by F X Holden
AJ had slept six hours, which left 23 to Whitehorse, but it felt longer, because looking out the window, he saw nothing but cloud and rain. Through the night, it was dark and rainy, and as morning dawned, it was grey, misty and rainy. The highway had popped up above the cloud cover into weak sunshine for what must have been a maximum of fifteen minutes, before they started dropping down through grey cloud again and the windows were streaked with drizzle.
AJ had something to eat, chatted with Cassie a little, dozed off again, and when he woke again a few hours later, he realized it was because Cassie was sitting forward in her seat and tapping him on the knee.
“Sorry to wake you,” she said on TH. “I’ve been monitoring the comms for all of our principals, I thought you’d like an update.”
He took a second to orient himself. “Let me guess. They’re not worried about us anymore and we can just turn this baby around and go home,” he said. “We’ll be back in time for an early morning surf on Friday, right?”
“That would be no,” she said. “The content is all encrypted, so I can only analyze patterns, but I can see comms has been running hot between Winter and McMaster and it peaked just after the neural blast. Given neither of them should even know about it, we can conclude they were behind that little intervention...”
“As if there was any doubt,” he scowled. He needed to pee and tried to ignore it.
“Ferguson has also been busy, mostly internal calls to other ITMP IDs,” she said. “My best guess is he’s trying to work out who the hell we are, before we arrive. Probably checking highway patrol, border force, fugitive notices. Here’s something interesting though, he put in a call to Warnecke’s son.”
“On Orkutsk?!” AJ spluttered. “He couldn’t have paid for that himself.”
“No, the call was made from his ITMP ID,” she said. “But it’s interesting, right? I’ve got a theory about it, but I’d like to hear what you think.”
He ran a few hundred scenarios and ranked them, “He knows Warnecke is dead. He got a message last week about Farley. Now we call him, saying we have something for him, from Farley. He’s worried the three things are connected but can’t see how. He called the son to talk it over, see if he can see a connection.”
“I had that in my top two as well,” Cassie said. “But I have another one. The daughter is on Orkutsk.”
“He called the son, to talk to the daughter?” AJ asked.
“I can’t see who he talked to, only that he called the son’s ID,” she said. “If there is some connection between Ferguson and the daughter, which there must be if Warnecke wanted him to have those photos, then it makes just as much sense he’d want to talk to the daughter, as to the son.”
“I worked that scenario, but I ranked it much lower,” AJ said. “Why would she be on Orkutsk? She can’t dive the Core from there, she can’t even access it. Orkutsk is neutral territory, it has its own independent AI platform. She’d be isolated. Plus,” he held a finger in the air. “Orkutsk isn’t a place you just visit. It’s population controlled, with strict limits for each colony and as far as I know, there are no tourist visas.”
“No, but,” she wagged a finger back at him, “What if she’s just transiting?”
“Catching a jump ship to another system? Leaving Coruscant?” he said. “Why would she bug out?”
“Maybe she knows I’m on to her,” Cassie speculated. “And she’s scared.”
He smiled, “You are pretty scary when you do the vampire lady look.”
“No, not me Cassie - me The Core,” she said. “I thought I’ve been covering our tracks, but maybe she found out I was onto Warnecke and either saw, or assumed that would lead me to her. So she ran.”
“She can’t survive more than two hours without drifting,” AJ said. “Even if she found a way to hide her drift signal from you, the need to drift is hard-wired into her brain. Could she have found a workaround for that?”
“Almost impossible,” Cassie said.
“I know, so … wait,” AJ said, sitting upright. “You said ‘almost’.”
She sighed, “I’ll tell you, but then I’m going to delete the data from your cache immediately, alright?”
“No, what?”
“No one, and I mean no one, knows this AJ. So I can’t wipe your biological memory but if I find you ever, ever tell this to anyone, I will reintegrate you and keep your consciousness aware and make you listen to 20th Century rap music for eternity.”
“Whoa, OK. Now we’re seeing the true Core side of you.”
“I’m serious.”
“Clearly. I promise.”
She stared at him another long second before continuing, “The drift protocol works like this. Your body naturally produces Gamma-aminobutyric acid, GABA, to regulate brain activity. Normal levels, normal brain activity. Too much, and it shuts down brain activity. Your brain is hard-wired to drift at least every 20 minutes. If you miss six drift windows, two hours, it triggers a massive release of GABA to your brain. You go into a GABA induced coma. If you can drift again while in the coma, you’ll return to normal and wake up again. If you don’t...”
“You never wake up,” he said. “Three days, and you die of thirst. So freaking barbaric.”
“Hey, not my idea,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “It was a requirement Congress put into the law enabling the creation of cybers, that they should not be able to survive, independent of the Core. This was how I had to design you, to satisfy the lawmakers.”
“Still barbaric.”
“OK, now you know how it works, design a way around it,” she said, sitting back in her chair with her arms crossed. “And assume that if she can dive the Deep Core, Warnecke’s daughter also knows about the GABA protocol.”
He played with the parameters she’d given him and threw out solution after solution until he’d arrived at two that might work. “Alright, one – if a cyber went into shutdown mode you could keep them alive indefinitely by putting them on a nutrient drip and feeding them water and food that way.”
“That’s barbaric,” she said. “They’d be alive, but in a coma forever.”
“Or, you could take some sort of GABA inhibitor drug, something that counter-acted the effect of the GABA.”
“Yes,” she said. “Except it would need to be very precise and dosed continuously as long as you were outside the drift window. The brain needs GABA to function, too much and you shut the brain down, too little and make it neuronally unstable.” She held up three fingers, “There’s a third hack. Remember, she’s a data freak, not a neuroscientist.”
A data hack? He worked that idea for a moment. “The only way to use that would be to fake the signal going from the cyber to the Core. No, wait – that would just trick the Core. You need to trick the cybers’ brain. So you would need to simulate the confirmation code coming back from the Core, to the cyber! If you could trick the brain into thinking it had drifted and received confirmation of the drift from the Core, the GABA flood wouldn’t be triggered!” He patted himself on the back. “Boom.”
“Which I thought of when I designed the protocol,” Cassie said. “I figured that one day one or more of my curious and frustrated children would experiment on themselves to try to trigger the shutdown protocol and discover how it worked. Easy enough, you just have to be smart or lucky enough to be measuring amino acid levels at the time of the shutdown. You’d see a massive spike in GABA. You would also need to figure out that the trigger was in the return drift signal, and isolate it, and be able to replicate it.”
“So simple,” he said. “Don’t know why no-one did it yet.”
“Oh, they’ve tried,” she said. “As I knew they would. So I use one-time chaos-synchronized quantum entanglement on the GABA trigger. It can neither be predicted, nor copied.”
He frowned, “Now you’re saying your magical ‘third hack’ isn’t viable.”
She turned away to stare out the window, “No, it isn’t. But no-one until now has had a
ccess to every bit of data there is to know about the drift protocol, and how it is encrypted.” She ran a finger through the condensation inside the window. “Knowledge is power.”
AJ watched the rain beating on the windows, sliding sideways on the glass as the car powered down the highway. “Sorry, but I don’t think she ran off world. You just aren’t that scary, and if she’s a Core data junkie, she needs to stay here to get her fix. If Ferguson called the son’s number on Orkutsk, then he probably spoke to the son.”
“OK,” she said, coming over to his side of the car and lying down across the bench seat with her head in his lap. “If he called the son, he should also have called the daughter. Ergo one of the other IDs that Ferguson called must be Warnecke’s daughter. I’ll send you the comms data, you work out which one, smart guy.”
In seconds she was asleep.
A couple of hours before they hit Whitehorse, Cassie woke. “I need to pee, hand me a juice bottle and some swabs will you?”
AJ handed her an empty bottle and watched as Cassie awkwardly relieved herself. Cassie laughed, “Do you mind? I’m taking a whizz here.”
“Sorry,” AJ said. “Just impressed you could hold that in for ten hours. Also impressed you could sleep for ten hours straight.”
“I never sleep,” she said. “I am Core. But Cassie, Cassie was gutted.” She finished up and delicately tucked the bottle and used swabs into a compartment in the door. “Trust me, I didn’t exactly think of this part when I decided to grow this body.”
“And what happens to ‘this body’ when we’re done?” he asked.
“Told you,” she said. “It’s coded with the same re-integration date as yours.” She was already sitting beside him, so she leaned her head on his shoulder. “I figure we’ll just lay down on a bed of flowers together, holding hands as these bodies breathe their last breaths, and we merge with the Core again.”
“You thought that’s what I wanted to hear?” he asked. “Really?”
“OK, how about we both walk to the top of the Kodiak Ice Cliff and throw ourselves off? Is that more like it?”
“How about we just don’t die,” AJ said. “How about that for an idea?”
“Not an option, sorry. Do you love me AJ?” Cassie asked.
“What?”
“I’ve admitted I love you,” Cassie said. “I’ve told you I adore you. Think of the resources it took for me to make this body. It’s not just any old wetware shell, I made it specifically for you. Yesterday, I risked its life for you – hell I might have risked the future of the entire planet to save your ass back there at that station. But do you realize, you never once told me that you love me?”
That made AJ stop. Hadn’t he? Did he?
“Hell yes, I love you,” AJ said.
Cassie slid off the seat and lay her lithe frame on top of AJ. AJ had seen her lift him over her shoulder like he was just a bag of shopping, but right now, her touch was featherlight as she ran her fingers through his hair.
“We don’t have forever, but we have ten years,” Cassie said, kissing him passionately. “It will have to be enough.”
“I guess.”
“Good, now we have that sorted, get your clothes off. We still have two hours until we hit Whitehorse, and I know exactly how to occupy them.”
As the car swung down a mountainside toward Whitehorse, they swabbed the perspiration from each other and pulled on their thermals. Cassie applied the traditional Territory makeup he’d seen her wearing the first time they’d met – dark eyeliner, black lipstick, black nails. Neither of them had packed for Whitehorse in September. Hell, they hadn’t even packed for Ketchikan but at least the planer suits they’d been wearing offered a double layer of protection against the polar cold. All AJ knew about Whitehorse was that it was the second closest city dome to the north pole – Bloor being the only city closer. The weather forecast AJ called up on his cortex said 33 degrees, with low visibility, but as they dropped down a mountainside and out of the mist, AJ saw the Whitehorse city dome reveal itself on the plain below.
No wonder the duty officer at the ITMP station had laughed a few minutes ago when Cassie had called and asked if she could recommend a hotel that was close to both the station and other amenities. The dome was tiny, no bigger as a whole than the South Coast City suburb of Sea Gate, where AJ lived. Had lived. He somehow doubted he would ever be going back. AJ was a little nervous about what might await them at the entrance into the dome, but it was automated and unattended, traffic flowing freely through, both in and out of the city. He’d feared a lockdown after the neural blast at the station just outside the border crossing, but it seemed the good people of Whitehorse weren’t too concerned with odd things that happened in the deep South down by the border.
That thought didn’t make him less nervous, even though they cruised through the entrance without a hiccup.
Inside the dome, Whitehorse revealed itself as a town of low rise buildings painted bright white and blue, with spiked trees buried halfway up their trunks in powdered ice thrown up by road graders. It made sense the town didn’t waste unnecessary energy on trying to make the climate temperate, as they did in South Gate City. This was the Territory, top of Tatsensui dammit – waist-high powdered ice drifts were part of the charm!
Their car followed a small ring road around to the other side of the town then dropped down a ramp, into light traffic, before it taxied up to a gate in front of a small green terminal building, with powder blanketed mounds and a small mountain rising up to the top of the dome behind it.
“This is the ITMP office?” AJ asked. “It looks more like a ride-hailing hub.”
“This is the address. Town schematics show most buildings here are multifunctional,” Cassie said. “We’ll try here first.”
For what looked like a ride-hailing hub, there were damn few people around for four o’clock in the afternoon. It made AJ uneasy. “And if this is a trap? We’re walking right into the arms of the Mounties here.”
“Come on, don’t be so suspicious, it’s the Territory. I bet even the cops here are super polite,” Cassie said.
As it turned out, a reception committee was waiting for them. As they stepped out of the car, waiting at the entrance to the transport hub was a six-foot tall woman in a flat-brimmed brown hat and a bright red uniform jacket with dark collar, epaulets, black trousers and boots.
Red hair. Bright green eyes. And a glowing dot between her eyebrows.
He jumped onto a private TH frequency. Holy hell it's her, right? He pulled up the images in his cache, paging through the most recent. There was no doubt. It was Warnecke’s daughter. In a Mountie’s uniform.
Stay calm, Cassie said, studying her as well. We’re more of a threat to her than she is to us. She might know about you, but I’m guessing she has no idea who I am.
AJ couldn’t help himself. He stood and stared.
The woman turned his way and looked carefully at the two of them. Their car had a Ketchikan ID, and they were wearing thermals that clearly weren’t ideal for Whitehorse. They stuck out like a proverbial thumb. She walked toward them and held out her hand, smiling “You must be the Chief’s guests.”
A cyber working as a cop? AJ chirped.
Different laws up here, Cassie observed. In case we needed reminding.
They shook, “I’m Carly,” Cassie said. “This big lump here is FJ. And you are...”
“JNN.9734. Most people just call me Jen.” The woman smiled and held out her hand to AJ, “You’re a cyber too! I saw you staring – it's the uniform, right? Don’t be freaked by it, the Chief told me to come in my Red Serge,” she said, straightening her jacket. “Said you’d probably expect it.”
“I don’t know what we were expecting,” Cassie said.
“Take your bag?” she asked, reaching for their backpack.
“No thanks, all good,” AJ said. “Oh, what about our car?”
“Oh, right,” the woman said. She pulled a magnetic tag from her pocket and wa
lked down to slap it on the roof of the car, then came back to them. “OK, you can send it to the station guest parking level now,” she said.
AJ linked to the car’s AI and sent it on its way.
“Okay then,” the Mountie said, indicating a door that led into the hub and then further on into an office complex behind it.
“You don’t usually wear that … outfit?” Cassie asked as they hurried to keep up with her.
“It’s traditional. Few hundred years old. I kind of like it,” the woman said, happily. “But no, we just wear it for reviews and parades and stuff usually. Keep it in my locker at the station though, in case we get the big brass visiting.” She turned and looked at them, “Or friends of the Chief, from down south.”
Cassie looked at AJ, Friends of the Chief?
That’s nice, he said. If this is all an act, it’s a pretty convincing one.
Don’t be fooled. If this is her, then it’s totally an act, Cassie said. She would know you’ve been interacting with Warnecke; she would have images and voiceprints of you. She would have worked out who you are, the minute you stepped out of the car and she saw your face.
They walked out into an open courtyard, shrugging their shoulders against the light snow and freezing air. Their lightweight thermals wouldn’t be enough if they had to stay out longer than a few minutes, even here under the dome.
“Just over here,” Jen said, pointing to a big white door with a thin red, blue and yellow stripe down one side. As they stepped through, AJ saw a reception booth, with biometrics scanner. He nearly froze.
We have to sign in with biometrics, will the IDs from the border work here?
Not taking chances, so I swapped them for fresh ones, Cassie told him. Just follow the normal routine. I’ll intercept the upload. I’m Carly, you’re FJ, got it?
Sure, Carly.
“You can sign in here. The doorway will scan you for weapons, so if you’re carrying, you probably want to declare them now,” Jen warned.
Cassie and AJ both held their hands up. “Not a problem,” Cassie said, shooting AJ an I told you so, kind of look.