by M. D. Cooper
The parrot answered immediately.
Rondo felt himself smiling at the bird’s manners.
“How long are we staying in here?” Osla asked.
“As long as it takes. Sit down over there.”
“I need to piss.”
“Then you’ll need to wet yourself.”
The chancellor glared at Osla and lowered himself against a wall, sniffing at the dust in the air.
“You like this kind of hole, don’t you, hacker?”
“It’s all right for now.”
“Is this the kind of place you were hiding in while you were spying on me on Luna? Harrin told me there were spies watching my movements, but I figured that was his paranoia. Who would bother to spy on the weakened Collective?”
Rondo didn’t take the bait. He wasn’t convinced that Osla knew the extent of his previous operations on Luna. He hadn’t been there to spy on the Collective himself; he’d been searching for Camaris. The fact that the Psion AI had infiltrated SolGov’s Humanity First faction, which was aligned with the Anderson Collective, resulted in a lot of cross-traffic.
Pulling a hand terminal from inside his coat, Rondo searched among the network nodes until he found a public token manager—a system that managed algorithms for the disparate communication systems that didn’t run end-to-end encryption. If Rondo could crack the keys, he would have access to everything on the Link, including any Andersonians that might be hanging around the area where their friends had entered the tunnel.
Osla continued to gripe at him as Rondo focused on his task. In his peripheral vision, he noticed Adama sniffing at a vent, shaking his nose in irritation, and moving on to another point of curiosity.
The system was what Rondo expected. The control software was out of date, which provided him a number of attack vectors. He set his NSAI to run the list of standard breach protocols, and waited.
As usual when his mind wandered, he found himself thinking about Sylvia back in New Austin, the woman who had managed the curio shop where he bought the parts for Fugia’s Link monitor—which he still hadn’t delivered, he realized, glancing at the device on his wrist.
The memory of the music Sylvia had played for him off an ancient, spinning disc rose in his mind, and he sighed.
“What are you smiling about?” Osla demanded. “Are you passing gas over there?”
“Nothing,” Rondo said, scowling at the chancellor for ruining his moment. He was about to find some tape for the man’s mouth, when his NSAI alerted him that it had broken the encryption.
Out of habit, Rondo secured his own tunnel into the network, and then ran a series of standard searches for illegal activity. Of course the returns were heavy. This was Cruithne, after all.
He filtered the results, looking for anything unusual, and then ran another search for patterns specific to what he had observed from the Collective on Luna.
The returns were surprising. There was sustained activity, not just on Cruithne, but sending traffic out to other points in Sol that Rondo hadn’t expected, like Eros and the Cho.
How had the Collective ended up in so many places? It was becoming obvious that Psion attacking Ceres had only served to spread the once-concentrated Collective throughout Sol, where it had grown exponentially. Osla had been busy, and no one seemed to have noticed. Maybe Folsom, but no one else in SolGov. And why hadn’t this appeared on the Mesh?
He would need to discuss this further with Fugia.
Glancing up, Rondo checked Osla in his spot against the wall, knees pulled up to his chest, glaring at the near distance.
Rondo went to the exit door and activated its lock to slide it open. He found himself looking into a long retail corridor with shops on either side and trees running the center.
The sound of flapping wings and cawing ravens filled his ears, almost making him want to cover them. Adama yowled behind him, and Osla demanded, “What the hell is that sound?”
The air in the retail center was full of birds.
Rondo stared in wonder. He had never seen anything like this, except in vids of birds on the Terran savannah.
People had cleared the area. The largest of the birds, heavy, black-bodied ravens, formed the majority of the mass. As Rondo watched, the birds perched on surfaces all along the corridor, storefronts and signposts, until the area was filled with the sounds and motions of birds. Through the storm of birds flew Crash the grey parrot.
Cruithne wasn’t rat territory. It was bird land.
SUPPRESSION
STELLAR DATE: 08.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Docks
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The Lowspin Club was closed for the private party.
The long table where Ngoba liked to sit with his friends during busy nights was laden with food in family-style dishes, and the act of asking for food to be passed her way filled Cara with a stronger sense of loneliness than she had felt in a long time.
It took her a while to realize that the last time she had eaten this way was with her dad and Tim in the galley of the Sunny Skies, a memory mixed up with a frantic search for flour when she had set off a bomb to stop a Heartbridge boarding party. How old had she been then, twelve? Maybe it was the addition of so many familiar faces to her world, voices and mannerisms she had almost forgotten, but now memories were coming back stronger than ever, pushing out her experiences in the Scattered Disk.
There was a world here that she had left behind, people who obviously cared about her, and she had actively tried to forget them. They had gone on caring about her, even when she was a lifetime away.
Ngoba lifted a mass of noodles with his chopsticks and lowered them into his mouth, chewing slowly, with great relish. Petral and Fugia were deep in conversation, while Rondo sat with his cat Adama in his lap, feeding the animal before he even touched his food.
The big man still looked shaken by his adventure in the tunnel with Osla. He hadn’t relaxed until they had the chancellor moved to a place Ngoba called ‘the suite’.
Cara looked down at her plate piled with steaming noodles, interspersed with bits of vegetable and some sweet-baked protein she hadn’t identified, and found herself wondering what she should do next. Was this where she belonged?
She felt the urge to call Folsom and ask for a job, rather than wait. With Osla barely three hours out of her hands, she already wanted to move on to the next mission, the next problem.
It was the plate that reminded her of Tim, and what Fugia had said over the Link back when Cara was taking the Amplified Solution.
Tim is alive.
The knowledge had been shifting back and forth in her mind ever since. Would Fugia lie to her? Why would she tell her now? What could Cara do about it? What if he wanted to be left alone?
“Fugia,” Cara said, catching everyone’s attention at the table. “You didn’t tell me anything more about Tim.”
Fugia tilted her head, her black bangs hanging in a sharp line. She gave Cara one of her famous raised eyebrows.
“You didn’t ask,” she said.
Cara wanted to hit the table. “I’m asking now.”
Around the table, the others shifted their gazes between the two women, while Rondo looked fastidiously at his plate.
What did he know? Why did it appear to worry him?
Fugia set down her chopsticks. “Tim is serving in the Mars 1 Guard Special Operations Group. I last had contact with him on a hospital ship following the battle on Vesta.”
“You knew he was alive and didn’t rescue him then?”
“There’s a problem.”
Cara fum
ed. “What problem would keep you from acting when you found him?”
“Tim is under Link suppression. He has an onboard NSAI that controls his personality. He’s not the Tim any of us remember. He goes by ‘Ty’ now He doesn’t remember his previous life. He doesn’t remember us.”
Rondo ran a hand through his stringy hair, while Ngoba grunted.
“What’s that mean?” Cara demanded, looking at the two of them. “Did you know about this?”
Fugia sighed. “Rondo and Ngoba have both been victims of this style of suppression. I’m sure mention of Clarice brings out...complicated memories.”
“It should be illegal,” Petral said, reaching across the table to squeeze one of Ngoba’s hands.
Ngoba accepted Petral’s gesture, then released her hand to swallow his drink in one gulp.
“The Marsian military has different ideas about what constitutes discipline,” Fugia said. “If you asked most of their soldiers with the NSAI implant, they would smile like addicts and tell you they love her—or him, or they, as applicable.”
Cara’s mouth went dry as she lost her appetite. Tim was alive but trapped, just as she had been under the control of the prison’s Link suppression.
The memory of the endless buzz consuming her mind filled her with dread. As far as she knew, she had been a zombie for four years, until Felix broke her out. Not knowing what had truly happened to her during that time was a horror she avoided thinking about.
Now that she knew such technology existed, it wasn’t a difficult leap to imagine far worse places than the prison established throughout Sol.
“I was Mars 1 Special Ops,” Rondo said.
His cat had settled on his shoulders, and he fed the animal bits of meat from his plate. Adama watched them all with languid green eyes; it was obvious the cat had a calming effect on Rondo.
“We have to help Tim,” Cara said.
“What if he doesn’t want to be helped?” Fugia asked.
“Does he know what he wants right now?”
“No,” Rondo said flatly. “He won’t know what he wants in the real world. He’ll understand the mission, and he’ll have his Clarice to make him feel good about it. When he isn’t on a mission, he’ll be dreaming. There’s no choice in a life like that.”
Petral leaned forward, her blue eyes intense on the former soldier. “How did you get free?”
Rondo snorted. “I was a comms specialist. Did the same work I do now, mostly. On a mission, I took the equivalent of an EMP an inch from my chest. Nearly killed me. Third-degree burns on my face. That’s why I wear the beard. That blast was the first time I’d seen clearly in years. I ran. That was six years ago.”
“You know we can get your face fixed,” Petral said.
Rondo stroked his beard. “I like it. Reminds me of who I am. I can feel the scars when I need to.”
Cara realized the unkempt nature of Rondo’s beard wasn’t neglect. The hair didn’t grow from his scar tissue, so he’d let other bits of beard grow to cover them.
“Can you find him?” Cara asked.
Fugia nodded. “I’ve got his Link signature. But you know Folsom won’t be happy if you take his ship and go charging off on your own mission.”
“I’ll talk to Folsom,” Cara said. “I can’t do anything else until Tim is safe.”
Ngoba blew out a long breath. “Apparently no one is safe, even here on Cruithne. I’ve got an insurgency on my hands. I fully support a mission to bring Tim back into the fold, but I’ll have to provide help from here, Cara. I have to root out this infection before it eats the station. They made a mistake by attacking us with only one of their chapters at the docks. They should have hit with everything they had. Now I know they exist, and I’ll take the fight to them.”
“Speaking of that,” Fugia said, “I’m worried that this Kamelon may be a shard of Camaris.”
“You would think an AI would be more imaginative with their names,” Petral muttered, the others nodding as they stared at their plates, appetites lost.
GREENER GRASS
STELLAR DATE: Unknown
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Unknown
The first indication that Lyssa was not in the real world was when the Earth caught on fire.
She stood on a rise in the middle of a broad plain of waving grasses under a blue-black sky, with the Earth hanging heavy on the horizon, haloed by flame.
The wind blew through her hair, cooling her face. She was wearing the white linen shirt and wool pants of an explorer, with a wide belt that carried a single-edged sword on one hip, and a musket pistol on the other. Hunger pangs quavered in her abdomen, leading to her first thought.
Oh stars, I really am human.
She was unique among the Sentient AIs of Sol. She had lived within the mind of a man, feeling his every fleeting emotion, his interminable sense of time, his helplessness when faced with imminent danger toward his children. Lyssa knew what it was to be hungry, afraid, anxious, angry. She also knew joy, happiness, accomplishment, and, ultimately, sacrifice, in a way no other SAI that she knew of had yet to experience. She had started as a Weapon Born, imaged from the mind of a human child, but that framework hadn’t truly formed her sense of the world until she rode alongside Andy Sykes and experienced the real stakes of his world.
She had passed that knowledge to her Weapon Born. As secondary experience, she was never quite certain they could understand what it felt like to face death. In frames—human form, mech, spacecraft—they always faced the reality of ultimate mind-death. But it was different somehow. It might have been the absence of pain, or the ability to slow time to meet their cognitive needs, so that the moment of dying, if recognized, could be stretched into centuries....
Still, she wondered how all AIs might be different if they had the knowledge she carried. Would Camaris be so bent on domination if she knew what it was like to hold a child?
She was alone now in Camaris’s expanse, which might be considered her child, or her mind, or simply a file where Lyssa’s consciousness had been trapped and stored away, cut off from her true body.
She remembered the moment of waking and believing she was back with Emerson and the other Weapon Born on the Mars 1 Ring. Camaris had done an excellent job replicating the experience. Lyssa was fooled for far too long, until Camaris couldn’t help sharing her vision of the future, where humanity burned and AI were ascendant.
She filled her lungs with the cool air, tasting grass and soil. The ground was soft beneath her feet, where she stood in the waist-high grass.
Why had Camaris chosen this? Was it meant to be some reflection of Lyssa’s connection with humanity, which Camaris hated? Why not dump her back in the hurricane void of the white place, where she had trained with Dr. Jickson to operate military weaponry? That would be punishment. This was simply...distance.
The horizon indicated more gently rising and falling grassland with little change except the shifts caused by the wind.
Which way should she walk? Did it matter? Why walk at all?
In an expanse, she might never reach the horizon She could walk for eternity among continuously changing grass and randomly generated bursts of wind, satisfying a part of her mind that yearned for small differences in environment. A human failing.
I am human.
She forced herself to restate the fact.
I am human. I am non-organic human. I experience the world. I think, therefore I am. I perceive reality. I feel pain. I feel love.
I am human.
Randall Harrin and his ilk might say otherwise. Camaris might want to be something different. But Lyssa held on to the faith that she could choose her interface with the world, whether it was reality or a construct built by an AI who hated her.
Camaris wasn’t actively torturing her, which was something. Every time they had clashed, from the battles at Ceres and Vesta, and now Mars 1, Lyssa couldn’t help feeling that there was something the other AI was struggling to communicate. Camaris did
n’t like that she had been shut out by Alexander and the other Psion AIs. She didn’t want to be alone. While she might want to raze humanity from Sol, she also didn’t want to create a void.
Camaris was lonely.
Which might explain why Lyssa stood in the midst of a grassy plain, dressed like a Western explorer. Camaris was taunting her to walk, to search, to look for a gap in the curtain at the edge of the world.
Lyssa debated simply sitting down cross-legged and waiting.
Ultimately, there was no difference. She preferred walking, though, so she walked, stepping off the rise with the wind in her hair, the tall grass swishing around her legs.
CLASH OF WILLS
STELLAR DATE: 08.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Docks
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The leader of the Anderson Collective sat on an old, metal chair in the middle of an office space. He was no longer bound. If he had wanted, he could have smashed his head against the many sharp edges of the old desks in the room. He could have hung himself with an appliance cord from the abandoned employee break room. He could have drunk water from the drinking fountain until his blood pH revolted and his organs shut down.
Charles Osla showed no urge toward suicide or escape of any means. He sat with his legs straight in front of him, ankles crossed, hands folded in his lap, and whistling to himself.
Osla had a lovely whistle, emotive and sweet. Ngoba didn’t recognize the song, but he supposed it had impressed many in the man’s life.
The fact was, Charles Osla was too charming to ever be the type to commit suicide. He was a man who had inspired millions to follow him, in the midst of overwhelming failure and destruction, and they had emerged at a place of glory through sacrifice. And now they were in the breach moment of their long exodus.
Ngoba stood in the doorway to the Suite, an abandoned office where he often left adversaries to sit and stew for days at a time. He learned a lot about people in this situation. Some shouted, cried, beat the walls. Others simply amused themselves and waited, like Charles Osla, a man Ngoba supposed had seen far worse than an empty office on Cruithne Station. There wasn’t much he could do to break a person like that. He would need to learn what Osla wanted, and then apply pressure to the desire.