by Damien Boyes
Because you’re careful. Xiao, covering his tracks.
“But you were able to recover something?” the Inspector asks.
“Yes. Well, no. We started dissecting the Cortexes and discovered that the self-destructs weren’t completely efficient. The photonic concussion originated in two points, one on either side of the charge, and their positioning created an interference pattern in the—” he pauses, notices the inspector’s face is clouded with impatience, “—some of the pattern survived.”
“And you were able to read it?”
“Well…no,” he admits.
A vein in the Inspector’s temple has started throbbing.
“That’s the thing, even though we couldn’t get any workable memories, there were still pattern fragments accessible. We should have been able to read them but they were indecipherable, like they were scrambled.”
“Another failsafe?” I ask.
“We thought that at first,” he says. “But nope, the answer’s simpler than that.”
“Would you like us to continue guessing,” the Inspector says, her tone flat.
“Those rithms don’t use the standard psychorithm encoding patterns.”
The Inspector leans back in her chair, exposing her long neck, her eyes jigging in the mid-distance.
“What do they use?” I ask.
“An encoding pattern not from around here,” he answers.
“Sam—” I growl.
He gives a can-you-believe-this-guy sidelong glance to the Inspector. “They’re Zŭxiān.”
“Ancestors?” The Inspector says, surprised. Just like the Fate agent told me.
“Specifically shù zì zŭxiān—Chinese Digital Ancestors. That’s why the rithms were indecipherable at first. Fate’s Ancestor program doesn’t use the same personality capture technology that Second Skyn does.”
“How’d Ancestors end up here?” Chaddah asks.
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. Somehow they got free from the Yuanfen and into Cortexes modded to run their patterns.”
“This explains my visit from the Fate agents,” Chaddah says.
I keep my reaction to all this neutral. The Fate agent told me Xiao was building an army of minds lifted from the Yuanfen—China’s version of the Hereafter. I don’t want Chaddah to know I’ve had a run in with Fate myself. Or that I agreed to help them track Xiao down.
“What were they after?” I ask her, already knowing the answer.
“They wanted to know if I had any information to share on our investigation into Xiao, as a professional courtesy. They told me Xiao is, in addition to his many Standards offences, somehow infiltrating the Yuanfen and psyphoning out people’s minds. Perhaps to extort them. Perhaps to torment them.” She closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her crooked nose and we wait until she opens them again and drops her hand from her face. “The question is why?”
“Bring me another Cortex that hasn’t blown itself to bits and I’ll find out for you,” Sam says.
“We’ll make that our first priority. Very good work, Samuel,” the Inspector says.
Omondi grins, holds up a finger. “I’m not done. The bit-hea—” he looks at me, quickly, then back at the Inspector, “the Reszo, the fried one in the AV, he didn’t have a standard Cortex at all.”
The Inspector opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes out, instead motions with her hand for him to continue.
“Whatever was in his head was destroyed in the fire, just melted right to shit, but the components don’t line up with a Cortex. It was smaller, simpler.”
I think back to the arKade, to the transmitters in the heads of the identically skynned guests. “Could it have been an version of what was going on at the arKade?”
Omondi nods. “Sure, could be. Could be anything. We’re dealing with Ancestors walking our streets in superhuman bodies, why stop at something as simple as local storage and a transmitter. Maybe it was ancient alien technology. From the future.”
The Inspector shoots him a look.
“Anything else make sense?” I ask.
“Not that I can think of. I’ll compare what’s left of the burned Cortex to one we pulled from the arKade. But even with a local rithm, a remote neural connection is data intensive, multiple updates per second, up and down. Kade blacked out the entire link spectrum to run the arKade. This was in the middle of a sea of drone traffic. Spare bandwidth would have been slim.”
I turn to the Inspector. “We need authorization for a packet sweep, trace any consistent, high-bandwidth traffic in the area of the drone yard in the hours before the raid.”
“It won’t be easy,” Omondi interjects. “Anyone this careful will likely set up a proxy or two, route it through a bunch of nodes.”
The Inspector nods.
“I’ll begin processing the warrant request immediately,” the AMP says, listening all the time.
“I’ll sign it when you’re done,” Chaddah answers, then looks at Omondi. “Anything else.”
“That’s not enough?” He smiles. “We’re running traces on all the burned gear we could identify—some of it is pretty specialized stuff, might come up with something. I’ll get Anders started on the linktrace.”
“Good. Samuel, you’re dismissed.” We both stand to leave, but the Inspector asks me to sit back down.
When Omondi has left the office Chaddah says, “We missed you at Kalifa’s funeral today.”
That was this morning. Shit. I slept through it.
“After last night, Galvan almost dying, it slipped my mind,” I say.
She looks down at her desk, takes a breath, lets it out slowly through pursed lips then raises her eyes back to me and searches my face, as if she’s reading something on my forehead.
“Do you want to be here, Fin?”
The question throws me. No one’s bothered to ask what I wanted since I woke up on that bed in Second Skyn. Did I want to go back to work? Did I want to be assigned to Rithm Crime? Did I want to be poured back into a life that wasn’t mine anymore?
She waits for me to answer.
“I don’t know—” I say, finally. The one thing I do want, the only thing I know for sure, is I want to find Eka. Need to find him. And right now, finding Xiao is my best hope of doing that. “I mean—yes. I do.”
Chaddah leans back in her chair. “You don’t sound sure.”
“It’s been a hard few days, but I’m sure. I want to help.”
She brushes a stray hair back under her hijab. “Kalifa’s gone. Galvan will be for the near future. We’re running out of capable officers,” she hesitates, considering. “I need you now, Finsbury. I’m putting you in charge of the Xiao investigation.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I suppress a smile. Finally.
“Don’t let me down, Finsbury,” she says, and waves me out of her office.
***
SysDate
[05:58:29. Tuesday, April 30, 2058]
I’m crouched on a mossy hallway carpet beside a dinged-up metal door with 106 scrawled across it in silver paint. There’s a doorcharge set next to the expensive-looking lock, detonator ready to pop.
We hit at six o’clock. Ninety seconds to breach.
Omondi and the AMP took half a day to sort through the assorted linktivity that passed within five hundred cubic metres of the drone yard, filtering out the drone chatter and airport comms and the millions of benign packets until they found an anomaly: a series of intermittent, ultrahigh-bandwidth packets that dropped just milliseconds after the incendiary device detonated. They traced its origin point across thirty bounces, chasing it around the globe all the way back to a commercial unit in the north-east of the city’s fab zone.
Tech said it was surprisingly easy. So easy, I expect it’s a trap.
Sixty seconds to breach.
SecNet showed the location as a single story building, utilitarian brown and grey brick, the front wall covered with the green tendrils of newly-budding ivy. We immediately dispatched a spydrone
and it’s been scanning for the past twelve hours, silently charting the interior layout, locating and tracking the people inside. It’s identified twelve discrete units in the building. Only four of them remained occupied into the evening and through the night.
The linktrace routed back specifically to unit 106, two large rooms—a living area and what looks like a lab—plus a bathroom. Property records, linktivity, and voting rolls show seventeen residents over the past five years. It’s currently reported as unoccupied.
It isn’t.
Thirty seconds to breach.
There’s one person there now, a male, 170cm, approximately 66kg, and six or seven small animals, probably cats. The occupant is on his side, asleep, and hasn’t moved since 03:00hrs when he left his back room, trailed by a parade of animals, and lay down.
I’ve got the Revv cranked up, been playing the simulations, but until the door opens I can’t tell what’s going to happen. Can’t do anything until the action starts.
I’m itching for it.
Yellowbird’s behind me. She said she wanted to come, to find the guy who hurt Galvan. Insisted on it.
I told her ‘no’ at first. I wouldn’t be responsible for her getting hurt too, and she told me to get my head out of my ass, that I wasn’t her father and who the fuck did I think I was trying to protect her from doing her job?
I couldn’t argue with that, and it’s just one guy and a bunch of cats, but I made her promise to stay at the back, and in cover at all times.
Two TAC officers, Copeland and Pendelton, huddle on the other side of the door. They’re armoured up, weapons hot. Two more are stationed at each end of the hallway, keeping it clear.
The AMP in a lawbot idles silently between us, hammer poised before the door, awaiting the order to breach.
Ten seconds.
Five minutes ago the door to 110 opened and guy walked out, bare-chested in jogging pants, barely glanced at the heavily armed TAC team surrounding his neighbour’s apartment, threw open the door to the stairwell and took a piss. In the half-second it took to recognize he wasn’t a threat I’d worked through twelve scenarios to disable him. Four of them lethal.
He didn’t say anything as he returned inside.
One second.
The alarm chimes in my head.
Six o’clock. Time to move.
Without a word the AMP bot moves up, hammer raised. A countdown flickers on its back. Out of habit I drop my fingers, one by one, and when the last one drops we go in.
We don’t knock.
The doorbuster rocks the narrow hallway, throwing up a cloud of plaster dust and the bot immediately slams the hammer in after it, punching the door so hard it swings around and embeds itself into the drywall. The AMP then flips up its armgun and glides inside, green targeting laser swinging through the haze, searching for potential threats.
I follow it in, the others on my six. Copeland, then Pendleton, with Yellowbird at the rear. TAC’s supposed to breach first, but I pulled rank. The guy who nearly killed Galvan is in here, and I want to be the first one he sees.
The room’s dark, clouded, roughly ten meters square with unfinished walls and a high ceiling. It’s separated into four primary functional areas: the entranceway with a line of coats hanging from hooks on the wall; an entertainment system and seating area to our immediate left; a kitchenette with a long island across from us on the other side of the room; and a loft-bed over a work station kitty-corner from the entrance. The only light comes from pipes running along the ceiling, originating from the bathroom and the kitchen, their surfaces undulating with tiny swarms of peristaltic glow. They meet in a large bundle and pass through to the closed-off back room.
I move along the wall toward the entertainment system, blinking through the ripe ammonia stink of too many cats, to a couch and two mismatched chairs on a faded red diamond-pattered throwrug, put my ass in the corner, and try not to breathe through my nose.
A top-line TeleviZ system hangs from the ceiling, its control tab resting on a small black table underneath.
Copeland follows the other wall, weapon at her shoulder, to the kitchenette, clearing the bathroom along the way.
Pendelton dashes past the bot settled in the middle of the room to the raised loft-bed and puts his back to the wall between the loft and the sliding metal door that closes off the lab in the next room.
Yellowbird covers us from the doorway, her weapon trained on the suspect still asleep on his raised mattress. How he slept through the doorbuster I have no idea.
“Clear,” Copeland shouts, just as something launches itself from atop a kitchen cupboard.
That’s no cat.
It’s hairless, six-legged and dense with muscle under glossy, blue-grey skin. The head is sleek, flared at the jaw, with a tight pointed nose and big ears like parabolic antennas pulled back flat against its skull. Its small black eyes are fixed on Copeland.
Whatever it is, it’s made to kill: inch-long teeth; razor-sharp, matte-black claws; the tips of it’s scrabbling mid-paws glistening with what has to be some kind of poison.
We saw more and more creatures like this as the fighting in Africa ground to a close. Printed or fast-grown animals, designed purely for combat. With imbedded Cortexes and a rudimentary intelligence. Some, like these, hunters designed to stalk and incapacitate individual targets. Others, often the size of small cars, built to work in packs, immobilize and tear through an armoured transport to get at the tasty soldier meat inside.
It took specialized hunters nearly a decade of bloody, dangerous work to clear them out, an activity that became a draw for adventure tourists from around the world. Even now the swamps of Lost Orleans are thick with animals like this, released or abandoned by the Fleshmiths who migrated to the drowned city to take advantage of ravaged Louisanna’s lax laws on just about everything.
Back on Base Bush, a creature similar to one of these animals took out four soldiers before the rest of the patrol could bring it down, the neurotoxin on its claws killing quicker than we could administer an antidote.
We’re dealing with a room full of them.
The AMP’s targeting system picks up the airborne animal before I can lift my arm to get a bead on it, and a flick of fire bursts in the room as it picks the creature off.
That’s one, but we identified six more on the scan. Even the AMP won’t be able to track and disable the rest of them in time.
They’re everywhere now. One peeks over the edge of the bed, eying Pendelton. Another creeps out of the bathroom, rounding on Yellowbird. Two more lean over the cupboards on the other side of the kitchen, teeth bared at Copeland below.
The AMP’s green targeting laser is swinging across the room, aiming to take out one of the animals above Copeland, but it won’t get both.
Then another launches itself from above the cupboards, claws bared, straight at the AMP, as the suspect springs up from his bed—rising in slow motion with his mouth open in a scream, his bearded face wild and the covers trailing behind him like some kind of yipster banshee—with an autopistol in his hand.
He sees Yellowbird first, silhouetted in the doorway, and the barrel of his gun tracks around toward her.
His eyes glow an artificial green, set deep in a gaunt face topped by a tangle of blonde curls. His light brows are furrowed. SecNet searches his bio/kin through my eyes and comes back with a StatUS-ID:
Florence McMillian, Restored.
Personality Certified under COPA, Dec 12, 2056.
Rithmsync 98%.
This is the guy who incinerated the container in the AV yard, the guy who nearly killed Galvan.
Now he’s gunning for Yellowbird.
I dig deep into the Revv and run through the probabilities, trying to hit on a solution that gets us all out of here alive without making me look like a superhero. I don’t want anyone knowing I’m shyfting, but I’ll out myself before I let anyone get hurt.
I run through the scenarios. There’s a gun on Yellowbird and an animal
headed her way. Two animals ready to pounce on Copeland, another stalking toward Pendleton.
I can’t save everyone. Even with an economy of movement, I can only count on the AMP for one shot. An animal’s already mid-air. I could probably shoot it first but that’s what the bot’s for. To keep the rest of us alive.
Even letting bot go I’m still not going to be fast enough.
I can’t save Yellowbird.
Either I can disable McMillian before he fires from his bed or I can get the animal heading toward her. I can’t get them both.
Someone’s going to die. Those animals are too dangerous.
I need to call for medics, now. The extra seconds might be the difference between life and death.
The head of another sleek animal emerges from under the couch, its dead eyes set on me. One more variable. Maybe McMillian misses. Maybe Yellowbird gets lucky and hits the swift-moving animal with the one shot she’ll get before it’s on her. Maybe the AMP will be able to quickly neutralize the animal about to pounce.
A world of ‘maybes.’ More than the Revv can take. The future’s a blur.
Even thinking at the speed of light, I’m still not fast enough.
Even if I call the medics, even with the bot, even with the Revv, we’re looking at casualties.
I have to decide who walks out and who gets carried.
Then I notice that the Tz projector hanging from the ceiling isn’t off, it’s just waiting on standby.
Maybe there’s another way.
I run through it three times, enough until I’ve got the motions perfect. It’ll be close but it’s my best option. Once I have it timed to the millisecond I let the Revv take over my body.
I tense my legs and leap, target the animal under the couch and put a bullet between its eyes just as it springs, exploding its head in a flash of uncontained programmatic light.
The animal leaping at the bot is a half second away from landing. It’s claws are outstretched, ready to tear into the bot’s torso.