Unity code, p.16
Unity Code, page 16
Instead, he ducked back inside the visitors’ center, where the central atrium was hosting a huge exhibit on asteroid mining.
In honor of the Aethera mission’s tenth anniversary and its promise of limitless, pollution-free mineral extraction.
Driven, in large part, by the Domain Array. By groups like SAAL. Abiota may not eat or sleep or shit like biotic life did, but they still had a need for resources. Electricity. Copper for machine body wiring. Cobalt for batteries. All sorts of things.
Argo wandered around the edge, feeling a little out of place as a single guy, here by himself in the sea of families.
Where the hell was his little brother?
But there were no answers to be had here, and the place was uncomfortably crowded. So Argo headed back out to the parking lot, through the throngs of excited kids and visiting grandparents.
Tried not to think about it on his way back to Ellington.
Why you here?
“I told you, Emily. I’m not leaving you alone right now.”
Here or not, nothing change.
“I don’t care if it changes the situation or not. I’m here, and you’re just going to have to put up with it.”
Emily made a little harummp sound, a deep bass rumble accompanied by a small spit of fire, but didn’t protest any further. She rolled one wing, then the other, against her scaled back, then settled back into her nest. It was a low spot in the aerie-cave, a little hollow filled with black volcanic sand that never seemed to cool down.
Lara really had done a great job on Emily’s private virch, Daelia thought to herself, and pulled up another command-line screen, continuing an idle search through the TGLP. Looking for some sign of Emily’s previous injuries. It was something for her mind to chew on.
Emily was absolutely right. There was no reason for Daelia to be here. Drill had ended that afternoon the same way drill always ended: with a whimper. Some units on base had formation at the end of the afternoon on Sunday, ceremonies to mark the end of things that everyone was expected to be present at.
Not the Ops Group.
Here, people began drifting out after lunch, sometimes right after lunch. A few of the Guardsmen lived out of town, as far as Louisiana. Long drive after a full weekend of work. And most of the full-timers, who had to report in at 0630 the next morning, usually found excuses to leave early, too.
By 1400, the unit was always a ghost town.
Bellona Robotics had it stipulated in their contract to provide support for the entire drill period, though, which meant that Daelia had spent the weekend on call, stuck at the base. Not like she was going anywhere anyway.
She didn’t want to mess with the bitzers. Raijinn was busy.
So she’d loaded the virch bottle into the UTV and come up here instead. Fired up the virch and stepped in.
Storm Gryphons, Emily said.
“Yeah, I know. They’re getting the whole support package packed up.” That team had been busy all day, and if Daelia had cared to, she could have turned off the virch to watch them work. She didn’t, though. She was still bitter about the whole thing. The whole damn thing.
No, not it.
“Hmm?”
Resets. And Emily smiled a little, feral and pleased.
“They’re all being reset? Really?”
Yes yes, Emily said. In AR, they scream. You want listen?
“No, that’s okay,” Daelia said. She felt suddenly bad for being mad at the remaining three planes. Predictive abiota didn’t exactly evolve, but they did change and grow somewhat over the course of their operational lives. Pruning them back curtailed that growth but didn’t harm the source code.
At least, that was the theory.
The inviolability of source code was one of the reasons why the military embraced abiota to the degree that it did. They couldn’t be hacked. Without that, coming up with some kind of universal intrusion-and-control program was impossible. But something had seized control of those FQ-47s, and if it wasn’t aliens…
Well, what the hell else could it be? What would it be?
Something.
It had to be something.
Emily wasn’t wrong. There was no need to be here. Her presence didn’t bring the abiota any comfort, nor did it change anything. While TGLP allowed them to imitate animal or human behavior, they rarely demonstrated the same animal or human need for companionship.
Daelia wasn’t okay with it, though.
Emily should have been ebullient. The Storm Gryphons were vanquished. More importantly, they were leaving soon. First thing in the morning. But instead, she was subdued, tired.
Hurting, Daelia thought.
So here she was.
Looking for that blood again.
Little knight comes, Emily told her.
“What do you mean?”
“Uhh, Daelia?” She heard the voice on the very edge of her hearing. “Daelia, can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you, Argo,” she called back. “What’s up?”
“What’s the password to join?”
Daelia looked over at Emily, who impassively puffed a smoke ring out through her right nostrils, then sent another from the left chasing through it. “Hardline connection only,” she said. “There should be some extra connectors in the UTV.”
A few moments more, and then Argo shimmered into view.
Looking at other people was always interesting, inside a virch. Sometimes you saw them in their VR gear, full visor and panoply if they had those on, too. Sometimes, their faces would be projected back onto their digital image—eye movements were captured, after all, as part of the TGLP translation process.
Emily’s virch had a heavy level of filtering, however, and people took on an illustrated appearance. It took some of the creepiness away. Right now, Argo looked like some hero out of some futuristic dragon-rider movie in the projected flight leathers and connection circuitry outlined on them. Daelia wondered how she looked to him. She’d never asked anybody what Emily’s projection did to her.
“You ever go home?” she asked him.
“Do you?”
“I’m staying at the Scrap House,” she told him, unsure of what was going on now.
“Huh,” he said, and came around. “What’re you looking at?”
With nobody else in the virch, Daelia hadn’t bothered setting her screens to private. Damn. Still, this was about as private as things got, and he’d been cool about stuff so far, so… “This is one of Emily’s TGLP layers. I’m looking at her form specifically.”
“What are you looking for?”
“She was projecting injuries earlier in the week. Never seen her do that before. I was trying to see if I could find the problem. Emily’s behavior is still weird.”
Fine, Emily huffed. As Serket say.
“Huh,” Argo said, and then brandished what looked to be a crystal. “I’ve got something. Gift from the Storm Gryphons. Troll said they found something.”
Dragon. Troll. Gryphons. It was like a game of D&D around here. Made Daelia tired.
Look.
“Emily, we’ve got no idea what’s on this thing, and—”
LOOK.
The words were delivered with such force that the aerie wall shook.
“Okay,” Daelia said. “Let’s look.
It took her a few minutes to get the data loaded; it was a system scan from Storm Gryphon Three, an automatic snapshot taken by the cockpit’s back-end equipment ten minutes before that final flight. In order to properly model it, Daelia had to pull up a simulation field within the virch. She loaded a coding-bot, too, to mark out anything anomalous. In the virch, the program appeared like a chittering little bird.
Eat it, Emily said, one set of eyes swinging over to glare at the thing.
Daelia moved the bird figure to her other side, away from Emily. “I need it right now, girl,” she said, and keyed the simulation.
“What are you looking for?” Argo asked.
“Anything,” Daelia said.
In the simulation field, a gryphon appeared, outlined in glowing gold, as the code scrolled by on separate screens. One for the abiota’s specifics, one for the standard seed programming for the FQ-47, one for the accepted range of variations. Daelia couldn’t pick out anything herself, but that was what the bot was for.
The bird form sat on her hand, head cocked.
Chirped. Almost immediately. Analysis complete. Anomalies located.
“How many?”
Thirty-three separate instances across four subsystems.
“Is that a lot?” Argo asked.
“It is when everybody apparently missed the problem.” Daelia looked back at Emily. “Do you mind if I switch to the diagnostic view?”
I come too.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.”
A few commands later and they were standing in what appeared to be a white room. Emily’s detail was stripping away, her form reduced back down to the glowing blue sketch lines of basic military AR. The bird, likewise, was gone. Argo was rendered as a basic avatar, as was Daelia.
In the center of the space was a model of the FQ-47. Glowing, suspended, spinning slowly. Like something in an Orpheus Watch holographic field. The show graphics had been modeled on these aeronautic evaluation programs, not the other way around, but it was an impossible comparison not to make. Especially after spending half her day watching the damn show.
“Okay,” Daelia said, pulling the projection toward her, so she was standing right at its edge. “Show me the standard programming layout.”
The simple image opened up, turning into something quite a bit more abstract. Segments of the plane pulled apart. First physical, then logical. Standard 3D symbols clung to the various clusters, indicating propulsion, flight surface controls, sensor networks, and all the various things that kept an abiota RPA in the air.
“Show me the layout at the time this data pull occurred.”
That shifted the view again, the logic changing based on the exact development of the abiota. The hardware didn’t change, of course, and there was only so far the programming could alter itself, but…
“I don’t see anything,” Daelia commented, and rubbed her neck, trying to think. “Why don’t we see anything?”
Pulling up a command screen, she adjusted a few parameters. But nothing lit up.
The logical path was uncorrupted.
“How is this possible?” Daelia asked out loud. “Does this mean the damn thing decided on its own to go batshit crazy?”
Try AR form, Emily suggested. Might show decision path. Predictive thoughts easier to copy.
That was a surprisingly insightful observation, and Daelia took advantage of it. A few more prompts and the predictive’s AR form popped up in place of the plane.
See? Emily was practically preening. Problem.
And yeah, there it was. Red light. Tendrils, spreading from the form’s head out through its wings.
“What is that?” Argo asked.
“I have no idea,” Daelia said. “Bot? Analysis?”
No aberrations reported.
Daelia walked around the figure. The tendrils were very distinct, very clear. As clean as if a human illuminator had cleaned them up by hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Daelia said. “Never heard Dad mention it, never heard anything. What is this?”
Problem deeper in, Emily said, coming over. She’d shrunk her form somewhat, so her heads were level with Daelia’s own. Independently, they nosed at the form. Problem from inside.
“Inside what?”
Is TGLP metaphor, Emily replied. Looks like cordyceps.
“That mushroom thing that takes over ants?” Argo asked.
People.
“What?”
Like in video game 2Shy like, Emily answered, seemingly heedless of Daelia’s confusion. She prowled around. Thing grow inside, influence behavior, make monsters.
Daelia parsed that. “You think something hacked into the source code of this plane and gradually took control of what?” She glanced at the form. “The flight systems?”
Yes.
Argo was standing on the other side of the form, avatar obscured by the glow. “Is that possible?”
For emergents, no. Only reason ACC tolerates. Predictives? Possible maybe. Source code spontaneous but comes from human programming. Emily’s chest rumbled an uncertain note. Would be easier with access.
“Somebody with access to the servers, you mean.”
Server, cockpit, maintenance virch. Anything that connects.
Emily seemed awfully sure. Daelia frowned. “You ever heard of this happening before?”
Data transfer was wrong, when ate gryphon.
“Wait,” Argo said. “You pulled data out of that thing when you tore it apart?”
Both. Yes. Something wrong in them.
“Emily, shit, why didn’t you tell us this before?”
Both heads curled back. She scratched at her blunt chest with a claw. Nobody ask. ACC team think me animal, not worth interview like all else.
Had Emily been deliberately concealing information because she was pissed off about not being treated as an equal team member? Would she be that petty? Probably. Not that Daelia really blamed her.
“What else aren’t you telling us?” Argo asked, folding his arms.
Nothing.
“I’m asking, Emily,” Daelia said. “Me, right here, right now. You know I respect you.”
Respect, blegh, she replied, and a string of indifferent emojis danced merrily around Emily’s feet. Why I give what take in fight?
“I don’t want to see you shut down.”
You find origin of this. Emily gestured with one of her heads. Find find find.
“I don’t think I can,” Daelia said. “Not without some kind of deep dive into their entire network to locate the penetration point. This is just the shadow of what happened, right? A reflection of something deeper in, down in the rudiment core? So I can’t see exactly what it is from just this.”
Maybe why ACC worried.
Argo’s voice had an edge to it now. “Who says ACC is worried?”
Rumors, Emily told them, but didn’t elaborate. Instead, she disconnected.
Argo’s head turned in Daelia’s direction. “What the hell just happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Daelia said, and popped off her VR rig. The afternoon air, so much cooler than yesterday, hit the sweat ring on her face, collected under the visor’s seal. “Want to take a walk with me?”
With the base flying mission being a 24/7 affair, there was always at least one of the cyber team on shift. That afternoon, it was Tech Sergeant Kirby, a no-nonsense woman who taught ninth grade for her full-time job.
“Captain Irvington, Daelia,” she acknowledged when the two of them wandered into the server room. “What can I do for you?”
“I need Emily’s system snapshots,” Daelia told her. “From before the air show, and now.”
“I’ve got her baseline diagnostic pattern, of course, but the snapshots? Those are a memory-suck. You know we overwrite the old files after a few days,” Kirby said. “I might not have them.”
“The SIB didn’t order them preserved?” Argo asked.
“Huh, maybe? I’ll have to check.” She tapped one finger on her console top. “What are you looking for?”
“Not sure.”
It was only partially a lie.
The data pull would take some time, and Kirby promised to bring it over as soon as the shop finished it. Probably tomorrow, she said; getting anything out of the SCIF was a complicated process.
Argo took off after that, citing unpacking and a strong desire for pizza and sleep. Daelia couldn’t begrudge him that. Both sounded like excellent ideas.
Walking back to the Scrap House in the day’s failing light, Daelia still felt like she was missing something important. Some little nugget of information that would make this whole thing make sense.
It wasn’t until later though, when she was in her pajamas and watching an old episode of Orpheus Watch—season three—that she realized what it was.
In the episode, a rogue Roc was using another’s machine body to cause havoc on the station. While the original Roc was still inside of it.
Maybe Lara was on to something after all.
19
“How did you do this every weekend growing up?” Ivan asked as they walked up to her grandmother’s house.
An animatronic ghoul cackled at them from the neighbor’s yard; Mr. and Mrs. Jackson were out there, setting up their usual Halloween display. This year, it was a cemetery, full of hanging cobwebs and big plastic tombstones. Old Mr. Jackson waved at them as they walked past, Mrs. Jackson wrangling a fake skeleton onto a support frame. Lara waved back. Ivan scowled.
“It’s just Sunday at Abuelita’s,” she told him. “It’s great. Get some good food, hang out with the family, listen to some music…”
“Oh, yeah, I can hear that,” Ivan said pointedly.
And yes, sure, there was music blaring from the backyard, and yes, there were a terrifying number of cars in the street, but it was all family. It was just the way things were.
Ivan was Venezuelan on his father’s side and Irish on his mom’s, and Lara supposed that led to some different family traditions. And Ivan was an introvert, which was the real problem. He would have rather been at home tuning his gaming server or planning out another event for the 991st. Anywhere but in a crowded house full of people. Still, he came for her, and Lara appreciated that.
In truth, Lara didn’t always love it either. Family up in her business, cousins pestering her about whether they should join the state Guard, too, or aunts cajoling her to just do this one illumination project for a friend of theirs, you’re such a good artist, Lara, just this one time.
Coming out on drill weekends was also rough—Abuelita lived out in Katy, in the same house she’d owned for forty years, and the drive was a long one. Hypnotic, too, once you got up on the dead-straight elevated expanse of the Westpark Tollway.
But it was worth it to see her grandmother.
And after the weekend she’d had, Lara needed a little normal.
