Idyllian (Amsterdam Institute)
Page 21
But Sienna had her own instincts for this, thanks, and she gave them free reign. Scramble up, run. Run for all she was worth. Elantine was bare steps behind, cursing, and Sienna had no time to see where she was going, only that it was toward a door, and then through a hallway. The floor was covered with—wood?—of all things. Perhaps it was a texture on the polymer. It grayed out in Sienna’s vision with each beat of her overstressed heart and slam of her feet. After the healing, she had so little left, she’d literally fall over the next breath, she was sure of it, but she kept running anyway, falling into each step and somehow continuing to move forward.
The implant showed her—some kind of a map—she had no time to read it, and it wasn’t guiding her feet, but Sienna aimed herself at a side path that seemed to lead somewhere convoluted. A door stopped her, adding more bruises to her forearms as she smashed into it, and she wanted to lean and pant and she couldn’t afford that. It opened out from under her, the implant transmitting an access code, and she was in an area of stark shadows, one emergency light bar very far down the hall.
Yes. Good. Somewhere to lose herself. The door slid closed behind her, chirped acknowledgment of another code. The slam that followed, half a second later, startled Sienna enough she stumbled forward, in lieu of any other reaction when her heart was already laboring at far past the redline. All right. Forward. Moving. Losing herself.
A hand on the wall kept Sienna upright, but she wasn’t seeing very well in the darkness—no, she was seeing perfectly, in the grayscale of enhanced light—and then that was gone again, fuzzing out so she wasn’t sure if it had been the implant or her own imagination. Her hand bumped into a line that matched an access panel on the map, and Sienna leaned her forehead against the wall for a while. She couldn’t hear pursuit or any effort to smash through the door the hard way, but that probably only meant it was a silent code battle of the commander’s access codes against those of an intelligence agent.
Open, she thought at the implant. Open, open, open.
Nothing. Sienna slapped a palm against the panel, the pure incandescent frustration of a universe currently without mercy lending her a last burst of strength. She hadn’t died in the camp, she hadn’t died under the knife when the implant was installed—which she apparently should have—and she was not going to die because a panel wouldn’t open!
She promptly fell through the open space, one more strike on the heels of her hands, with a bonus jab of the lip into her stomach. Climbing in was beyond her, but she managed a messy maneuver that involved tipping in, shifting most of her weight to one hip, and drawing in her legs. She heard a hiss as the panel eased back into place.
Gray beat in and out across her vision and Sienna lost track of where she was between breaths as well. She was lying—lying on metal—enclosed, pipes and cables surrounding her—was she dying? What did dying feel like?
“We thought LSF understood that the implant ensures I can’t be broken. But they’re determined to try. I think this is where I should say I regret marrying you, Gentiana, tying you to someone who apparently is dying just as young as my parents always said I would, but I can’t regret that. I hope you can forgive me—”
Pain was layered with and laced through the memory, mixing once more with Sienna’s own pain while centuries passed. Eventually, however, she didn’t die, and some little of her exhaustion abated, enough for her to draw her mind back to herself, fence it round with her name. She was Sienna, not Isachne, not Pax Romana. She didn’t have a wife.
Low-light vision came back for her, starkly grayscale in the ambient LEDs of the technological guts of the building around her. She used it to sketch with a fingertip on the patch of walkway beside her. A memory of home, just the shape of the roof of her childhood house against the mountain at the horizon.
The polymer coating of the walkway resisted the oils from her finger the same as it did any other grime, but she could see the shapes in her mind’s eye anyway. Her breathing evened and her heart finally followed. How many times could she relive dying before she died herself? “Help,” she whispered, to the universe, perhaps. At least she wouldn’t die in silence. The word came out in Lingua, rather than Idyllian, because she’d pretended to be Pax Romana for so long, she supposed. Or maybe it was another sign of the implant dragging her down, away from her own identity.
“Hello, I am Penstemon, the Near-AI in charge of this facility. Was that request directed at me?” A pleasant female voice, at a conversational volume that nevertheless filled the enclosed space.
Sienna’s surprise smashed her back into a pipe, and the wash of fresh adrenaline over stale made her head swim. “Request you disclose my location to no one,” she said. “And don’t disclose that these access codes have been active. Or allow anyone to change my access level. Authorization—” And the implant sent Isachne’s codes, wonder of wonders, almost like it was actually responding to her.
“Authorization accepted.”
There had been a Near-AI in charge of the dorms at the Pax Romana university Sienna had been attending, but she’d never done much more with it than check class schedules. Near-AI were very good within their specific range of requests, but conveying anything out of the ordinary was a slog. If she could make it through the slog, there was an opportunity here, though. “I need somewhere safe. To hide.”
“All of my facility is safe. Atmosphere and temperature are within tolerances, and there are no extreme weather events affecting the environment outside—” Penstemon burbled on for a while longer and Sienna stopped listening as her foolishness hit her with the force of another blow. Penstemon was using external speakers—what if Elantine heard her or the Near-AI from out in the hall?
“Quiet,” Sienna hissed, and Penstemon complied. No sounds in the hallway that she could hear, amid the rising hiss over-enhanced background noise. She let the enhancement ebb. All right. Safe for now, but undoubtedly not much longer. She needed to use one of her implant’s internal channels and convince the Near-AI to—
“Honestly, it’s hardly worth the trouble to hack a Near-AI, they’re kept so dumb exactly for that reason, so to not allow too much control—”
She’d said that to—No! Sienna hadn’t done any such thing, that had been Isachne. She was Sienna. Prague Sienna. She’d been born—been born—
She needed to get Isachne out of her head.
Sienna slumped her shoulder a little more inward into her curl in relief. Then she pressed her hand flat to the walkway where her roofline and mountain had been, pushing herself straighter for the principle of the thing.
Or did she want to delete them? Concern flickered automatically at the thought of deleting something that might be immensely valuable, and that thought linked onward to a belated realization.
LSF clearly hadn’t intended her to survive this long, only long enough to regain their own prisoners. But not intending her survival and attempting to ensure her death were two different things. The only difference Sienna could think of was the fact that she had access to Isachne’s intelligence. Somewhere on the implant was something LSF and their sleeper agent were willing to kill for.
And perhaps that intelligence was leverage she’d be able to use. Sienna certainly didn’t have much else available to her.
A deep breath, and she summoned Gentiana’s face to her mind, what she’d glimpsed of it. Memories rose from the implant, b
ut she shoved them away, out, and they lifted from her, in linked skeins.
Sienna answered positively and then let herself slip away for a while. Penstemon said something about how long the transfer would take, given the lack of a wired connection, but it made little difference to her. If she was found here, in this hiding place, because she had not moved on quickly enough, perhaps that would be a relief. An ending.
Instead of discovery, at the end of the files came a last paroxysm of pain. Like a fishhook in her skin, she couldn’t release Isachne’s last message without experiencing it one last time, and to force herself to that was beyond what she had left. She shoved the message and memory down instead, stuffed it too tight to link to any of her thoughts, and stepped cautiously back to consciousness, curled around exhaustion that at least belonged to her alone.
The flat, unyielding plane of the floor made itself known then, aches slowly welling up from points at hip and shoulder. Sienna made it to hands and knees, and found the implant’s ever-helpful map superimposed on the enhanced brightness before her in the narrow crawlspace. That hadn’t been part of the memories, then. Sienna supposed the implant’s package of “get your stupid ass out of danger” wouldn’t be, and it had linked to Penstemon’s local data to furnish her with this new spur to continued movement toward saving herself.
She followed its guidance to a room buried deep within this section of the facility, which was sealed for some reason not notated on the map and Sienna didn’t honestly care at the moment. Climbing out of the access panel within the room, facing inward and dragging her stomach over the lip centimeter by painful centimeter until her feet touched the floor was all she was prepared to think about. Her enhanced vision showed her a bare mattress on a bed, awaiting sheet and blanket along with the rest of some future occupant’s accoutrements should this section ever come into use again.
She collapsed on the bed; that was ending enough for now.
***
Cold woke Sienna, though her own stink hit her so powerfully on her first conscious breath that it seemed very much like the cause instead. Sweat, dye, dust—she felt it all as a physical film squirming over her skin. She groaned and turned over, but that removed her from the pocket of warmth she’d built up on the mattress and started shivers down her legs. The army jacket had insulated her core, but her feet were ice. This wasn’t ship cold, but planet cold was plenty cold enough to keep her from sleep.
She sat up, shucked off her boots, wrapped the sides of the jacket around as much of her knees as she could encompass, and turtled her head down under the hood. Examined in the light of day, the room was of good quality. Without cleaning systems operational, dust had drifted away from most anti-dirt-coated surfaces to the floor, where it could drift no further—she could see her prints standing clear. On the wood, as she apparently hadn’t imagined from before. Strange luxury, for a Pax Romana facility.
Or maybe not so strange, for somewhere clearly far from the core. It dawned on Sienna that she was seeing things in the literal light of day, through a window that took up much of the space where a headboard might have been. Outside, beyond a speckling of wind-driven rain droplets, was dense, temperate rainforest. That explained the wood, but raised another question: why was this facility the only human-made feature she could see? The vegetation was dense, but not that dense—unlike the close, even ranks of timber farms she’d visited at home, these trees were gnarled, leaning, and fallen, opening gaps for bushier species, and something like a line of sight over the understory.
“Penstemon, please verify no one has found my location or locked out my codes, then tell me about the planet we’re on.” Sienna’s throat felt as if it stuck to itself, trying to form the words, and she pushed to her feet instead of waiting for the answer. Personal quarters must have a bathroom. Would the water still be running?
“Oh, the sleeping beauty awakes,” Isachne’s voice said. “Don’t worry, they’re still running a search through sensors before they put boots on the ground in this section of the facility.”
Sienna caught herself on the bathroom doorframe, clenched her fingertips into the metal as if its hardness would differentiate dreaming from waking. She was awake right now, wasn’t she? Simply by virtue of asking the question? Unless she was hallucinating. “Penstemon? Did you just speak to me?”
“Yes, I’m speaking to you at the moment. We’ll see if that changes, I might decide to spend some more time watching my wife sob her eyes out.” The acid of the Near-AI’s tone etched holes into Sienna’s thoughts. She didn’t—that didn’t make sense, no Near-AI acted like that—
Unless maybe it wasn’t so near anymore. With memories placed in Penstemon’s core storage…
And this whole situation had somewhere become absurd, and she refused to defend herself to a fellow victim of LSF. “I had nothing to do with your—with Isachne’s death.” Sienna swallowed painfully, and made it the last few stumbling steps to the faucet. It did produce water when she turned it on, and she drank straight from it until her stomach hurt.
And universal mercy, the shower cubicle. The temperature controls were as unresponsive as all the other powered aspects of the room, but Sienna would take even cold water. She didn’t immerse herself, but scrubbing at the worst spots on body and clothes both made all the difference. She felt human; she felt almost optimistic. She was free, at least within the facility, and if she could find a ship, she could actually escape, unlike back at the camp. And maybe the implant could even aid her with that.
“Penstemon? Would you tell me about the planet?” The Near-AI’s programming had to be somewhere underneath Isachne’s scraps of personality.
Sure enough, after a muttered curse, Penstemon’s tone smoothed out. “The planet of Penstemon was originally terraformed to allow long-term settlement after resource extraction, but the weather proved a deterrent. The clinic complex that takes its name from the planet,”—and had given its name to what had once been the complex’s Near-AI—“was built at the site of the one spaceport as a rehab facility, behind the main front of the Pax Romana–LSF conflict, but when the front moved too far beyond, the unneeded portions of the complex were shuttered.”
That was where she was currently hiding, then, the shuttered section. “The one spaceport” didn’t sound promising, however. “What spacecraft are available to the facility?”
“None. There are only a couple suborbital runabouts.” Isachne’s personality oozed back in. “You can visit whatever patch of dripping trees on the habitable continent strikes your fancy, but I don’t see why you’d want to. There aren’t any buildings left, outside of this complex. The only craft that touches down consistently is the monthly supply ship, and good luck sneaking onto that.”
For that, perhaps the implant pillaging its way through her head could earn its keep once more. It certainly seemed like the sort of thing an agent would need to accomplish in the course of her normal duties. Of course, Sienna would have to ensure it would respond to her consistently before then, however. “When’s the next one?”
“Just over three weeks.”
If connections were at 40%, would they grow the rest of the way given time? Or did she need to direct—hunger clawed at her guts with a pain so physical Sienna folded over, arms pressed in. Either way, int-tech needed energy and energy needed food, and it had been far too long since she’d had any of that.
Well, that was a goal Sienna felt she could presently encompass. Sneak out, find food, sneak back. Grow connections. Escape. A lot better than simple endurance in the camp.
At least she could tell herself that.
***
Somewhere, tucked into individual rooms, must be snacks, but Sienna could find no other option besides the mess and attached kitchen in her study of the map her implant had downloaded and her questioning of Penstemon. She timed her strike for
the dead time after dinner, when everyone should be settling in to enjoy their entertainment or the privacy of their own room or both. She hoped. Her implant didn’t tag anyone in her vicinity when she peeked out of the door to the sealed section nearest the mess. That matched what she could see with her own eyes as she slipped quickly along the wall. Cameras would be active out here, and while she’d told Penstemon not to share the feed with anyone, perhaps Elantine might manage to revoke her access, or perhaps Penstemon’s new, borrowed personality might prompt her to be more than a verbal asshole.
She felt weak enough to keep one hand on the wall, but the mess wasn’t far. And no one was there, just as the implant had promised. Empty of people, but not empty of food—Sienna could see a couple dishes in a plexi-fronted cooler, leftovers from the last meal placed for late-night snacking. Sienna turned her balancing hand to hold on to the doorway, relief piling briefly atop her weakness to still her for a moment.
She’d meant to load up her arms to take back to safety, but with the portions divided by dish, she could only reasonably carry two or perhaps three without dangerously interfering with her ability to avoid encounters on her way back. She seized a small bowl piled with mixed vegetables, a splash of sauce staining their tops, and tipped it into her mouth. The camp taught you that the majority of chewing was optional, and she’d swallowed one bite, two, when her implant flashed an urgent warning she didn’t understand.
She lowered the bowl as she tried to puzzle it out. Someone was coming? No, the immediate vicinity was still clear, on the implant’s map and to her normal senses as she strained to hear footsteps in the hall. She hadn’t been able to talk to the implant sufficiently to request warnings on anything, so this must be something built into the system already.