by C. T. Phipps
I chuckled. “Well, people who are more honest about it, at least. Will you take this journey to me?”
“You realize this will probably end in you getting shot and us dying together, right?”
“That’s not an entirely bad ending from my perspective, but I’d rather stay alive with you.”
“I don’t want to be immortal like the other A.I. The reason I live is for the ones I love around me and you’re the last one in the universe left alive but for my family, Judith’s family, or whatever you want to call them. I want to look after them, too.”
“We’ll find them.”
“Then consider yourself to have an A.I. as your new ship’s something or other, Captain.”
Captain? Hmm, I suppose I could get used to that.
“You know, I absolutely hated everyone in the Navy. They existed solely to provide us with transport and make us look good in comparison.”
“That was because you were in the Starfighter Corps.”
“Which just reinforces the truth of my statement.”
“Okay,” I said, now very nervous about what’s going to happen. “Anything I should know before you do it?”
“Oh, was I not supposed to do it already?” Judith asked innocently.
I stared at her. “Oh…good.”
I didn’t feel any different, which I supposed was a good thing. I hadn’t made use of my cybernetics beyond navigational computations, viewing data files, and making sure I never forgot a single detail of my marriage.
“Gives new meaning to the idea of marriage as one body and one soul.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve unlocked the doorway to the outside and arranged for a distraction to get to the prison. You should dress up in some of the power-armor here in the containment room.”
“So we can pass ourselves off as guards?”
Judith shook her head. “So you can blast your way out of here and to one of the nearby transport platforms. This entire planet is about to get really, really busy with the incoming military strikes, and that’s your best chance to get the fuck out of here.”
Point taken.
That was when the Water Palace’s plans were uploaded into my brain with three-dimensional renderings of the environment, location of troopers, types of weapons, and just how much of a fight we’d be able to put up if we got caught. The numbers were discouraging, not insurmountable, as security was designed for protecting the guests rather than chasing down fugitives.
“Ow,” I muttered, wincing. “Warn me next time you do something like that.”
“This is why cybernetics will never be as good as A.I. The wet gooey stuff doesn’t interact with the purely digital stuff.”
I kissed her again. “I’ve got some experience with bioroids that says otherwise.”
Judith frowned.
“That was actually supposed to reassure you.”
“I’m not sure I want a biological body.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“You’d be amazed at the worlds opened up to me,” Judith said, shaking her head. “I’ve learned more things in the half-day I’ve been activated than I did in the whole of my previous existence. Being stuffed back in a squishy box has its appeals, well specifically you, but it has its limitations, too.”
I closed my eyes. “Whatever you want.”
“We’ll discuss it later when we’re not in a life and death struggle for existence.” She conjured a globe of Shogun above our heads with a small glowing red light signifying the Melampus and the clearest route we could take to get back to it. “Any objections to my plan?”
“Not a one.”
“Then let’s get going.”
I paused. “Uh, actually, there is one thing.”
Judith looked at me sideways. “What?”
“Could we…uh…I can’t believe I’m going to say this, warn Clarice and Ida the place is about to go up in smoke?”
Judith’s eyes widened. “Are you fucking serious?”
“I know it sounds strange—”
“Strange is your love for recording mirrors in the bedroom. This is ridiculous!” Judith interrupted me. “They betrayed you! Both of them.”
I gritted my teeth, not wanting to have this argument as I had extremely mixed feelings about all of this but was confident of my conclusions. “Yes, and I’m stealing their ship as well as ruining their reputations for it. No matter what happens, the Rin-O’Harra family is going to be ruined by all this. Likewise, with Ida burned, that means Clarice’s own ambitions to find redemption as a soldier, or whatever she had planned, is screwed. I consider that payback enough.”
Judith blinked. “Do you really think they deserve to live? I mean, I understand Clarice, she’s beautiful but—”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it?”
I shrugged. “Ida gave me a place where I felt like I didn’t have to run away from the rest of the universe anymore. The Melampus, in a very real way, became a dirty disgusting pile-of-floating-space-junk home.”
“You’re really selling me on moving in with you.”
“We can redecorate with all the money you’ve recovered.”
“Point taken.”
“There’s more—”
“Do you love her?” Judith asked.
“Fuck no,” I said, sighing, “but she did what she thought was right and I think Isla does love her.”
“Do you love her?” Judith asked.
I closed my eyes, thinking of how Isla would react to all this. Probably not well. She was a jealous sort with her sole exception being Clarice. “I said no, but they are my friends.”
I didn’t know what sort of reaction I was expecting from Judith but the one I got surprised me. She burst out laughing and carried on for a good thirty seconds.
“It wasn’t that funny.”
“I’m sorry, but after all the shit we’ve both been through,” Judith chuckled some more, “I didn’t think you’d make an appeal for their lives on the power of friendship.”
I thought about the dozens of friends I’d sent to their deaths over the past decade. Relationships broken by betrayal, sometimes by me, with people used and discarded like cleansing paper. It was hard to put into words why these particular relationships mattered.
Or whether the fact they mattered was all in my head.
“Is it a problem?” I asked.
Judith looked at me. “No, Cassius, it’s not. Just realize all hell is probably going to break loose sooner rather than later if I do send a warning.”
“Judith, after your…death, I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I was involved in terrorism. I killed innocent people trying to get at the ones I thought weren’t innocent for being involved in the Commonwealth government. I stole things. I murdered people. I even ran with some pirates at one point. I damned my soul repeatedly for doing things far less horrible than what I did with a song in my heart in the name of Duke and Country.”
Judith looked at me. “Estimates for how many people will die in the upcoming battle, civilian and others range from a hundred thousand to two million if the battle gets to the surface of the planet. I did that because you asked that from me.”
I closed my eyes. “Am I insane for believing it’ll be less bloody this way?”
“Maybe. Still, both of us put our hands on the trigger and pulled. We’re both killers now. I may not be the original Judith, but I remember the first person she murdered for one of your noble games. It was one of Thomas’ friends, an ex-lover of his who was bragging about his conquests and threatening your brother’s position. I got paid a lot of money for that and it put me in the pocket of State Security.”
“I knew that story.”
“I used you, too.”
“We used each other. Don’t think I didn’t know my mistresses, the ones you introduced me to, were your friends from Lucifer City you wanted to get out of prostitution and indentured servitude.”
I’d
honestly never wanted another woman after meeting Judith. It was a strange thing and I’d been roundly criticized for it by my fellows. To love was considered a character flaw among the nobility and to love a nat actually shameful.
Judith had encouraged me to take mistresses for my position even as I knew she hadn’t loved me the way I’d loved her. Now here we were, working to save the traitorous lover of my other lover, while desperately in love with what amounted to my wife’s clone. It sounded like a daytime holonovella for bored concubines.
Judith grimaced. “You knew, huh?”
“You could have just asked for the money to help them.”
“They never would have accepted it. Pride was the only thing getting us through some days in the Asmodean Slums. They weren’t exactly brimming with gratitude for the favor I did them either. All of them sold information about us both to State Security.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Thomas usually cleaned up the reports on you, me, and Zoe. He left in just enough for us to be uninterestingly perverse. Nothing arouses State Security attention like insufficiently sordid nobles.”
Not that Zoe would qualify anymore. I really, really hope she wasn’t planning on living as my clone’s wife.
Judith shook her head with an amused expression on her face. I got the impression since her digital life had begun, she hadn’t had much to smile about. “I guess we both know something about sacrifices for ungrateful friends.”
“Perhaps not so—”
That was when there was a repeating beeping noise as the holo around us started to shake and change.
“Oh crap,” Judith said, looking around us. “We are screwed.”
“Wait, what? I thought you said this was all just taking a second of real time.”
“It is,” Judith said. “However, that doesn’t mean all of this digital time wasn’t passing for one of Janice’s dummy A.I. to catch onto us.”
“I thought dummy A.I. were shit compared to Cognition A.I.”
“Not completely so!” Judith grabbed her head in frustration and started to pace around the holographic room. “Since they just made us.”
“Made us?”
I was about to say more when a searing pain raced through my synapses. It was like someone sending white-hot lightning through my skull. It was an anti-cyberattack defense mechanism, and if I’d been directly linked to their servers rather than working through Judith as a proxy, I suspected it would have caused my cybernetics to melt in my brain.
“Found us. Tracked us. Put us on their shit list! You’ve got to log off now and get the hell out of there with your friends.”
“How bad is it?”
Judith grimaced. “You may have to deal with the kriegermonster in a few minutes.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Go!” Judith said, pushing me.
With that, I woke up with my hands removed from the Elder Marker. Isla and William were behind me, finishing a sentence that sounded like it had begun moments after I touched it.
“Is that normal?” William asked, being affixed with his artificial arm by Isla. “It glowed. He glowed. We should shoot him and blow it up to make sure.”
“We’re not shooting Cassius!” Isla said, using a laser connector to create a makeshift interface. The fact she’d managed to set one up within minutes was amazing. “He got us out of here, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t do anything,” William said. “Someone else is pulling the strings in all of this and I don’t like it.”
A bunch of alarms sounded throughout the prison.
“And we’re going to get screwed by it!” William said, waving his gun and shaking his newly acquired arm. Looking at it in surprise, he moved it a few more times. “You’re actually pretty good at this, Robotgirl.”
“I just want you to know I hate you,” Isla said, stepping away. “For many, many reasons.”
That was when there was a hideous roaring noise from outside Containment’s door. It sounded like someone had freed Cerberus from Hades and sent him to hunt us down.
I thought to Judith, “Are you there?”
“Yes, Cassius.”
“Good,” I said, looking around the room for weapons. There was a rack of them next to a set of Durandal-class Power Armor suits. They weren’t top quality weapons, confiscated from pirates possibly, but it was still top-notch mercenary wear.
“Everybody put on a suit, get your weapons ready. Things are about to get crazy.”
William just stared at me. “What the hell have they been until now?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
I headed over to the Durandal Power Armor and began typing furiously into an interface built into its shoulder, programming it to accommodate my frame. The thick suit of red armor weighed over two hundred pounds but had its own generators and artificial muscle to make it essentially weightless to its user. It was something I was almost completely unfamiliar with the operation of. I was a pilot, not a Marine, after all. Still, I was pretty sure I wanted the thickest and toughest material between me and everything out there.
Unfortunately, even as everything was going to hell, I noted the armor suits were all locked down with security passcodes and complicated password sequences designed to, well, prevent people like me from stealing incredibly dangerous military equipment. That was when I saw Judith by me, still glowing as she was in the virtual reality world we were located in. It caused me to do a double take before I remembered all of my perceptions were filtered through my cybernetics so of course she could create a virtual avatar of herself in my vision. Still, it was briefly unsettling.
“Let me handle this,” Judith said, looking at the armor.
“What can you—” I started to say.
That was when all three suits of armor, one red, one blue, one gold, all had their keypads blink and their front chest pieces open up to allow a user to slide in.
I blinked. “You’re really useful to have around.”
“Glad you noticed.”
“Who are you talking to?” Isla asked, concerned.
William responded less charitably by double-charging his plasma rifle. “Okay, what the hell is going on?”
“Well, that’s not good,” Judith muttered. “You should probably tell them—”
I closed my eyes. “We’re actually being helped by the A.I. version of my wife, Judith, who is not a Cognition A.I. because my sister intended to upload herself into it and become a kind of god thing.”
“God thing?” Judith asked.
I continued making up shit. “She’s shut down the power, summoned the Commonwealth authorities, and there’s going to be a big battle here due to the Revengeance coming to slaughter everyone.”
“Why are they doing that?” Isla asked.
“Because they’re bad guys,” I said, eliminating my role in bringing the warship here. “I’ve been working for Ida and the Watchers for some time now in exchange for a pardon, which has come through. They’ve arranged for the Melampus to be turned over to us as part of our retirement package as Ida moves on to bigger and better things. We have to get out of here, though, because it’s going to get messy. Very messy.”
Judith blinked. “Wow, you effortlessly mixed truth and lies there.”
“Thank you,” I thought back to her, guessing she’d be able to hear me.
“It’s not a compliment,” Judith replied.
William gestured with his gun between me and the Elder Marker. “How do we know you’re not protecting the Cognition A.I. out of some twisted plan to return the nobility to power?”
Looking at one of the nearby shelves, I saw a detonator cube. Picking it up and clicking it three times, I hurled it at the Elder Marker where it stuck against the side like a fly against a wall. “You should probably take a few steps back.”
William scooted away as Isla practically ran to the other side of the room. Seconds later, the obelisk exploded along with the Cognition A.I. equipment attached to it. The pieces didn’t shatter and go i
n every direction like shrapnel, but just fell over into five or six different chunks. There appeared to be no interior wiring or moving parts, just one big block of quartz.
“There, does that prove it?” I asked William.
William stared at the ruins, then back at me, then at the large metal door beside him. The banging noises were getting louder even as I saw it was being pulled out of where it had been fused into the concrete. Shoddy construction, that. Either way, I actually felt a digital gasp of confusion and grief from Judith in the back of my mind. The destruction of the Elder Marker was an object of immense historical importance and power being eradicated—even if the so-called Nobility was apparently a bunch of super-advanced genocidal monsters.
I could also tell she was affected by the destruction of the equipment Zoe had designed for her as well. Judith was, in her current state, still a Cognition A.I. and capable of potentially limitless expansion as well as data-manipulation but limited by the hardware she was running on. I couldn’t help but think my cyberware, as effective as it was for containing a human consciousness, was still an immense step down from the near-goddess she’d been before. There was also the practical consideration we weren’t going to have nearly the same amount of access to her higher abilities.
“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Judith chuckled and smiled at me. “I’ve still got plenty of digital oomph.”
“Uh, can you hear all my thoughts?” I thought to her.
“Yes. Only when I’m listening, though.”
I grimaced and thought about a series of inappropriate things.
Judith laughed.
“We need to discuss boundaries,” I thought at her. Just not when we’re all about to die at the hands of a rampaging kill monster.”
“Agreed,” Judith said. “Though I do like being the girl you can’t get out of your head.”
You were always that.
William and Isla finished looking at the destroyed Cognition A.I. device and Elder Marker on the ground before they both gazed at the door about to fall down. We were running out of time to maneuver and I was the only one with a plan.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” William said, putting his gun over his shoulder and heading to the blue suit of armor.