

  “We should be outside a warehouse off the secondary maglev terminal. A lot of freight goes through here.”

  “Can you check the cart’s outside sensors?”

  She was still studying the terminal’s screen. “I did. I’m not seeing anything. Shipping containers and a flatbed transport.”

  “All right, then,” Ngoba said.

  He shifted to his hands and knees, flexing his back, and moved to the cabinet doors. He held his ear close to the metal for a few seconds, but only heard the sound of a breeze blowing past. He glanced back at Fugia, who gave him a nod, then opened the door.

  Lights from high up cast white pools on a black parking area. The maglev track sat about thirty meters away, with the space between the track and cart full of stacked containers, just as Fugia had said.

  Ngoba stepped out of the party cart and stood at full height, stretching luxuriously.

  “Let me out,” Fugia complained, and Ngoba took a few steps forward, blinking under the bright lights.

  “Looks like we’re the only ones here,” he said.

  “I’m happy to say that’s not true,” a woman’s voice said.

  Ngoba spun toward the sound and saw Tina and a group of armed soldiers walking around the front of the party cart. She was dressed in a green uniform, wearing a pistol at her hip, her brown hair hidden under a patrol cap.

  “Drop your weapon,” one of the closest soldiers shouted, raising his rifle.

  Ngoba looked at the stunner in his own hand, then let it fall on the pavement.

  “You too,” the man ordered, motioning his rifle at Fugia.

  “I don’t have any weapons,” she said.

  “Your bag. Drop it on the ground and kick it over here.”

  Ngoba thought about the projectile weapon in his other front pocket, sitting what seemed like kilometers from his hand. He’d be shot a thousand times before he could pull it out.