by Lee Bond
Yeva smacked Tremax on the leg when no one could see. “An hour?” she hissed. “Really?”
“I have a break coming up.” Tremax replied casually, tapping away on his prote. “Lasts about an hour.” Yeva’s check-me code danced this way and that on the tiny little screen, reacting … oddly … to his own software.
“I see.” Yeva quirked an eyebrow. “And you think throwing my work ethic into question, right up to the Captain, is going to make that happen?”
“Isn’t it?” Tremax booted up a beefier version of avatar code he was running, a hefty piece of work designed to root through heavily corrupted hunter-seeker avatars. He wasn't really expecting the brute to detect anything untoward in the code, but there were procedures to follow, and this was the next step in the chain.
Yeva pursed her lips together fiercely for a moment. Being ‘forced’ to spend an hour in Tremax’s arms –on Army time no less- wasn’t precisely a terrible way to wait out a reboot. “All right, okay, fine, you bastard, yes, that sounds wonderful, but you need to square away my ethics with the Captain in the meantime, you hear m… what’s going on?”
Tremax had seen this kind of thing before, but not … like this. It wasn’t as bad as code trying to rewrite itself, but it was damned near the closest thing to it; the check-me code, designed to run a targeted avatar program through the wringer in search of faulty logic, random core faults, decaying nucleus links, that sort of thing … it’d adopted part of the primary avatar to itself and was trying to … sync with the scanners.
Instead of a check-me, it wanted to look out into the stars. It wanted to be a scanner avatar.
The profound coding errors that must’ve happened to this check-me for that to happen!
This … this was the sort of scripter mistake that could land someone not just in jail, but in front of a firing squad, especially now, when they were in the middle of an actual conflict!
From the side of his mouth, fingers flying expertly across his larger than average proteus, Tremax did his best to explain. “We call it code-volution. It happens maybe once every hundred billion avatar boots. Some quirk in the hardware or the software of the avatar, we don’t really know, but when you ran the check-me, part of it caught data fragments from the primary avatars looking through the scopes and … absorbed it.”
From the side of her mouth, Yeva’s confusion was self-evident. “That doesn’t sound like something avatars should be able to do.”
“It’s something we keep quiet, Yeva.” Tremax replied matter-of-factly. “Extremely quiet. You know how the OverCommander kept all those sleeping God soldiers a secret for five thousand years? We’ve been doing the same thing with spontaneous code-volution, though only since, you know. The Kamagana Refresh. It’s been happening a lot more frequently, lately. Just wish we could find out how or why.”
Captain Homolka’s voice broke their whispered, sideways conversation in half. “Is everything all right over there? Do you need someone else to help you? I can call one of the other Tech Experts from their bunks, if you like.”
Tremax looked over his shoulder, hoping the sickly grin pasted across his face would serve as a passable smile. “No, no, everything is fine, sir, no need to involve anyone enjoying a bit of down time. I’m just in the middle of examining the faulty code. Once I know where the error is occurring, I can reset it and everything will be fine.”
“Well, be about it then, lad.” Captain Homolka handed his empty tea cup and plate bereft of cookies off to his aide and resumed staring moodily out into space. He toyed with the idea of mirroring Tremax’s prote, then decided against. Not only could he not really be bothered in messing about with things like avatar code and scripting errors, the truth of the matter was he wouldn’t know what he was looking at either way. He’d bribed his way through that portion of the Academy tests and that was that. “Can’t have you and Yeva sitting beside one another all day now.”
That brought a few knowing chuckles and even a few wry smirks from the other Techs in the room, but nothing was said out loud. Fraternizing with colleagues while on deployment was strictly frowned on yet routinely ignored. Next to sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom and bringing illegal substances aboard a ship, banging your bunkmate was the fastest broken rule of them all.
Yeva tried deciphering the script flowing across her subsystem Screens, but it was all alien to her; like all Tech Experts, she knew enough about avatar coding to plug gaps, fix the occasional screwy avatar and to code the even more occasional on-the-fly avatar, but Tremax was in the deepest areas of the machine language now.
She whispered furtively into his ear, ignoring the fact that he smelled like spicy coffee. “This doesn’t look like this should be happening, Tremax.”
“That,” the Avatar Specialist replied with an equal amount of furtiveness combined with disbelief, “is because it shouldn’t be. There’re super-sub-root commands that every military avatar is supposed to respond to, from the bits of script running the air conditioning to the big monoliths that control the weapons. Even the new stuff, the weird avatars controlling the new engines and our shields, they all respond. They have to. These passcodes are like gigantic keys that unlock everything.”
“And your codes aren’t working?” Yeva could feel the eyes from the other Tech Experts on the back of her head, drilling right through into her brain. They hadn’t bothered to steal her feeds for their own yet –mostly because there were rules against mirroring any kind of technical issues- but the longer this whole thing went on without resolution, the more likely it was that stupid Dorify or curious Carenna would do just that.
Tremax resisted the urge to smack his prote. He’d probably do himself an injury and then the Captain –who was now almost half asleep on his chair, lulled by the dual combo of delicious tea and skull-numbingly boring space- would really be up his nose. “That’s just it. The faulty code is wide open now, like it should be, but it’s still going on. Still trying to encode itself onto the scanner avatars. I … I might have to call this in.”
Somehow, Yeva didn’t think ‘calling it in’ meant informing the Captain and his superiors. If she was correct in her understanding of how OverCommanders had kept the secret of the Sleepers for five thousand years, Tremax ‘calling it in’ would almost certainly result in the LSS Honor Your Offer turning itself into a brief ball of light in the sky. She could even imagine the report: Black Hole Engine Failure, avatar complexity compromised.
They’d lost nearly fifteen vessels in the beginning, all because of the complex nature of the avatars required to run Huey’s remodeled black hole engine technology. No one, anywhere, would ever doubt that report.
Yeva impulsively grabbed Tremax by the elbow. “Please don’t do that. I … I … what does it matter if this one bit of code becomes another avatar, anyways?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” Tremax saw Yeva wasn’t getting it, so he explained, very okay with her holding onto his elbow like it was a lifeline. They were all in some serious trouble and if this was the last bit of human contact he had, so be it.
“Code-volution like this could cause the rest of the avatars you’re running to go off, which in turn could affect the ones they’re connected to, so on and so forth, up and down the daisy chain of avatar connectedness. Left unchecked, this kind of ripple effect could hit a prote syncing to a server, which in turn would influence the server’s integrity, and then suddenly, Hospitalis is hit. We should … we need to stop this here and now. Cascade failure like this is the worst, and I’ve never seen a kernel act this way before. Once they’re opened up, they’re supposed to stop.”
Mind racing, heart thumping, Yeva thought of everything she’d been taught in school. There had to be something they could do. “Can we isolate my system from the rest?”
Tremax nodded slowly. “That’d work for a while, yes. But your system would still be compromised. The longer this code remains unstopped, the higher the chance it’ll lodge itself in deeper still. If I call i
t in here and now, one of my superiors might have a way of stopping it. There’s literally nothing I can do from here. Any kind of script-killer powerful enough to stop this code is too dangerous to store on a prote, even a specialized one. A boss would have to come here, with a deadlock fob, slot it in, with armed guards all around. Real serious stuff. We … don’t want that."
Yeva refused to let this situation get the better of her. She didn’t want to die, not when there was so much left to do. They were in the middle of a war, a big huge war that might see them all die anyways, and she was fine with that, she just didn’t want to go like this, sitting in a room, staring at a spot of space that was a bit on the weird side. She wanted to see what it meant when Goddies talked about ‘Darkness Falling, Light Rising’.
She wanted to marry Tremax, too, she supposed, though the idiot would probably never realize that on his own.
“What if … what if we let the code do it’s thing?” A hand flew to Yeva’s mouth once the question blurted it’s way past the logical parts of her brain and out through her lips. The horrified, aghast expression on her lover’s face said it all, and so she raced to explain. “Look, it’s like this; my system is somehow compromised by an avatar that refuses to lay down and die when you’re telling it to, right?” She nodded along with Tremax, though without all the suspicion. “Now … bear with me, here, for this next part.”
Tremax said nothing, but watched on as Yeva’s hands worked their magic on her prote. Her screens lit up with a relatively large, mostly uninteresting bit of space. That was the problem with space. It was so big, and boring.
“Okay, this ‘bit’ of space is what had my avatars going wrong to start with, which is why I ran the check-me in the first place. There’s something going on out there. There has to be. Yorrin, the guy before me, working on this station, had the same problems, only he just turned everything off and pretended like he was doing his job for the rest of his shift.” Yeva looked Tremax deep in the eyes. “But not me, I needed to make sure things were working, and now we’ve got this script that’s completely misbehaving. So … we let it become a scanner avatar. What if … what if in the process of looking through my supposedly malfunctioning code it saw something else, and tried to check it? And, like my code, it got influenced. Only instead of just breaking, like Yorrin’s, this code then tried to fix itself? So we separate my system from the rest, let the check-me change, and … see what happens. We’re doomed either way, right? Calling it in now, calling it in later, it all results in the same ending, right? Tell me you’re not curious to see what happens when one of these avatars evolves on it’s own and we can do things your way.”
There were some moments that slowed your perception of time right down to a glacial crawl.
The first time he’d done something colossally stupid and caught the wrath of his father, a heavy-handed sergeant in the Army. The first time he’d put his hand down Amy Hallenbeck’s top. The time he’d accepted his Technical Expert Avatar-Class Grade One papers.
And now? The moment he seriously considered letting a top-tier check-me avatar run loose and wild all but froze the Universe in place.
The world was pregnant with untold and profound risk from this moment onward, and as he stared at Yeva and saw the glimmer of excitement at the possibility of seeing something new sprout from his choice, he saw that there really wasn’t anything else he could do except allow the corrupted kernel of code to do what it wanted.
They were dead either way, weren’t they?
Call it in to his supervisors, and the Honor Your Offer would be turned into a burst of photonic light. No choice, no chance to risk any of the devices aboard the LSS vessel had been corrupted.
Let it happen, those same supervisors would notice, and the same thing. A quick, heavily encrypted burst of data down reserved communication lines and they, and everyone else, would simply be erased. If they were lucky, their deaths would be listed as ‘death in combat’ or something equally heroic. If they were unlucky, their lives would be lost in a ‘training accident’.
“Everything all right over there?” Captain Homolka asked, inching forward on the edge of his seat. Tech Specialists Yeva and Tremax seemed to be getting their heads quite together over the whole affair and if he wasn’t entirely certain, Homolka thought there might be something more … familiar with their positioning…
Tremax blinked, and the moment of near-magical connection with Yeva was gone. Fingers working on the keypad of his prote, the Code Specialist looked up quickly at the Captain. “Err, yes, sir, everything is fine. I was just having Specialist Yeva explain the particulars of what she was trying to do so that I might better understand the code fault I’m looking at here. Now she’s explained it fully and clearly, we’re good to go here.”
Captain Homolka nodded once, brusquely. “Be quick about it, Specialist Tremax. Don’t waste any more of our time.”
“By your command, sir.” Tremax finished undoing the code restrictions he’d put in place around the modified bit of programming, slotted it into a fresh boot sequence and ran the whole array’s control module.
Yeva, who’d been working with this particular deep sensor array module for more than a year now, knew the precise length of time it took for it to load up. It was one of those things people who used the same pieces of software picked up after a time, and the system was already running slowly. Not enough to matter to anyone, not even enough to really suggest that there was something wrong, but they were nearly a half second too slow in getting to the secondary stage.
“What’s going on?” Yeva risked a look at Tremax’s prote screen.
Tremax angled his forearm so Yeva might get a better look, taking the time out while she rearranged herself a bit to find the right words. What they were witnessing was the closest thing to a miracle he’d ever admit to encountering. “The, ah, the corrupt check-me is … streamlining the preexisting data sets for the command module’s avatar structure. Making them more … efficient? Here, let me … let me check something out.”
Yeva moved out of the way a bit to grant Tremax access to the command console. He pecked his way through a few of the screens until he came across what he was looking for.
Puzzled, she whispered, “Those are the output/input control mechs.” She squinted. “The numbers for the gain are way off. They’re way too high. I’ve never had that much power left to the devices. There’s always been a bleed out of at least ten percent. That’s why everything in the sector we’ve been tasked with scanning looks fuzzy right out of the gate and why we get analytical avatars clean the pictures up when we’re done. This … this looks like we could get clear pictures right away. How is that …”
Tremax settled back in his seat and checked the boot process on his prote. Things were coming to a full close now. Everything associated with Yeva’s deep space probe had been thoroughly and completely corrupted by the weird check-me avatar and … everything was running properly.
“Possible? Dunno. What I do know, and for a fact, is that if whatever we just let happen was a bad thing, we’d already be dead. This kind of code revision, this … this level of reprogramming … it gets spotted. Almost immediately. My supervisors don’t mess around with this kind of thing, Yeva. Our military systems are ‘LINKed together in ways almost no one can really comprehend. We use immense amounts of bandwidth just to ensure our netLINKs stay uncorrupt and safe. Somewhere in this system, there’s a computer with a readout of everything that happens on your module. Powerful enough to run two versions. The one you should be running, and the one you are running. So either both ends are corrupt or somehow this end doesn’t look contaminated back home.”
Yeva pursed her lips, more distracted now by what she was seeing on her Screens than what Tremax was talking about; the facts that they weren’t dead and that her array hadn’t blown up or done anything that’d get her into court-martial levels of trouble were all she needed to resume. From the preliminary pictures coming through the revamped system, the
re was a lot more out there than they’d suspected. The level of clarity coming from this new, illicit connection of avatars was unlike anything that should be possible.
What was happening?
Distracted, she bounced a request off Tremax. “Hey, I know you’re not supposed to, but … can you call up Yorrin’s module from last shift? He was working on the other end of this portion of space, trying to determine what we’re looking at from a different angle. At least, until his system started acting buggy.”
“What’s up?” Tremax logged into Yorrin’s account using his Code Specialist ident, spoofing the security parameters by pretending he wanted to run a double-check on the man’s avatars. Yorrin’s account protection avatars allowed the intrusion, and after that, it took less than a minute to find the data sets Yeva wanted. “Uh, there’s only about fifteen minutes’ worth of information here, Yeva. Wow, did he really just turn everything off and pretend to work for the rest of his shift?”
“Happens more often than you might think, with all of us. This job is hellaciously boring, Tremax.” Yeva turned her head this way and that, trying to make heads or tails of what the array was pulling from deep space. Where before the images had been blobby and … blobbier, everything now was … well, still blobby but … with extra interference. “Can you … is it possible to run Yorrin’s end of things through this system now? At … at the same time?”
Tremax looked at Yorrin’s data sets and the paces the system was already being put through with a conscientious eye; the software upgrades Yeva’s avatars had undergone were already putting considerable strain on the system, but from the looks of things, there might be just enough computational space left to run Yorrin's smaller dataset at the same time. The whole array might very well crawl to a shuddering halt, but that was a risk they were going to have to take.
The Code Specialist said as much, adding, “Though if we run them for too long, we'll probably break the system. Good Captain Homolka and the others might not like that too much.”