Star Noir

by Paul Bishop

  “During the attack,” he concurred.

  “It’s how they appeared to move faster than sound,” the researcher added.

  “Have any of them disappeared for good?” he asked, his mind fully focused again on Jen.

  “Oh, yes. We continue to lose samples at an astonishing rate.”

  “Tell me this,” he asked quickly. “Wherever it is the ticks go, do they take the host biological material along?”

  “You’re asking if Jennifer will go away with them, the answer is yes, as near as we can determine. Yes.”

  The day kept getting better and better.

  He walked away without another word, stopped at his quarters to retrieve his portable tablet, and continued up a flight of metal steps to the floor above. The hallway was deserted and he turned right and approached Jen’s quarters. When he was sure no one was watching, he slipped the key card out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.

  Maybe he could begin to find some answers.

  “Hiya, Slade,” a voice said from the darkness. “I’ll bet you’re here for the file.”

  The room was dark but he didn’t need any light. Jennifer’s amber glow was more than enough to make out the interior of the room, the streamlined furniture, and a vast painting of the bleached white buildings on the Isle of Santorini in front of a crystalline blue sea. She sat at her desk, dressed as she had been in the Med Space in a short gown that stopped a few inches above the knee. Her legs and feet were bare and she looked the picture of health.

  She was radiant—literally.

  “I hope I didn’t startle you,” she said. “I waited for you for ten minutes.”

  With a tentative and careful movement, he reached out to her. His hand touched her and passed through.

  There was no heat and no cold, only light.

  She was there, but she wasn’t.

  He placed his tablet on the desk beside her shimmering elbow.

  “I suppose you heard about our skirmish today,” he said. “Stevens waylaid me in the corridor and read me the riot act over using munitions.”

  “I would’ve done the same. Then I would have thanked you,” she said and stood. She put her arms around him and, for an instant, she was whole. He put a hand on her waist, and she kissed him before she melted away again.

  When Jen reappeared, she sat on the edge of the bed.

  In the place where she had stood, a rug had been pushed aside and Slade saw a square outline in the laminate floor with a flat plastic keypad embedded into it.

  “That’s where you’ll find the file, she said.

  “Listen, Jen,” he said. “Stevens has a theory about the phasing. About what’s going on with you. He thinks the ticks are traveling. Moving through quantum space and taking you along.”

  She inclined her head as if pondering his words.

  “Is that right? Do you think you’re moving through space?” He joined her on the bed. “Obviously you made it here from the Med Space without walking.”

  “Yes,” she said and her eyes seemed to search inward while her voice took on a strange tone. “We can go away and we can come back. But we’re drawn away…constantly drawn away to someplace.” She started to fade. “Home.”

  “Where’s home?” he asked as she slipped from view and the room went dark. “Where’s home, Jen?”

  This time, she didn’t return.

  For a while, Slade sat in the dark. When he finally turned Jen’s desk lamp on and looked around the room, he wondered if the whole thing had been a dream.

  But no, the bedspread was rumpled. He could still taste her peppermint lip balm.

  He knelt on the floor and typed Shackleton into the keypad. Internal springs snapped and the safe opened. Inside was a thin blue chip that he plucked out and snapped into his tablet.

  There was only one file on it.

  After a long, deep breath, he opened it and began to read.

  “Dak, meet me in Commander Morocco’s quarters,” Slade said. “Post haste.”

  “I’m just getting in from the final sweep,” she said. “Let a girl get warmed up?”

  “Get down here now or there won’t be any more beer for any of us,” he said. “And, Dak, I need you to run an errand first.” He told her what he needed and logged out.

  While he waited for her, he removed the chip from his tablet and replaced it inside Jen’s safe. He pushed the rug back into place.

  The file he’d viewed contained an enormous amount of written information, speculative charts and diagrams, video testimony, and related news clips. It had taken him an hour to skim the surface. He could’ve spent a day and not gotten through it all.

  That it was highly confidential and dealt with matters way beyond his pay grade wasn’t surprising. That Jen asked him to read it meant their fat was farther into the fryer than anybody knew.

  “Lin Wu?” he said into the dark. “Are you there?”

  “Here, Slade,” the AI responded.

  “Tell me about your origin point. Carson City, Nevada.”

  “Carson City, Nevada, is a capital city of Nevada, the thirty-sixth state in the union of the United States of—”

  “Stop,” he said. “Tell me about you, about Lin Wu.”

  The room was silent for too long.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Lin Wu is a mark-four artificial intelligence complex of organic and inorganic matter.”

  “I think there’s a little more to it than that,” he pressed.

  “Lin Wu is the mark-four artificial intelligence complex of organic and inorganic matter.”

  “How many models exist?”

  “The is the definite article.”

  “So there’s only one of you,” said Slade.

  No response was forthcoming.

  The AI was missing in action once again, and it only worked to confirm his suspicions. He thought about it and it began to come together. One or two pieces made sense, but he had to learn more. And that learning would be dangerous.

  He tapped the screen on his tablet. “Doctor Stevens? It’s Slade. Can you update me on the commander’s status?”

  “It’s the same as before,” the man replied. “She’s fading in and out.” He paused, then said, “She’s here now and seems to be resting comfortably.”

  “She’s asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I need you to listen carefully. No arguments, please. Just listen.”

  “That’s highly irregular of you, Slade. I—”

  “No arguments.” He put all the command authority he could into his directive. “I need you to prepare to evacuate the base.”

  “Evacuate the base? Where to?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Call every other research facility on the ice. Appeal to the international community. Whatever you have to do. But get everything into play. You’ll know in a few hours whether it’s a go or not. If not, you and I will have a drink in the commissary tonight at oh-nine-hundred, my treat. If it is a go, if you have to evacuate, you’ll have to go it alone with a busy month and many disgruntled people on your hands.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? I’ll be dead,” he said and cut the connection when Liz called from main mission.

  “I thought you’d want to know. We got a ping from Spinner Three, Commander Morocco’s ship.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At the bottom of Ross Sea.”

  Slade took the information in stride as the door to Jen’s quarters chimed.

  That would be Dak with their special guest.

  When he opened the door, Charlie Walton said, “What’s the big idea?” with a nervous hitch in his voice.

  “Charlie seemed reluctant to come to our soiree,” she said and towered over him from behind. “I assured him it would be in his best interest to tag along,” she said with a light snarl. Nobody could put the fear into a guy like Dak.

  But the security boss still had chutzpah, too. His mouth thinned and he j
erked a thumb over his shoulder. “You wanna call your Amazon off?”

  The man was dressed as he’d been in the mission room in blue coveralls and zipped ankle boots. Under his navy-blue cap, his hair curled, limp and wet and patchy like the whiskers that forested his cheeks. His tired eyes gave in to dollops of puffy flesh. Maybe it was the light but in one hour, Charlie had aged five years.

  Dak was as lovely and as vibrant as ever, wearing nothing but form-fitting black thermomesh and her blonde hair gleaming in the amber hallway light. In her right hand, she carried a shotgun. The overall effect was stunning.

  Slade led them across the threshold into Jen’s dimly lit quarters. “So this is how the upper crust lives?” the woman asked and ran a finger along Jen’s glass-topped desk. “I’m disappointed. I expected King Tut’s tomb.”

  “Fancy you mentioning tombs,” Slade said, “because it turns out we’ll go on an expedition of our own.” There was a long futon against the wall under the Greek painting. He led Charlie over to it and motioned for him to sit, then sat beside him.

  Dak stood at the door with the shotgun, ever on guard. He had seen her at peak readiness and exhausted to the point of collapse but there wasn’t much between. For a moment, he tried to think of a single time when he’d seen her even slightly fatigued and realized he never had.

  Charlie, on the other hand, showed all the signs. He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and said, “After the day we’ve had, you of all people should know I have about a hundred things to get done and you’ve got me schlepping up to the private quarters in the middle of the day.” He drummed his fingers on the futon’s armrest.

  “Nervous, Charlie?” he asked.

  “Nice place,” the man responded. “Would it hurt you to turn on some lights?”

  “I like it this way. Shady doings require the appropriate mood. Or wouldn’t you agree with that?”

  “I ain’t agreeing with nothin’.” He began to lever himself up.

  Slade pushed him back and the furniture rocked under the man’s weight.

  “It’s not so much what we’re getting you into as what you’re getting us out of,” Slade continued.

  “So why the rough stuff suddenly? Why pick on old Charlie?”

  “Tell me about Carson City, Nevada.”

  Charlie looked like he’d sucked on a lemon. After too long a pause, he shrugged. “I lived there for a few years after my hitch with the service.”

  “You worked for Hurst Velocity and were one of their brightest young developers. In fact, you laid the foundation for the Lin Wu complex.” Slade repeated the information he’d gleaned from the Shackleton file in Jen’s safe.

  “Wait a minute,” Dak interjected. “This sleazeball invented our AI?”

  “Yep. Charlie Walton was the lead designer on the five-year project,” he confirmed. “It’s what happened after you left Velocity that I want to know about.”

  The man folded his arms and wiggled himself deeper into the cushion.

  “You seem to already know a lot about ol’ Charlie. Been looking down holes you shouldn’t be? Maybe snoopin’ in stuff that’s none of your business?”

  “What about Morrison Subsystems?”

  “You tell me,” Charlie challenged.

  “How about you tell me, Slade?” Dak said. “Charlie’s a numero-uno jerkoff, but the tone in your voice makes him out to be some kind of cosmic villain.”

  “Charlie left Hurst Velocity on bad terms. With the Lin Wu project close to completion, I suspect the work wasn’t as challenging, or maybe you weren’t getting the credit you deserved?” The other man stared straight ahead without a word while Slade continued. “Anyway, after signing a host of non-compete clauses and being sworn to secrecy, he went to work for Morrison where he promptly started work on a new AI system.”

  “Lemme guess,” she said. “He sold Velocity out.”

  “Not all at once, but, yeah—he was found out. Here’s how it affects us. It turns out that Morrison Subsystems is a bio firm that originally started operations as a pharmaceutical company harvesting micro-tech from arachnids. And Charlie knows a considerable amount about ticks and spiders and scorpions. I wouldn’t hesitate to say he might be the leading expert on the relationship between organic material and carbon alloy AI systems.”

  Charlie stood before Slade could react and said, “I don’t have to listen to this crap.” He shook his finger furiously. “I went to trial. I did my time. All that’s supposed to be sealed and have no bearing on my current job. Because if that’s what this is about, I’ll take it to my union rep and he’ll take it to their attorney. Military big shot or not, you don’t wanna screw with the union, pal.”

  He ignored the tirade and chose to enjoy the chance to share the final pieces of the puzzle with Dak. “Did you ever wonder why ticks and spiders are drawn to certain people? For example, I’ve never had a tick bite in my life and I spent my summers on a farm. My cousin, who lives in lower Manhattan, has been attacked five or six times. Why?”

  “Doesn’t it have something to do with blood types?” Dak asked.

  “Partially,” Charlie said. “It’s also the amount of CO2 you exhale and the other chemicals mixed in. The little bastards smell you coming.”

  “What our friend here also found out is that they’re drawn to certain prolonged, rhythmic, electromagnetic pulses. And with only a little tinkering, you can program them to favor some kinds of rhythm over others,” Slade added.

  “How do you program a tick?” She frowned, her expression both confused and disgusted in the shadowed lighting.

  “We’d have to ask our friends at the Biodome about that. Or whoever it is that’s using them to phase out our AI. Do you have any idea about who that might be, Charlie?”

  “I swear to God, I don’t,” the man said quickly.

  “You say they’re phasing our AI out? Do you think the ticks are after Lin Wu?” Dak asked incredulously.

  Slade grinned. “I think it’s a good thing you brought your shotgun because we’re going to find out.”

  7

  Slade had visited every square inch of Endurance Base at least once and had set foot in every corridor, every lab space and medical unit, and inspected all the quarters. During the past eighteen months, his duties had relegated him to the main mission rooms and the spinner decks.

  He’d left the utility rooms to janitors and the tech rooms to Lin Wu’s cult of geeks.

  The AI lived everywhere on base and in the ships, connected through wireless routers and laser optics, and anyone could query her with conversation. Lin Wu was the personification of the base. With two dozen public rooms in the facility hologram compliant, she was also a member of the crew. The latest software upgrades made the transition from flickering, digitized simulation to the appearance of a flesh-and-blood woman almost complete.

  But there was still a flicker.

  On the edge of perception, from the corner of his eye when he looked at her, he could still pick up a consistent, measurable flutter in the spectrum of the AI’s physical form.

  The narrow corridor he and Dak walked through thrummed with that same, identical rhythm.

  A homing beacon for the ʼnids.

  “It’s why they always attack the base and never travel outside the Antarctic Circle,” he said. “They’re here for Lin Wu.”

  “We thought they were hungry for us.”

  “They like us too but we’re only an appetizer or maybe dessert. Lin Wu is the main course.”

  When Charlie continued to deny any knowledge of the arachnid invasion and wasn’t willing to help with the AI, Slade called Stevens and dumped the security man into lockup.

  At the outer shell, the hallway spread out and he opened the hatchway into Lin Wu’s service space, a two-tiered octagonal-shaped atrium workspace about half the size of the main mission area on the floor above. During the summer, sunlight would pour through the glass domed ceiling, but he preferred the dark, with each of the glass panes c
overed in whorls of soft window frost.

  Out of a dozen men and women, one or two looked in their direction before they returned to the task at hand. Half the techs sat glued to two-dimensional lighted floating monitors. The other half scurried between consoles to check readouts and verify code.

  The redhead from the mission room sat one step down from the entrance and the top half of Lin Wu’s hologram emerged from a horizontal panel, frozen in space—except for the flicker.

  “Hi, Liz,” Slade said. “What can you tell me?”

  The girl liked him and appreciated the recognition. She perked up and came around her station to confer, saw Dak’s shotgun, and swallowed audibly before continuing. “We’re not making any progress at all, sir.”

  “Lin Wu’s still offline?”

  Liz made an expert’s disapproving face. “Offline is a colloquialism—a term that’s basically a holdover from the early days of the Internet. With ongoing neuron activity, it’s more accurate to say Lin Wu is asleep or awake,” she explained.

  “So she’s asleep?” said Dak.

  “That’s what’s so frustrating. She’s awake but she’s ignoring us.”

  “Do you have visual on her core?”

  The woman shook her head. “Video output went down twelve hours ago. Thompson and Marz have been working to restore it.”

  Slade followed her gaze to the far side of the room where a tall glass cubicle with a single sealed door housed an elevator tube that descended into the volcanic crust. Below them, in a cramped whitewashed cubicle, was Lin Wu’s cortex.

  “We’ll suit up and go inside,” he said.

  Liz hesitated before she voiced her refusal. “I don’t think we can allow that. You know the core server’s a clean room.”

  “And we don’t look too clean, is that it?” Dak asked.

  “There are a dozen checkboxes to fill in before we can open that door and send you down,” Liz responded, “and less than a handful of reasons why you’d need to go in the first place.”

  Even as she said it, the overhead lights dimmed and everybody’s attention was taken away from their jobs to stare at the weird, lime glow that emanated from inside the elevator.