by John Ringo
“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 organization, 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 U.S. 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 barely adolescent 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 hypercritical eyes, she thought they were trying to be nice. If the subject came up, Granpa 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. Its 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, blonde 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?” Cally 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 preprepared 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 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?
Cally leaned forward, propping her hands on her knees. “You shouldn’t take this job. It will fuck up your relationships. You will find yourself fucking about a bazillion strangers off the job because after you’ve fucked a bunch on the job, who the hell would you be saving yourself for? You will see things you absolutely do not want in your head, and the pictures won’t go away. You will do things that literally make you puke. The price is too high. Go home. Get a legit ID, move to Indianapolis, get a husband, a white picket fence, a dog, two or three kids. Don’t look back. It’s a happier life. That’s God’s own truth. Go the hell home,” she said.
The girl’s jaw tightened. “Are you declining my job application, ma’am?”
Suddenly feeling every one of her fifty-eight years, Cally pressed her palms into her eyes and sat back up, sighing. She absently flicked the growing ash tail off the end of her cigarette. “No, I’m not doing that. Not yet, anyway. Okay. You want it, then it’s time for your next test.”
The tall blonde walked out of the room and returned in under a minute with two armfuls of clothes. One set she threw to the kid. “Get changed,” she said. “Your sneakers are fine. They’ll be covered by the boots, anyway.”
Both sets of clothing were average to the point of boring. A set of long johns implied they’d be going outside. The jeans to go over them were faded and somehow a bit grayed out, as if they’d been washed too often in unsorted loads with all the other clothes. The sweaters were some kind of blend, hers a faded navy blue, the other a rusty brown, with the random little fluff balls sweaters get when they’ve been around a couple of years. The older woman didn’t look up, just started changing her clothes as if she was alone.
“What the hell are you waiting for? Get dressed,” she told the girl, who was hesitating. The kid jumped to comply, startled.
Chapter Eight
They got off the train at a station in the south of Chicago, trudging down the path of crumbled gray asphalt and sand that wobbled between jumbled stretches of gray and white snow, leading into Bronzeville. Once, their O’Neal-fair skin would have been cause for comment in the historically black community. Not now. Time and migrations to and from the Nat King Cole Sub-Urb, along with the shuffling effect of the semi-random sweeps for shippers — as the involuntary off-world colonists were called — had shuffled the population into a spectrum from Sub-Urban spectral white Caucasians to dark brown, old-time Metropolitans, with a vast middle of cafe au l’asian.
The landscape was a mixture of buildings. Bricks with early twentieth-century arched windows. Buildings with squared off prewar windows. Crumbling brick, crumbling cinder block. Tattered strips of old stores. Row houses like shark teeth and blocky old four-story tenements. In front of one of the old strips of had-been neon and steel, a cart of fresh vegetables from a black-market hydroponics setup sat upwind of a burnt-out sedan, whose trunk served as a shelf for piles of bagged tortillas, dimebags of cornmeal, the same of textured soy, and a large pile of slump cakes. The latter was a heavy, flat bread that had begun life as wet wheat sourdough, then got loaded with as much corn and soy meal as it could take without turning into a rock. It was a staple, as the name implied, of people whose financial resources were in a slump. Judging from the size of the piles, compared to those of the other fare on offer, this included most of the scattered denizens of Chicago’s once-teeming South Side. Over a fire in a barrel, an old woman shook and tossed a pan of popping corn, which a little boy beside her poured into paper cones and hawked to passers-by. In the late afternoon sun, a smattering of young teen whores, pushers, and grays milled around, grabbing something to eat and running errands before their nighttime working hours. Dressed in the typical third-hand drabs of the grays, Cally and Denise blended into invisibility among the cleaners and other low-grade menials that served to keep the city’s innards running for Chicago’s trade and professional classes. She dropped a couple of dollars on the popcorn boy, handing one of the two cones of the plain, hot kernels to the girl beside her.
As they moved away, Cally hissed under her breath, “If you don’t quit sneaking and just walk, I’m going to cold-cock your ass.”
The girl flushed in embarrassment and began walking more normally, keeping her mouth shut. Next, the older woman bought a cake of slump for another dollar, breaking it in half and sharing it with her. The tall blonde glared at the kid when she bit into the bread and almost choked. Denise erased the offending expression and tried hard to look hungry as she dry-swallowed the nasty stuff. It was scratchy, as if ground or chopped corn husk had been added to make a few kilos of grain stretch.
As they moved past the makeshift market and its shoppers, Denise only pretended to eat and hoped nobody noticed, not the least her interviewer. A block down, they turned into an alley. Shortly thereafte
r, Aunt Cally tossed her half of the awful stuff over to a couple of rats who were scrabbling around in a mess best left unidentified. She followed suit, trailing behind to a particle-board door in one of the buildings. Her aunt pulled out a pistol, seemingly from nowhere, and screwed a cylinder onto the end.
“Kick in the door. There should be a man sleeping inside. Kill him,” she said, thrusting the gun into the girl’s limp hand.
“Huh? Just like that? What’d he do?” She blurted. Her hands were sweating, and she felt a sudden cramping in her guts as if her bowels were about to cut loose. She swallowed.
“Do you really need to know?” Cally shrugged. “Please do make sure he’s dead.” After a second she sighed and snatched the gun back. “You cock it like this. This is the safety. See? Now it’s off. See the little patch of red beside the lever?” She shoved the gun back at Reardon. “There. Do it, now, or I will. Then we go home.”
Taking a deep breath, the thirteen-year-old girl hit the door with a solid side kick right at the knob. Then she had to hit it again, since it only collapsed into a ragged almost-hole at the point of impact. Her second kick knocked it open, and she stumbled into the dark, musty room, blinking. Over on a pallet in the corner, barely visible by the light streaming in through the doorway, a man lay, face to the wall. He was snoring loudly, though it was pretty damned amazing he had slept through the noise. She walked up to maybe two and a half meters from him and fired two shots at his head, closing her eyes despite herself. Her hand must have been shaking, because two dark, wet splotches that she could barely identify as red splashed across his back, splattering onto the pallet and the floor. She ran back for the door, stopping halfway to heave up the contents of her stomach.
Outside, she wiped off her mouth with her sleeve, shakily. “Okay,” she said. “I did it.” The arm with the pistol hung limp at her side.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Her aunt asked her, searching her eyes. “Gimme,” she said coldly. She held out her hand for the gun. The professional disappeared into the building, emerging after what seemed forever, but from the pounding of her heart could only have been a few seconds.