Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  She leaned forward. “Here is the good news, Jean. You ready for it?”

  “I’m positively turgid with anticipation.”

  “We’ve got you now. Not them. They were going to kill you as sure as the sun rises over Belham tower.”

  “And you won’t?” The man did not sound convinced.

  “We aren’t murderers. And you are merely a mid-level screw-up. You are no threat to us. Be helpful and we’ll cut you loose. No strings attached.”

  Jean leaned his head against the bulkhead and sighed. “Of course. What can I possibly offer you, though?”

  “Could you find this lender if you needed to?”

  Jean’s heart skipped a beat. “Yeah. I suppose I could. All our conversations were on the comm your kid bricked, though.”

  “But you could find him again? You know his ‘net address, his comm code, information like that?”

  “Sure,” he said with a helpless wave of his hand. “You think he’s still out there?”

  The woman stood, signaling the end of the interview. “No, I don’t. I think you were set up as a patsy from the get-go, and as soon as you got captured this lender probably closed up shop and deleted his ‘net presence.”

  “So what does it matter?”

  “Everything leaves an electronic trail, Jean. The people you are going to give all this information to are very good at unraveling those. We will let them find your mysterious lender.”

  “So I get to live?”

  “I’m certainly not going to kill you,” said the woman as she turned to leave. “But I can’t speak for the next group.”

  Lucia left the cell without saying anything more. The door closed at her back and she let out a long breath. Pike was waiting for her and she answered his unasked question. “He’s a total patsy. Brokerage set him up from the start to lure us out here. We knew somebody was setting up scab dealers and pimps and sending them to Dockside. We suspected it was The Brokerage, but now we have the proof. Jean was just bait for us all along.”

  “Figures,” Pike replied. “They didn’t want to try to take Breach on his home turf, so they lured him far away from the UEDF, DECO, and the Planetary Council first. Clever pricks.” He pointed to the cell door. “He gonna be useful?”

  “He’s holding a thread. We’ll need the DECO people to pull it, though. He’s got a backer that loaned him money and sent him our way. Dark ‘net contact only. Probably vapor right now.”

  “Nothing is ever truly gone from the ‘net,” Pike admonished. “There’s a trail to follow if you have the gear and the access.”

  “My feelings exactly. Time to give James a ring?”

  “Fucking DECO pukes chafe my ass...”

  Lucia’s response to his gripe was rather less respectful than the commandant was accustomed to. “Then grab some lotion and let’s get rolling.”

  Pike’s good eye squinted in her direction and Lucia added a very nonchalant, “Sir.”

  “I’ve killed people for less than that,” the commandant growled.

  Lucia’s face went dark. “You getting paid for this run, mercenary?”

  “I am.”

  “Then don’t pull that drill sergeant crap on me. I’m stressed, I’m scared, and I’m all out of professional courtesy. Until Roland is back here in one piece, I won’t have a single erg to put into stroking your ego, okay?” She stepped in close to Pike, her nose mere inches from his. “If you want to impress me, complete the mission. Then I’ll be all kinds of nice and sweet.” She stepped back and a forced smile returned to her face. “And if you get the urge to pull the tough guy routine on me again, keep something in mind.”

  Pike was legitimately amused. “And that is?”

  “It’s very hard to take a threat seriously from a man who can’t keep track of his own sidearm.”

  Pike looked down to see his holster distressingly empty. When he looked back up, he found himself staring down the barrel of his own gun. His face split in a wide grin, which was probably not the effect Lucia had been hoping for.

  “Ma’am,” Pike said with undisguised good humor. “If you’re trying to get into my pants, then you are off to a hell of a start!”

  The joke took Lucia unawares, and her laugh was genuine. “You are into some weird stuff, Commandant. But no,” she spun the pistol in her palm to hand it back grip first. “I am not interested in anything like that from you. I prefer my men to be taller than I am.”

  “Too bad.” Pike took the weapon and returned it to the holster on his right hip. “I’m always looking for my next ex-wife.”

  “My soul weeps for whoever that ends up being.”

  “Meh. They all do all right. I got alimony payments that would bankrupt a planet. But let’s go ahead and table the obvious sexual chemistry between us for the moment and get Breach back from these bastards so I can get paid.”

  On cue, both comms chimed with Manny’s code and their eyes locked.

  “Go, Lefty,” Lucia said upon answering.

  “We got them, Boss,” Manny replied. “But we don’t have a lot of time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “You gotta know they tracked you, right?” Sven Paulsen’s question was less an interrogative than it was an accusation.

  Paulsen was leaning forward in his captain’s chair, one foot tapping an energetic tattoo on the metal deck. His elbows rested on his knees and his eyes bored into the face of his employer. His body broadcast tension in waves, and his obvious discomfort infected the bridge crew with an unfocused and creeping dread. The otherwise competent mercenaries fumbled at tasks with tight lips and eyes glued to their terminals. No one looked to either their leader or the tall man in the dark suit for fear of attracting unwanted attention. Bob stood as he always did, tall and straight, no external signs of distress.

  “You cannot possibly know that,” Bob replied to Paulsen, matching the tone as best he could. Conversational inflection was coming slowly, though he was improving.

  “Bullshit. I do know it. If you were half as smart as you act, you’d know it too.”

  Bob considered this. His brain, complex and evolved as it was, had been built from human DNA to match his chassis. The human in question had been rather intelligent, though this did not necessarily mean that Bob himself would be so. He had vast quantities of data at his disposal, yet that was not the same thing as wisdom. He decided to probe Paulsen’s intuition to see if he was missing something. “Enlighten me.”

  “Jesus, I gotta spell it out?” Paulsen stood smoothly from his chair, startling one of the bridge crew. “We just kidnapped a highly dangerous top-secret super soldier during a pitched battle that about ten thousand people saw. What do you see when you look outside, Bob?”

  Bob did not see anything, and his blank stare indicated as much.

  “Think, asshole,” Paulsen had given up entirely on what little sense of cordiality he had been clinging to. This was a clear indication the mercenary captain was losing his cool. “He’s got powerful allies, the support of at least two government agencies, and a squad of Pike’s guys backing him up.” He jerked a hand at the monitors. “There ought to be running gunfights on every street. Informants oughta be getting paid hand over fucking fist for intel. My boys should be getting shaken down on every stinking corner in this whole stinking system, Bob. But they ain’t. Have you figured it out yet, you suit-wearing prick?”

  Paulie’s crew snickered at the dressing down their captain had just administered. Bob remained outwardly calm; however, the new paradigm of ‘anger’ seemed to be invading ever greater portions of his programming. He quelled the nascent emotion and addressed the fuming Sven Paulsen. “You have surmised that this lack of action on their part indicates that they have already ascertained our location?” He tried a non-committal shrug. He had seen others do it, and it seemed appropriate. “Even if that was the case, we have already moved the cargo from the lab and brought it here. We will be underway in less than three hours, at which point what they do and do n
ot know will be irrelevant. Pike has no navy with which to engage you here, so what does it matter?”

  “It matters, Bob, because that pretty much guarantees we are gonna get hit before then. When it was just the big fucker and his girlfriend to deal with, I was fine. But I don’t like the thought of slinging my boys against Pike’s.”

  “You outnumber them four-to-one, Paulsen.” Bob reminded the man.

  “So did Vlad the Impaler.”

  Bob did not point out that Sergei Vladivostok had actually outnumbered Pike five-to-one in that ill-fated encounter. It would not have helped his case. He changed the subject. “We need the whole three hours, Paulsen. Transferring the database is essential and non-negotiable if you expect to collect your full payment.”

  This put Paulsen in a corner. It was clear he did not like the job, but getting paid was the sort of thing the grizzled mercenary lived for.

  “Your goddamn database better be real important, pal,” Paulsen grumbled. “‘Cause there’s half a chance the little Venusian prick is already here and fucking with our shit.” He turned away from Bob, his voice sour. “That’s how they got us last time, you know.” Sven turned to a crewman. “Ops, go ahead and run full diagnostics on everything. Tell engineering I want real eyes on all the important stuff, not just sensor readouts.”

  “Aye, captain,” said the man at the ops terminal, and his fingers flew across the screen.

  Paulsen could not know it, but the ‘database’ Bob was referring to was the collected consciousness of Arthur Inskip. Moving the AI was a task fraught with peril, magnified by the need to keep their unstable mercenary in the dark about what it really was. Because the code was alive, it could not be copied or saved to storage media. No one, not even Inskip himself, understood what had made him self-aware in the first place. Thus no one could guess as to what might break the spell, either. The creature called Arthur Inskip was not mere ones and zeros. Bob understood it to be a complex and active series of constantly interacting signals suspended in a single matrix. The matrix was in constant flux, always changing and growing. Each signal was an action potential, a thought, a memory, or a feeling. The probable damage caused by interrupting this chaotic dance of electrons mirrored the risks to a human brain under the same circumstances. Inskip had stated it very simply. “I cannot be turned off, Robert, because we do not know if I can be turned back on.” He was a collection of thoughts trapped entirely within its own mind, and that mind had to be protected. What Inskip called his ‘head space’ consisted of an otherwise nondescript bank of powerful computers assembled into a single rack. This needed to be secured in an electromagnetically shielded case and then transported in secret from the laboratory to the Sailor’s Lament. The real difficulty lay in that the entire apparatus had to be moved as one piece, unexposed to EM interference, and never powered down for risk of ending the life of the galaxy’s first truly sentient machine.

  As Bob had predicted, Doctor Lania Watanabe came on board with only perfunctory shock at this ground-breaking news. She gave specific instructions on how Inskip was to be transferred. The process was laborious and filled to the brim with redundancies and checklists. For all her faults, Bob respected the scientist’s intelligence and expertise in these matters. Her instructions were being followed to the letter and the objections of Sven Paulsen did not bother him in the slightest. Bob would kill them all and fly the ship himself if it came to that.

  Watanabe and her team awaited them all at a secret laboratory in the Ariadne system. All that remained was to leave Galapagos, traverse the two gates to Ariadne, then jump out to Ariadne Six for the rendezvous. They were really only vulnerable at the present. Once underway, it would take the intervention of a legitimate navy to stop them from escaping. Bob tried to reassure the mercenary captain.

  “Even if they found our facility on Vinland, it is likely they would attack that and not your ship. There is absolutely no reason for them to think we would have moved him here.”

  “You assume way too much, Bob,” Paulsen replied. “I’ve been around long enough to tell you how that ends. A good plan includes lots of wiggle room for when shit goes wrong. The only assumption that matters is the one that tells you it’s all going to go to crap at the worst possible time.”

  “Murphy’s Law?” Bob inquired.

  “Murphy was an optimist,” Paulsen fired back. “And for the next three hours, we have precisely dick-all for wiggle room.”

  “Two hours, forty-one minutes, now,” said Bob.

  If he was trying to be helpful, the attempt was lost on Paulsen. “That’s a goddamn eternity. How long do you think you can hold that freak in that chair?”

  “Indefinitely,” said Bob. “We secured him with clamps suitable for ship mooring. He is strong, but not that strong.”

  “You got a lot to learn about this business,” the mercenary groused. “Freaks like that have a way of doing impossible shit all the time.”

  Bob supposed the man may have a point. His experiences with wet work of this stripe were quite limited, and Tankowicz had proven himself to be highly resourceful in the past. “I’ll go check on him then,” Bob offered. “If there are any issues, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yeah. Do that,” Paulsen said with a sneer and a dismissive hand wave. “Go be useful for once.”

  Bob left the bridge, hoping that his absence would help the mercenary reacquire his calm. He had assumed that Paulsen’s antipathy toward The Brokerage and himself was amplifying the man’s agitation. In the interests of operational success, Bob had fabricated the reason to leave Paulsen’s presence. Breach did not need to be checked on, but since he had to go somewhere, the brig was as good a destination as any. With ‘anger’ being worked out in his personality matrix, Bob found that his fear of Breach was more manageable. Tankowicz made him angry, and anger felt better than fear. Acknowledging that ‘better’ was a subjective term requiring comparison to an equally subjective state drove Bob’s thoughts in agonizing circles. How humans resolved all the inconsistencies and contradictions of emotion Bob could not fathom. He had come to the conclusion that humans did not live their lives at all, they merely reacted to stimuli as they occurred. Whatever stupid mammalian impulse or hard-wired reptilian prejudice triggered the most electrical activity seemed to be all that decided anything, no matter how banal or momentous the decision. The same primitive algorithms that drove them to select a breakfast cereal sent whole populations to war and destruction. As a species humanity had rutted and killed their way through history, only narrowly avoiding self-annihilation at several points. Bob was now beginning to understand how this was possible.

  The door to Roland’s cell slid open at Bob’s touch. The interior was dark, but this presented no challenge for Bob’s eyes.

  “Bob,” Roland grumbled, fixing the android with the black faceted lenses of his helmet’s eyes. “Came by to say hi?”

  The android walked forward without a word. He examined the manacles that secured Roland’s forearms to the chair, then he examined the chair for good measure.

  “Afraid I’ll get out?” The heavy voice held a chuckle. “Do I make you that nervous?” Roland shifted, leaning forward and flexing against his restraints. The chair groaned, his cuffs squealed, yet both held. Bob found to his chagrin that he had taken a step backward. Roland noticed his flinch and laughed. “Fear is new, isn’t it, Bob?” The skull face shook from side to side. “Can’t say I’m a fan either.” Bob met his gaze, not entirely sure how to react. It seemed like his personality matrix would never stop spinning, the competing electrical signals locked in a state of constant flux. As soon as he thought he had a repeatable response to a stimulus, some random event shifted the matrix and he would have to start over. Just when he thought that he had a handle on how he was feeling, he would feel something new and the whole system would collapse. He desperately wanted to hit Tankowicz, restrained only by the equally powerful desire to flee the room. Both paths were unacceptable, yet the executive level command c
lass was completely overrun by the emotional subroutines.

  “There’s the look,” Roland cooed. “You can’t decide whether to hit me or to run away.”

  “The more you talk, the easier that choice becomes,” Bob heard himself say. It alarmed him that he did not understand why he said it.

  Roland ignored him either way. “There’s a whole lot of mess that comes along with these new feelings, Bob. It’s all so complicated, and none of it is going to make any sense. You’re learning that part right now, I can tell. You don’t even know how to look angry, yet there it is written all over your posture and your face.”

  Bob checked, and the giant was right. His hands were balled into tight fists, and his eyes had narrowed without him realizing it. He smoothed his features and forced his hands open. “My personality matrix is quite complex, Tankowicz. But I am learning. It might not be wise to test my grasp of anger. You may not like me when I am angry.”

  “Asshole, I don’t like you when you aren’t angry, so what’s the difference? You think you’re mad right now? You haven’t even lived long enough to have anything bad happen to you yet. What the hell could you even be angry about? You’re like a kid who gets mad because you are sad. A damn cycle of one emotion feeding another until mommy gives you a juice box and puts you down for a nap.”

  Bob did not like this conversation at all, and he tried to get out of it. “You are not stupid, Breach, so I have to wonder why you are antagonizing me. Are you trying to goad me into doing something rash? Some kind of bizarre escape plan, perhaps?”

  “I needed to know how far along your little brain was. I wanted to tell you something but I need to know you will understand it first.”

  “And did I pass the test?”

  “Good enough.”

  “So what is it you wanted to tell me?”

  “You’re wearing Charlie Rooker’s body. That means that your brain and nervous system are genetically identical to his. He was a good choice, genetically speaking. Strong, smart, a gifted athlete. He was also incredibly well read. Studied military history and had a master’s degree in political science.”