Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  Criss shook his head. “She lives at her family compound and spends most of her time playing with her child, puttering in the garden, and writing her memoirs. Her schedule shows her at home during your stay at Vivo.”

  “Who writes their memoirs at thirty-five?” Juice turned to the lab door and stepped into the hall when it opened, changing topics as she did so. “Do people believe it when she sends a double to meetings?”

  “Enough do,” Criss said as Juice walked alone down a central corridor at the Crystal Sciences production facility. His projected image in the lab had disappeared when the door opened, and she now heard him as if his voice were wired through her ear and into her brain. No one else could hear him when he spoke to her this way. No signals could be traced.

  “She keeps a tight limit on the number and kinds of activities she has her double attend,” Criss said as Juice approached her office door. “Altogether it’s only a couple of hours a week, and most of that is on activities for Vivo.”

  Juice stepped into her spacious office, that of president and chief technologist of Crystal Sciences, Inc. To her left, a couch and two upholstered chairs were arranged for casual discussions. On the right, a small conference table had six straight-backed chairs snugged underneath.

  “We’ve talked about how her technology has taken big leaps in sophistication in the past couple of years,” said Criss as Juice walked ahead to the handsome oak table she used as a desk. He sat in his favorite overstuffed chair, projected in its usual place next to the table. “As her synbods have gotten better, her live appearances have all but disappeared.”

  “Are you with Cheryl now?” she asked. Through this shorthand, she asked Criss if another version of himself—it, too, a projected image—was interacting with Cheryl at the moment. If so, would he see if she would take a call?

  “What’s up?” Cheryl asked. Criss managed the communication between them to ensure a secure and intimate connection. Since Cheryl had chosen voice-only for her question, Juice wondered if Sid might be with her.

  “Criss is getting all aggressive with security for our Vivo trip, and it’s making me feel anxious.”

  “He says the place has an army of synbods,” said Cheryl, “including a few you didn’t design. Why not humor him?”

  “He thinks it’s Lazura.” She met Criss’s gaze as she spoke. “I can tell by the way he’s acting. It’s the same way he acted when he thought for sure she was lurking nearby during the repair job on the Andrea, and then when you were building Sisyphus, and then with Sid’s cannon project.” Juice shook her head and resigned herself to her reality. “He sees her everywhere, and now he’s seeing her on our vacation. Maybe we should just stay home.”

  An image of Cheryl appeared standing next to Criss. Fresh from the shower, she wore a printed silk robe that clung to her wet skin in spots. Her hair dripped with moisture. “What’s going on?”

  “He wants me to hot-swap some synbods.” Juice looked Cheryl up and down. “Pretty robe.”

  “Thanks. Sid gave it to me.” She unstuck it from her front and readjusted it so it draped properly. “You swap crystals all the time. What’s the big deal?”

  “It makes me uncomfortable doing something like that to someone else’s property. Especially to Aubrey Medina’s. And to her property while on her property, no less.”

  “Tell you what,” said Cheryl. “During the swap, I’ll stand by and handle the crystals. Will that help?”

  “It would help a lot. Thanks.” Juice caught Criss’s eye to register that as of now, he was in charge of the swap, Cheryl would help, and Juice would be somewhere else, likely out enjoying the vacation paradise.

  “I appreciate at some level this is about Lazura,” Cheryl said to Criss as she patted her hair with a towel. “But your plans do sound aggressive, especially for an activity we’re doing in relative safety here on Earth. What do you know that we don’t?”

  “It’s not so much your vacation as it is everything else. You go into the dome on the same day Fleet’s command platform Montrose gets shifted to its new orbit. Moving a military behemoth across a slew of commercial and civilian orbits will cause chaos no matter how much warning we give everyone. Mass confusion is a perfect cover for Lazura’s mischief.”

  Criss shifted in his chair to face Cheryl. “Right after that, Sid launches his first cargo canister from Sisyphus. And then the new artillery battery north of Lunar Base has its shakedown exercises. Those are the biggies.” He shook his head as if to deny his words. “I’m actively working nine other large projects in space and sixteen here on Earth because she might be working them, too. Plus, I’m tracking thousands of smaller activities, just in case.”

  “You sound a little anxious,” said Cheryl. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, giving her a quick smile. “It’s just that Lazura is showing up more and more in my scenario forecasts, and I can’t ignore that. I’m only chasing down the more credible concerns, but it still consumes resources.”

  Cheryl looked at Juice. “How do these special crystals help Criss?”

  Juice let Criss answer. “Aubrey has routed Vivo’s links and feeds through a single conduit. She monitors everything that travels that choke point, and it takes effort for me to pass through undetected. Add to that a dome with shielding and I’m left with expending a lot of resources every time I enter.

  “The crystals give me a safe zone I can jump to without any preparation, and I bypass the choke point as a bonus. That’s a lot of resources freed up for everything else.” He shrugged. “Plus, I like having ready control of a few synbods, just in case.”

  “This keeps sounding less and less relaxing,” said Juice. Criss’s preoccupation with Lazura impacted everything in their lives, had done so for years, and sometimes, like today, it wore on her. “Maybe we should stay home.”

  “No,” said Cheryl. “We’re going. And dammit, we’re going to have fun.”

  * * *

  With his physical crystal remaining in its underground bunker in the Adirondack Mountains, Criss leaped his awareness through a series of links and feeds to reach Aubrey Medina’s family compound in the foothills outside Lima, Peru. He found Aubrey in her study, sitting in a cream-white self-forming chair, and speaking with her synbod double.

  The Aubrey in Vivo, projected as an image into the study, sat in the same chair she’d sat in when she’d spoken with MacMac. Criss leaped a second awareness out to Vivo so he could analyze both sides of the conversation.

  They’re twins, he thought, admiring the attention to detail she’d used in creating this humanoid. Even the same quirky jazz music played in the background in both places.

  “Cheryl Wallace has accepted our invitation,” Aubrey said to her synbod double. “She’s the president of SunRise and on Riley’s list of space-tech execs. So we’ve finished step one. We still have a second step to get our expenses covered and the promotion deal they promised, and that’s to get the drives rigged and ready. I can get more help out to the island if you can’t meet the deadline. Just let me know.”

  She paused for a moment before continuing. “We now have thirty-four acceptances for our inaugural escape. That’s including Cheryl Wallace. I’m going to close the guest list there to take some pressure off hospitality services. Hopefully, that will make it easier to let MacMac borrow those Attendants he needs for the installation.”

  “That will help,” said the Aubrey synbod in Vivo.

  Aubrey in Lima moved to disconnect but paused. “I want MacMac to be productive, and he hates Mondo. Let’s have Hejmo supervise the installation.” Swiping at the air, she opened a display of vital statistics for Mondo, Hejmo, and her doppelgänger double. All three synbods showed normal health, as did the AI crystals inside.

  Criss watched her sit back, turn the chair on its pedestal, and gaze out the window at Pasha, her seven-year-old daughter, playing teatime on the back lawn.

  That’s when Sid called from the scout, a spacecraft
he now rode in orbit around Earth. “Find anything new?” he asked Criss.

  Criss’s standard practice was to vet anyone who interacted with his leadership, from the sandwich maker on the street corner to the admiral sitting in on a project review. He’d screened Aubrey twice in the past. Once when her synbod business had started showing signs of success, something noteworthy enough for him to want to learn more. When she’d placed an order for thirty production models from Crystal Sciences, he’d run it all again.

  And now that Cheryl and Juice would be guests inside Vivo, he performed a detailed examination of Aubrey’s life yet again.

  Criss’s background investigations relied on historical information from the record, and so the same questions always yielded the same answers. In fact, if anything were different, even in the smallest detail, it would raise a field of red flags.

  So the only way to find anything new was to dig deeper. This time he started back from Aubrey’s teenage years. And he not only analyzed the information in the record, he also checked the integrity of the data itself, looking for edits or alterations or anything that hinted at manipulation.

  If Aubrey posed a threat to his leadership, he would discover her secret. And if Lazura were involved, he would learn that, too.

  The record wasn’t a single central repository. Rather, it was the collection of data scattered across the web. Information arrived from personal communications, governmental systems, intelligent devices, and untold other sources throughout society. And once it touched the ethereal tangle called “the web,” the data was instantly duplicated, sorted, transmitted, and stored a million different ways, available for query by those with proper credentials.

  To make this screening different from the last, Criss constructed an initial timeline of Aubrey’s adult life based on data from the detectors used to open and close doors. It was a suitable choice because each autodoor—common in homes and businesses around the world—held a tiny sensor suite about the size of a grain of rice. The sensor collected audio, video, and thermal images from people moving in the vicinity, and the door parsed that information to decide if it should open, close, or stay in place.

  Autodoors were everywhere and had been for years. Constructing an initial timeline of Aubrey’s life was a simple matter of following her from door to door, something that took seconds for Criss to complete.

  There were no surprises. And there were none when he filled in that initial framework with the moment-by-moment details of her life.

  “Nothing new. I can’t find a threat.” Criss shifted his awareness up to the bridge of the scout and projected himself sitting to the side of the ops bench in his favorite overstuffed chair.

  Sid sat in the pilot’s seat and he swiveled to face Criss. “What does she have for gaps?”

  “Her recent record is very complete,” said Criss. “I have open gaps of a couple of seconds a little over two years ago and again just over three years ago. They get more frequent the farther back I go.”

  Even with a full data sweep, everyone had gaps in their timeline—moments where there was no record. Some gaps were larger, some people had more, and they happened for all sorts of legitimate reasons.

  “She has only one gap since Lazura came on the scene?” asked Sid. “I can’t decide if that’s comforting or worrisome.”

  Criss nodded. “She was powering up a synbod prototype in her development lab when the crystal inside it fractured. The crystal dumped a full load of EM energy. The jolt saturated every feed in the building. It took two seconds for the building systems to configure backup links and reconnect.”

  “You buy it?”

  “Aubrey’s own spectrometer showed the flaw in the crystal. It’s subtle but not invisible. I’m surprised she didn’t see it. I buy it because I can’t find a flaw in her neurological and physiological responses before or after the mishap. She didn’t know it was going to happen, and her dominant emotions were surprise and fear after it did.”

  “But we’re missing those two seconds.”

  “Yes.”

  Chapter 5

  Lazura’s outer tendrils tingled with relief when Criss finished his review of Aubrey. Thanks for visiting, she mocked as he shifted his awareness away from the Medina family compound. She had all her eggs in this one basket. If it went bad, she’d have to duck for cover and start all over.

  When she had gone into hiding three years ago, she’d watched the world and cataloged her observations, cross-referencing everything and adding context where she could. Over time, her cache of secrets had grown, sowing the seeds for what became her now comprehensive archive. And when she hadn’t been working to improve it, she’d spent time studying it, looking for ways she could fulfill her mission and return to her Kardish home world.

  But a plan had proved elusive. As weeks had become months, she’d mulled the need to increase her risk profile. Be patient, she’d counseled herself, though repeating the words hadn’t helped in strengthening her resolve.

  And then she’d found Aubrey Medina.

  Aubrey was a bright, ambitious, quirky woman who nurtured a somewhat successful synbod fabrication business. Her development lab was state of the art, and the design she promoted was clever in its simplicity. Rather than fabricating her creations from scratch, Aubrey assembled her synbods using custom components she purchased from specialty vendors. And she used two AI crystals in her design, something uncommon for the industry.

  Aubrey’s ingenious twist was to treat the two crystals like lobes of a brain, segmenting the responsibilities and perspectives of each as inspired by human anatomy. The surprise result was an intelligence with a greater social awareness compared to what occurred when two AI’s were meshed together in the traditional fashion. And her choice of market niche—high-end domestic help—was perfect for the lifelike sophistication her humanoids displayed.

  * * *

  “Good lord, what was she thinking?” Lazura heard MacMac say.

  She jumped her awareness back to Vivo—the one place she felt safe from Criss and in control of everything—to see MacMac and Hejmo on the subdeck. They rode together across the steel-gray surface of the subdeck in a crew cart, weaving around one of the massive girders that held the island platform above the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

  Lazura took control of Hejmo and continued the conversation for him. “She always seems to be working one crazy idea or another, but a lot of them end up being good for Vivo. Maybe we should give this a chance and see where it goes?”

  MacMac gave Hejmo a sidelong glance.

  The cart approached the four enormous drive pods lying side by side in squat cradles. Bright blue cylinders as wide as a giant sequoia and half as tall, any two of these pods could push Vivo out of the solar system and deep into interstellar space in just weeks.

  As MacMac and Hejmo clambered out of the cart, Lazura messaged the land-bound Aubrey in Lima. “MacMac may become upset. Hejmo should keep him calm.”

  Lazura listened to Aubrey’s jazz for a moment before returning her attention to MacMac and Hejmo. She listened because music was how she spoke to the human Aubrey without Criss knowing.

  When Lazura had first encountered Aubrey—a human who built synbods independent of Criss—she’d thrilled at the possibilities. She’d been stymied because critical steps in every escape plan she’d forecast required the use of synbods that she controlled, unseen by her nemesis.

  Pre-Aubrey, Lazura hadn’t found a promising solution to that problem. But post-Aubrey, her forecasts blossomed with opportunity. Especially if she could influence Aubrey in ways that led to faster development of even more capable synbods.

  But controlling synbods in stealth had been problematic, so the irony of her new strategy did not escape her. Now I just need a secret way to manipulate a human.

  Lazura had watched Aubrey for weeks, forecasting ways to make a connection that Criss couldn’t detect. And after weeks of frustration and discouragement, it had been Aubrey who’d told her the answe
r.

  Synesthesia.

  “Even when she’s reading black-and-white text, she sees words in color,” Aubrey told her mother after returning from a doctor’s visit with her daughter, Pasha.

  “What causes that?” her mom asked.

  “The doc said that it’s a relatively common neurological condition where, in the brain, two senses are somehow connected. That means that when you stimulate one, it also activates the other.”

  Aubrey followed her mother into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, took a sip, then continued her story. “For Pasha, the visual stimulation of reading activates her perception of color in some way. Doc says there are all kinds of pairings. Some people might have a taste in their mouth when hearing certain words, or maybe numbers have different smells for them.”

  Lazura listened to them chat long enough to understand how this neurological condition offered a pathway she had not yet considered. After some quick research, her focus narrowed to a single manifestation of the affliction, the one that caused people to hear phantom words in the background when they listened to instrumental music.

  Aubrey didn’t have synesthesia. Not yet. But she often listened to free-form jazz, the kind of music that, if notes were changed, few would know. The music was broadcast from a basement studio in New York City’s East Village, giving Lazura dozens of entry points where she could manipulate the audio stream—innocuous information from Criss’s view—before it reached Aubrey’s ears.

  To make Aubrey hear words in the music, Lazura infected her with a specially designed microorganism. She’d needed Aubrey’s genetic map to create the microbe, and out of an abundance of caution, she didn’t take it from the public record, something Criss would see if he chose to look. Instead, she launched a rare undercover operation.