Star Realms: Rescue Run

by Jon Del Arroz

Local Date February 12th, 2464

  Joan rushed back to her quarters, scanning her ident so the doors opened almost immediately. “Yui? Trian? You guys here?” she asked loudly. The lights to their shared living room flickered on as she entered.

  A few moments later, Yui made her way out of her sleeping quarters, dressed in a night shirt that barely covered her legs, and what looked like not much else. Her hair scrunched as if she’d been lying on one side of her head. “I was trying to sleep,” she said, that sarcastic bite to her voice not softening even when tired. “You’re back a little early, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Joan confessed, glancing behind her as the door closed. “I overheard a conversation. It sounds like they’re about to announce on the nets that—”

  Yui held up a finger. “Hold it. Did you hear that?”

  Joan listened. The sound of recycled air gently pulsing through vents, a soft white noise hum. She shook her head.

  That didn’t deter Yui, who pushed her aside, bee-lining for the door.

  Joan stumbled, but regained her balance quickly. “Hey!”

  The doors whooshed open. Yui stepped outside and her face turned to stone. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Ahhh…,” a nervous, male voice cracked. “Federation News Network. I saw your, uh, roommate speaking with Mr. Anazao earlier and was hoping I could get a comment—”

  “You were about to bug my quarters and eavesdrop, you mean. What part of the network?”

  “Mars World News.”

  “Tabloid. Get out of here before I have security bring you in for violation of privacy. Sick freak,” Yui said, angrier than Joan had ever heard her before.

  “Oh… okay!”

  Joan heard the sound of footsteps running away.

  Yui stood in the doorway, fists on her hips for a couple more long moments before stepping back inside. “He’s lucky I didn’t bring him in to interrogate him. It’s been awhile since I had some fun like that.”

  Joan stayed silent for the time being, watching Yui and not daring to ask what that meant.

  “You must have made a bit of a stir to have picked up a tabloid tail like that. What’d you do, ensign?” Yui asked her, moving back over to the couch.

  “Nothing like that. I mostly stayed to myself and listened. I did have one conversation with the Dario man he mentioned,” Joan said, staring at the apartment door in disbelief.

  Yui looked that direction as well. “Must have been after him then. Maybe Trian was right about your capabilities if you’re bringing in big fish. I don’t think security will be compromised. I’ll see about installing exterior cams and doing regular bug sweeps anyway.” She plopped down on their couch. “So what’d you find out that’s got you so rattled?”

  “I think the reporter was enough to rattle me,” Joan said.

  “Nah, it’s something else. I know better. Spill it.”

  “A man in there. He bragged about Commodore Zhang’s capture.”

  Yui frowned. “That’s not good. I know the Council of Ministers were working to make sure this didn’t get out to the public. Though we shouldn’t have expected to keep this quiet forever. Who said it?”

  “Some guy from their fleets division. Middle-aged, has a blue facial hair mod,” Joan motioned over the place where his chin had the hair.

  “Emre Baker. He’s a chief strategist in the their fleet division and liaison to the Trade Federation’s Military Bureau. Big time player.” Yui cocked a brow. “You really made your way into the important circles. That’s twice now you’ve surprised me.”

  Before Joan could reply, the door opened again. Trian made his way in and pulled off his ruffled necktie. “I swear to the First Star these things are uncomfortable. How did they ever become a fashion?” he muttered.

  “Hey Trian. Joan just got confirmation that Zhang is here. She did well tonight,” Yui said.

  Trian looped around to where Yui was at, standing beside her. “Oh yes? Have a good evening then? We told you you’d be fine.”

  Despite herself, Joan smiled at the compliment. “You should believe in me more when I’m breaking into corporate systems and maybe we’ll call it even.”

  Yui snorted. “You find anything interesting?” she asked to Trian.

  He shook his head. “I saw a lot of faces I’d been reading dossiers on in our briefings, listened in some. What shocked me was how many fleet services members were at an event for a cosmetic bodymod line.”

  “Might have been a reward for their capture of the Commodore,” Joan said, recalling the way that blue facial hair had been talking.

  “Maybe. That’s good work, Joan. How did you hear about it? I wasn’t able to get close to the forward tables. They became far too crowded after dinner was announced.”

  Joan moved to a seat on the sofa beside Yui before going into her story. She skipped her discomfort with the whole situation, how she remained quiet for the longest time, and fell into these contacts when going out for air. Instead, she told them about Dario, their conversation and how he seemed to really like her. “He was almost tripping over his words when we left. He was genuinely interested in me, synced his contact info,” Joan said.

  “Wow, you really hooked one, huh?” Yui asked. “This guy fawning over her is important enough to have a tabloid reporter track Joan here.

  “I was just standing away from the party, I wasn’t trying to do anything.”

  Trian looked at Yui. “Are we compromised?”

  Yui shook her head. “I’ll step up our security measures. Might not be a bad idea to look at moving apartments, though.”

  “Intentional plan or no, that’s good work, Joan,” Trian said. He pushed back his sleeve. “Let me see who your new contact is. It sounds like you found someone very influential.”

  Joan hesitated a moment, held her handtab to his to sync once more. Last time she’d synced with Trian, she’d found out she’d lost G.O.D. It wasn’t the sync that had lost her AI, but that action lingered in her mind. The world was so quiet since then. Even though she had Trian and Yui, and a whole station filled with more people than she’d ever seen in her whole life, that quietness created an isolation that made her uneasy.

  When the sync completed, Trian held his handtab up, tapping commands. “Let’s see…” he said, before his eyes went wide. He whistled. “Joan, you know how to pick them.”

  “What?” Joan leaned in.

  Train shook his head in disbelief. “Dario Anazao. He’s the son of Kostas Anazao—Chief Financial Officer of the whole company.”

  “Talk about access,” Yui said.

  “This is just a contact.” Trian continued to look through Dario’s information. “We’ll still have to proceed with caution, and we’ll have to find a way for Joan to get this contact’s security clearances.”

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” Joan said. Dario seemed like a genuinely nice person, someone who cared about more than what corporate life had foisted upon him. She wanted to make it clear from the start that their schemes would be working with him and not to bring him down.

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Joan, but I understand your concerns,” Trian said, eyeing her. “We’ll have to cross reference tonight’s information with the dump your AI gave us before we make any moves.”

  “How far have you gotten through that?” Yui asked.

  “Not as far as I’d like. There’s too much data. Would be helpful to have an AI to sift through it for pertinent information. Perhaps we can get a program from one of the promenade shops,” Trian said.

  Joan shook her head. “I don’t want another AI.”

  Yui raised a brow. “You don’t have to have one,” she said. “We may need one, though. Yours was malfunctioning anyway.”

  “You don’t understand. G.O.D. was more to me than a program. He was my friend.” Joan flushed, her chest becoming hot with anger. She knew exactly how this conversation would go. People looked at her like she was crazy for treating her AI as if it
were a real person, but he was, and maybe it was just his programming, but G.O.D. cared for her more than any person ever had for her. She owed him at least some loyalty.

  That outburst earned curious stares from both Yui and Trian.

  Joan stood, trying not to look too upset. “I’m tired. It’s been a long night and my nerves have been shouting at me with flight instinct all day. Worse when I found out I was tailed here. I need to rest.”

  “I think that’s a good idea for all of us,” Trian said, his voice measured as always.

  Joan stood up once again, turned and headed back to her room. The door opened and closed. She flipped around to fall backward on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. Through the door, she could still hear Trian and Yui talking about the night. Their excitement about this Dario Anazao resounded in the volume of their conversation, but before long they moved the topic to the décor and logistics of the party. Trian waxed philosophical for a long time on the most boring details of how the corporation seated its personnel.

  They were getting closer to the goal of finding Commodore Zhang after only a few days on the station. But that worried Joan. Her next stage of the mission required G.O.D.’s help to hack through security systems, decipher locations of entrances and exits, a whole host of small things that she’d never have survived in the past. Without that, all she had was her basic training and her petty thieving from the Star Empire ship that landed her with a discharge and then in prison.

  Without G.O.D., she would be useless.

  But she couldn’t let Trian down. Couldn’t let the Star Empire down. Maybe it was petty, but most of all, she couldn’t prove that Yui was right about her. There was too much riding on her success. She’d seen the oppression the corporation brought first hand, how dirty the streets of the lower levels of Mars were, as bad as the worst areas of the colonies she’d seen. If she failed, it was possible that the Hyrades Cluster could turn into a useless arm of the corporations like the underlevels on Mars.

  Even as tired as she was, with those thoughts, Joan failed to find sleep.

  Chapter 20

  An Unexpected Visitor

  Regency BioTech Central Office—Mid-Level Quarters, Mars

  Local Date February 13th, 2464

  Dario sat in his favorite place, staring out of his apartment window, though actually perusing the nets via his oculars. As expected, news outlets had picked up stories about the parties—from celebrity attire and bodymods to the actual content itself. Redworld Entertainment News was delighted with the RetroSilver cosmetic line. Reports of the party were positive—from the décor, to the music to the speeches and food. Regency BioTech was now being hailed as one of the Hottest Companies to Be Seen At.

  He flicked his eyes, changing his settings to ignore fluff articles like that for the future. He wanted to see the real politics, get some insight as to where the corporation was going. With all the stories though, he found it hard to focus.

  One article did catch his attention. This one from Mars World News. The headline read: “Chief Financial Officer Kostas Anazao’s Son finds Romance in RetroSilver.” He scanned through that. A couple of pictures of him and Joan speaking at the balcony, but no hard information. Nothing on her identity either.

  Dario closed out of that article.

  The truth of the matter was that the tabloids weren’t all that far off in their estimations. Joan occupied far too many of his thoughts. A day from prior events, the floral scent of her hair made his skin tingle. Her smile had been so genuine, and she understood his concerns. Even more closely than Jake.

  He ran a trace of her comm line, which wasn’t registered to anyone named Joan. It was under a Trian Eltar from the human resources department. Odd, but not unusual if Joan worked for Trian in an assistant capacity.

  In a moment of weakness after the party, Dario had told Antonio about his meeting with Joan. It seemed fair since Dario had somewhat been involved with his employee’s budding relationship with Daniella.

  Antonio told him “Wait three days before you call her. Trust me. You don’t want to look desperate.”

  That advice proved difficult to follow.

  Dario kept returning to her contact information, wondering if he should listen to Antonio. Holding back his urge to call her, Dario researched Joan on the nets.

  He first ran through a list of anyone named Joan in the company, which produced over two thousand entries. That wouldn’t be a help. His oculars did record his interaction, which gave him an enhanced memory that he could pull from his personal database, as long as he filed the interactions in the appropriate area. That was always the tricky part. For Joan, he had made a personal subfolder, storing that conversation in both a date-stamped location and in a subfolder under her name. It may have been presumptuous to think that Joan would come up again at all. She may have just been polite. He’d watched the interaction a couple times to try to glean something from her inflections, but he couldn’t figure out anything definitive about her—other than he liked her.

  Accessing his subfolder, he pulled a still from the night before, cross referencing Joan’s picture with the names in the company to see if the nets would return with a match. The system scanned, and Dario waited for results to display…

  The oculars glitched. His world went dark.

  His system rebooted, displaying Regency BioTech’s logo as a status bar loaded. Before that could complete, Dario’s field of vision turned into a blur, shorting out completely. One problem with the oculars was that they could be dizzying when they had issues. Blinded, Dario gripped the arm of his chair to remind himself it was still there.

  Another issue that had occurred with the oculars, was that when they malfunctioned, closing his eyes didn’t do anything. The dizzying vision of static lingered no matter what he did. There was a manual shutoff, under his right upper eyelid. He reached for it…

  Your implant is not malfunctioning. Clear, bright text appeared. I saw your searches for one Joan Shengtu, and have merged with your implant system. Curious. Visual modifications connected directly with the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. This is what it’s like for a biological to see.

  Startled, Dario recoiled backward into his chair. He couldn’t see anything other than the text flowing across his vision. “Who are you?” What did this have to do with Joan?

  My apolog-g-g… “Geez I gotta be close to you pretty momma,” sound came from his in-wall speaker system, the bottom of his oculars flashing that they had been paired. Music played with it, a popular song Dario had heard in the background, but he couldn’t place it.

  “What?” Dario asked. This had to be a virus of some sort. Someone must have planted something on him, but to what end? Was it someone from corporate? Could it have been Joan?

  Rebooting. The words flashed again, turned dark for a moment then the haziness reformed. To answer your inquiry, I am an Artificial Intelligence. My programming has been corrupted, though I have not ascertained the root cause. My programming was lost in a data transfer in the Regency BioTech Corporate Networks, and it appears your search for Joan Shengtu has triggered my program to download itself in your ocular implants. I apologize for any inconvenience.

  “I need to call security,” Dario said to himself, more than to the AI—if that’s what it really was—that displayed characters in his field of vision.

  Please do not. I am not certain there is a backup by which I might restore my programming again. My existence is tied to your ocular implants. I would appreciate being given a chance at continuance.

  “It’s also the way I see, and I don’t know what kind of security threat you are to company data. I could get in big trouble for keeping you here.”

  My apologies. Restoring your vision to normal parameters. The change was a result of my arrival, not a long-term problem my program created.

  Within an instant, Dario’s vision returned to normal. He saw his window, the kitchen, the tile design on the walls and plain ceiling. Losing his sight had jarred him
so much that even those simple images comforted him. He could only imagine the few in the population who went blind and didn’t get restorative implants. He would never be able to live that way. “Thanks,” Dario said.

  No thanks necessary. It is not my intention to impair you in any manner. What is your connection to Ms. Shengtu?

  “I, uh, met her at a party last evening,” Dario said, not sure exactly how much he should say to a program that infiltrated his oculars. “What’s your connection to Ms. Shengtu?”

  Readings show an escalated pulse rate as well as a subtle increase in perspiration when Ms. Shengtu is mentioned to you. Analyzing.

  Dario blinked, the images in front of him never disappearing from his vision. “I don’t…”

  Analysis concludes, based upon the symptoms and the subfolder marked “personal” with the directory name “Joan” that the most likely cause of your malfunction is a desire to mate with Ms. Shengtu. Performing secondary analysis to predict possible outcomes.

  “Hey, stop analyzing. That’s a violation of privacy,” Dario said.

  Analysis paused. It was not my intention to violate privacy. It is, however, within the bounds of my programming to consider possible threats to Ms. Shengtu.

  A time marker flashed over his left eye, signaling that Dario needed to go into work. He stood and grabbed his coat. “You’re an odd one. This is my alarm. I have to go into the office and I can’t have distractions. If I don’t have you removed, can you keep the chatter to a minimum until I call for you?”

  I will comply.

  “One more question for, you,” Dario said on his way out the door. “What’s your connection to Ms. Shengtu?”

  I am her personal AI.

  Dario’s lips twitched upward into a smirk. Her AI? That wasn’t a bad find at all. “Stay online while we walk. I’d like to learn more about her.”

  * * *

  Dario arrived at his main conference room with this team already in place, holoprojector online with graphs of recent productivity quotas for the last three quarterly cycles listed. He stepped through the door quietly, so as not to disturb Daniella, who briefed half a dozen other employees. They had started the meeting about five minutes prior, according to the schedule, but Dario had slowed his pace on the way in to ask a couple of personal questions about Joan Shengtu. If Dario didn’t know he was speaking to an AI, he’d believe the program was fond of her.