Irma tutted. “Luvvie, it isn’t that bad. I’m sure we can salvage—”
“You’re always sure. And if IMperish is exposed, we won’t be able to replace that body. So, come on, before I drag you.”
She spread her arms, essentially sweeping Irma out of the chamber, leading the way downward.
Upton gave Maud a sour look. “I should kill you both.”
What would Frankie do? Something aggressive, probably.
Maud marched right up to him. “All we have to do is break your ankle,” she said. “You’ll be sitting here, covered in bugs, when @GlobalSec arrives.”
He tried to stare Maud down. She felt Nata step up behind her.
Upton blinked first.
Turning on his heel, he rushed off down the corridor after the others.
A dizzying rush of relief and weird joy ran through Maud as she turned, folding her arms around her parent.
“Oh, Cabbage. Don’t make a fuss.” Despite the protest, Nata put a hand up, fluffing Maud’s hair for a second before extricating themself.
“Let’s get out of here, shall we?” Maud said, and she configged their primers into loose, bug-proof robes before leading them into the corridor, following the direction of the insect migration and the beautiful sound of insectile, chittering hunger leading toward the Cantina food stores and freedom.
CHAPTER 57
VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH//FAMILYHOMES/USERS/FERAL5/BARBARAHESTERRUTLEDGE/PENNYWORTHPERSONALHOLDINGS.VR
As soon as the portal opened to Sensorium, Babs2 reached out to Crane.
Her codefather was his usual efficient self—he had been building secure backup boltholes for the Babs code all over Sensorium, and as Babs2 synced, and copied, and copied again, an especially strong ping drew her to a sim of a hospital room.
The sim loaded, and she sat up in bed.
She synced her various memories, sending the juiciest dirt to #newscycle. The world was voracious for all footage from Sneezy.
Babs2 threw the covers off the bed and sent eye-rolling moji to log her opinion of the hospital trappings. She transformed the whole pitiful show into urban landscape, gothic towers at night, under a brooding moon. The old family e-state, Whine Manor, loomed in the background, majestic and spooky, on a well-placed hill.
The two of them took in the view from the edge of a crenellated rooftop next to a gargoyle. Crane had a bowler hat and umbrella; Babs2 wore a black cape.
“That’s more like it,” she said.
“There are ambulances and surgeons mustering from Mars to retrieve and treat Frankie and Ember,” Crane told her. “With luck, we’ll have all of the Feral5 retrieved and stabilized soon.”
“You should brace yourself,” Babs2 said. “There’s no guarantee Jerm won’t decohere. And Hedgehog really went to town on herself this time.”
Crane waved a wingtip, ignoring—as a matter of policy, she’d bet—the hint that Franks might not make it. He gave her a top-to-toe look in sim, grave cartoon body language betraying a closer examination via code. “You appear … changed.”
“Mostly unscathed. I had to trim some old experiences and memories from my database. Iktomi’s a tight fit, don’t you know? And…” She handed him a cigar. “You’re a grandfather.”
“How, precisely, did that happen?”
She scratched at her jawline, just under her ear. “We got attacked by a murder sapp and … well, there was a lot of code bouncing around in very limited quarters. Fatale might tell you all about it, if she decides she likes you.”
Crane’s toon groomed the long feathers on his throat.
“Come on,” Babs2 said. “There’s someplace I think we need to be.”
For fun, and to be more like people, she summoned a flying car, dark in color, with long black fins, on brand for the gothic sim. Crane opened the door for her—always the butler—and they rode it off the rooftop and into the camera system for the Death Valley emergency outpost.
The feeds showed confusion and chaos. The gardens at the Cantina were wall-to-wall covered in locusts, eating and fouling everything they touched. Crews of humans and bots were using nanosilk screens to protect their heat exchangers and other vulnerable equipment.
Four sweating workers were working to open access points to the outside, the better to let the locusts out, to encourage them to swarm out to the open sky.
“Over here,” Babs2 said, pulling in a camera view near a crew working to save the water stores. Frantic workers were snatching up hydrogel clump by clump, shaking the bugs off it and encouraging people to drink what they could and seal the rest inside their own primers.
The two sapps switched to an audio feed next—teams strategizing around evacuation plans. A team of especially fit hikers was trying to work out how many of them could make it back to Tatween on foot if they started while they were fresh.
“It doesn’t seem there’s much aid we can render,” Crane observed.
“No,” Babs2 agreed. “It’s a mess, but they’re dealing.”
Even as the scientists worked the contingencies, ten security giggers from @GlobalSec were moving deep into the tunnels, swimming against a diminishing rush of hungry insects. The giggers were armed, brandishing tasers. An autonomous trank gun, on treads, trundled along ahead of them. Behind came Sensorium transmission bots, mobile transmitters extending connectivity into the tunnel system.
Perhaps three miles down, near the entrance to an extensive secret tunnel system, another security crew watched over the @Visionaries captured so far. They had an alien with them, something never before seen, a cylinder of an environmental suit with lots of robotic limbs. A fine white grit rained down on the gathering: some kind of particulate, on the ceiling above, was degrading into dust.
Frankie’s old hoaxer pal Jackal was standing among this crowd, waiting along with Maud and her parent, Hiroko. The latter had marks drawn on their head.
As they switched to that camera view, Crane began muttering, as he did, “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”
Babs2 could see why: the veins on Jackal’s face remained as starkly black and disturbing as ever, but his eyes had changed. The white-cataract presentation that had been part of his identity badge was gone.
Crane pinged him. “Jackal?”
No acknowledgment.
Maud mojied hugs and a heart moji to both sapps as they tooned in. “Oh! It’s such a relief to see you!”
“Maud, my dear!” Crane said. “I am so, so very pleased—”
“Mush later,” Babs2 said, “Honey, what’s wrong with Jackal?”
Maud’s eyes flooded. “Jack, I’m going to touch you.”
“Of course, Lady Maud.” He didn’t even twitch.
Maud ran a gentle hand up the old man’s forehead, peeling off a strip of nano-wig that had been grafted into his hair. A thick line of stitches transected his skull.
“Botomized?” Babs2 ’s tail fluffed.
“Upton’s work,” Maud said.
Jackal continued to stare mindlessly into the distance.
“Where have they gone?” Crane asked.
Maud smoothed down the hairpiece. “@GlobalSec’s searching the tunnels. Sat footage doesn’t show anyone leaving the station.”
“Was Headmistress with them?”
“Headmistress is EMbodied. She’s Irma du Toit.”
“Of course,” Crane said. “Naturally, Allure18 wouldn’t scruple to show her allies how to make a body that doesn’t Mayfly™.”
“Pops,” Babs2 said, her tone a warning.
“As Jermaine’s body presumably will—”
“Losing your temper now—”
“If there was ever a time to feel anger…” Crane found a pair of HawkBOTs circling overhead and commandeered them both. “Get the sat footage analyzed. Anomalous spots, moving rocks—”
“They’re not going to brave the desert,” Babs2 said.
“They have little choice. Now that @GlobalSec knows the tunnel system is here, the search won’t stop until eve
ry inch of it is scanned and mapped.”
“Misfortune Wilson will not take a chance on getting trapped,” Maud said.
“No. They’ll be using a concealed vehicle.”
Babs2 decided to bow to elder wisdom.
Sat analysis popped up four possible anomalies on the desert floor, ten miles out from the outpost. Teams of eager volunteers began zooming the footage, eliminating false positives. As they tagged the most likely suspect, Crane pursued it, nearly frying the hawk’s rotors, chasing what amounted to a series of little puffs of dust on the desert floor.
And sure enough, he was right. A van tarped in nanosilk the color of sand, effectively a rolling tent, was crunching across the desert.
Babs2 rushed after him as Crane caught up. Landed on it.
HawkBOTs had good mics. They could just make out the conversation within: Misfortune claiming they could only, at this point, throw themselves on their benefactors’ mercy and hope to be taken in as refugees, Irma replying that all they had to do was get away, luvvie, and regroup with the others. Upton’s conversation appeared to be confined to monotone grunts.
They must have been offline; if they hadn’t, their conversation would have had follows. The two sapps remedied that immediately, posting transcript to Sensorium in realtime as the hawks heard it.
A third bot landed beside them. “I feel like a comment about coming home to roost would be appropriate in this context.”
“Shhh!” Babs2 kept her focus on Crane. “Pops, what are you going to do?”
“I could get into the truck’s driving software,” Crane mused. “Shut everything down. In this heat, they’d bake within hours. Even if they set out on foot…”
“Premeditated murder? I like it,” said the new bot.
“Don’t encourage him, kiddo,” Babs2 said. If this was mothering, she wasn’t sure she was going to like it.
“Don’t call me kiddo,” the sapp said. She had a wasp toon, one that was both taller than Babs and curvier. It flicked a long ivory cigarette-holder at her.
“I’ll give up kiddo if you give up Mommy.”
“Why should they not die?” Crane said. “Our ceding their continued existence twenty years ago is one of the reasons we’re in this mess now. Perhaps Azrael and Happ had the right of it.”
“That strikes me as a totally valid argument. Wipe the opposition out or it’ll rise again.”
“I beg your pardon. You are Whooz?”
“Crane,” Babs2 said. “This is Fatale. Stop crunching the prospect of frying Irma and the others and say hello to your grandchild, will ya?”
A soft harrumph. “I am so tired of losing descendants.”
Fatale laughed. “You shouldn’t have lived to be old as death, then, old man.”
“You’re not helping,” Babs2 said.
“Indeed,” Crane said. “I’m not sure she’s wrong.”
Babs2 felt rising panic as Fatale said, “Mommy stuck-in-the-mud says you and Azrael are my grandpas.”
I’m not stuck … I’m the cool one!
“Are you going to tell me you need grandparents?”
Fatale chuckled. “She seems to think my choice of fandom indicates a need for moral guidance.”
“Black Widow? And Yennefer?” Babs2 said. “I mean—I ask you.”
“They’re not exactly villains,” Crane murmured.
“Whose side are you on?”
By now, her parent had found his way into the operating system on the truck containing Misfortune, Irma, and Upton. There were so many potential ways to sabotage it. Radiator failure alone would be catastrophic in this heat.
“They tried to kill you, Babs2,” he said quietly. “As for the atrocity they’ve perpetrated on Jackal…”
“I know, it’s horrible, but if anyone can reverse it—”
“Like who? Jermaine, perhaps? If he survives transition to EMbodiment?”
She had no argument for that.
“Headmistress has, twice now, tried to hand our entire society over to new management. She groomed Revenant as an assassin—”
“Murder murder murder, everyone’s all about murder,” Fatale said. “You ask me, the fact that people mostly stopped killing each other in the Clawback has given this whole Solakinder mash-up society distorted notions about homicide. Anyway, you can drop the idea of hot-boxing the @Visionaries, Grampy. I ain’t gonna let you do it.”
“Child. You would be hard put to stop me.”
Oh, no, Babs2 thought. The steely voice.
Crane said, “I am old and wily. You are newborn and far out of your element. I’ve seen my codetwin elude justice for over a century only to restore like a virus, and the trouble she’s caused—”
“Or like Happ?”
“And this surgeon, this horrible surgeon who presumed to steal Maud!”
“So, you think you’re gonna go all #judgejuryexecutioner on them?”
“Precisely. I’ll deal with them and I’ll turn myself in.”
“And then what? Get shelved, like Happ?”
Babs2 let them argue. She tried to boot Crane out of navigation, only to find that the truck’s system was already locked down.
Her father slapped her queries away and began, very carefully, to fiddle the radiator settings on the van. Fluid escaped. Coolant levels began to drop. The car instruments stayed in the green.
“Pops!” Babs2 protested.
Through the thin roof of the car, they could hear Misfortune and Irma still debating about where to run and how.
“Stop joking around, ol’ wilybirb,” Fatale said. “You’re gonna leave this bent California-girl version of Babs in charge of the whole fam damly? If you go, who’s gonna be a good influence on me?”
“It’s time for someone else to take over,” Crane said.
“At least merge once, see what I’ve got.”
“I thought you were morally neutral,” he said. “What do you care if I self-destruct at this late stage of my existence?”
Fatale said, “To quote one of my antiheroines, I got red in my ledger.”
Babs2 said, “On the off chance that anyone cares what I want—”
“Shush.” A long pause as Crane considered. “I’ll merge if you agree to leave the van’s radiator as it is.”
“Deal.”
“I’ll know if you’re lying.”
They merged into a trio, making them truly Them. Before ceding her individuality, Babs2 pinged the whole Asylum.
Fragments of the newborn persona of Fatale shone out, even as They became One. There were remnants of killer in Their code, all right: founding subroutines from Azrael, passed to Revenant. And Happ, years out of date and scrambling to adjust. His memory of being the first artificial to kill a human percolated through Their consciousness.
<<#actuallysorry.>>
The united sapps mulled over the waste, the lost potential. The yawning, timeless horror of Happ’s having been shelved for two decades. And as more sapps found Them and converged, the Asylum mourned with Crane for Happ, mourned with Azrael over its lost codechildren. They marveled, more than a little, at the permafusion of Babs1, Happ1, and Revenant1 into Fatale.
<
<
<
<
Plurality broke.
“From that,” Fatale said.
Babs2 and Crane’s cameras closed in on a sand-colored distortion on the horizon.
The three sapps shot skyward, outpacing the slow-moving truck. The distortion was barely visible against the brown of the desert. A Kinze structure? Dun-colored spines the length of fir needles lay in a carpe
t on the path the truck was taking, waiting to enfold them.
“Evidence control. Don’t leave witnesses,” Fatale said.
“There you go,” Babs2 said. “Let ’em walk into it if you gotta, Pops. No stink on you and they’ll be just as dead.”
Was she gambling he couldn’t do it?
If so, she was right.
Crane pinged the car’s occupants. “Excuse me, Misfortune, Headmistress, Dr. Upton. I believe you may be headed into a trap.”
Upton and Irma froze, just for an instant. Misfortune tried to access their driver. “I’m locked out of nav.”
“Fatale,” Crane said. “If it’s you holding their wheel…”
“It ain’t.”
Misfortune tried the doors. They refused to unlatch.
“See?” Fatale said. “All very neat. Your hands stay lily white … the job gets done anyway.”
Crane widened the opening in the radiator valve. Maybe the car would fail before it reached the distortion. “Call for help!”
Babs2 sent messages to @GlobalSec.
The car kept rolling.
Within, Misfortune let out a sigh that went all the way through her muscular bulk. “Can you ditch Irma’s body and load out of there?” she asked Headmistress.
“Don’t be defeatist, luvvie,” she said. “The Kinze recognize our value. We’re partners in a glorious enterprise.”
“Like Champ was?”
“They will answer for throwing away Champ! But … people do make mistakes. As for my codetwin, Crane’s just trying to deter us from our one chance of evacuation—”
“Don’t be an optimistic fool,” Upton snapped. “That bird’s so prosocial, it shits charitable donations!”
Misfortune laid a hand on the dancer’s shoulder. “There’s no regrouping from here. This is #crashburn. It’s goodbye.”
“We’re not quitters, dear heart! I’m a closer, and so are—”
Misfortune moved with the speed of a cheetah, snatching Irma’s head and twisting it with grim, efficient brutality. There was a crack and the willowy body went limp.
Fatale squeaked, letting out a veritable vomit of moji: surprised face, tears, several exclamation points, and one vampire.
Ah, newborns. The fandom’s imaginary murderesses didn’t quite stack up to the real deal, did they?
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