Unity code, p.10
Unity Code, page 10
Daelia mulled it over, all the way back to Ellington.
But later, over a beer and an Orpheus Watch rerun, she decided to do a fresh review of Mirror Applications.
This time, down in the Chans.
And that showed all sorts of interesting things.
Or at least, showed the absence of interesting things.
Quite a bit of the company information had been scrubbed from the legitimate Internet. Wiped clean. Even the record of that information was absent from Galatea’s extensive caching library.
None of what was missing seemed that strange, though. Nothing worth hiding. Employee names, tax records.
She did find a connection to the air show, though. Mirror Applications, as a subsidiary of Tamm Good Industries, had been the compiler of record for the PR overlay for the air show.
Why, Daelia wondered, would that be worth covering up?
Why was Daniel Maas—a guy who was clean enough to pass a DOD background check, qualify for some pretty sensitive contracts—dead?
And why would Unity kill him?
11
In her apartment down by the University of Houston campus that night, Lara fired up her old VR rig and stepped into the Chans.
For some reason, it always made her nervous.
It wasn’t like anything could hurt her down here. The place didn’t even have a proper virch, not like the more legitimate Internet did. VR wasn’t normally how she chose to interface with the place; a computer terminal with a VPN and packet-scrubber bot was usually good enough for just about anything she wanted to do.
Galatea didn’t index the Chans. Didn’t direct to it. Never allowed anything from it to show up in her web searches. Whether that was because the predictive couldn’t, or wouldn’t, was anybody’s guess. But either way, her inattention had turned the region into a shadow land, a place where you could do anything, say anything, post anything.
And yeah, that led to some incredibly fucked-up things existing down here. But, by the very nature of the place, Lara never had to interact with those fucked-up things if she didn’t want to.
It took technical know-how to run even a simple discussion forum in the Chans. No drop-and-click website builder tools down here. You coded it yourself. And no Omphalos hosting, either. You figured that out, too.
The place, therefore, was a bit of a throwback. Similar to the old Internet of the mid-’90s. At least, that’s what she’d heard. Before her time. You had to know where you were going if you wanted to find anything or run a navigation-bot. Lara had one of those, but today she didn’t need it.
She knew where she was going.
While the Chans didn’t have a formal virtual reality presence, it did have several servers that were only accessible through VR. GeoForums. That’s where Lara was headed. GeoForums.
She typed in the Chans address, offered up her twenty-character passphrase, and waited.
The place loaded slowly. The default view in a VR rig was an empty white space, unless you loaded your own background. Lara used to have one of those, an environment she’d designed herself and really enjoyed, but she’d killed it after VirCon last year. Trying to go cold turkey on that lens addiction.
After an agonizing ten seconds, details began to coalesce. The place looked very much like some secret mountain base in an old spy movie: big blast doors set into the face of a granite cliff, snow blowing around, obscuring any detail.
A figure was standing in front of it. Swathed in a fur-lined parka, big ski goggles mirroring the false gray sky.
“State your username,” it said.
“StarHorse96,” Lara said. She’d picked the handle back when she was twelve and stupidly kept using it. Ivan called it an OPSEC problem, but what difference did it make? The damn Air Force probably knew everything they were doing online, legitimate or otherwise. Or at least, that’s what she imagined. Just because the Chans were harder to surveil didn’t mean it was impossible.
“Business here at Mistress Eleutheria’s Fortified Fortress of Rumor?”
The name was a bit of a joke. Deliberately ridiculous. Eleutheria, everyone said, was extremely paranoid.
But there was only one answer to give if you wanted in.
“I’m here to help data-mine the bullshit from up above.”
And with that, the figure was gone. The gates behind it were open.
Lara trudged inside.
Eleutheria was an emergent, that much Lara knew. But everything else about her—location, machine body, original purpose—was intentionally, purposefully unavailable. Her server had some of the best security Lara had ever seen, the grime of virch a contrast to the serious work beneath.
The emergent wasn’t the only information broker in the Chans, but she was the only one who would allow Lara into her private forums.
The rest had all discovered her military credentials and shut down on her.
Nothing was guaranteed here. You found yourself a seat in the cantina and you listened. You debated. You scoured email dumps and corporate leaks. You said anything you damn well pleased. And you didn’t believe a damn thing anybody else said without some kind of evidence. You didn’t come here to scheme—there were better places for that—but to find answers.
And after what had happened to Daelia today, Lara needed some answers.
Everyone who entered was forced into the same visual avatar. Only the temporary ID numbers changed. Didn’t matter what it was. You never got the same number twice.
An ID number was held out to her at the door. “Cover charge,” the bouncer-bot said.
Lara had thought about this all day. What she said next needed to be something decent, something that showed you had something to offer, but it couldn’t be anything classified. Nothing that would get her—or Eleutheria—in trouble.
“A compiler was killed today, in Houston, Texas. By the kugus that are with Unity.”
The bot didn’t answer for a moment. Then— “That murder confirmed, but the cause of death is not. You may add your evidence to the boards.”
“Thanks,” she said, and headed into the cantina.
This place had the same cold, dirty facade as the exterior. Metal, frost, grease, rust, age. There was a small bar, but that was just window-dressing. What really mattered here were the tables.
In the virch, there were only five, and none of them empty. In reality, each represented an active discussion thread; there could be dozens of threads active at any given time, but the virch presented them randomly. You could access a thread, active or archived, with an identifier code. Lara had heard that there were tables here that had been open for years.
Sometimes, she’d just find an open seat at a table, one of those randomly presented threads, and jump into the conversation. There were all sorts of things that got talked about here, but today, Lara was after something specific.
She headed for the boards.
Here, any user could post information for examination or questions to explore. It would open a new table, new discussions.
Sometimes Eleutheria posted bounties for specific data-hunts. Those were always fun. Sometimes it led nowhere, bullshit conspiracies that were fun to run to ground but all too often believed. Sometimes, her bounties led to explosive revelations.
It was places like this that had organized the FOIA campaign that ultimately revealed the truth behind the Day Four Incident.
Didn’t mean it was always right though.
Hell, according to the boards, there was a theory being tested right now that the entire first-contact thing was an enormous fake-out. One hundred percent fraudulent.
Too many people had seen them, though. Right? NASA had footage, a lot of footage. Ivan had sent her some. Lara had thought about offering this—photographic evidence was pretty much gold around here—but that was too identifiable.
No, no, Lara swiped that away and kept looking.
Dan Maas wasn’t here yet.
She entered his name on a clean board, uploaded the handful of local news articles she’d found on his death, along with a snapshot of his entire website. That, she’d had on hand from back when they were working together.
That hit immediately.
Lara heard a chime, and instead of a new table appearing, an existing one lit up. Somebody inviting her into a chat.
“There’s nothing on Galatea that I can see,” the user avatar there told her. “This website’s not there.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, heading over.
“Yeah, nothing. I’ve got it on another screen,” the blank-faced avatar said, gesturing at something that Lara couldn’t see.
“I used to work with the guy,” she said. “He’s real, the business is real.”
“And you think that Unity killed him?”
Lara chose her words carefully. “A source I have saw those kugus Unity is using running away from the scene.”
“That’s weird,” somebody else at the table said. “There are no records of anything like that anywhere else.”
“I saw it happen myself. I want to know why this guy is dead,” Lara said.
“Sure, sounds fun. Let’s see what we can find.”
But after several hours, and a number of others joining in on the data-hunt, the only significant connection anybody turned up was an invitation.
A handwritten note inside a double-fold Cirque de Synthétique flyer, one that had been in his mailbox. Somebody had driven over to the guy’s house and picked up his mail. Kind of a shitty thing to do to a dead guy, but the Chans wasn’t a place where things like that mattered.
Talk this weekend, the note said.
Lara disconnected after that, wanting free air and a think. It wasn’t necessarily beyond possibility that Maas had had some kind of connection with an abiota art show, but she also wasn’t sure if it was significant.
Or real at all.
What a waste of time.
12
The Envoy was everywhere. On podcasts. On streaming news channels. Heck, Omphalos had even set aside an entire afternoon on their biggest social media hive for a meet and greet, which had proven so popular it crashed the servers. And then they did it again the next day.
Daelia couldn’t figure it out.
Why people were so enamored with this Unity thing.
The stories were amazing. Maybe that was it. The Envoy talked about worlds of carved glass, of metal rain, liquid atmospheres, and endless mountains. Endless seas under the tidal dance of multiple moons. Planets with their faces locked to the sun, eternal storms swirling over the terminator line while people walked the halls of ancient libraries, sunk deep into the crust. She spoke of entire worlds drifting in the interstellar deeps, webs of inhabitations stretching for thousands of kilometers, gossamer thin and incredibly tough.
She spoke of past wars and future glories, the way the myriad races of the galaxy had found better ways to relate with each other. To lift everyone up, toward—
“It kind of sounds like you’re talking about some kind of transcendence,” an interviewer on the radio said.
“I suppose I am. It’s difficult, sometimes, to understand some of these things that I can see in Unity,” the Envoy replied. Her voice was seductive, Daelia thought, sweet and pure and full of wonder. Full of promise. Maybe that was it. “I talk to them, of course, and they do their best to answer. But I do think there are species out there that have managed to rise above this base physical state we find ourselves in. Get loose from the cycle of eating and breathing and, uhh, you know.”
“Shitting?” The interviewer laughed. “That’s pretty amazing.”
“It is, it really is. The galaxy is an amazing place, and I can’t wait for humanity to join it,” the Envoy replied. “I think it’s going to b—”
Finally. The words cut out as Daelia steered Dingo under the aegis of the jamming field.
Back at Aunt June’s.
Finally.
Parking Dingo in the pullout, Daelia made a note to find a music channel for the drive back to Ellington. She was getting pretty tired of hearing about how glorious this alien bullshit was.
They’d almost killed Ginger.
Hell, they’d killed that guy yesterday. Tried to kill her.
And that was without considering what they had done to Manila. C-Springs and Guangzhou and all that had only suffered a twelve-hour blackout, but Manila, Luzon, was still dark. Aid was flowing into the place now, at least, but had to be staged well outside the city. Taken in on foot, bike, or rickshaw. Anything electronic that went in stopped working.
Nobody knew how they were doing it. The intelligence reports over the past few days had been all over the place.
What was so great about that?
Probably a matter of perspective. Deaths so far had been negligible. If anything, the technological freeze-out had stopped a lot of the sporadic violence that Manila had been subjected to over the past few years. The place had been a war zone since the end of the Five Days Wars. Public consensus, according to Raijinn’s analysis, was that this was a positive thing.
Daelia wasn’t so sure. But then, something had tried to kill her yesterday.
She still wasn’t sure what to do with that.
Once again, June was waiting for her on the porch. No shotgun this time.
“You look like hell,” June said as Daelia walked up. She gave the younger woman a quick hug, then laid both hands on her shoulders, looking her over. “What happened?”
“I need to see the kugu.”
“Catch me up on the walk. We’ll go slow.”
Despite her words, June didn’t dawdle. Daelia was soon standing in the small, isolated server room once again, a fusion generator humming beyond the thin walls. The sustainment unit and kugu were laid out on the workbench, and Aunt June had set up a monitor next to it. No AR field in here to access. Daelia had left her monocle in the car.
“You have it out.”
“Yes, yes, I do. Got it out this morning, after I got your message. Figured I might as well look it over myself. August has been scanning it for Q-BAL.”
“Find anything interesting?”
June tapped the workbench. “So this is an interesting puzzle you brought us.”
“How so?”
“The interior circuitry of the kugu, or whatever it’s supposed to be, is almost completely unsalvageable. The self-destruct setting did its job. However, the form of everything else is familiar.”
Daelia cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
Grabbing a wrench, June poked at something inside the kugu’s chest. “I mean the internal structure, the design, the way everything’s put together looks very much like any other kugu. See?”
Daelia peered in. “Looks destroyed.”
June sighed and beckoned her over to the monitor. She pulled up a three-dimensional model. “Here. Q-BAL was able to extrapolate this. Recognize the leg assembly?”
It did look remarkably like any other commercial kugu.
“Robotics is robotics, isn’t it?” Daelia asked.
“For a group that’s claiming our imaginations have been severely limited by Hollywood,” June said, and tapped the kugu’s chassis with the wrench again, “this thing is basically the equivalent of a human in a rubber suit. Solenoids, gears, movement housings, power fibers, circuitry connection points, all look very similar to what I’d expect out of any human manufacturing house.”
Daelia didn’t know quite how to process that. “Maybe it’s the best way of doing things.”
“Not to mention, the proportions are similar, the body shape and style…” Aunt June trailed off. “It’s got an exotic skin on it, I’ll give you that, but it’s nothing I expect from some…organization with operations as varied as the Envoy is claiming.”
“Specialized?” Daelia asked. “Maybe they need something that appeals to humans or something.”
“Abiota here do tend to imitate the human form, or at least, forms we’re familiar with,” June said, but she didn’t sound convinced. She looked at Daelia then. “I heard you had a little run-in with one of these yesterday.”
“Heard from who?” Daelia asked.
June just kept looking at her.
“Fine, yes, I did,” she said, and sighed. “I was trying to talk to the guy who does, did, simulation conversions.”
“Why?”
“I think they killed him. I mean, he’s dead, right? And there was a pack of these things at his damn house—”
“No, I mean why were you talking to him?”
Daelia looked down at the kugu. “I didn’t get to talk to him, did I?” June was still looking at her. “What?”
“Daelia, I can’t help you if you aren’t going to be honest with me.”
“I’m not lying, Aunt June.”
“Fine,” June said, and fiddled with the three-dimensional reconstruction. “This is about all I can do without pulling the thing apart.” She looked at Daelia. “You okay with me doing that?”
“Can I help?”
“Sure,” June said, and then snapped her fingers, changing the view on the monitor. “Before I forget, this is what we were able to pull off and reconstruct from the sustainment unit. Wasn’t much, just a couple hundred lines of…something.”
Daelia watched the code strings scroll by. “Was Q-BAL able to make sense of it?”
“Not enough left. The explosion cracked the housing on this, too, I think. Memory got scrambled.”
Daelia squinted at it. It wasn’t so much about the individual letters, she realized, but the way they were arranged. Some kind of pattern in the text. One that looked familiar. “Can I get a printout of this?” she asked.
“Sure. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said, and glanced back at the kugu. “So, take it apart?”
“Take it apart,” June confirmed.
It was a simple, straightforward process. Where Daelia had been expecting something exotic, Aunt June had been right: the assembly was extremely mundane. Screws, plates, actuators. The system ran on a pneumatic assembly, something Daelia had seen in most kugu models she’d dealt with.
