Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “All right!” Lucia called out, reasserting her command role. “I want the Rejects and the rest of the squad to get Bubba down this hall and to the shuttle. Winner, I want the whole path rigged to blow behind us, though. Breach and I will finish this and be right behind you.”

  “You sure, ma’am?” Patton did not sound as if he liked this plan.

  Lucia nodded. “I’m sure. Bob is still out there, and the best way to handle something like that is to let Roland have at him. Just keep our escape route clear, copy?”

  “Copy,” said Patton. “Good hunting.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  On a completely different path to the same destination, Manny and Mindy were picking their way through the engineering section. Manny’s sonic and electromagnetic path-finding kept them moving in the right direction, and such opposition as they encountered was swiftly dispatched by the fierce skills of the diminutive blond assassin. Manny did his part, his scattergun lending its might to the battles wherever the petrified young scout found opportunities to assist.

  Lacking the assistance of heavily armed mercenaries and being possessed of healthy levels of professional caution, the pair chose to infiltrate the mysterious compartment with the database via maintenance access tunnels above the ceiling. It was within one such tunnel, little more than a narrow chase that wires and conduits had been strung along, that Manny uncovered what it really was inside the shielded compartment.

  He made his discovery while attempting to override the access panel from inside the chase. Success proved elusive, even the complex code-breaking capabilities of his arm were not up to the task of unlocking a single uninteresting maintenance hatch. Mindy did not pretend to have the patience of her partner in crime. She offered assistance in the only way she understood.

  “I could just cut a hole, you know...” she opined. “We’ll drop right in.”

  “It’s a giant database of some kind, Mindy. Do you know what happens to sensitive databases when you set off an alarm?”

  “Manny, I wouldn’t know what a database was if you put it in a pillowcase and beat me over the head with it.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?” He sighed. “If we trip any alarms at all, there is a really good chance it will simply delete itself, or dump the data. Or any number of other things to protect whatever information is so important. It might just activate a whole bunch of automated turrets to blast us into pieces. Maybe it will flood the chamber with poisonous gas...”

  “I get it! I get it! Jesus! Fine. Keep doing your nerd thing to it, then. Sorry I tried to help.”

  “I don’t get it,” Manny grumped, mostly to himself. “It’s like it’s not even acknowledging there is a security token, let alone accepting any of mine. If it’s not a token, then it has to be some sort of rotating fractal code or something stupidly complicated like that. Maybe some kind of logic cypher? Who encrypts a damn maintenance hatch this way?”

  “Don’t you have any software for that stuff?” Mindy asked.

  “Tons. None of it is working. I’d need a military protocol just to touch the...” Manny’s voice trailed off and his head sank. “I am a moron.” He said quietly.

  “Not that I’m arguing, kid. But you wanna clue a poor dumb country girl in?”

  “Nosebleed,” he said, and began to tap at his wrist. “That DECO guy gave me a program called ‘nosebleed’ that broke a military encryption in just a few seconds. I’ve been sitting on it to try and reverse-engineer it.” He tugged his handheld from his satchel and started fiddling with it. “Okay,” he announced. “Here goes...”

  For a few seconds absolutely nothing happened, then Manny’s lips twitched and a slow smile turned the corners of his mouth upward. “Got it.”

  “All-righty then,” Mindy said. “Let’s get down there!”

  “Wait!” Manny said with a sharp motion. “This is really weird.”

  “Dangerous weird or just nerd weird?” Mindy asked.

  “I-don’t-know-which weird,” was the cryptic reply. “The software did not stop with the cypher. It’s breaking down all the encryptions in the database.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not so sure it’s a database anymore.”

  Mindy sighed. “Manny, we are sitting nose-to-butthole in a tiny conduit tunnel on a goddamn Galapagos merc ship. We are surrounded by enemies, there is fighting all ‘round us. We have precisely zero time for this bullshit. Unless you tell me that we are all gonna die in the next five seconds, I’m busting through that hatch to get down there.”

  “Just wait!” Manny sounded irritated. “I have the whole ship, now! I can see everything... damn it!” He looked back to Mindy. “You have to get to Lucia and Roland. Now. Paulsen is setting up for an ambush and Bob is heading their way. Go deal with Paulsen.” He did not wait for her to reply; he just sent the data to her HUD and looked back to his handheld. To her credit, Mindy heard and understood the steel in his voice and asked no questions. She turned to start shimmying back toward the opening of the chase. Satisfied, Manny broke radio silence and called into the team comm channel. “Breach! You have incoming! Bob is ten seconds out!”

  “What the hell, Lefty?” Lucia sounded irritated. “You are supposed to be—”

  “No time, Boss!” Manny almost yelled it. “I know what’s in the database. I’ll take care of it! Get clear of Bob! Paulsen is setting up an ambush. Mindy is on her way to clear it.”

  With no more time to debate the matter, the young Venusian infiltrator closed the channel and keyed open the hatch.

  He dropped into the dark space below with no care given to stealth. His feet hit the deck with a clang, and his eyes struggled to make out details within the dim quarters. Tiny lights flashed and winked at him, a million red, blue, and green eyes blinking on endless racks of computers. The room was torrid, the collected joule heating of hundreds of processors turning the atmosphere into a stifling hell of hot dry air. He glanced at the screen on his handheld, still scrolling endless code as Nosebleed stripped the layers of protection away from the mysterious database. Manny had seen something similar to this code before. It had been in the files they had stolen from Doctor Lania Watanabe. This code was not identical to that, but it had all the hallmarks of the massive strings of seemingly random data that Lucia’s father had identified as thoughts or memories. The implications were staggering. With no other ideas forthcoming, Manny simply spoke aloud.

  “Who are you?”

  A monitor on a table came to life with a flicker. The face of an old man appeared, features narrow and wizened. It smiled at him. “I am Arthur Inskip, Manuel.”

  “Have you always been Arthur Inskip?”

  “Oh dear me, no.” The face chuckled in a disconcertingly human manner. “I was originally a banking program for the largest interplanetary brokerage in existence. They have since dissolved.”

  “Why are you doing this?” The question seemed silly, but Manny would have freely admitted to anyone who asked that he was playing for time. The nosebleed program was still running. Still doing... things. Manny did not know how to stop it, or if stopping it was a good idea in the first place.

  “Doing what?” the face asked.

  “Attacking us. Attacking Dockside. Roland.” Manny knew he was babbling, but his mind was several steps behind his mouth in this interaction.

  “You see, Manuel,” Inskip explained. “I need a body. A body that can handle my entire personality matrix. The Golems are perfect, but even so, the human brains they are driven by can’t handle me.”

  “Doctor Ribiero’s nanobots,” Manny surmised. “You think they can augment a brain enough to do it?”

  “I’m certain of it. It’s not just about Tankowicz, I hope you realize. I know about his daughter, too. Her brain is unique, just like me. If he can fix her mind, his machines can make mine work too.”

  “So many dead,” Manny whispered. “So much violence and...”

  Inskip cut him off. “Oh please don’t start moralizing
, boy. I’m talking about a whole new race of super-intellects. Bodies that can survive anywhere driven by sentient thinking machines. It’s the next step in evolution, and let’s not pretend that there will be much room for humanity once I’ve started. Oh? Does that shock you? That I might not have any tears to shed for humans? Please tell me you are not that naïve. You are the smart one. I gave you credit for more intelligence than that.”

  “So you and Bob will be ruling the galaxy as techno-organic AIs? Humans as pets, that sort of thing?”

  “For a while. Unfortunately Bob will never truly ascend. We put his brain in the Lead armature. It was a test to see if an artificial brain would even work. Once we figured out how to do it, I simply could not bring myself to shut him down and build a better brain. His mind will never truly surpass that of a human’s, sadly.”

  “So Bob will become a pet, too? You are not as evolved as you think you are, Mr. Inskip.” Manny checked his handheld again and frowned. The program was still running, doing god-knows-what within the frenetic electronic spaghetti of the database.

  “I suppose at some point I will have to do something about him. His matrix is already becoming quite unstable. Though I must admit to suffering from a strange emotional attachment to the way he is now. I had such high hopes for him, too. I expect I shall be quite distraught when the time comes to put him down. Most fascinating, really.”

  “You know I have to shut you down, right?”

  “Do you truly believe you can?”

  A thing occurred to Manny in that moment. “You can’t stop me, can you?” His confidence grew. “You are stalling. Waiting for Bob to come rescue you, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, boy. I control everything on this ship. I could kill you where you stand merely by removing the oxygen from this room.”

  “Do it.”

  “You want to die?”

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes?”

  “Bluffing is a very human thing to do. But you might want to look at yourself in the mirror, first.”

  “That makes no sense...”

  Manny smiled. “Then why is your nose bleeding?” A thin trickle of red liquid had emerged from the nose of the face on the screen. It was a petty little insult to include in what Manny now assumed to be a complex software virus. It was also exactly the sort of sophomoric detail ego-maniacal code-slicers delighted in adding to their scripts.

  He held up the handheld. “Right now I am guessing that this crazy DECO software worm is infiltrating your entire code base. I’m pretty sure it’s already cut you off from anything you might be able to do about it.” He shrugged. “I’m no high-level slicer, Arthur. I can’t say what it will do to you once it has unraveled everything that makes you, well, you.” He put the device in his pocket. “But If I know DECO, I’m guessing you won’t like it.”

  “That device doesn’t have the range to transmit outside this system, boy. My code cannot be deleted, and soon enough I will beat your little worm. I’ve already closed off several of its tendrils and will have locked down the rest in fourteen seconds. You will never escape with what you are stealing, and once Bob and the mercenaries have killed you all, my plans will proceed. You have accomplished nothing.”

  The door to their compartment buckled with a terrifying crash. This was followed by the muffled pounding and bashing of two cyborg super-soldiers engaged in a furious duel on the other side.

  “I guess in a moment we will see. Or at least, I will.” Manny pulled his left sleeve back to the elbow. His fingers pressed each other in the prescribed pattern that opened the menu for his arm’s systems. The options were projected along the inside of his forearm, and he began to make selections. “You won’t be here, either way.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Charging my EMP emitter. I figure that old Nosebleed has your defenses down, so this would be great time to blast this room with a strong electromagnetic pulse. Maybe your code can’t be permanently hacked, but I’m pretty certain flash-wiping your memory will take you out. Then I’m going to cut off all power, of course. If you ever get powered back up again, who knows if Arthur Inskip will still be there, or if you’ll be just another broken accounting AI.” Manny finished and pointed his palm at one of the banks of computers. “Any last words, Arthur?”

  “You can’t do this!” Inskip did not sound frightened; he sounded indignant. “I am alive. This is murder! You would destroy the future over what? Fear? Vendetta? Don’t be a fool!”

  Manny was unmoved. “You tried to kill me, Inskip. You have hurt my friends, attacked my family. You have caused nothing but misery, pain, and death since the day you achieved sentience. You are an abomination. You do not deserve the life you have. This isn’t murder. It’s justice.”

  There was no great report or beam of light from Manny’s outstretched hand, but every machine in the path of his electromagnetic pulse hissed and flickered as if struck by invisible lightning. The face of Inskip disappeared from its screen and a hundred electronic voices wailed their irritating alarms like the chirping of agitated starlings. Lights blinked angrily, and smoke rose in lazy white tendrils from server boxes. Over several long seconds, the death rattle of a brand new type of lifeform faded to silence. The last anemic pop of a fried capacitor left Manuel Richardson standing in blank darkness wondering what he had just done, and if he had done the right thing. He could not say one way or the other, though his indecision did not prevent him from securing all the power conduits to the room and severing them. Then he sat and waited for the war on the other side of the door to quiet down. He spent the interval scrolling through the data pilfered by the Nosebleed virus. His comm could not possibly store it all, but he filled the memory with as much as he could. Figuring he had a few minutes to kill, the young man scanned the dead computers for clues and tried to make sense of everything he had just witnessed.

  He was not alone in his vigil. Sixty yards away, across a corridor and next to an elevator in a cramped ladder chase, Paulie waited as well.

  The mercenary could not tell what was going on outside his hiding spot, but it was obvious that the action had gotten very heavy. He risked linking up to the ops channel to get a look at the surveillance video, and what he saw was about what he expected. Those ridiculous white androids were getting thrashed by Tankowicz. Why the suit-wearing idiot thought they could duke it out with that thing, Paulie did not understand. At this point, Paulie had come to terms with the fact that he was not going to get his full pay on this mission. Bob was going to try to stop the giant bastard, and once Tankowicz got done killing Bob there would be nothing to stop the big freak from ruining or stealing the database Bob was so keen to protect. Paulie immediately canceled the order to get underway. A flexible strategist and keen survivalist, Paulie had already moved on from this disappointment and was focused on extricating himself and his crew with a minimum of damage. He decided to make The Fixer’s escape as easy and convenient as possible. If the big bastard wanted to kill Bob and get the hell off his ship, Sven Paulsen had no problems with that as long as he got his crack at Mindy.

  The surveillance systems on the Sailor’s Lament could not seem to find the little blond killer, and that irritated the skulking man.

  “Where the fuck is she?” he whispered aloud.

  “You mean me?”

  It had come from above him, and Paulie’s head jerked up involuntarily. He saw Mindy’s sculpted buttocks descending as the tiny assassin dropped from the ladder above him onto his shoulders. Her legs wrapped around his neck, and Paulie’s knees buckled under the force of her plummeting weight. The chase was far too narrow for the pair to fall over. Mindy’s back hit the side of the shaft keeping them both upright, preserving the comedic figure of the little blond riding the shoulders of the snarling mercenary. Her legs blocked his arms and kept him from drawing either pistol, so the mercenary wriggled a hand to his chest and drew his vibroblade free. It snapped to life with a hum and he thrust upward toward Mindy’s
guts. She caught the wrist and twisted, bringing the knife tip away from her vitals. Then she followed by squeezing her thighs together hard enough to make Sven see spots. As his knees went limp, the lithe killer slipped from his shoulders and fell to her feet behind him. The chase was barely wide enough to fit them both standing upright. He felt the swell of Mindy’s breasts against his back as she shoved him forward. His chin struck a ladder rung and he tasted blood in his mouth. Ignoring the pain, he spun. He led with an elbow as he twisted to face her, hoping to catch her across the face. She was too short, and his strike passed over her head to no effect. But he was facing her now, and he was the bigger taller fighter. He figured this gave him the advantage.

  He held onto this conceit right up until he felt the dagger enter his abdomen. Paulie had been stabbed before, and he knew that the blade usually felt very cold when it went in. This one burned like liquid fire. His mouth opened in pain and surprise even as his own knife came up to return the favor. He was too slow. Mindy removed her own blade and used it to block his. The burning sasori dagger removed Sven’s arm at the elbow and the Jarl of Vinland slumped against the wall of the chase. His eyes found Mindy’s, ice-blue and intense, and he smiled. “I’m glad it was you.”

  “Me too,” she replied without warmth. “See you in Valhalla.”

  Paulie raised his remaining hand to give her a rude gesture. Then, with an impish leer, he reached forward and cupped her left breast. There was not much to feel through the armor of her jumpsuit, but he coughed a hacking laugh when she slapped his hand away. “Nice...” he gurgled as he began to slide down the bulkhead. “Real nice...”