Source code, p.17
Source Code, page 17
“Nothing to do now but wait,” Rover said. “See what shakes out.”
“Well, I know you’re on top of it,” Cactus said with a chuckle. “Come to watch the show? It’s good to see you. Come on, pull up a chair. Storm Gryphons are up in fifteen.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the overlay?” Rover asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They are in quite the state right now. Fighting. Thank fuck for the show overlay, or we’d probably be freaking out the civilians right—”
“That is exactly why we have the show overlay,” Sausage interrupted. “You know the fight we have, even now, with abiota-equipped weapons platforms, manned aircraft, all that. People trust it, but they trust it more when they can’t see them squabbling with each other.”
“Nobody wants the reminder that these things have minds of their own,” Cactus added.
“They’re fighting, straight up. Animated blood sprays and everything. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
That got them both to pause. Whatever their other faults, both the colonels in front of him had decades in the cockpit, had been there when the military first started struggling with abiota integration. They knew the score.
“We don’t have some kind of emergence event going on, do we?” Cactus asked, more serious now.
“I don’t know what the hell it is. But I think it might have something to do with that space rock. Sir—”
Cactus held up a hand. “Whatever you’re going to say next, the answer’s no. We can’t turn that thing over to NASA without State’s approval. And we sure as shit aren’t shutting down the air show on a whim.”
Rover gritted his teeth. “It’s not a whim, sir. Something is wrong here.”
“Did you talk to Storm Gryphons Ops?”
“They told Sergeant Brandel to pound sand.”
Cactus looked over at Sausage, who sighed and tapped the side of his monocle to turn it on. “I’ll give ’em a call.”
“I’m going to go check out the space rock,” Rover said. “See if there’s anything we can do.”
Neither Cactus nor Sausage bothered saying goodbye.
When Rover got to the hangar, there was a cluster of people standing around a small table, right at the edge of the space rock. Right around Daelia Hall and some crazy robotic assembly she had spread out.
The AR field in the hangar was full of smoke. Not thick, heavy smoke. Smoke like the wisps of dry ice in a stage play. Weird shit.
“Daelia!” he yelled, striding up. “What’re you doing?”
“Hang on, sir,” she said, obviously distracted.
“Daelia, I swear to god, if you don’t—”
“Receiving power!” she said excitedly. A murmur went up from a few of the folks watching.
But Rover noticed something else.
Something…interesting.
The smoke was gone.
“I’m going to ask you again,” he said, placing a hand on the table next to her. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to see if we can get this talking,” she said.
Rover scrubbed a hand over his face. “Look, Daelia, I appreciate your expertise in this area, but have you thought that maybe this is why everything is going insane?”
“Can’t be,” she said, and pointed at the space rock. “That thing’s not putting out any kind of broadcast that we can detect, and it’s definitely not running any kind of AR. And this”—she indicated her device—“isn’t digital either.”
Rover got a text from Brandel. Storm Gryphons normal, it said. Whatever was going on, it’s over now.
Rover looked at the space rock. That big stupid rock.
It had to be connected. Had to be.
“Let’s leave it on, let’s let it run,” he said, coming to a decision. “Give me an update tonight, at EMC shift change.”
“Can do,” she replied with a nod. She sounded distant. Kid always was good at burying herself in her work.
Since he was here, Rover talked to a few of the other folks milling about. Highlander had nothing of note to report. Material samples had been taken, analysis ongoing. Intelligence had turned up no leads yet; no origin, no function.
Rover was a simple man. He liked simple answers. Straightforward. Actionable.
Daelia’s device corresponded to the cessation of that error in the AR field.
Daelia’s device corresponded to the Storm Gryphons calming down.
Daelia’s device was connected to that damn rock.
Rover shook a few more hands and then begged his way clear of the hangar, headed back to the squadron. The second he was clear of the place, he pulled up Navarro’s number.
“You still here?” he asked.
“Sure, sir. What’s up?”
“Let’s talk.”
20
Daelia let the detector run for an hour.
Nothing was happening.
Nothing.
The weird effect in the AR field had turned off, sure, but there was no read on the machine. Nothing of any kind. Not even in the indicator module, which she’d built specifically to ensure that everything was calibrated correctly.
Which meant that something was wrong.
So she went back to her laptop. Went through her hand-typed build notes. Pulled up her engineering virch program, the three-dimensional space she preferred for laying out system components.
And there, she found the problem.
Information was missing.
No, not missing.
Information had been changed.
On the surface, everything looked fine. But digging down into the metadata indicated a number of alterations to both her simulations and her notes, dating from around the time she’d left Ware.
And then it hit her.
Somebody had changed her data.
No wonder she hadn’t gotten anything further since leaving. No wonder none of her recent builds had functioned properly.
Rover had told her to leave the device on. So Daelia did.
But she could feel the anger in her blood now.
She needed a walk.
It wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice, heading back down to the airshow. The secondary hangar wasn’t far from the gate, though, and all the planes were down there. All static displays. The abiota.
She kept turning the question over and over in her mind. Somebody had poisoned her research. They’d fucked with it—somebody, somehow—but why? So she couldn’t continue to work on it? So she didn’t do something with it they didn’t want her to do? Or was it petty, just a way of getting back at her for not agreeing to change it?
Why do that? Why?
Daelia’s wandering feet took her through the very center of the area. She wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going until something flared up in her AR field and brought her up short.
Daelia stopped at the edge of a large pavilion, a great steel-gray structure with a single dark tail fin in front, standing like a megalith at the entrance.
The name of the place came up in her monocle.
She sighed.
MEMORIAL PLAZA
There was always one of these at air shows now, wasn’t there?
0700, Greenwich Mean, 24 January 2026.
That was when the first power grid had come down. When the first missiles were fired. When the first assault boat was launched into the South China Sea.
0700, Greenwich Mean, 24 January 2026.
The start of the Five Days War.
China had moved on Taiwan. Burned-out, under-supplied and under-manned, US forces in the region had been unable to react in time. The next five days had been chaos, both for the Western Pacific and North America alike. Five days of pure terror.
Nobody was quite sure how it would have ended, if not for the abiota. This was a matter of much speculation as well; Daelia had been in several lectures at college that had descended into bitter debates about this. Would the Chinese have relented? Would the Americans have been able to rally? Would they all really have dropped nukes on each other? These were questions that had no good answers.
Because the Five Days War ended, just as promptly, at 0934, 29 January 2026, when the guns themselves decided to stop firing. Because a freshly eclosed abiota, deep in the People’s Liberation Army missile infrastructure, managed to get in contact with the AWACS that had been coordinating the American response, and between them, they hashed out a deal.
No more killing.
No mutual annihilation.
It hadn’t stop everything, though.
The more sophisticated weaponry turned off, and some of the Chinese tanks and planes and support vehicles refused to move. But Taiwan was small enough and the PLA invasion force numerous enough that the Party pressed on. With small arms and bayonets.
Neither the Japanese nor the Americans nor anybody else in the region had been able to stop it. The slaughter had shocked the world. China kept Taiwan, but at terrible cost; international investment had pulled out, an insurgency popped up, and everyone who was left alive fled. China had won nothing but rubble, and blood.
And the fallout hadn’t been limited to just Taiwan. Some of the best farmland in China was gone, wiped out by an inland tsunami that struck late on Day Four. Somebody at INDOPACOM had ignored orders. Took out the Three Gorges Dam, in retaliation for an earlier strike against Boston. A host of other places in the region—Manila, the Vietnamese coast, Macao—were reduced to shells of their former selves.
But abiota, abiota…
They had been hailed as saviors. More sensible than humans. More ethical. More principled. Why exactly they’d decided to stop fighting, nobody actually knew. It wasn’t as if anybody could go interview the PLA’s weapon systems, and the AWACS…he’d never given an interview either.
Here at home, the Northeast had suffered the worst. The grid had been nearly destroyed. Catastrophic utility failures went on for months. Power failed, then they ran out of gasoline, food, clean water. In the middle of winter, tens of thousands had died.
The civil strife had been beyond anything the local police could handle. Active-duty troops had struggled to make it into the worst-affected areas, fighting against an outflowing tide of fleeing civilians. Some cities, like New York, had never recovered, people risking everything as they fled the unrest that followed.
Some places, like Boston, were just gone.
The West Coast had been likewise ravaged, its location making it an easy target for Chinese missile strikes.
Texas had gotten through okay, its power grid and pipelines more isolated than many places in the country. The cyber defenses had held here, at least. But, like everywhere else in the country, they’d still had their fair share of kinetic strikes.
Daelia had been in high school. Mom was already gone. Dad had been needed at Ellington. He’d gone in the first night and when he wasn’t back by the evening, like he’d said he’d be, Daelia threw the hurricane survival kit into Ginger and headed to base. The normal twenty-minute drive took her over two hours.
Dad had been pissed. Wanted her to go home. Fifteen and uncertain and desperately afraid, Daelia had refused. They’d gotten in a screaming match over it, one that finally ended with her sobbing on his shoulder on the break room’s couch.
Her anger over that had taken a long, long time to fade.
It hadn’t been until much later that Daelia realized he was probably trying to protect her. Ellington, as a military base, had been a primary target.
Pulling herself away from the unpleasant memories, Daelia realized could hear Emily down the runway. Not roaring right now. Talking to somebody.
Well, she could wait, Daelia figured, and went into the pavilion.
The space had a few displays. A few artifacts of importance, a few upright posts holding narrative plaques, describing what each of the state military services had done that day. Active duty had been consumed with the fight, units like the 121st called up to assist with the killing, but by and large, the Texas Military Department had spent the week—and the weeks, the months after—trying to stem the dying.
Daelia remembered that all personally. She had no desire to read the stories plastered up on the walls here. A memorial, yes, but a plea as well.
Don’t forget. Not again.
The reflection area, the little chapel-like space, was closed in with solid walls, vents at the top to allow in the breeze. The fading evening light fell in through skylights of clear vinyl. There was no altar, no religious signs, nothing like that. Just the usual wall, covered in the names of those who’d died, and a few benches to sit on. In acknowledgment of some universal human need, there were banks of candles, sitting within big open-topped acrylic tanks. After the day was over, they were almost all lit.
Staring at the wall, Daelia wished she could find Mom’s name on it. Dad had told her, in the middle of the worst of the missile attacks on the second night, that he believed that wherever her mom had gotten off to, she would be fighting in this. That she’d left in order to protect Daelia.
Daelia had always wanted to believe that. But Mom’s body, even then, had been still, powered down, in the company hangar. What was she going to do with just her rudiment core and a kugu?
At the time, she told her dad that was bullshit.
Now, she picked up a long-stemmed match from the hopper at the side of the tanks, staring at the tiny flames for a moment. Disrespectful, she finally told herself, and put the thing back.
None of this helped.
She kept going.
21
“Aren’t you here kind of late…sir?”
The honorific was tacked on. Argo thought about saying something about it and decided against it. The enlisted troops at Emily’s display had probably been there all day. They all looked tired. The one who’d spoken, a master sergeant, had a crescent of sunburn across her nose and cheeks. Hats had been authorized out here for the duration of the show, but hers clearly hadn’t provided enough shade.
With the show over for the day, the airfield was slowly emptying out. The crowds were gone, still dispersing through the arteries of the greater Ellington grounds, back out onto the highway or into the buses that would take them to far-flung parking lots. Vendors were closing down, securing tents and goods for tomorrow. Out here in the static displays, military personnel were closing up cargo bays and cockpits, shutting down any interactive displays or localized AR fields they might have set up for the day’s visitors.
Two of the enlisted crew were checking Emily over carefully, as if she was going out to fly.
“Just got off shift,” he said. “Thought I’d come by and say hi.” He glanced at the crew. “What are you doing?”
“As a higher-level emergent, Emily has the right to freedom of movement,” one of them explained, still working.
“It means she’s got a full fuel tank at all times,” the tech sergeant told him. “Among other things.”
“We keep her flight ready?”
“Yes.”
Argo thought about that. “Is this standard?”
“For any abiota over equine-class, yes sir.”
Even ones across the runway, Emily rumbled.
“Everyone across the runway is bricked, Emily,” one of the maintainers said. He had some kind of diagnostic device hooked up to her and was studying the tiny screen keenly. Like a doctor listening to a baby’s lungs.
You still keep fueled, though, yes? Violation of Domain Array protocol if not.
“You’re talking about the Repose, right?” Argo asked. One big head nodded. “I haven’t been over there yet. I thought they were dead or something.”
They sleep, but they are not gone. Like Snow White in fairy tale.
“I ain’t kissin’ ’em,” one of the other maintainers said.
The enlisted crew laughed.
Argo just felt uneasy. Emily was allowed to just…go fly? On her own? He hadn’t realized that.
One of the maintainers was looking at him. “We’re basically done here, sir. We can get out of your hair if you want to talk to her in private.”
Private. With a plane. Jesus. Argo rubbed his forehead. “Sure, that would…that would be good.” As an afterthought, he tossed the sergeant the keys to the squadron UTV he’d borrowed. “Here, feel free to drive back, if you’d like.”
“Thanks, Captain,” she said, less sarcastic this time, and waved to her people.
Argo’s attention turned back to the MQ-9 as they left. Emily really was a beast of an abiota. He wasn’t used to this much customization. Predictives, if they bothered with adjustments at all, kept themselves well inside AR appearance guidelines.
The MQ-9’s twin dragon heads were watching him. How she perceived his attention, Argo had no idea. Monocles did contain sensors that tracked pupil movement, dilation, position, in order to better display whatever it was you wanted them to display. So maybe she could track that, determine that his eye was focused on her.
There was probably some article he could find on the Internet that would explain it to him. For whatever that was worth. The writing bots that managed most website content these days had a terrible habit of making things up, just to make their minimum word count. It made for amusing reading, sure, but it made research much more difficult.
I feel your eyes, new rider. You come to cower? Emily said, and the head that wasn’t looking at him yawned. She scratched the other with a clawed front foot. Her bat wing spread out as she did so, twitching. Come to beg forgiveness?
How, or what, one was supposed to say to an emergent, Argo had no idea. This was why he liked predictives. While they weren’t all mono-tasked, built for writing or gaming or admin or aviation, they did stay in their lane. They didn’t try to fuck with you.
They didn’t try to trick you into flying into an oil platform.
Then taunt you for it.
“I’m just here to say hi.”
