by M. D. Cooper
Brit returned fire, hitting the top of the door.
“There’s a present for you in the bed there,” Kraft said. “Beside Tim’s head.”
The door slid closed in front of him, immediately scarred by three scorch marks from Brit’s pistol.
Andy pulled his helmet off and threw it on the floor. “Tim,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
Tim opened his mouth, frowning.
Brit came around the other side of the bed as she pulled off her helmet. “We’re here, Tim,” she said. “Are you all right?”
Tim squeezed his eyes closed, tears leaking down his cheeks. His eyes were red and wet when he opened them again, looking from Brit to Andy. He didn’t seem to know how to respond.
Andy held his hands over Tim’s head, then cursed the armored gloves and spent a minute wrestling each free of its connection to his forearm. With his hands finally bare, he reached under the silver arc and touched Tim’s face, wiping away tears with his thumb. A tingling sensation spread across the top of his hand that seemed to emanate from the neural interface.
“I’m pulling him out of this thing,” he told Brit.
“Is it safe?” she asked. She looked at the door behind her, despair in her face. “I should have gone after that asshole.”
“We’ve got Tim. We need to get off this rock.”
Her gaze went to the dead scientist on the floor next to Andy. “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have shot him.” She looked at Andy. “How will we know if it’s safe to take him off this thing?”
“We don’t.” Andy went around the table to the cabinet where Kraft had been standing. The graphs on the equipment’s display appeared to show Tim’s neural function and standard bio signs. His pulse and breathing were normal but the electrical signals in his brain showed erratic returns. A reading labeled “image” stood at seventy-three percent.
Andy glanced at the closed door next to the cabinet. There was no locking mechanism that he could see. “He must have opened this via Link. I don’t see any other control system. I guess how much time we have depends on what Kraft is doing right now.”
“He’s either getting the hell off this station and figuring out a way to blow it up behind him or rallying reinforcements to come back.”
“Don’t forget, he ultimately wants Lyssa,” Andy said.
“Does he?” Brit didn’t look up from Tim’s anxious face. “What if he got something else as valuable?”
Andy shook his head.
Andy reached for one of Tim’s hands. His fingers were cold against Andy’s palm. The display ticked up to eighty-five percent.
“We’re going to have to wait?” Brit asked.
“What choice do we have? I don’t want to risk taking him off this thing. We have no idea what it’s doing.”
Brit gave a frustrated half-nod. “I know. I don’t like it.”
Andy wrapped his other hand around Tim’s and watched his son’s face. Tim had closed his eyes, stopping the tears, and his cheeks were flushed with what looked like a slight fever.
“Andy?” Brit asked. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” He straightened, looking back at her.
Brit turned toward the sealed door Cal Kraft had gone through. “I smell burning plas. It’s coming from behind the wall.”
“Is the panel warm?”
Brit placed her hand against the alloy and pulled it back abruptly, cursing. She slid around the bed, a difficult task in her armor, and grabbed her helmet. Pulling the faceshield over her head, she studied the wall and cursed again.
“There’s a massive IR signature behind that wall. Something’s on fire.”
The display read ninety-one percent now.
Andy took a deep breath. He smelled it now. Something was pulling air through the door they had come through. There was smoke in the other hallway as well.
“We have to get him out of here,” Brit said.
Lyssa disappeared for several seconds. When she came back, she had a frantic note in her voice.
The display read ninety-five percent. Andy reached for the lattice arch over Tim’s face and forehead. He hesitated.
Andy tore the lattice away. Tim didn’t stir but a red warning indicator flashed on the display. Cradling the back of Tim’s head, Andy lifted him off the bed and held him against his chest.
“Andy,” Brit said. “Look at that.” She pointed at the metal plate that had been sitting beneath Tim’s head. One of the Weapon Born cylinders sat in an indentation. The lattice fed into sockets along one edge of the assembly.
“That must be the gift he was talking about.”
“I’m going to take it,” Brit said.
A curtain of black smoke abruptly rose from the bottom edge of the closed door and climbed the wall to spread across the ceiling. Andy covered Tim’s face.
“Grab my helmet and gloves,” he said as he turned for the door. He caught a last glimpse of the smoke coiling around the dead scientist before running out into the corridor that had brought them to the room.
Harl laughed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
STELLAR DATE: 09.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Raleigh
REGION: High Terra, Earth, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Sitting at her kitchen table, Jirl Gallagher studied the plate of food her son had left untouched. Three spears of asparagus covered in congealing butter-cheese sauce sat next to a naked slab of Santa Fe-flavored protein on the pale green plate. She knew Bry had eaten a sliver cut from the edge of the protein, chewing on it for nearly five minutes as she had pushed her own bits around in the puddle of cooling sauce. They had spoken about his day at the preparatory school, where he talked about friends in his engineering class, the fact that he wasn’t actually going to consume any calories despite her best efforts hanging between them like a ghost.
He could inject calories later and that would be fine but it didn’t change the fact th
at she felt she had failed Bry on some fundamental level. He was quickly becoming old enough that she could imagine him out in the world on his own, and it terrified her that she had no idea what his life would become. The life she imagined was him sitting in a bare apartment staring at a white wall as he wasted away. Nothing truly excited him. He only smiled for her.
Their apartment was on the fortieth floor of a complex not far from the administrative sector where Jirl spent most of her days. Through the glass wall in the living room she could make out both the Heartbridge headquarters building and the structure where she and Arla had met Colonel Yarnes earlier in the week.
It was a lovely apartment, furnished tastefully with expensive touches like antique media, real paintings and several plants that Jirl had started herself from natural Earthen seedstock. A begonia with wide, shiny green leaves filled most of one wall in her bedroom, its vine-like stems suspended from lengths of white thread.
In the two days since the meeting with Colonel Yarnes, Jirl hadn’t been able to get his final words out her head. The name Alexander hung in her mind like a miasma. She imagined she heard the name on the maglev during her ride to work, while walking down the street, even in restaurants.
Have you heard about Alexander?
Well, Alexander said--
Arla had been in high spirits since the meeting, preparing for the TSF demonstration, as well as the follow-on business development with the Marsian Guard. Mars had been slower to show interest in the Weapon Born project. They depended more heavily on trade with the Anderson Collective and elements of the Jovian Combine that might have been fringe ten years ago but had become more popular and less fearful of sharing their anti-AI message.
Trying to sell Mars on a military AI project would have been child’s play during any other time but it seemed like the more the technology came into reach, the more it terrified people. AI had always been the monster in the closet. Now it seemed to have taken on the same epic danger as the first Lunar war with Earth.
Someone had to stand firm against the uncontrolled spread of sentient AI. In places like Mars, the Anderson Collective and the JC—where there just weren’t enough humans to do the work—Sentient AI should have been a gift from God. Instead, it was a threat.
Jirl glanced toward Bry’s room, where the sounds of a vid played quietly. She sighed and stood from the table, picking up the two plates to carry them in to the kitchen sink. As she scraped perfectly good food into the reclamation tub and rinsed off the plates, she wondered if Yarnes had actually been trying to trick her.
What better name for a frightening AI than Alexander, conqueror of the ancient world? It would play nicely into any number of apocalyptic conspiracies. She smiled as she imagined the disaster vids that might already be in production based on Link chatter alone.
Besides Sentient AI stealing jobs, the next question was when they were going to rise up and destroy humanity. There were legends about the uprising that had yet to happen. Personally, she found it exciting to be working on the cutting edge of sentience research, even if she was basically in sales and the execution of the product was mostly in remote weapons control. Still, who was to say she wouldn’t have a Weapon Born toaster in her kitchen someday? Jirl chuckled to herself at the thought.
She was just sitting down on the living room couch with a tumbler of vodka and ice when a request came over her Link. She answered the alert, expecting someone from the office, when a second message followed her response, requesting a shift to encrypted audio.
Jirl glanced at the hallway again. Just to be safe, she stood and decided to take the call in the bathroom. She was nearly at the hallway when she remembered her drink and went back for the vodka.
Closing the bathroom door, she set the tumbler next to the polished alloy faucet and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked tired, her silver-gray hair listless.
“This is Jirl,” she said.
“Jirl Gallagher,” a woman’s gruff voice answered, warped slightly by the encryption. “This is Chandra Kade.”
Jirl’s eyes went wide in the mirror. This was the last call she had expected. It meant Kade was on Terra or close. Jirl immediately tried to determine why the general might be calling her directly. Were the Marsians pulling out of the program?
“General Kade,” Jirl said. “This is a surprise.”
Kade chuckled. She sounded slightly drunk. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to trick you and get you fired.”
Jirl took a deep breath, calming her anxious heartbeat. “I don’t think I could get fired if I wanted to. What can I do for you, General?”
“Chandra, please. You don’t get paid to salute me.”
“All right. Chandra.”
“I’m calling about your Weapon Born program. This is mostly above board. I know you’re planning a demonstration for the TSF and I imagine you planned on showing us the same thing. Scratch that. I know you were planning on it, so you don’t have to dance around your business plan.”
Jirl watched her face in the mirror as she listened. She envisioned herself as the Queen of Calm, her mind moving swiftly between thoughts, connecting ideas and incentives. What did Kade want? Why did Kade believe it would serve her purpose to contact Jirl personally? Why not have an aide make the call?
A sipping sound came across the line and Kade made an appreciative sound. Whiskey? “Price negotiations don’t concern me. I want to know about the capabilities.”
Jirl cleared her throat. “There isn’t much beyond what we’ve talked about. The command and control capabilities have shown the most promise. We’ve moved from a single AI per combat platform to a multiple-deployment scenario without any loss in capability, with near real-time responses. They’re not faster than light but they’ve certainly been faster than other command AI.”
“I’m not talking about your Seed-things, Jirl. I know all about that. I want to know about the implantation technology.”
“What?” Jirl said, despite herself.
“SAI Implantation. I have intel that one of your operatives used a specialized mobile surgery to implant one of your SAI in a woman we had in custody on the M1R. She didn’t reject the AI. In fact, it appeared as though the Weapon Born SAI took control of her body. Tell me about that.”
Jirl bit her lip, trying to make her thoughts line up. Non-words didn’t come to mind. All she could see was Cal Kraft, face blunt as a hammer, doing something very illegal and not giving a damn.
“Does skin-jacking someone constitute a crime against humanity?” Kade mused. “I would check with my legal jerks, but they would want to know why. Is that even the right word? Skin-jacking? Sounds violent enough.”
“General,” Jirl said.
“Chandra. I told you.”
“Chandra.” Jirl heart pounded in her ears. “I’ve heard rumors of pilot programs at freelance research facilities, nothing specifically associated with Heartbridge. We’re approached by third party contractors with various claims every day. Someone might try to say they’re working for us based on a conversation, trying to get their own deal with you.”
“No one’s tried to make a deal with me, Jirl. I’m looking for the deal. I want to know if Heartbridge has finally cracked the code on human-AI interface. I could do something with that. I could do something with that right now, not in some potential future war with Terra or the JC or whoever else might be hiding out there.”
“I don’t know what to say about that,” Jirl managed to answer.
Kade sounded immensely pleased with herself. The sound of clinking ice cubes made Jirl look down at her own tumbler, still three-quarters full of vodka. Her own ice had melted. She picked up the glass and swallowed its contents in two gulps. She caught the sight of herself grimacing at the alcohol in the mirror, her throat stretched like a shedding snake, and nearly choked.
“You all right, Jirl?”
Jirl coughed and put the glass down too hard on the edge of the sink. “I’m fine. Something went down the wrong pip
e, that’s all.”
“Be careful. I want you around. You know I called you specifically because I think out of all those snakes at Heartbridge, you’re a trustworthy person. I see it in your face.”
Jirl poured water from the faucet into her tumbler and quickly sipped water.
“I’m not sure how to respond to that,” she said when she could finally talk.
“You don’t have to say anything. I did my homework on you, Jirl. You’re a normal person with a normal life. I can appreciate that. You’ve invested in life. You’re a good person. A mother. Not everybody can say that these days. You’ve got things to lose.”
Jirl stared at herself in the mirror. Her face was going numb. “I’m not sure what you’re saying, General Kade.”
“Don’t make me remind you again,” Kade said. “This is a call among equals. I’m just saying we live in a world of selfish people and you aren’t selfish. I appreciate that. I acknowledge it. You’re one of the most Marsian Terrans I’ve ever met. Not caught up in wild body mods or other foolishness to turn yourself into some kind of freak. You operate like you’ve got a mission. That makes you more like an Andersonian or a Marsian whether you realize it or not.”
“I appreciate that,” Jirl said slowly.
“Here’s the thing. Your man Kraft on the M1R…isn’t the first time I’ve heard about Heartbridge carrying off a successful human-SAI merger. Otherwise I would have marked it up to hearsay. Six days ago, the SAI on the Mars 1 Ring started spitting out all kinds of strange anomalies, talking about being in love, about having found reality, blah blah blah. Eggheads thought it was going rampant. Or maybe ascending like some of them go on about when they’ve got too many nodes for their own good.”
Like Alexander, Jirl thought.
“What can you tell me about someone called Lyssa?”
“Lyssa? I don’t know that name.”
“How about Andy Sykes, or Brit Sykes, or a gangster on Cruithne called Ngoba Starl? Any of this ringing a bell?”
Jirl ran back through her conversation with Cal Kraft, which had been almost too abstract. He hadn’t mentioned names, only that he was about to retrieve the stolen assets from Hari Jickson’s project. He had mentioned an implantation, saying it had gone well, but she hadn’t received any updates since then. She couldn’t believe Kraft would be so careless as to let the Marsians observe him. Kade was right: an implantation outside research parameters was a crime. The question was what authority would or could interpret and enforce the law.