“The what?” Iridian asked.
“The AI interpretation base for the software,” said Noor. “What the dev AI uses to collaborate with the team guiding the project. Even a human-readable code version would help, if your modder reads code.”
“They do,” Adda said.
“We need the source before we do anything else,” said Noor. “You can tell Biometallic about the vulnerability later. And how the hell are we paying your modder?”
“Biometallic makes a lot of medical software.” Noor’s reaction had apparently taken all the fun out of this endeavor for Adda, and she was frowning at her comp instead of talking to him. “If we get far enough into their systems to copy our implants’ firmware source, someone will buy any other proprietary data we can take with us.”
“Do you know where they keep this stuff?” Iridian asked.
“They have their own orbital station. Everything I’ve read indicates that the firmware is housed there, but it’s orbiting Ceres.” And she’d have run everything she’d read through analyses that looked for systematic recent edits that’d indicate Casey was setting a trap for them. After Tash’s death, Adda didn’t trust any text until she’d tested it for tampering.
“Fuck that then,” said Noor.
“Hold up,” Iridian said. “This could solve all our problems, yeah? We get in there, steal your and Adda’s implant firmware and anything else we can get our hands on, then sell it all.” They’d be selling medical equipment data, unfortunately. Somebody could change it and kill people who that equipment kept alive. It was one of several reasons Iridian would’ve torn the one in her head out with her bare hands, if that wouldn’t require cracking her skull open.
But people wouldn’t necessarily misuse what they stole, and Casey would influence Adda again if they caught her with that vulnerability still in her implant. That took priority. “Depending on how much we make, we could help Björn somehow,” Iridian said. “Blackmail someone in Oxia, or hire a lawyer to get ver out of vis commitments to the corp, even. With enough money, we’d have options for convincing ver.”
“How much are we planning to take, here?” Noor asked. “And what’s my cut?”
“As much as we can get you,” said Iridian. “It’s digital. We can take on a lot.”
Noor threw up his hands. “Where are we getting the pseudo-organics to store ‘a lot’? And how do you know we’ll be able to grab enough that it’s worth, you know, waltzing back into the ITA’s home stationspace on this ship we don’t even have, with awakened AIs out there looking for us?”
Adda raised her comp-gloved hand. “I’ll send you everything I have on Biometallic. The firmware they make is so valuable that I don’t think we’d need a separate tank to store enough to pay for the trip and make a profit. As to the ship, I know the pilots here aren’t anyone’s first pick, but some of them have ships. We saw them while we were docking.”
“And if Biometallic ignores the report like you’re saying they will, then the chance to fix the vulnerability ourselves should make the trip worth it,” said Iridian. “Casey’s already chatting with the station AI, and I figure Adda’s right. Someday soon it’ll find a way to do more. Besides, don’t you have two implants in your head at this point?”
Noor laughed, although he sounded more disgusted than amused. “No. Why would the ITA put in more hardware when the neural implant net I’ve already got works fine?”
Pel leaned into the meditation room, rattling the beads that hung over its doorway. “We have funds!” He threw himself onto a cushion beside Adda and shoved his comp between her own and her face. Wiley’s hand pushed the beads aside so he and Rio could see in from the hall.
Adda frowned at whatever Pel’s comp displayed, then said, “All right. Thanks.”
“All right?” Pel withdrew his comp hand to press it to his chest while his eyes and mouth opened in scandalized protest. “All right? This is, like, a month of rent here.”
Iridian ignored him. “Like I was saying, if we pull off a run on Biometallic, we can fix the vulnerability ourselves and make enough afterward to get us onto Björn’s expedition.”
Rio sat down beside Pel. “Then let’s get to it.”
Comforting as it was that Rio would follow Iridian’s lead as long as she said she’d found a corp it’d pay to target, they had more to discuss. Iridian, Rio, Noor, and Wiley spent an hour going over the op in more detail and listing equipment they’d need. They separated it into “essential” (transport, armor for Iridian and Wiley, midrange ship-safe weapons, a comp for Adda that the ITA and the AIs had never touched, a datacask for bringing and removing data), and “optional” (armor for Noor, Adda, and Pel, parts for the shield Iridian hoped to rebuild, long-range weapons, and lip balm and lotion to combat Yăo’s painfully dry atmo). Occasionally Pel interrupted with something funny from social feeds that were hours out of date.
When they were satisfied with the list, despite Noor’s protests about his armor ending up in the optional section, Adda compared the list to the money now in Pel’s Yăo Station account. “Pel, Noor, and I will see what we can find for a usable datacask,” she said. “But the rest of the essential list isn’t going to happen without more money.”
Pel’s shoulders drooped. “That was all I had left, Sissy.”
“I know. I’ll pay you back when I can. Until then . . .” She glanced around at Iridian, Rio, and Wiley. “Do you all still have your Marsat IDs?”
* * *
A few minutes later, Iridian was leading Rio and Wiley down the dark corridor toward the Odin Razum again, with comps blaring their Marsat IDs on whatever band the station AI accepted, so it wouldn’t lock them out or set its influenced gang on them. This time, only six Odin Razum came out of the water treatment plant’s orange light to greet them. “So, you’ve been selling water and Patchwork access,” Iridian said. “Where’s the corporate share? When was the last time you paid into it?”
According to Adda, budgetary management was usually part of a port management AI package, but Yăo Station’s previous owners hadn’t needed it. This trick would work if, without that budgetary function activated, the AI deferred to an upper-level corporate employee’s orders.
Judging by the worried and angry looks they exchanged, the Odin Razum understood what Iridian was asking just fine. “Why should—” one of the Odin Razum started to ask. All six stopped moving for a moment.
“We don’t have an account for that,” one of them said grudgingly. “But we’ll make one.”
“You’d better,” Rio said. “And here’s the account you can transfer the corporate share into. See where it says how much is supposed to be in there? That’s how we know you’re not paying.” She twisted her thick wrist to display Pel’s local account information on her comp projection.
The numbers she was referencing were the difference between what was in the account now and what Adda calculated they’d need to complete the op and live on until she sold whatever they stole. It wasn’t the Odin Razum’s money any more than it was the Shieldrunners’. Maybe they’d make enough selling stolen proprietary tech to pay Yăo Station’s people back, but Iridian had to take care of her crew first. As Captain Sloane had once said, nobody else was looking out for them.
“We’ll wait,” said Iridian.
Rio stood with her huge feet shoulder-width apart, watching the Odin Razum’s base in the water treatment mod like she could stand there forever. Wiley and Iridian crossed paths, pacing. They were both trying to cover the side approaches and their egress at once, and she almost got a laugh out of him by faking right and left like she was blocking his path on purpose.
“Hey, Rio,” Iridian said. “What’s it like in the ZVs? All work and no play?”
“It’s a good balance,” Rio said without shifting her gaze from the Odin Razum. “Some scientists found out the ideal rest and action periods for the NEU military. The NEU didn’t do what the scientists said to do, but the ZVs did. It always feels like the day befor
e we’re bored with barhopping or family or whatever we’ve been doing with downtime, we get a new op to train for. It came a little late for me last time and I got antsy and pissed the ITA off, but that wasn’t the ZVs’ fault. And we don’t have much turnover, so going back to work feels just like getting the gang back together.”
“That sounds amazing,” Wiley said quietly.
“I’ve been with them ever since Recognition.” Rio sounded proud of that. If she was referencing the day the NEU officially recognized colonial independence, then that was over a year longer than Iridian had spent with the Shieldrunners. “I can’t stay out of a fight for long,” Rio added.
“I hear you.” Wiley sounded more thoughtful than sad, as Iridian had hoped he would.
If the ZVs would take Rio back after all this was over, they might hire Wiley too. That way, even if the AIs turned on the two of them after Iridian and Adda were out of their reach, Wiley and Rio would have a whole army to defend them. Besides, if Wiley went back to construction on Mars, he’d keep shoving his anger and his war stories down until he blew up, or blew something else up. That was, she’d learned, how he’d gotten sent to Sorenson ITAS. The ITA took a hard view of people who kept fighting the war after Recognition.
During almost an hour, the Odin Razum kept transferring money into the local account until it got to the number Adda said it would take to get to Biometallic’s station. One of the Odin Razum people who came forward to report their success squinted at his comp and asked, “Can we use this account too? For, uh, business expenses?”
“No,” Iridian said. “Corporate share goes to the corp. That’s why we’re not taking everything you have.” She turned her back on them and started walking before the Odin Razum got any more clever ideas. The universe they were living in now, as quasi-employees and quasi-slaves of an AI, had to be confusing and frustrating. If Shingetsu hadn’t told Iridian how much the Odin Razum charged the locals for water, she’d feel sorry for them.
As it was, Iridian felt only hope. She and Adda were together, safe, and about to take the next step toward getting out of the AIs’ reach. They’d be operating with whatever equipment they scrounged up on Yăo Station, but now they’d all have allies equipped to fight the Odin Razum or anybody else the AIs sent their way. In theory, although she hadn’t talked to the others about it yet, they were operating as a crew. And Iridian was their captain.
CHAPTER 17 Days until launch: 27 (holding for mechanical issues)
The ship that Adda had suggested that Iridian hire to carry the Shieldrunners, as the rest of Yăo Station was calling their group, shook around them as it entered the Ceres-Jupiter reliable route. This was the point at which she, Iridian, Wiley, and Rio needed to avoid passing ITA ships’ sensor range. Although the nannite cultures that would’ve announced their location and immobilized them on command were gone, the ITA’s biometric profiles on all of them would be precise and recent enough to identify them remotely.
Adda had also read about more frequent physical boardings for inspection in Ceres stationspace over the past few weeks, especially among passenger transports. The light cargo hauler they’d selected was designed to carry three people and would only appear to carry one. The arrangement left the passengers in uncomfortably tight quarters during the first part of the trip, but the small ship would be less conspicuous to both the ITA and the awakened intelligences than a passenger vessel with more seats and beds would’ve been.
Their individual internet traffic patterns had been harder to deal with. After so long with limited access, it would’ve been too hard on everyone to fly through high connectivity areas without taking advantage. Pel, in particular, would forget. He’d once checked his social feeds while at knifepoint. The fact that he’d been high at the time did not make Adda feel any better about that.
The ITA’s digital profiles were brief to the point of uselessness, but the intelligences would rely on them. Adda’s replacement for the comp Casey had stolen for her on Ceres should throw them off for a little while. For everyone else, they were relying on moving through the Patchwork nodes quickly enough not to attract the intelligences’ attention that way.
Iridian handed Adda an enviro suit, which she accepted without looking up from her comp. Now that her comp was in range of the Patchwork buoys that orbited with the reliable route, her latest test results and monitoring reports were coming in. She had a hypothesis about the intelligences’ activity that she was almost ready to regard as a theory.
If Casey was really interested in getting human help with whatever it was building, it should’ve influenced a hardware architect, or someone who could find a place for them to build, or a billionaire to fund its project. Casey should’ve had the capacity to understand it would need all those things. Adda had compiled a list of such people within near-real-time communication range of where the intelligences’ ships had appeared on her tracking routines, and she’d made new routines to monitor newsfeeds, social feeds, and other publicly accessible data about those individuals.
Abrupt changes in those individuals’ social feed behavior, opinions on and frequency of discussion of intelligences, and investments in remote locations where a project that size would’ve been built all would’ve gotten collected for her review. She was also assuming that others’ influence symptoms would proceed much like Adda’s had, although not all the useful targets would have neural implants like hers. So far, none of the routines she had running suggested that awakened intelligences had influenced anyone else. Limited as her observations and analyses were, she would’ve expected them to turn up something suspicious if there’d been anything to find. So far, it’d all been false positives explained by normal life or business.
Iridian put her hands on Adda’s shoulders and smiled when Adda looked away from her comp. She kissed Adda gently. “Now we can suit up.” Iridian already wore the armor they’d gotten printed for her on Yăo Station, colored the dull steel of undyed carbon composite. The black-and-yellow ZV armor Rio wore made Iridian’s and Wiley’s look even more plain. “Let’s get moving before somebody takes a good look at this ship and realizes it’s carrying more than algae.”
Adda put on her enviro suit, still thinking about the reports. If Casey understood it could’ve benefited from many humans helping it, and chose not to influence those people, it wasn’t doing that out of the goodness of its nonexistent heart. It valued efficiency.
It also valued self-preservation, but fear of discovery hadn’t stopped it, or more accurately the Coin, from revealing its nature on Barbary Station. Perhaps it had learned more about humans’ generally violent reactions to awakened intelligences since then. Since neither efficiency nor self-preservation were motivating Casey’s restraint, two possibilities remained. The first was that Casey, or even one of the other awakened intelligences, had a complex inhibition or strategy that Adda would need a fully staffed development lab to understand. Zombie intelligences were complex. Awakened intelligences might be effectively impossible for humans to comprehend.
The second possibility, the most likely one given everything she did know about these intelligences, was that while Sloane’s crew was awakening the intelligences on Barbary Station, the inexperienced and ill-informed technicians had allowed an overfitting error. Based on some historical data the intelligences had obtained, they had erroneously concluded that only Adda and Iridian, out of all humanity, could help them.
Overfitting to a particular kind of human intervention would explain why Casey claimed to need Adda and Iridian’s assistance with whatever it was building. Without that error, it could’ve influenced people qualified to build massive pseudo-organic constructs, like the one Casey had shown Adda in the workspace on Ceres. Even if the intelligences stole every modern supercomputer construction plan in existence, the error would compel Casey to obtain Adda and Iridian’s participation. “Where can we build something massive?” would’ve been a much less challenging problem than “How can we make these two humans help us build
it?” and Casey seemed determined to solve both.
The exact nature of Casey’s inhibition against influencing multiple targets, which appeared to be a product of their overfitting error interacting with previous anti-influence conditioning, would depend on how the overfitting error had developed as the intelligences awakened. If Adda could talk to Casey without losing her mind, one of the first questions she’d ask it was why it preferred her and Iridian over anyone else who’d been on Barbary Station.
In normal intelligence development, the whole project might be restarted to erase such a severe overfitting error. All intelligences that had awakened before Casey had been destroyed, either by their development team or by people the development team told about them. None had existed in their awakened state for longer than a few hours.
This was the first known instance of an awakened intelligence existing long enough to form and execute plans. And Adda was the only person in the universe in a position to observe it up close. Closer than she would’ve preferred, but to her surprise, that made it even more exciting. Dangerous as it would be to herself and to Iridian, Adda longed for a chance to study how Casey and the other intelligences had reached this point.
On the remainder of their journey to Biometallic 1, the Biometallic Technologies station orbiting Ceres, Adda downloaded the latest research about overfitting errors. Her analyses would continue to search for people who Casey contacted and didn’t influence. Their existence would support Adda’s suspicions about the overfitting error.
* * *
The Biometallic station maintained a fixed orbit that kept it out of Ceres shipping lanes. That should have made the landing easier, but Adda had never been on a ship that shook this much. The crew had gotten what they’d paid the pilot for: next to nothing.
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