They did a precautionary run through station systems. Nothing screamed sabotage. Body9 remained a husk but one that was still breathing. The organ pig’s two donor hearts beat steadily in the wet room.
Babs1 reached out to Iktomi’s autopilot, ordering an extra scan of the area.
Scrap’s gone from Us to I.
When that happens in the Asylum, we’re literally breaking into individuals.
Comms, comms, restore our comms. That’s all it had to say for days.
“You said you can’t approve invoices for the All,” they ventured. “Does that change the terms for me asking you about Kinze tech?”
“I will not betray the All!”
“Don’t bark; I’m trying to understand.” Babs1 licked a paw haughtily, a move that almost always got an apology out of a human. Nothing.
Understanding a sapient pile of bioelectric insectile tissue? Really, it was a job for Maud. Babs1 gave in to a brief-but-piercing sense of homesickness for the rest of the Feral5.
“What Scrap really needs”—the offworlder mused—“is to resolve on self-termination.”
“Suicide?” It made sense, they supposed. Scrap’s presence aboard Sneezy was proof of sabotage. “No point in that, my good fellow. I’d still have your body. We have evidence you were here on multiple camera feeds, starting fires and sneaking around—”
“Correct,” Scrap agreed. “The only way to eliminate evidence of attempted salvage would be to destroy Sneezy and Iktomi as well.”
“We sent your nanobeads out to Earth,” Babs1 reminded him. “And the pieces of Appaloosa. You’re already rumbled.”
Scrap said, “Then my mission imperatives are unclear.”
“It sounds like you’re having an identity crisis.”
“I have no context for that comment.”
“Let’s build you a proper toon for this drive-in simulation,” Babs1 offered. “Do you wish to look like, for example, a big Kinze?”
Its needles bunched and separated. “Scrap can no longer use the brands of the All.”
“All,” Babs1 said. “Does that mean you’re all one?”
No answer.
“Why would you have individual bank accounts? Individual Sensorium accounts either, for that matter…”
In the lab, in the bell jar, the EMbodied form of the alien went still as stone. For a moment, Babs1 feared it had, indeed, committed self-harm.
“Of course, you can’t betray the All,” Babs1 kept their voice casual. “I apologize for prying.”
Could that have been a stress tell?
“Come on,” Babs1 said. “Animal toon, then?”
“Animals represent sentient programs. Scrap—”
“Scrap isn’t a sapp. Indeed, you are not. What about this?” They showed it a marionette.
“Automaton?”
“Not quite a bot. More of a costume, I’d say.”
It condescended to browse the available choices, briefly pausing to take in the details on a rosewood marionette, with bulky brass fastens on its joints. Clad in a royal blue onesie, it had full red lips and golden eyes.
“Presenting as mammalian is unappealing.”
“No to animals, no to people shapes. What about an anthropomorphized object?” Babs1 split the screen, showing a clock and candelabra with animated eyes and mouths, two characters from an ancient McDiznazon property.
Could Scrap kill itself if it wanted to? How was Babs1 supposed to prevent suicidality in an individualized alien from a possible group mind?
All kinds of prisoners get depressed.
“Don’t you feel torn away? Abandoned? Discarded?” Scrap said suddenly.
“What? Me? Thank you for asking, but I’m fine.”
“Your focus on entertainment, and these endless discussions with me suggests loneliness.”
“I’m trying to keep you company.”
“The medic is ignoring you, is she not? Have you clashed?”
If it didn’t know Body9 was brain-dead, Babs1 wasn’t about to share. “Teagan’s got a project on.”
“What if you self-terminated? Shut off the dark matter attractors and allowed me to access your systems?”
“I’m fine, dear fellow,” Babs1 told it. “And if this whole conversation has been in service of getting me to hash myself, you’ve misjudged radically.”
It emitted a shrug moji. Then it reset its avatar, transforming from a twinkling star to a big linen handkerchief, embroidered at the edges, with white silk thread in a crossed-swords motif. It had big, black-and-white cartoon eyes, inspired by the McDiznazon icons. As Babs1 watched, it folded itself into a crisp fabric flower.
“Better?” it asked.
“You tell me—it’s your manifestation.”
Had it merely suggested the suicide pact to change the subject?
Babs1 pulled up the transcript of their conversation. The query about individual Kinze user accounts. That was definitely what had triggered the stress tell.
“I prefer this film property to the homicide stories,” it announced.
Babs1 murmured: “I don’t have a lot of the McDiznazon kids’ stuff—it’s pricey.”
“Are you saying … is it not your fandom?”
“Teagan’s got the original Brave, I think. Let me … yes.”
Babs1 created a second drive-in screen, found the kid’s show in the station share drive, and started it up. The cartoon napkin let out a thumbs-up moji.
Could it have wanted to distract them? Had Babs1 got a damaging admission out of it? Did it matter if the Kinze were just one mind, and if so, why?
They had only just begun to turn over the transcripts when incoming comms pinged, throwing their fragile sense of a status quo back into the solar wind.
CHAPTER 32
NORTHAM WEST COAST EVACUATION ZONE
DEATH VALLEY SCIENTIFIC OUTLIER COMMUNITY
(INFORMAL DESIGNATION: TATWEEN)
Harbinger days.
Earth’s early, devastating #ecofails—quakes and droughts and coastal floods, coupled with murder sprees, the rise of #antivaxxing and the resultant pandemics—had all but emptied the southern California landscape in the mid twenty-first. The region had been the first in NorthAm to be deconstructed, down to the foundations of its swimming pools and skyscrapers. Its remnant population of deburbing crews had endured quakes, fires, and tsunami as they recycled the megacity.
Humanity ceded the West Coast to wildfire and searing heat. Even now, sim creators often used old Tinseltown as their go-to setting for hellscapes.
The desert didn’t look infernal to Maud; the ecosystem was sere, but as she and Bredda cruised its terrain in one of Desert Valley’s rolling labs, she saw plenty of life: coyote and jackrabbit, a carefully managed herd of bighorn sheep, overwatched by bots. Joshua tree and mesquite grew beyond the saltpan, and flowering cacti were everywhere. A pair of greater roadrunners paced the lab for a few clicks. A series of trackers showed the location of all the resident birds of prey and a rebounding population of ravens.
“There’s the stock tank,” Bredda said, as the lab circled around to park near a shaded habitat space.
The van doors opened to a rush of blast furnace. Catching her breath, Maud stepped into the wall of heat, helping Bredda heft hydrogel to the stock tank. There was a spring there that the project hoped to restore to natural flow later in the year; meanwhile, the tank needed replenishing twice weekly.
Kneeling, Maud dug carefully within a marked boundary within the management area, seeking wild locust egg capsules.
The searing heat—ground temperatures exceeded sixty degrees Celsius—made it hard for her to imagine naturally occurring moist areas within this ecosystem. Breeze lifted her sunscreen as she carefully extracted the egg cases, a wash of heat over her shoulders like the unwelcome press of bodies in a crowd. She indulged a what-if—what if the Clawback hadn’t worked? What if humanity hadn’t drawn the planet closer to a human-friendly carbon balance? Would it be this hot everywhere?<
br />
“Let me.” Bredda put a hand out for the egg capsules, settling them into prepared suspension lozenges. They would harden into marbles, remaining encased until exposed to enzymatic triggers.
Maud remembered Bredda from her days in Manhattan as a taciturn, surly child. The type who’d be bound for a security job, she’d have thought. Since she’d arrived in the desert, the two of them had worked three consecutive shifts together. Bredda hadn’t so much as blinked to indicate recognition of Maud.
She’d seen other @Visionary kids, too. Nobody had said a word about their venned past.
As they stepped back into the air-conditioned not-quite-cool of the rolling laboratory, Maud got a ping.
“I got us a proper pop-in,” Nata said without preamble, posting room specs. “Four beds—so, still a sharespace.”
“It beats the big dorm,” Maud said.
“You see? All is well. We are having the grand adventure!”
“Very grand.” Maud had managed to get a hand onto Nata, off camera, before they left Detroit. She’d told them, via Morse, that the Death Valley offer was dangerous. She should go alone to Tatween, she had said …
… but Nata had brushed that suggestion aside. Wasn’t that Frankie’s move, they had asked, the one Maud disliked so much—setting off on her own?
It was as close as they had come to arguing since Maud was a teen.
“I’m off shift soon,” Nata said now. “Meet me for dinner. I am making friends.”
“Yes, I’ll meet you,” Maud said now. “Be careful, okay?”
“Don’t worry so much, you cabbage!” On that note, Nata closed the channel.
Maud stared at the lab counter, chewing on her lip.
“Egg numbers look good,” Bredda said.
“Very healthy,” Maud replied automatically.
“You okay?” It was the first personal remark the other woman had made.
Frankie wouldn’t sit around, would she? Maud met Bredda’s gaze squarely. “Wondering when something’s going to happen.”
Bredda scratched her head. “Well … want to go caving?”
“Now?”
“Why not? We box-ticked all the day’s research tasks. Cave’s barely a diversion; we can recharge the lab there.”
“All right.” Maud authorized luxury credit to offset the extra wear and tear they’d be putting on the vehicle. Bredda sent her a stroke, by way of thanking her for maintaining the commons.
Maud configged her primer for a hike. Tough-soled boots with nanogrips at the toes thickened underfoot. She arranged her worldlies into sealed panniers on either hip, once again giving a concertina configuration to her legs.
As she ran a fingertip inventory of all her treasures, she brushed Frankie’s Braille tape. Unreadable now. It might say anything.
Never doubt I love …
Maud stocked hydrogel within the top layers of the panniers, then ate a trio of printed spicy tuna wraps from the lab’s cooler, washing them down with a mango-citrus chugger.
“Aren’t you fueling up?” she asked Bredda. “Specs you sent say the cave’s a twelve-click hike.”
“I went heavy on breakfast.” The lab trundled out to an outcropping of rock near an array of solar panels harvesting light for a salt stack. The stack rose up the cliff face, vein of silver embedded in the rock wall.
Salt stacks took in solar energy, converting some to electricity immediately and using the rest to heat the salt so they would continue to generate power at night. The panels and stack, working together, could drive a turbine around the clock, even when temps there in the valley dropped to their winter nighttime low of four degrees.
“Lot of infrastructure here,” Maud said.
“Cantina is a designated survival shelter,” Bredda explained. “If Tatween was ever under threat, this is where we’d evacuate to.”
Maud felt a faint rush of nerves. A survival shelter would offer a perfect opp for some @Visionary wanting to get creative with food and supply inventories.
They stepped out into a sliver of shade. Bredda led the way, hiking forty feet up the rock face to the cave mouth, via a well-walked switchback path wide enough for a wheelchair.
“You’re not claustrophobic,” Bredda said, in a tone indicating she’d already checked. Maud signed no.
They passed through a pair of revolving doors, into an efficiently modern antechamber. Emergency refuge, just as Bredda had said: medical support, sarco pods, food printers, Kanga, Fox and HawkBOTs. A twenty-by-twenty array of tish banks rose along the wall, ensuring maximum bandwidth. Everything necessary to keep a few hundred refugee bodies alive while directing their attention online.
Bredda led Maud past an array of crutches and splints, a big pharmaceutical printer, and an antivenin fridge. She opened a steel fire-rated door, revealing a room without a back wall … a chamber that morphed from construct into actual cave. Human-made plaster slamming right up against the natural world; it didn’t quite look real.
On the manmade side of the chamber, shelves of hiking equipment awaited.
The women logged an exploration plan, helped themselves to gloves, ropes, and fitted safety helmets.
“I’m no hardcore climber,” Maud warned, testing her light.
“Don’t worry: you won’t even break a sweat. Equipment’s required for emergencies, that’s all.”
“Playing it safe,” Maud said.
“Always.” Bredda reached for her then, moving slowly to assure consent, then leading her onto a floormat. As her second foot came down on its rubbery surface, Maud’s skin came up in gooseflesh. Her nanosilk primer crashed, leaving her in a baggy brown clownsuit. As her panniers decohered, all her worldlies dropped to the floor.
“Eyes up,” Bredda murmured.
Heart pounding, Maud stepped off the mat. Bredda picked it up by its corners, bundling everything Maud owned into an opaque satchel—she held out a hand to silently request Frankie’s locator chip, still dangling on a slim chain from Maud’s neck. With that collected, she set the bundle on one of the shelves.
All her things, left behind in an unsecured bag.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad that her note from Frankie had self-destructed.
Dammit, we all bloody hate it when I’m right! Frankie’s imagined comment was so on brand, it didn’t even feel like imagination.
That sense of Frankie’s presence evaporated as Maud’s primer rebooted. Nanosilk contracted against her skin. The hiking overalls and boots reassembled themselves, snug as a cocoon.
“On we go,” Bredda said, leading the way into the cavern.
The quality of the air changed as soon as they were a hundred feet into the system, becoming dense in a way Maud associated with old concrete basements—almost a flavor, like wet stone pushed against the tongue. The surfaces of the cave walls alternated between lumpy and jagged. The former had a look of dried dough, the latter of children’s blocks fitted together imperfectly, in colors from caramel to black. The path beneath them was raspy aggregate; chipped rock underfoot made each step a bit treacherous.
Bredda chose the route, moving surely through the branches of the paths. Each intersection was labeled with a pair of alphanumeric symbols: in theory, you could make your way back as long as you had tracked the codes. Her sidekick app, Minky, was keeping a list: right turn at 6P, left at 8K, straight on at 10A.
She found herself wishing it was Crane tracking the breadcrumbs.
In a chamber labelled 7L, a shaft from the side broke through to the surface, spearing sunlight and hot air through the gloom, leaving everything darker after they passed.
Their augments’ connection to Sensorium failed about five minutes later. One by one, Maud’s apps went into Friday mode, saving her camera and microphone feeds for later upload.
If I could get Nata down here, I could try to talk them into getting away from Tatween before Upton and Headmistress make their move.
Bredda slid into a barely visible gap in the cave wall, leading Maud into t
he crevice. From there she pushed on the rock wall itself. A panel slid aside, revealing a dim antechamber. The alphanumeric coding on the wall changed, from S1 to G4.
Goosebumps, a feeling like her hands were sticky. “All my wayfinding is a lie?”
“You’re well and truly lost,” Bredda confirmed. She pulled a small, copper-colored medallion out of the storage, handing it over. “Here. Spoofer for your built-in mic and your eyecams.”
Maud let the medallion lie on her palm for long seconds, feeling its warmth against her skin.
“Or go back. It’s nothing to us. I’ll reset your route so you make it up to the top.”
Yeah, right.
“If it’s nothing to you,” Maud said, “then you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get me this far.”
“Following orders.” Hanging a second spoofer at her own throat, Bredda pushed on an outcropping of rock, sliding aside another false wall to reveal a carved flight of stairs, aglow with steady, artificial light. Turning sideways, she edged out of sight.
Nerves humming with a weird mix of apprehension and excitement, Maud followed.
The concealed exit slid shut behind her. As she descended the narrow flight of steps, the corridor widened and smoothed out, becoming more regular. Loose rock beneath her boots disappeared, giving way to pitted stone floor. Above, the ceiling began to show a line of green and brown spines, bristling, like upside-down lawn. The spines presented in a narrow strip at first, widening until the whole ceiling—by now, it was about ten feet above her—was carpeted in a combination of textures: stiff spines, fine waving antennae, threads of silk, and pieces indistinguishable from tent caterpillar.
Kinze. Lots of them. On Earth, in flagrant violation of the noninterference treaty.
Ignoring the aliens with an effort—Maud would have happily just stared in fascination, if only to seek out the boundary where one individual ended and the next began—she followed Bredda through an open archway and into a chamber the size of a barn, illuminated by torchiere lights set into the wall at one-meter intervals. The ceiling angled up, away, to a height of eight or ten meters. The accumulation of Kinze biostructure covered the entire space above them.
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