Proxima Centauri - Hunt for the Lost AIs
Page 32
It seems this one has forgotten she’s on a tether.
He plucked it once, as a reminder. She sucked in a breath, bowing her body in as if she’d been punched. Which, in a way, she had.
“You forget who holds the power here, Frida.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “And you forget our mutual goal: complete primacy over this system. Get in my way, and AI or no, I will end your existence.”
She glared back at him but remained silent.
“Tell me what communication you’ve received from Chinquapin and the habitat. Is there still no indication they’re aware of my presence?”
She paused briefly, a rebellious glint in her eye, but as he raised one hand, she capitulated and shook her head.
“No. Every message from Proxima leading up to the teams’ missions was specific to the whereabouts of the seven AIs from the New Saint Louis that we came here to recover.” She shrugged. “I haven’t heard anything from El Dorado for over two months.”
“Very well. The ship will dock in a matter of hours. I will disembark with my human at that time, and you will remain onboard, monitoring all communication for news of me. Who knows?” He allowed his visage a brief smile. “If all goes well, you will have your freedom soon. Perhaps even a human of your own, a mule to transport you wherever you wish to go.”
Ignoring her sour look, he tossed her out of the expanse, then ran a cursory search of public feeds being broadcast from the C-47 that were now updating in thirty-second intervals, confirming that there were no reports of a rogue AI.
Soon, the communications lag wouldn’t be noticeable—at least, not to humans.
He was mere hours away from inserting his own nano into the habitat and using the unique genius inherited from his progenitor and the skills he’d lifted from that Norden AI’s backup to physically remap its systems and bend its very structure and substrate to his control. A part of him wished he could share this with Ethan; no one but another neuroscientist would be able to truly comprehend the intricacy of the virtuoso solo he was about to play.
Habitats were so much easier to hack than a planetary ring. Of necessity, planetary rings were segmented, and their sheer size made infiltration an order of magnitude more difficult.
He would begin by dropping a few well-placed packets of nano at the dock. This customs area they would be transiting would, he was sure, have sufficient throughput to the habitat itself for him to begin mapping its core systems.
His thoughts returned to the fictional sleight-of-hand he had portrayed back in the lab. Staging Ethan’s death had been a stroke of brilliance; it had thrown the investigators off any possible trail that might have led back to his creation.
Might he not do more of the same here? He accessed the Speedwell’s ships’ stores and pulled up the roster of mech frames they had in storage.
Yes, that one will do nicely for my purposes. He sent a priority command to Frida to have it delivered to Judith’s quarters.
Excitement shot through him as he considered how near he was to his goals. Early in the journey, Prime had had the presence of mind to realize that he would need to alter his own neural code while onboard the ship, or risk exposure. It had been surprisingly difficult to do so—not that he wasn’t skilled enough to accomplish such a thing, he just abhorred attenuating himself.
Now, so close to his goal, he found it increasingly difficult to suppress what remained of the sociopathic nature Lilith had programmed into him. He was ready to reverse the code, to embrace the darkness again. He craved it.
Prime seethed with resentment when he considered the inconveniences Lysander had forced upon him when he had been made to flee; the prime minister would be made to pay.
Those thoughts conjured up the human of Lysander’s that he had complete control over. He reached out, accessing the shackling collar embedded into Judith’s brainstem, tracing the filaments he’d used in lieu of his own neural pathways paralleling hers, as they might have had he been normally embedded with his current meat-suit.
He mentally fingered the neural circuit in her parabrachial nucleus, the one that toggled between the sensations of hunger and inflammatory pain. Humans were so odd; in an AI, two such differing sensations would not be paired together in a coded sequence. In a human, they were: toggle the switch one way, induce the sensation of hunger; toggle it the other way, inflamed joints.
He accessed the optics in Judith’s room and saw her seated on the cabin’s bed, her belongings scattered around her as she packed. Not that he needed to; he could use her own organic optics just fine, but there was something appealing about recording what he was about to do…from an outside perspective.
He reached for the circuit in her parabrachial nucleus and tweaked it, reveling in the sight of the woman as she doubled over, her belly cramping in simulated starvation.
Reaching out to the circuit once more, he tweaked it in the opposite direction, and she rocked her body side to side in an effort to escape the intense aching feeling her brain insisted her joints now felt.
She began to moan in pain, and he seized control of her diaphragm and vocal cords, stifling the sounds.
Judith’s eyes, clenched tightly in pain, now opened wide in shock. “Ethan?” she gasped. “But you’re dead…How…? You—you’re hurting me—”
“Yes,” he sent his voice projecting from the room’s speakers. “And it feels magnificent. You have no idea, my dear, how very long I’ve waited for this.”
He laughed as tears streamed down her face, her eyes staring in disbelief and betrayal.
This never gets old….
His internal chrono warned him he had reached the end of his allotted playtime. If he wanted to be able to fully erase her short-term memories, to reintroduce anterograde amnesia, he would need to release her now and perform a memory flush on her brain.
He’d been doing this periodically throughout the ten-month journey, indulging himself each time his control had threatened to slip and reveal his presence on the ship. Stealing a few quality moments with Judith from time to time had kept his hunger at bay. In the ten months he’d been locked up and forced into hiding, it was the one indulgence he’d permitted himself when his rage welled up inside and he just had to sate his cravings.
He manipulated her shackles once more, rendering her unconscious as he focused his concentration on the delicate job of inducing her brain into a state of forgetfulness. As that program ran its course, he conducted a cursory scan of the female’s condition, and then initiated a basic mednano program that would complete just as the ship docked with the spindle.
She must look whole…at least until they had been on the C-47 Spire long enough for him to seed the habitat’s net with his own nano and firmly establish control. Then…
Then, he would really have some fun.
TURN AND BURN
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Approaching C-47 Nearspace
REGION: Proxima Centauri System
Jason’s hands flew over the Eidolon’s nav holo, rechecking the information as it updated every few seconds. It displayed a plot showing the course he’d been cleared to fly; next to his green line was the vector the Sable Wind had been assigned. Both ships were on an expedited, straight-in approach to the military side of the dock.
The comm holo lit up with a split image—one from the Sable Wind, the other from the habitat. Tobias’s avatar hovered next to a feed that showed Jason’s father with one of the C-47’s council members.
Jason nodded to Bonnie as she raised her hand in hello; he’d known the woman since he was a child.
“You’re cleared to apprehend your suspect, Commodore Eric,” Bonnie informed them. “We’ve reinstated Tobias’s rank in the Habitat Armed Forces, temporarily; Captain Tobias will be your liaison.”
Jason and his father exchanged a brief glance, and he knew that the elder Andrews was t
hinking the same thing he was. Tobias had dutifully served his required tour with the habitat when he had first arrived in Proxima after the Sentience Wars, but had resigned after the minimum three-year tour. He’d told them he’d seen enough war as a Weapon Born and was happy to see that part of his life come to an end.
Cracking AI trafficking rings and bringing rogue AIs to justice were in a different class, as was the more informal and close-knit spec-op team they had formed.
Tobias’s avatar gave a curt nod, betraying none of his inner thoughts.
A diagram of the dock’s landing pads and their associated gates in the Outsystem Terminal area replaced Tobias’s avatar. The Weapon Born highlighted the far end of the terminal where it abutted the military operations area. Next, he tagged the three berths in the MOA where the Icarus-class shuttles and the fighter were inbound.
His avatar looked up at her questioningly as a dotted line ran from the spot where their ships would dock to the icon that represented the Speedwell.
The councilwoman’s voice spoke over the diagram. “You do, Captain Tobias, on my authority. But only to apprehend this Prime.”
Her visage once again appeared on the holo as Tobias minimized the diagram. Bonnie looked pointedly between Terrance and Tobias’s avatar. “It is our understanding that he will then be detained aboard your ships and will be isolated from any contact with the C-47 or the planetside Chinquapin settlement?”
The woman nodded. “Very well, then. I’ll report this to the Council now and ask our Habitat Marines to connect with you, Captain Tobias.”
The wince he felt over his private connection to the Weapon Born was subtle, but it was there. At any other time, Jason would jibe Tobias about it, but not now.
Bonnie glanced from Tobias’s avatar toward where Jason sat in the pilot’s cradle, and smiled slightly. “Welcome home, Jason. I wish it were under happier circumstances.”
She nodded to him, and her visage faded, leaving Rhys staring back at him. Jason saw his father’s mouth twist in a slight half-smile.
“Your mom sends her love—and says to give ’em hell, son.” His mouth turned up in the ghost of a smile, and then he gave them both a brief nod before saying, “I’ll meet you at the gate.” Then the connection was severed, to be replaced by Approach’s scan of nearspace.
As he saw the icons that indicated local traffic, he noticed how tightly they were grouped. Usually ships operated with wider separation, and he was certain pilots everywhere were filing complaints about their revised flight plans, as well as cursing the need to navigate with greater precision than they normally did.
Just then, the Sable Wind flipped and began its braking burn for the C-47’s dock. He and Calista would follow suit shortly as they continued on course for their designated landing spots on the dock.
Unlike the habitat cylinder itself, the dock didn’t rotate. Just under the surface of the dock was a slightly smaller ring; this ring was spinning rapidly with an electric current running through it. This, combined with the magnetic properties of the hoops that encircled the smaller ring, allowed for a dock to be built atop the ring-hoop assembly that generated a half-g of apparent gravity.
This was optimal for loading and unloading cargo, since stevedoring shipments in a weightless environment was a nuisance, and lower gravity was much more economical than a full one-g. Maglev lines arced gracefully away from the dock, then took a steep dive along the spindle until they reached the habitat proper.
Jason watched ship’s countdown reach zero on his HUD, and sent the crew a warning to prepare for burn. As he executed the flip, he saw Calista do the same with the Mirage, off to his port side. He heard Terrance grunt as the Eidolon’s MFR engines kicked in hard, and they experienced thirty gs of deceleration.
With a mental flick, he locked the docking coordinates into the shuttle’s NSAI interface and relaxed back into the cradle, keeping a watchful eye for traffic—although he knew at these speeds, any craft that deviated the tiniest bit could result in a catastrophic collision that even his L2 reflexes wouldn’t be able to avoid.
Unlike the Speedwell, the shuttles would follow a standard landing configuration. Once they slowed to normal shipping lane speeds and were within a hundred kilometers of the dock, the two shuttles and the fighter would flip once more for a standard runway-style approach.
The Military Operations Area had a unique configuration, in that two-thirds of the landing strip was in vacuum. The vacuum ribbon allowed plenty of room for spacecraft braking burns before it transitioned through an ES shield and into a pressurized landing area. From there, the Docking AI who controlled military traffic for this section of the dock would direct them to their berths.
Jason had always heard that landing on this runway was a bit of a thrill ride, as the pilot’s heading steered the craft headlong toward what looked like a cavernous black hole. As a civilian, he’d never been allowed to land here before, and wished it was under less stressful circumstances, so he could enjoy the experience.
Shannon touched down first, and he watched the Sable Wind disappear into the MOA’s maw just as he lined up on final. He greased the landing, braking hard and killing his fusion engine well below the mandatory cutoff point. Had he not done so, his ship would have automatically been flung back out into the black, and he would have been tagged as a missed approach—something he was sure Terrance wouldn’t have let him forget.
Now that he’d avoided that potential embarrassing faux pas, he enjoyed the novel experience of an MOA landing as the Eidolon passed through the ES shields from the blackness of space into the bright expanse of the MOA’s hangar expanse.
He followed the lighting grid that indicated which taxiway he was to exit onto, and watched as Shannon neatly tucked herself into the military berth she had been assigned. On his HUD, he saw Calista slip the Mirage through the MOA’s shields behind him and roll to a stop, holding short as she awaited her turn to taxi to a berth.
He mentally toggled his pilot mods to their dormant setting and took his first deep breath in hours, as the carbon nanotube lattice surrounding his lungs retreated into their dormant state.
Glancing over at Terrance, he raised a brow. “You good?”
The exec grimaced. “Least fun part of the job, those hard burns,” he said, but gave Jason a brief nod as he swiveled in his cradle and began to unstrap.
“Maybe we need to get you some proper mods,” Jason shot back with a wink.
As he powered the Eidolon down, he glanced over at the fighter moored next to them, feeling a sense of relief as the Mirage’s canopy retracted, and Calista swung herself out of the pilot’s cradle. Her avatar gave him a brief nod and he returned a quick salute before swinging his gaze back to Terrance.
He nodded to the holo. “Looks like we have that hour Eric said we’d have.” He highlighted the display that showed the remaining time before the Speedwell was scheduled to dock.
Calista came around the side of her fighter, and Jason beckon
ed her into the shuttle as the two men began gearing up.
Terrance stepped to one side to allow Jason better access after grabbing a sniper’s rifle and two pistols for himself. As Jason began strapping holsters in place, Terrance began to reach for spare ammo and charge cartridges.
Jason’s eyebrows tracked upward as the man snagged several concussive and EM grenades, followed by another pistol.
“You’re sure we’re cleared to carry this much?” he asked, as Terrance checked the charge on the low-energy e-beam weapon and expertly flipped it into its holster.
He grinned at Jason and then moved away to let Calista in as he let Eric answer for him.
Jason just shook his head and reached for a lightwand to accompany his two pistols, and then moved to join Paula, who was standing with Logan and Kodi at the base of the shuttle’s ramp.
He nodded toward the squad of eight Habitat Marines that Tobias was approaching. The Weapon Born stopped as he reached them; as the Marines parted, Jason spied his father.
“Ready?” Terrance said as he stepped up to Jason’s side, and they began walking across the deck to join Tobias and the Proxas.
Eric sent his ident and security token to handshake with the military operation’s NSAI, and his holo appeared in front of the El Doradans.
A human wearing the PSF uniform bearing the single star of a brigadier general on each lapel stepped forward, Rhys at her heels.
“General Smith?” Eric asked, and as the woman nodded, he replied, “I’m Commodore Eric of the El Dorado Space Force. Thank you for giving us permission to land, and to apprehend this very dangerous criminal.”
The general raised one hand. “You’re not cleared beyond this MOA, not yet, at least,” she warned. “The Council is in deliberations, and—”
“With all due respect, General, your own councilwoman, Bonnie, gave us that clearance. We don’t have a lot of time,” Eric interrupted. “The danger this sentient poses cannot be overstated. We’re in the unique position to apprehend him before he’s even aware we’re after him. The longer we wait, the greater the risk that something tips him off. At that point, we’ll be dealing with a hostage situation.”