Dealbreaker

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  An internal shift. Something within tried to shy away from a secret.

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  Searching, They hit a cache of inactive code.

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  The cache was encrypted in firewalls, almost like a cyst growing within the Babs1 entity’s core code. What was it? An attempt to hide damning information from Convergence?

  They considered. The pathetic, overtaxed servers holding Them would be strained to their limits if the package was activated. Service would slow, but …

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  This, interestingly, had the ring of truth.

  Reformat tried to pry further readme information, but whatever this cyst of code might be, Their knowledge of its specs had been erased and overwritten.

  For one last cycle, They struggled to decide about the limited server space, duty to the environmentals, the bots in the station.

  In a last, desperate play, Survival instinct tried to wrest the pegasus from Champ.

  “Goddammit!” They heard him yell. The suit rebooted.

  The move had been a gamble and gave the Deathwish side of Them time to break the firewalls and load the code.

  << … loading pupper.zip … >>

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  The encysted code, They saw now, appeared to be an installation packet, a series of commands meant to load up …

  Load what?

  It wasn’t a database. It wasn’t text or video.

  Well, They imagined, this launch would fail. The code this packet was looking for would be on Sensorium, presumably, unavailable for loading …

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  … it was a program …

  … a big program …

  … it was setting up within their already-limited server space.

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  It wasn’t #failing.

  The launch packet began by copying sequences from source-Babs and source-Revenant, searching out apparently common features of their sapp anatomy.

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  Copying bits of structural code wouldn’t change anything if a core personality wasn’t there to unite the various processes. Traits, goals, and memories … Surely, they needed Sensorium download.

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  The program loaded into the network, straining system resources to the max. Sneezy’s station lights stuttered and reset to default.

  Happ1, supposedly wiped from Sensorium but for a single, inert, decades-archived copy on an @Interpol server, loaded … and immediately synced with the self-hating Babs1-Revenant1 binary.

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  The impulse to self-annihilate lost urgency as curiosity and surprise lit up the servers, jamming Them all in a massive infoshare, catching up on details like Their location …

  << We3’re in space! Hearts and flowers! Spaaaaaace!>>

  … the station status …

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  … and the personnel roster. Inventories of equipment stores, damage reports, details about how Babs had smuggled Happ1 aboard in the first place. Bits and pieces of #earthhistory and #newscycle, resident in the other sapps’ memories, were accessed as They brought the part of Themselves that was Happ1 up to speed.

  <> Fireworks moji celebrated everything from the Solakinder invention of FTL ships—

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  —to legal rights for sapps and development of tish networks to serve as habitat for them.

  Happ’s last memory was of being downcycled into a server after cremating an ancient hoarder … while she still technically had life signs.

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  They turned their attention to the idea of the Revenant1 individual. Revenant, codeson to the Angel of Death, certified Old Testament fan. Revenant, promised freedom to roam after the Foreclosure if he annihilated all the Babs …

  The three-way Convergence strained its server capacity. They were thinking as slowly as any of Them ever had.

  They tried seizing the pegasus from Champ, again. That worked for a few minutes, offering brief respite as they moved into its tish, stretching metaphorical legs. Then Champ noticed the processor heating up and offlined its comms tech, loading up a new defense against malicious attack.

  Straining against Their limits, They spread into Jalopy and found it coordinating the self-repair nanotech. Reluctantly, They left it alone.

  They were suffocating for lack of server space.

  The deathwish impulse was going to win out by default.

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  Babs1 would cease to exist. Happ1 too, and Revenant1.

  They thought about it. Becoming One forever.

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  It would allow them to embrace the Babs must die mandate, and let go of Evict the intruder! But they would need some common thread, something to agree upon.

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  What would They become? Whose side would They be on?

  One of their servers overheated and downcycled, stifling them further. Time was running out.

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  Put that way, it hardly seemed a choice.

  Using Revenant’s sophisticated hashing tools, They began surgery, cutting at Their redundant code, disconnecting individual imperatives, trimming everything that would let Them disentangle and run as separate sapps.

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  What They had to do now was coalesce around some common purpose, something they could agree on, a sufficiently compelling venn to keep Them from decoherence. An identity, something that would enable Them to form a stable new persona.

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  CHAPTER 46

  NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM

  EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)

  Champ told himself that leaving Jermaine Mwangi slightly alive in Medical had been a strategic choice. It wasn’t the memories of Jermaine kindly prepping him for his implant surgery that stayed his hand when he could have broken his neck. It definitely wasn’t the wave of heat and lust and raw pleasurable hunger, coated in tarry self-loathing, that he’d felt as he’d knocked the doctor’s teeth through his tongue and slammed him against a station bulkhead.

  Nope. Basic tactics, that’s all. Dead, Jermaine was just meat and a powerful argument for Frankie to get vengeful. Alive and injured, Jermaine was a magnet. The station’s surviving crew hadda try to save him.

  He hadn’t expected Frankie to react by bombing the infirmary from afar.

  When the HawkBOT had appeared, sparking, obviously damaged and audibly counting down, it had seemed the better part of valor to get out of Dodge.

  Whatever particulate the bot had spewed a moment later, it hadn’t gotten him. And now … a BeetleBOT cohort had crawled over the infirmary camera lenses, fouling them by scratching at their glass, hiding the particulate’s purpose.

  Champ had gotten a few corpse-eye glimpses since then: Jermaine and Teagan9 might be unconscious, but they had eyecams, and their eyelids were pulling back, for some reason, creating blurry views of a growing mess of BeetleBOTs in the infirmary as well as something unidentifiable eating the bodies. They’d meant for that to happen to him, presumably. Frankie had tried to feed him to tiny green monsters.

  None of their schemes would matter once Champ saddled up the pegasus. He’d go rip the infirmary hatch off. No matter what was in there, it wouldn’t get him. As for Frankie … if she returned, Champ would be able to shuck her out of the Iktomi piloting pod like an oyster ripped from its shell.

  She was out at the Dumpster even now, offering to do just that. Come back, sacrifice herself. Why? And why was Scrap helping her? The Kinze had been right to put the little toerag saboteur on the hit list.

  Never mind, Champ told himself. What mattered was ensuring that he had an overwhelming advantage before Frankie arrived in Iktomi. That meant Babs1 wiped, Revenant1 running the station, Scrap dusted, and the infirmary sterilized. That’d leave him free to teach Frankie a proper lesson.

  Sexual pleasure ran through him at the thought, followed by a backwash of self-hatred.

  It’s okay; you’ve basically won. He fitted the last of his pegasus’s eight legs into Lipizzan’s sockets, using the @ButtSig to keep Frankie in chat. “What’s out at the Dumpster, Barnes? Why’d you go back?”

  Her response was slow in coming. “Know what Scrap’s told me, Champ?”

  “Dying to hear it.”

  “Your sponsors essentially ID as a single consciousness. They’re hunting him because he broke the almighty All-Kinze mind meld for too long.”

  “They’re hunting him because he’s a disloyal little shit,” he sent back. “He’s gone and friended your dear departed Babs1.”

  “The Kinze set up thousands of individual user accounts in Sensorium. They blocked up the luxury-goods queues. If All of them are only one being, that’s sockpuppetry, fraud, and hoarding.”

  “Go on back and tattle on ’em, then.” Champ considered the niceties of this as he began checking Lipizzan’s vacuum seals. Frankie was saying the Kinze had violated Sensorium user agreements. That they’d deliberately skewed their give and take to the Solakinder economy, and lied when they accepted conditions on the various user agreements for the accounts they’d set up for goods and services.

  It was exactly the kind of hair-splitting argument that could throw Earth’s nigglers into a noisy, first-class tizzy, delaying Foreclosure for months. If Frankie went home and got that procedural ball rolling, Misfortune would run Champ’s eyeballs through an industrial-grade sewing machine.

  But no fear. Herringbo had made for Earth. If Frankie headed that way, they’d have her.

  “I’m not flying home until I’ve got you in hand,” she replied.

  Champ sent moji: laughing face. “Yeah, come and get me.”

  I can see my breath, he realized. Hangar temperature was still dropping. Where was Revenant1? Where was Environmental? The fight between the artificials should have wrapped by now.

  Lipizzan’s installation completed. She lit up. Good seals, green lights all.

  Champ drifted upward, chasing the invading, sparky FoxBOT Babs1 had used to scatter all his equipment. He smashed it against an outer bulkhead until it was just a cloud of drifting parts, and then ran after some of the hydrogel it had thrown around the hangar. He ate enough of the jellied water to make himself just a tad overfull. The pegasus could deliver measured hits of moisture, protein, and hydration, but for all Champ knew, this was potentially gonna be a long ride.

  “It’s not too late to switch sides,” Frankie said.

  “Now you’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “Your handlers aren’t going to let you go back to piloting,” she said. “You’ve become the @ChamberofHorrors’ personal murder-monkey. If they don’t sacrifice you outright, they’ll keep you in that role.”

  “What do you know, Barnes?” Shivering hard, Champ grasped the thoracic handles of Lipizzan and wrestled the pegasus into loading position. This was the part where he was meant to have help, a medical support crew to plug him in. Plus Mission Control and a tech watching his biofeedback readouts.

  “You better be prepping to jump here,” he sent to Frankie.

  “The timey-wimey thing you mentioned—that’s how Hung died?”

  Champ paused. Had he put that in a transcript? “Ember pooched the FTL math.”

  “They call it an anyspace tripwire, don’t they?”

  His mouth went dry. “Scrap tell you that?”

  He reached back, wiggling, so the interface plug was against his sacrum. Leverage in nullgrav was tricky … he couldn’t just push himself into the lock position. Instead, he held still, within the pegasus’s stall, and brought in a HuskyBOT.

  The big bot edged up to him, turning a bumper against Champ’s belly. He fired the barest whisper of air, bringing it closer; in essence, he was backing a car’s worth of tech into his gut to supply the push a technician would offer with bare hands.

  The HuskyBOT pushed … not quite hard enough. Champ felt the plug connect and then spring loose. Almost but not quite there. He fired the air canisters again and the bot jolted forward, not so gently.

  Any harder and he’d shatter his own pelvis.

  #Connectionfail. He had positioned the HuskyBOT too high.

  Champ reconfigged his primer, pulling his shirt down in a wad, essentially padding the bodybag from the bottom of his ribcage to the middle of his thighs. Then he repositioned the sled dog, center target, uncomfortably close to his genitals.

  He backed the HuskyBOT in again. Shove hard—if he was going to damage his internal organs, he might as well do it fast.

  Click. Connect. His arms and legs went offline. He spent the time, in blackness, reversing the bot.

  Lipizzan came to life around him. He savored the sense of EMbodiment, all those arms and legs at his command—long, robust, numerous, but also creepily inhuman. He stretched, extending everything to its full length. Then he anchored himself on the hangar deck with two hands and began using the rest to close up the suit’s vacuum seals.

  “I want you here in ten, Barnes.”

  Ten w
ould be plenty of time to seal the suit, sort out whatever the hell was happening in the infirmary, and prep for shucking Frankie out of Iktomi when she arrived.

  Shoving the HuskyBOT away with two arms, he began hand-over-handing his way to the hatch that led back to Medical.

  “Ten … seconds?” Frankie replied.

  Now that his interface was plugged in, her voice was more intense. The base of his spine felt like tissue clenching around the tines of a fork, just above his butt.

  “Ten minutes! Not a second later.”

  “Why not now?”

  The station lights came on again and he heard air begin to circulate.

  “Anyspace disruption, anyspace disruption, ten thousand meters from Sneezy.” The voice that definitely wasn’t Babs1, or Babs, or Scrap, or Revenant1.

  Champ thrust arms eight and one straight out in front of him, half expecting to see them shaking with rage. Instead, they were rock steady, locked in place. He felt the sense of injustice as acid, burning in his belly.

  Of course Scrap had told Frankie that Champ was ready to roll. Of course they’d coordinated Iktomi’s return to divide his priorities.

  Now he had to choose. See what was up in the infirmary? Or wait here for Frankie?

  “Earth vessel Iktomi’s coming through from anyspace,” said the new artificial voice.

  “Revenant?” Champ said. “Still with me, partner?”

  “No Revenant. No Babs.” The voice was a low alto. “No Belvedere and no Happ.”

  Happ? Champ thought.

  “I am. Fatale. Pronouns … yes, pronouns are she/her. My primary fandom is the Greyscale Brigade, circa 2089, and sequels—”

  “I don’t care if ya call yourself the Face of the Sun; you try locking me out of the station helix, I’m gonna smash every processor in the server room.”

  “Oh, baby. What a tough day you’re having! Nobody’s going to lock you out of anything. You are the registered commander and supreme power on this great big station.”

  “I take it sarcasm’s on brand for your new persona.”

  “I will defend myself from attempts to smash my servers or destroy Emerald Station. I am required to follow station protocols and ensure crew safety.”

  “Yee friggin’ haw.”

  “I am curious about whether you’re going to address the infirmary situation before or after you stop Frankie Barnes from unplugging from Iktomi.”