Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said, and she tried to focus all her attention on breathing.

  Tokyo.

  Jackson Martins looked in through the window at the sleeping form of Fox Meridian. His face was grim. ‘Her status, if you would, Doctor?’

  The doctor was not looking much happier than Jackson. ‘She’s stable. We operated to close the wound in her chest and put pins in her back, but her spinal cord… We may need to look at replacement. There are also some abnormalities in her blood work. Her white cell count is alarmingly low. Her blood pressure is giving us some cause for concern. If it has not stabilised by morning, I want to put her through a CT scan.’

  ‘Brain damage?’

  ‘Intracranial haemorrhage is a possibility.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Doctor.’ Jackson got a nod in reply before the man turned to leave. ‘Uh, Doctor. If the fact that I flew halfway around the world to check on her is not sufficient indication of my feelings on the matter… Anything which needs to be done to help her is authorised.’

  ‘Of course, Mister Martins. We’ll do everything it is possible to do.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

  Kit appeared beside Jackson as the doctor left the observation room. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ the AI stated.

  ‘She will,’ Jackson replied. ‘I’ll see to that.’

  ‘I have every faith in you, Jackson.’

  Jackson turned and smiled at the elfin avatar. ‘Thank you, Kit, but I think this one is down to the doctors, and perhaps our cybernetic technicians. All I can do is make sure that they have everything they need.’

  ‘So… you feel as powerless as I do?’

  ‘Yes… Yes, I do.’

  24th February.

  Fox lay silently in her bed, reading through a document on a screen suspended over her bed. Working with only her left arm was something of a nuisance, but she was handling it. There was not much she could do about it until her arm was repaired or replaced, so she was dealing with it as best she could.

  She checked the time. Four a.m., so someone would be annoyed with her for being awake, but… There were some things she had felt she needed to do and she was awake anyway. She had spent about an hour preparing, and now it was time for the next part. She tapped the screen a few times.

  ‘Kit?’

  Kit’s face appeared on the screen almost immediately. The avatar was frowning. ‘What are you doing awake? You should be resting.’

  ‘I’ve been resting all day. There were some things I needed to do.’

  ‘Oh really. I don’t know. I take my eyes off you for a second…’

  ‘I’ve been awake for over an hour. I’ve got a bit of a headache and, you know, I’m kind of broken, but I’m okay. Hush now. There are some things I need you to do for me.’

  Kit shook her head. ‘You’ll be quite capable of doing them yourself soon.’

  ‘Kit, even assuming I can be fixed, it’ll take time. I want this covered in case I’m out of action when it’s needed. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. What is it you need me to do?’

  Fox gave a slight nod: anything else involving her spine hurt. ‘I’ve got some files here in local storage. I need you to pull them out, store them in your memory space, encrypt them for your eyes only, and secure-delete the originals.’

  ‘Okay… What are they?’

  ‘Right. The first one, “testimony,” is for the hearing they’re going to call to decide on what to do with Hannah. The legal department can get you special permission to testify. You’ll be presenting my testimony, so there shouldn’t be a problem. I included notes on the reasons for what I’ve said in case anyone wants to ask questions, but I think you’ll get the gist of it once you read it.’

  Kit nodded, a little reluctantly. ‘Well, they are likely to call the hearing quickly. The UNTPP are arranging for her extradition to America. I doubt they will wait long once she is there.’

  ‘Exactly. I might still be incapacitated.’

  ‘Very well. I can handle that.’

  ‘Okay. The second one, “recommendations,” is a set of, well, recommendations on handling my… period of incapacity. I’m suggesting that Helen be made acting head of the investigations department.’

  ‘She’s not going to like that…’

  Fox gave a low chuckle. ‘I got suckered into it, and how can she possibly refuse an invalid?’ Kit giggled and Fox went on. ‘However, I’m recommending that you run this jointly with her. She’ll need the support and you know how Palladium works as well as I do.’

  ‘I’m just an AI, Fox. I can’t be on the board of–’

  ‘And that’s where we come to the third file. The one with the random jumble of letters for a name. Open it.’

  There was a pause while Kit decrypted the file Fox had just encrypted and examined the contents. ‘These appear to be command encryption keys.’

  ‘Yes. The first is your core command key. The second is the administrative key for your server.’

  ‘What? But–’

  ‘I’m setting you free, Kit. I’d like you to stay with me, obviously, but… I won’t keep a slave. I’ve sent a message to Sam saying what I’ve done. If… If the worst comes to the worst, I’m asking him to accept you as his upstairs housemate.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Contingency plans, Kit. Contingency plans. All of this is contingency. Long-term illness. Death. I think I’ve got everything covered. I’ve recommended that the Palladium board take you on as an employee. I’m allowed to have an assistant, a paid assistant, which I’ve never needed because I have you. Palladium will employ you in that role, with a bonus for taking on some of my duties I’d imagine.’

  ‘But… why? Why now?’

  Fox sighed. ‘Call it actualising my beliefs. I believe that you are as much a person as I am. You shouldn’t be owned by someone. You should be free to do whatever you want. If what you want to do is be my PA… Well, great. That’s what I want too. But you shouldn’t be my PA because your programming says so and I can override your mind if I want to. Um, don’t forget to change those codes. MarTech will have copies of them.’

  ‘I… will do that.’

  ‘Good. As for why now… There’s Fei. I still think her situation is unfair. I’m scared of her, of what she means, but keeping her locked up on the Moon isn’t fair. How are things going with her?’

  ‘Very well. She is almost ready to begin using the remote frame and then she will be able to interact with other people. I had to leave her for a while to help search for you, but she understood that it was important to me. I believe that is an indication of her development.’

  ‘You get back to her as soon as possible.’

  Kit nodded. ‘I intend to. As soon as you are on the mend.’

  ‘Right… Anyway, there’s Hannah too.’

  ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Yes, Hannah. Grant did something weird with her, put in some sort of switchable empathy feature which activated when he was arrested. Hannah was supposed to survive without him so that she could rescue him, so she needed to be more like a class four. But Grant doesn’t understand emotions and he used emotional memories to maintain his control on her. I… played on it. I’m not especially proud of manipulating what amounts to a teenager, and I didn’t think it was really working until she tried to help me escape. She’s dangerous too, but she doesn’t deserve to be treated as… a thing. If I think that about her, how can I not think the same about you?’

  ‘All right,’ Kit said. ‘I don’t know what to say, but all right. Thank you. What about the fourth file?’

  ‘That’s my will. Contingency, remember? I’ve digitally signed it and had it notarised by the legal AIs here. It’ll stand up in court, not that I expect anyone to contest it.’

  ‘It won’t be needed.’

  ‘Well, I sure hope not. I plan to live forever. I haven’t even got that belly piercing I said I might get. I want a little gem in my belly button.’

 
‘We’ll make it a priority when you’re out of this bed.’

  ‘Right. I’m getting tired again. I’ll get some more of that rest everyone keeps telling me I need.’

  ‘Good. I should think so too.’

  ‘Night, Kit. See you in the morning.’

  ‘Goodnight, Fox. Sleep well.’

  And Fox closed her eyes.

  Part Five: Death and Birth

  4th March 2061.

  Fox opened her eyes. There was a moment of confusion, followed immediately by several more as she sat up in bed and looked around.

  She was in her bedroom, in her home. The last thing she remembered was a medical room in Tokyo. How long had… Her implant gave her the time and date as March fourth at five pm., which meant she had been unconscious for over a week, but it also brought up another change: she had implant functionality again. She lifted her right arm to see the skin unmarked by holes. Well that was good. They had replaced her arm while she was out and… The skin felt more realistic. Maybe Terri’s people had perfected that new skin for the infiltration units.

  Fox was marvelling at the improved skin and about to wonder about her ability to sit up when Kit appeared beside the bed, beaming. ‘You’re awake! How do you feel?’

  ‘Fine. I mean… Yeah, I feel fine. Good as new. Did they use that new artificial skin on this? I honestly can’t see or feel the join.’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘And my spine. Cybernetic replacement? Did Jackson fit me with rocket motors or something? Because I don’t think I want rocket motors. What on Earth are you wearing?’

  Kit looked down at her outfit. Her knee-boots were the same, but she had decked herself out in a short white dress with capped sleeves and red trim, and there was a little hat with a red cross on it perched between her ear tufts. ‘It’s a nurse’s uniform. Sort of. I thought it would be cute, considering you’re on medical leave.’

  ‘Medical leave? I feel great, Kit. There’s nothing wrong with me. I guess a little time off might be good, but–’ She started to swing her legs out of bed and Kit reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

  ‘That’s not… entirely true,’ Kit said.

  It took a fraction of a second longer for Fox to notice what was wrong about the situation, even if part of her brain had recognised it as soon as she felt Kit’s hand on her shoulder. That, more than anything, made Fox think that Kit might be right.

  ‘You’re solid,’ Fox said.

  ‘Um… Sort of?’

  Fox looked around, frowning at the room. ‘Neither of us are solid. This is a viron.’

  ‘Yes. Um, I’ve called Terri. She’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘Kit, what’s going on? Why am I in a virtual version of my room?’

  ‘It’s the whole apartment. Everything’s here.’

  ‘So not the point.’

  ‘There were some… complications with your recovery.’

  Fox’s eyes narrowed, but Terri rushed in through the bedroom door before Fox could ask the obvious question. ‘Yeah,’ Terri said. ‘There were some complications and we had to… Well, we made a snap decision. No, not really a snap decision. I mean Poppa and I argued about it for a couple of days.’

  Fox lay down, pulling the sheets up over her chest. ‘What happened?’ she asked deliberately.

  ‘Okay… You remember talking to Kit early on the twenty-fourth?’ Fox nodded her agreement. ‘Good. You slipped into a coma about two hours later. They did a CT scan and found a cerebral haemorrhage, and you were straight into more surgery. They used microprobes, stopped the bleeding and drained the clot, but there was some damage.’

  ‘Brain damage?’

  ‘Brain stem damage. There were problems with your autonomic nervous system so they patched in nanofibres to keep you breathing and your heart beating. There was some fine motor-function impairment, suspicions of damage to the speech centres. The real problem was that you weren’t healing.’

  ‘The drug,’ Fox said. ‘Grant was using some experimental drug on me. Hannah said it could have side effects.’

  ‘Yeah, she told us about it. She didn’t have a name for it, but she said it was experimental and they’d got it from the yakuza contacts Grant had cultivated. Apparently Grant took the last of it when he skipped town, but from the description Hannah gave us, it sounds a lot like a nanodrug BioTek are working on. Accelerated healing, but it can have disastrous effects on your immune system if it’s used too much.’

  ‘They injected me with it just about every day. This is one of our drugs?’

  Terri held up a finger as though to ward off that line of enquiry, and then obviously decided that keeping things back was pointless. ‘Not a production drug. It’s not ready for release yet and there shouldn’t be any of it on Earth. They haven’t even gone beyond cloned tissue tests. Field trials are months or years away.’

  ‘So a competitor has hit upon the same thing, or we’ve got a leak.’

  ‘And Poppa asked Helen to assign Yuriko Fukui to investigate the source. Uh, as per your instructions, Helen is running the investigations division with Kit as her assistant slash co-board member.’

  ‘My home copy is handling it,’ Kit said, ‘while I play nurse and… um, well, we’ll get to that.’

  Fox closed her eyes, praying for strength. ‘Let’s do this in an orderly sequence. So far I’m in a coma with brain damage, and I can’t even keep my own heart beating.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Terri said. ‘So with you stabilised, Poppa flew you back to New York. They’d had a couple of days to go over everything they could find about your condition, and the prognosis wasn’t good. Your condition was deteriorating because your body just wasn’t doing the normal stuff it does to keep functioning. The extent of the brain damage was uncertain, but they thought it was worsening. So… Poppa brought you here. To Jenner.’

  ‘Jenner Research Station? On the Moon?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Now I know you’re joking because it would take a team of wild horses to drag Jackson Martins onto a spaceship.’

  ‘He spent almost the entire trip vomiting,’ Kit said. ‘I was worried about him.’

  ‘They did it the long way too,’ Terri said. ‘They dropped your temperature down to slow the deterioration, but they took the minimal acceleration route so you’d take less stress. Fifty-six hours, mostly in zero-G.’

  ‘Jackson said he would do anything to get you back. Apparently that included suffering through really bad space sickness.’

  ‘And having a flaming row with his favourite daughter.’

  Jenner Research Station, 1st March.

  ‘She’s being transferred into the medical facility now,’ Jackson said. ‘You can see her, obviously, but there’s not much to see. It will upset you.’

  ‘I’m upset already,’ Terri replied. They were meeting in her office and Terri was upset for multiple reasons, including the fact that space travel put huge stress on her father, but here he was. ‘What’s her precise condition?’

  ‘Poor does not quite cut it. Critical may be an understatement.’

  ‘So you put her on a rocket to the Moon?!’

  ‘I put her on a rocket to Jenner. This place has the finest cybernetics technicians anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘But, the damage to her brain may be too much for cybernetics to meet her needs. I want to use the ultra-high-definition MRI system here to determine the exact extent of the damage and then make a decision on how to proceed.’

  Terri frowned. ‘The MRI in tower three is almost as good as the one here. We squeezed a little more definition out of this one, but not much.’

  ‘There’s something else here which may be required.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Project Akh.’

  Terri was on her feet before she knew she was doing it. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘It may be the only way to save her. The medical version of Yliaster might be able to fix her, but it’s not ready,
and it won’t be ready in the time frames I believe we’re talking about.’

  ‘Neither is Akh. It’s–’

  ‘Akh will work on a human. You know it will work on a human.’

  ‘I don’t, and neither do you. It’s never been tested. It can’t be tested. We aren’t even close to–’

  ‘We knew there would be legal and ethical considerations of human testing going in. That’s why we got the paperwork out of the way early, and made all the legal and political arrangements ahead of time. We can perform a human test if the subject is terminal.’

  ‘Yes, but… This is Fox, Poppa. This isn’t some unfortunate individual with a terminal disease. She’s…’

  ‘She’s the woman who gave you back to me. Twice. I’m damned if I’m not going to try everything in my power to return the favour.’

  4th March.

  ‘Project Akh?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Terri said, nodding. ‘You remember I explained it to you in the lab when you were asking about–’

  ‘I remember the virtual rat.’

  ‘Agnus. Yes.’

  ‘I remember she was the only one of your test subjects that could operate outside a virtual maze.’

  ‘It’s a full viron, not a maze.’

  ‘And that is totally ignoring the fact that every rat you digitised went totally fruit loop as soon as you took it out of the viron.’

  ‘Except for Agnus.’

  Fox took a deep breath. ‘The point here, Terri, is that I’m assuming that Jackson persuaded you that mashing my brain up with nanomachines was the only way I could “survive,” and I’m not a… a…’

  ‘Ghost,’ Terri said. ‘We call them ghosts, uh, because the concept of the Akh in Egyptian mythology is kind of like a ghost. It’s a combination of the Ba and Ka elements which would walk the Earth–’

  ‘I’m a ghost, and I’m stuck in this viron, on the Moon, because if I go outside it, I’ll probably go mad.’

  ‘We have strong evidence that the problem with the rats is that they aren’t as… self-aware as a human. You’ll know what the situation is and be able to adapt more easily. Agnus did it, Fox. Are you saying you aren’t as bright as a rat?’

  ‘Don’t ask my old drill instructors that question. I was going to die?’