<
Eyes wide in the darkness, Ayumi tried to passively access camera feeds, but everything was offline. We are being jammed.
<
That vehicle must be the source of the jamming.
<
Camera systems were back online, and she quickly found the autocar moving toward the Perth expressway. The car’s actual data was shielded, but the company and software matched contracts with the Terran Council.
Shit.
<
Ayumi ran across the street, up the simple concrete walkway, and hit the door with her shoulder, knocking it from its hinges. The living room appeared torn to pieces. On the floor, beyond a blood-sprayed sofa, she saw Berkeley’s motionless form.
“Berkeley?” The sound of her slightly echoing voice was odd and pleasing at the same time. “Berkeley?”
Ayumi moved around the sofa and saw the entire scene. A gasp escaped her lips.
<
Berkeley lay on the floor with a wide bullet wound over her heart and another in her right temple. Her eyes gazed sightlessly at the ceiling, and Ayumi found herself looking away for a brief second before steeling herself. She had to know for sure. Kneeling, but not touching the carpet, Ayumi searched for a pulse and found none. Berkeley’s neurals were offline as well. Analyzing the scene took less than a minute. The assassins left no trace of physical evidence, but they’d casually tossed the apartment and likely taken some jewels and electronic components. Simple robbery gone wrong. Bastards.
Ayumi felt her hands ball into fists. “How could they do this?”
<
“We were going to talk,” Ayumi said aloud. She turned toward what had been a work desk. A small paper calendar was flipped oddly to a date three weeks in the future. She read the note aloud.
“OBGYN appointment at 1515. Getting ready for the big surprise!” Ayumi felt her stomach swirling. “She was pregnant?”
<
A heavy flood of emotional data washed over her sensors and rendered her motionless. Knees wobbling, Ayumi wanted to fall to the ground and cry out for help, but she did neither. The data and the raw emotion overpowered her for more than thirty seconds. All of her rage melted away with the hot tears pouring down her face. This woman had known love and was preparing herself to have Kieran’s child, a child that would never be born and that Kieran would never know. Ayumi looked down at the young scientist, whom she had once thought of as her sworn enemy, and cried.
<
“Where do I go?” Ayumi sobbed. Answers should have been here, or in Sydney, but there was nothing. “How could they do this?”
<
“You’re a ghost in the machine.” She formed the words, aware that she herself had been just that a few short months before. Now Kieran was lost as well as any chance for answers. There was simply nothing.
<
From the kitchen, a shrill beep sounded. She searched with sensors and found that the thermostat on the hot water system had been tampered with. The overpressurized tank would detonate within two hundred seconds and could not be stopped. While she waited, Ayumi found the home server, which had also been tampered with to delete video, audio, and neural connections. Berkeley had been too smart for that, and Ayumi easily found what she’d left behind to reactivate the information.
The thermostat unit on the wall did not match what Ayumi could sense in the house. With trembling fingers, she removed the unit’s cover, found the small camera device, and isolated a very faint radio signal. She connected in a heartbeat, and the visual file began to play.
Ayumi watched Berkeley recoil as the door burst in and four armed men ransacked the apartment. After a moment of observing the conversation, Ayumi guessed there was a pistol in the bag and that Berkeley would make a move for it.
Berkeley said, “Livermore Six Two Seven, priority override Sigma Two. Find Downy. Keep the faith.”
Ayumi’s brow furrowed. “What is priority override Sigma Two?”
A remote server, located at Downy’s flat, pinged her incoming server ports with a four-hundred-gigabyte download. Ayumi fell silent as the data unfolded. The procedures were simple and breathtaking. Protocol and human mind were compatible after all. Mally’s own musings had been successful in taking control of the physical body, but the merge of machine and consciousness, true artificial intelligence, was not possible without a more human level of conscience. The full file was now hers, she realized, and it all made sense.
Stasis mode is the connection to saving memory and human consciousness! No wonder I couldn’t get rid of you. Crawley planned for this.
<
Ayumi turned to leave and gazed down at Berkeley’s wide, shocked eyes.
“Thank you, Berkeley.” A sob threatened to escape her throat. Berkeley had indeed given her exactly what she wanted. She’d been good to her word, but why? The gift she’d given Ayumi was beyond comprehension and inherently undefinable, as only being alive could be. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what faith is.”
<
“I’m sorry, Berkeley. It didn’t have to be this way. I didn’t mean for them to kill you.”
<
Shut up.
<
She walked back through the house and avoided looking at the pictures and Berkeley’s memories on the walls as best she could. Every smiling, happy eye that caught hers burned like a torch. The heavy feeling in her heart and the anxiety in her mind produced new lines of data and significant amounts of code she’d never processed before. Trying to push it aside was pointless. It was there and needed to be dealt with, but she could not fathom it.
<
Ayumi ran through the door and down the street toward the ocean. Fifteen seconds later, the house detonated behind her and filled the dark night with orange and red.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ayumi accelerated toward the water and the scrub forests on the edge of town. Finding Downy, even in a town the size of Esperance, would be easy. She checked the surf reports and saw conditions were ideal. He’d be awake and down at the shore by sunrise. The backfire of an old internal combustion engine startled her, and she whirled toward the sound and stopped in the road. A wave of relief crashed over her. She knew the vehicle and, as it slowed, saw a familiar face behind the wheel.
“Get in,” Downy said. “Hurry up!”
Ayumi opened the door to the beat-up blue Holden and crawled inside. Downy thrust a purple hooded sweatshirt at her. “Put this on.”
“What are you doing here, Downy?”
The fair-haired surfer squinted at her. “Do I know ya?”
Ayumi opened her mouth and closed it. “Sorry…”
“Look, ya got my name from my private
profile, right? You some kind of hacker? That’s great. I’m just supposed to get you from here to someplace else, all right?”
“Where am I going?”
“To meet a friend. That mean anything to ya?”
“No.” She pulled the sweatshirt over her shoulders. If Downy was here, it was possible that Kieran’s friends knew what had happened and were trying to help. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
The car accelerated down the tight street and took the ninety-degree corner at the end without slowing. Rocketing down the main thoroughfare, Downy whipped like a madman around autocars that moved at their predetermined speeds and distances. Ayumi’s hands found the worn plastic handle on the door and the side of the ragged faux-vinyl seat and held on for dear life. Nothing she’d experienced in this new life had prepared her for the violent, jerking ride through Esperance.
Sirens wailed at almost every intersection. “You’re going to get us stopped.” She scrunched lower in the seat, trying not to be seen.
“These blokes all know me. Figure I’m trying to get to the surf out at Sunset, which is up and which I’m missing for this shit.” Downy shook his head. “Feels like I’m supposed to know ya, but I don’t. Did you stop them?”
Ayumi’s gut twisted into a knot. “Who?”
Downy frowned. “Who d’ya think? They got to Berk, didn’t they?”
Ayumi nodded. “I was too late.”
“Fuck!” A few seconds later, Downy wiped tears from his cheeks. He punched the center portion of the steering column twice and shook his head violently. The sight of it threatened to bring more of her own tears.
Through the windshield, the familiar coastline of Esperance appeared. At the boulevard overlooking the beach, Downy turned right and headed west toward Albany. About ten kilometers outside of town, he pulled to the side of the road.
“End of the line,” he said. “See that trail over there? Take it, and head back to the east. Back to town. You’re supposed to recognize it.”
Ayumi visually mapped the trail and matched it to the corresponding satellite imagery. Her breath caught in her chest. She’d run the same trail with Kieran more than a year earlier. “I do. Thank you, Downy.”
The man frowned at her with something like disgust or mistrust. His crooked teeth appeared. “Yeah. Now, go.”
And she did—not as quickly as her run from the maglev station, but she set a quick pace through the scrub oaks and rock outcroppings. On the top of a craggy knoll, a solitary bench stood. Frozen, she recognized it from more than a year before, from Kieran that first morning away from the Integration Center. The fact that she’d found it calmed her thoughts, and she sat down to watch the wave sets come crashing into to the beach below.
Sitting there for a few seconds, her legs aching from the constant stress of the last several days, she reached back to her files of Kieran sitting there, studying a missing scar on his thigh. Tears welled in her vision as she replayed his voice and every bit of his physical data. The songs pumping into his ears pushed her over the edge, and she raised her head to the sky and sobbed a great, unanswered question. “Why?”
<
Instead, Ayumi lowered her face to her knees and cried. Kieran was in danger. Berkeley and Crawley, the two people he trusted most in the world, were dead, and so were more than two hundred others.
Somewhere in the guilt and what she classified as grief, she realized she could see the horizon. Without the cover of darkness, she could be found. Her body heavy and mind numb, Ayumi stood and looked down the path to the east. It would end at a familiar public house above Sunset Beach. A last vestige of Kieran’s found family would be there. She could just as easily turn her back to it, run in the opposite direction, and hop an autotruck bound for Albany. Disappearing into this new world and living a quiet life tempted her for a few seconds, but Kieran’s longing for acceptance and family called to her fresh emotions, and Ayumi headed east at a comfortable, easy pace in the hope of finding solace.
A scant twenty minutes later, she emerged at the edge of the Sunset Beach Public House property. All was quiet, as it should have been for the hour. Allan Wright, Kieran’s closest friend and father figure, would not wake for another hour at the very least. She would wait on the closed-in porch. Hidden in shade, she could even sleep for a bit before having to face Allan with the news that not only was Kieran in danger, but his wife was dead, and it had all been her fault. She hoped for some type of absolution, but hope was not a method—as Kieran would have said. It was time to be honest and up front. She owed Kieran, Berkeley, and even General Crawley that much. Kieran had started discovering his identity with Allan Wright. Whether it was serendipity or simply fate that she would do the same did not matter. Kieran’s family could possibly be hers as well, and that was enough.
<
No, it doesn’t.
<
No, I can’t.
<
I’m sorry, Amy.
<
There was a hint of a smile there, but Amy’s words were simple and true. As Mally, she’d carelessly thrown Amy away, as she’d done to Chastity and eventually to Kieran, in her quest for survival. Maybe having a conscience was an essential part of being human so that mistakes could be learned from and, hopefully, not repeated.
The slow walk to Allan’s took only a few minutes. Weaving through the scrub above West Beach, Ayumi snuck lingering glances at the steel-blue ocean. Whitecaps tipped the waves in the distance. On cue, the sea breeze stiffened with a hint of mist. The cooler air on her face reminded her of Japan just a week before. How easy being human had seemed then. But humanity wasn’t about action. Most often, being human was about the moments of quiet. Flashes of emotion in action were easy to deal with, but the consequences of them filled her quiet thoughts like water taking the shape of any vessel. Decisions troubled her at every turn, but she was still alive, and there were possibilities. If she handled the rest carefully, perhaps it could both produce a different outcome and grant her some type of peace for those quiet-time thoughts.
The path dropped out of the scrub, down to the dirt and broken pavement around Allan’s bar. The older, whitewashed home had received a fresh coat of paint and a new roof since she’d seen it last, but the rest of it was the same as ever. The wide veranda stretched between the seaside corners toward the front door. Behind screens, the southern end of the deck was a private space above the room Kieran had taken after first arriving in Esperance. The screened doors were unlocked, and Ayumi moved quietly around the deck to the southern end. Her legs were tired and shaky. A worn recliner overlooking the ocean would be a perfect place to—
“Good morning, Mally.”
She froze. There were two recliners side by side on the porch. The orange-brown one closest to her was empty. The black-and-red one held a partially silhouetted figure who smiled at her but did not move. She recognized him immediately.
“General Crawley.”
“Are you calling yourself Mally now?”
“No.” There were no weapons nearby. Crawley was not a threat. She brought her hands together and clasped them below her waist like a child ready for scolding. “Ayumi. I thought you were dead.”
“To the rest of the world, I am.”
Ayumi shook her head. “Your data markers were in the Integration Center with about two hundred other people. How is that possible?”
He sighed. “You of all people know
that data can be manipulated. For the record, only six people really died in the explosion. The rest are safe at an undisclosed location.” Crawley paused. “You have the data Berkeley left you?”
“Yes. She’s dead.”
“I know.” Crawley stared out to sea for a long moment.
She wondered what quiet thoughts he was having.
“Ayumi is a good name. We can use that.”
She squinted at him. “Aren’t you calling for assistance?”
Crawley squinted at her. “From whom? I’m dead, remember?”
Ayumi sat down on the empty recliner and contemplated him for a long moment. “You’re not dead, obviously. You expected this, didn’t you?”
Crawley sighed. “Most of it.”
“Berkeley wasn’t supposed to die,” Ayumi said, realizing it sounded like an accusation instead of a question. “She told me we needed to talk.”
“Berkeley realized, as I hoped she would, that we need you. You’re on the road to being one person instead of two sharing a body. We hoped to have time for you to integrate the two naturally, but we don’t.”
“You wanted me to do this on my own?”
Crawley chuckled. “Haven’t you wondered why I never deleted you in the first place? The first time you stopped reporting data, I knew it wasn’t all for Kieran’s sake—it was for yours as well. You became an asset, whether you realized it or not. Look, Kieran is one piece of the equation. Your abilities combined with his knowledge could have a tremendous effect if we can just leverage you both in the right way.”
Ayumi nodded. “The Terran Council won’t allow that.”
“They want us to lose the coming war, Ayumi. It’s like they want to give it the old college try then say we couldn’t help after all and hope that everyone will leave us alone. They don’t understand that the Greys have no such intention.”
“Why would the council do that?”
Crawley sighed. “They don’t want to get their hands dirty. Nobody wants to be in charge when war fails. Humanity fought wars that were ‘successful,’ according to politicians, and were, in reality, failures, and they let them drag on because no one wanted to take the blame. Why else would you fight a war with one hand tied behind your back?”
Vendetta Protocol Page 29