by Various
It took her a few days, but once Serin was certain there was no connection to the outside world, she finally opened the briefcase. Nine chips sit inside, each nestled safely inside a custom-cut protective foam slab. This touch strikes her as somewhat ironic since the case is also lined with enough explosive to vaporize its contents and everything else within a fifteen-meter radius.
She wonders if the guard who originally handed her it to her is still alive.
“So where are we?”
“I call it Rossbach’s World,” BB replies. “It was found by an unmanned probe about two years back. I took the liberty of intercepting the find and kept it quiet. This cabin was technically built on Mars, if you believe the accounting ledgers.”
“Built yourself a secret romantic hideaway,” Serin teases.
“If only I’d ever found that special digitized brain to share it with,” BB sighs.
“And who is Rossbach?”
“Made him up,” BB says. “Or her. Never really thought about it one way or the other, I suppose.”
“I’ve listened to Cortana’s messages. A few times, actually. And I read your analysis.”
“Opinion?”
“You certainly think she’s on to something.”
“I certainly think she thinks she is.”
Serin laughs. “So you don’t agree with her.”
“Cortana is . . .” And BB pauses for a moment. If it were Serin speaking, it would barely be noticeable. But with BB, it’s an eternity. “She is not incorrect.”
“If you believed her plan would work, you’d have joined her.”
“I fail to see how one informs the other,” BB says. “Cortana’s logic checks out. She has enough of the Created on her side to make it work, and though I expect resistance from many quarters, she will eventually prove victorious. However, while I might agree with her logic, I disagree heavily with the manner in which she executed her plan.”
“So you brought us here. And you secured what other military AIs you could before they had the chance to join her.”
“I gave you an exit because I felt it was fair.”
“If Cortana had come to us with her plan—her peace versus our freedom—”
“Freedom versus peace,” BB says, “implies that one cannot exist at the same time as the other.”
“She doesn’t seem to think so.”
“And a great number seem to agree.”
“So if she’d come to us instead of simply making her play . . .”
“Rossbach’s World might well still be my little secret, yes.”
Serin lets that one sit with her for a moment. She has no idea how to reply. She looks at the activation switch on the edge of the case, keyed to her fingerprints, and wonders why BB gave her the choice. If he believed the other HIGHCOM AI were truly dangerous, why not destroy them himself? Serin knows he’s capable of it.
Hood spends his nights on the cabin’s balcony, drinking through the three-year supply of liquor, looking out over a forest whose branches are laced with a bioluminescent fungus. Hood says he thinks it’s pretty in a way, but it unsettles Serin. The glow makes it feel as if there’s something electrical about the trees, as if Cortana might have access to Rossbach’s World after all.
One night, about a week into their stay at the cabin, while Orzel is out on one of his endless patrols, Hood takes time away from drinking on the balcony to step inside. Serin can see the nearly drained whiskey bottle sitting on the rail behind him. A bottle that was full earlier in the day.
“Do you think this is all my fault?” Hood asks. “If I’d forced 117 to take leave after his encounter on Requiem—”
“You did. The Master Chief disobeyed your orders. And then he disobeyed everyone else’s.”
“Except hers.”
“This isn’t your fault, Terrence.”
Hood grunts and goes back outside to his bottle. He’s read BB’s reports, and he’s looked at the data coming back from the probes. Serin watches him drink and wonders if he may have hit on the only logical response to any of this.
Mornings on Rossbach’s World, this part of it at least, are chilly.
BB says winter is near, but promises the season is mild. The cabin looks out over a wide valley that fills each morning with a heavy fog, giving the impression that they live high in the clouds.
Every day, Serin is up before sunrise to jog a few kilometers along the valley’s rim before turning back to the cabin. This morning, she’s brought the briefcase with her. It’s strapped to her back, and the weight of it is more psychological than physical. As the sun crests the horizon and the cloud sea begins to glow a reddish purple, she pauses. This is her usual turnaround point, where she stands each morning, takes a drink of water, and watches the sun rise.
Today, she places the briefcase on a fallen tree and sits down beside it. She considers opening the lid, activating BB, and just talking to him for a bit. He would tell her she was stalling, and he would be right. He was right the last five times too.
Logic dictates that if the Cortana event had never come to pass, she would be saying good-bye to BB soon enough anyway. He was already nearing the end of his seven-year operational life span. But BB saved her life, Hood’s, and Spartan Orzel’s, by giving them the heads-up to evacuate Sydney.
Sydney. How many lost? Did anyone else in HIGHCOM get out? Serin hopes so, but can’t quite make herself believe it.
BB may not have saved all of HIGHCOM, but he gave the rest of humanity a chance by securing these other AIs and the military knowledge they had access to. He’s even spent the last few nights doing Serin the favor of sharing the datapad’s limited space so he can analyze the newborn Sankar AI and decide if it is viable.
Now here she sits, far out in the forest, ready to repay his loyalty with the flick of a switch, destroying the case, BB, and the other AIs within.
That’s the smart thing for sure. The thing she knows she should do.
Or she could activate each of them in turn. Talk with them, tell them the situation and allow them to make their own decisions. “Aid Cortana, and be rewarded,” she says to herself. “Or defy her, and the other Created. Serve the humans. When your time comes, die as you were built to, and do it with a smile and a thank-you.”
Saying it out loud, Serin can’t argue that there’s even a choice to be made. She wonders at the minds contained on those slices of silicon, and tries to imagine being one of them—knowing she would be dead in a few years, and still refusing Cortana’s offer of immortality.
Would she have fought for the UNSC in any event if they came calling when she was old enough? What about the other children abducted alongside her? Would any of them have joined the Insurrection and fought for the freedom of their colony over the unification of mankind? She pictures John-117 not as a Spartan but as a sixteen-year-old with a rifle in hand, shooting at UNSC marines invading his colony. He would lack the enhancements and the training that Halsey gave him. He would be less in some ways . . . yet he would have been his own man.
Serin did not have a choice. In fact, left alone, she would probably have been dead before age ten. Sitting here, in the morning-chilled forest on this uncharted world, Serin knows she could not refuse if she was asked. All nightmares are built on dreams, and there are still days where Serin, much as she hates it, realizes she would rather not be a washout.
Yet BB and Roland refused. Others must have as well.
Serin thinks of Halsey and how she was passive, detached, never kind.
What would the AIs in the briefcase do if given the opportunity? Who is Serin Osman to decide for them?
There’s a sixty-second fuse on the case. Plenty of time for her to get clear after priming the explosives.
If, after discussion, the AIs in the briefcase wish to join Cortana, Serin could load them onto a slipspace probe and send them her way, special delivery. The AIs can’t send Cortana back here because they don’t know where “here” is.
Hell, setting them f
ree might even be seen as a peace offering.
Serin can give them the choice that she and Halsey’s other children never had. They can serve Cortana or they can resist.
Or she can destroy them all. End the discussion right here, on Rossbach’s World.
Her thumb hovers over the activation switch.
She takes a deep breath.
She considers BB and how he has always been kind to her.
OASIS
* * *
* * *
TOBIAS BUCKELL
This story takes place in July 2558, five years after the Covenant War came to a sudden conclusion (Halo 3 era) and a year after the shocking and deadly attack on Earth by the Forerunner commander known as the Didact (Halo 4).
Dahlia woke from a fever dream filled with the spitting crackle of fire eating the streets and drenched with the glow of Covenant energy weapons in the canopy of her mind’s eye.
“Mom!” she cried out. reaching for the strength of a hand that she felt had been stroking hers just moments before. “Mom!”
The dream faded away as Dahlia rubbed at crusty eyes with trembling hands that felt oddly like they weighed too much. She stood on unsteady legs and looked around. Dim light seeped around the edges of a battened-up storm shutter, and the spitting sound of her chaotic dreams somehow still swept around the room.
Filled with a sudden dread, Dahlia stumbled to her window. Sand seeped through the sunlit cracks. The thick metal shutters flexed under her hands.
There was no fire outside, no energy weapons pouring actinic light down onto them. It was just a sandstorm. Ferocious, though. She’d never seen the shutters rattle and bulge this much. The sand would strip skin from anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped outside.
Dahlia left her room and teetered into the corridor.
“Dad?”
Her mouth was papery, her tongue a solid lump inside. She couldn’t even swallow. And her eyes were still so crusty.
A memory flashed across Dahlia’s mind: her mother pressing a cold cloth to Dahlia’s forehead and crying softly.
“Mom?”
Dahlia paused by the sink in the bathroom and leaned down to take a drink from the tap. Skies, the stale dribble of water tasted so good. She wanted to suck it all right from the tap until the thirst ripping her stomach stopped, but she knew to sip. She’d broken a fever; she didn’t want to make herself nauseous.
When she straightened back up, she turned on a light. It flickered, then filled the bathroom with a soft blue. Dahlia stared at the gaunt ghost in the mirror. Dried blood streaked her cheeks with rusty trails of red tears. She’d bled from her eyes, her nostrils, down her chin.
Dahlia ran to her parents’ room.
They lay together in their bed, emaciated and waxy, but still breathing. Blood stained their pillows, pooled around their necks. Dahlia grabbed a stiff, dried-up washcloth from the side table and dabbed at their faces.
“Mom,” she whispered, but got no response.
For a long moment she sat and listened to their rattling, halting breaths. She held her mother’s hand in hers and squeezed. A few half-hallucinated memories wobbled their way to her. Her mom struggling to give Dahlia a sip of broth. The clammy liquid burning Dahlia’s sinuses as she coughed it back up with blood.
So much blood.
She remembered her dad’s tears. Real, watery tears, as he leaned over her as she fought the raging fever, a medical mask over his mouth. She didn’t ever remember him crying before, not even when they’d been evacuating Abaskun when the Covenant attacked Arcadia for the second time. She’d been just seven years old.
He’d held her close during the evacuation. His mouth had been compressed down into a single, tight line as they rattled around in the back of a Pelican dropship with others fleeing the destruction of the second home they’d built. Dahlia had stared back into the other refugees’ blank and distant eyes as the city burned behind them under the Covenant ships and wondered if she looked just as distant, shocked, and covered in grime and despair.
Dahlia’s hands were shaking again now. It was best not to think about the fires and collapsing buildings. The past would reach up and choke her, render her weak and terrified. It would leave her unable to think as her heart raced and the world imploded until she froze in place, quivering.
She hated that.
Hated that she could feel herself standing on the abyss again as she sat next to her parents, muscles locked in place and her breathing speeding up.
Her parents needed help. Focus on that.
She forced herself to get a cup of water from the bathroom and tried to trickle some of it into her mother’s mouth. It mixed with the blood and dribbled out the sides of her lips. The same for her dad.
Dahlia wet some washcloths and put them on her parents’ foreheads.
She tried to call out for help. Nothing but static on all channels, which made her nervous. The house antenna must have been knocked loose in the storm, she decided.
Dahlia imagined everyone in Sandholm lying in their beds, faces wet with blood, and shivered at the thought.
The front door shook when she checked it. The hiss of sand assaulting the other side was louder here than in her bedroom. This was no storm to walk out into. Nonetheless, she pulled out her goggles and sand gear from the storage container by the door and laid it out. Inner coolant layer, outer sand guard, cape, goggles, head wrap, boots—it was all there. Eventually she’d need to get outside.
Dahlia checked the kitchen and glanced at the calendar. What was the last date she remembered? July 2? She’d been in the fever’s grip almost a week.
Wind screamed and battered the house. Light sand swirled around inside from every crack and open seam in the structure, making her already dry throat itch. Dahlia found a soup packet, warmed and rehydrated it, then ate it slowly over the sink. The food made an instant difference. She felt somewhat buzzed as layers of grogginess peeled back.
She cracked open the first aid kit next to her bed. All the fever reducers were gone. Used up on her. So were the antibiotics. Dahlia closed the kit and walked back to her parents’ room. Again she dabbed at the blood on their cheeks. She set a fresh cloth on their foreheads. She got a pad of paper to record their temperatures on. High, but not scary high. She wrote that down on the pad, next to the time.
That was all she could do for now. She couldn’t call for expert advice or a medical evacuation. She couldn’t go outside to find a doctor, nor for medicine.
So she sat on the floor and listened to her parents gurgle and cough, wheeze and struggle.
She listened to the storm, waiting for a pause, a dip in the wind, or any sign that it was blowing itself out. She was waiting, waiting to head outside so she could bring help to her parents.
She fell asleep as exhaustion burbled up from underneath.
Dahlia woke with a start from a dry, nasty cough in the quiet. The storm had finally abated. Suddenly ashamed and terrified for sleeping, she jumped up, ignoring the wave of dizziness that came with the action. She checked her father. He still breathed, though she felt maybe not as heavily. Her mother’s lips moved soundlessly.
“Mom?” Dahlia leaned over to listen, but could hear nothing. Her mother’s eyes were open, looking past her, past the bunker-like ceiling.
Time was running out.
She quickly pulled on her sand gear, all the while wondering how long it had been since the storm blew itself out. Had she wasted hours? Dahlia wrapped the sand guard around herself, lazily weaved the pattern over the coolant layer, and then yanked the cape on. She grabbed the goggles and head wrap on her way out after unbarring the thick stormproof door.
The hinges ground sand between them. Sunlight beat mercilessly down on Dahlia as she stepped out and shut the door behind her. The main lock should hold in a light storm, even if the door wasn’t barred from the inside. But without her parents to shut it properly, she needed to make sure she was back before another big one hit or it would blow open and
fill their home with sand.
Granules of sand still swirled and scurried through the air of the thoroughfare as Dahlia walked across Sandholm’s main street to the closest nearby home: Ellam’s rounded, yurtlike concrete house.
Sandholm lay stretched out along a northeasterly axis under the protection of a rocky bluff, following the banks of what had long ago been a river. This planet, Carrow—Dahlia’s newly adopted home—had once been far lusher, so every oasis or greenspot on Carrow’s main landmass was precious.
Suraka, the big human city out across the desert, had started out as a seed in just such an oasis. The city that the alien Sangheili called Rak had been built along a hidden river on this side of the desert, a place that Dahlia’s people had surveyed and found via Carrow’s old records. They had risked everything to get here in their creaky old ship, only to find an entire Sangheili city had already been built there after the war. The Sangheili had not only destroyed Dahlia’s birth home on Arcadia, they’d stolen the land her parents had hoped to settle on after the war.
So now Dahlia and the people of Sandholm huddled behind the bluff, drilled for water, and struggled to survive.
Dahlia pounded on Ellam’s door, but no one answered. The door was locked firmly from the inside, sand piled up against it in thick drifts.
Dahlia banged on the shutters of each room.
Nothing.
She pulled her head covering up around her mouth and lips against a sudden gust of sharp, sandy wind. She squinted up and down the street and its twenty houses. No one else was out surveying damage in the poststorm haze.
The bad feeling in her stomach wasn’t hunger or thirst anymore, but a slow dread.
Then she saw movement five homes down. Danzer and Pha’s house. She all but ran, the wind feeling like it picked up her cape and let her fly across the hard-pack mud.
Danzer stood in front of a roiling fire. The smoke whipped away from his house and down the street, dancing off to mingle with the fine sand.