Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  "That could be a problem."

  "It hasn't been, yet. Not as far as I'm concerned. She says she turned them down because they were, quote, 'Using her as a whore out of convenience, not necessity,' " Tommy said. "I asked," he added.

  "Yeah, maybe she has a point there. Still," Schmidt grimaced, "I hate to say it, but resources matter. This isn't a job for those kinds of scruples."

  "Fine, but I can't blame her for asking if they're paying her enough for that." The huge man held up one hand. "Sure, she's dedicated to the cause. We're all dedicated to the cause—but if you'd watched her go through half of what we have . . . I'd say she's earned herself the right to a couple of scruples. If you can't agree, I doubt anybody's going to force you to take the mission. Even though, as you say, resources matter."

  "I don't know. I still have to wonder if we're going to be in the shit and hit a wall because of those new-found scruples. I do it if necessary, and so have you, once or twice. Face it, it's part of the job."

  "George, you're either thinking like a guy, or thinking like an Indowy. She was right, they were using her as a fucking convenience—to the point of not even considering any other kind of operational plans if good ol' Cally could get them what they wanted on her back. And while she was fine with it, it was nobody's business to say anything." He looked the boyish assassin directly in the eye. "You grew up in the Bane Sidhe. We may be on the side of good and right, but you know the Organization sure as hell isn't perfect. You know the Indowy—how could anything be anything but honorable and joyful if it furthers the interests of your clan. Especially if it doesn't maim or kill you. Or not permanently, anyway. Man, if you had just been there when one of the little furballs who's been trying to learn accounting came in all excited, 'Cally, with your present form, do you realize how much fedcreds we could bring in if you just—' George, she was three months fucking pregnant. And then he ran out of the room before Papa could deck him. Caught the first Himmit express off planet and hasn't come back. And the rest of the little green fuckers had not a clue what the big deal was. We were 'overreacting.' 'Anachronistic, irrational, residual fear of mating with inferior genes,' they said. You wonder that O'Reilly backed her? Vitapetroni finally got through to them, barely, with an analogy about damage to their psyches from fighting, even for survival of their clan. You may not have known about it, being a guy and not having worked with her enough to be close, but if she hadn't won that argument, I don't think we'd have a female operator left. Don't even talk about the O'Neal wives—I thought Wendy was gonna hop a plane up there and start lopping off heads. So yeah, just about all the female operators are telling them to fuck off on the honey trap jobs right now unless there's a damned good reason. It's not just Cally. Call it a pink flu."

  "Roger that—but you talk like she's your little sister," he grinned. "You've given me what I needed to know. After lunch tomorrow, I'll know whether I'm going to volunteer or suggest she look at her next choice. Yeah, I'll probably take it, but you know as well as I do how quickly it can fuck up an op if the team doesn't fit together. If I don't think I can work with her, I'll say so."

  "George, how many people have you ever met that you couldn't work with?"

  "I've met a few. Not many, but a few. Enough to make asking the question one of my cardinal rules. Oh, dude. Pink Flu indeed. Good old Bane Sidhe 101. 'Alien minds are alien.' Too bad the Indowy seem to have such a tough time getting their heads around that. They get it with the other Galactics, but when you get right down to it, none of the Galactics are any good at adapting to new ideas or new situations. Including just about everything about Human nature. That's dense even for them, though. That must have been right after I lost Sherry. And everything. That's the only way I could've missed something that big."

  Tommy was silent for a minute, uncomfortable at the reminder of his friend's dead wife. And the rest of Team Hector. What could you say to that?

  "Oh, one other thing," the big man said. "You do not want to be in the same State—no, on the same continent—when that woman is seriously pissed off. But that could describe Papa, or—what can I say? She's an O'Neal. They're all like that. But whether it's something to do with growing up right in the middle of the Posleen war, or having her dad blow up a nuke on her head when she was thirteen, or having to kill her first assassin at age eight, Cally's just—more so. O'Neal, but more so."

  "Hey, totally off the subject of Cally and the O'Neals, except that her weird relationship with her PDA creeps me out a bit, what is the deal with the buckleys? Somebody back at the shop told me you worked at Personality Solutions when they first came out. Why the hell did they make the base personality fucked up like that?" the assassin asked.

  "That is one tough question. I didn't work in that department. The buckley template came in through technology acquisitions somehow and I never worked on the underlying bit pushing for the chip design. Couldn't tell you, unless you just want my speculations," he said. He continued when the other man nodded. "I don't know if you've ever been dead yet, in more than the pre-war heart stoppage sense, to the extent of being revivified on the slab—which we don't have right now, dammit."

  "No. Never happened to me personally," Schmidt replied.

  "Sometimes I forget you're a baby." The veteran of the Ten Thousand and Iron Mike's Triple Nickle Armored Combat Suits in the Posleen War smiled.

  The younger assassin favored him with the pained expression of a young juv who had heard that refrain for a couple of decades now.

  "Anyway. The Crabs can do some damn scary things with storing and amalgamating and fiddling with the Human brain, when and if they get their hands on one. My wife once knew a woman who . . . well, nevermind. That's another story. Anyway, the Crabs' bouncy little claw-prints are all over this one. I think somewhere there was one or more real guys, that for some reason the Crabs found especially interesting, and somehow got their claws on at least for a little while. My suspicion is that there was more than one brain, or more than one access to the same brain, involved. But that's all speculation, of course. I also suspect the base personality learned some things as an electronic entity—like awareness of what it was—before it was reproduced and distributed as a fixed base program. But all that is sheer speculation on my part. No idea how much, if any, is true."

  "So that would make it a full, real AI, not the simulation everybody says."

  "Well, no. Not exactly. You see, at full AI, the buckley personality is unstable and self-destructive. The progressively stronger inhibitions against those fundamentally self-destructive, pessimistic tendencies take more and more AI functionality from a buckley. That's part of the coding I was into, a little bit. That's why buckleys tend to crash. Turning up its emulation is really turning off, by stages, that inhibitory code—strictly necessary to get more independent functionality. So the more you turn it up, the faster it crashes. It's unusable at full AI level, which is why it's sold as a simulation. It's close enough to true for government work. Then, of course, there are the after market personality overlays. They interact unpredictably with the fundamental personality and the level of inhibitory code turned on. You may have noticed the 'Martha' personality overlay was recalled five years ago. At emulation level 1, the lowest setting, they never had a buckley go longer than a week without crashing into an endless loop. For some reason, all the screen would display was, 'no more raffia.' Nobody's ever been able to figure that one out."

  "Okay, so how are the buckleys different from the AIDs? I mean, I know the subjective difference, I've used both, but I want a more professional view. I've never had the chance to sit down and talk to a really good AI cyberpunk about this stuff."

  "You know all about the Darhel spyware from your basic classes, so I won't cover that. First of all, AIDs are addictive. Darhel-made AIDs a lot more so than our own. I've got my theories about that, but AID software is frighteningly complex. The Elves know their damn programming. They also deliberately sabotaged Human software theory. Only outside our organiza
tion, of course. It's why our cybers can crack damned near anything anywhere, and a factor in the fusing of the cyberpunk faction with the pre-split Bane Sidhe back during the war. Did I mention I'm freezing my ass off? Not to mention we're going to have to start the real work out here any damn minute," Tommy's teeth were chattering, and he gratefully accepted the chemical hand-warmer George passed him.

  "Right. All the AIDs are different for the different Galactics species. AIDs for Indowy think like Indowy, Crabs like Crabs, and so forth. It still strikes me as damned suspicious that the Darhel had such a bead on Human cognitive psychology to turn out AIDs set up for us so soon after first contact. I've never bought the official explanations, and I still don't. The upper levels of the pre-split Bane Sidhe didn't know or weren't saying, and, of course, same with the O'Neal Bane Sidhe. Except in the latter case I'm more likely to believe they don't know. The official explanation is that it was the same way they knew how to call the US President on his private phone as their first contact, and the same way they knew we were what they needed against the Posleen, that they'd watched us when they started having problems with the Posleen and knew us from our TV and radio broadcasts and all that. It doesn't smell right to me, but I don't have better speculations. Wild ass guesses? I could give you half a dozen and bullshit all day long, but the truth is I just don't know. The Humans and the Bane Sidhe had obviously known each other before, which means the fucking Elves were around here, too. Even the name has old connections. Way, way old. Then the Posleen pyramids and the Egyptian pyramids had a whole similarity. And there were bits of Human archetypal history the Darhel were awful keen to alter or take out of circulation entirely," the giant said.

  "Wheels within wheels within wheels," the older man got up and shook himself. "That's all I know, and really more than I know. You're about to earn your ride anyway, if I feel this boat slowing. Which I do."

  "Oh, joy," George groaned.

  Cally stepped out of the gym shower and began toweling her hair dry. The surfaces of the Galplas walls were that glossy shade of light blue that seemed to infest locker rooms everywhere.

  "Buckley," she said, drying off, "please project a holo of interrogation room 7B."

  "Huh? Oh. What was that again?" Cally noticed the subdued red light that indicated an active camera. She dropped a sock over the camera port.

  "Dammit," it said. "Infrared just isn't the same."

  "Quit ogling and show me 7B."

  "You look nice today. Well, you did. If you put on your socks and shoes, you wouldn't have wet feet."

  She couldn't do much about it. Slapping a PDA was possible, of course, but hardly effective.

  "Shut up, buckley," she said.

  "I knew it was too good to last."

  "Shut up, buckley."

  "Right."

  She waited for a long moment. "Buckley! 7B!"

  A display of the requested room appeared above the bench seat where she'd just tossed her towel. A teenage girl sat in one of the chairs, apparently reading something on her own buckley. It had to be something she had stored locally, since the room was shielded against outside access. Her eyes kept flickering upwards towards the camera lens on the far wall, which was quite a trick since said lens was only as big as a pencil point and shaded to blend with the walls.

  "Huh. She might have potential." Cally finished dressing and stuck the buckley in her back pocket. "Not one word," she warned it.

  The candidate had been waiting for a good twenty minutes. Long enough to see how much patience she had for her age. Time for the next step.

  She passed Harrison Schmidt on her way to the stairs. She almost always took the stairs. Every little bit helped. Tommy and Harrison said she looked better with another ten pounds than without it. Seeing herself only through hyper-critical eyes, she thought they were trying to be nice. If the subject came up, Grandpa just coughed.

  "Hey! Harrison!" She turned and jogged to catch him. He could be a big help.

  "Can I borrow you a minute?" she asked.

  He quirked an eyebrow at her, waiting for an explanation.

  "I've got a potential recruit. I need to run her through evaluation. Be at the alley off Pappas Street, the one nearest Horner on the far west side. Two hours. Be sure not to see us."

  "That's more than a minute. Wednesday. Why do I always get this kind of crap on Wednesday?" He sighed, "Okay. Skulking, or oblivious?"

  "Drunk and oblivious," she decided. "Taking a piss would be ideal. That'll look pathetic enough."

  "Oh, thanks so much. I have to get all grimy for this, don't I," he sighed. "You owe me, dear."

  "Yeah, I do. Thanks a bunch. I know this is a sucky assignment," Cally said.

  The interrogation room looked smaller from the inside than it did on camera. The walls were a rather unsettling puke green. Beyond the two chairs, the room was bare. It's ugliness was deliberate, designed to unsettle anyone interrogated here. There were other rooms for other kinds of discussions. She pulled the empty chair around backwards, straddling it, to look the girl over.

  "Denise Reardon. So, you think you want to be an assassin. That's one strike against you, Denise. Why should I let you have one of the slots to the school?" Wisps of her damp, blond hair had fallen forward. The pro absently tucked them back behind her ear.

  "Because I'd be good at it." The skinny, brunette kid looked at her through owlish glasses. Eyesight was fixable.

  "At killing people? Why would anybody want to do that?" The older woman set a knee bouncing, tapping her heel. It wasn't a real mission, but she was fidgety to get going.

  "You do." The kid squinted, scrunching her glasses back up her nose.

  "That's not an answer. Answer the question."

  "Because our whole family, just about, lives on an island hiding from people who want to kill us. Because I know our family. We're not monsters. We argue, we squabble, we gossip behind each other's backs, we have a fair dose of hypocrites and liars, a couple of drunks, and a few serious assholes—but we're not monsters. So the people who are trying to kill us must be the monsters." The words sounded like a pre-prepared little speech.

  "And what if they're not?"

  "What?" Her forehead wrinkled a little, like a worried puppy's.

  "What if the people we're fighting against, that you're sent out to kill, aren't monsters."

  "I . . . um . . . I—I don't know."

  "That's the first sensible thing you've said. One in your favor."

  "Look, the Posties wanted to eat us. I'm not dumb. I know a lot of you were alive back then. You're juvs. You're sick of fighting, right? So anybody who the whole family, basically, is working so hard to fight must not be planning to hug us and give us a cookie."

  "So what if you get deep enough to get more information and decide we're wrong?" Cally crossed her arms on the chair back, propping her chin on them.

  "Nothing's perfect. I don't think my whole family is stupid, and I don't think they're evil. I'll throw in my lot with y'all. I'm not stupid. There will be a lot I don't need to know. Keeping that in mind, if I saw anything too bad, I'd talk about it to my boss."

  "What if you were in the field when that happened?"

  "Then I'd have to do my job and wait until I got back to talk about it, wouldn't I? Nothing's perfect. I'll throw in my lot with you."

  "What do you think this job is like, anyway? What do you think your average day would be?"

  "I don't know."

  "Speculate," the assassin ordered.

  "Average day? Probably buffing my skills or doing mission prep. Maybe traveling to or from a mission. Maybe under cover in some mission or other. Maybe watching people or scoping out situations before going in. It's like dance, isn't it? A lot of hard work preparing, for just a couple of recitals a year."

  "Like dance. I wouldn't have put it like that, but we'll let it go. Especially since I dance, too. But you knew that. I think you were in my beginning jazz class one year on the island, weren't you?"

 
"Yes, ma'am." The young girl hesitated. "Ma'am, excuse me, but you're pretty good, right? So why did you leave work to be with your kids? I mean, why would they let you? Wouldn't the Bane Sidhe want you to keep working?"

  "Tsk. You're not really supposed to know much about who you're interviewing with." Cally turned the chair and sat, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. "Look, just between us girls, if you take this job you're going to spend a lot of time in a shrink's office. You'll need it. But being a chick, you're going to spend more time in there than one of the guys would. It may not be fair, it may or may not be necessary. This job isn't about fair. The bosses just about pushed me into taking a long sabbatical." She shrugged. "In my case, yeah, I needed it. I'd been active a long time—you don't need to know how long. You can't do this job forever, presuming you live that long, and not have it get to you. It will dehumanize you. It will fuck you up." The assassin grimaced as the girl's eyes widened at the profanity. What the hell am I doing letting a little girl—no, I was just thirteen myself. She'll get several chances to opt out. An honest little voice insisted at the back of her mind, Yeah, but there will be subtle pressures on her to measure up. Pressures on her teachers not to lose candidates. Inevitably. What the hell am I doing?