Going Dark

by Linda Nagata

  “Easy,” I warn him, my voice still raspy.

  She freezes—a small woman, brown-skinned, with black hair confined against her head in heavy braids. But she recovers faster than Logan. Scorn washes out the shock on her face as she confronts him, launching into a verbal reprimand in a language my overlay doesn’t know. I start to wonder if she went to drill-sergeant school. Logan lowers the muzzle of his weapon, but he holds onto his dignity, fixing her with suspicious attention even as she waves him out of the way.

  I get the impression this hospital has dealt with mercenaries from time to time.

  She switches to English as she addresses me, but her tone isn’t any kinder, leading me to suspect that I’ve been sorted into her mental category of ‘idiot soldier.’ “You were not thinking of standing up on your own, I hope, sir? I will walk you to the toilet. We do not want you to fall.”

  Her size doesn’t inspire confidence in her ability to hold me up, but I’ve been down this road before and size doesn’t tell everything. Anyway, I know better than to argue.

  She holds on to me, but before I shift my weight to my artificial legs, I try flexing the feet. The left one moves more or less as I want it to, though the joints grind and click. The right foot is obviously misaligned, and I can hardly get it to move at all. I look at Logan. “I need maintenance.”

  “No shit.” He looks tired.

  “You been on watch since we got here?”

  He shrugs.

  “Come on, sir,” the attendant says. “Let’s get you moving.”

  With her assistance, I manage the trek to the toilet. The feet are stiff and awkward, but I can still get around on them. I’m returned to my bed, where I’m given an inhaler with instructions to use it every hour while I’m awake. There is a promise that food will arrive soon, and then we are left to our own company.

  “I haven’t linked into the Cloud,” Logan tells me.

  I check my overlay. “I’m still locked down too.” It surprises me. “I thought the Red would have turned us back on by now.”

  “It probably doesn’t need us yet.” There’s an edge to his voice. “But it’s a matter of time. Before it happens, we need to decide what we’re going to do.”

  Time for a sitrep. “No contact from Kanoa?”

  “No. Of course the only way he has to get in touch is to physically send someone—but there haven’t been any visitor requests. He’s got to know where we are, though. It’s been eighteen hours since we dropped Captain Thurman off at the embassy. Plenty of time to debrief. So, Kanoa knows we arrived. Abajian knows.”

  We stare at each other for several seconds while I consider the jeopardy of our situation. “They have to see us as a security risk.”

  Logan nods. “If we’re lucky, they’ll want to debrief us.”

  I reach for my coat pocket, where I stashed Issam’s farsights, but of course I’m not wearing the coat. I’m wearing pajama pants and a hospital shirt with shoulder snaps.

  “I’ve got the farsights,” Logan says. “But that data’s already been shared, and it isn’t going to buy us any favors. Right now, I’m wishing we hadn’t sent it to Kanoa.”

  “We needed to send it in case we didn’t get out. Just tell me you’ve still got Issam.”

  “Papa put a bodyguard on him. He’s staying in a hotel across the street—it’s part of the medical center, connected by an underground tunnel. But he stops in here every couple of hours to sit by your bed. I think he’s in love with you, Shelley. Must like your brutal approach.”

  “Reminds him of Maksim.”

  “Yeah? Well, he’s not grieving.”

  “Why hasn’t Abajian sent anyone after us? We’re either assets or targets, and either way, we should have had visitors by now.”

  Logan cradles his HITR. “Maybe he just can’t get to us. Papa swore this medical center was secure, including the hotel.” But then he shrugs. It’s a casual dismissal of Leonid’s assurances. Logan has been keeping watch for a reason. “Maybe they don’t want to draw attention.”

  “Where is Papa? Did he take off?”

  Logan looks startled. “I fucking hope not, because I can’t pay your medical bills. And if Kanoa has cut us off, we’re in a really deep hole.”

  Money is a problem. I’ve got a personal account under a fictitious identity. There’s a fat chunk of cash in it but probably not enough to cover what our treatment must be costing, and if Kanoa is really pissed at us, he’ll deny our access to ETM’s corporate account, leaving us essentially broke and homeless. The fate of many American patriots before us.

  After all we’ve been through, the thought that we might be undone by a lack of funds strikes me as painfully funny and I laugh. Laughing starts me coughing, but it’s a shallow cough and over quickly.

  Logan gets up to check the door, then returns to his chair. Something in his expression puts me on guard. “One more thing you should know. About Issam. He has this theory about locally integrated AIs.”

  “I’ve heard some of that.”

  “A local AI kept Abaza’s UGF dark.”

  “Issam designed that AI.”

  “He wants to redesign the Red.”

  • • • •

  Tap-ti-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  It’s a complex knock on the door, like a code. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed, my HITR laid out in front of me, disassembled for cleaning.

  Logan is sleeping again in the chair, but he starts awake at the noise. I drop the cleaning rag I’m holding and reach for my pistol.

  “It’s okay,” Logan says. “That’s Issam’s knock.”

  I hear the door sigh on its hinges, then Issam comes in. He’s acquired new farsights. “Oh, you’re awake,” he says when he sees me. Logan leans back and closes his eyes again. Tran is still asleep.

  “Where’s your bodyguard?” I ask him.

  “Outside in the hall.”

  He grabs a white plastic folding chair from a corner, sets it up by the bed, sits, and then gets right to the point. “I’m in a lot of trouble. I’ve got a revoked passport. My name’s on the terrorist watch list. And I’ve got money problems, as in no money. My assets were seized. My parents can’t send me anything, or they’ll be arrested. You know. For financing terrorism.”

  I smile to myself as I pick up the cleaning rag again and get back to work. The legal net that’s caught Issam is constitutionally questionable, but sometimes it does work.

  “Shelley, I was hoping with your connections, you might be able to … adjust the record?”

  “My connections?”

  “You’re a soldier for the Red.”

  I trade the cleaning rag for a soft brush. “You think I can just requisition a change to the terrorist watch list?”

  “I don’t know. How does it work for you? How do you get things done?”

  “I just do what I’m told … more or less.” But I scowl as I recall what happened to the Mars rocket in San Antonio. Maybe sometimes I do get what I want—but I’m not going to tell Issam about that. “Like I said before, you’re an intelligence asset. And that means you’re not going home. Not until things play out.”

  He glances uneasily at the door—thinking of the bodyguard on the other side? “You said you’d help me get home.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. Were you lying?”

  “I guess so.” I would have said anything while we were in that tunnel, just to keep him moving.

  “Shit,” he whispers. I glance up to see his hands clenched by his mouth, his eyes staring ahead into a future of years spent in prison.

  “Come on, Issam. You’ve got value. We just need to make sure you get picked up by the right party.”

  “You’ll help me with that?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know what’s coming. But if I can, I will.”

  He’s quiet for a time, but he’s restless, like there’s something he wants to say but he needs to work up the courage. I don’t want to hear a confession about a bad case of Stockholm synd
rome, so I shift the subject. “Logan said you’re working on some way to get rid of the Red.”

  “Huh? What? No. I don’t want to get rid of it.”

  I stop what I’m doing to look at him.

  He nods, speaking quickly, like he’s desperate to hold on to my attention now that he has it. “The Red is the most amazing phenomenon to arise out of human science. It’s unarguably an entity. Not inherently evil, but not remotely human either. Intelligent, with a will of its own, with goals, loose in the world, affecting everyone—and of course we’re terrified of it. It challenges our conceit of free will, and the first thing most people want to know is, how can we get rid of it?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think we can, not without carrying out a scheme like Broken Sky aimed at crashing civilization. But more than that, I don’t think we should. We need the Red. We need our cyber-guardian. What else is going to pull us back from the abyss?”

  I go back to cleaning, disappointed, dissatisfied to hear Issam express my own pessimistic views. “We’re too damned stupid to stay out of the fire.”

  “Collectively? Yes. After what I’ve seen, I don’t think we have a chance without outside intervention.”

  “So this is our foreseeable future. Some asshole, somewhere, trying to slag the world, and if we’re lucky, the Red figures it out in time to intervene.” I put aside the rag and the brushes and start reassembling the HITR. “That’s why I joined up—and if that’s all it was, I could live with it. But the Red doesn’t really give a fuck about peace. If things get too quiet, it just sends us out to fire up another conflict.”

  “Another conflict? What conflict?”

  “You’ve heard about the Arctic War?”

  “Yes.”

  “It started from nothing.”

  “Wasn’t a biowarfare lab uncovered?”

  That rumor again. It won’t die.

  “It wasn’t biowarfare. It was pharmaceutical research. But either way, the war shouldn’t have happened. Worst case, a ceasefire should have been called within twelve hours. But last time I checked, the conflict was escalating.”

  “And you had a role in it?”

  Not a question I want to answer. I ignore it, checking the electrical connections on my HITR instead. I switch it on, inventory the ready lights. Raise it to my shoulder and sight down the optical scope.

  “What really pisses me off about the Arctic War,” I say, “is that it doesn’t make any sense. All that territory, all those resources. It’s too much to fight over. There’s too much at risk and it doesn’t make any fucking sense.” I load the grenade magazine, and then the 7.62-millimeter rounds. “It feels like war for the sake of war. Another manufactured war.”

  “It probably is,” Issam says.

  I lay the HITR down. “Because there needs to be a war going on somewhere, right? The fucking Red is supposed to choke back the dragons, the defense contractors, the contracted politicians. That’s how it started. That’s why we did First Light. Now we’re back where we began, only this time the conflict is more dangerous than the Sahel, more dangerous than Bolivia. When this idiot war succeeds in fucking up the Arctic, the whole planet is going down.”

  My rant wakes Logan. “We on?” he asks as he sits up and drops his footrest.

  “No. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  He squints suspiciously at Issam. Then he leans back, closes his eyes, and turns himself off again.

  Issam watches him. “That is so creepy.”

  I shrug.

  He looks at me again. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are strategic reasons to continue the Arctic War. Not for those fighting it, but for outside groups. The Shahin Council might like to see America involved in that war, because after the damage done on Coma Day, a war could destabilize—even bankrupt—the country. And a war would stop Arctic crude from ever reaching the market, keeping the price higher for everyone else.”

  “Are you saying the Shahin Council is involved?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. They could be. I just don’t know.”

  FaceValue doesn’t flag a lie. “It still doesn’t make sense to me that the Red is allowing this to escalate. It’s too dangerous. It is an existential threat.”

  “Remember I told you I’ve been working with locally integrated AIs? I know I’m not the only one.”

  I start packing up the cleaning kit. “Okay, maybe you could explain that.”

  He nods. “I’m going to use metaphors, not mathematics, okay?”

  “Works for me.”

  • • • •

  He gets up, paces a few steps, raises his hands as if he’s trying to grasp the proper words. “The human brain—your brain—is a physical system that generates ‘you’—your personality, your thoughts, your feelings, your memories.” He looks at me to make sure I’m following along. “It’s a crude analogy, but think of the Red as an entity, like you, existing across the computational resources of the Cloud, the way ‘you’ exist across the physical organ of your brain.”

  I think about it, and shake my head. “No. The Red isn’t everywhere at once. It comes and goes.”

  Issam shrugs. “Maybe you aren’t everywhere at once in your own mind. You can’t recall all your memories at once. You can’t consider multiple problems at the same time. And what you think about can be dictated. You’re an LCS soldier.” He taps his head. “That means you’ve got neuromodulating microbeads in your brain tissue.”

  I nod wary agreement, wondering if I’m giving something critical away.

  “You’ll agree that the activity of the microbeads influences who ‘you’ are. They can be used to affect your persona to some extent, your emotional empathy, and your ready state, that is, whether you’re asleep, alert, calm, or hostile.”

  “Sure, but the microbeads are only active if they’re stimulated from the outside. By a skullnet or a skullcap.”

  “And you have a skullnet that’s always on, providing a constant, baseline level of stimulation. Am I right?”

  Grudgingly: “Yes.”

  “An interesting aspect of bio-inspired AIs like the Red is that over time, they interlink. As they compete for computing resources, they set up cooperative pathways between one another that can influence both the pace and the nature of activity in their linked network. A local AI, given a repeating sequence of specific tasks, can expropriate local resources, restricting the influence of other entities within a given area. Because it’s a learning system, those entities may eventually just transfer tasks to the locally dominant AI. Think of it as your brain giving up on regulating some neurochemical because that function has been taken over by the microbeads.”

  “So control of who I am is handed off to an outside system … which works through the embedded microbeads.”

  “Exactly. And in an analogous way, neighborhoods in the Cloud can be influenced by the activity of aggressive local AIs.”

  I see where this is going. “You kept the UGF hidden by using one of these L-AIs to modify the behavior of the Red to …” To do what? “To suppress evidence of the facility? But you weren’t even hooked into the Cloud.”

  “Not directly, but being off the grid is not going to make you invisible. It doesn’t take a direct connection to deduce that someone, something, or someplace exists. Most objects in the world, animate or not, have a kind of metaphorical gravity that influences elements around them, so the existence of a hidden location or organization or whatever it is can be detected from its effect on other things. The UGF was decades old to begin with, forgotten in most records, and remembered by only a handful of people who learned a long time ago to keep their mouths shut. So before Maksim got there, it had very little gravity. But our presence in there, all the activity, it was sure to be noticed. Trucks on the roads. Heat signatures. EM transmissions. Lights. So, I tasked an AI with obscuring or corrupting evidence of activity, and diverting queries and investigations.”

  “But you’d need to crack into all kinds of systems to
be able to do that.”

  He shakes his head. “Not necessarily. You’ve seen maps of the Cloud, with nodes of activity charting the density of information packets. Some of that is the Red or linked to the Red—because the Red is not a single, simple system. It’s being rewritten constantly and constantly forges new links to other parts of the system.”

  “Including your AIs.”

  “They can share access, just like they share tasks.”

  “So your L-AIs are hacking the Red to accomplish their tasks—and the Red has already hacked most of the world.”

  He flashes an awkward smile. “Not exactly a secure system, is it?”

  I pick up my HITR again, holding it in the crook of my arm, because maybe there is no security and who the fuck knows what’s going to happen next?

  Issam sits again in his chair. He looks up at me with his vulnerable dark eyes, and he says, “The L-AIs are just like the microbeads in your brain tissue. They change the personality and affect the goals of the Red. I think someone is using an L-AI to continue the Arctic conflict. Why, I don’t know. Sell more armaments, maybe. Restrict petroleum development. Or maybe it’s more subtle than that.”

  “Could that L-AI have been used to launch the conflict?” I ask him.

  He gives me a curious look. “Do you have a reason to think that’s what happened?”

  I don’t say it aloud, but yes, every anomaly on that mission gives me a reason to think an L-AI was involved. “This Arctic AI—it’s not one of yours?”

  “No. But this is a big world, with billions of people, maybe a million smarter, more clever than me. Someone else was bound to work it out. I mean, if you can manipulate the Red, eventually you’ll own the world. Right?”

  • • • •

  Issam is too important an asset. I decide I want him where I can see him. “You’re staying with us,” I tell him, “until we figure out friendlies and hostiles and what we’re going to do.”

  He nods, looking relieved. “Sure. That’s fine.”

  When Logan wakes up, I have him request a cot. There’s a fee. Logan tells them to add it to the bill.