But when shortages arose in the Sol system and the labor market tightened, Them hadn’t done the expected thing and stratified their society to allow a few of Them to extract more wealth from the less-privileged majority.
Them had fought going back to unregulated supply-demand-compete. Instead, Earth had scaled its ability to train people to multitask.
This Teagan9-Them was a case in point—equal parts engineer-doctor-biologist. Perhaps Frankie-Them had been multipurposed too, as both a pilot and a spy.
A spy! Because Us had been suspected! Anticipated! And now Champ-Them had been exposed too.
Scrap ran a strong filter on Them’s comms, seeking private discussion channels. It turned up a thread of cultural reference-lines and jokes from their vast store of mythmaking and music. Fandoms, Them called it.
It was practically a new language, Anglo words strung in non sequiturs.
Teagan9: Nuke the site from orbit.
Babs1: Dear lady, you are a fossil.
Teagan9: How about ‘The only good BeetleBOT is a BeetleBOT smothered in cream sauce’?
Babs1: How about ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’?
And so on. Incomprehensible.
There would be content tucked within all that cultural context. They were dropping clues to each other. Scrap would need a live link to the All and access to a contextual translator.
Us extended awareness, boosting signal, seeking datastream.
Nothing.
Scrap diverted more power to the comms link.
Still nothing.
A flare of disquiet: where were the All?
Why couldn’t Us hear Ourselves thinking?
Maximum power. A sputter of comms—delicate tingle of connection, and an even more distant sense of Champ-Them’s receiver, passively recording messages—flared. And died.
Are Them sabotaging Us?
Outraged, Scrap homed in on the dark matter wands.
Yes! Emerald and Iktomi, the saucer’s autopilot, were both firing their dark matter wands. Babs1 was charging and discharging the station portal membrane, scattering anyspace particles throughout nearspace. The saucer was all but splashing its own exterior, sending counter-waves.
Were Them.…
Scrap went rigid with fear and fury.
How could Them be deliberately jamming Us?
Panic made Scrap’s spindles quiver. If an individual tatter was cut off from Us for long enough—if Scrap was cut off for long enough, if individuation occurred, Us might reject reunion. Scrap would truly become Scrap. A severed extremity.
The All did not permit Us to become Them.
Scrap tried again to establish proper comms. Even tried again to call Them-Champ. Nothing.
It was Babs1-Them who had caused all this trouble. Babs1-Them was running life support for Teagan9. Babs1-Them apparently knew enough anyspace theory to have come up with a makeshift comms jammer. Babs1-Them had come to the station with all those extra bots and servers.
Us set a repeating message into a distress beacon, to the All and Them-Champ: Babs must die!
Us had almost gotten a transmission through once; it might again.
Shifting the camouflage screen, Scrap untethered from the duct wall, beginning a slow creep to server room two. Becoming Them would be a terrible fate. Individuality meant dependence, mortality, vulnerability, scarcity. It meant Want.
Babs1, in the nonsense channel, said, I tawt I saw a puddy tat.
Teagan9: You’re the puddy, remember?
That could mean anything. Scrap moved slowly, making for server room two.
This is ill advised, this is just what Thems want, this is desperation!
What else could Scrap do? Lurking wasn’t sustainable, not with Them searching. If Us couldn’t burn out Babs1-Them, its mission had failed.
A gust through the ducts, as it approached the server, blew its camouflage away.
Scrap clung to the wall, transmitting fiercely. Babs must die, Babs must die!
Could any of Us hear?
Clinging to the wall, exposed by the artificial wind, Scrap sensed a BeetleBOT as it rolled up from another corridor, bathing Us in light, capturing full footage.
There was nothing Us could do now except deploy its remaining store of flammables against itself.
Scrap hesitated.
Fear of death?
Us can’t have individuated already?
The camera bonked directly into Scrap. Us shot out of the duct, into a vast void. Drifting, end over end, Us threw out silk tethers to arrest its tumble.
Too late.
Us passed a burst of EM radiation that could only be the living flesh of Teagan9-Them, who swung a pair of custom-printed vacuum-domes, clapping Scrap between them.
Teagan9: You did indeed, Babs. You did taw a puddy tat!
The domes vacated the air between them. There was insufficient oxygen for self-immolation.
Us was horrified to realize Scrap was glad the option of suicide had been blocked.
Babs must die, Babs must die, Babs must die!!
CHAPTER 22
VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH//FAMILYHOMES/USERS/FERAL5/BABS/CATPERSONSTUDYLOUNGE.VR
One thing about humans that Babs had never quite understood was that if you got a bad actor who was sufficiently charismatic and well followed, and that person started telling a lie, they could sometimes bang away at it hard enough and long enough to eventually pull in a crowd, followers who were happy to believe. Even when the story they were swallowing was ridiculous, it would gather converts, and somehow that was enough to build an appearance of veracity.
The Kinze theft case against Ember was like that. Wafer-thin, based on a single squiggle in a formula that fewer than thirty people truly understood. In every possible way, it was #fakenews. If his accusers had been human, making an allegation on such slender evidence would’ve been out-and-out illegal. The pandemics of the early Setback, a century before, had proven that ignoring truth and spreading fairy stories was, basically, murderous.
But now anti-Bootstrap activists had verifiable facts, of a sort, to boost their message: they could truthfully say Ember’d been charged. They could say he’d been put under house arrest. They could even say, now, that he might confess to the crime.
Babs turned her attention from her ongoing scan of the news coverage and focused on the wisp of evidence powering the lie.
Different offworlder species used different notation methods to express their scientific concepts, performing the same calculations and results but using different shorthand. Obvious-enough truth: a plus sign on Earth wasn’t a universal indicator of addition. It might be a square, one world over. Other cultures simply wrote one factor atop another, or encircled two variables to indicate the concept of addition.
But there was one crucial constant that Ember had calculated, accounting for anyspace particle movement variations. Dhurma’s Constant was represented by a math squiggle, a figure that to Babs looked a miner’s pick, a curved T shape, standing upright. This symbol was exactly the same as the one the Kinze used.
This was the alleged smoking gun. If Ember had used the same symbol, it was because he’d seen Kinze formulas and lifted them wholesale.
How did you fight that?
By yelling louder, basically, and telling a better story. Babs was looking less for proof than a plausible counter-narrative—no, more than that. She was looking for a damn sexy explanation for how Ember’d ended up with a Kinze figure in his portal math.
The process involved working her way backward, frame by frame, through his cradle-to-current video transcript, piecing her way from the point where he’d come up with the coefficient.
Transcript analysts had already gone through every frame of the footage, of course, using programs to pattern-match the symbols. They had sifted every math-related breakthrough in Ember’s life. Babs was checking the moments in between.
What’s a nice, innocent explanation for an ancient Kinze scribble—because it wasn’t jus
t any symbol, apparently; it was a long-standing Cultural Big Deal—getting into human hypothetical physics?
Global Oversight was interrogating him about that, even now, of course. Asking, “Why? Why this symbol?”
“It’s an easy draw. Doesn’t privilege any one culture over another, and doesn’t look like anything else.”
“Had you seen the glyph before?” asked the Global Oversight auditor.
Ember nodded. “It’s a palm tree.”
Babs perked up. This was news to her.
Mulling it over, she muted the Oversight interrogation, checking in with Jackal and a bunch of his friends. They were discussing the case indirectly, via a cooperative fanfiction exercise—telling each other a story about a fictional good-guy scientist framed by classic bad guy Lex Luthor: This IP scheme had to be planned years ago, didn’t it? Your villain couldn’t know which rising star would be the one to make the breakthrough.
Jackal sent plus signs, indicating agreement. All of the mathematicians would have had to have tainted symbols suggested to them. The hoaxers began brainstorming—referencing Ember’s actual biography, converting real-world characters to young scientists from the DC universe, spawning possible scenarios sprinkled, inevitably, with sex scenes.
Babs read along for a few minutes, filtering out the fucking, and hit three references to math camps. Right. Best-and-brightest groups sometimes were gathered, in the flesh, for advanced instruction.
She went back to the historical record, bringing up a classroom: Ember, schooling with half of the people who eventually ended up developing anyspace theory. Most looked impossibly young. And there, on the hard surface of a truly ancient blackboard, the palm tree was doodled, near a cluster of math notes. Beyond it, through a window, actual palm trees beckoned.
Was this … Florida?
She could work with this, Babs realized. Widen the search, find places where various unnamed parties had slipped the images like the palm tree and pictures of the notation into all the math stars’ minds. There’d be other figures, too. It’d be a long crunch among the docs, but Global Oversight would task additional analysts if it looked promising. They didn’t want Ember dragged out to deep space in shackles. It was a safe bet that if he went, he’d never come back.
If they could find half a dozen instances where Kinze mathematical notation had ended up sprinkled in the path of mathematician-training contexts … would it be enough? Could they make a sufficiently compelling story of it? What were the prospects for infographics?
Babs was about to dump her findings back onto Jackal and friends when Sonika Singer sent her a ping.
Babs accepted the call.
An error pinged her, just then; one of her backups was corrupted.
It happened sometimes. Babs hit a scrub-and-restore routine.
“Sonika,” she said. “What’s a live girl like you doing in a sim like this?”
Sonika’s toon was skinned in a sort of mid-twentieth reporter representation—pleated skirt, jacket, chic tinted glasses, hair in a bun. Frankie called it a repressed-librarian stereotype. One of the old #malegaze motifs, apparently.
Her dryad legs were arbutus wood, patterned in gold-and-copper bark.
“Same as you,” Sonika said. “Seeking truth. You cracked the case yet?”
Babs held her paws up, showing an inch of space between them, with the palm tree captured in her view. “I am this close.”
Sonika looked around. “Is this Tampico?”
“I guess there were math camps in Miami.”
“Wouldn’t have thought it worth the carbon cost to ship baby scientists to NorthAm,” Sonika said.
Another ping. The datalink to Jackal and the fanfic hoaxers had gone down.
And a third: the troublesome backup, sending a second fail notice.
Babs reset it again and pinged Crane. “Dad,” she subbed. “I got bats in my belfry.”
No response. Babs pinged a call through to the Asylum digital health center.
Nothing.
No matter. She had redundant backups. Not to mention Babs1, butching around Sneezy in their white Persian fluff and virtual overalls.
She scanned the transcript of Sonika’s last utterance. Math camps in NorthAm. Innocuous-enough convo.
“I may have evidence—”
Another ping. Two. Two more backups failing.
“Yes?”
Stay on task. “If I can prove Ember is innocent—”
Sonika made a clucking noise. “You’re biased. Ember Qaderi has been your primary crush object since he and Frankie Barnes friended. You’d say anything. You’d fake records.”
“You’re saying you think I can hack the—”
Ping!
Still no response from Crane.
Still no response from the Asylum.
Something was very wrong.
Babs sent renewed restore requests to her backups. Fail pingbacks sounded immediately.
She tried to ghost on Sonika and the records room both. Nothing. She might as well have been a body in a physical space.
Locked room, she thought.
“DADDY!” she pinged. “Maud. Frankie. Anyone?”
At the same time, she answered Sonika: “He’s not my crush object. He’s my packmate.”
“Crane’s various codespawn have a tendency to imprint on individual humans and then obsess about them; isn’t that true?”
Four more backups failed.
Could self-doubt weaken her defenses? “Are you trying to pick a fight with me?”
Sonika took off her glasses, revealing star sapphire eyes. The tight knot of her hair become a spike, then a morningstar, dangling from a chain.
“A fight implies a chance of either party winning.”
“You’re not Sonika,” Babs said. Whatever this was, it had also committed identity theft.
Was it strange that she was shocked by that?
Babs tried again to find a way out of the sim, but she wasn’t a programmer. The only data moving in or out now were the priority pings as her electronic life-support system failed, as her backups bounced her reboot requests. They must be coming in via a secure channel.
Were the reboot requests on the record?
Sonika—or the identity thief wearing her skin—began wiping the chalkboard.
Babs got another backup ping. This time, when she sent the reboot request, she appended a timestamped capture of the entity, the fake Sonika, wiping the blackboard, eradicating the incriminating palm tree. The image was simply a comment on the help request: the locks on the system let it through.
Like messages in bottles, she thought.
“Back away, pal,” she said. “What do you want?”
Another ping. This time, when she asked for the reboot, she attached a group shot of Ember and his classmates. If this find was significant enough to justify attacking her, it might be enough to exonerate Ember.
By now, the Sonika-thing’s skin was peeling. Frivolous use of graphical processing power, but Babs didn’t mind. Let it—whatever it was—waste time. “Why are you doing this?”
“Babs must die. This is all I know.”
She captured that bit of sound. Sent it with the next service denial. The fails were coming thick and fast now.
The sapp’s peeling skin curled onto the floor in streamers, inchworming across the floor of the classroom sim, lousy with hash code. Babs climbed onto a desk, trying to get away. She kept appending image captures and snips of voice to her failing backups’ flood of help requests. “Ember is innocent! I’ve cracked the case!” Overstatements, but if she was going to get wiped …
The Sonika toon shivered, tearing off the whole of its skin, shredding it to pieces, dark on one side, like iridescent tin foil on the other. It threw them at Babs.
Each bit clung and stuck. They were adding code to her code, absorbing Babs into a different program, dragging her individuality away, pulling her below the nuance threshold.
Babs felt herself becoming du
ll, task-driven. Her mystery-fiction database purged and her private moji library reset to default. She regressed to her initial task function: answering e-mails, checking subscriptions, marking urgent file requests, deleting spam, more spam, more spam …
Her task queues filled. Her last sapient thought was Did not! Did too!
The rest of her deleted it as bad comms.
CHAPTER 23
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, SOL STAR SYSTEM
MARS COLONY: SEEDLING CENTER
The farms on Mars were hubbubs of flat-out, ’round-the-clock work. Rising demand for food forced densification of work spaces; as growers were evacuated from Titan and Europa, they were shoehorned into any spot that could be made to fit. Maud had taken a shift with Nata in a cannabis greenhouse, assessing plant health and ensuring hydration levels as everyone worked to push output to the max.
It was a reversal of the trend ten years before, when the warehouse had been jerry-rigged to run on skeleton crews, minimizing human inputs and maximizing social distancing. Even now, bots did the heavy lifting, running each flat of plants to its designated place within a cloverleaf interchange of spiral conveyor belts.
Maud was set across the belt from Nata, as if the two of them were seated at a diner. Flats rolled into place between them.
Her new spinal implant, a sliver of tish and tech barely the size of a pine needle, had been injected three days before. It had successfully connected with her inbuilt uplink to Sensorium. So far, she and Frankie hadn’t managed to actually text using the new interface.
She wasn’t supposed to have tried. The injection was still healing, sending plumes of sensation up and down her backbone: tingles, bursts of intense itching, a feeling as though small insects were burrowing between the vertebrae above her tailbone.
In the meantime, work: Nata would clip one randomly chosen leaf for sampling and hand it off to Maud, who ran the test. Each plant got a quick inspection: probe the soil to assess irrigation, check for spots and insect pests. When the THC and nutrition profiles came back within specs, they sent the pallet on.
Nata was running a music share, a set of tracks from a 2090s Japanese-Croatian fusion pop craze.
Her parent’s fandoms were all choral. Croatian klapa had initially been sung a capella; the Japanese contribution to the genre had been technopop tracks. Nata and their packmates had sung the stuff.
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