Virch code, p.15
Virch Code, page 15
Instead, he found himself looking up the back tailgate of a very familiar modified Hilux at a very familiar figure.
Lee.
His old friend’s back was to him, the man working on something in a metal crate strapped down to the bed.
Automatically, the man’s heart rate popped up in a corner of his vision. Elevated from what it normally was, the screen suggested. Rover realized his NULI was automatically scanning him. Stupid presets.
For abiota, their metadata was omnipresent, as unique and identifiable as a fingerprint. For humans, it was becoming more common to broadcast one’s digital IDs to be picked up in the AR.
Lee was not one of those humans—in fact, he’d been downright paranoid over his digital footprint ever since Bellona had left. So the NULI had switched instead to matching up known physical parameters. Biometric data it had been passively collecting on him. Apparently.
Lee would murder him if he realized Rover was looking at that.
But it was informative today. Despite the fact that Lee was wearing a rather heavy-looking jacket, his biometric data suggested he had lost weight. A lot of weight. And looking a little closer, Lee’s face was gaunt, the fat stripped out.
“You look like shit,” Rover said. “Where were you?”
“Daelia’s missing,” he said.
What? “Missing?” Rover demanded.
“Yeah, missing.” Lee sat back, crossing his legs. “Good to hear your voice, Ty.”
“What’s going on?” Rover demanded. He looked at Argo. “What are you doing in the middle of this?”
“I don’t think we should talk about that just yet, sir.”
“I can make it an order.”
“I still don’t think we should talk about it.”
“You don’t think you need to take an order?” Rover snapped, patience frayed thin already from a day of dealing with both the Army and the damn city officials. “You are pushing for some non-judicial punishment now, Captain. You want paperwork?”
“You do what you what you have to do, sir.”
“Well, that’s a little dramatic, isn’t it?”
“Rover, wait for the virch bottle to boot up,” Lee said.
“Virch?” Rover asked, feeling incredibly off-balance. He didn’t like it. “Whose virch?”
“Emily’s,” Lee said, and hit a button before the argument could pick up any more momentum.
Rover had been in Emily’s virch plenty of times, and generally knew what to expect. Nothing looked out of place today. Windswept hilltops overlooking green rocky land, mountain ledges, a view of the sea. A little grainy, a little washed out. Barely in focus. That was the price of linking in over RF, instead of via hardline. But it was serviceable enough for—
“Hey, Lee,” Rover heard a familiar voice say, “looks like we’re holding strong with the signal now, and…”
In the virch, Rover turned to the owner of that voice. “Technical Sergeant Ivan Garcia. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Umm, helping?” he said.
Rover resisted the urge to close his eyes and take a moment, feeling his temper flare a little now. It would initiate a log-out. “Somebody start talking,” he growled. “What the fuck is going on?”
And talk they did.
Stepping into the virch with the NULI was a disorienting experience, one Rover wondered if he’d ever get used to. Having a long-form conversation there, on the other hand, made it settle somehow. Lulled him into forgetting that these places weren’t real.
It was a little creepy, how good the verisimilitude could be.
The truly disconcerting thing today, however, was another abiota they had with them, a thing of smoke and fangs and rain who’d referred to herself as Chalk.
The name was vaguely familiar to Rover, and she did give him that sort of bemused deference that most military abiota tended to develop toward officers. He made a mental note to look her name up later.
But as bad as this particular virtual environment was, the story…
The story was almost unbelievable. Had it not come from Lee and Emily, Rover would have dismissed it all as bullshit.
They’d finished almost a minute ago. Nobody had spoken since, the sound of the wind on the rocky slopes the only sound.
“I take it back about the paperwork, Argo,” Rover finally said, pulling his tortured thoughts together. “I think we’re looking at judicial proceedings at this point.”
Emily hissed, heads drawing back and claws digging into the earth. Lee looked away. Even Garcia had the good grace to look shocked.
Argo just shrugged.
Because of the way the NULI implants interacted with the optical processing center of the brain, Rover could still see his newest pilot in perfect detail. He could see his expression—blank. His body language—closed. He had gotten banged up, shot, in the fight the night before, and that was on top of the injuries he’d come back with from orbit.
Rover remembered laughing about that with his wife, glad that Daelia might have finally found a guy who made her happy.
Didn’t seem so funny now.
“Did you hear me?” Rover said, irritated by the lack of reaction. Irritated by all of it. “Why in the fuck was your first stop, and I mean, your very first fucking stop, not my office when you got back from orbit?”
“I did come by, if you remember.”
“You spent almost two hours in the Sinkhole that morning with Cactus!” Rover snapped. “Not a word of this, to any of us!”
“What the hell was I supposed to say, sir? Who could I trust with this? Fucking Serket herself tried to kill me last night. Who knows where this thing connects or how high it goes?”
It was a fair point. But being a commander wasn’t always about being fair. “Did she try to kill you in between getting back from orbit and fucking lying to your commander?”
Argo sighed and sat down on a chunk of rock. “You hate Cactus, and Sausage…Sausage doesn’t belong in his position. Everyone knows it. Would you really want me talking to them before you?”
“You should have told me.”
Argo didn’t say anything.
“Forget the NJP shit. I am going to recommend a court-martial when—”
“Fine,” Argo said. “Just help us get Daelia back first.”
“Do you have any idea where she is?”
“Austin,” Emily said.
Austin. Shit. “What do you want me to do here?” he demanded of nobody in particular. “Authorize Emily to fly a cap over the city to help you locate her?”
Emily puffed smoke out of her nostrils. Rover realized he could smell it, sulfur and fire. Freaky. “Yes,” she rumbled.
“No. No. Absolutely not. After last night? No. You need to stay here, fly your pattern, and do your job for the state.”
“Daelia in trouble.”
“You are in trouble,” he said, leveling a hand at her. “And I don’t want to get you in more trouble.”
Emily bared both sets of teeth. “What, you no want court-martial me?”
“You wanna find out, keep talking,” he snapped, and looked at Lee. “And you. You leave for three weeks in the middle of some crazy shit, and this is what you ask when you show back up?”
Lee shrugged. “Emily asked.”
Rover ignored the very obvious bait. “Where the hell have you been, Lee?”
“I’d like the answer to that too,” Argo muttered.
“Detained,” Lee said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “We’re talking now, aren’t we?”
Rover took a deep breath, half expecting to feel that cold, thin air he remembered from weekend hikes in the Colorado Rockies, back when he was a cadet. But they weren’t really on a mountain. They were sitting in Dingo’s cab, having an unpleasant conversation in Emily’s virch.
He never would have gotten one of these damn NULIs if he hadn’t gotten the squadron commander’s job.
A job that should never have been his in the first place.
But he owned it now, just like he owned this mess, and he looked up into the false sky, an impossible sapphire blue. “So Unity is fake? All a con?”
Lee nodded. “Yeah.”
“Then we’ve got big-ass problems. Bigger than Daelia missing.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lee said. “I just got a message from the Array. Says Daelia’s following some kind of lead on Unity. Headed to a place called Aaru.”
Aaru. Wait. Aaru? Rover knew that name. “You mean that biomedical initiative you and the Millers and Tamm were working on? I thought you pulled your money out. Dissuaded your investors.”
“I thought I had too.”
“The Millers?” Argo asked.
“June and August,” Emily supplied.
In the virch, the look Argo gave Lee was almost comically furious. The TGLP exaggerating his facial expression, no doubt. “June knows about this?”
“What’s really shocking is that you know about June,” Rover said. That part of the story was almost more than he could believe. June. June Miller. Lee was still in contact with her? She had let herself get caught up in this shit? Maybe it was over Daelia. After all, June was Daelia’s—
“This is really not the time to talk about this,” Lee muttered, and then, louder, asked, “Are we getting Emily or what?”
Rover considered it for a moment but shook his head. “I can’t, I can’t give you Emily.” The abiota bristled. “No, girl. You were requested by name, by City Hall, from the Texas Military Department. I have to keep you here.”
“Ty…” Lee began.
“2Shy hasn’t had a personal flight in a long time, especially considering she’s been deployed. She’s overdue for it by at least fourteen months. If she wants to go out, not even the FAA’s ground hold can prevent her from doing that.”
“Suspicious this.”
Rover started; it was Chalk. He’d almost forgotten the other abiota was there, her voice like wind through broken glass.
“Maybe,” he said, regaining himself. “But everyone’s got bigger things to worry about. And 2Shy has a reputation for being a little weird.”
“How long?” Lee asked.
“To get her on station over Central Austin? Maybe two hours, hopefully less. I’ll need to make a few phone calls.”
“Good,” Emily said, flapping her wings hard. “I need go. Too close to flight deck. Too hard maintain this place.”
“Roger that,” Lee said, and disconnected the virch.
Gone were the mountains and the slope and the sea.
Back was the interior of the truck’s cab. The worn seats. The battered dashboard. The faint smell of old foam and gasoline.
Disconnecting from the virch was disconcerting.
Shaking it off, Rover leaned forward. “If you’re going to Austin, you better leave. Once that march starts, I’m not sure even that police tag on your metadata’s going to get you out of here.”
Lee turned around in the driver’s seat, pulling his VR helmet off. “We’ll get caught up later, Ty.”
“We better,” Rover said. “What do you think the Aaru thing is about?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “But between that and some of the shit we’ve seen, I’d suggest keeping a silencer on your NULI unless you absolutely need to use it.”
Rover drummed his fingers against the truck door. Motherfucker. What an unpleasant thought that was. “Lee, I might need a favor in return.”
“What’s that?”
“You see we’ve got Idisi here, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And they’re run by a predictive.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Before she takes off, I think Emily might need to pick herself up something from your storage room.”
Lee stared at him. “Ty, anyone finds out about that and your career is over.”
Rover shrugged. “Do you trust First MAB?”
“Not in the slightest,” Lee agreed.
“Then let’s let Emily have a little fun, why don’t we?”
Rover mulled it over on his way out of the parking garage.
NULIs. People being controlled, puppeted like kugus. Unity behind it.
So what was behind Unity?
He thought about his own words, his threat to Argo.
It was mostly bullshit. If anybody was going to get court-martialed for anything, it would be him. Rover. For not picking up a phone, right the hell now, and reporting this immediately.
But Argo was right: there was no way of knowing who was in on this, who was involved, or who would be a big blabbermouth and give the whole game away.
No, Rover decided. No, he’d keep his own counsel on this for the moment. He’d get 2Shy in the air, get her collecting imagery, see what they were up against here.
He blinked up his phone app and dialed a very familiar number. Waited for the man on the other end to answer.
“Marathon, hate to do this to you on a Sunday, but I need you in at the unit,” he said. “I need you to take 2Shy out to stretch her wings.”
“You let me handle the details. I need you in. Now.”
22
Despite all reassurances to the contrary, Sean didn’t trust anything the Austin Mediation Office was telling him.
“So why haven’t you found this girl yet?” he asked, cutting off yet another long, babbling statement from the surveillance team.
If he’d been in a standard police precinct, that was likely when the people he was talking to would have exchanged glances, trying to communicate, coordinate, before answering him. Here, the three humans on the team were all reclining in their virch pods and the two abiota were server-based. All very out of view.
But from the length of time it took them to answer him, Sean was pretty sure the Mediator Deployment Team was still trying to coordinate a response he’d accept.
The foundational concept of the Austin Mediation Office was similar to the community moderation team that could be found at every other booville, past and present, anywhere else in the world. They were responsible for ensuring community rules were followed and that the vision of a harmonious, mutually beneficial social order was achieved.
Sean could remember the arguments. It had been a topic of debate within the circles Serket and Tamm traveled in ever since he’d come on with the company, five years back. At first, fresh out of the Marine Corps and two tours over in the Bathtub, Sean had thought the entire thing insane. No cops? No judicial system? How could a city run like that?
But for the most part, it worked.
For the most part.
Except when you were asking for assistance catching a fugitive, it seemed.
“You must understand,” their kugu said, “she has found some way of evading our surveillance network.”
“How is that possible?” Boyd asked, arms crossed. On edge. He’d been on edge for hours now.
“You did not see her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Galatea told them,” Sean said with a sigh, diffusing the accusation in Boyd’s words. “Galatea is frustrated.”
“We understand,” the kugu said. “We are doing everything we can.”
“Clearly it’s not enough,” Sean said. “I want access.”
“We have already told you, for legal purposes, we cannot grant this.”
Sean felt a stab of rage at the back of his mind, wincing at the force of it. It slammed through his skull, red-hot, furious.
The whisper was fainter. Which was strange. After granting her permission to contact him directly, he had expected her voice to grow louder. Instead, the opposite had happened. He could barely hear her now, and yet somehow, he still knew what she was trying to tell him.
He could feel her now.
At least it was a more efficient means of communication. He didn’t have to ask what she wanted. He already knew.
“You will,” he said. “You are directed to. It’s what she wants.”
“We cannot.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” he said, reaching for the right words and somehow finding them, “so let me say it again. This is crime, real crime, offenses past, current, and projected. The monitoring network here can’t anticipate and catch these? Something is wrong.”
There was no petty crime in Austin, no theft or property damage. It was impossible for a resident to commit such a crime. There was no ownership of anything; everything came from Omphalos, everything was owned by Omphalos, and thus, all injury was suffered by Omphalos, not the individual resident. As long as you were a resident, you could have anything you needed, but with very few exceptions, nothing belonged to you.
Of course, such things were still social problems. People had hang-ups about the things that were leased to them. People objected to losing a favorite desk at work or having an item in their home taken and used by another. But Omphalos itself could request materiel back at any time, issue it out to somebody else, or reassign maintenance to another. It happened all the time.
In the case that somebody did not understand another’s needs, or objected to the reassignment of an item, a moderator would be dispatched, and the affected parties would talk it through. Such conversations would go on as long as they needed to until everyone was satisfied.
But in general, a shared sense of purpose amongst booville residents did a lot for the general peace. The lengthy and very selective application process tended to weed out potential troublemakers too. And beyond that? The threat of expulsion was enough to keep most people from straying too far out of line. Anybody deemed an exceptional risk to community harmony, somebody who could not respect their fellow residents, could always be escorted out.
For everything else—serious crime, violent crime, crimes against the community committed by those outside of it—there were the abiota. The monitoring network that Omphalos had designed for Austin was second to none. It irritated Sean to no end that they wouldn’t grant him access now.
There was no way it wasn’t working.
