Source code, p.13
Source Code, page 13
The simulated noise overlapped with the actual sounds of the morning. Engines warming up. People talking. Shuttle buses arriving to disgorge their first loads of attendees.
“Zero nine hundred,” Raijinn announced.
And just like that, the airfield fell silent.
All simulated animal noise cut off; all sound other than straight English had just been disabled in the PR overlay.
“Finally,” Raijinn said.
If only it were so easy to get rid of people, Daelia thought glumly.
Approaching the Scrap Yard’s doors now were the reporters. Some local, some more national. Syndicated news streams and smaller industry publications. That was pretty typical. This was one of the few times a year when Frank Tamm poked his head out in public and the press always made the most of it.
Swallowing down the last of her hangover, she cued up her notes in her monocle. Dad always knew the right thing to say to these people, but she’d never been very good with the press.
“Good morning,” she called to the knot of people approaching her now, waving Raijinn away. “Everybody enjoying the lovely Houston weather?”
That got a few chuckles. It was already hot, hot and muggy, and it was only going to get worse throughout the day.
She went around, shook a few hands, didn’t pay much attention to their names or positions or companies. That information was already loaded in the press kit in her monocle; all she had to do was look at one of them, and their metadata would pop up.
When she was done with introductions, she looked around at all of them as a group. “I trust everybody got the show overlay loaded?” she asked. Nods, nods all around. She smiled. “Come on then. Let me show you around.”
So far, she hadn’t pissed anybody off.
Dad would be proud.
Raijinn had helpfully marked out the route she needed to walk in her monocle’s maps program, along with tags for what she was supposed to talk about. Most of it was on subjects she was familiar with, and walking helped. Daelia found her nerves starting to settle.
The route through the increasingly crowded static displays took her by most of the base assets that Bellona Robotics serviced—the public loved seeing the military abiota. She had a little spiel to recite at each one. Daelia hoped she wasn’t too mechanical. They even laughed every now and then.
She answered questions as they walked. There were a few about applied nonlinear mechatronics. The differences between the new MQ-13 and the MQ-9 from a technical perspective. How she liked working for her dad. What kind of ongoing combat operations the 121st was engaged in.
Raijinn interjected on that one.
Do not tell them anything. Do not confirm or deny.
Daelia just managed to keep her answer caged behind her teeth. The reporter smiled at her. Sneaky fucker, she thought.
But after an agonizing twenty minutes, the route finally came to an end.
At Emily’s station.
Emily was one of the most popular attractions. People came every year to see what she’d added to herself and what her virch looked like. Of course, it was a cleaned-up, sanitized version. A happy little treasure cave. Cartoony, even.
Not at all what Daelia could see in the military overlay.
There was the cave the way Emily liked it.
Highly rendered. Very detailed. Photorealistic for the most part, if you discounted the gigantic glowing crystals jammed into the water-smoothed walls. Or the heaped piles of gold coins behind Emily’s form. Or the rotting skeletons in ridiculously ornate armor, slumped up against the cave’s fake walls.
Emily had been parked near the edge of the display zone. Not quite up against the fences, but close. A huge area around her was roped off, decorated with a lively variety of warning signs.
NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY
NO TOUCHING
NO PERSONAL DEVICES WITH PREDICTIVES LOADED
“Anybody have anything?” Daelia asked, tapping the sign.
A murmur went up through the reporters; a few held up cell phones or other devices. Daelia collected them all and passed them off to one of the maintenance troops who was there, standing guard. Only then did she lead them in.
“Emily, if you’re not familiar with her, is the highest-ordered emergent we have got on the base,” she explained. “As you can no doubt tell from her overlay here, she considers herself the queen of this place.”
Considers? Emily said, and stood up, spreading her wings. The cave melted away into billowing clouds and golden light. Even for her, it was melodramatic. Am.
“She’s in a mood this morning, isn’t she?” commented one of the reporters. He was one of the few Daelia knew from experience. He was the writer for Aerospace Monthly and was here every year. “What’s got her worked up, Miss Hall?”
Emily was close to the gates that led back onto the active ramp. But not the closest.
That position was being held by one of the Storm Gryphons. An FQ-47 and its own support crew.
It was standard, as Daelia understood it, for at least one of the Storm Gryphons to spend most of the day in the static display area, answering questions and taking photos with the civilians. Today was no exception: there was a long line already, just to step up and say hello.
The Storm Gryphons were tied into the air show overlay, of course, in brilliant high definition. The PR forms of the aircraft’s abiota had been sculpted by the same people who did the effects for Hollywood. Orpheus Watch and Star Wars and the like.
The PR forms were sleek and slick. Bald eagle heads and front talons. Lean leonid bodies. Huge proud wings. Exquisite detail. The AR illumination team had done a damn good job. The plane here, Tail Number Five, was currently showing off that artistry, posing shamelessly with the excited civilians.
Daelia was unimpressed.
Unlike the abiota here at Ellington, the Storm Gryphons were all predictive. With them, it was possible to enforce some uniformity. But even cloned predictives tended to individualize themselves after a while. And so the basic forms, while still all conforming to the gryphon standard for the team, had a degree of variation in military AR. Five, in its military form, was smaller with a duller palette. Less gold and white, more muted grays and browns.
And it looked agitated.
Five flapped its wings now, cawing at Emily. Daelia didn’t register any words, but Emily clearly took offense to it and spat fire back.
In the AR field, the flame hit some invisible barrier, perfectly aligned with the rope, and curled back in. Like it was solid.
That was all in the military field. Thank god. The reporters didn’t see any of that.
“Emily’s not a huge fan of competition for attention,” Daelia said. It was partially true. See? She’d have to tell Dad. She could be tactful. Sort of.
Except now one of the pilots was walking over. One of the kugus. Shit.
“She’s an impressive machine,” the pilot said, stopping right at the edge of Emily’s rope and giving Daelia a grin. “Especially after yesterday. You have a minute?”
Daelia glared at him and waved to the reporters. “Excuse me,” she said. “Sergeant Gillibrand in there can answer any questions you might have about Emily. Better than me.”
The pilot, at least, waited until they had wandered away before saying anything else.
“You’re Daelia Hall, right?” he asked her.
“Why?” she asked.
The Storm Gryphons pilot shrugged. He was built like a tank and the movement made his gray flight suit pull tight across his shoulders.
“It’s the arm, daughter of Bellona,” the kugu answered instead. Daelia blink-clicked its metadata up on her monocle. ST3, it was labeled.
The pilot gave his companion a look. “You weren’t this blunt before your last reboot.”
“Pardon my lack of diplomacy, but there are few humans with such devices as hers,” the Storm Gryphon replied. “Unusual, a human having a mechanical interface for a limb.”
The pilot tapped his temple. “Then what do you call a NULI?”
“Prudent.”
“It’s always the arm,” Daelia said, and squinted at his name patch. “What can I do for you, umm, Major Takamori?”
“Just sayin’ hi,” he said. “This one’s been screaming at us ever since we showed up. It’s starting to hurt my feelings a little.”
“What do you want me to do? Tell her to shut up?”
“Maybe,” he said with a smile. “If you think she’ll listen to you.”
Three, the one inhabiting the kugu, didn’t have a distinct military AR form. Just the blue outline, to indicate there was something there. The PR form for that, too, was impressive. An anthropomorphic eagle figure that managed to look dangerous and cool, and not like somebody at a furry convention. The lack of detail and Takamori’s comments made Daelia think it hadn’t been active very long.
You give me a go, Emily challenged, a predator’s smile on both of her faces. I take you for good ride, little dweller of bridges.
Takamori laughed. “Well, isn’t she a perceptive one?”
“She’s an animal,” Three said coolly. “Orcinus-class always are. I question the wisdom of allowing them in the service at all.”
“Hey,” Daelia snapped. “She was in the Five Days War. She has more experience than you ever will.”
“Obsolete model then. What good are these ancient aircraft?”
Emily puffed more fire, and again, it was repelled. Come in here, she taunted. I show you obsolete.
“Pathetic.”
“Three,” the major said, in the same tone one would use to scold a dog. And he smiled ruefully at Daelia. “You’ll have to forgive her. She’s just been rebooted recently, and—”
“Maybe you should leave her alone,” Daelia snapped. “Let her develop a persona that isn’t a total asshole.”
He laughed at that.
“You are obsolete,” Three said, the kugu pacing now. “It is not an insult. You still serve a purpose, I imagine, or Air Combat Command would not permit you to continue, but—”
Yes, purpose, purpose. Primary purpose. I serve.
“What, playacting with your little dollhouse cave? Yes, what a tough warrior you are.”
This why you will lose, Emily replied. You think purpose is this place, this time. She reared back for emphasis, spreading her wings, her front claws. This not purpose. This irritation, distraction. You enjoy it? You fail at primary purpose. Primary purpose is killing.
“Our primary purpose is the protection of human life.”
Yes. By other human life taking. Emily’s huge eyes blinked slowly, deliberately. Cannot ponder this, you, I think. Fucking robot.
“Emily!” Daelia snapped, shocked at the slur.
“See?” Three said to the pilot. “Animal. This thing wouldn’t last ten seconds in the air against us.”
Find out, Emily said, and looked at Daelia, excitement emojis filling Daelia’s monocle. You vouch for match to Rover? We go after show. Or during. Give civvies real fight watch.
“Come on, Three,” the major said, laying a hand on the kugu’s arm. “We need to get back up to the cockpits, run that systems check on you again.”
“You would lose,” Three said to Emily.
Emily’s heads dropped low, close. Give excuse me. We find out.
Takamori laughed and held out his hand. It took Daelia a moment to realize he was offering a handshake. “To dogfights that we’ll never have,” he laughed. “Nice to meet you, Daelia Hall.”
“Sure,” she said, and shook back, unsure what else to do.
One of Emily’s heads dropped down by her shoulder as the two of them walked back to their own display area. I eat her.
“Don’t eat her,” Daelia said. “You’d get in so much trouble.”
Emily made a sound that was somewhere between a snort and a growl.
Daelia looked back. The other head was searching. Sniffing through the crowd.
Shit.
“Behave, Emily,” she told the MQ-9, going back over to the knot of reporters.
The head kept searching.
“What is she doing?” one of them asked Daelia, unconsciously moving out of the way as Emily’s head swung between them.
“Emily has a bad habit of, uhh—”
Daelia’s explanation got cut off. Emily let out an ear-rending screech into the PR overlay and then shuffled around, snapping at a civilian. The girl let out a shriek as one of Emily’s snouts shoved its way through her body and into her backpack, disappearing for a moment before pulling back again.
There was something small and squirming in her teeth.
Emily tossed her head back, flipping the little thing up into the air, and snapped it up. Swallowing visibly, the dragon form let out a contented belch and went back to playfully nosing at the civilians still clustered around.
The girl was going through her backpack, trembling a little. She had a full visor on. The experience must have been unsettling.
“Did you have something running on your phone?” Daelia asked, going over.
“Sure, it’s an art-bot, but…”
“I hope you have a system backup,” Daelia said, and looked back at Emily. Smug. Always so smug. “Emily just bricked it.”
“How does that work?” one of the reporters asked, clearly fascinated.
DO NOT SAY SIREN VARIANT, Raijinn ordered.
Dammit. She had been about to say that. It was the answer, after all.
“They can’t really eat each other,” Daelia said instead. “Not the way we would interpret it. A lot of it’s just playacting. For our benefit, maybe. The abiota overlays take into account a lot of animal body language.”
“You said the phone’s bricked. How?” the reporter pressed.
“You know, there are just things we don’t understand about abiota.” Daelia glared at Emily. The dragon form ruffled its head, scales fluffing up like feathers on a cockatoo. “Yeah, I’m talking about you, girl.”
Emil was quite good at this, the targeted wiping of programs or machines she took a disliking to. Nobody knew how she managed it. Dad was fairly certain it was a feature of her Siren pod, but the Domain Array had never approved his request to investigate.
Should read signs, Emily said, grumpy now.
That set off a flurry of questions from the reporters, most of them directed at Emily herself. She answered in her usual clipped, grammatically incorrect manner, taking the pressure off Daelia.
Five minutes later, the team from Gravipause showed up and took the reporters off her hands.
Fucking finally.
“No more bricking,” Daelia warned Emily, before she left.
Get Three back over here. I brick it. Then, no others.
“Don’t take your irritation out on any more poor teenagers, okay?” Daelia ordered. She got no answer; Emily was pouting. She gave the abiota one last pat on her machine body and headed out.
That space rock wasn’t going to examine itself, after all.
The route back to the 121st’s hangar took Daelia right past the massive form of the Eurus.
The Astraeus Aerospace XP-109 Eurus spaceplane took up a vast amount of real estate on the apron. As large as an old-school 797, the Eurus was a wedge-shaped lifter, made to ferry the small trans-atmospheric Apeliotes passenger craft into the stratosphere, where it could fire up its SCRAMJETs and make orbit.
Tamm had eight in his fleet, three of which flew out of Ellington, the other five out of international spaceports. Yokohama. Madrid. Harare.
As far as Daelia was aware, the Eurus spaceplanes hadn’t yet exhibited any emergence. The fleet, this one included, were all predictives. And much like the Storm Gryphons, these all had the same basic graphic presentation in AR.
That pterosaur form.
There was some kind of symbolism with these things. That was what Dad said; he and Tamm had known each other pretty well, once upon a time. Tamm had named the individual planes after various individual species, so they were all a little different.
This one, the one on display this weekend, was named Queltzcoatlus. Some dinosaur name, which itself was some reference to an Aztec god. Not really Daelia’s thing.
Tamm loved that crap, though.
Daelia flipped between the show overlay and the airfield’s as she passed the Eurus. The show overlay showed the pterosaur in what she assumed to be exaggerated scale. That comically oversized head was nuzzling mischievously through the crowd at the edge of its roped-off projection area. It was a riot of color, like a parrot gone insane. That too probably wasn’t the way the original animal had looked.
At least, that was the way it looked in the PR field.
But cutting back over to the native airfield overlay…
The pterosaur projection was crouched on top of the plane’s flattened fuselage, beak dipping down into the crowd, snapping at people waiting on the steps to enter. Its weird little wing claws swiped around. It threw its head back and screamed.
Nobody seemed to pay it any heed, though.
The crowd around the base of the plane was huge. Milling about or waiting in line to go up and see the crew cabin.
Serket was here, speaking to a group in the crowd. But she looked up at just the right time.
Made eye contact with Daelia.
The projected face smiled at her with those perfect, vintage-red lips.
And an invitation popped up in Daelia’s monocle.
Mister Tamm would love to see you for a drink. Talk about your research.
Not a chance of that happening.
Daelia was afraid of what she might say to the man.
She blinked the message shut and walked on.
16
Rover was not having a good day.
Air show weekends were always stressful.
It was worse this year, now that he was in charge.
Sure, most of his troops had had fun yesterday. That was worth something.
Air Show Friday was always a great time to kick back, relax, take it easy for an afternoon. Enjoy all that shit a guy was supposed to have in the military. Family and camaraderie and all that. It seemed a bit more necessary this year, considering how many people they’d lost in Tokyo, with the attack on the annual RPA warfighters’ conference. The Group was still pulling itself back together. Hell, the entire community was still pulling itself back together; every RPA unit in the DOD has lost at least a few of its people to that bombing. Ellington had lost more than most.
