Source code, p.10
Source Code, page 10
But more than being angry, Daelia was exhausted. It was past midnight now. The phantom pains in her arm were fading at least, her liver finally metabolizing the last vestiges of alcohol in her bloodstream. But even that left her shaky. She wanted to go back to the hangar and collapse on her air mattress and not deal with this.
She had tried to call her dad. More than once. He wasn’t answering.
“That wasn’t my decision,” the Army lieutenant told her with a long-suffering sigh. “I’m here to help you get them back to the Scrap House.”
She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “They’re over there.”
The lieutenant cast a glance over. He clearly blink-clicked his monocle on; the projection light in the housing suddenly snapped on, glowing in the darkness. He winced. “What is that noise?”
“That’s them,” she said.
“Huh,” was all he said in reply, and he got his guys organized to start loading them up into a big flatbed.
While they were working, Argo walked up, stretching a little. “You can head back, if you want,” he told her.
“Yeah, I have to.” She gestured at the Army. “Need to get these back in their cradles.”
“Sure,” he said. “I mean, I’m staying. Cactus is headed out here. Figure I should be here when he shows up.”
Daelia was too tired to ask why. The beginnings of a headache was beating in the back of her skull. No more drinking like that, she decided. The aftereffects were just miserable. She nodded. “Sounds good.”
Fifteen minutes later, she was following the Army truck back home.
Everything was dark back at the Scrap House. Raijinn had shut down the facility for the night. Daelia had to deactivate the alarm and unlock a couple of doors in order to get them all inside. It was dark in there, empty, still. Even Raijinn’s kugutsu was offline for the evening, tucked into its cradle in the small lobby.
Dad had always kept it there. Said he wanted people to understand they weren’t dealing with a droid from Star Wars or whatever. It was easy to forget a kugu was just a walking puppet, not the abiota itself. She thought maybe it would come out to see its trainees returned, but the kugu didn’t budge.
The Army guys got the bitzers off the truck and back onto the main floor with surprising efficiency. Daelia worked on autopilot to get them hooked up and hooked in.
By the time the lieutenant finally took his guys away and her work was done, it was almost 0200.
Upstairs in her little apartment again, Daelia stripped off her arm brace, along with her sweaty, muddy clothes. She wanted a shower. She wanted some sleep. But before doing that, she retrieved the darknet laptop from Dad’s desk and plugged in her monocle.
She cycled through the nested settings screens until she found the memory. The monocle still had a few seconds of that broadcast from the object. She moved the file to Dad’s hard drive for later analysis, and as an afterthought, downloaded a copy to a thumb drive.
She was in the shower, over-chlorinated city water pounding on her back, when a second flatbed truck drove past outside. It had come through the airfield access gates south of the Scrap House.
Headed for the 121st.
12
Dad had still not shown up at 0700.
That was a problem. Daelia had already exhausted what few options she had for tracking him down. She’d called him. She’d left a voice mail. She’d texted. And that was all she could do.
With anybody else, she would have had more options. But Dad was the kind of guy who spent as much of his life off the grid as possible. He removed the GPS systems from his cars. He deactivated the transponder chips in his field equipment. He stripped every new server to bare boards to find any built-in spyware. He stubbornly refused any sort of enhancement.
Even now, a man could still disappear if he knew how, if he was determined enough.
It had never made sense to Daelia, why he went to such lengths to remove technology from his immediate sphere. It went beyond paranoia. It had always felt more spiteful than anything else.
Sometimes she thought he was trying to prevent Mom from finding him, coming back.
But that didn’t make sense either. He was still working out of the same facility for the same clients with the same company name as when she’d walked out. She didn’t have to look anywhere.
She wasn’t trying to get a hold of him at 0630 on a Saturday morning, wanting to know where the hell he was.
There was no help for it. Dad was gone and Daelia was here and whatever was planned for that morning for the air show, she’d just have to handle it.
Dragging herself out of bed, throwing a robe on over her thin sleep shirt, Daelia tied the belt just so. Then, she tucked her dead left arm carefully up against her body, into the pocket she’d formed between robe and belt. The robe held it good as any sling, with far less fussing.
At this point, Daelia was used to it.
She couldn’t remember the accident. Not the crash itself. Not her mom helping the fire department cut her out of the cab. Not the ambulance ride, the hospital, the surgeries, the recovery. Her brain had blocked it out. Almost a full month, lost.
No, the only thing that stuck out about that whole miserable few weeks was a comment from Mom.
Telling her she would have to have her arm amputated.
Don’t worry, darling. Daddy will make you a new one.
Daelia had screamed. Thrashed. Yelled. Refused. The nurses had come running and the doctor had backed Mom out of the room. Daelia remembered the fear she had felt in that moment, that Mom would revert to her primary purpose.
Mom didn’t kill anybody, though, and Daelia kept her arm. The medical team been able to piece the shattered bone back together well enough. Her arm looked normal enough. The muscles were all still where they were supposed to be, the skin still in place. The scarring was bad, but she hadn’t cared about that too much.
The arm didn’t work anymore, though. Too much nerve damage. The doctors had hoped that maybe she’d regain some kind of sensation, eventually, but that was almost fourteen years ago now. Daelia only felt what was transmitted through the brace.
Dad had made her that, partnering up with a biomedical firm that did specialized prosthetics for all the subtle little bits he had no experience with. Her parents had tried to turn it into a family thing, something they did together. Mom had always been there, helping her tune it, adjust it.
Until Mom was gone. And Daelia had had to learn how to do all this on her own.
Now, she set about fixing herself a bowl of cereal one-handed, digging around in the small kitchenette, and took it back to the desk in her makeshift bedroom. Daelia laid her bad arm on the surface and reached for her laptop.
After the little adventure in Armand Bayou, Daelia had managed to grab a few hours of sleep. She was surprised not to see the event plastered all over the morning news, not to mention social media. It was all quiet, though. Not a peep about it anywhere.
Anywhere legitimate, anyway.
It did pop up in her Chan feed.
Daelia reviewed that as she ate.
Technically, she wasn’t supposed to be in the Chans. Nobody was. It was the sewer of the Internet, the undercroft, the place where all decent things went to die. But it was also the one place where one could still operate completely anonymously; there was no government monitoring there, no advertisers to please or corporate terms of service agreements to obey. Whatever you wanted to build, you could.
Companies like Omphalos liked to claim that the Chans were an accident, a relic of the early Internet that had branched off on its own, that couldn’t be brought to heel. Dad had always said that was a load of bullshit. The place, he insisted, was allowed to exist. A release valve of sorts, allowing people a few outlets for uncontrolled outrage, so they’d leave the legitimate spaces of the Internet alone.
Daelia was inclined to believe him. His stories about the early days of the Internet made it sound like the damn Wild West of depravity. Mandatory digital IDs had brought a lot of that under control, and the Omphalos team of predictive content monitors kept things civilized.
Dad always said it was more fun before.
So he’d built a Chan machine. It was the computer equivalent of a zombie apocalypse vehicle. Reinforced, cobbled together, but highly effective at keeping all the bad shit out there in the environment from touching you. An ugly old brute, it ran Delphi 5, an open-source operating system that had been obsolete for twenty years. Dad had made quite a few tweaks to it, so much so that it barely resembled the original code.
He’d started working on that laptop after Mom left. Daelia had never asked him why. She pretended she didn’t know about it, and he pretended he didn’t know that she used it.
She stayed away from the truly heinous shit, the zoophilia chat rooms and other illegal insanity that flourished down here. But there were a number of unregulated message boards that—if you could stand the occasional fetish post—tended to have some interesting conversations.
There was exactly one thread she could find about the crash.
Reading through it, though, she realized the site descriptors were wrong.
It wasn’t describing something that had happened in South Texas, but Alaska. The event itself sounded incredibly similar. Same size object, same appearance, close to a Guard base.
If there had been two strikes, odds were good there had been more. But if there were more, she wasn’t seeing them anywhere. Daelia wasn’t sure what that meant. She didn’t like the implications.
“Since when do Chan posts get suppressed?” she muttered to herself.
There wasn’t time to search any deeper. Daelia set a simple algorithm to start trawling for her.
That would have to be good enough.
Before she shut down the computer, she pulled in the data analysis file from Raijinn. Getting it from the main company server onto the laptop took a few steps—nothing that touched the Chan machine could ever touch the network again, per Dad’s rules—but it was relatively simple. She pulled it up in a fresh screen.
Daelia was not the world’s best programmer. She could do it. She was competent with it, even. But anything that required typing, beyond the extensive personal shorthand she had developed for her AR input keyboard, was difficult.
The brace was good, but it wasn’t perfect. Her left fingers could grab and hold and bend and feel, but fast, repetitive motions were beyond them.
Besides, she still had bad memories from that time in undergrad when she’d developed carpal tunnel and her brace had simply canceled out the pain. That had gone on for weeks, until her hand function was so impaired, and the pain so overwhelming, she called Dad, sobbing. She’d spent the next month in a stabilizing splint and almost failed a couple of midterms.
But fortunately, there were visual workarounds.
On the laptop, she pulled up a render screen. It showed very little: light, haze, nothing concrete.
Raijinn had added some helpful notes too.
It didn’t believe that it was anything other than junk, and any images were just a byproduct. Monkeys typing Shakespeare, the note said. A coincidence.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But she had other things to deal with that morning.
Daelia removed the thumb drive and, barefoot, took both it and the laptop back to Dad’s office. She put the thumb drive in the degausser he kept in the corner and went back to her own little space.
She stripped then, tossing her sleep clothes back onto the unmade bed, and spent a minute or two figuring out what she had that was presentable.
She wasn’t the type of girl who cared much about her appearance. With Dad gone, though, Daelia would have to deal with the press junket, and she couldn’t roll out there looking like a homeless person.
Jeans and a T-shirt were what she had, and they would have to be good enough. She wrangled her brace back on first, though. Try as she might, she’d never quite mastered the art of getting her bra on one-handed. Daelia winced as the interface points just under her skin—shoulder, elbow, wrist, palm, fingertips—reconnected into the brace’s corresponding nodes. A familiar sensation, like the pins and needles when her foot would fall asleep, flooded down her arm.
It took a minute or two to subside.
The same shit every day. Every day since she was thirteen.
Sensation came back to the limb now. Or at least, a facsimile of sensation, as subtle electrical impulses were rerouted from her brain through the brace’s circuitry and back into the muscles and nerves. She flexed her fingers, mentally running through her connection checklist, the way any of the pilots might inspect their flight controls before taking off.
All systems green, she thought to herself, and shook her hand out. The wrongness of the sensation provided by the brace would fade over the next hour or so as her body readapted.
Daelia wondered if maybe Mom had been right. Maybe she should have just gotten the damn arm amputated, gotten the full implant-prosthetic instead.
That thought too would fade. Always did.
She started dragging her clothes on, fingers operable but clumsy.
By the time she sat down to lace her boots up, her hindbrain was already reading the brace’s impulses as natural.
Raijinn was waiting for her out in the main hangar space. “Daelia,” it acknowledged. “Good to see you.”
“Thanks,” she said, a little distracted. She had pulled her phone app back up on the monocle screen. “Have you heard from Dad this morning?”
“I have.”
Well, shit, that was a relief. She blinked the app away. “I haven’t been able to get through at all. My app’s saying his cell number’s been disconnected.”
“Ah, not voice contact,” Raijinn replied. “Email.”
“What’d he say?”
“He wanted to preemptively congratulate you for the excellent job he knows you’ll do with the press conference.”
With Dad, that could be genuine or an attempt at a joke. Daelia wasn’t sure which and wasn’t in the mood for either option anyway. “When are they getting here?” she asked.
“By ten, I’m told.”
“Great,” she grumbled. She wondered if this was some kind of ploy on her father’s part to get her to agree to his employment offer. Make it like she had always been here, and always would be. “Does Dad at least have notes?”
“I shall send them to your monocle for your review.”
“Let’s hope I don’t embarrass us all,” she muttered.
“Yes, let’s hope.” And the data file popped up in the corner of her lens.
“There’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
But she need not have asked, because the answer was standing in the half-open doors of the hangar. A figure. Silhouetted against the low morning sun.
Clearly in uniform.
“Daelia!” Rover. Had to be. He was in OCPs, the regular duty uniform instead of his flight suit, and didn’t look pleased about it. “Good to see you all awake and cheery this morning.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked, cautious, even as she headed over.
“Wanted to thank you for your help last night. I hate to think what those damn things would be up to if we hadn’t gotten them rounded up. Everything good?”
She jabbed a finger back over her shoulder. “They’re back in their racks.”
“Good. That’s good. Me and the Army are going to have a little chat about that later. If you can get Raijinn to print me off a current status report for them, I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll ask.”
“Nothing new,” he warned. “I’m not asking you to generate a report out of cycle. God only knows what your dad would charge us for that.”
“Not that much.”
“Daelia, an invoice of ten bucks that Base Contracting hasn’t approved can cause me a world of pain.” He paused. “Where is your dad, anyway? I need to talk to him.”
If he were anybody else, Daelia would have given him some bullshit line. But Rover had been Uncle Ty, once upon a time. Most of Dad’s biological family had drifted away after Mom had come into the picture, and Mom…well, abiota didn’t have families.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Off on another contract, he said. Private client.”
Rover frowned at that but didn’t press her on it. “Well, then I guess it’s you. I want you at the morning briefing in, oh”—and he checked his hideously expensive watch—“forty-five minutes.”
“What briefing?”
“Actually, make it twenty minutes. Good idea to be early.” Rover looked at her. “We wouldn’t want to start a damn panic by telling the governor’s office the wrong fucking thing, now would we?”
“I’m not military,” Daelia started to protest.
Rover snorted. “Good thing our state’s emergency management framework allows, nay, requires civilian involvement.”
“I don’t know about that, but—”
“Wonderful,” Rover said. He tugged down his OCPs. He looked uncomfortable in the uniform, like it didn’t quite fit. “I trust you’ve got flight line passes and everything you need for this weekend. You have a problem with access, call Blanket.”
“I don’t have his phone number.”
“Ask Raijinn. Shit, you’re in grad school, work it out.” He rolled a shoulder. He was definitely uncomfortable. “My shift at the Wing burger booth starts in ten minutes and I’m not about to allow those fuckers from Force Support to claim we aren’t pulling our weight here in Ops.”
“You’d think a meteor strike would take precedence,” Daelia replied drily.
“You would think.” Rover gave Daelia a look, and then was gone.
She ducked back in the hangar to pass along Rover’s request to Raijinn, and then Dailia was off again. She’d forgotten to plug the UTV back in; the damn thing was dead. Instead, she walked.
Daelia wandered up the flight line. She fumbled her monocle on, one-handed, as she walked. Her left hand wasn’t quite up for fine motor control yet. It was awkward but she got it working.
