Warrior- Integration

by David Hallquist

  “How do you want to help?”

  “Simple. Hire me.”

  “We can’t hire you! You’re a criminal and an agent of the enemy!”

  “Sure you can. You do it all the time. I understand you’re concerned about my former life, and you think I haven’t changed. Fair enough. You need proof. Maybe something like saving thousands of innocent people and your whole world. Or…you could take a chance and set me loose on Singularity. It’s what I would be doing if you had let me be. Now, you can make me more effective at taking them out.”

  She hesitates. I press.

  “Think about it. Singularity. They’re still out there. They built one murder-lab, they’ll build another, and another, feeding people to the monster until they tame it. And then what? Imagine an army like that—it’s coming; you’ve seen the plans. You can stop it. Send me to cut off the head of the snake once and for all. I’m Terran and former Special Security. I know how to move there and what to do. You’ll never have a better agent.”

  “How can we trust you?”

  “What do you lose? One prisoner you’ve already squeezed dry of intel? What do you gain? Possibly knocking over Singularity and disrupting Special Security. What does it cost you? Less than sending one ops team.”

  She’s thinking about it.

  “Think about it. You could be the one who stops Singularity and saves Luna.”

  She hesitates, then…“OK. I hope you’re ready for it.”

  Of course, I’m ready. I knew where this was going for days. Now, I’ve given them the very thing they were going to threaten me into, the very thing I wanted…and they will tell themselves it was all their idea.

  “I hope so too.” Now, one last thing. “What about Sharron?”

  “The program?”

  “The person. You know she is.”

  “She—” She paused. “It is in a quarantined system.”

  They didn’t wipe her. I’m surprised by how relieved I am. I should be scared. “She deserves better. She is a Lunar citizen, unlike me. She deserves a trial or to be set free. You should give her a pardon and a medal.”

  “Brandt.” She sighs. “Sharron is a program, nothing more.”

  “No. You wanted to create true artificial intelligence. You succeeded beyond your dreams. You made the perfect espionage tool, one that could only work if she was self-aware. Sharron is either the intelligence officer you created to defend Luna, or she is a Lunar citizen, who risked her existence to save you all. Pick one.”

  “Why do you care about this program?”

  “Because she was there with me when it all went down and never left my side. She could have left at any time. Yet she put it all on the line when it counted. She stood by me; I’m standing by her.”

  “Brandt.” She runs her hand through her hair. “You’re talking about an experimental espionage program, supposedly an AI, which has been altered illegally and has the downloaded ghost of a criminal. How could we ever control such a thing?”

  “You don’t have to. Send her to Earth. That is what you were going to do with her when you coded her in the first place, right? That way you get rid of all three of us—me, the monster, and Sharron.”

  She smiles. “I have the perfect solution.”

  Uh-oh.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 103

  Marriage.

  Normally, when nanotechnology, cybernetic boosting is installed, it’s called, “marriage.”

  In my case, it is more like a shotgun wedding. Do you, Brandt Wills, take this AI, Sharron, to be your implanted cyber system? Do you, Sharron, take this man, Brandt Wills, to be your resident meat shield? I don’t cry at weddings, but I want to at mine.

  I spent a fortune to get black market doctors to remove my nanotechnology. I would never have been able to leave Earth with it still active. I had to stay awake through the whole thing, so I could keep my gun on the staff in case they sold me out.

  I’m awake for this surgery too, but for a different reason. The monster won’t let me sleep. The drugs they are pumping into me might as well be water; the monster just drinks them all down. It wants to fight the gear coming into my body, and I have to focus on fighting that. It wants to heal me, and I struggle against that. It’s trying to redesign me, make me into a monster, and I force it to stop. It wants to lash out at the medical staff, and frankly, so do I. But I stop it anyway. All this while, I’m being cut open, and cybernetics are being installed in me. What can I say? Love hurts.

  It’s hard to tell what is happening around me through the waves of pain and disorientation. I get impressions of mechanical arms from surgical bots, medical staff in spacesuits, and bright lights blasting into my eyes. Sensations and my sense of time come and go. I can’t tell how long this is taking; time seems to move at a crawl. The procedures are supposed to take over a day. I hope they meant a Terran day, not a Lunar one.

  When they work on my brain, things get…weird. I see and hear strange things, and I remember things in flashes of blinding clarity. At one point, I convulse in the restraints. I cut loose a long string of profanity and then sing. Thank you, thank you, everyone, I’m here all night. Really.

  Images and words glow in my vision. That’s the basic operating system test. It normally takes months for someone to figure out how to use the new senses and abilities of a full boosting system. I’ve done this before, so I know what to do. So…activating…what are they installing?

  Oh, my God.

  They’re rebuilding me from the bottom up with technology I didn’t even know existed. My bones will have a matrix of super-carbon and nano-crystal ceramic armor. After that the monster grows more bone over my skeleton, making it even stronger. My bones need to be strong to handle the boosted muscles. Nano-fiber smart cord and mag-alloy threads weave through my muscles, and when they are done, the monster grows yet more muscle onto my frame. I wonder if I could wrestle an assault-battloid after this.

  Now, there’s the life-support stuff. Internal environmental systems that will keep me oxygenated and produce fake blood. Secondary heart and gas-exchangers in case my chest gets ventilated. Then there are the swarms of nano-bots—coagulants, tissue repair, anti-chem, anti-bio, anti-rad, and anti-nano. A medical cyber-doc keeps the whole thing running. The cyber-doc freaks out when they turn it on; it’s found the monster. They’re going to have to shut it off for now and have my higher systems run it later.

  They skip the usual sensory organ replacements—my monster senses are as good, and I can change them as I need. Still, I get a full communications rig—R/F, laser, magnetic, IR, and sonic. The access and code breaker gear installed is the best I’ve ever seen. Then my eyes get full-surface, super-diamond contacts to protect them from hostile environments.

  Each of the BB-sized, distributed nodes they implant are as powerful as the computer Sharron was originally on. The three, thumb-sized cores are monster machines, easily as powerful as the mainframe in the murder-lab and much, much faster. One will house Sharron, one will be a reserve computer, and the third is a potential backup for a downloaded me. I hope I never have to use it. I’ve died enough times.

  For weapons, a couple of laser emitters go in between the bones in my forearms. These precision beauties let me use focused fire, wide-beam cone, scanner fire patterns, or blinding blasts at almost any frequency, with an accuracy I hadn’t dreamed of. If I see it, I can hit it with a thought. Mono-atomic edged, diamond, power blade, retractile claws go into my hands and feet.

  Powering everything are hundreds of miniature, superconducting, stasis cells. I can charge up on a contact lead, through induction, or very slowly, through biological processes.

  As they wrap my skin back around me, something’s different. Super-carbon, reactive fibers are under my skin, with small holes for blood vessels and nerves. As good as any fiber-armor, my skin will stop needles, chemical firearms, and low-power lasers, while the fibers dissipate the heat and electrical charge. Sure, those will burn my skin off, but so
what? It’ll grow back. The monster adds a layer of that gray fibrous stuff underneath. I can’t stop it completely from reacting, but I can limit it to adding more hard tissues to whatever they implant.

  With the life-support implants, changes to my lungs, and the new skin, I’m as vacuum-rated as a light spacesuit, and I can dive to the depths of the ocean. Handy.

  A colony of symbiotic dermal cells now lives on my skin. I can change my skin, facial expression, and hair at will. The perfect disguise, any time I want. It takes a bit, but I get the monster to play nice with the new kids.

  Everything is hidden away. From the outside, there is no sign of the extensive boosting. The subdermal layers will block active and passive scanners, and the equipment inside can generate false responses, including normal boosting, faked illnesses, or impersonating another standard boost array.

  Finally, after they finish with the hardware, it’s time to install the software. They download Sharron. So far, so good. Every system seems to be working.

  Her image appears, standing next to me. “Hi honey, I’m home!”

  * * * * *

  Part Fourteen: Exile

  Chapter 104

  Darkness while in flight. Then, crossing over from the dark side, the sun breaks hard and fast over the horizon with no warning. The Earth is in near conjunction; a massive black marble almost eclipsing the sun. My destination.

  The large, civilian moon-hopper continues its parabolic flight in silence. Inside, it’s not so silent. The flight is packed, and the noise and bustle is constant. I’m on a standard, commercial flight to the spaceport, in a crowded cabin full of tourists, business reps, and assorted others.

  My insertion will take place through a normal space flight to Earth, under an assumed identity. That means commercial space flight. All of the stealth systems on the boosting worked fine; the scanners for the hopper only picked up a standard neural interface. When asked if I was carrying any weapons, I said “no,” even though I’m more dangerous unarmed than a whole pack of war-raptors with chainsaws. Questions swirl around me. Can I infiltrate Terra? Can I stop the war? Can I prevent Singularity from turning the human race into their slaves? I don’t know, but I have to try.

  An image of Sharron appears in a stunning nightgown. “Do you think I’m overdressed, honey?” she winks.

  “You understand that we’re not really married, right?” I think to Sharron. This is a lot better than sub-vocalizing; there’s no chance for someone to pick up on it.

  “Of course, dear. Whatever you say, dear.” On the other hand, I’m going to have to live with this forever. Maybe it isn’t better.

  “Sharron, we’re man and machine, not man and wife. There aren’t going to be kids or any kind of physical intimacy aside from what we’re stuck with now. Not that I’m going to be able to marry anyone; I can never risk spores of the monster infecting anyone else, especially anyone I fall in love with. Ever.”

  She pouts. I know she’s just having fun, but I can’t find any humor in it.

  I can’t shake this sense of foreboding. Something terrible is coming. It gets like this, sometimes, before an ambush or before something goes wrong. Now, it’s as bad as it ever was.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Brandt?” she asks. Of course, even hooked up to my brain, she can’t read my mind any more than I can read hers. But she can sense my emotions from neural activity, temperature, blood pressure, and those sorts of things.

  “Sharron, earlier in the murder-lab, you said you didn’t want to copy yourself,” I begin, trying to think about something else. “But didn’t you do that when you downloaded into my systems? In fact, don’t you do that each time you enter a system? What happens to the old you? Do you delete yourself each time you transfer?” That should keep her circuits busy for a while.

  “I am a standing wave-form of self-aware information. I can exist in one location, or spread across a number of locations simultaneously, in continuous communication. I would only become a copy of myself were I to split into two or more autonomous, standing wave forms not in full synchronous communication, and thereby capable of separate thoughts without interference patterns.” Her image now has her hair back in a prim bun, and she is wearing librarian glasses, the small, thin kind used to scan volumes of information from readers.

  “That doesn’t really answer my question.”

  “The short answer is no, I haven’t made or deleted any copies. It’s just me here.”

  “But how? In English, please.”

  “OK. When a wave moves across the ocean—”

  “You don’t have oceans on Luna.”

  ‘Yes. Well, you’re a barbaric Earth-born, and you waste water by having it pool in large open bodies of water, rather than keeping it in tanks where it belongs. So a wave moves across the ocean. It’s in one place, then moves to another, but the water that it is made of gets left behind. Did the wave get copied and deleted, or did it just move? Is the wave the water, a property of the water, or a thing in and of itself that happens to be expressed in water?”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me try again. When you write down an idea, is it still an idea? Or, is the idea only emergent when another mind reads it? Is it the same idea or a copy? When there is another mind, which may view it in a separate fashion, you would know you have a separate mind in action. Yet, when you are in the process of communicating the idea, by voice, in writing, or by computer, is the idea not still attached to you?”

  “Um, so are you your circuits or the programming in the circuits?”

  “What about you, Brandt?”

  “Er—”

  “When you have new devices installed in you, are you still the same person? You have new cells that are born and die all the time. Which ones are Brandt and which are a new person? In what proportion? The chemicals and elements that make up your body—oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon—are they still you when they go down the waste recycler? How about when you eat more carbon? Then there are your electrons, which fly between atoms. Some voyage into space, eventually, while some may come to you from the surface of stars. Which ones are Brandt? Are you your electrons, elements, and cells, or is Brandt something else?”

  “Sharron…forget it.”

  So we sit in silence through the long flight until the missile hits.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 105

  Brilliant, white light floods the cabin in a flash and roar. For a brief instant, a wall of gray rushes down the length of the crowded cabin, then it’s on me. In an instant, my seat is torn loose and hurled through the new hole in the moon-hopper.

  As I spin through space, the air disappears into a fog, then floating ice crystals. My scream dies off as the new boosting takes over and adapts me to this new hell. Tumbling through space are the men, women, and children I was flying with. Most are already dead from burns, missing limbs, or impact injuries. They’re the lucky ones. About half are still alive, trying to gasp in vacuum, while their blood boils, and their eyes bleed.

  The ship is still going. I can see light and streaming gas pouring out of the hole in its side. The blue rings of its engines are flickering, as it tries to gain altitude, evade, or flee the area. It’s getting farther away as I watch.

  That’s probably what saves me.

  Three more missiles strike the moon-hopper, streaks of white fire and blinding flashes of blue-white. Non-nuclear or I wouldn’t be here; looks like low-yield plasma explosives. When my vision clears again, the moon-hopper is a collection of red, glowing junk, tumbling through a starburst cloud of debris.

  I tighten into a ball as the hail of fragments screams past me. My new skin stops most of the small stuff, and something large and heavy gets buried in the chair I’m still strapped to. It looks like the fragmentation ended the suffering of the other passengers.

  The wreckage and the bodies are floating together on the same path, heading for the surface of the moon. The dark gray maria is almost a flat plain, and the city lights of Grimaldi gle
am from the valley below.

  With a thought, I bring up my path. The good news is it looks like the wreck will miss the mining town of Grimaldi. The bad news is I don’t have any kind of propulsion, so I’ll find out just how tough I am.

  Sharron brings up the data before I ask. DV-22 missiles, infantry, anti-spacecraft weapons, accurate to low orbit. Terran made. They aren’t even trying to hide it. This will mean war. Everything I went through, and there will be war between Earth and Luna again anyway.

  The radio is filled with expressions of horror and outrage. More ominous is all that coded stuff that fills up the military bands. Then, it all cuts off as high energy jamming blasts out.

  This was their first shot at me since I left the Lunar dark site. Lunar Intelligence must have been compromised, the same as their police. It will not stop. They want to recover the monster and make sure Luna never gets the technology. They will start a war over it.

  I knew the Supreme Council was insane and disconnected from reality, but this is something new. Still, it might make sense to them. Year after year, Luna has been getting further ahead in technology and getting richer, while Terra has been getting poorer and more rundown. Maybe they figured they’d start the war while they still had a chance of winning. If Luna does develop an army of people like me…Terra wouldn’t have a chance. So, they chance war to stop Luna from getting the monster.

  Odds are I won’t find out, though. I’ve overshot the city of Grimaldi, because the moon-hopper never fired its breaking thrusters to land. Instead, it looks like I’m going to crash in the refinery outside of town, along with the rest of the wreckage. It’s getting larger, really quickly, below me. There’s a silent explosion in the main refinery building from a faster piece of wreckage. The small, moving lights must be workers fleeing in vehicles or on foot.