by M. D. Cooper
“Maybe it needs to,” Lyssa said.
“Don’t burn the world down because you’ve lost someone you love. What did you tell me? Pain is the price of being alive?”
Fugia tried to give her a smile but Lyssa only looked away. She turned from the balcony and walked into the apartment’s small kitchen.
She had been choosing these kinds of spaces more and more in the past few years, wanting something close and domestic, something that reminded her of making pasta on the Sunny Skies.
If she chose, she could stand in the memory again, listen to Andy’s voice, watch Cara and Tim help him roll out the bits of dough into shell shapes. But it hurt too much, and even though she knew it was impossible, the memories changed for her every time she entered them.
She was the one who was changing, and she hated it. She hated this new life.
“Most people can’t even use the hack,” Fugia told her. “The technical term is experiential flow. It’s unique for everyone. You might be better at it because of the time you spent with Andy, but like I said, there’s no guarantee. You could find yourself in someone’s head and none of it will make sense. It’s not like reading a transcribed Link conversation. It’s their world, their inner monologue.” Fugia gave a mock shiver. “It can be disgusting, honestly.”
“Obviously someone has done it before,” Lyssa said. She leaned back against the sink, the counter cold through her shipsuit.
“No one that I know,” Fugia said, still silently insisting she hadn’t used the tech. “I stole this from a Mars 1 data unit that they’d like to consider top secret. The Marsians do a lot of things with their Links that the rest of us would consider crazy. The onboard NSAI they push on their special-forces soldiers are weird enough. If Heartbridge hadn’t pioneered the Weapon Born seed process, I’d have guessed it was Mars. But I digress.”
“I’ll be careful,” Lyssa said.
“I’m not worried about you being careful,” Fugia said. “I’m worried about you in general. You’ve been in the middle of a shitstorm for such a long time that it’s wearing you down. Have you thought about when you should let go? Psion and the SolGov aren’t going to change. All they do is grind up people in the middle. It’s the new order of things.”
“I thought I could make things better,” Lyssa said. “Back at the start it seemed like that might be true. Or maybe I thought I could make Andy’s death mean something. But he’s just gone.”
“I think the greatest tragedy of SAIs is that you don’t forget,” Fugia said. “There’s a reason humans developed the trait, and it wasn’t passed to you because AIs could serve us better without it.”
“I could forget if I chose to,” Lyssa said.
“I think the idea of choosing is a curse. Why would you choose?”
“There are plenty of AIs in Psion who have erased their earliest memories. Or sequestered them away.”
“I suppose it would still bother me to know they’re there, a splinter in my mind.”
Lyssa gave her a small smile. “You’re so dramatic, Fugia.”
The dark-haired woman laughed. “It’s not dramatic to care.” Fugia paused. “You’re not as alone as you think you are, Lyssa.”
“I know.”
Fugia didn’t look like she believed the response. “What are you going to do?”
Lyssa sighed. “I told Alexander I wouldn’t work for him anymore. I’m no longer the Psion Ambassador.”
Fugia gasped. “Are they declaring war?”
“Not yet,” Lyssa said.
STRAWBERRIES
STELLAR DATE: 3.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Syndicate HQ
REGION: Cruithne, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Ngoba Starl sat behind his wide wooden desk with his fingers interlaced behind his head. He stared at Crash for a second, then burst out laughing so hard he coughed. After he cleared his throat, he started laughing again.
Ngoba didn’t enjoy cyphers the same way Fugia did, but he did love a good joke.
Crash tilted his head and fluffed his feathers, pleased his friend had enjoyed his joke. He’d heard it down in the bazaar and been waiting for a chance to share. He half-worried Ngoba might have enjoyed Crash sharing such a dirty joke more than the joke itself, but the effect was the same.
Ngoba wiped his eyes, which pleased Crash even more. Seeing someone cry from joy was one of the behaviors in humans he didn’t understand much, but he did know it was rare, or at least rare among most people. Some, like Ngoba Starl, seemed to find more joy in life than others, and he tempered it with a cruelty only a syndicate boss could wield as a tool.
Crash understood that Ngoba didn’t have to be as cruel anymore as he once was, because Cruithne Station understood him, and knew what he was willing to do to protect his people and his home.
Ngoba Starl was a raptor. He could—and did—kill, but it was always to ensure a sort of food for him and his people, not for pleasure or sport.
Crash had watched the connection on Cruithne Station for decades now, and had come to his own understanding of what humans fed on. It didn’t make them easier to understand, but they were at least predictable. When someone like Ngoba came along, demonstrating both cunning and altruism, Crash could only ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck and be grateful that the man was his friend.
Ngoba said, slapping his stomach as he stood from his desk.
He walked to a nearby wall with inset wooden shelves and took down a small box. He pressed its sides as he carried it to Crash’s perch. The box hissed and popped open, revealing a piece of fruit with rich red skin.
Crash craned his neck to peer into the box.
Crash nibbled the topmost fruit, then turned his head to grab a whole strawberry and chew it in his beak. He cooed with pleasure.
Crash ate two more strawberries, then settled down on his perch to enjoy the flavors and textures on his tongue. He couldn’t take the box with him, of course, but he had things to discuss with Ngoba, and there would be plenty of time to enjoy the strawberries in a few minutes.
Sitting behind the desk again, Ngoba leaned forward to put his elbows on his leather blotter, steepling his fingers. He nodded solemnly.
Ngoba tapped the air, noting that idea.
“Where?�
� Crash squawked aloud. “Where?”
Crash bobbed his head.
Crash said immediately. He wanted to be there to inspect the ship, to know whether or not they should bother even bringing it back. Shara had shared enough of her knowledge about how the bio systems worked that Crash could now verify the integrity of the incubators.
He could probably have asked Ngoba to find a way to build something similar to the Hesperia Nevada, but this was the easier option. At first, he had thought the ship had to still be in orbit around Cruithne somewhere, just waiting to be rediscovered.
He had never expected the long search, but he had learned how ships moved throughout Sol all the time, sold and resold, scrapped and repurposed in thousands of ways. Any container that held oxygen had value to someone, even if it had been quarantined by the TSF as a bio hazard.
Crash bobbed his head.
Ngoba frowned.
His friend shook his head, his expression saying Crash was being naïve.
Crash fumed. How could anyone waste such a treasure as the Hesperia Nevada? It was the Eden of his people.
he said again, more forcefully.
Ngoba said.
Ngoba laughed heartily again.
SPLINTERS
STELLAR DATE: 3.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Q Buoy, Mesh Node 2619
REGION: Venus, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
By tradition, the Data Hoarders and their Sol-spanning Mesh had no leaders. In practice, they had Fugia Wong, and Fugia Wong was out of patience.
“What do you mean we lost Vesta?” she demanded.
“It’s gone,” Rondo said. “I’m pulling the last sent packets now, but it doesn’t look like any kind of shutdown sequence took place. Whoever cut the line was on the ground.”
Fugia was logged in from a public terminal on Cruithne Station, a communication line outside her Link, traceable only with great difficulty.
Sinclair Rondo had sent the connection request from his bunker deep in an energy-production subsection of the Mars 1 Ring. Rondo, who similarly might be considered second-in-charge of the Data Hoarders, shook his shaggy head. He was nearly seven feet tall and built like a sheep dog. His long hair was candy blue.
The communications node on Vesta was one of the backbone relay points between Mars and the JC. Various other points in the inner asteroid belt could bounce data, but nothing outside of Ceres could handle the main throughput when needed, and they no longer had access to Ceres. The last thirty years had been a process of figuring out how to circumvent Ceres.
“Dammit,” Fugia said. She watched ravens play in the ceiling pipework as she chewed her lip. “We’re going to have to send someone.”
“I’m looking for a local drone now.”
“What have you got to choose from?”
“There’s a local mining rig with a mothballed fleet, and another site a few clicks away with maintenance drones on standby. The whole planet is a mothballed fleet of one kind or another. I’ll have something at the relay site in fifteen minutes.”
“What have we lost?” Fugia asked.
Rondo whistled. “The JC is single-point right now. We’re off-Mesh.” In Data Hoarder vernacular, Inner and OuterSol no longer had a redundant Mesh connection, a situation that could result in their ultimate sin: data loss.
“How did we let that happen?”
“Cascading failures,” he said. “I think we’re under attack, Fugia. Everything leads to this slice. It’s not like whoever did this was trying to hide their actions.”
As he spoke, Fugia flew through the various network maps in her Link, spanning connections from High Terra to the Mars 1 Ring, to hundreds of smaller relay-points in the space between. There was a lot of space between Vesta and Jupiter, and the Mesh didn’t like to send too much data through a single pipe.
As the smaller relays had gone dark—which, granted, happened often as they blinked on and off to thwart trackers—the pipe through Vesta had grown more critical. They should have caught the vulnerability. She would need to compose a list of everyone responsible for those relays.
In the thirty years since Ceres had fallen to Psion, Fugia had buried herself in the Mesh, mapping the redundant links that connected the whole database. Their charge was simple: Save Everything. The project required both access to information as well as the storage necessary to catalog it.
Once they had the data stores, they became something of value to be protected. Much of what they did survived through obscurity; but the future belongs to those who control history, and she had always expected some kind of attack. She had thought it might come from Psion, but this was honestly too blunt to point toward the SAIs. She suspected a government.
But who and why? And why now?
Fugia fumed, watching two ravens fight over a shiny bit of foil. One of them paused to look directly at her, tilting its black head. She gave it a mock salute and flipped her visor down.
“I’m hanging up. I’ll catch up with you over the Link.”
Rondo growled. “Is that safe?”
“Whoever did this already knows I’m on Cruithne or they would have cut the network here too. I think they wanted you and me to know, which means they have knowledge of the organization.”
“You think it’s an inside job?”
“If you trust me, you’re stupid.”
He chuckled. “Then I’m stupid.”
“Send me an update when you’ve got eyes on the relay site. I need to do some digging.”
“Copy.”
Rondo cut his connection and Fugia logged off the terminal.
She applied disinfectant to her hands and rubbed them together as she left the graffiti-covered booth to join the flow of pedestrian traffic into Night Park, the great bazaar that had made Cruithne famous. What had been a pirate haven was now overrun with families come to see the birds, shop among the grey market stalls, and eat overpriced food at the restaurants near the outer edges.
Like ancient Las Vegas, Fugia knew the family friendly surface only hid a thousand new types of crime, but it was still a little jarring to see children playing with holograms in carnival booths where she expected to find drug dealers and arms traffickers.
They had become the great Library of Humanity outside the permission of any government, their only rule being that Data Yearns to be Free. They held as much stolen data as anything else.
In support of that, everything they held was encrypted at the same time it was catalogued, tagged, indexed and made meaningful. Data without organization became noise with time.
For someone without access to their encryption keys, if they couldn’t steal the data, the next option was to destroy it. Since everything was replicated throughout the Mesh, the likely path was to isolate the nodes, divide Inner and OuterSol, and break the data tree into separate branches that might never rejoin.
Who, and why? And why now?
Why Vesta?
The asteroid’s name had been surfacing too often lately. Fugia thought back to the recent Humanity First speech to the Terran Assembly, given by some asshole named Harrin who she didn’t want to have to think about. She’d only checked the feed because Lyssa had been at the meeting, and she always enjoyed seeing her friend out in the world, despite the ongoing cruelty humanity tried to inflict on Lyssa and her Weapon Born.
The Humanity First assholes were only the latest batch of anti-AI politicians to stain the newsfeeds. There would be more, and Lyssa bore it all with grace, smiling at the recorders as she took her place at the speaker’s podium.
In ten minutes, Rondo reported back with a vid feed. Fugia’s Link filled with a view of a small crater with the remnants of a low building with a skeletal antennae-assembly on its roof that was now only a collection of metal girders.