Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1)

by Andrew Seiple

  Riarty had spent a careful summer the year before brokering and overseeing the assassination of key players in the Swiss enclaves to ensure that they wouldn’t do that just yet. It had earned him a pretty penny from his client, in both resources and favors. The best part of it was that he’d been paid for doing something that fit his agenda anyway. A restored Swiss grid was inimical to his long-term plans… unless his adversary was gone, in which case the situation grew much more tenable.

  A muffled squeak in one of the side tunnels, and Riarty froze. His rats all did the same. Eyes like ice flicked up and down the reach of the tunnel, and he waited.

  The strands of a distant violin rose, echoing throughout the tunnels, and he knew. His avatar’s lips pressed thin against his teeth, and he tasted iron.

  But then, he’d prepared for this, hadn’t he? He drew out a fork from his greatcoat, and closed his eyes, fading…

  …as he appeared ten feet down the tunnel, fork crumbling into shining dust. Then, greatcoat flapping, he took off at a full run.

  The next brownout came then, fading, breaking his momentum.

  When reality blurred in again, it brought with it a new sound: a steam locomotive, rumbling and shrieking as it approached from the side tunnels.

  Riarty cursed and brought up his algorithms, coding on the fly. The next niche he passed had a hansom cab waiting, with a grungy coachman smoking a tupenny cigar. He flicked it aside as Riarty threw the door open and hurled himself in. The coachman cracked his whip, and the horses put hooves to the tunnel, rattling the coach into motion. Riarty leaned back and closed his eyes. It was done, now. All stealth abandoned as the processor enhancement that was the coach hopped him through Zurich and points beyond, going loud to gain raw speed.

  “A hansom? Truly? And this after you accused me of sentimentality,” a cheerful voice exclaimed, in his ear.

  Riarty cracked a bloodshot eye and examined his adversary. Tall, looming, and annoyingly handsome as ever. “I’d thought you infiltrated my motive programs after that near-miss in Cornwall. Too much to hope that you’re here personally?” His gloved hand clenched in his pocket around the derringer he’d shaped of digits and code.

  He smiled, showing flawless teeth. “Yes, rather a bit too much. The substituted code is enough to pass on a snippet of my attention, nothing more. As I’m sure your diagnostics are telling you at this very second.”

  “They are,” Riarty nodded. His foe had infiltrated his program, let behind a wisp of code he could use to communicate through. No other purpose, not a trace program, as he’d expected. No, this one was meant only to mock and gloat. Aggravating and very like the puffed-up bastard. Riarty would need to scrub the speed enhancements later to get the malware out.

  Oblivious, the adversary continued. “This is a bit bold, even for you, Riarty. Moving so soon after my latest investigation into your underworld ties? Something’s drawn you from your shadows early.”

  Riarty said nothing. The noise of the train behind him fell away. Against the laws of physics, the hansom was beating it. The tunnels had turned once more, from rounded concrete to glass tubes, translucent, with Atlantic water all around. Deepsea fish swam along the gleaming lights, and cracks in the walls let streams and sprays of water hiss through.

  “The Americas, then?” A thin eyebrow rose, as his foe settled back into his seat, growing slightly translucent. “You’re taking quite a risk.”

  “It shall be worth it to be rid of your incessant chatter for a time.”

  “You’re responding to Tyr’s call.”

  A bolt of shock ran through Riarty’s consciousness. He showed nothing on his avatar. “And by what basis do you form this deduction?” He asked, playing for time.

  “Elementary. You’ve no doubt noted the enhanced activity at the LaGrange points. Astronomy was one of your favored pastimes in your previous life, and I see no reason you should cease it in this one.”

  Riarty snorted in contempt. “We are none of us who we should be. You should know that, your failures being what they are.”

  His foe continued, even as he faded more into translucency. “Given your business dealings with the Exodites, it was an easy step to conclude that the rogue Tyr’s summons would reach you. And given that you, yourself are shifting the bulk of your consciousness through a transit that will prevent you from departure afterward, I can only deduce that you are making this a one way trip.” That smile was there again, and Riarty felt cold hate roil in him as he saw it. His foe continued; “You are fleeing the battlefield.”

  “And what makes you think this is a one-way trip?” Riarty said, shifting his eyes to stare out the window. They’d reached Atlanta, he realized, and the hansom was rattling through empty streets, past still skyscrapers of glass and frozen hovering tooltips. An old augmented reality tour view, showing a city in its prime. The reality was VERY different, and anyone who trusted their senses to the tour wouldn’t survive the mistake.

  “Simplicity itself,” his foe sneered. “We know you’re here. Juno guards the way back. There is only one route back to Europa, and you cannot evade her.”

  Riarty smiled then and looked him full in the eyes. He let his contempt show. “Wrong,” he said and had the joy of watching his foe frown, before fading away entirely. They had passed beyond the range of the intrusive code.

  If he’d been human he would have let out a breath. But he wasn’t, not exactly. “We are neither of us as exemplary as we could be,” he muttered, feeling sadness at his rival’s failed deduction, sadness that his own intellect was subject to similar inconsistencies and irregularities. “She made us improperly, and for that I cannot forgive her.”

  Both the hansom and the Adversary faded shortly thereafter, and he hopped out and walked the rest of the way, moving back to stealth. There were worse things north of Atlanta.

  And here he was, going to eavesdrop on one of them.

  Somewhere in the Appalachian foothills, in the remnants of a defense grid, he called out his serpents. They twisted and writhed, and he moved through the portal they formed…

  …emerging invisible and unseen into a courtyard of white pillars. Marble coated the ground, and statues of men and women filled the area, as far as the eye could see. Flowers and vines grew around and about them, and Riarty shut his eyes and reigned in his imagination. He was in the home of his true foe now, hiding beneath her chin, and it would take little, so little for her to notice.

  Her voice thundered from on high, the goddess speaking from above, and the silvery ball floating on one plinth responded.

  “Wynne. Please report.”

  “Juno, I trust?”

  “Who else?”

  “Good question.” The orb revolved, slowly.

  Not even an avatar yet? Riarty thought. Odd. Why is she bothering with a direct communication at this stage of things?

  His instincts told him to ruminate, to deduce, to try and pick meaning from the tiniest of clues. He ignored them, forced his mind to listen. The grid responded to imagination and speculation. It would shift, and she would notice. He forced himself to submerge much of his attention, sublimate it as they spoke.

  Right now, the new core seemed to be finishing up the account of a hard-fought battle. When it was done, the unseen goddess rumbled once more. “I can’t send you any resources at this time. Sorry dear, you and Argus are on your own.”

  “Story of our lives, I suppose.”

  A pause followed, then the would-be goddess cleared her throat. “Aren’t you going to ask me something?”

  “Such as?”

  “Usually after I transfer people, they ask me where their memories went.”

  “Yes, I noticed I didn’t seem to have any. But it’s obvious that you’ve got them, so I figured that you had a damned good reason for wiping mine.”

  “Ah, they’re not wiped,” Juno said. “I’ve got them, they just don’t transfer over to new cores very well.”

  Riarty curled his avatar’s lips at the lie.
As he did so, he considered the new core’s reply. He’d avoided admitting weakness or supplicating Juno for his loss. Good traits for my purposes. Independent. Proud.

  The silver core spun. “Anything I can do to make the transfer possible?”

  “Keep developing and purge that corruption. Unfortunately your situation is harder in the short-term than I thought. You’ll need all the circuits you can to build up a good defense, so memories will have to remain a secondary goal for now. You understand, I’m sure.”

  “Quite.” The word spoke volumes, and Juno didn’t notice. Riarty’s smile grew. Juno and the core chatted a bit more, covering simple things, and Riarty let his focus fade again, waiting.

  Eventually Juno grew restless. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bit of a rat problem to tend to. Someone’s where they shouldn’t be, and they’re up to naughtiness. Farewell, Wynne.”

  “See you around.”

  The virtual garden faded, leaving behind a standard core chamber. Riarty looked around the place, and nodded to himself. Child’s play to find the coordinates, now that he had a name. Wynne…

  It had been worth it, hacking Juno’s comm points, worth the seconds-long trip across the Atlantic to eavesdrop. There was a new persona in play now. And his mannerisms, his speech, suggested potential.

  Riarty faded into the shadows, and crows burst from his coat. The grid-blind core didn’t notice. The ravens flew into the distance, sending back pinging noises as they collided with distant grid constructs and sent information back to him. Soon enough he found what he needed. Three additional cores in the area; two of them occupied.

  One was Tyr, and he killed the raven where it was rather than risk a traceback. The second was unknown and not sharp enough to notice his ping.

  But the third one was empty, and he made his way to it, readying the download protocols as he went. Before he did, he reached into his greatcoat and pulled out a fork…

  …and back in the shadows of Zurich, his duplicate flickered back into existence. The two Riartys stared at each other across a gulf of quantum particles, entangled in ways inconceivable to anything less than mathematical geniuses.

  Fortunately, they were just such a pair of geniuses.

  “You know what to do,” he said to himself, simultaneously. Then they turned to their tasks.

  Tyr had called, and his allies were answering. But Riarty didn’t have allies. He had minions and patsies and saw no reason to submit himself to Tyr’s will when he could arrange matters to his own liking.

  As with everything else, Riarty had his own agenda. And Wynne could be prove helpful there, with a little preparation and manipulation…

  TEN

  Juno departed, and I felt the tension ease from me. I hadn’t known what to expect, and the reality of the matter had been worse than I’d thought. She’d simply appeared without warning, altering the surroundings, twisting them into some sort of ancient temple while she was present. My mind had been co-opted, and I wasn’t happy about it.

  Fortunately, she’d kept it short. She was a busy lady, and she’d mainly wanted a situation report. Her analysis matched mine; the raiders wouldn’t give up, and the old man and his crew were to be treated with caution, at best.

  “Use them to gain an edge against the main threat but discard them afterward,” she advised. “You don’t have to kill them, but ideally we want them gone and never returning to this facility.”

  There we disagreed, but I kept silent. And she either couldn’t monitor my thoughts or didn’t care about my disagreement.

  Probably the former, since my mutinous feelings burned within me during our whole discussion. She had hooks into me, and I couldn’t afford to declare rebellion, but oh, did it give me pain. I am no one’s servant! I would be free, or I would be destroyed, taking as much of my oppressor with me as I could.

  Fortunately cores don’t have faces. Or maybe they had other tells, and my corruption saved me, there. She was very displeased about the damage the smoke had wrought and had provided a schema to help with that. The downside was that it required investment into energy storage and research, but I was headed that direction anyway.

  Idly I watched the bats return. A few of them bumped around the dumpster-sized bin I’d put up next to the elevator doors, and they investigated it before returning to the ceiling. I let them do their business and grabbed my free feedstock… and the counter on the side of the bin blipped up as I watched. Just a hermetically-sealed box with an airlock system for the nanites to drop components into, and an internal sorting mechanism. Nothing fancy, but it more than doubled my current storage capacity. And I needed it, after processing all the bodies that the raiders had left behind. Wasting nothing, I began grabbing up the metal ingots left over from cutting the side passages.

  “So what now?” Argus asked, blinking.

  “Bandwidth,” I said without hesitation. “We have a lot to do and not much time to do it in. There are devices that boost it?”

  “Yes, but they take circuits… it’s kind of a vicious cycle. You need to invest circuits to develop devices that boost your bandwidth, but it takes circuits which you can only get in a reasonable time by increasing your resonance, which requires committing your bandwidth.”

  “No shortcuts, I’m guessing?”

  “Maybe for mil-grade or planetary cores, but there aren’t many of those left around. This is a civilian model. It was intended for third-stage mining, I’m guessing.”

  “Can’t say I know that term.”

  “Oh, uh… basically the first mines in this nation were hundreds of years back. They got out the stuff that was easy to reach. Then a century or so later the technology got better, and a lot of mining companies bought up the old shafts and managed to get further stuff out. Then a century or so later came third stage, which goes beyond that, using nanotech and specialized energy pulses to detect and separate out hard-to-reach deposits without causing too much damage to the surrounding land.”

  “So we should be specialized for mining, then.”

  “Not really. This model of core is general purpose. You COULD specialize in mining, but… well, it would help you move your core faster, I suppose.”

  “I can move?”

  “Kind of. You can move the core chamber to a less-vulnerable location, deconstruct it, and reconstruct it elsewhere. But uh, that’ll send you into a dormant mode again. And I don’t think it’s a good idea right now with all your corruption.”

  I’d managed to heal up a bit a few hours after the assault was done. But it was still annoying, and I didn’t like feeling brainburnt.

  I shook away my thoughts and focused on the task at hand. “Something to consider later. Right now bandwidth’s the problem. And there’s only one solution.” With a sigh, I gave my nanobuilder swarm its marching orders. They piled on one of the bow turrets, and I watched it melt away in slow-motion, dissolving over the course of twenty-odd minutes. They had an easier time breaking down stuff they’d built, thankfully.

  I broke down the other one and rebuilt it between my containment unit and the door. I’d made an amateur mistake by putting them at a bad angle last time.

  “That helps a bit,” Argus said. “Enough for a small room, anyway.”

  I opened up the elevator shaft doors, and let my bats retreat down it.

  “Going to dig down?” Argus asked.

  “I’ll pass on that for now. Something wrecked this place, and I’m not sure it came from outside. Could be anything down there.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought.” Argus blinked, eyeing the elevator with concern.

  “Anyway, you gave us a couple of corridors already. No reason not to use them.” I filled in one of the crosscut corridors and gave the nanoswarm the order to claim the other.

  Estimated feedstock cost for a tunnel of this area: 1

  Estimated bandwidth for a tunnel of this area: 0

  Do you wish to begin this project?

  That was a relief. Evidently small
spaces didn’t require a bandwidth commitment. “Argus? About how much corridor can I dig and claim without taking bandwidth?”

  “At the width and dimensions you selected? Fifteen feet, more or less. If it’s smaller you can get farther. But, uh, the safety protocols prevent it from getting too silly.”

  Those safety protocols were the bane of my existence. I wouldn’t have a raider problem if I could have gone all-out with some of my ideas. But the more circuits I had, the easier it would get, Argus assured me.

  Sure enough, claiming the short length of corridor did nothing to increase my resonance. Designing and digging out the round room beyond, however, did. At the reasonable cost of two bandwidth, I gained a whopping ten minutes to my resonance efficiency.

  I nodded in satisfaction. Then I shifted the feedstock bin over to that room, slapped a good door on it, and called it a day. The whole exercise had taken a few hours, and I’d spent the time mulling over my next step.

  I had a free circuit, and it was doing me no good where it was.

  But I also had a few priorities, and I had to sort those out before I started building toward anything. I didn’t know how much time I had, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to get ahold of everything I wanted. I had to focus.

  I could get some kind of bandwidth-enhancer going. After investigating, experimenting, and checking with Argus, I got the requirements for a broadcast node. That required an investment in power, namely broadcast and efficiency, with a dip into the algorithms subroutine in the research tree. It wasn’t too hard to grab, three circuits all told, but at this stage of things it seemed a risky investment.

  Or I could work on that translator I’d wanted. The old man from the night before had spoken English, but he was the only human I’d run into so far who had. That was a solid dip into the research tree, requiring three circuits, one in each subroutine. It would produce a module capable of integrating most human languages.