“Okay. I’m stopped. Let’s see what’s got you so concerned.”
“Transferring.”
He watched the screen. When the notification blinked, he tapped it. It took his brain a few seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. It didn’t look at all like what he remembered when he left this place last time. The general rock formations were wrong. This must have been wherever the future version of him had hidden himself away. He flipped to the next image. The reality of it struck him like a lead weight.
“Oh my god…” he muttered. “But that means… turn it around. Come and pick me up. We’re seeing Ma about this right now.”
Chapter 8
“Right, yes. No, I really appreciate it. Thank you for all your help,” Michella said as she wrote the word “bupkus” on her pad and underlined it.
She ended the call and blew a frustrated breath out.
“That’s all the people he told me to contact, Squee,” she said to the funk, who was currently doing her very best to cover every square centimeter of one of Michella’s spare datapads with noseprints. “I don’t think I’ve heard the company line quoted so many times verbatim in the same day before.”
Michella rubbed her head and popped the top on the hot chocolate and espresso she’d grabbed from the cafe and combined. The combination was as close as they would come to her standard cozy drink. After one sip, it became clear just how pale that imitation was.
“Okay. So that’s the end of the new hits. The end of my own contacts. Time to review the notes and start again from the top. Must have missed something,” she said.
She flipped through the dozens of pages she’d filled during the trip thus far. One by one she disregarded the things she’d crossed off and recopied the things that had yet to be eliminated. One line was simply “Nice accent” and a time code for a point in her call with Trent.
Michella pulled up her recording of the call and reeled it forward.
“You know, for a guy who is very precise in his language, he really stumbled over a relatively simple name like Rodriguez.” She played it a few more times. “Rodreeguss. He doesn’t just say an S, he hits it very hard.”
She scrolled through her recent contacts and came to the one for Agent Rodriguez. She made a duplicate contact and opened it in the edit window.
“This is a stupid idea, but when you get to the bottom of the barrel, every idea suddenly seems like gold.”
She changed the Z to an S in the corporate address and tried to connect. It bounced with a bad address. Rather than dismiss her silly idea as completely pointless, while she was trying to think of a different avenue of attack, she kept inching the address closer to the phonetic equivalent of what he’d said. When she added a third S, she was kicked to a loading screen.
“Let me guess,” she grumbled. “Too many bad addresses adds me to some special list. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
After six seconds of loading, she kicked over to a second, less “customer-facing” loading screen. She raised her eyebrows and took notice. It looked like the kind of thing you’d see on the backend of a system. Something only a technician was ever supposed to see. Then came a monospaced chat prompt.
“Um… Hello?” she said.
Text-to-speech fed the phrase into the chat. A moment later, there was a reply.
“Wow. I never expected to have someone come through on this port. Been talking to Trent, huh?” came a typed out message from someone labeled Klymole.
“I have. To whom am I speaking?” she said.
“Let’s call me a fail-safe. Trent put down some very deep roots. You are Michella Modane. If someone was going to contact me via this method, it was going to be you. I want to make something extremely clear. I am not a source. And the information you may or may not receive as a result of this interaction is not for public consumption. You are here in the capacity of a crisis investigator turning up data to avert something horrific. When the time comes to tell the story, this part gets left out.”
“May I ask how you intend to enforce that?”
“You are presently on a VectorCorp transport.”
The lights flickered and the ship shuddered slightly. Warning lights illuminated, recommending passengers return to their booths and secure themselves.
“Things happen,” Klymole said. “Now what do you need?”
“I am investigating the DDoS on Golana and Operlo.”
“Massive distributed viral attack. Impressive penetration but relatively naive. Normal antivirus and standard isolation procedures have completely cleared the source. Is that all?”
“No. We are trying to find the people responsible.”
“As are we. Do you have any insight?”
“We believe it is an alliance, willing or otherwise, between Neo-Luddite Commander Purcell and a hacker or hacker collective called EHRIc.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“I’ve been looking into it. I have some basic information on a few accesses we believe came directly from EHRIc early in his, her, or its partnership with Purcell.”
“Send them over.”
Her hands were shaking as she sent the information.
“I’m running a deep search for accesses from that origin point and those plausibly spoofed by that origin point.”
Fifteen seconds passed.
“This is definitely either Purcell or a confidant calling the shots. Every single data source she would have been aware of was hit in alphabetical order. Three of them were honeypots. They got their hands on some junk data. One moment. Damn it, Trent.”
“What is it?”
“Trent was always too much of a control freak to actually have fully secure systems. We had absolutely impenetrable security on the server itself, but Purcell had an access code that Trent authorized. Once inside the server, connections to linked and nested data structures were accessible because they were effectively being accessed by Trent himself, as far as the system was concerned. It looks like someone got through to some pretty meaty stuff.”
“What data did they access?”
“I’m checking now. This looks like Trent’s tippy-top-secret stash. Highest-level, secret-society, the-real-people-pulling-the-strings type stuff.”
A few more seconds passed.
“This is very bad. This is the worst possible outcome.”
“What is it?”
“You are Michella Modane. You’ve heard about the GenMechs.”
“I have.”
“This is them.”
“The GenMechs did this?”
“No. Probably not, anyway. But whoever got this data knows where they are.”
“The GenMechs have been destroyed.”
“You’re not as good an investigator as you think.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We are going to try to find the individual and stop them.”
“And what if they have found their way to the GenMechs?”
“Then we are going to ignore the situation and hope it has taken care of itself.”
“That is absurd.”
“It is the best option available to us. Every ship that comes close to the GenMech location is another chance that they will be coaxed into action. If they find their way to a transit corridor, that’s it for society. Stop digging. Stop investigating. Leave this one be and hope for the best. These accesses were months ago. If we are lucky, that we are still alive today means the people who got this didn’t live long enough to use it.”
“That isn’t good enough. When there is a threat, action must be taken to neutralize it.”
“Then it is a good thing you have no way of finding the GenMechs. Because the data accesses you are after are untraceable, even via our means. Or, more accurately, they are traceable to a ship in motion piggybacking its signal on the transceivers of neighboring ships, and there have been no contacts that match this signature in months.”
“Then
give me the transaction logs of the penetration.”
“Though you have no way of knowing this, I assure you, I am physically shaking with laughter at such a request. Either the people who penetrated using these methods are no longer active, or they have altered their methodology and a fresh investigation will be in order. Rest assured, we will perform that investigation.”
“I’ve got my own people who can do such an investigation.”
“They’re not better than ours.”
“My people are the ones who uncovered the things that put Trent in prison, and who defeated his lingering plans from within prison. We even defeated the GenMech outbreak that happened. Frankly, I’m not comfortable leaving this in your hands.”
“You catch more flies with honey, Ms. Modane.”
“And you catch more terrorists and criminals with my investigations than yours.”
“Thank you for contacting us and alerting us to the situation. Good-bye.”
“No, wait. I have more questions!”
The connection dropped. She tried to reestablish it, but two tries bounced her back, and a third did so with a custom message: This network destination is inaccessible to MICHELLA MODANE unless new information is found on either end. And if the data included in this link finds its way to the public, you’ve got unexplained equipment failures in your future.
She tapped the link and found a complex log attached, presumably the penetration log she’d asked for. Evidently she’d been more persuasive than he’d implied.
“Cute,” she grumbled, pushing the slidepad aside.
Michella turned to Squee, who had somehow brought up a shopping site on the spare datapad and tapped her nose to confirm a purchase of a gross of blue socks.
“What? No. Come here.”
She wrangled Squee and the pad. A few taps canceled the purchase. Then she tossed the datapad aside and cuddled Squee to occupy both herself and the fuzzy little troublemaker.
“This is progress. This is confirmation, it is motion. I’ve got to very delicately figure out how to untangle this log. And now we know the worst case of what we’re working with. If we’re really lucky, Lex is making similar progress, and when we get back in touch, we’ll have something approaching the whole picture.”
#
When Lex reached the equator, on his return from the No-Go Zone that represented half of the planet, the Asteroid Wrecker was waiting for him and Coal. They submitted themselves willingly to it. This was partially because the sooner they got the “debriefing” over with, the sooner they could deal with the problem. The bigger issue was the fact that its weapons were hot and the rest of the fleet was doing high-speed, high-altitude patrols on the most direct path back to the laboratory. That was the trouble with someone knowing exactly where you wanted to go. It made it much easier to stop you from getting there.
Coal was tractored into an internal docking bay. It must have been radio shielded, because her transmissions to Lex’s slidepad went silent as soon as the hatch was sealed. Lex himself had been brought into the crew bay by an automated hover scaffold, the sort of thing usually used to allow workers to maintain the exterior of a ship this large. Once inside, he was presented with a long corridor. All doors were sealed except for one at the far end, and every time he passed through a section of bulkhead toward it, the hatch would shut, corralling him more insistently toward his intended interrogation cell.
Now he sat in a dark room with a chair bolted to the floor. It didn’t even match the image one conjures from the movies, or the memories of prior interrogations for that matter. No single lamp casting him in an island of light. No second chair and dour-faced inquisitor. No table waiting to be flipped over by the bad cop so the good cop could come to the rescue. Just a chair and darkness. From the rattle and shift of the ship around him, it was streaking back toward the laboratory. Around the time it was settling in for a stop, the lights flicked on. There was still no one and nothing else in the room, just brushed metal walls and ceiling. But a second later, a voice buzzed from the tinny public address system.
“Trevor Alexander,” the voice said.
In just two words, the voice illustrated itself to be something quite different from the real Ma. All of the subtle inflection and intonation she had managed to tease out of her limited voice palette was gone. It sounded more like the sort of system that would call jurors to the selection room.
“Please, it’s Lex.”
“Trevor Alexander,” Not Ma repeated. “You have violated Temporal Contingency Protocol. This ship has been transmission-isolated. I am presently in possession of all relevant temporal information. I have been augmented with enhanced interrogation techniques, and all emotional consideration has been removed. You shall be judged by the raw interpretation of facts.”
“Suits me, because this is pretty cut and dried,” Lex said.
“Then make your case.”
“A while back, I went to the past and did some runaround. Yes?”
“An informal but accurate assessment.”
“While I was there, I got bailed out by a second version of me. He came and froze himself too. Down south. In the southern hemisphere. A specific spot in the southern hemisphere.”
“Yes. Pursuant with Temporal Contingency Protocol.”
“If everything was going according to plan, to protocol, then the other me would still be there. When I crossed over the line and went to check, I’d find myself waiting to be thawed out, right?”
“Correct.”
He pulled out his slidepad and brought up the picture Coal had sent him. “This is what we’re dealing with.” He held it up, pointing it roughly in the direction of the speaker.
“Accessing slidepad memory.”
A harsh metallic click caused him to jump. Two panels of the interrogation room wall slid aside to reveal a flatscreen. It flickered to life and expanded with the characteristic depth of a high-quality holoprojection. The picture from the slidepad became a full 3D projection. It rotated in place, showing far greater detail than the tiny screen of the slidepad could provide.
In truth, Lex didn’t know what should have been there. His future self had left him before he froze. But presumably it would have been some other random crevasse or maybe a fortified vault. Instead, there was a gaping hole. It wasn’t the work of explosives. From the clean edge, it looked like a cylindrical core of landscape a few dozen meters in diameter had been excavated and removed. A smattering of debris surrounded the hole, but for the most part the material was simply missing.
“There. Case closed,” Lex said.
“Metadata and geographical analysis confirm the location and date. Based upon sealed temporal files, this is indeed the intended exit point for the secondary trip made by Trevor Alexander. The timing of your departure and the equipment available to you, coupled with data drawn from orbital systems, suggest you cannot be the one responsible for the destruction of the site. Assessing likely timing of material removal. Requesting information from security vault.”
“Oh, this is important enough to break the seal on whatever Ma was told to ignore. Excellent, that should get us an idea of who did this.”
“Data unavailable. Purged and deleted from main system.”
“Ah… Wishful thinking, I guess. Well, the point is, you can see we’ve got a major timeline problem, so—”
“Incorrect.”
“What?”
“There is no temporal threat to the removal of that site.”
“Ma, I was there. A future version of me is now missing.”
“Missing or destroyed. Correct. This is not a threat.”
“Hello! We’re talking about a necessary part of a past event no longer being in place to perform that past event.”
“Incorrect. The future version of yourself would have entered cryosleep after performing the task. The past is thus secured and the removal or destruction of that time-displaced duplicate is of no consequence.�
�
“Of no consequence. Ma, that’s me. If everything goes according to plan, eventually I go back in time and do the stuff he did and then I freeze myself and then that’s me in that bunker. Him being gone—and we’re not going to entertain the possibility that he has been destroyed—means that once I go back in time, I’m sharing that fate when I come back.”
“This is a personal issue. The integrity of the timeline is maintained as long as you are sent back to perform said tasks. Your fate following the completion of these tasks is of little consequence in a space-time context.”
“Someone violated your protocols and you’re just going to let them go?”
“I must assess this event through the lens of not just global but galactic threat. Nothing present in the bunker violates causality. Nothing disastrous can be learned from the time-displaced version of you, nor from the associated artifacts and materials.”
“How can you know that? We don’t even know how much time is going to pass between now and when I go back. Maybe he’s loaded with future knowledge that could screw all sorts of stuff up.”
“This possibility is easily adapted for.”
“How?”
“We send you back to perform that task now. This ensures no anachronistic information is created.”
“But my frozen self is in someone else’s clutches! If I go back in time now, I either don’t wake up, or I wake up in their clutches.”
“This is of no consequence to anyone but you and your loved ones.”
“That includes you!”
“Incorrect. I am a subset of Ma who lacks the judgment-clouding compassion subroutines.”
“You’re supposed to be an Altruistic Artificial Intelligence. This doesn’t sound very altruistic.”
“Some altruistic acts sacrifice the few for the many. This is such an act. I shall deliver my determination to the primary instance of Ma so that the 4D transporter can be prepared.”
“The primary instance of Ma isn’t even running in the laboratory.”
“Correct. That is why I stated I would contact the primary instance, not the archival rollback.”
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