by M. D. Cooper
Organic shells.
Jirl said quickly.
Or did.
Camaris said.
Jirl froze. The AI watched her with a bemused expression, like she was playing with a child.
Jirl crossed her arms.
Arla rolled her eyes.
Because I’m not the one with nothing to lose.
The data stick jabbed Jirl as she set her stance, maintaining eye contact with Camaris.
Arla said.
Camaris said.
Arla smiled.
Arla glanced at Jirl, giving her a look that said, Including you.
Her hand was still raised from shifting the solar map to the Heartbridge interior schematic. Camaris pointed at Petral, making a pistol shape with her hand, then squeezed her fingers into a fist. In the holodisplay, Petral went stiff and started to shake, her head upright like she was having a seizure.
Camaris said.
Jirl said,
She looked from the holodisplay to Arla, who watched with a leering smile. Movement in the hallway outside showed her employees were still walking by oblivious to what she was seeing, her voice blocked by the windows.
Jirl reached across Arla for the seed. Arla shoved her hand in Jirl’s chest, her forearm sending the metal cylinder rolling across the conference table.
The red-tinted AI didn’t change as the rolling seed scattered light on the ceiling and walls.
As she struggled with Arla, Jirl tried to see where the projection was actually coming from. Then she realized it didn’t matter. If the AI was already connected to the network, she couldn’t stop her. All she could do was focus on her original task.
Arla had grabbed Jirl’s reaching hand at her wrist and then under her armpit, in what seemed like an attempt to push her on the table. Because Jirl had been standing when she reached for the seed, she still had leverage on Arla in her sitting position.
With her free hand, Jirl grabbed the hair at the back of Arla’s head. Wrenching her other arm free, Jirl used Arla’s moment of surprise to slam the woman’s face against the table. Arla’s nose burst, spraying blood across the conference table and the front of the chair where Camaris’s projection was sitting.
The AI watched them with a placid expression. In the surveillance holo, Brit and Starl had laid Petral on the floor.
Jirl pulled Arla’s head back. Her boss had gone limp in the chair, her arms dangling to the sides, resembling Petral in the holo.
“Arla!” Jirl shouted. “Where is she?”
Hair strewn across her face, mixed with blood and saliva, Arla blinked. “Who?”
“The AI?” Jirl demanded. “Camaris. Where is she?”
Arla’s lips drew back in a wet smile. “You surprised me, Jirl. I didn’t think you had this in you. You’re so… invisible.”
“Tell me!” Jirl said.
“She’s everywhere,” Arla said, lifting a hand to indicate the whole room.
Jirl gaze fell on the disk-shaped pendant sitting at Arla’s neck. Seeing it again, it reminded her of one of the seeds pressed flat. She grabbed it and pulled, breaking the thin chain around Arla’s neck.
“Hey!” her boss shouted.
Jirl let go of Arla’s hair and went around the table to grab the seed where it had rolled to a stop. She’d destroy both of the devices if it would affect the AI.
When Jirl reached the door, Camaris called,
The dark eyes didn’t blink.
Now Camaris smiled, her lips a darker red than the rest of her skin.
Jirl understood: Because the Weapon Born were the only SAI that could stand against Psion, and there were still thousands of seeds in the remaining clinics.
Arla pushed away from the table, swiping at her face to get her bloody hair out of her eyes. Jirl stared at her, then opened the door and stepped out into the hallway before Arla could aim herself at the exit.
The transition out to the quiet corridor was unnerving, as though she had entered a different world.
Walking quickly past the windows, Jirl looked back at the strange scene of Camaris sitting at the conference table, giving Jirl a small wave as she left, while Arla lurched for the door. Jirl squeezed the two seeds in her fist, then paused in the middle of the corridor. Dropping the pendant and cylinder on the plascrete floor, she crushed them under her heel. Both were surprisingly fragile.
Turning, Jirl increased her pace to a rapid walk, searching for one of the empty offices that had brought her to the floor in the first place.
Behind her, Arla made it into the corridor and yelled, “Security! Security, I want her stopped!”
Jirl didn’t look back. She could see the horrified expressions of the employees walking toward her.
Her mind raced. Had they missed the bigger picture? If an armada of AI were moving on Ceres, then they would need all the resources available to produce more Weapon Born, more SAI to fight the others. She wanted to call Yarnes. First, she had to help Petral, and tell Brit and Starl to stop, to get out. Everything was a mess.
She reached an open office and went immediately to the first available cubicle. A woman eating her lunch glanced at her, then went back to the game she was playing on the terminal.
Jirl dropped into the chair in front of the console, then dug the data stic
k from her waistband. She navigated to the Heartbridge public network and inserted the stick.
At first, she thought nothing had happened. A cold feeling grew in her stomach. Then the terminal froze.
The answer came back immediately.
Brit’s voice was flat. she said.
Jirl felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She had hoped it wasn’t true, that the AI was showing her some false vid.
she said.
Jirl’s hands hovered over the terminal console, thinking about what to do. She wasn’t sure what access she still had. She’d been gone for two weeks, and now Petral’s virus was attacking the system, shutting down the physical security systems in the lower levels.
She entered her personal security token and breathed a sigh of relief when she found her normal portal. Her last searches through the personnel databases were still in her work queue.
The sounds of people running in the hallway outside sent her heart hammering. Jirl focused on the terminal, shutting out all distractions as she began working between the terminal and her Link, navigating to a set of instructions Arla had made her set up years before, when the Special Operations Division was only in planning.
Jirl found the null-set command for the database and entered her security token again. Only she and Arla had this access. It was separate from the Board, separate from Heartbridge Security. This had been Arla’s final safety measure. Once Jirl erased the main project database, the Weapon Born and all their development resources, all the central records, would cease to exist, living on only through the remote clinics, which would disappear from Heartbridge holdings. The employees would receive instructions to abandon all facilities; it wouldn’t seem strange as Heartbridge mothballed clinics all the time.
Heart pounding in her ears, Jirl entered the command.
The NSAI asked her to verify and she said,
Jirl closed her eyes and took her hands away from the console.
“There she is!” a harsh voice shouted from the outside corridor. The woman eating her lunch stiffened, eyes wide as she stared at the security officer pointing a rifle at her form the doorway.
Jirl opened her eyes and took a deep breath. Composing herself, she set her hands in her lap and straightened her shoulders, assuming the posture she often did during Board meetings or press conferences. Like Arla had said, she had a way of seeming invisible. But she wasn’t any more.
She didn’t resist when they put her hands in restraints and led her out into the corridor.
Arla was nowhere to be found but there was blood smeared on the corridor floor just outside the conference room door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 01.15.2982 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Fryson’s Clinic, Traverna
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Fran tried to ease Cara out the door as Fryson activated the medical scanner hanging above her dad. Cara knew Fran was trying to protect her from something terrible, but if her dad was going to die, she figured she’d rather be there with him.
“I want to stay,” Cara said, slipping around Fran to take her dad’s hand.
Fryson surprised her by slapping her hand away.
“No, you don’t,” he said, “You’ll upset the—”
Cara kicked the back of his calf, just below the knee. The surgeon stumbled backward, bringing his shoulder low enough that she could jab the pressure point inside his arm socket.
Fryson grabbed his spasming arm and tripped over a box on the floor, falling against one of the shipping crates on the side of the room.
“Hey!” he shouted.
“Cara,” Fran warned. She stepped to Fryson and caught the front of his dirty shipsuit as if to help him up, then pushed him into the wall.
“That kid needs discipline,” Fryson sputtered. “If you aren’t going to paddle her ass, I’m going to.”
Fran gave a thin smile. “I think you’re welcome to try. You didn’t notice the pistol on her hip, did you?”
Fryson’s gaze slid to Cara and then down to her waist, where the pistol hung in the holster her dad had given her. She was surprised by the satisfaction she felt seeing fear in the man’s eyes.
The technician seemed to do a math problem in his head, then muttered, “Fine. You can stay. But no touching him. The equipment isn’t calibrated for multiple scans. You’ll get bad data.”
Fran let him down. “We can agree to that. Can’t we, Cara?”
From the other side of the room, Fugia hooted a laugh. “Where did you learn to do that, girl?” she asked Cara.
Cara gave her a sheepish grin. “My mom taught me.”
“Well,” Fryson said from his control console. “You better be able to back it up in a place like Traverna. You caught me by surprise. You sucker punch somebody, you better be ready to follow it up hard or they’ll come back twice as hard.”
“Is that a threat?” Fran asked. “Are you threatening a child?”
“No. I’m just saying.”
“Run the scan,” Fugia said. “Tell us what you can do. Otherwise we’re just wasting our time here.”
“I’m the best there is on Traverna,” Fryson affirmed. “There isn’t anybody else.”
Cara considered the menace in his expression. While her mom had taught her how to perform the take-down on a bigger adversary, her dad would have told her to avoid the attack unless necessary. Now Fryson knew she could fight and would hit back with something harder next time.
If it makes you feel good, it’s probably the wrong option, her dad would say.
Still mumbling under his breath, Fryson started the neuro-scanner. An articulated arm above the couch lowered a plas orb to a few centimeters above her dad’s forehead. At first, it didn’t seem like anything was happening, until a spray of light from a holodisplay generated a brain in the space above her dad’s chest. Sounding pleased with himself, Fryson turned the model to mark various points on the frontal lobes, cortex and then the long, silvery shapes of the Link interface. He zoomed out a few layers, and the glittering Link overlay was highlighted against the labyrinthine folds of her dad’s brain. She wondered where Lyssa was in there, until Fryson turned the model upside down so her dad’s brain stem pointed at the door, highlighting a series of silvery branches that led from the stem into a structure at the base of his brain.
“There it is,” Fryson said. “Not that you asked, but I’ve seen this kind of device before. Enfield Scientific developed an NSAI for soldiers that’s almost
identical. They sold the system to the Marsian Protectorate, but I didn’t hear whether it actually worked or not. You never know with military stuff. They just cover it up.”
Fryson glanced at Cara. “Is your dad part of some military experiment, kid?”
Cara didn’t bother to answer. She shifted her gaze from the ghostly model, hanging like a jellyfish, to her dad’s face—eyes closed and brow slightly knit—as though he was having a bad dream.
“The implant isn’t malfunctioning,” Fran said. “He’s bleeding. Do you see anything else?”
“Not with my eyeballs, I can’t,” Fryson said. “These things are integrated at the neuron.” When Fran gave him a threatening look, he added, “I’m doing the secondary scan next. You want me to remove the implant?”
“No!” Fugia, Fran and Cara all shouted at once.
Fryson pulled his head back, eyes going wide. “It’s malfunctioning, right?”
“The implant can’t come out,” Fran explained. “You need to heal the bleeding. You said you could do that.”
Fugia moved to stand beside Cara. She leaned over to tell her in a low voice, “Lyssa says she can’t feel anything. She’ll let us know if anything is going to hurt your dad.” Fugia offered her hand and Cara took it, squeezing harder than she intended.
“How are we going to know if something happens to Lyssa?” Cara asked.
“The thing about this kind of surgery is that it’s all automated,” Fugia said. “Despite what this guy might seem like, he’s got very little to do with the actual procedure. He pushes the start button and that’s it. What he’s doing now is making it seem like he knows what he’s doing. It’s all show.”
“How do you know that?” Cara whispered.
Fugia smiled. “It’s my business. Sometimes the information people want is very easy to attain, they just don’t know how to get it. So I make it seem very difficult and I get paid accordingly.”
“It’s not going to hurt Lyssa, though, right?”