Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  Helen caught a glimpse of cloudy sky and brightly lit signage before the connection closed. Downtown indeed. The light pollution restrictions meant he was on one of maybe a half-dozen streets in the City between the Far Reaches campus and Wade’s, each with varying degrees of safety, none of which Helen was comfortable being on after dark. No wonder he’s jumpy.

  Helen dropped into one of the plastic office chairs and set the tablet on the closest flat surface. “Ivester, Beauchamp is an excellent OP. I might even buy her being a saboteur because she had it in for Ted. But this is way too big and way too hands-on for her. She’s not an actor, she’s an instigator. She never takes direct action.”

  “You only know the half of it,” Ivester returned. He scrubbed his fingers through hair that had gotten longer and wilder while they brought Recovr up to speed. Helen caught the whispers in the air as he shut down all the cameras in the room and asked James to engage the privacy settings. “I went back and reviewed my notes. We had a bidder working against us when we were trying to acquire the BrightWinds assets. I mean, there’s always people looking to pick up discount salvage rights, but this time we had an actual fight on our hands.”

  “Let me guess,” Dougal interjected. “Beyond Blue wasn’t just after the computer assets?”

  “Exactly, but the lawyers had packaged everything up separately to get the most cash possible. So the timeline, as I see it right now, is as follows.” His glasses flickered as Ivester began to sketch out the order of events with his hands. Helen quickly slipped on her own lenses so she could follow along. A white starting point appeared in the air. “BrightWinds’ mining operations were supposed to be entirely AI-driven, with as few humans as could possibly be involved. They anticipated it could cut costs by billions and allow them to operate literally around the clock. No breaks, no downtime, no medical issues. Their pitch was that an AI-driven system would slash operating costs, allow for greater risk-taking, and, of course, bigger profits.”

  “Which didn’t work out as planned,” Helen responded.

  Ivester began to pace, drawing lines in the air with broad, sweeping gestures. “The idea wasn’t a new one, but the problem with true human-form AIs is that they don’t like getting hurt any more than humans do. We don’t bother to fix them, we just junk them and compile a replacement.” He wagged his fingers in frustration. “At the end of the day it got too expensive, so they started bringing in human OPs again on the sly while they tried to get their computers back on track.”

  “Enter Catherine Beauchamp.” Helen regarded the engineer from her chair.

  “Exactly. There were four human OPs that BrightWinds brought in quietly. When we acquired their assets, all four of them came to us, including Beauchamp. Beyond Blue got some of BrightWinds’ smaller operations, took over all the AI assets and computers, but Far Reaches wanted the people as much as the salvage.” He eyeballed Helen. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to hire experienced OPs.” A gesture of his fingertips and a node labeled Beyond Blue appeared along one of the two lines he’d drawn, Beauchamp along the other.

  “So you’re thinking that Beyond Blue used their NAV particle to sneak in to Myrian23A5 and encountered these . . . Scale there before we did?” Dougal interjected.

  “But Cat was out at Myrian while she was working for Bright-Winds, and the logs don’t show anyone else accessing the mole after shutdown,” Helen put in.

  “That line’s a little less certain. We opened the micro-wormhole to send the Golfball to Otlyan23 right about the same time Beauchamp came on board.” Ivester gestured at his timeline and another node appeared on the line. “It’s possible, just barely, that Beauchamp could have introduced some of these Scale into the delivery.”

  “That’s . . . that’s really tight. Onboarding a new OP takes weeks, so she’d have to have foreknowledge of all our procedures, get access to the R&D floors. She’d have to be some kind of super-spy to pull all that off.” Helen found herself defending her fellow OP without really intending to.

  “Or someone else planned this out and Beauchamp was just the hands. But espionage is still more likely than our alien theory,” Dougal hastened to add. “If we’re going to posit any of this seriously, we can’t handwave those details. It’s possible Beauchamp had help, that there are other people at Far Reaches involved. We can’t afford to ignore that.”

  Ivester nodded. “True enough, there’s always a small percentage that could be compromised, or who hate their jobs or teammates, or who are in some kind of financial straits that makes a little industrial espionage seem harmless. We try to keep a lid on it as much as possible, but no system is perfectly airtight.” Beauchamp’s node turned into a little cloud of yellow speckles. “So the information here is a little fuzzy.”

  The next node to pop up was an angry red. Helen appreciated the sentiment.

  “When we connected to the Golfball we discovered a fatal interference in the NAV Feed. We also discovered the presence of Scale, active Scale, unlike the dust you found out at Myrian23A5.”

  Helen stared at the pulsing red node that represented Ted’s death. The Ted-shaped hole in her life was still there. She figured it would always be there, but for every piece of the puzzle she slotted into place, the edges grew a little less raw, a little less angry.

  “There’s too much coincidence here.” Dougal broke in to Helen’s introspective moment. “Every time the Scale pops up, Beauchamp is involved.”

  “Yeah, but Beauchamp isn’t an engineer, she’s not building these things. She’s not a hands-on person. I mean, even when she’s being bitchy in the commissary, she’s got other people doing the real work, she’s just winding them up and pointing them at a target.” Helen got to her feet and stepped closer to the timeline. “Maybe she’s a middleman of some kind.”

  “Then we come to our own discovery of the Scale at Myrian23A5.” Ivester pulled the conversation back on track and drew a new node on the timeline. “Helen, as soon as you passed this information through to our system, everything started to escalate.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for starters, someone tried to kill you.”

  “Which makes no sense either. I drive a waldo. I’m not an engineer, I’m not one of the brains driving this boat.”

  “You’re the one insisting we take a closer look. You were the one who brought the Scale to our attention. Not just in the case of the Golfball, but also Myrian23A5. As an operator, you’re the only one out there who can take action. We can talk, theorize, and compare the data, but you’re the person on the ground, therefore you’re the biggest threat.”

  “A threat to what? It’s not like a waldo has rocket launchers and ray guns strapped to it.”

  “After we moved you to Analysis, the work you and Dougal did was a key step towards preserving the entire Line Drive project. Your insistence that there was some kind of interference in the Feed, the initial observations on the Scale, your constant pushing to go to get another look when it would have been simpler to transfer out, all of those elements have been a driving force behind keeping this project moving forward.”

  A series of windows opened in the air as Ivester paced back and forth, comparing lists of information, deleted files showing in alarming red. “In the chaos that followed, all the Myrian23A5 information got scrubbed from our computers. Lucky for us, James is obsessive about redundant backups. In that case, we know Beauchamp handled the deletions. It’s very possible, in fact, that she’s the one who poisoned the nutrient mix in your coffin, but we don’t have proof of that yet.”

  “She . . . what?” That idea rocked Helen back a little. Rivalry was one thing. Constant sniping and undercutting were par for the course, especially given Cat’s status as the angry ex, but out-and-out murder was a step too far. Helen wasn’t sure she could get her head around Beauchamp as a killer.

  “The log records don’t show her in the Mo
rtuary while you were out at Myrian23A5, but one of the coffin techs made a note in his daily report that someone was there—they heard them but didn’t see who it was. James notes the changes to the mix were entered manually, but the cameras can’t see anything other than a couple hardware racks out of place.”

  “What about Ravi, the NAV on the first Myrian mission? Is he okay?” Helen realized that, one by one, almost everyone who had been involved with the Golfball was now gone from Far Reaches. Mira and Bright had transferred to the Helsinki operation; Elliot and Zai had been let go, snapped up by Lightflyer. Analysts and support staff had been let go or transferred off-site. If someone made a move on her because of what she’d discovered about the Scale and BrightWinds so far, did that mean everyone else was a target too?

  “He moved to Animus when we started shutting down the Golfball portion of Line Drive.”

  “You don’t think he’s at risk?”

  “Maybe, but he’s out of our circle of influence for now. I’ve given Animus the heads up. They think I’m trying to poach him back.”

  “And you guys? And Keller?”

  Ivester and Dougal exchanged a glance. Helen got the sense this had already been discussed behind her back.

  “Now that Beauchamp is gone, any real risk is likely gone with her. They’ve done a fair job making us all look a little dirty on the outside.”

  “Likely gone?”

  “When Metro completes their investigation, Beauchamp’s going to be arrested and charged. In fact, the PR hit to Beyond Blue might be enough to put us back ahead of the game.”

  Ivester’s constellation of events coalesced at the last mention of Beauchamp and moved from a solid beam of light to a series of dots.

  The future, the image said clearly, was not yet certain. Helen stared at the lights, following the train of logic in her own mind.

  “So what’s our next step?” she asked.

  “Simple. We take another run at the Golfball,” Ivester replied.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Helen didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until she exhaled with a long, low, “Whoa . . .”

  She’d known the spider waldo was slowly being consumed by the Scale. What she hadn’t expected was how far along the process had gotten.

  “Operator Vectorovich, please confirm you’re connected.” Ivester’s voice was the only one on the line. He was sticking to the stricter protocols that Helen had laid down for NAV conduct. She didn’t expect him to stick to them for long, but with Keller running late, Ivester would have to fill in.

  “You’re not going to be-fucking-lieve this.” Helen reached and stretched, settling into not the spider waldo’s body, but a new configuration. Something not in the design specs. Too many legs, not enough eyeballs. Much like driving the mole, she couldn’t “see” things quite the same way. It was like keeping your eyes closed and having everyone in the room whisper the details to you. Whatever she had entangled with, it wasn’t the waldo, it didn’t feel like anything Far Reaches-related at all.

  This is going to take a little getting used to.

  “Operator Vectorovich, are we live?” Ivester asked over the emergency link, clear as a bell, even with the rest of the “noise” that had begun to creep in. It was the sound in the NAV Feed, the sound that had she’d been trying to avoid. Here, in this body, it was different, soothing. It fell across her senses like a veil. Even Ivester’s voice was different, as if it registered on a different level somehow, more feel and color than sound.

  Helen didn’t respond immediately. There was a lot to take in: the change in perceptions, the absolute delicacy of the waldo’s motion, and . . . that noise. She wasn’t getting it directly. The signal was being transmitted through her sibs. This waldo, whatever it was, was only one part of a larger network. Millions of Scale were connected and communicating. Somewhere, out of the edges of that vast impression, something was going wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

  Holy shit. This isn’t the spider. It’s a Scale. . . .

  “Operator Vectorovich, are we live?” Ivester’s voice, more urgently this time, impinged on her wandering attention. She had to pull herself back and re-center, keep her attention on this one problem. Something must have consumed the entanglement particle from the spider waldo and recycled it to build a Scale. Helen had to work to maintain focus, but the noise of a million voices was alluring, distracting. Helen wanted to stop and listen, really listen, but she kept herself on task.

  “Control, this is Operator Vectorovich. We are live, we are live, we are live.”

  With that utterance, Helen found it easier to settle back into old patterns. The screens in her line of sight came to life, interposing like a barrier against the whispering minds of the Scale. The lists and protocols she and Dougal and Keller had been agonizing over started to emerge.

  “Helen, just what the hell happened to my waldo? The coffin is showing anomalous readings all across the board.”

  “I think it’s fair to say that this is not your waldo I’m riding,” Helen responded. Let’s see what we have to work with here. The feeling was invigorating. She’d stepped into a wholly new, wholly different kind of waldo configuration.

  It made some kind of sense that a Scale, if they truly were tiny robots like the Far Reaches’ eenies, could be ridden like any other waldo. Waldos in general were empty husks, waiting for an OP to act as their mind and will. This Scale was different. This Scale knew what it needed to do with absolute certainty. It acted according to instructions passed to it from its sibs. At the moment, Helen was just along for the ride.

  Helen leaned back, trying to assume control. She had to fight it, to keep pulling as it attempted to return to its programmed series of actions. It wasn’t so much that it could think, or want, but it had a very, very specific set of calls and responses. Getting it to do anything outside of those for more than an instant required Helen’s total focus, like trying to keep a dog from chasing a car.

  She could feel the shift in attention as the Scale’s sibs around her imposed their will. They chattered at her, delivering new instructions, telling her to get her back in line. It was a powerful pressure, like the disapproval of a parent or a lover. She had to fight her Scale to keep it from relenting and she was losing.

  “Wait, you need to stop that. Right now.” Ivester’s voice broke in sharply.

  “Hang on, I’ve almost got it.”

  “No. NOW.” Sharper tone this time, maybe a touch of panic?

  Helen relented, relaxing and allowing the Scale to return to its position, to fit back in where it belonged.

  It was too late.

  An instruction came down the line, echoed through the thousands of sibs close by. It was paralyzing. Her Scale’s limbs locked up and Helen found herself unable to control anything at all.

  “We have a problem.” Helen tried again, but the microscopic robot was unresponsive. She could feel herself coming undone as her sibs approached and started nibbling, picking apart her body for reuse. The panic started to rise . . .

  “Pulling you out now.”

  “Wait, don’t.” Helen’s protest was cut short as she was unceremoniously dumped back into her own body. She opened her eyes to the soft blue interior of the coffin, felt the backlash of too quick a transfer burn on the inside of her skull, behind her eyes.

  “WHAT THE HELL, GUYS!” she roared at the screens on the inside lid of the coffin. They couldn’t hear her through the soundproofing, so Helen burned her frustration off before she popped the latches and said something she’d regret. She thrashed a bit for good measure, throwing elbows and knees at the padded walls to no real effect.

  In Ivester’s inexperience, he’d dumped her straight back to her own body without any of the precautions dialed up. Once the initial adrenaline rush wore off, Helen still had shooting pains running down her spine, through her arms to her fingerti
ps. Her mind tried to adjust but the supersuit kept firing random signals, making her fingers slip as she fumbled to pop the emergency catches. Helen retreated into the black inside her own head, trying to separate herself from her own body long enough to get a handle on the disjointed sensory input and confusion.

  This fucking ROOKIE team, she thought unkindly.

  Deep breaths made the pain worse. She tried not breathing at all. Even the soft lights inside the coffin were too much, and once the lid slid open, the lights from the lab were even worse.

  “Here, I’ve got it.” Hofstaeder’s voice was way too loud, and the injection that followed burned like a brand on contact, then cooled down and moved through Helen’s skull like a wave. The pain and disorientation weren’t washed away entirely, just dimmed enough to allow Helen to open her eyes, catch a glimpse of silver hair.

  “Thanks, Doc.” The light and noise were tolerable now. Her head was still filled with the chatter from the Scale, making it even harder for her to sort out her own limbs.

  “Good thing I was here this time,” Hofstaeder admonished. “You do not have the full nutrient setup in this ’pod yet, which also means no drugs on demand.”

  “This is what I get for leaving Keller behind,” Helen groused. The last of the umbilicals wormed its way out of her supersuit, freeing her to climb out. She managed to get a hand on of one of the brackets to pull herself up, then a second.

  “Sorry about that, but we were getting shutdown readings across the board. Whatever it was you entangled with was going to be dead and gone in less than a second.” Ivester and Dougal clustered at the control panels, comparing data points and information. Helen sat up in the coffin, elbows hanging over the edges.

  “Ivester.” Helen tried to get the engineer’s attention. He and Dougal were still discussing the information sheeting across the touchscreens. “IVESTER!” Helen raised her voice, ignoring the stab of pain in her head. He whipped around, surprise evident on his face. Dougal looked alarmed, darting looks from the furious Helen, to Ivester, then back again.