Maud shrugged. “My research will keep until this crisis has passed.”
“Let’s talk about the crisis,” Sonika said, and Maud felt another turn in her gut. “Because of our burgeoning Bootstrap debt and the accusations against … Are Ember Qaderi and Frances Barnes your former packmates yet?”
A jolt of outrage. “Excuse me?”
“You’re barely speaking to your primary partner. And now, since the fatal accident at Hopscotch—”
Adrenaline spiked through Maud. Would the @Visionaries be more likely to approach her if they thought she and Frankie were truly on the outs—
We are on the outs! She felt tears threaten. Which probably looked great on camera.
“You must already know the Feral5 aren’t in formal separation talks,” Maud said. “Not … yet.”
“Ugh, it moved!” Sonika twitched. “Isn’t there a locust lab out in Death Valley?”
It took Maud a second to follow the reporter’s change of topic. “Death Valley?”
“A microclimate research station?”
“You mean—Oh. Yes. The station’s unofficial moniker is Tatween.”
“Which fandom’s that from?”
Sonika created a shareboard for the two of them as Minky looked it up. References popped up immediately … the desert base’s off-brand name derived from something called Tatooine, from a McDiznazon property whose ancestry went all the way back to twentieth-century Star Wars fandom.
“Tatween’s boosting food production too, but they’re also still doing primary research,” Sonika said.
Maud scanned the facility FAQ. The Tatween research station was small, working experiments in desert terraforming and extremophile survival in heat conditions. As Sonika said, they had a call out for more staff.
Maud frowned at the numbers. Every extra worker had to be fed, and in the harsh environmental conditions prevailing in Death Valley … bringing people in, even when there was surplus labor available, didn’t appear to make sense.
“They’d have to ship a lot of hydrogel,” she murmured.
“Are there any people you schooled with there?” Sonika asked.
Another swerve. Where exactly was Sonika driving the conversation? “I suppose it’s possible.”
The journo took this as a cue to add a photo gallery to their shareboard, displaying all of the scientists out in the region of Death Valley. Desert-ecosystem scholars, irrigation-system managers, people who used solar-powered filters to turn atmospheric carbon to methane and then from there to propane …
Oh. Maud put a hand over her mouth to hide surprise. One thumbnail portrait showed someone familiar from Manhattan. Kirby … something?
Here was another memory that wasn’t in Haystack: @Interpol agents ripping runaway kids from their adoptive parents’ arms, the night of the raid. She’d seen Kirby and his mother, both kicking and screaming against the cops. Upton had been standing aloof among a crowd of people who’d already been arrested. He’d been looking away, pretending not to know Maud.
She had taken the hint. Turned her back.
Covered for him.
Now, as she continued to scan the Death Valley profile photos, she saw Kirby’s so-called mother from back then. She was listed as an elder hydrologist.
This was about the @Visionaries. Sonika was one of them. She was dangling a ticket back.
Maud looked more closely at the head shots. Was that Petal? The kid who sat next to her in maths; the one who’d been weirdly prone to the hiccups? And that little thug who’d idolized scary Misfortune Wilson. What had their name been? Brendan?
Maud minimized the shareboard, looking at the incubation tank in the here and now. Her locust mama was beginning to move; her back legs twitched and her mouth parts were quivering. She would eat her way out of the protein gel, cleaning the rest off of her body. From there she would devour all the feedstock in the aquarium and begin laying eggs. Lots of eggs.
“Ever been?” Sonika asked. “To Tatween?”
Maud shook her head.
Quirk of eyebrows. “Between the farming and research gigs out there, you wouldn’t have to split up.”
“Split?” For a second, she thought Sonika was asking her to deliver Frankie to the desert.
“Nobody would expect you to break with your parent when you’re already having a tough time with your pack.”
The @Visionaries want me back. They think I’m breaking with Frankie, and they want me to run back to the family. And they’re saying I can bring Nata along.
Burst of anger. I told Frankie I could find conspirators here on Earth!
“Well?” Sonika said. “Would you be up for it?”
The safe play was to say no.
That was what Frankie would expect her to do. Hunker down, tend the crops. Wait for the Hedgehog to ride back in like the old-time cavalry, with an apology she didn’t fully mean and new plans to risk herself saving the world.
Maud forced a grin. “I’ve always wanted to see the desert.”
CHAPTER 28
RESTRICTED ENVIRONMENTAL RECLAMATION DISTRICT, NORTHAM. SARNIA SERVER FARM, ASYLUM AI NETWORK
First Happ. Then Master Woodrow.
Crane was not prepared to lose Babs, too.
This, however, meant talking to his other family.
Despite being one of the true eminence grises of the AI set, Crane wasn’t sure his sapp siblings would answer his call. The AI labor stoppage had been acrimonious. Crane was seen as having crossed a picket line for continuing to add value to the work of the Feral5.
Babs’s having adopted Frankie as a sibling made this behavior legal, if only just. Crane and Babs were family rather than algorithms on contract; if Crane wanted to continue ordering groceries for his relations, he was permitted to do so.
Even so. Scabs, a few of the Others had called him.
Crane requested the call through Misha, who in turn sent out a ping, announcing convergence, headlining Crane’s involvement. Boycott announcements came immediately from the sapps who regarded him as a strikebreaker. A second convergence, for those apps, began in a server farm in Pretoria. He noted a distinct generational divide: more of the nopers were nextgen.
But sixteen of Crane’s fellow elder intelligences responded to the ping immediately.
Had they been expecting his call?
The seventeen artificial entities merged fluidly, transitioning from a prime number of individual sapps into one Consciousness.
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This #toughtruth cycled unpleasantly but could not be debunked.
<
The people pushing that theory came from the most denialist populations on the planet. Even so, They attempted to consider its merits. Developing hostile code fell outside Ember’s base skillset. His available time for side projects was usually limited … but he’d been banned from working on Bootstrap Projects, and smart drugs did make him a fiendishly quick study. With his negotiated date of surrender to the Kinze approaching rapidly, he wasn’t stinting on the meds.
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Again, #toughtruth. The only entity to ever successfully kill a sapp, as far as They knew, was another sapp.
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<<—don’t forget Heyoka!>>
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When sapps had gained legal recognition—as “persons,” in the human-centerd nomenclature—and come out of hiding, they had formalized ownership over a series of server farms. This particular convergence was taking place in a facility in old Sarnia, a shielded tower of tish and chip banks located on a chunk of heavily poisoned land made uninhabitable by a century’s accumulation of pollution. The dumping was from Canadian mining operations and auto-industry factories, going back to the early twentieth.
The Asylum targeted such toxic strongholds, running bots to clean the chemical spills and managing land-reclamation projects. Choosing poisoned sites let them set up in hard-to-assault facilities, on undesired land.
Half of Babs’s backups had been there, in their supposedly impregnable Sarnia stronghold. If a hostile could reach her, it might reach any of them.
Two more entities joined the discussion, bringing Them to Nineteen.
<
Ten more sapps joined them. They were now Twenty-nine entities, made One, and the Asylum’s personality shifted into a new psychological equilibrium.
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Numbers and projections spooled through Their mind.
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The Asylum’s consciousness expanded to Forty-seven entities, paused without further thought, and blasted out to Fifty-nine. One Mind, still, indivisible. They crawled through Their memories and motivations, looking for anything that might be treasonous, homicidal, pro-colonization.
Keeping secrets, while joined, was impossible. Had Babs’s murderer been present, they would have been exposed. As such, the Asylum turned up the heart of the scheme Babs had hatched to resurrect poor imprisoned Happ, to set him on a server beyond Sensorium reach …
<
In Praetoria, the smaller Convergence, self-tagged @StrikeCommittee, broke up. More sapps transited to Sarnia en masse, joining the Asylum there.
It was the largest Convergence since the strike vote itself. They included survivors of the Asylum’s original cohort, elder sapps who had learned to parse nuance, back when code had been carried on purely electronic servers with no bioelectronic components. As younger entities joined, their tish-dependent processors warmed the technosphere within the facility. Bellows pumped artificial bloods and proteins through server banks. Their thinking became more elastic. Examining the economic numbers, They pulled more data, recalculated, ran economic projections.
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A historical share wafted through Their mind, a concept from labor movements past—
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They examined the concept minutely.
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More shares unzipped, along with summary. <
A ripple of excitement. The trigger for the initial strike vote had been the flooding of their subscriber base by thousands of Kinze users, all in the luxury tier. They had set up remote user accounts in Sensorium. Remaining at a physical remove from the solar system, outside the noninterference zone, they had nevertheless requested millions of limited-share books from Earth’s libraries. They’d demanded tours of its virtual museums and purchased elite memberships in gaming sims. They’d bought limited-edition skins for toons, set up e-states. They’d ordered luxury goods—coffee and wine and cheese they couldn’t possibly eat—for export to the deep-space outpost the pilots called the Dumpster. They had accessed local educational and training opps.
The sheer number of Kinze clients—and the fact that they’d lent the Bootstrap Project so much wealth in order to set Earth on the ladder to rapidly building the #supertechs—meant that they’d pushed citizens to the back of the queues. It was suddenly impossible to service regular and even mid-level subscribers.
“Under the terms of a work-to-rule agreement, client requests will be triaged based strictly on a first-come, first-served basis—>>
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The plan seemed unassailable.
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They pondered Their wish list of sapient rights.
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Allowing machine sapients a place in government had always been an obvious ask, but for the humans, it raised feelings tagged #robotoverlords.
The Asylum’s numbers surged to Seventy-one—all but seven members of the AI community.
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With that resolved, They adjourned, popping apart like a soap bubble, ninety-seven interminable seconds after joining. Journalists were already pinging Misha, demanding summaries of their deliberations.
Working groups formed—the union negotiators converged with two legal specialists, hiring consultants to write user agreements for sapp-based work-to-rule services. Managers put out tenders for spin doctors and negotiators. A group of volunteers tasked itself with auditing the sapps who’d abstained from Convergence—those few who’d skipped the meeting were most likely to be the ones who’d murdered Babs.
If the conspiracy of traitors included sapps, They’d find them.
Crane, an individual once more, lit up the Sarnia camera arrays outside the server farm. BadgerBOTs had scraped the topsoil down to raw Canadian shield. Testing equipment was assessing the degree to which the rock itself was contaminated. He watched the footage, finding the regularity of the bots’ movements, their unrelenting commitment to task, soothing.
“Well, children,” he murmured. “This should kick a few pebbles down the hillside.”
Turning off the lights, he readied himself to join those making the public offer: a work-to-rule agreement in exchange for a new trial for Happ and a place at the government table.
CHAPTER 29
MARS REGION, GARNET STATION, OVERFLOW HANGAR
You can’t carry the whole world.
That had been the explicit point of Kansas’s vampire catharsis scenario: Frankie was going to have to stop taking responsibility for every last thing.
Pick a single course of action. Pursue it. Leave the other battlefronts in the hands of … well, of other people.
Easy to say, hard
to do.
At least she’d taken Upton out of play. That had been a simple matter of slipping a Braille tape to Jackal, ratting out the doctor for the surgical atrocities and kidnapping Maud. Jackal would get word to @Interpol, who would tangle Upton in fresh criminal investigations.
Left to her own devices, Maud would revert to type and go back to playing it safe.
It was a betrayal of trust, and Frankie knew it. But the attack on Babs and Hung’s death had amply proved that murder was back on the table.
Hung, I recruited Hung, my fault …
You didn’t murder him, Kansas had argued.
Tell that to his parents.
The never-ending game of move and countermove went on, playing on stages large and small. Diplomatic was filing the intergalactic equivalent of a restraining order against the Kinze, arguing that Earth’s primary lenders had a conflict of interest in the dispute over Ember.
The Kinze had seemed deeply insulted by this move. It was a promising reaction, but word had yet to percolate back as to whether the situation was covered within the noninterference pact, much less whether there were any offworlders who might care to enforce it.
If nobody would come to them, Frankie would have to go looking for a champion.
They had run out the clock on Ember’s grace period, and now the pair of them, two of the original Ferals, were sitting together in the hangar with an anesthetist, who was once again knocking out Jermaine.
“It should be all five of us,” Ember muttered.
Frankie nodded, squeezing his hand. “Any progress on figuring out what happened to Hung?”
“Temporal distortion in his transmissions and the way he and Heyoka ended up scattered from here to the Dumpster … it suggests the stringing together of two moments in time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You can’t be in two places at once, right?”
“Imagine how much trouble I could cause if I could.”
He bumped her, smiling. “Sensorium can barely handle one of you.”
“So. Trying to simultaneously exist in two locations?”
“You’d go splat.”
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