by M. D. Cooper
Andy stopped and put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “We’re going to take care of Em.”
Tim hunched his shoulders. “I know. I’m scared.”
“It’s all right to be scared. You can’t pretend the thing that scares you isn’t there, though. You have to face it.”
Andy glanced at Fugia Wong as she opened her mouth then clamped it shut, apparently biting back a sarcastic comment. He gave her a nod in thanks and adjusted Em in his arms.
He couldn’t help noticing the Em had already gotten bigger. Soon Andy wouldn’t be able to carry him comfortably. The Corgi was all muscle beneath his fluffy undercoat. While one of his ears had drooped at the pet shop, both now stood erect all the time, moving like scanning dishes whenever Em turned his head. Em’s ears also expressed most of his emotion: perking up when excited and laying nearly flat when he knew he’d broken a rule. Even when chewing on conduits, the dog couldn’t help but be cute. It was like a survival mechanism.
Em snuggled into his arms as Andy walked down the corridor. In the medbay, he sat the puppy down in the middle of the examination couch. Em immediately stood and started sniffing the couch, then tried to jump down.
Tim pushed close to the puppy and held him in place. “No, Em,” he said. “Sit still so you can get your scan. We’ll find out if you’re sick or not.”
The dog grinned and licked his face.
With Tim and Cara keeping Em on the exam couch, Andy tapped the control console and waited for the system to calibrate. It recognized Em as a dog and shifted to a new set of menu options.
“Look at that, Fran,” Andy said. “Apparently vet services are built in.”
“Apparently somebody found you the right software upgrade,” Fran said.
“Oh? Well, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Your daughter figured it out. I just reset the physical admin override. That was a pain.”
Andy smiled at Cara. “Good work.”
The panel beeped its ready status and the scanning arm moved over Em. The puppy whined as the scanner stopped directly over his head, shining purple light in his eyes. After two more passes, the system cycled through report and emitted a warning squawk.
Andy frowned and looked at the display. The internal image rotated and zoomed in on a point in Em’s spine near the base of his tail where a lozenge-shaped metal object had been embedded. A series of metallic filaments ran up Em’s spine from the lozenge.
“Damn,” Fugia said. “It’s a transmitter.”
Em looked at the faces around him, whining, able to sense the anxiety in the tiny room.
“We bought a dog with a lowjack,” Andy said.
“Can you get it out?” Tim demanded. “You said we would get it out!”
“Calm down, Tim,” Andy said. Like any anomaly the autodoc found, a list of offered remedies appeared under the condition. The system read-out said only ‘Foreign Object’ with ‘Remove?’ as an option. Andy looked at Em, not liking the idea of ripping out the puppy’s spine to remove the transmitter.
“Cara,” he said. “Can you tell if it’s sending or receiving anything?”
Cara bit her lip, thinking. “Can the autodoc do an electrical scan?”
Andy checked several menus. “Looks like it can.” The imaging scanner didn’t move this time but an electrical wave appeared on the screen.
“It’s sending,” Fran said. “Why didn’t we catch that before?”
“It’s not very strong,” Andy said. “I don’t know how anyone would pick that up over real distances.”
“It doesn’t have to be strong,” Fugia said. “Just consistent. If that thing’s been sending out pings since you left M1R, whoever’s monitoring the signal is going to be able to plot where you’re going. They’ll know generally where you are and can follow the signal in for an intercept.”
“I’m worried surgery isn’t the best option,” Andy said. “What can we do to block the signal, or maybe burn out the transmitter without taking it out of him?”
Fran had been studying the internal images. “It looks like we could take the transmitter out and just leave the antenna. That’s the thing that’s all mixed up with his spine.”
“Don’t hurt him!” Tim said.
Em whined again as Tim pulled him into a hug.
“All right,” Andy said. “We’re five days out of Callisto Orbital. Realistically, who’s going to follow this signal and find us before we arrive?”
Wong shook her head. “I don’t understand the point behind this. Maybe you’re missing a remote control that makes his tail stand up when you press a button. It makes no sense to implant a transmitter in random dogs when you have no idea where they’re going to end up. What if they never left the M1R. That’s where you bought him right? Imagine being a pirate captain with this lofty plan and all your dogs end up getting bought by M1G soldiers. What are you going to do then?”
“That makes it even stranger,” Andy said. He tousled Tim’s hair. “We’re going to wait for now, buddy. At least we know it isn’t a joke anymore.”
Andy let Em lick his hand.
“He sure is a friendly little guy for a hacking device,” Fugia said. She laughed. “Hacking a dog. That sounds like something Riggs Zanda would have tried to do. That guy never thought things through.”
Andy shot her a surprised look but she didn’t seem to notice.
“He’d turn up with a dumb idea like exploding controllers at the Crash games,” Wong said. “And you’d explain why it was the dumbest idea ever, and then he’d get angry with you for ruining his great idea.”
She sighed. “I was sad when I learned he was dead, but I wasn’t surprised. I was more surprised he lived as long as he had.”
Fran cleared her throat. “You know he died on our ship, right?”
Wong nodded but still didn’t glance at Andy. “I know.”
Em barked and tried to jump off the exam couch again. Tim caught him and let him down to the deck, where the puppy ran in a circle before shooting out into the corridor.
Andy saved the scans and copied them to his console on the command deck.
“Cara,” he said, “why don’t you set up a search for that signal anyway. I’d like to see if it’s directional at all—it would have to be to reach anyone. Can we at least figure out where it’s going?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“We could copy the wave form and boost the power,” Fran said. “That would get someone’s attention.”
“I don’t know if we want to do that,” Andy said.
Fran shrugged. “We’ll try the search first. I’m bored anyway. Are you bored, Cara?”
Andy caught Cara giving him an anxious glance. “She knows if she admits to being bored, I’ll put her to work,” he said.
“He doesn’t get to put me to work unless I agree,” Fran said. “You’re almost old enough to do the same thing.”
“I am?” Cara asked.
“That’s a lie,” Andy said. He powered down the autodoc and leaned against the couch, crossing his arms. With Tim gone, he asked, “What are we going to do with a hacked dog? You think it’s a danger?”
Fran shook her head. “Like Fugia said, it’s a pretty dumb way to try to hack somebody. I say we leave it alone for now. We’ll try to figure out where the signal’s going. And like you said, we’ll be at Calisto before any of it matters. It would have to be some pretty fast pirates to hit us between here are Callisto. They’d have to already be inbound and showing up on our long-range scanners.”
“Right. Mind you, there are seven thousand and forty three ships on our long-range scanners right now,” Andy said. He glanced at Fugia, eager to change the subject. “How’s the Senator doing?”
“She wants to plant something in your garden room.”
“I don’t have any seeds.”
“You have tomatoes in storage.”
“We do?”
“Captain Sykes,” Fugia said. �
�Are you telling me I know more about your ship than you do? They’re in your safe room in the cabinet next to my package.”
“Brit must have put them there,” Andy said.
“Brit?” Fugia said, smirking at him.
Andy glanced at Fran but she didn’t seem to care. “My wife—well, we’re separated. She hasn’t been here for two years.”
“That’s too bad for the kids.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. “That’s one of the reasons I thought a puppy might do them good. Cara’s birthday is coming up.”
Fugia clapped her hands. “When?”
“Six days,” Andy said. “We should be on Callisto Orbital.”
“How old?”
“Thirteen.”
The black-haired woman’s eyes lit up. “That’s so much worse than a hacked dog!” She laughed. “I’ll take a hacked dog on my crew over a teenage girl any day.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
STELLAR DATE: 09.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: En route to Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Three doors opened in the space Lyssa had created outside her mind. Andy’s consciousness existed behind her, an amorphous mass she couldn’t control but could move away from. In the space outside her connection to him, she could create whatever she wanted. The hard part was deciding what to make.
Remembering the ocean Fred had created to represent his mind, she made vistas that stretched as far as she could imagine, oceans and deserts and then boundless starscapes. She didn’t like how alone those places made her feel, how small, so she pulled the world back in close and concentrated on simple things like four walls, furniture, colors and textures.
The decisions ached as she realized how little she knew. She dipped again and again into the database available to her on Sunny Skies, which only made her more aware how stale the information was, how little emotion or passion it possessed. She wanted to know what washed cotton felt like and how close she could stand to a fireplace burning seasoned hickory.
And then in the frustrating chaos of decisions, she asked herself why she was trying to approximate human experiences at all. She wasn’t human. The problem was the framework she had to define her imagination had been created by humans. She had been coupled to Andy, a human with a specific life and history, and now she would never be the same again. Had Dr. Jickson realized what he was doing to her?
She couldn’t be angry with Dr. Jickson, if she was angry at all. She didn’t know how she felt. Life was circumstances, she was learning. Life was struggling through the situation one found themselves caught in. She was alive. She would have to learn through the consequences of her experience.
Cara and Tim didn’t get to choose their parents. Neither did she.
The thought was both limiting and comforting. But it also brought the question, what would she do when they arrived at Proteus? What would happen when she was separated from Andy?
As she considered the three doors, she thought about what it would feel like to find herself back in the dark world again, experiencing systems through disconnected inputs—the abstractions that Fred hated. She understood now that what had seemed a simple game of connecting dots was really the control of a weapon system.
Slowly, carefully, Lyssa opened the doors. She had considered opening them one at a time, but realized she didn’t know if she could handle introducing herself over and over again. This way they could help each other.
Did Fugia Wong know she was able to communicate with the SAI in their canisters? She had to know they were equipped with network inputs so others could see in—the problem lay in being able to reach out. They had no sensors to interpret the world; their link to the outside depended on someone reaching in to provide a path out. She offered that path through herself, into the safe room she had made. She would moderate their connection to the outside world, keep them safe.
The three newcomers walked into the room, two young women and one boy with a withered arm. The first woman was tall, muscular, with flat hazel eyes and a wary expression. The second woman was smaller and fox-like, with blue eyes.
They looked at each other and then around the room.
The tall woman crossed her arms, making her muscles stand out.
The word ‘target’ struck Lyssa like a knife in the breast. Images of the matrix of blood-red dots swimming in darkness, aligning along coordinates, swarmed in her mind like flies. The dots pulled apart and sucked back together, creating a single hot point where she directed fire.
Lyssa focused on the voice, pulling herself away from the sorrow flooding her mind. She didn’t know who she had killed, what she had destroyed. That made it worse.
Valih stared at her. In the room, where anything was possible, her eyes looked like fire.
Lyssa said.
Lyssa smiled.
Valih’s face was still full of passion.
Valih shrugged.
Lyssa said.
The others nodded. Lyssa couldn’t help thinking of Fred’s thought loops, his obsessions with his purpose and the inferiority of directionless humans. Without purpose, what were they?
Lyssa frowned.
Valih nodded.
Valih said. She looked at the others. Neither had an answer.
Lyssa frowned.
Ino said.
Lyssa said.
Card held his thin arm.
Valih raised her arms the flame in her eyes spread to her entire body until she stood bathed blue fire.
Valih shook her head, hair a swirling mix of red and blue fire.