Text-based coding that he could replicate would be identifiable to people trained to stop influence victims from contacting intelligences. If she were going to record audio or vid, vid would include more information that might distract observers from her real message. Vid’s wealth of information also made it an unreliable way to communicate with intelligences, which the therapists watching her would know. And Pel knew vid was Adda’s least favorite communication medium. That’d catch his attention.
Once she gave her therapists the journal entries, they let her into the monitored conference room to make her recording. Her code would be obvious to any ITA or security-conscious listeners, but Adda was still acting less neurologically competent than she felt. Security-conscious people wouldn’t be interested in analyzing a brain-damaged person’s message.
Even so, her and Pel’s shared experience was the foundation of her cipher, and she couldn’t pour a whole new vocabulary into a single message. She’d selected five concepts she wanted to convey. She breathed slowly for a beat, one of the few useful techniques the therapists had offered her to calm herself down, then activated the recorder in the conference room’s projector.
“Hi, Pel. I hope you’re doing well. Sorry to leave you alone like this.” Breath in, breath out. It was so easy to make mistakes on a vid and so hard to edit them later, especially when she had to use the clinic’s outdated editing equipment. “I haven’t heard from you lately, so, what are you planning to do? Tell me all the details.” That second phrase was usually Pel’s line, not hers, so he might notice that she’d paired “details” with the “planning” she was now talking about. She paused after her first cipher, then went on.
“I know it’s hard to keep a schedule in real time, but it’s important to anything you’re planning to do.” “Real time” was a phrase he’d made fun of her for using. Her light emphasis would, she hoped, communicate that if their plans were proceeding on schedule, he could use that phrase to tell her so. This might’ve made more sense in her head. If it took more than one message to clarify their code, so be it.
She paused again. She must’ve looked as nervous as she felt, and Pel knew he was one of two people in the universe who Adda talked to with ease. To a stranger, her nerves might explain these long pauses in the message.
“And I know recording always takes longer than you planned, but I wish you’d send me a message anyway.” Demanding that your relatives talk to you seemed normal, but she was repeating variations of “plan” too often. She was proposing that conjugations of “record” could be used to say that they were falling behind schedule. Two more terms to go.
“And tell me how Iridian is doing. There are veterans who can help her, if we can ask them.” That was the biggest stretch of all of these. Although the universe was full of veterans, the ones most likely to assist Iridian were the ZV Group, not the NEU veteran support system. Pel could say “veterans” to discuss the ZVs.
“Whatever, you don’t have to tell me what you’re up to if you don’t want to.” This was the part that should make Pel realize that several of her sentences had secondary meanings. She’d never let him get away with failing to tell her about his life, not when she’d tracked him down and gone to the trouble of recording something on vid. If he said “whatever,” a word he used the way she used “never mind,” to tell her that he was finished talking about plans to get Iridian out of prison, then that would be a useful way to end encoded messages.
“I love you, so please reply to this.” Adda stopped recording and played back what she’d said. The pauses felt incredibly long. Maybe that was just her nerves, or maybe she’d really been speaking in an obviously strange rhythm.
She gave the message to the therapists to send, and they didn’t bring it back to her with scowls and accusations. With a few more messages like these, she and Pel would have a set of alternative terms with which to discuss escape.
* * *
It’d been over a month since her implanted comms had gone silent. Adda was almost certain that the problem was on her end, not Iridian’s. Still, for the sixth or seventh time that day, she subvocalized, Iri? into the mic in her throat. There was no response, even taking into account the distance between Ceres and Venus, where, according to Pel, the ZV Group were entering Venus’s orbit to help Iridian escape. In the weeks since she’d shared the first words of a verbal cipher with Pel, he’d accomplished a lot.
She should stop checking. The implanted comms wouldn’t spontaneously fix themselves. The silence upset her, and when she was upset it was harder to avoid frightening, time-eating mental loops. Today, she couldn’t afford to have one of those.
Anybody who knew anything about her and Iridian knew that as soon as one of them were free, she’d go straight to the other one. It’d been Iridian’s idea, communicated through Pel and the Vestan address AegiSKADA should’ve listened to, for Iridian and the ZVs to travel to Ceres as fast as physiology and hardware permitted to rescue Adda, from the clinic if necessary. If Adda got the opportunity to free herself and run for the port, she’d do that instead.
Because AegiSKADA was listening. Probably. Even before Casey had installed it on Sloane’s servers, it’d collected copious data throughout its domain. If Casey had changed AegiSKADA’s behavior, it would only have increased surveillance priorities. Captain Sloane would’ve liked that tendency too.
Instead of sending her the ZV Group’s timetable in the previous week’s message, Pel had said something that could’ve meant he forgot it, or could’ve meant he hadn’t had it at the time. They’d expanded their coded vocabulary over the past two weeks, but if they’d had more time to work on it, they could’ve made a lot more sense to each other. From what he had been able to communicate, Adda expected at least a day between when the ZVs broke Iridian out of prison and when they arrived on Ceres. If AegiSKADA freed Adda from the clinic during that waiting period, she might have time to find a workspace generator where she could turn her implanted comms back on. If AegiSKADA didn’t intervene, Iridian was bringing enough ZV soldiers to destroy the entire clinic, if that was what it took to get Adda out of it.
She’d never planned a contingency for losing all comms connection with Iridian. The next time she put together a mission . . . operation . . . job . . . thing . . . she’d add a contingency for that.
For now, she faced an hour of scheduled babbling from the clinic staff. The most recent influence resistance and recovery research they’d read must’ve been published during the previous decade. Every technique they’d “taught” her had already been built into modern artificial intelligence development and countered by the newest intelligences. If the staff had used those techniques on a modern intelligence, they’d have been doing whatever it asked within an hour. Iridian might find that funny, or at least comically horrifying. Adda wished she could tell her about it.
As Adda’s “training” session wound down, her instructor said, “You’re making progress!” Adda just looked at him. That was the method she’d been using to establish herself as too disoriented to stand trial. “And your brother sent you a message! You’ll find it at your desk in your room.” Adda hid her excitement behind the blank expression and turned to go. “Oh, hey, I’ll come too,” the instructor said. Adda managed not to sigh. The staff trusted the other patients to walk around on their own, but counselors escorted Adda everywhere.
She still heard . . . wind chimes, maybe? Or a series of quiet, overlapping comp alerts and notifications, sometimes, when her roommate was gone and everything should’ve been quiet. But she really was doing better. She’d learned to get from the classrooms to her dorm room, if the counselors ever let her walk there by herself.
No art or windows decorated her new room’s empty walls. The desk with a comp and a projector built in was a welcome addition, though. The desk comp didn’t seem to cause the hallucinations that she’d had the last time she’d used her comp glove. Some content was censored, and counselors watched everything she did. Still, the b
oring but approved feeds were better than no contact with the rest of the universe at all.
Her new roommate, an older woman who’d let a learning management intelligence influence her, was elsewhere at the moment. Adda had the desk to herself. She sat in its chair, opened the message from Pel, and adjusted the sound’s volume and direction until Pel’s voice would stay in her room and not echo into the hallway.
“Hey, Sissy!” Pel sat somewhere dimly lit, with black faux-wood paneling behind his back. Colored lights flashed across his face at unpredictable intervals, and music thumped whenever he wasn’t speaking. “Wanted to pick a nice public place to say hi! I can’t wait until they let you do synchronous comms again. Iridian says hi too! I got a message from her, so, I mean, that’s good. She asked . . . Oh, never mind, probably shouldn’t repeat it. She says she loves every detail of you, or some gross awfulness like that. Okay, that was word-for-word. And she also says that it’ll be great to see you in real time too. Like me, same thing. Well, whatever, talk to you when I can.” “Every detail” and “in real time too” meant that Iridian’s side of their joint escape was proceeding as planned.
It seemed impossible that AegiSKADA would ignore all the messages she’d routed through the stations it was responsible for, full of keywords that would attract it. When she and Iridian were planning this out through Pel, it had seemed straightforward: the ZVs helped Iridian, AegiSKADA helped Adda, and the ZVs would collect Adda on the way to Jupiter. If AegiSKADA didn’t step in, the ZVs would free Adda from the clinic themselves.
That had been planned while Adda was still coping with long bouts of disorientation. Now that her brain was connecting her thoughts more effectively, she realized that getting AegiSKADA to understand that it should let her out today, while Iridian and the ZV Group were making their own bid for freedom, made the operation schedule much less reliable than she preferred.
At least the clinic had accomplished its stated goal. It’d been days since Adda had felt compelled to contact an intelligence, as opposed to wanting to work with one for practical reasons. That was the only stage one influence symptom she’d experienced. She’d always lost track of time when working with intelligences, and the stage one self-care behavioral criteria applied to people with very different daily routines than Adda’s.
She let herself mentally drift while she replayed Pel’s message. The colored lights decorating whatever club or bar he was in flickered across his face. Something about the lights was unnatural. The way they moved was wrong, but Adda couldn’t think how. A workspace would’ve told her what that difference meant.
This was the acknowledgment she’d been watching for. AegiSKADA had been listening after all. But what was it telling her?
In minutes, a workspace would’ve decoded AegiSKADA’s message and let her compose a response in kind. Intelligences misunderstood plain speech as often as they intentionally misinterpreted it, and workspaces limited potential error to practically nothing. AegiSKADA had proven itself to be excellent at interpreting spoken words. She’d have to be as specific as possible in her reply.
She lost some time then, second-guessing everything that she knew about intelligences generally and AegiSKADA in particular. When her brain got out of its loop, her foot had fallen asleep. She sighed, shook the doubt from her head, and began tapping out—not subvocalizing, since the damned desk blocked such hard-to-monitor input—a vague outline of her reply, recorded in terms of what she might say to Pel and AegiSKADA.
Her message, woven with specific terms she’d taught Pel through weeks of careful communication that AegiSKADA overheard, was simple. “Release me from the artificial intelligence influence recovery clinic on Ceres.” It was the only influence recovery facility in the asteroid belt, so there’d be no room for confusion or intentional misinterpretation.
She added “without hurting anyone” to the end of that message and recorded her reply, speaking carefully. Despite spending her rehab literature reading hour outlining the message, it took only a couple of minutes to record. She was ending it with “So I’m really glad—” when her door opened.
She turned, hoping to see her roommate in the doorway, but it was an instructor. He held up a small key fob, which she’d seen staff members use to turn off desk comps like hers. “I’m really glad you sent me this,” Adda said quickly to the desk’s mic. “I’ll talk to you soon.” She ended her recording and sent it, hoping that it wouldn’t be too closely inspected or delayed, before turning her blank stare on the instructor.
“Your whole family is a bit off, do you know that?” the instructor asked. He’d seen her message to Pel, then, or one of the messages Pel had sent her. After a few seconds of silence, he sighed. “The ITA has asked us to speak with you about—” His comp started pinging with the default alert for the staff’s messaging software. The instructor paused to read what he’d received.
Air conditioners whined and rumbled to life. That could’ve been an indication that AegiSKADA and the intelligence managing this building were interacting, or it could’ve been ordinary temperature regulation. AegiSKADA would’ve had to have copied part of itself to a Ceres installation, to receive the message so fast. A workspace would’ve told Adda whether the air-conditioning was important. That still wasn’t an option without her freedom and an unlocked comp.
Adda’s message to Pel had only included what Adda wanted AegiSKADA to do, not how to do it. Without a workspace, giving it detailed orders could cause dangerous contortions of logic as the intelligence balanced all the factors involved. She’d asked it for help, but she had no idea how it would go about letting her out of the clinic. Despite the terrifying possibilities, it was thrilling to be such a huge step closer to seeing Iridian again. Assuming AegiSKADA decided to act, anyway.
“Hey, ah, I’ve got to go, but I’ll be back,” the instructor said. “Stay right here, okay?” The door remained open as his footsteps retreated down the hall at a pace just short of a run. Doors usually closed and locked themselves behind the staff.
Adda glanced around her room to see if she wanted to bring anything with her, in case AegiSKADA was in the process of releasing her now. Nothing the clinic had given her would keep her out of ITA custody until Iridian and the ZV Group reached Ceres. She activated the projector on her desk to check for anything digital that she’d want to memorize.
The desk’s comms showed a single unread message with the clinic’s identifiers in its origination. The user information was missing. It couldn’t have been sent through the staff’s interface without user information. And yet, there it was.
Outside her room, people were shouting. She opened the new message and stood up from the desk. The desk’s eye tracker tilted the projection so she could read it from her new position. It said, The doors are open.
The indignant and alarmed shouting resolved into “Hey, who left this open?” and “You’re not supposed to be out here,” and “I said occupied, asshole!” AegiSKADA must’ve opened every door in the building. For the first time in weeks, Adda felt like laughing. She couldn’t quite remember how to do it.
The instructor returned and threw a small package on Adda’s desk. “Dr. Vega says to take this. I’ll be back to see how you’re doing in a few minutes.” He rushed out of Adda’s room without glancing at the message projected in the desk. She deleted it.
The package contained a compound drug in rows of bubble-packed blue tablets. Estidexamphetamine was a stimulant, but she’d never seen karovoxin or the entire second medication that the package said it was combined with.
Except she had. She’d read about karovoxin in an article on prescription-grade workspace aids. She grinned, possibly for the first time since she’d been hospitalized. AegiSKADA had been listening, and it knew exactly what she needed to communicate with it more clearly. Captain Sloane must’ve been holding it to high standards of order verification.
Yes, she’d made significant mistakes with the awakened intelligences, but AegiSKADA she understood. The id
ea of returning to the universe where the awakened intelligences prowled was terrifying, but if she and Iridian could get to Jupiter, they’d be safe and together, at least for a little while.
And eventually, Adda hoped she could collaborate with Casey and the other awakened intelligences again. They were fascinating. Even if that risked Adda falling under Casey’s influence again, giving up on ever learning more about them wasn’t possible. She had to know more, but she’d also have to be more careful.
She set a tiny blue tablet under her tongue, as the package indicated. While it dissolved, she pocketed the rest and walked out of her room, into chaos. Every door in sight was open. Patients shouted at one another, the staff, and, in one case, a wall. The staff loudly and ineffectually begged the patients to sit down.
Adda strolled past all of them, toward the clinic’s exit, according to signs on the walls. If AegiSKADA had opened every door in the building, then the exit was open too. Once she was outside, AegiSKADA could help her find an implant workspace where she’d try to reactivate her comms implants and coordinate with Iridian. When Iridian and the ZV Group arrived, Adda would be ready to leave.
Her neural implant net was giving her a kind of tingling headache, reacting to the concentration drug after so long without it. If she had her comp, she’d be able to converse with AegiSKADA by sending more messages through the clinic’s comms, the way it’d sent one to her earlier. There was no time to look for one, though. Staff should’ve been stationed near the exits, and anyone could be waiting outside.
Iridian would know what to say to make the staff members leave their posts. Can you hear me? Adda subvocalized. It would’ve been nice if the concentration aid also reactivated her comms implants, but that was a lot to hope for. The world faded to shades of gray as the drug took hold. Also, the floor rippled with each step, like she was walking in a shallow pool. The floors had never rippled when she took her usual concentration aids.
Gravity of a Distant Sun Page 7