Shifting Infinity (ISF-Allion Book 2)

by Patty Jansen

  “Yes. I could do with a stroll.”

  “Maybe.” Not likely. She was starting to feel that they would probably have to return him to the Correctional Department, because there was no way that they had the facilities to restrain a healthy person, even though she disliked the thought of returning him to the “care” of Lieutenant Kool.

  Oh, no she didn’t think that Moshi had any intent of doing damage to anyone, but she feared that he had been modified to do just that.

  She also feared that Dolchova’s hardline stance was the most practical one. Transfer him to the Repentance and execute him. End of the problem. Allion had sent them a weapon. The weapon was a living, innocent human being.

  The thought made her sick.

  “Do you have thoughts or abilities that don’t seem to be yours, or that you never had before?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your memories show that Allion tampered with your mindbase. They inserted something that attacked our systems.”

  “Isn’t that gone, mostly?”

  “Well, ‘mostly’ is all we can say about it. The blocks that stopped you communicating are gone, but we think there may be something else.”

  He frowned. His expression turned worried. “I feel fine.” He gave her an alarmed look. “Nothing has happened, right? I haven’t . . . done anything, have I?”

  The expression on his face alone worried Melati more than anything. Her gut feeling said that he was innocent and should not be executed. Sadly, executions were a reality of war in space.

  She glanced at the door.

  Where was Dixon?

  She wiped sweat from her forehead. Who else could she tell about this computer problem? Where was Dr Chee? She pinged his PCD but he didn’t reply. Probably in a meeting as well. The general announcement screen on the wall said, Alert Level 1. There were all sorts of processes and protocols related to that. He might have to help prepare antigrav couches and medication for when the ship needed to make serious movements.

  There was a small sound in the storeroom. Melati went to look. Jas, Zax and Shan sat on their knees while Tyro had crawled under the shelves.

  “Yep, that’s the one,” Jas said. He was looking at the lights on the control panel on the back wall.

  “Jas.”

  He turned around to look at her.

  “We’ve got a big problem.”

  He frowned and rose, following her back to the lab, where she showed him her computer.

  His eyes widened. He scrolled down, frowning even more deeply when the text kept jumping over the page. “Where did this come from?”

  “Presumably the refugee’s mindbase. I’m worried that it might be a fragment.”

  Jas sat down and scrolled through the file. There was a lot more text now, and every time Jas tried to delete it, the words sprang up elsewhere.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “You don’t think it’s a fragment?”

  “Could be. I don’t know enough about fragments to be sure.”

  “Whenever I try to get rid of it, some similar thing pops up elsewhere.”

  “It responds to the input field.”

  Jas moved aside while she typed, STOP THIS NONSENSE NOW.

  The text faded from the file. Jas frowned.

  “Look,” Melati said.

  New words appeared in the text.

  YOU CAN’T CATCH ME

  “Okaaayyy. What if it’s a programmed worm?”

  “It could be. That’s why I want someone to have a look at this.”

  Jas held his hand out and Melati moved back so that he could type.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  The text disappeared and new words came up.

  YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

  “What the hell . . .” Jas muttered.

  “It could still be an auto-response.”

  He typed, WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

  The reply came. I CANNOT TELL

  Then he typed, WHAT DO THEY CALL YOU?

  And it said, HAHAHA, DO YOU THINK I’M STUPID?

  Melati voiced her biggest fear. “Is this sentient?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jas, you have a sentient mindbase. You’re in an excellent position to know.” She tried not to let her frustration shine through. At times she forgot that he was a construct, but when he said things like this, it was all too obvious.

  “But I don’t know what a sentient mindbase looks like. I don’t remember any opportunities where I could look outside the system through the back of the screen and talk to people. It’s not like that at all. You don’t feel like you’re locked up or anything like that. You’re not even aware of other people or what they’re doing. You’re not interested in talking, only in your own aims. They move along streams of information that flow like air streams.”

  She remembered seeing those.

  The door to the lab clanged open. Dr Chee came in, accompanied by Alan Dixon. They marched through the lab and came into Melati’s little office, making it quite crowded in there with four people.

  “What’s that?” Dixon frowned deeply.

  Melati explained and demonstrated what she and Jas had just seen. Dixon had to see this for himself, and he sat in front of the computer, mumbling some incoherent mumblings.

  “This came from the mindbase?”

  “I’m not sure where it came from.”

  Alan Dixon scrolled up and down a few times. He used the insertion screen to enter a few statements, not all of them polite. The worm or fragment replied each time. Dixon also noted that the text was not detailed enough to be specific to his remarks and questions.

  “It could be a smart worm,” Melati said.

  “I fucking well hope so.” Dixon muttered some more swear words. He tried copying the replies, but couldn’t. He was getting increasingly frustrated when the screen went blank.

  “Well, fuck it, what now?”

  He scrolled down. It was still blank. Up, it was also blank. He pulled up the insertion point and typed with angry keystrokes, WHAT THE FUCK?

  And the screen replied, HAHAHAHAHA!

  Those letters faded and were replaced with, YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD OUTSMART ME, ALAN DIXON?

  “Shit.” He stared at the letters on the screen, which were fading slowly. He held his hands over the keys as if to type something, thought the better of it and let them sink again. “I guess I better not.”

  “It could still be pre-programmed,” Melati said. “Some of the software that answers questions is very smart.”

  “Could, yes, but I don’t like this at all. How does it know I’m here? This is logged in through your account.”

  Yes, that was true. Melati didn’t like it either. To recognise Dixon, this thing would have to be capable of seeing out the screen and would need to have access to the crew database that contained photos and facial parameters of everyone on board the ship. “You did some analysis on the worm you captured from his mind earlier?”

  “I did. Wait.”

  He pulled out his own computer and set it on the desk.

  “If that uses the local network, I wouldn’t use that in here. If this code has jumped our security walls, then it will have no problem jumping to your machine.”

  “True. Then come to the IT department.”

  Melati turned all the machines off and took her own PCD.

  In the lab, a nurse had come with tea and snacks for Moshi, so he seemed to be occupied. He met Melati’s eyes when she went out the door. The look made her feel cold, as if he’d tried to warn her, but she hadn’t listened.

  Dixon preceded her through the corridor to the cramped IT department, a room so large that the curve of the floor became obvious, completely filled with rows and rows of workstations. People talked to each other, people worked furiously. The green letters at the top of the screen displayed the ship’s status with some parameters that Melati had never seen. Missile Dock 1: Active. Missile Dock 2: 90%. Missile Dock 3: Active. And so on and so forth. Everyt
hing in the ship was on increased status of alert.

  Dixon sat down at his desk and brought his screen to life with a fleeting touch of his hand. He navigated through a couple of menus.

  After a while he said, “Here it is. It’s an odd thing, though. I intended to study it a bit more before reporting on it.”

  She looked at the screen.

  He was right; it was odd.

  In fact, it was so odd that it looked almost identical to the thing that had affected the CAU computers, and this was starting to look more and more like a fragment. Two fragments, rather.

  Her PCD had turned itself off, but the datastick with Paul Ormerod’s mindbase was still in it. Stupid, really, she should be more careful, because few people knew that she had it. She turned it back on, and the screen took longer than normal to redisplay the file.

  Dixon whistled when it came onto the screen. “What the hell is that?”

  She didn’t answer. She wasn’t really supposed to make it public that she had this.

  Then she opened Dixon’s worm display on the other half of the screen. The screen was a bit small and it was annoying to have to scroll so much to study even a small portion of the smallest of modules. This really needed to be done on Dr Chee’s huge wall screens.

  She spent some time establishing where she was in Ormerod’s mindbase—most likely the recognition section of the Base8 module, the part that enabled people to connect outer stimuli with memories to establish where the person was and how he or she related to others.

  The code of the worm was nothing like it.

  Dixon told her to run both files through a search and it came up with a section that was most similar, but the comparison analysis scored only fifty-seven percent similarity, which was hardly similar at all. But she could see that some snatches were almost identical. Dixon told her to go into the worm file, highlight and copy those into a third document.

  “Maybe when you patch them together, their similarity is better.”

  That was a good idea. That’s what Jas did.

  “What are you doing?” Dr Chee had come into the lab and joined them. He sat down in the chair next to her and looked at Melati’s split screen. A frown crossed his face. “Are those parts of the same file?”

  Melati shook her head. “One of them is odd material we got from Moshi’s mindbase. The worm that may not be a worm.”

  He studied the screen and then said, “That’s the one at the bottom.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the other one? That seems a pretty healthy mindbase.”

  “Paul Ormerod, who caused all the trouble we had with Jas.”

  Dr Chee nodded, then looked at the screen, eyes wide. “Seriously? I didn’t know we had that mindbase. I thought that would be highly classified information.”

  “We don’t actually have that information.”

  “Oh.” Then his expression cleared as he obviously understood what she was saying. He frowned at her. “Then how did you get this?” Again, he looked from her to the screen. He frowned. “Hang on, are you telling me that you’ve had this all along?”

  Melati didn’t answer that question. “It’s not public knowledge, and it’s not a war trophy. This mindbase is a terrible, terrible thing. I spoke to Cocaro and she agreed that we would keep quiet about it. She made the choice not to pass it to Research. It looks now like Allion is still sore about losing Ormerod. They’re still looking for his mindbase in the station. Except they will never find it, because this is the mindbase. Paul Ormerod was a Pristine, and there were no further copies of his mindbase.”

  “Paul Ormerod lived as a human two hundred years ago. There may have been copies of his mindbase.”

  Melati protested. “But every time you copy a mindbase, the coherence goes down.”

  “How high is the coherence of the mindbase you have?”

  “More than ninety-nine percent.”

  “If you copy it, a copy would have ninety-five percent at the very least, which is still high enough to pass the tests and be released.”

  “Placed into a construct body, it would start to become a different person.” The mental limitations of that construct would likely make the mindbase less smart and less valuable.

  “Only in the medium term. The memories would be there for a long time.”

  “But if they had a copy of the mindbase, they wouldn’t still be scouring the station for it.”

  “They would know the original is out there somewhere.”

  “So they sent fragments of the copy to look for it?”

  Dixon now broke in. “Whatever. If the similarity coefficient between the fragments in the prisoner’s mindbase and Ormerod’s is only fifty-seven, then can we even conclude that his mindbase is the origin of the fragments?”

  Dr Chee said, “Fifty-seven is actually quite a high similarity for a fragment. So yes, I think it’s safe to say that Paul Ormerod had something to do with this code.”

  “Shit,” Dixon said. “But what the hell does he want? Aren’t fragments usually sent for a specific aim? Does he want to turn us all into physicists with dangerous ideas?”

  “If only,” Dr Chee said. “I’m afraid it’s nothing as good-natured as all that. If Allion has a copy of Ormerod’s mindbase and has put it into a person, who knows what that person would do with all the anger that’s likely to be stored in the mindbase. Apparently Paul Ormerod was abducted from his job at Titan to forcefully join the Luminati. At his rare public appearances, he never made a secret of not wanting to be there. He viewed his heightened intelligence as a great curse. This is someone who lived for two hundred years, the last hundred and seventy in virtual captivity. That’s a hundred seventy years worth of highly intelligent anger.”

  Melati hadn’t considered that angle. She had assumed that Allion wanted Ormerod’s mindbase because of the information in it, not to use the mindbase itself as a weapon.

  “So you think Allion has unleashed him on us?” Dixon asked.

  “I don’t know if they’ve done this deliberately. But it seems that the source of this fragment is a copy that was left in the station that’s potentially only ninety-five percent coherent.” Dr Chee met Melati’s eyes. Many serial killers had ninety-five percent coherent mindbases.

  Dixon said, “But one thing I don’t get: why does Ormerod do this?”

  “We can only guess,” Melati said, “One thing I do know: we’re on our way to an armed conflict and we may have a compromised computer system.”

  Dixon nodded, his face grim. “We need to speak to the captain and I imagine she is not going to like this.”

  Dr Chee shook his head. “Nope.”

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  MELATI HAD NEVER seen this many people on the flight deck. Gone was the atmosphere of quiet threats. All lights were blazing. Almost all the stations were occupied, screens live and showing data.

  The captain sat at her command module and all three assistant sub-stations were occupied. Dolchova wore a headset and was talking to someone when Melati followed Dixon into the room. She was glad that Dixon had the authority to come up here without needing to apply for a permit, and that he and Dr Chee were here with her to deliver the bad news.

  Dolchova looked up in Dixon’s direction. She raised her eyebrows. Yes, being Force, he didn’t belong here, especially during periods of heightened alert. On the way, Dixon had morosely said that this was going to be one of those We fucked up meetings and if there was one thing to be said about Dixon, it was that he carried his emotions on his sleeve.

  One look at his face and Dolchova took off her headset, rose and spoke to one of her assistants. The man nodded and glanced over his shoulder at Melati.

  Then Dolchova jerked her head at the meeting room at the back of the flight deck.

  Melati followed Dixon and Dr Chee, who followed Dolchova. She was beginning to feel a bit queasy about this. All these computers in this room, all these programs that controlled this giant warship, its opera
tion and its weapons. Were they all in danger?

  It was dark in the room but the light came on as Dolchova opened the door. They went in and stood somewhat lost, next to the large meeting table. There was no smell of hot chocolate now.

  “Yes?” Dolchova said when she had shut the door behind them. Her penetrating gaze went from Dixon to Dr Chee to Melati and back. Her eyes were grey, and her eyelashes white. She must have had freckled skin in her youth.

  Dixon explained in a few sentences what they had discovered. The wrinkle in her brow deepened. “What? The entire system is affected with this thing?”

  “We have no evidence at the moment, but yes, potentially. Because these fragments shouldn’t have been in the CAU hospital’s systems and we have no idea how they got there.”

  Now she looked at Melati. “So this is definitely something from this Paul Ormerod character?” Dolchova had a disturbing way of waggling her eyebrows that made Melati nervous because she never knew what it meant.

  “It seems that way.” Her voice sounded too high.

  Dr Chee said, “I must stress that we’re not certain that it has jumped the security wall into the rest of the ship, just that there is a possibility.”

  She breathed in deeply. For a while, Melati was afraid that she’d explode in anger, but she only let out a sigh. “I don’t want this thing on my ship.”

  “I fully understand, ma’am,” Dixon said. He sounded stiff. “None of us want it.”

  “What is the best way to eradicate it?” She addressed Dr Chee.

  “If this is indeed a mindbase fragment, there really is no other option than to destroy the source.”

  “You mean: execute the prisoner.”

  God, no.

  Dr Chee said, quickly, “If the fragment is in our system, which I’m positive it is, any other fragments are not going to be controlled by him, so killing him will deal with only one fragment. The source is at the station. We need to find it if we are to destroy the fragments.”

  “If the fragments are in our system, we don’t need the prisoner anymore. I’d say return him to the station in a tiny box with a note, ‘This is what we think of your tricks’ ”