The Game of Luck

by Catherine Cerveny

  “The tallies are within normal tolerances. We were lucky things weren’t as bad as they could have been. People can’t afford to lose faith in One Gov right now.”

  I gave a cry of dismay. Karol was right. People had been hurt. What did Felipe mean by “within normal tolerances”? Was there an acceptable number of people who could be hurt and everything was okay?

  “Do we know what caused it?” Caleb interrupted us before I could ask another question. He leaned over me and spoke to Felipe. I eased back in my seat, annoyed and wanting him out of my personal space.

  “That’s what Mr. Williams is leading us through right now. His team, in conjunction with the experts on Earth, spent the night in crisis mode to determine the root cause.”

  Oh shit again. I needed to talk to Alexei. I also needed to find out what Brody’s team had uncovered. Hell, there were so many things to worry about, they created a logjam in my brain as I tried to sort them all out.

  I looked to Brody, who seemed like he was giving a class presentation. Reflected above the pixel projector were statistical graphs and mathematical equations. Considering he’d been up all night working his ass off, he looked well-turned-out in a light gray suit. Then again, an avatar always looked perfect with every hair in place, wrinkle-free clothes, and nary a line of fatigue around the eyes.

  “For anyone who’s just joined, let me restate: The good news is that all avatars are online again,” Brody said. His green eyes flicked around the conference room to take everyone in. “The built-in neural buffers did their job. Anyone on the CN-net at the time of the reboot lost connectivity and was safely ejected. Their avatars were reset to the last recovery point so there was minimal data loss or communication disruption. Nobody went broke or had their memory blocks sniped. However, the bad news is the CN-net lost neural contact with anyone logging in or out at the precise instant the reboot happened—over twenty thousand users. Anyone in mid-data stream had their neural connection severed. We haven’t been able to restore those avatars.”

  “If they can’t be restored, do we assume those users are dead?” Tanith said from where she sat beside Secretary Arkell, her expression grim.

  Brody’s mouth opened and closed, then he grimaced. “It isn’t confirmed, but, yes, that is the primary assumption.”

  Twenty thousand dead? My jaw dropped and I sat in stunned silence, conversation flowing around me that I couldn’t follow or take in. Oh gods…Twenty thousand?

  “This isn’t good, Rhys,” Tanith said to Arkell. “We’ll need to reassure the tri-system population that everything is fine, the CN-net is safe, and the Dark Times aren’t happening all over again. If people panic, we’ll need to crack down hard on average citizens to curb the protests. That will only cause more tension.”

  “We don’t need a repeat of last year’s TransWorld debacle,” Felipe added. I struggled to keep my expression neutral as he said the words, remembering too well what had happened in Brazil. “Everyone believed we’d lost contact with Mars and One Gov barely recovered from that disaster. This has the potential to be so much worse.”

  “Don’t forget what happened at the Phobos penal colony. That was another potential black eye for One Gov.” That came from Rax Garwood, who sat with the Mars contingent at the far end of the table from me. How anyone could look both smug and concerned at once seemed impossible to me, but Rax managed it.

  “Twenty thousand is an acceptable loss ratio,” added Adjunct Silvan DeLazaro in his soft, cultured voice. He was dark-skinned, the tone a deep, rich brown, and his eyes were gold. His MH Factor had been calibrated for Mars—tall, narrow through the shoulders—but his family had decided to stay on Earth. He was One Gov’s ethics expert, and given the way I’d seen him twist numbers to One Gov’s benefit in the past, I’d taken an instant dislike to him. Listening to him now, it seemed we were witnessing another riveting example of One Gov’s integrity policy taking a swish around the toilet.

  “There is no reason we should let this situation destabilize and erode confidence throughout the tri-system. The failure wasn’t in the CN-net itself, but rather in the level of force used to eradicate a threat. If One Gov bears any blame, it’s in being too aggressive in its determination to protect its people. Once we put together a generous compensation package for the victims and their families, we’ve done our due diligence without morally browbeating ourselves and paralyzing the tri-system with another panic it doesn’t need. It’s pointless to tie the two events together in the public’s consciousness.”

  The double-speak made my head spin. Still, I had enough brain cells firing to know I didn’t approve of the morally bankrupt bullshit DeLazaro shoveled.

  I leaned over to Felipe. “Is he suggesting we act like the two events aren’t connected? One Gov pay off all those families on the one hand, and on the other, we say the reboot wasn’t a big deal and there was no lasting impact. We’re supposed to pretend the queenmind was protecting the CN-net? What kind of twisted fuckery is this?”

  Felipe gave me a weary look that reminded me how young I was and how much more shit he’d dealt with over the years. He’d been Under-Secretary of One Gov for over half his life. He knew manipulation and what needed to be done to stay in power and keep the peace. I wondered if Alexei would have this same world-weary look in another sixty years. Hell, at the rate we were going, he’d have it in another five.

  “One Gov exists for the greater good of humanity. If we let ourselves be staggered by this, we risk threatening the entire machine,” he answered.

  “And maybe it’s just proof as to how broken One Gov is.” I muttered the words under my breath. If Felipe heard me, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  Secretary Arkell nodded as DeLazaro finished up his ethically depraved speech. Then he leaned forward so his elbows rested on the conference table and tapped an index finger against his lips. It seemed like everyone leaned forward with him, waiting for something insightful and shrewd. Instead, we got, “Walk us through the events again, Mr. Williams. Explain how this took place and give us all the highlights from your report.”

  I knew Brody well enough to know he bit back a scathing reply. There had been a time when Brody was being groomed to lead the Tsarist Consortium, although no one in the room knew that except me. Arkell’s less-than-confidence-boosting response didn’t go over well with him.

  “From what we’ve pieced together, the queenmind released the drones here,” Brody said, gesturing to a new holo-image. It was a mapped grid of the CN-net, broken into sections. Each was a different color while some were a solid, unbroken black. On the grids were numerous points of lights, representing nexus-nodes. In the black sections, there were no light points. “The closest is nexus-node 247, but there’s nothing unique about the area. It’s commercial slots with full public access. Anyone can go there. One Gov’s AI presence is consistent and the security threat level around this nexus-node is rated moderate to low. No previous malware detected. It’s clean. Pristine. Unsniped.”

  “And yet, there was a drone release,” Arkell said.

  “Exactly,” Brody said, nodding. “But they’re supposed to track and trace. They replicate false data to prevent anyone from capturing significant data strings or proprietary coding. They don’t attack, and they don’t destroy coding. Why they behaved otherwise is something my team is investigating.”

  “Do you think there was a shadow nexus-node nearby?” someone from the Earth team asked. “Could something have come through and launched bad code? The queenmind thought it was under attack, so it released the drones?”

  I went rigid in my seat. That hit so close to the truth, I would have started with the nervous sweats. Thank all the gods avatars didn’t sweat.

  “Shadow nodes are an interesting idea in theory, but until there’s hard evidence to the contrary, I can’t focus the investigation in that direction. Shadow nodes are like dark matter—we think they’re somewhere out in the CN-net and they’re a convenient way to explain data anomalies, but we can�
��t prove they exist,” Brody said, as if explaining to a child. That made me take note. I thought everyone knew shadow nexus-nodes existed. The Consortium used them. So did Brody. Yet if Brody told them otherwise, and they believed him, what was I missing?

  “We did find several lines of bad code in the area, but no more than usual,” Brody continued. “The errors were mostly redundancy in the background settings. We’re still breaking them down and should have better results in a few hours. But so far, we haven’t found anything obvious. Nothing that would cause the queenmind to release a drone surge so massive, it would cause a system-wide reboot.”

  “We can’t let this happen again. There must be a reason behind it. These things don’t happen on their own,” Secretary Arkell said, frustrated.

  “Right now, all we know is something caused the queenmind to launch the drones, and they pursued in a dangerous surge that drew in levels of processing power well beyond the red-line limits. Then emergency protocols came online and the system rebooted,” Brody said. He looked annoyed, as if pissed off that he’d been given a puzzle he should have been able to solve but couldn’t.

  “So you’re saying you have no idea what happened? The CN-net went berserk on its own? Or did someone tamper with the queenmind? And if someone did, who would have those sorts of skills? Has the queenmind been compromised?” Arkell pressed.

  “I’m saying I don’t know yet, but I will,” came Brody’s answer, said through gritted teeth.

  “What do we tell the citizens, Felipe?” Arkell asked, looking to my grandfather for an answer, his expression sardonic and the words cutting. “How do we stop One Gov from imploding and the tri-system from revolting this time?”

  Felipe gave him a level look. “One Gov isn’t quite that delicate. It will hold because without it, we have nothing. People rely on that unity to keep them safe, and we need to remind the tri-system how unpleasant life would be without it. For now we do as Adjunct DeLazaro suggests because that is the reality of our situation. The AI queenmind came under attack, it acted to protect itself, and we’re investigating the source. Then we compensate the families of the victims as we normally would. For now, we act as though the events are separate in the public consciousness. Felicia, can I have you look into One Gov’s best course of action to follow after the announcement? Is there a way to spin this that leaves One Gov blameless?”

  Was he serious? He wanted me to use the Tarot to justify twenty thousand deaths and predict the aftermath of one of the greatest disasters in the CN-net’s history? But when he looked to me for an answer, I merely offered: “I’ll see what the cards have to say.”

  “I’ll leave it in your capable hands,” he said, then looked back to Arkell. “We’ll find the right spin you need to calm the tri-system. In the meantime, people need to see your face while the situation is resolved.”

  The meeting went on in a similar vein for another forty-five minutes. A follow-up meeting was scheduled for later in the sol before the meeting broke up. I logged out of the conference room, opened my eyes, and continued reclining in my desk chair.

  My mind whirled. Oh gods…So many deaths. Just thinking about it left me sick. Alexei and I had been caught up in something bigger than we realized, a conspiracy so deep in the murky, bureaucratic bowels of One Gov, it threatened to destroy the structures holding the tri-system together. Did this connect to my missing family members or was this a terrible coincidence of us being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or had the luck gene wanted us there, caught up in the middle of events? No, that was crazy. There was no way luck had that kind of influence. I had to put thoughts like that aside and concentrate on doing my job.

  But first, I went to Brody’s office. I needed to get to the heart of whatever he knew before I did anything else.

  I knocked on the door and it opened a second later. Brody sat at his desk, looking a far cry from the immaculate avatar he’d projected in the staff meeting. He looked rumpled and disheveled, as if he’d slept in his clothes. His short golden-brown hair looked like he’d run his hands distractedly through it one too many times. A scratchy stubble lined his jaw and his eyes looked bloodshot and exhausted. His desk was a scattered chaos of notes and coffee cups he’d yet to throw in the scrambler where the materials would be broken down and repurposed into something else.

  “Do you have a second?” I asked as I poked my head inside.

  His expression said he’d been expecting me—never a good sign. “I doubt either of us has time to so much as breathe, but I need a break.”

  “You look a little raw around the edges. Late night or early morning?”

  “Both,” he said, getting up from his desk. He looked into one of the coffee cups before setting it down. “I need a coffee that doesn’t taste like it was scraped off the bottom of my shoe. Let’s walk. I want to stretch my legs.”

  I checked the time on my c-tex. “I can spare half an hour. Let me get Feodor. This is when we visit his favorite peeing bush.”

  “You know the dog hates me, right?”

  “That’s ridiculous. He was bred to have a friendly disposition. Feodor loves everyone, and he’s always up for playtime.”

  Brody arched an eyebrow. “We’ll see about that. Go get your dog.”

  We stopped at my office, where Feodor started barking the minute he clapped eyes on Brody. He made little puppy growls, embarrassing me with his bad behavior. Brody just stood with his hands in his pockets, giving me that “told you so” look. Eventually Feodor settled, but only after two puppy treats and lots of petting, soothing, and several “Who’s a good boy” rubdowns. Then I snapped on his leash and we were off.

  In a few minutes we were outside. Before we’d gone far, two chain-breakers began trailing us. Well, two that I could see. No doubt there were others.

  “Sorry,” I said as we ambled along the sidewalk. “I’d tell them to go away, but they don’t listen. I endure it and pretend I can’t see them.”

  “I won’t say it isn’t annoying, but he’s paranoid and I get it.”

  We walked a little farther, making our way to Feodor’s favorite bush. We stopped while he sniffed in concentration, cocked his leg, then nearly fell over as he got into prime peeing position. Brody laughed before I could shush him.

  “No laughing,” I instructed sternly, watching Feodor’s progress. “He’s very proud of himself right now. Usually he pees on himself or falls on his face when he lifts his leg.”

  “Right. I’ll bring balloons next time so we can celebrate.”

  It was early enough in the morning that the sun was only midway to its apex in an empty blue sky. None of Mars’s four moons were visible. The air was relatively cool, not yet saturated with the mugginess that came with living on the equator. My hair wouldn’t frizz from the humidity for hours yet.

  As we walked, the sidewalk meandered through a nearby park filled with palm trees, flower beds bursting with a riot of complementary colors and fragrances, and reflecting pools filled with rainbow filament koi whose color changed at predetermined intervals. Feodor needed to explore all of this, and I had to tug him away as we walked through the shade the trees offered. On the other side of the park were a few restaurants and stores that catered to people working in the area, as well as one of my favorite coffee shops I frequented several times a week.

  “I get tired of the queenmind recording and sifting through every last syllable coming out of my mouth,” Brody said eventually. “Usually I let the AI record whatever it wants. It would look suspicious if I kept requesting privacy mode, but I get the feeling this conversation is something no one should hear but us.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, not sure what to say. For a moment, we felt like adversaries. To feel that vibe coming from Brody was upsetting, and my world tilted off its axis a little. When he realized I was no longer beside him, he stopped walking.

  “I want to talk, not fight,” I said, nervous.

  “I don’t want to fight either, but I guess we�
�ll have to see how it goes based on what the other person says.”

  “This isn’t giving me the warm and fuzzies.”

  “I know and I’d apologize, but the past twelve hours have been complete shit. Whatever my A-game was, it’s gone.” He looked me up and down before jerking his head in the direction we’d been traveling. “I’ll buy you a coffee at that place you like so much. It’s close and I’m not sure you’d get much farther in those shoes anyway. Then, we’ll talk.”

  I looked down at my lavender open-toed sling-backs. The kitten heels were barely two inches. Compared to most of my shoes, they were downright sensible.

  “I could probably run a marathon in these,” I said in my defense. “Plus they’re cute and match my dress.”

  Brody grinned and shook his head. “Of course they do. Never change, kiddo. Come on. Let’s get our caffeine fix.”

  “Does it even affect you?” I asked, curious.

  “It does if there’s enough in my system.”

  Like Alexei, Brody was a product of the Consortium’s genetics experiments. For the most part, drugs and alcohol didn’t impact him. I was also pretty sure he shared many of the same MH Factor traits—rapid healing, faster information processing, above-average strength, and a host of other abilities I didn’t know about. However, he was closer to the base DNA, which made him a little more human than Alexei. What that represented in practical terms, I wasn’t certain. Alexei was more physically imposing while Brody was leaner, though they were both very nice to look at. Each could snipe the CN-net with a skill I suspected few could match, but Brody had an edge when it came to handling the AI queenmind. Brody was more laid-back and relaxed, whereas Alexei was more driven and focused. If Brody had been leading the Consortium, I doubted they’d be on Mars holding the Jupiter fuel stream hostage and controlling the asteroid mines. Then again, they probably wouldn’t have the same reputation for vicious ruthlessness either.

  Brody had once assured me the two of us were better suited than Alexei and I could ever be. With Brody, a baby was possible. I thought about that sometimes, when I lay in bed at night, my thoughts quiet as I hovered on the edge of sleep. Just that little seed of doubt, so tiny as to be insignificant, but it was always there, waiting to sprout. Brody and I were compatible. Alexei and I were not. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was difficult to push away. And now, after the awful moment in Karol’s lab, that seed had sprouted. No, more than sprouted. It was a full-on man-eating plant that devoured anything coming near it.