Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  She almost jumped when Bryan slid up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned to him, as grateful for the dimness of the light hiding her blush as she was to take her eyes off Patty and Carver. A pulse fluttered in the notch of his collar, and Leah felt her eyes drawn to it. “You okay, Leah?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn't supposed to be like this.”

  He hugged her awkwardly and then stepped away. It didn't feel quite like when Dad hugged her, and she was both glad and sorry when Patty stepped back from Carver's bed, trailing her IV stand, and said in a strangely level voice, “I think I want to go back to our room now.”

  0745 Hours

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Today's the day. Just a few hours off.

  And I'm a fucking idiot. I'm crawling around under the eight barbershop chairs in the lab—mine, freshly installed, and seven others—stress making me itch to dirty my hands, staring at holographic circuit diagrams through my prosthetic eye just exactly as if I had any kind of sense at all. Or as if I could make head or tail of what half these things are supposed to do.

  Valens lets me get away with it, probably realizing I have to blow off the tension somehow, and it beats showing up drunk to work. Which was the other option. But probably contraindicated in this case. Hah.

  One of those chairs won't be used. One of the boys who went in for the nanite treatment didn't make it. Carver Mallory, the handsome cocoa-skinned sixteen-year-old I glimpsed on the Montreal, is never going to wake up. And I hate myself because with every breath I take, the only thought I can produce is thank God it wasn't Leah.

  Gabe leans against the console, checking the VR module programming one last time. Elspeth is by the door, alternately keeping us company and getting in the way.

  There's something coolly soothing about wiring charts. The doc's pantsuit rustles as she comes over to me, leaning down to see what I'm doing. I'm not changing anything, of course. Just making sure everything looks like it does in the charts.

  Gabe looks up. “Is that firing right, Maker?”

  “Good as gold.” The technicians will go over it all again, of course. I drop a diagram chip into the box, fumble for the next in the sequence.

  Elspeth squats beside me, ice clinking in the mug of water in her other hand, and passes the chip. “What's this Maker thing, anyway?”

  I can feel Gabe wince as I compare chips. “Nickname from the army. Stupid joke, Doc.” I sit up, finished with that chair. Elspeth gives me an assist, grabs my steel hand tight in her small brown one, and hauls me to my feet. She might be little, but she's not a sissy.

  “How stupid?”

  Gabe blushes; I see him turning away, feigning deafness as if his ears had grown lids. “Gabe speaks too many languages.”

  “I know. He makes me feel inadequate. Which doesn't happen often, let me tell you—” The disarming grin. Doc scratches between her eyebrows with a pinky nail. “It's a pun?”

  “Genevieve. Jenny. You've got medical Latin, right?”

  “Mostly pig—Oh! Gene.”

  “‘Maker.' Right. You're in business.”

  Over by the refrigerator, Gabe chokes on something I didn't see him put in his mouth. “I have apologized,” he says.

  The doc clears her throat. “It stuck?”

  “It stuck.” He tilts his head to one side, turns back over his shoulder to shrug.

  Ellie flips an ice cube at him. “An offense that great demands a more material kind of restitution. You're buying dinner tonight.”

  “After the training run,” I put in. “Although Leah might not be hungry.” It will be her first time on the Hyperex, and I can't shake the conviction that it's a bad idea. I push back, try to remember what it was like. Try to put myself in Leah's experience.

  Damn, that was a long time ago. I was—eighteen? Nineteen. Something like that. A cold sweat breaks across my forehead when I contemplate it too deeply, and I let the thought slide away the way it wants to. I have a catch-and-release policy on some of those memories.

  I've also got a head full of drugged-out clarity: the biggest dose since I was out of the service, and the new formula hits harder and cleaner than the old stuff did. Some of Face's kids paid the price for that efficiency. I must have been staring into space, because I snap back to myself when Gabe lays his hand on my elbow. “You girls are ganging up on me, n'est-ce pas?”

  “You had to know that was going to happen.” I lay my hand over his for a second. His breath changes minutely when I let the steel fingers circle his wrist; my smile is amusement at this power over him, and then it drops away. Should I have noticed that?

  Richard?

  “It shouldn't be anything to worry about,” Richard says. “The nanite growth—the trace-element burden—in both you and Koske seems to be lessening parabolically; the sensitivity increase should be stabilizing soon. You've been taking your supplements?”

  Religiously. Which makes me grin, because Ellie dragged me to Mass yesterday, and Gabe along with us. It felt a little strange to watch them go for communion and not to follow. Stranger still—well, let's just say that the kyrie's been in and out a few times since my last confession.

  Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.

  “You should be good,” Richard says. “By the way, I will attempt to talk to Leah tonight.”

  Patricia and the boys, too?

  “Unnecessary risk.”

  Yeah. That will make her pretty happy. Leah and Richard were friends while Richard was still hiding out in the Internet, pretending he didn't exist.

  Well, that was a slightly different Richard. But that, too, is a story for another day.

  “She should be pretty happy. Jenny—”

  Yeah? You gonna tell me to take good care of a kid whose diapers I changed, Dick?

  “No, I'm going to tell you to be very careful in there. I'm still concerned. I don't know what sort of control our benefactors have over our little nanite buddies, but I know they have FTL quantum communication. And I really wish I could decompile your operating system and find out what sort of nasty little surprises Valens and Holmes had built into it by this Ramirez fellow. By the way, I thought you should know that there are two more ships under construction.”

  Before the Montreal is tested?

  “One of them's nearly done.”

  Have you told them about—

  “The aliens? How would you or I manage to tell them that and make them believe it, and still keep my freedom a secret? And what could they do about it if they knew?”

  International cooperation—

  “Set up some sort of a booby trap and give us a war with beings whose technology is so far beyond ours that it sits up and barks when you pat it on the head? Meanwhile they're clawing over each other to get to the stars? I don't want to give anybody another reason to fight, just yet.”

  The multiple ships—that's not something . . . that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you do for a chest-beating sort of space race. For national pride. You only need one successful ship for that.

  “I'm looking into it. But add it to your list of things to worry about. The good news is, I've about got the physics on the stardrive licked. It's superstrings, as I suspected, and I'd explain how it works but I suspect you'd find it even more unsettling than I do.”

  Doc told me quantum mechanics only works on very small things. Subatomic.

  As if out of the corner of my eye, I see Richard grin. “It does. But it can work on a lot of them at once.”

  2:00 PM

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Leah brushed irritably at her cheek before she woke fully enough to realize the brambles scratching her face were just the tweed upholstery of her living-room sofa. She heard voices dimly through a closed door and stood, then padded across the floor, twisting her blouse a
round her belly to tuck it straight into the jeans she still wore. Her father's voice, urgent but not unhappy, and Elspeth's answering in a similar register. The office door was only slightly ajar.

  Her hand was on the cool brass knob when she heard a third voice, one at the back of her head. “Leah? Can you hear me now?”

  “Tuva!” She had the presence of mind to gasp, not scream, but it was close. “You're in my head!”

  “Sh. Talk inside.”

  Leah put her hand across her mouth. Approaching footsteps bowed the old wooden floor; the door came open under her hand, the knob slipping through tingling fingers. She looked up into Elspeth's questioning face, bronze skin fading into the darkness of the room, her curls backlit with a green glow from the desktop. “You're awake?” Dad loomed over Elspeth's shoulder.

  Leah turned her hand in front of her mouth so a finger touched her lips. Richard? Can you hear this?

  “Perfectly. Are you recovering okay?”

  I'm very tired.

  “Leah, can you think of a way to let Elspeth and Gabe . . . your dad . . . know I'm in here? Quietly, in case the apartment is wiretapped? I have some information I need to pass along.”

  Elspeth and Dad had come out of the office, but they heeded her silencing gesture. Leah closed her eyes for a second and thought. “Dad, do we have any paper?”

  “Ask a programmer for paper?” Elspeth chuckled, but got out of the way as Dad brushed past her.

  He offered Elspeth a dirty look and a fond insult. Leah smiled after him, proud that he trusted her enough to do as she asked without explanation. Elspeth found a pencil.

  “Dad, can you show me what you were working on?”

  “More AI stuff,” he said, returning. A sheaf of glittering perfect squares showed one white side in his hand. “Boring.”

  “I want to learn,” she said, and didn't mean it as anything except an excuse until she saw his eyebrow go up and the little smile curve the corner of his lip. Nobody actually cares what he does, do they? We just leave him alone and let him do it. The revelation hit her almost like a fist, and she dropped her eyes as she took the papers from his hand.

  And she paid attention while she wrote out, slowly and precisely, with a rounded hand, every word Richard dictated, and sketched out the circuit diagrams and schematics he showed her—nanite controller protocols, and the careful instructions on how to create them.

  1500 Hours

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Under way

  Min-xue opened his eyes on the wonder of the stars. Whispers seemed to stroke him—the Huang Di—like anemone fingers. Whispers without voices, he thought, and wondered if one day he, too, would write a poem that might be worthy of remembrance. He might have said that he felt the ship as he felt his flesh, but it was more than that. Imagine the feeling of starlight on your skin, Captain.

  What he said was, “Captain, I'm ready to activate the stardrive now.”

  Captain Wu cleared his throat. “Affirmative,” and if Min-xue hadn't been able to read his heartbeat through the medical sensors in his chair, he never would have known that the man was afraid.

  The Huang Di flexed itself into darkness and the sightless space between spaces, and almost instantly back out again. Despite himself, despite knowing how far from the deadly embrace of the Sun and her planets they were, Min-xue half expected the unfelt breath that filled his human body's lungs to be his last. Too close to the gravity well, he thought, and almost whooped out loud at the realization that he was still alive to think it.

  “Transition accomplished,” he announced coolly. “Distance traveled”—he checked parallax through his external sensors—“one-twentieth of an astronomical unit, sir.”

  Less than half of a light minute.

  The smallest distance yet recorded using the Martian drive.

  5:00 PM

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Leah couldn't sit still, even though Patty kept grinning at her from under the polished dark curtain of her hair. The light moved over it, entrancing Leah with how real and how bright everything seemed. The boundless energy in her veins pushed her around the green-carpeted waiting room. She glanced up, squinted at the brightness of the fluorescents flickering on the stark white walls, and tried to tune out the yells of the four male students playing hologames while they waited.

  “Jumping bean,” Patricia said.

  Leah jiggled her shoulders and paced a few more steps. “Like you're not excited.” Tuva, are you there? Richard, I mean. Tuva was the handle he'd used in the VR game space where she had originally met him. Leah hadn't known he was an AI then.

  “I'm here, Leah.” The sense of presence was comforting. “Your friend is right. You're bouncing off the walls.”

  Like you ever sit still. Which was true. Even his computer-generated image was a fidget. I'm going to fly, Richard!

  She felt him grin. And then she startled, as Patricia seemed to materialize beside Leah and place her hand on Leah's arm. The touch felt funny—sharp—and Leah jerked away. Patricia did, too, looking down at her fingers as if she'd scorched them. “Whoa.”

  “Weird.” Leah brushed her hair off her neck in irritation. “It must be the Hammers. Aunt Jenny said they could make everything a little weird. Weirder, I mean.”

  Patty smiled, but Leah could see—by now—that it didn't ease the tightness by the older girl's eyes. And then Patty looked up, and Leah did, too. They both heard the footsteps in the hall. “That'll be Aunt Jenny.”

  “And Papa Fred,” Patricia answered, nodding. The boys were still distracted by their game as the two girls moved toward the door.

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Sol-system wide area nanonetwork

  17:15:44:45–17:15:44:56

  Richard let a thin filament of his awareness move through the Montreal, the Huang Di, the Calgary, the half-built Vancouver, and the three Chinese vessels still under construction. Was aware of the presence of the Chinese pilots in their regimented daily routines. Followed the progress of the Chinese invasion into Russia, Russia's response—piggybacking on the Montreal's radio, microwave, and laser transmissions. It annoyed him to not be able to use the Chinese ships similarly, and it annoyed him more to have to spawn remote processes and wait for them to report back, and the amount of data he could transfer without being noticed was limited. They're desperate. The Huang Di and its sister ships are a last-ditch effort, he realized. The AI contemplated the Chinese record of cultural imperialism, and Japan, and Taiwan, and Tibet. He ran a few hundred variations on population and climate numbers. And he worried.

  Richard sighed, while another thread of his attention rested on Trevor Koske—not able to control him, or read Trevor's thoughts without revealing Richard's presence, but the AI feeling the pilot's existence like a heartbeat low in the back of his chest. Richard watched through the shipwide monitors as Koske went about his routine—one life among uncounted thousands, if he considered the still incomprehensible alien presences pushing at his attention.

  The AI had also conceived a particular fascination with Lt. Christopher Ramirez. Chiefly because he couldn't see why the sullen, muscular blond made such an effort to cultivate Koske. Koske was only slightly less offensive to Ramirez than he was to anyone else. Richard, the eternal observer, let his crippled alter-ego deal with Koske and with Wainwright on those occasions when it became necessary, and chose to watch the grunted conversations between the two men at meals or in the boxing ring.

  They both liked to fight.

  Ramirez spent his off-duty hours reading twentieth-century politics and twenty-first-century philosophy. He was unmarried. His early air force career had been marked by disciplinary problems, but his service for the past five years had been exemplary—and even the armed services tended to overlook minor problems in a code jockey as talented as Ramirez.

>   Except Richard—sacrificing some of his precious bootlegged bandwidth to pick over Ramirez's records on Earth—noticed a few things. Such as that Ramirez's registered party affiliation in college had been to the neo-Greens, but the neo-Green Party—while extant—had not become widespread outside of Europe until two years later, and Ramirez had been the only student at the University of Guelph to so register.

  Not conclusive, but suggestive that perhaps records had been altered along the way.

  Richard was also becoming familiar with Captain Wainwright. Concealed under the mantle of the second AI, his mind-controlled progenitor, he found he had astonishing freedom. The nanite web allowed him to sense things that happened across light-years of space. Through Jenny and Leah, Richard knew that Gabe and Elspeth were on a new track with the AI research. He showed them how to build control chips and planned to expand his nanite fingers through the Internet soon—solving his bandwidth problem nicely. The other ships would need minds, he knew, minds of their own to survive the strange planes and angles of eleven-dimensional space. The human pilots were fast and intuitive. But Richard didn't think any human mind—even the one he himself was modeled on—could quite manage to comprehend the world behind the veil of what they'd jokingly dubbed sneakier-than-light technology.

  He could feel the minds of the Benefactors, as he'd taken wryly to calling them; he'd tried to speak to them. Would have tried to speak to their AIs, but they didn't seem to have them. Just brains so alien he wasn't sure, in fact, that they could be considered to have anything like language at all.

  He felt the ships moving, coming at what must be for them a stately and considered pace given what he had speculated about their capabilities.

  Coming—and he hadn't shared this with Jenny yet, or with anyone—coming from two directions at once.

  1730 Hours