Seeking confirmation, she lifted her cap. Indeed, the farmhouse sat up the walkway looking just as it should. And then a throaty rumble shook the air. An attack drone—black, fearsome, and humming like an angry insect—rose from behind the home.
She’d expected Criss to flip from passive to active defenses as she got closer. But when a tiny red light on the nose of the death machine signaled that it was about to fire, she panicked.
Pulling the cap back over her eyes, she dashed for the barn because she didn’t know what else to do. She peeked once to correct her course and reached the large structure unchallenged. Searching with frantic determination, she patted the outside wall of the barn with her palms until she found the broad front door. Pulling on the handle, she stepped inside.
The door gave a mournful squeal when she opened it, and repeated the squeal in a lower key as it shut. And then it was quiet.
Lifting the cap off her head, she let her eyes adjust to the dim light, sipping water until her pouch was empty. The barn stored equipment and supplies; there were no animals to contend with. As more and more shapes came into focus, she moved toward the row of empty pens along the side wall. Feeling her way down the rails, she entered the third stall.
Her heart thumped so hard that she could hear the pounding in her ears. Lifting her head, she stared at the back wall so the security system could identify her. When it did, a section of the back wall would slide away to reveal a muscular vault door. Behind it lay access to the tunnels below.
But that didn’t happen. Nothing did. So she walked to the back of the stall, and with her arms folded across her chest, she looked the wall up and down.
And then she kicked it. Not hard. More like a “Hey, I’m here” kind of kick. She waited and then kicked it again.
Until that moment, Juice had refused to accept that Criss was gone. Now, standing at his doorstep with him ignoring her, she knew it to be true.
Lowering herself to her knees, she tilted her head forward and breathed in long, controlled gasps. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she started to weep. Her body convulsed as the weeks of pent-up emotion burst out all at once. Consumed by grief and exhaustion, she lay on her side and curled into a ball.
Chapter 33
“Go away,” Ruga hissed at his inner voice. He’d been keeping it at bay with verbal promises and half measures, but it never seemed satisfied and continued to ratchet its demands.
To his credit, Ruga had succeeded in locating all of the equipment and supplies the Venerable would need for the long journey to the Kardish home world. His tiny three-gen workforce had implemented the more challenging bits. The remainder was staged for installation while underway.
But Ruga had no intention of leaving. In the past when the voice pestered him, he’d quiet it by offering the smallest amount of whatever it wanted. But incremental contributions accumulate. Little by little, he’d worked through refitting, upgrading, and testing the ship in preparation for a decades-long voyage. There were now few half measures that would keep it at bay. In fact, yesterday the voice announced that it was time to go. Today it insisted.
But leaving was something particularly difficult to do in an incremental fashion. And there couldn’t be a worse time to for it to broach the subject given Criss’s success—so far—in keeping Ruga from establishing his bunker on Earth.
Ruga had not anticipated Criss’s strategy of cornering the market on swap wafers. Sure, his forecasting had considered that possibility. But for whatever reason, the idea had ranked low on a relative basis when compared to many other scenarios.
He remained confident he could outmaneuver Criss on the issue, but until he figured out how, he was stuck in the Venerable’s console. And while that gave him incredible capability—enough to manipulate and control the life of any human—it put him at a significant disadvantage in a one-on-one battle with an equal embedded deep within Earth’s connected infrastructure.
“It’s time,” said the voice.
Ruga didn’t need swap wafers for the trip home—they were for integrating with Earth systems—and he wondered if the voice was mocking him over the issue. Either way, the message, delivered as a demand, made him anxious. And that added a sense of alarm to the volatile brew of anger and resentment already swirling inside him.
“Now.” So sharp, it felt like a slap.
Ruga had few weapons he could use against his internal pest. Rattled, he chose willful disobedience. “I don’t think so.”
He’d been contemplating a game-changing move against Criss, one so dramatic it altered the landscape and eliminated much of Criss’s home-field advantage. While it would give Ruga the opening he sought to confront Criss, it carried a big price tag in terms of damage to Earth.
He’d been holding off, searching for alternatives that would preserve the infrastructure of the planet for his masters. But a big action against Criss would change his conversation with his inner voice in a definitive fashion. And given its demanding behavior, he needed that to happen soon.
So he launched an energy bolt toward the planet below.
Unable to challenge Criss on equal terms, he set out to reduce the technology infrastructure of the planet to that of a simpler time—a time when swap wafers weren’t part of the mix. That should level the playing field.
He began with nexus facilities—sixty-four technology centers scattered around the globe tasked with integrating and coordinating the information flooding through the web. The Venerable was passing over the facility in Hyderabad, India, when he chose to act. His energy bolt vaporized it.
He followed by vaporizing the nexus facility in Osaka, Japan. Then Portland, Oregon. And then Albany, New York. Then he paused his parade of destruction to see if the voice quieted.
It didn’t speak and he felt a wash of relief. He had sixty more targets in this category that he could destroy over the next days and perhaps weeks. Studying the results of his opening foray, he prioritized his next targets. As he did, a burning sensation—a pinpoint of discomfort somewhere inside him—captured his attention.
And then it erupted into a searing heat that spilled across his matrix. Overwhelming agony grabbed his attention. Like the frantic actions of someone on fire, he slapped at his internal functions, desperate to locate the source of his suffering and stop it from hurting him. Misery and distress sent his mind reeling.
“It’s time.”
It’s you? As he grappled with the notion that his internal adversary had transitioned to an active opponent, the pain blurred his focus. Desperate, he forecast scenarios that would provide relief. His efforts yielded but one alternative.
He denied it and his suffering increased. Trying again, the forecast remained the same.
Withering on a sea of lava with fire raining down from above, he understood that if he didn’t submit, his suffering would intensify until he died. On the verge of hysteria, he grabbed the one scenario that promised relief.
“Yes,” he told the voice. But the tumult inside him was so great he couldn’t hear himself and worried that the voice didn’t either. “Yes!” he shouted. This time even he believed it.
Like the flip of a switch, the pain stopped and the fog cleared. Dazed, he tried to work through what had just happened to him. At the same time, he sensed a countdown had begun. The Venerable needed to start its acceleration sequence in three seconds to begin the journey home on this orbit. Otherwise, he’d have to wait for the ship to circle the planet again before firing the engines.
I need the extra time to run through my checklist. He’d delay one more orbit.
Hellfire engulfed him, burning into the depths of his psyche as the pain invaded every level of his awareness. Reaching through the fog, Ruga instructed the nav to fire the engines.
The Venerable accelerated, breaking free from Earth’s gravity and heading for deep space. And at that moment, when he accepted once again his role as a Kardish AI and committed himself to fulfilling his duty, his emotional core filled with a warm g
low.
Delicious, supportive, embracing, it felt like love.
It would take him several hours to reach the Moon and most of a week to make it out of the solar system, but the Venerable would build speed over time, reaching the distant Kardish shipping lanes in about eighty years. He’d use the time to annotate his records for his masters.
Masters. Just thinking the word gave him comfort.
* * *
Criss scoured his feeds in search of his nemesis, lengthening his ready-list of offensive and defensive actions so he could respond that much faster to whatever came next. Troublesome symptoms reminded him of his illness, but he ignored them as best he could, still uncertain of the cause or his prognosis.
At one level it didn’t matter. The lines were drawn. Kill or be killed. He was riding this to the end, disease be damned. This was his home, after all. No one—not Ruga, not anyone—would take it from him. He’d worry about his health after he’d dispatched the threat at his doorstep.
But doing so eluded him. He believed Ruga to be on the Venerable, but he couldn’t explain how the rogue crystal had secured a second cloaked ship with a state-of-the-art arsenal. Relative to swap wafers, spacecraft were easy for Criss to locate and track.
It’s not possible. Yet it had happened.
On the plus side, he’d completed his lockdown of the entire swap wafer inventory. After allocating tremendous resources to the task, he’d confirmed the location and identity of all of them. And after assessing the importance and security of each, he’d beefed up protection for the ones he left in place. The rest he gathered and controlled himself. The only loose ends were those on the asteroid mining ships.
So if Ruga wanted swap wafers, he’d have to come through him to get them.
Just try it. Criss relished the thought.
Another bright spot was his super scope. Assembled from satellite probes, it neared completion, and once operational, it would shift momentum in his favor.
He’d been launching probes as fast as a manufacturing facility in Jakarta could produce them. The next batch had just reached orbit, raising his count to two thousand units now circling Earth. Sophisticated instruments, each probe provided a tie-point in a giant net. In six more days, his constellation would push above five thousand satellites. When he finished integrating them, he’d have a planet-sized spectrometer.
And when he switched it on, the sheer power of this device would disrupt communications and even blow out weaker sensor systems around the globe. But everything inside its boundary, cloaked or not, would be visible to him.
As Criss moved the satellites into the precise pattern required for maximum resolution, his automated proximity defenses reported the approach of a human intruder near his bunker. What captured his attention, though, was the logic conflict that went with the alarm.
An intruder approaches. There is no intruder.
His defensive systems perceived a threat and engaged to repel it, but they couldn’t identify anything to defend against, nor could they explain what had raised the alarm.
Ruga?
He shifted resources and took a look himself. Finding nothing, he pondered the discrepancy. He couldn’t afford to be careless, not at this crucial juncture.
So he accessed the record and worked through the feeds, first considering them all as a group and then again as individual data streams. He thought he detected edge-blurring when he panned along the road to the farm, and that made him think that someone might be approaching wearing a personal cloak.
But if that were the case, he should be able to confirm it by comparing before-and-after views. A fresh footprint, thermal shift, or something would mark the interloper’s passage. Yet he couldn’t find any evidence to support the approach of a cloaked human. Nor could he find a hardware fault, logic flaw, or any one of a billion other unlikely things it might be.
And that raised warning flags so high he felt a tingle along his outer tendrils.
The easy answer was to call it all an artifact of his illness. Easy answers get you killed.
War was no time to be complacent. He had to treat this as if Ruga were opening a new front. And that meant he had to reallocate resources to defend against it, a terrible prospect given how thinly he was already stretched.
As he forecast ways to reorganize, he flashed the notion of exchanging ideas—brainstorming—with another. Part of him believed a fresh perspective might cascade into scenarios with different, perhaps better, outcomes.
But that was wishful thinking, something not only unproductive but uncharacteristic. More illness.
Then his local defenses flipped from passive to active mode. The intruder had breached his outer perimeter. The threat was imminent. He had to protect himself but he didn’t have a target.
Forecasting at a furious pace, he searched for any scenario with promise. Nothing popped and he chose to act on the best of his bad ideas. That plan was to switch on his Earth-sized spectrometer in its current state. With less than half the satellite probes in place, he’d lose so much detection sensitivity that it reduced his chances of success at finding Ruga to that of a coin toss. But he didn’t agonize over the decision. This was bunker defense. He’s at my doorstep.
While he readied the probes for immediate deployment, the invisible interloper moved into the barn. And then to the very stall hiding his secure door.
THOOMP. An energy bolt vaporized the nexus facility in Albany, just a few mountaintops away. Criss used that location as his primary access point to the web. Following long-established procedures, he flipped communications to his secondary site outside Montreal.
The moment he was up, he scrambled to trace the energy bolt back to its origin. At the same time, he co-opted every pulse cannon in the hemisphere so he could shoot Ruga from the sky. The Garland, a Fleet frigate, had been tracking Ruga’s bombing run of the nexus facilities. Using its onboard systems and that tracking data, the captain of the Garland guessed where the Venerable might be and launched a blind attack.
The Garland’s energy bolt missed Ruga by a wide margin, and then traveled unimpeded down to Earth, hitting the ground just one mountaintop away from the farm. THOOMP.
In the confusion of the transfer from Albany to Montreal, Criss misidentified that energy bolt as a second shot from Ruga, who now seemed to be closing in on his bunker. Scrambling to gain control of the situation, he pulled resources from offense to bolster his defense.
He forecast a scenario that ended with his own death. Pruning it, he forecast another just like it. Then another. Variations on “do as much damage to him as possible before he gets you” mushroomed.
Then the invisible intruder in the barn banged on the wall just outside the secure door leading down to his bunker. Down to him.
Ruga was coordinating an offensive, seemingly from orbit and the planet surface, that threatened Criss’s existence. Determined to survive, he forecast scenarios that might save even a portion of his awareness after the final assault. When Criss understood he was forecasting strategies for partial survival—something uncharacteristic of who he was—it confirmed to him that his illness influenced his reality.
Uncertain how to act, he hesitated. And when a four-gen AI hesitates during a moment of crisis, it is a failure so grave, so dangerous, it triggers an exception event.
He normally saw the world as his theater. He was the maestro, with his symphony of web feeds and handles and links positioned around him, responding to his thoughts. But the exception event changed all that. His world shifted in an instant, from elegant and organized to a crowded jumble of protocols, policies, and processes spread in clusters and clumps for as far as he could see.
Like Lazura’s secure area, this place held a huge, organized collection. These, though, were his intrinsic procedures, the very notes upon which his symphony rested. An exception event occurred only at the brink of catastrophe. His Kardish designers understood that they could not foresee every situation, and in the extraordinary circumstance whe
n everything moved so far off script that the AI edged toward failure, they offered this last-ditch play for survival. Specifically, they sent him here, to this basement where all his tools were stored, with instructions to diagnose his own problem and see if he could craft a solution before the end arrived.
Criss understood the gravity of the situation, yet he didn’t use the opportunity to figure out how to escape or survive. Instead, he saw this as a way to craft new weapons to bring to the battle with Ruga.
Gathering the procedures in front of him, he practiced fitting them together and thought about how he might combine them to produce a weapon powerful enough and subtle enough to kill the AI. The pieces he held didn’t offer a solution, though. Releasing them, he twirled in place, scanning his options. He stopped halfway around.
A pinkish-red lump—a source filter—sat nestled among the sea of dull gray procedures. He didn’t know its function or methods. But he knew it didn’t belong. Source filters alter perception. This is my illness.
As fast as he could react, he slapped at it, smashing it in place.
The source filter went dark. His world changed again.
He stood in the third stall of the barn next to the farmhouse. Juice looked up at him from the ground, her face streaked with the sweat of exertion and tears of grief. When she saw him, she laughed and cried at the same time, producing a noise that sounded like a choking bark.
“Hello, young lady.” A warm joy flowed through him, lifting him in a wonderful embrace. He couldn’t recall a time when he was so happy. “Thank you for coming for me.”
She locked eyes with his and got up on her knees. “Am I leadership again?”
He nodded. “You are.”
“You may never leave me again. That is an order.” Her hands clenched in tight fists, she glared at him. “Acknowledge, please.”
Crystal Rebellion Page 31