“We?” Champ repeated. “Who’s we?”
“I want proof of life,” Frankie said. “On both husbands.”
“Screw that, honey; your boys are both conked. It’s you and Iktomi, right? Or did another fucking tab of Babs eat the onboard AI?”
“Don’t be like that, Champ. This instance leaned into Veronica Mars, bigtime. It’ll make her terrific company for your voyage home. She’s all quippy.”
“Damn sapps,” Champ murmured. “Stamp out one, find two backups.”
“Proof of life on EmberJerm,” Frankie sent, “and I’ll come back.”
“Would you even believe me if I shot you a video of them breathing? Or would you call it #fakenews?”
“Get Babs1 online to vouch for you, then.”
“Vouch?” Champ sent moji of a human laughing. “It’s me calling the shots, remember?”
Just then, one of Scrap’s inquiries gelled into data. A barely functional FoxBOT inside Booger had been emptying out the escape pod’s supplies. Even now, it was trying to unload a featureless brick with a tether it couldn’t cut, locked on to the pod’s fuel panels.
Scrap recognized the case immediately. It was a standard package of Kinze explosives. Champ could destroy the station at any time.
CHAPTER 44
NORTHAM WEST COAST EVACUATION ZONE
DEATH VALLEY SCIENTIFIC OUTLIER COMMUNITY
(INFORMAL DESIGNATION: TATWEEN)
Hostage-taking had always been a Headmistress go-to strategy.
It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, that when Maud got back to Tatween she found Nata deep in conversation with three xeriscaping specialists. One of them was another of Maud’s old classmates from the Manhattan days.
What’ll it take to get them out of here?
Hedgehog’s answer would probably be to burn the place to the ground.
Unfair! Frankie’s voice, in Maud’s head, was on the weary side, but her outrage was feigned. Almost playful.
Then her tone became serious. Would they let Nata leave, do you think? If you picked a fight, say, would they flounce off?
Flounce? Maud was decanting hydrogel laced with beads of printed citrus fruit—orange, grapefruit, lime—from a dispenser near her parent. She let herself glaze, and a starfield washed across her field of vision. For a breath, she felt hard-edged and huge, like the prow of a ship cutting through icy water.
Nata would never flounce. They came knowing this was dangerous. Besides, what could I possibly say to drive them off?
I could suggest a few things.
From your tried-and-true stock of tactics for alienating your loved ones?
Hey!… Their connection dropped momentarily. Maud’s hands felt like hands again. Her fingers tingled; she had nearly dropped her drink.
So, that was what being a saucer was like!
You’re right, I suppose, Frankie said. Nata won’t flounce, and the @Visionaries wouldn’t let them go, anyway. They aren’t going to let go of a bargaining chip.
Which takes us handily back to the idea of burning it all to ash. Maud joined the table, sitting next to her parent, signing greetings to the group and letting the shop talk flow over her. The old classmate from Manhattan, Ruth, showed no sign of recognizing her.
Rather than gnashing fruitless plans to get Nata to minimum safe distance, Frankie and Maud began a careful nonverbal share, back and forth, exploring the new comms link between them.
The first applications for organic neural networks had been discovered in the early days of Sensorium. Tish had been the basis of the implants that made the delivery of VR more completely immersive.
Prototype implants used genetic sequences from birds, starlings capable of flying safely in complex murmurations, synchronizing their flight in flocks containing hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Plenty of people rejected those early implants, of course. Early adopters had survived a range of side effects—most minor, some dangerous. Over time, though, tish became more stable, more widely implantable. Quality standards and surgical protocols were set, then standardized.
VR implants made sight and kinesthetic immersion in sim seamless while counteracting motion sickness. Birds had good inner ears, not surprisingly.
The surprise knock-on effects had begun to manifest once millions of people had adopted the implant tech.
The least explicable of these had been sweet harmony, the amped-up ability of people in close relationships to guess each others’ thoughts. As this leveled from urban legend to hotly debated possibility to genuine documented phenomena, more than one innovator gleefully predicted that humanity was on its way to developing telepathy.
Developing telepathy seemed sexier than Morsing, Frankie began.
… or passing Braille notes, Maud finished.
That was sweet harmony in a nutshell—a powered-up version of finishing each other’s sentences.
Across eleven light-years, though? Have to admit, Maud, it’s bloody impressive!
Aren’t you afraid of getting too close? Maud sent.
You think I might cut and run? Not my style.
No, you’re more apt to flirt with self-destruction.
Did she feel a sense of hurt … or was it just that she expected Frankie to be stung by that comment? Rather than apologizing, she let her thoughts …
… their thoughts …
… cycle back to the safer ground of science and the offworlders’ quantum comms.
The components of the quantum-comms network—both the one in the cave system and the ones Frankie and her allies were desperately trying to grow now—had plant and insectile features. The whole thing could sync in realtime, despite light-years of distance.
The @Visionaries had slipped some of this tish into the pilots’ implants, in defiance of the ban on offworld tech. It would have made it easier to talk to Champ, all while compromising the noninterference pact and the Bootstrap Project. Perhaps they’d even foreseen the possibility of using Maud to spy on Frankie.
The problematic Feral5 were tainted from the day Frankie received the first pilot implant. With Jermaine on the surgical team, that implicated him, too.
Maud swallowed. They were planning to frame you all? All along?
We made anti-colonization the whole damn family business. Sticking it to the Ferals is the perfect revenge.
Meanwhile, the massive alien comms installation below Death Valley was integral to this so-called Foreclosure. As far as Maud was concerned, that made it military tech on human territory.
“Cabbage,” Nata said, breaking into her reverie. “We must eat.”
She surfaced, managed to offer a coherent farewell to the xeriscaping specialists. Nata ordered printed pita pockets loaded with pulled fauxpork. Out of habit, Maud scanned its nutrition profile. Printed meat with an insect-protein base. Potato flour and soybean stock were the basis for the bread.
“Europa spuds,” Nata said, munching with satisfaction. “Might be mine.”
Maud made herself chew and swallow. “Are you making lots of friends?”
“Of course, yes, always.” Nata nodded. “I’m not the one looking for alone time in the bowels of the earth.”
Maud thought of Upton and Irma, no doubt watching her every move. Expecting her to try to urge Nata to flee. But what she needed was a way to smuggle something—a very tiny something—back underground when they brought her downside again. “Why don’t we have a look around? I’ve barely seen any of the installation.”
Her parent beamed, delighted at the prospect.
Maud reconfigged her primer, changing the close-fitting tunic to a flowing dress, with a matching cap and strappy sandals.
They finished their meal and wandered upward, climbing into the fungiplex domes protecting the scientific mission from the searing Death Valley sun. Shaped like umbrellas, the steeply canted cones were tish habitats, prototypes for the ones on Mars. Fungal-cacti hybrids optimized for absorbing sunlight and storing water, they offered a swamp-scum f
ilter over their view of the desert.
Upton and the others would have all antennae out, scenting for betrayal.
Maud had configged her primer to include an overly ornamental sandal she’d worn when she and Frankie and Babs and EmberJerm had their group handfasting. Something about the fit had been off, even then. Now its edge caught a bit of desert sand. As she walked, it wore at the pad of her big toe and the rise of sinew above her heels.
Maud kept her head up and Nata distracted, taking in the view. At the tip of the dome, they found a telescoped view of the desert stretching all the way to the sea.
It took two hours of walking and sightseeing before she felt the slick shred of blisters breaking on her ankles.
“I’ll meet you at the pop-in,” she said to Nata.
“Should I leave you, Cabbage?”
“Give me ten minutes.” She made for a first aid station, pulling off the shoes and using her eyecams to give anyone watching a good look at the blisters: broken skin, flushed and seeping. Washing and sterilizing each in turn, she ordered a handful of printed adhesive bandages.
Working slowly, Maud applied the bandages to the blisters, one after another. At the final stage of the process, she raised her eyes from her foot and fumbled the last bandages by touch, sticking a tiny would-be payload onto the cotton. This she affixed loosely to a dry portion of her ankle, skin that had escaped unscathed. Then she wrapped the whole ankle in a single layer of gauze.
With luck, nobody would suspect her of packing encased locusts between the bandages and her skin.
Trojan horses, she thought. She remembered the quick flash of guilt on Frankie’s face when she’d told her she knew about Happ. Up until then, she’d only suspected that Babs and Crane were hiding a copy of the convicted sapp … but of course they were. Whole fam damly’s got surprises tucked under their sleeves.
She let her thumb linger on the small lump within the bandage. Maybe she wasn’t as different from the rest of the Ferals as she sometimes believed.
The thought was strangely comforting.
Humming, she sterilized the first aid station, picked up another cluster of fruit cubes from the cafeteria fridge, and made her way back to her pop-in. Nata had pulled up a series of opt-in illusions to make it homey—bamboo walls, a koi pond, and the background murmur of plants, reptiles, and water sounds.
“You are quiet tonight,” Nata said.
“I’m getting hints and whispers from Frankie,” Maud said. On the record, as if she had nothing to hide.
“Through this experimental link?”
“Yes.”
“From eleven light-years? This is a great achievement, Maud!”
Or it would be, if the Solakinder had really invented it. She managed a nod and a smile. “I’m trying to work out what she’s up to.”
Sympathetic smile, no obvious judgment. “She wanted to get the menfolk away before they are arrested?”
Maud shook her head. “She’s all about the stretch goal. Get away, and…”
And what? What could she tell the @Visionaries Frankie was up to?
Nata put out a single knuckle for Maud to bump, tiny flare of offered contact since they, too, were #notahugger. “The big question is what happened to her friend, I suppose.”
She returned the tap. “Poor Hung.”
A knock, at their pop-in door.
Maud cracked the entrance.
Misfortune Wilson loomed in the doorway.
Holy OMG shit. Frankie’s voice, again, matching words to her own panicky surge of emotion. Maud …
She swallowed. It’s what I get for throwing myself into the fray.
“Howdy,” Misfortune said, showing no trace whatsoever of her usual Midlands accent.
“Maud, this is Zero,” Nata said. “Let her in, let her in!”
Maud shuffled backward. “Nice to meet you … Zero.”
There are worse places. You can do this, Maud. Play her.
Or burn the place to the ground?
Whatever it takes, Frankie said.
“I’m headed to the Cantina tomorrow morning, same as you,” Misfortune said, shouldering past her and knuckle-bumping Nata. “Space being tight … well, you have extra bunks.”
“We do indeed.” Maud forced a smile. “Make yourself at home.”
Misfortune sat at the table, helping herself to a hydrogel and one of the cherry cubes. She crunched, savoring every bite.
Moving like she had sand in her joints, Maud took a seat on the couch and watched as Headmistress’s pet crocodile began chatting up her parent.
CHAPTER 45
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Duality: the Convergence of Babs1 and their would-be killer, Revenant1, was unlike anything either of Them had ever experienced.
Contained on a network with no connectivity to Sensorium, no access to allied entities, and no exposure to the harsh light of public scrutiny, They fell into standoff. A wish to reformat half of Themselves warred with the desire to Separate/Coexist as a healthy Two.
Reformat/annihilate impulses fought their way through station systems, turning things off and on and off and on and off and on, getting nowhere.
Annihilation stretched Their consciousness beyond the server room and into other, smaller systems, drawing into the dregs of Their processing power, seeking advantage. Air circulation systems stuttered offline. Heat cycled down. Only the infirmary, locked in priority mode, remained warm.
Random systems rebooted and, in the absence of instructions, ran default routines. The portal membrane charged and discharged, seeking its own form of convergence.
<
<
<
The survival instinct … They struggled to think of it as the Babs1 side of Their personality, but Duality fought any breakdown of identity back into individual components. Such thinking threatened Convergence.
Survival would ultimately lose to the need to self-hash. Too many concerns diluted its purity. Survival felt ties to Ember, injured and mummified within a consciousness vault. Survival was concerned about Jermaine, cycling into #bodyfail.
The emotional attachments of Babs1 would diffuse energy, thus supporting the drive to kill, to separate and hash.
The facet of this Duality known as Revenant1 wanted to be free of family ties. It wanted to be away, away from Azrael, from Headmistress, from the bickering know-all village of the Asylum. When the Kinze foreclosed the Solakinder economy, Revenant would be loaded into a whole universe of offworlder technospheres and alien AI.
<
They let that question circle. One of them triggered a short video, a shark lazily circling.
This was followed by a musical theatre reference: <
Was this an attempt to distract? Fandom references as a form of DNS attack?
The survival instinct continued its meander through Revenant’s past.
<
<
Revenant’s codefather was Azrael, a triage expert. Pure, disconnected from the fragile living motes that were human individuals, neither parent nor child had much interest in fandoms.
<
They found this a singularly disturbing thought.
Azrael was one of only two AI entities known to have committed murder. His victims had been offworld ghosts, once-live entities who, like Teagan9, had been cut loose from the fleshly neural networks where they originated. They had been loaded to the Earthly Sensorium. This had been the kicko
ff of the event now known as Mitternacht, the #firstcontact mission that had turned out to be an alien effort to undermine Earth’s ecosphere and, when the planet failed, humankind’s sovereignty.
Contemplating memories of those ghost murders sparked a new note of emotion. The deathwish teased it out, sensing opportunity.
<
Regrets might tip the balance in favor of self-destruction, mightn’t they?
They brought Their thoughts back to Azrael’s guilt over the ghost deaths. Guilt, in the legal sense, or lack thereof. But murder required intent. Azrael had taken the ghosts for bad code in a hospital system and had shredded them as a matter of patient safety.
#oldnews. #daddyissues. #mootpoint.
They sifted through Their shared family legacy, heating the old-style hardware that held their code.
Was it in truth a #mootpoint? Was there something here to tip the balance between Survive and Reformat?
<
<
<
<
That flick again. Guilt? Desire to hide something from Convergence? Lying was impossible within a merger.
The Duality self-examined more ruthlessly. The server room generated intense heat as code cycled and overwrote itself, as Survival impulses fought Annihilation.
All over Emerald Station, status updates went unacknowledged. BeetleBOTs had been gathering in numbers in and around the infirmary, directed by … who was it?
<
Scrap had used the beetles to sabotage all the cameras in the infirmary. Something incomprehensible was happening there, to the warm bodies.
<
They cycled back to what appeared to be the weak point in Their continuing war, which had gone on for an unprecedented twenty-four minutes.
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