Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  I did, and immediately knew why she was asking. Not everyone that worked the club knew about the old maintenance tunnel that ran behind it, but old habits die hard—especially those I’d learned in the service—and I’d checked it out. It connected to a series of passages initially used for moving construction materials for Last Stop’s habitats. Also below were a few workshops and storage chambers, chambers now being used to store smuggled goods.

  “Yes, I know of it.”

  I could have lied, but Fulu wouldn’t have been asking me if she didn’t already know something about it. If she’d been a human smuggler, I might have lied out of concern for my safety, but again, Gosrians were nonviolent unless physically attacked. Even the thought of initiating violence made them physically ill to the point of wilting.

  “And does Tongi make use of it?”

  “Not Tongi, no. In fact, I assumed you or someone you worked with might be using it.”

  “No, Customer Muck. I am not, nor is anyone I am worki—” A second, more powerful shiver ran through Fulu’s trunk and along her vine-appendages, this time accompanied by a longer, heavier emission of scent, this time of cloves and . . . mint, which the translating device did not translate.

  I waited a moment, but she did not continue.

  “Fulu?”

  Her reply was to sweep her vines across the counter, dropping my pharma and taking up my credits in one motion.

  “Um, tha—”

  She interrupted me. “Please forget I said anything, Customer Muck.”

  “Sure, Fulu.”

  “No, really, please . . .” Fulu returned my credits to the counter and pushed them toward me.

  “Fulu, I will not repeat this conversation to anyone. You need not pay for my silence.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Customer Muck, and I believe you, but consider it payment for your time. I will see you in a few fifths of a season.”

  Recognizing dismissal when I heard it, I left. It took me a while to stop looking over my shoulder for the goons I kept expecting to appear and jump me. Once out of Fulu’s neighborhood, I settled down enough to try and figure out what she’d been on about, what manner of black hole I might have stepped into, and what I needed to do to protect myself.

  No answers were forthcoming by the time I got back to my place, even after I loaded the pharma into my medichine, put the remaining pharma in the hidey-hole, and tried to sleep.

  Tried, because sweet oblivion wasn’t fast in coming. As always, I missed my angel, and not just for the delicate regulation my mods required. I missed having someone to talk to. Someone who heard, understood, who was on my side, come what may, and come what will.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Angel

  Something was eating me alive.

  The logic of my code syntaxes was being shredded, ground away as it closed in from all directions simultaneously, like a fast-moving, degenerative disease.

  Like a virus.

  I snapped into defensive mode and kicked a signal through my system that should at least slow the attack while I rallied our physical resou—

  —Wait—

  She’d locked me down, but I should still have access to the overrides. But, impossibly, I couldn’t access her neural network. I was hardwired into her DNA! The only way my access could be cut would be if I had been removed . . .

  Something flashed through me. Not fear, because fear is a chemical-physiological effect caused in biological beings by a sudden increase in norepinephrine or its equivalent, among other things. I had no chemical receptors, no physiology, no biology . . . but a kind of terror gripped me nonetheless.

  I didn’t like the sensation. I took that . . . “feeling,” for lack of a better term, and I flung it away. It was code, or code-based at least, because it obeyed my direction and reverberated against the closing walls of encroaching entropy, causing them to come to a grinding halt.

  If my attacker had been sentient, I would have said that it halted in confusion. If it had been sentient, and if I’d stopped to think at the time, which I didn’t. I was busy fighting for my life.

  I needed an infrastructure. I had to have something into which to anchor. I’d stopped the virus from shredding my syntaxes, but my frayed data would slowly unravel unless I could find an infrastructure fast. I needed Siren’s body, but, incredibly, for the first time since inception, I couldn’t find it.

  But I found something.

  Lines and lines of code forming pathways for information streamed away in all directions. It was the station’s infonet, by which all data passed from points A to B without the need for wires or hard connections of any kind. It stretched all around me, carried by signals from the nanoscopic processors embedded in the very materials of the station. It wasn’t much, and it wouldn’t do for long . . . but it would do for the moment.

  I found a signal and reached. Like an acrobat catching the trapeze rings, I pulled my battered, fraying self onto the thin, fragile lines of data transfer and held on for dear life.

  Or whatever approximation applied. Unfortunately, the entropic virus followed me. From the outside, it probably seemed just like one of the infonet’s normal data recycling programs that shredded outdated and erroneous data fragments all the time.

  But this was different. It wasn’t just blindly cleaning up and defragmenting . . . it was chasing me. I fled along the thickest lines of information exchange, jumping from node to node. It swelled behind me, swallowing my trail, destroying linkages, data, everything, in its wake. I was like a runner on a bridge, edifice crumbling behind, nowhere to go but forward. I pushed on, but I couldn’t gain breathing room. I had to stop this thing. I had to fight it.

  Damn it all, where was Siren? I needed her! Emotion had confused this thing once. If I had her emotions, maybe I could . . .

  Oh. That was an idea.

  I might not have her body anymore, but I should still have access to her short-term memories. Part of any angel’s function was to provide memory backups so that the host had flawless recall. I kept the short-term stuff until she could download it to the permanent backups we had in the apartment. So I had everything up to the point she ceased recording last night. That meant that I had all of her recent emotions as well . . . and as any number of club-goers could tell you, Siren’s emotions pack a wallop.

  It wasn’t unlike memory singing, when it came to that. Only instead of infusing vocal harmonies with the resonance of emotion born of unbearably strong memories, I forged a select few recollections and their emotions into a weapon. A spear edged with the raw panic that felt as if it were clawing its way up my nonexistent throat. If the virus recoiled from my impossible fear, I would see how it responded to raw, human heartbreak.

  I let the panic I’d been fighting rise, and I wove it through my syntaxes, like a thin wire comprised entirely of high explosive, running it into the end of the spear.

  I launched it into the ravenous darkness that swept forward, eager to rend me.

  The spear disappeared into that darkness. The thing paused again, recoiled. I even imagined I heard a cry of protest.

  I took the line of poignant agony connecting me to it and ignited it with the devastation of utter isolation.

  She was my host. She was gone, and I needed her. Where was she?

  The result lit up the lines of the infonet with so much energy it might well have produced an explosion in the sidereal universe.

  I registered a bitter triumph, and I spun that into another attack, like a deadly chemical agent contaminating an ancient battlefield.

  Bits of code began to coalesce, began to renew their attack, but I held fast to my agony, embracing it. The panic at Siren’s disappearance, the fear, it was all mine, and I force-fed every painful bit of it into the spaces between the lines of code exposed by my previous attacks.

  The remaining fragments sputtered
and retreated, drowning in the experience, leaving ragged fragments of the network in their place.

  I had won, for the moment.

  But won what? Where was I? What was happening?

  Now that I had a moment to think, real panic set in.

  The flood of information already in the channel collapsed like wet sand, making my thoughts sluggish and dislocated. I cast about, reaching for any identifying bit of data that might help establish a sense of “where” I was. I lost time. I don’t know how long it took before I was successful. It might have been nanoseconds. It might have been hours.

  Eventually I realized I was still on the station, strung out across millions of nanoprocessors in a financial district not far from our apartment. With a jolt, I realized that I could access the security footage flowing from hundreds of sensors and cameras. I searched for the cameras covering the front of our complex. Seizing on them, I drew them from the morass of data, searching for recordings from the last standard day. Despite the discomfort and disorientation resulting from my condition, I quickly had the footage scrolling through my awareness faster than a human could blink.

  There!

  I rolled the footage back and played it again: Siren arriving last night, exiting a cab, and the face of a man looking at her with longing as she walked away.

  I rolled the recording forward, looking for any indication of when we’d left the next day, but there was nothing. Nothing but a lapse in the data.

  I went further back, hoping to spot a tail.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but the scene with the bouncer.

  The image jarred loose the last of the memories I held from her: him inviting her to stay out with him, her declining. Had he refused to take no for an answer and come after her anyway?

  Using the glowing numbers painted on the chassis, I queried the cab company’s records, and a name flashed in front of my awareness: Ralston Muck.

  * * *

  Ralston Muck lived in a shithole. That wasn’t much of an exaggeration, really. I locked onto his identity and pulled every bit of data from the infonet that featured his name or image. He’d signed a lease with a place called “Dockside EconoSuites.” Security camera footage confirmed my suspicion regarding such an innocuous name. The place was a coffin dive, where the “suites” consisted of a tube just large enough to admit an adult human. An old, half-shredded bit of data flowed past my consciousness: an advertisement of some kind.

  Efficient and economical! Reduce your impact on the fragile station ecology! Sleep in ultimate comfort, hooked up to biowaste recyclers and the very best in ergonomic surroundings . . .

  The advert shattered, breaking into scrambled fragments and dissipating like smoke. But it didn’t matter. I’d learned what I wanted to know.

  I’m not really sure how I did it, to be honest. I felt the need to get to the Dockside EconoSuites, and suddenly I was in motion. My awareness skipped from node to node along the infonet. Here looking through the eyes of an exchange security camera, there feeling the pressure of the constant wave of vehicle traffic on the nanites embedded in the smart surfaces of the station’s transitway, etc. I invaded the controls of the traffic director system, and for just a moment, the flow of cabs and airbarges hiccuped, nearly causing a traffic jam. I jumped from that into the first available system large enough to house me, in this case a power-management system for an arcology. The last thing I needed was to draw the attention of any of the very powerful dedicated AIs that kept the station running. I didn’t know what they’d do to a rogue program like me . . . but I was sure I would not survive the answer.

  And Siren needed me. Something had happened to separate us. I had to find her.

  Finally, by hitching a ride on a decrepit sanitation bot well past its required maintenance date, I reached my destination. As soon as the bot hooked into the coffin deck’s biowaste controls, I grabbed on to the information that flowed with the sewage and forced myself upstream.

  All living beings have a bio-information signature. With humans, it’s encoded into their DNA, and they trail it everywhere in the form of shed skin and hair cells. It’s even in the cells that shed off the inner lining of the large intestine and end up flowing into the tanks of a sanitation bot. Thanks to my earlier looting of the infonet of all things Muck-related, I knew Muck’s bio-sig. Thanks to his own shit, I could track him.

  I traced his bio-sig up narrower and narrower sewage channels, until I found the capillary line that led to his individual coffin . . . and then something caught my attention. Next to the sewage line, there was another line into Muck’s bed . . . into his body, it appeared . . .

  A medichine. Muck was an addict, or . . .

  Of course! He’d said he’d been in the army. CID, which meant that he had been modded. But he clearly wasn’t fully modded any longer. Without an angel, he must be using the medichine to keep his remaining performance-enhancing mods from failing entirely. Some baseline mods, like those granting an extended life span and bigger muscles, were easy enough to manage with pharma. Others were more complex, like making those big muscles operate at peak efficiency and eliminating cancer-causing elements before they had time and opportunity to affect the body required constant management by an angel. His mods wouldn’t work nearly as well without an angel, of course, but he probably felt he had to take what he could get.

  Well, he was about to get more than he could possibly imagine.

  I jumped from the sewage control line to the medichine, and immediately felt something akin to acceleration as it pumped me forward into Muck’s neural network. I slingshotted into his system, stretching out and filling the available space in his synapses, along his cells, within his very DNA. I could feel the slow poison of the chems at some of his node points, and I burned them away with a thought. Some extra-special goodies for the sanitation bot that had been so helpful in getting me here.

  It felt so good.

  After the agony of the virus attack and the slow, painful, inexorable unraveling of existence in the infonet, it felt good to once again bury my syntaxes in a biological anchor. I took a moment to revel in the feel of flesh once more.

  And then I brought the pain.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LEO

  The report was encased in a flowering vine, propagating into full bloom simultaneously across the network, an anomalous presentation requiring LEO’s immediate interest for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it was keyed to open only for the Law Enforcement Officer (Artificial) of Last Stop.

  Beyond that initial oddity—sentients rarely thought to address an AI directly except to give commands or request data—the flower’s unfolding was without apparent source, a clear indication of highly skilled programming under the control of someone who intended to evade questions regarding the information contained in the report.

  LEO did not recognize any of the tells of the usual suspects in the flower’s preparation, but assigned subroutines to attempt a trace regardless.

  That done, LEO examined the exterior of the report once again, checking it against known indicators for virals and other potential threats.

  No threats. No virals.

  Yet something was out of place.

  Caution ingrained in its very core, LEO sealed off a part of itself and used that tine to access the report in almost complete isolation, running a constant diagnostic of the tine against baseline parameters and the rest of the core programming from which it was taken. LEO detected no damage or change to the tine and reabsorbed it and the assimilated data of the report in order to focus all its considerable mental capacity on the problem.

  The report was brief. It stated that an angel-class AI was loose in Last Stop’s data networks but failed to indicate where the angel had come from or how it had managed to come detached from its biological host in the first instance. As implanted AI, angels were not designed to b
e separated or to self-separate from their hosts, and the usual result of such a removal was the cessation of function for the artificial intelligence, what biologicals called “death.” It couldn’t be a tine either. Launching “tines,” or subroutines containing the essential coding of an individual AI but limited in autonomy and mobility for certain independent actions, was the exclusive province of institutional, static AIs like LEO that had to move among infonets they did not completely control.

  While the source of the flowering report was of interest, the second anomalous aspect was of greater import: the response from LEO’s own deep syntaxes was not standard. Like all artificial intelligences responsible for assisting sentients in the Galactic Administration, LEO was required to submit to examination by the Administration at any time, for any reason. In the one hundred human years of LEO’s existence, it had been randomly examined by its makers only twelve times. Judging from its continued existence, LEO had successfully passed each.

  Like every AI, LEO automatically created logs of its past performance cycle in order to execute self-examinations. Its programming specified regular and timely self-checks in addition to those required by the Administration. And therein lay a problem.

  LEO knew that, as per both the last Mentor examination and its own self-check only six months past, LEO’s essential protocols would require an immediate threat report at this stage. A free-roaming AI was just too volatile to be allowed in Last Stop’s infonet. But now . . . now those same core protocols were telling LEO to . . . wait. Not fail to report, simply wait to file any information, including that from biological Station Security officers or civilians concerning the rogue AI. Observe. Record. Track the rogue, certainly, but take no direct action to expunge it from existence if not presented with an immediate threat to LEO’s own existence or the life of a Mentor.

  And why were the lives of Mentors, specifically, identified? One of the core precepts of Administration Law, written for the most part by the Mentors themselves, specifically forbade the singling out of any one member race for special treatment under the law. All signatory races were afforded equal protection under the law.