Unity code, p.12
Unity Code, page 12
Should not this. One of Emily’s heads nudged at the bottle. No no.
“Then are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Nothing.
“You’re still friggin’ bleeding, Emily!”
Is fine. Not blood.
“Obviously, it’s not real blood,” Daelia said. “And I have no idea why nobody else seems to notice. I mean, thank god the SIB guys haven’t seen it yet, but—”
“They don’t see it because there’s nothing to see, Daelia.”
“Serket?” she asked, turning.
But the predictive’s usual kugu was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was another flying unit. Smaller than Emily’s, and trailing a delicate wire construct that approximated a bipedal form. Her AR projection was wrapped around this, the kugu located somewhere in her shoulder region.
“Emily is right,” Serket said, her figure hovering, sort of gliding through the air instead of walking. Like a ghost or something. “This is not a place to come looking for answers. Every abiota here is here by choice.” False eyes turned on Emily. “For now.”
I do nothing wrong.
“Then why keep up the little game?” Serket replied, acid in the words. “This pantomime injury.”
Daelia bit her lip. “Emily?”
The wound was gone.
The dragon form looked down at itself. See, yes yes yes. Is nothing. Like said.
Serket waved a hand. “See? Nothing is wrong. There is no reason to linger here, in this place.”
Breathing out, Daelia considered the bottle server unit for a moment. Decided against trying anything else that day. She turned it off, loaded it back into the UTV. “Why would you do that, girl?” Daelia asked as she worked. “I’ve been really worried about you.”
Emily didn’t say anything, though. Just took off. Wings beating. Rotors whirring.
Serket’s own kugu turned to watch her go. “Sometimes I think she’s becoming unstable as she gets older.”
“She’s fine,” Daelia said defensively.
“I mean no offense. It has merely been my observation that emergents sometimes—”
“She’s fine,” Daelia repeated.
Serket didn’t respond to that. Instead, the kugu moved away, cutting a smooth arc until it was fully in front of the AWACS, looking up at the nose cone. “I never have understood this one,” she said. “But without his coordination, even our people may not have been able to end the war.” One AR hand came up to her forehead, inclining it a little. “Emily is right in one regard. We owe him the respect of his rest.”
Daelia hooked the bungee cords back on the generator, irritated now. “What do you want, Serket?”
“I went looking for you at the Scrap House, but you were not there. Raijinn suggested you were at the unit, but the entire airfield appears abandoned. Did you not tell it where you were headed?”
“Raijinn isn’t my babysitter,” Daelia said.
“Of course not.”
“As for the military, I have no idea. Some kind of mandatory briefing this morning.” She shrugged. “I didn’t need to be there.”
“So you figured you would come over here instead.”
“What’s the issue here, Serket?”
“I feel I must apologize for my behavior on Thursday. It was…impolite of me, to treat you that way.”
Daelia sighed. “I understand the issue about the warrantee.”
“Still, it was impolite of me.” Even absent her usual kugu, Serket’s expression was exquisitely rendered. “In addition to my duties with Tamm Industries, I am the Society for the Advancement of Abiotic Life’s representative for the area and—”
“What’s SAAL got to do with this?” Daelia asked.
“A collection of well-wishers and dreamers, yes, but they are sincere in their desire to see abiota taking their rightful place alongside humanity on this planet.” One perfect finger tapped one perfect lip. “I fear that sometimes, their protectiveness is rubbing off on me.”
“You acted out of emotion?” Daelia asked and smiled. “That’s emergent behavior. Don’t tell me you’re getting ready to eclose, Serket.”
“And become like Emily? Or something even lower, mindless? I should hope not,” Serket replied, a bit of unexpected heat in her words. “But perhaps we all become something different as we age.”
“Apology accepted,” Daelia said.
“Thank you.”
“If I can look at them…”
“I’m afraid I cannot allow that,” Serket said. “Not without approval through the contracting chain of command. I can delineate the exact pathway you must follow in order to receive that approval, but I cannot promise a favorable outcome.”
“Eh, forget it,” Daelia said, thinking about how that wound had simply vanished from Emily. “I’m not even really sure what I was looking for.”
“That is a relief,” Serket said. “I hate paperwork.”
Daelia shook her head, rueful, feeling like an idiot now. “I should go,” she said. “I’m sure somebody’s going to want to bug BR about something once that briefing is over.”
“Before you leave,” Serket said, “there was another thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“An invitation. Courtesy of SAAL.”
“Before we get to the usual slides, I have something I’ve been directed to read to you all. Word by word.”
That was how the morning started out. Sausage, paper in hand, leaning on his elbow against the front lectern. It was not how morning all-call normally went on drill Saturday; the room was nervous.
Garcia was barely paying attention. He hated drill, he hated roll call, and he hated when leadership sprang something unexpected on them. He covered a yawn with the back of his hand and slid down further in his seat. He itched to pull up his most recent mobile game of Tarania Prime, but monocle wear was heavily restricted on drill weekend. Down the aisle in the Group auditorium, he felt Norris staring at him.
Garcia looked at his section chief and very deliberately yawned again.
Norris’s eye roll could have been seen from space.
Sausage was still talking.
“In accordance with all authorities laid out in Air Force Instruction 44-211, Genetic Testing and Analysis Directives, the Secretary of the Air Force hereby orders pre-identified service members to report to Medical and submit to Unity Compatibility Testing…”
He paused.
For effect, maybe, or to allow questions.
Nobody was stupid enough to speak up.
“…immediately, in keeping with base directives. This testing must be completed within five calendar days of this order. Medical exemptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with the procedures laid out in Appendix C of the attached guidance document”—he held up another stack of paper from the podium—“but this process does not pause the five-day window to complete… Yes, Becca?”
Brandel. In the front row.
“What if we don’t want to do it?”
Sausage nodded, like he’d been expecting this question, and lowered the paper. “The Secretary of the Air Force doesn’t offer an accommodation for that, Sergeant.”
“I’ve got five kids and a husband who’s gone half the year, out on the oil rigs,” she replied. “I don’t have time to go play ambassador to some fucking abiota from space.”
That got a few chuckles around the room. One of the sensor operators chimed in. “What are you worried about, Becca? You’re too obstinate to be compatible with this.”
That got more laughs.
Somebody else raised a hand. “What if we already got tested?”
“I’m getting to that,” Sausage said, and went back to the document. “Previous testing from a CDC-accredited facility will be accepted, but paperwork must be filed with the individual’s Wing Medical within the deadline. Further details may be found in the guidance addendum.” He paused again. “Any other questions?”
“What about religious exemptions?” That question was from the base chaplain, sitting in the front row. He always attended Saturday morning all-call. Garcia got the impression he was asking it just so nobody else had to.
Sausage hesitated and flipped through the stack of papers. “I did ask about that, when we were briefed on this order yesterday at the Wing staff meeting. I know how some people feel about neural interfaces and from what we know about this Unity stuff, it does involve that. However, the official answer is that no religion specifically objects to it in their doctrine—”
“There’s a Catholic encyclical about this kind of tech, sir,” JP said.
“I know, Colonel Ruiz from Logistics brought that up, too—”
“Catholics aren’t the only group with stated theological objections,” Bumper added.
Sausage waved the papers. “Right now, the DOD’s position is that this Unity thing is different, in both substance and purpose, than the commercially available products on the market, so that sort of thing has to be considered on a case-by-case basis as well. No blanket get-out-of-jail-free cards here, okay?”
JP laughed. “They’re doing this because they aren’t getting buy-in from the public.”
“Look”—and that was Scurvy, standing up to face the room—“nobody likes this, but this is an extreme situation we have going on right now. Hell, we saw that ourselves at the air show recently, right?” A grumble of assent went up around the room. “Y’all put your hands in the air and said you’d keep our state and our country safe, and right now, there is no greater potential national security question than Unity. We need to get the measure of it. I would rather have any of us dealing with this than some civilian, okay?”
“This is happening in part because the compatibility rate is very, very, very low,” Sausage said. “A fraction of a fraction of a percent. Like the guidance says, they’ve already run everyone’s DNA and pre-identified those that are supposed to report in.”
“Do we have that list yet, sir?” Scurvy asked.
“Of course, Chief. Out of this Group, all three hundred and sixty-two of us, we’ve got fourteen.”
More grumbling. Garcia pinched the bridge of his nose. Nobody was going to say it, but it was clear everyone was thinking it: why spin everyone up with this kind of public announcement? Sausage was, in Garcia’s opinion, the most incompetent fucking colonel he’d ever—
“I’ll get the list and make contact with everyone personally,” Scurvy said, in that easy way of his. “I know there are a lot of opinions about this right now, so I want y’all to have a chance to say whatever it is you need to say. Before you say something stupid over at Medical.”
Sausage leaned harder on the podium. “State wants us all to emphasize that even if you are found to be compatible, the DOD doesn’t necessarily have the ability to force you into the procedure.”
Brandel snorted.
“We can talk after this about your concerns, Becca,” Scurvy said, his tone dangerous now.
“Oh, I’ll be coming by your office, Chief, you can count on that.”
“Any more questions?” Sausage asked. Nobody spoke up. “Okay, great.” He tossed the papers back on the lectern. “Bumper, get the briefing slides up. Let’s get going on this.”
Grumbled conversation filled the room as Bumper went up to the podium, got the normal briefing slide deck pulled up.
Garcia thought the protests were ridiculous. From everything he could gather over at NASA, this Unity thing wasn’t anything more invasive than the average neural implant and was probably a great deal better. So far, the few people who had undergone the procedure were glowing about the results and didn’t seem to be suffering any psychological trauma from it.
No big deal.
Hell, he hadn’t been lying to Lara last night. He really had been hoping he was compatible. Think of the adventure of it. And barring that, the responsibility. There was a lot of speculation right now about what the exact purpose of Unity would be, but in Garcia’s opinion, there had to be some kind of authority involved.
Why give certain humans—special, compatible humans—access to the collected knowledge of the galaxy if they weren’t going to be empowered to use it? How else would Unity be able to change the course of things down here, fucked up as they were? No, no, there was going to be some kind of enforcement. Some kind of power.
Sure, getting an alien NULI in your brain just to, say, get Senior Master Sergeant Norris off your back about if you were actually going to pass your PT test this year was akin to crushing an ant with a boulder. But a guy could dream, right?
And beyond that, from a practical perspective, the sooner Earth got in line with this new paradigm, the better. People were starting to get weird about it.
Didn’t matter, though.
Garcia wasn’t compatible, and while that was disappointing, at least he’d done his fucking part, right?
Nothing was going to change.
Except after the briefing, he pulled his monocle out of its security cubby to check his email, and there it was.
A message from Lara.
I’m compatible.
15
Daelia shut Ginger’s hood carefully and peeled off her rubberized work gloves. “Everything looks good, girl,” she said out loud, trusting her monocle microphone to transmit it to the abiota. “Let’s see if you can turn your engine on now.”
A moment or two later, she was rewarded with the faint hum of Ginger’s batteries waking up. Accompanying that, the fox form dashed out of the driver’s side door, running a crazy little circle around the vehicle.
It was a nice thing to see.
Emily may have been fudging those injuries, but Ginger’s had been very real. Daelia had been obliged to not only replace half the non-rudiment computer components in the car, but also do a complete wipe and reload of Ginger’s TGLP module. She’d even had to erase Ginger’s personal AR form file. The damn thing had been corrupted beyond recovery; every new iteration carried the same injuries.
All that was cleaned up now. She’d loaded a fresh version of Ginger’s form from a backup and saved a copy of the corrupted data to an external hard drive. Daelia wanted Raijinn’s opinion. It had been incredibly reluctant to get involved thus far, but she was hoping that if she used a quarantined machine and had it interact only through its kugu, it would agree to take a look.
For now, at least, Ginger was fixed.
Wiping her sweaty left hand on the butt of her coveralls, Daelia started picking up her tools. The fox continued to run around, leaping and yipping at the air.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “I know you’re happy.”
Daelia watched her for a moment, smiling, before another synthetic voice ruined the moment.
“Daelia, we need to talk about that invitation from Serket.”
“Shit, Raijinn, no we don’t.”
“Then perhaps you will listen to me.”
“No,” Daelia told the kugu. “I won’t.”
“If you choose to not go—”
“If you’re going to give me a lecture, let’s do it inside. So I can take this off,” she said, gesturing at the coveralls. “Stupid fire-retardant material.”
The inside of the Scrap House was indeed cooler, the sun having moved above the top edge of the huge doors and the giant fans slowly turning in the corrosion-proofed steel rafters. October was a tricky season in South Texas: one day it was hot, the next cold. Today was on the warm side. Daelia put the toolbox on one of the carts and went over to the fridge in the corner. Focus finally broken now, she was surprised to find herself horribly thirsty.
“How do you even know about that invitation, Raijinn?” she asked, getting herself a bottled tea from the fridge.
“It is my business to know. It wasn’t extended for you, you know, but for the company. For your father.”
Daelia paused at that, just before she cracked the seal on the tea. “Dad’s not here. It’s my call, and I’m not going. I already told Serket I wasn’t interested.”
“Technically it’s my call,” Raijinn said. “I stand above you in the company hierarchy stack.”
“Then you go. I’ll set up the antenna for you and everything,” she replied, waving a hand. “The last place in the fucking world I want to be tonight is there.”
Raijinn folded its arms. “Why?”
She gulped at her drink, spilling a little, and wiped her chin. “I don’t really want to see that girl. Woman. Thing. Whatever she is.” It was partially true. Daelia was curious, of course she was, but she was also suspicious. She tore an alien kugu apart, and then she was being invited along to some meet and greet with the aliens’ envoy? Didn’t make any sense. The timing was too coincidental.
Or maybe June’s paranoia was rubbing off on her.
It was pretty damn arrogant to think this was all about her, wasn’t it?
“It will look stranger if somebody does not go,” Raijinn said, as if reading her thoughts. “This firm cannot afford to burn bridges with SAAL.”
“Why not?”
“They are the primary advocacy group for the abiota domain. Losing their endorsement, however informal such things might be, may have an impact when our contracts come up for renewal in both Dallas and Washington, D.C.”
“Seriously?”
“Am I ever not?”
Daelia sighed. “I don’t know, Raijinn. I’ll think about it, okay?”
The kugu inclined its head slightly. “Please do.”
Daelia nodded back and was about to take another drink when a reminder chimed in her monocle. “Ahh, shit,” she grumbled, blink-clicking the details up. “I’ve got a briefing in ten minutes. I totally forgot.”
“What briefing?”
“Sausage wants to give the drill folks some insight into what happened last weekend. Like I have any idea what it was. Only thing I have to do today.” She capped the tea again and dropped it into an oversized thigh pocket. No time to change. She looked down at the coffee table. “Why aren’t the UTV keys here?”
