Unity code, p.17
Unity Code, page 17
Her parents weren’t going to be here, which was disappointing. Her mom had texted her earlier, said that her dad had taken on a job that weekend. He had his own custom kitchens business, which normally did pretty well, but there was a lot of new competition this year and somebody had just sued over a faulty oven installation—which wasn’t technically the fault of her dad but the damn electrician—and money was tight.
She didn’t think working seven days a week was the right way to make up the difference, but that was just how her dad was. Stubborn to a fault. Too proud to ask for help.
“There better be beer,” Ivan grumbled.
“When is there not?” she asked, and into the house they went.
“Mi corazón, come in, come in,” her grandmother said in Spanish, running into them in the hallway, a huge smile on her face. She reached out with her ample hands, pulling Lara in and leading them both deeper into the house. “You look hungry.”
“It’s a long drive out from base,” Lara replied in kind, and then looked at Ivan, who already looked uncomfortable.
“Yes, yes, of course. So proud of you, doing what you’re doing. Your abuelo would have been proud, too.” Abuelita gestured at the photograph of her late husband, the old family patriarch, that sat on the fireplace mantle. “His little girl, serving our country. What a fine thing.”
Sensing Ivan’s growing irritation, Lara smiled at her grandmother, hoping to defuse this. “Abuelita, you know Ivan doesn’t speak Spanish.”
“Not my fault his parents didn’t teach him.”
“Abuelita, please.”
Her grandmother huffed. “You and your sister both,” she replied in English. “At least you aren’t marrying a guero, too.”
“We aren’t getting married yet.”
“He hasn’t proposed? You two have been dating for almost three years.” Her grandmother looked straight at Ivan. “Don’t you play games with her now.”
“Not planning on it, ma’am.”
“Abuelita,” she corrected, and looked at Lara. “I know he’s being formal to shut me up,” she told her in Spanish.
“He likes you, Abuelita, but he doesn’t like large groups like this,” Lara sighed in Spanish, then switched back to English. “Would you like to get a drink, Ivan?” she asked, and very pointedly nudged him outside.
The music was louder out here, the crowd lighter. The porch overhang was smoky from the grill. It smelled good, like meat and spice and mesquite wood. Ivan grabbed them a couple of cans of whatever her cousins had picked up for the day, and they headed back inside.
Dodging a couple of her cousin’s kids as they ran through the house and out the door at top speed, Lara only barely managed to save her beer. Ivan swung his out of the way, but too late. The can was knocked out from his hand, smacking into the kitchen wall and splattering all over the floor.
“Shit,” he muttered, even as Lara’s brother-in-law started laughing from where he was, sat at the kitchen table.
“Knock it off, David,” Lara said. “I’ll go get a towel.”
Lara dodged two more attempts to knock her drink from her hand as she made for the linen closet in the back hall. She scrounged a dry towel and was about to head back when she caught sight of more cousins, huddled on the bed in the guest room.
She looked, adjusting her monocle, then pushed the door open. “Good lord,” she snapped at the kids, “Abuelita’s got a no-VR policy in her house, you know that!”
“We’re in the middle of a quest level!” one of them moaned. They all had VR rigs on, too big for their faces. Made it hard to tell them apart.
“Off,” she snapped, and held her hands out. Reluctantly, the kids handed over the rigs. The oldest of them was twelve, and none of the visors fit properly. She turned them over in her hands, checking the game information.
Ataraxi Quest, a game with plenty of mystery but very little adult-themed stuff. Thank god it wasn’t porn.
Still.
“There is a reason why they don’t make these in kids’ sizes,” she told them. “Even Tamm knows better than to do that to you. Do you know how badly this can screw up your brain? VR interferes with neuron growth!”
“Come on, everybody does it,” one of them whined.
They were playing a local copy, not connected to the main servers. If they had been, their retinal prints would have flagged as underage, gotten them booted. Sure, there were illicit games that allowed underage players, but anything available commercially had its servers monitored by abiota admins.
“I’m keeping these,” she told them, and whirled around, towel and beer and VR rigs all in hand.
It was harsh. Maybe a little too harsh. But after this weekend, Lara was in no mood to deal with idiot children disrespecting Abuelita’s house rules, not to mention common sense.
She’d had a long talk with her squadron’s first sergeant on Saturday, with the chaplain and Med Group. All separately, of course. But they all told her the same thing. There was nothing they could do. There was nothing she could do.
She had a week. Until Friday. To report in to the specialized testing facility that was being stood up in the Medical Center and get shoved into an MRI machine.
What exactly the aliens were looking for, nobody on base had been able to tell her. Something about brain structure. But there were a whole lot of other factors, Med Group had said, not all of which seemed to make sense to them.
For Lara, that was a red fucking flag, right there.
Ivan’s interpretation was more generous.
“These things have either been in some kind of stasis for, like, thousands of years or worked out some kind of FTL drive. Either way, their presence here implies a seriously advanced level of technology, one that probably wouldn’t make sense to us if they tried to explain it. So yeah, of course they have seemingly weird compatibility markers.”
“Then why is it an MRI? Why isn’t there some kind of magical bullshit machine doing these scans?”
“I don’t know, maybe they can’t get it down from orbit. Look at the thing they dropped on our base. Super tiny.”
Ivan’s insistence on his everything’s-above-board theory was even more irritating in light of the comparison they’d done on some Orpheus Watch episodes. Changes had been made to some scenes. Significant changes, in at least one instance. Dialog, mostly, but some of the visuals as well.
Lara couldn’t understand why it would have happened. All the scenes that had been altered dealt, in some way, with the interactions between the show’s human factions and aliens. But all the scenes had been positive in nature; the entire show was quite enthusiastic about the idea of first contact in general.
And it wasn’t like Orpheus Watch hadn’t been subject to controversy before. Another major theme was the idea of interplanetary resource extraction. In the show, humanity was expanding outward in order to support a dying, depleted Earth.
That last element hadn’t been part of the original. At the time the remake had premiered, a lot of people had accused Delphi Plus—an old-school studio streaming service under the Omphalos umbrella, which itself was a subsidiary of Tamm Good Industries Limited—of shilling for the experimental and highly questionable practice of asteroid mining. Orpheus Watch had gotten people interested, though. Eased a lot of the objections to it.
So why would they change things now? Delphi Plus may very well have taken money from companies like Gravipause to write in the asteroid mining stuff. At the very least, Tamm could have demanded it be put in. The creative team had never apologized for it, never altered a single word, a single plot point.
So why would they be worried now about their sunny portrayal of humanity’s first encounters with aliens?
It didn’t make any sense.
And that made Lara suspicious.
Which she’d said to Ivan on the drive out.
“So what, Delphi Plus got bribed to make first contact some happy occasion?”
“It doesn’t need to have been some kind of conspiracy—“
“Why can’t the propaganda work for the right side?” he’d asked. “How many people were terrified of abiota back in the day, because of movies like The Terminator?”
“Notice you can’t find those movies anymore?”
“Yeah, as it should be,” he’d argued. “Looking back on it all now, it was always just bigotry, Lara. I’m actually kind of disappointed in Lee that he’s got so much of that stuff saved. His wife is abiota, for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing with all that?”
“Lee’s no abiota-hater. Shouldn’t that tell you something that he does keep stuff like that?”
“If you’ve got some hard evidence of what you’re saying, that there’s something intentional behind all of this, like I said, I’m happy to look at it, but—”
“You wouldn’t believe something’s wrong unless one of those damn alien kugus told you in person that they were here to, I don’t know, eat us or something.”
“See?” he’d said. “You can’t even tell me why the aliens would be doing this.”
The why almost didn’t matter, though.
The how, on the other hand, was extremely important.
Deepfakes were staples in the fan fiction community. There were tons of bots you could download, abiota you could contract with, to turn your idea into a fully realized video or AR overlay or virch environment. Lara knew that firsthand, all too well. But in order to use studio assets—the 3D scans of the actors, prop sets, that sort of thing—you had to agree to watermark your work. Indicate clearly that it wasn’t official. And even barring that, abiota art always had tells.
Always.
Beyond all of that, though, it was extremely difficult, from a raw technical perspective, to change entire scenes with CGI alone. Even abiota-assisted CGI. Studio changes usually required re-shoots with actual actors, and even that was detectable; actors aged, after all, and the difference of even a few months could be picked out with simple imagery analysis predictives.
But what had been done to these episodes was perfect.
Flawless.
It shouldn’t have been possible. If it was, Lara had never heard of it. She had some feelers out now, some page-crawling-bots deployed in the Chans hunting out hints for her.
But she couldn’t escape the possibility that maybe the aliens had done it themselves. And if that was the case, what else were they manipulating?
How real was anything anybody was seeing right now?
Lara shook off the thoughts. It wasn’t a conversation she could have with anybody here. Not even Ivan. She needed time to think about it. Figure it out. She was missing something, but what that was, she didn’t know.
So she just dumped the rigs on the kitchen table and started cleaning up the floor. Her sister was already there, helping wipe down the furniture that had gotten splattered.
There were a dozen other people in there, mostly the older women in the family, putting food out, talking loudly to each other. Abuelita was nowhere to be seen. Good, Lara thought. She’d had to hide the VR rigs. Abuelita got so angry when she saw those things in her house.
“Useless men, eh?” her sister asked in Spanish.
Lara glanced up at Ivan, who looked uncomfortable. Her sister’s goal, no doubt. She’d never liked Ivan.
“I said I’d do it,” Lara replied in English, and got back up, swishing the towel around with one foot, cleaning the last stray drops of beer off the tile. It would need to be mopped. “You two figure out what cryptocurrency to buy this week?” she asked the guys.
“How did you guess that’s what they were talking about?” her sister asked.
“It’s all they ever talk about, Rosa.”
“Where’d you get the VR rigs?” her brother-in-law asked. “I thought your grandma hated that stuff.”
“She does,” Lara said. “That’s why monocles stay in the car. It’s Miguel’s kids again.”
“Feels weird without one, doesn’t it?” her sister said. “Really, what’s the harm with letting the kids have some fun?”
Lara could have rattled off a dozen different studies, cited some of the long-term consequences. Hell, she could have gone into her own personal experience. But her sister was a fashion fiend and loved the world of AR panoply design and would not be convinced that there was ever such a thing as too much lens time.
“It’s not good for them, Rosa,” Lara said, as she’d said a thousand times before. And just as her sister had always done, she rolled her eyes and changed the subject.
“I hear that you got marked for Unity,” Rosa said.
Instantly, the chatter around them stopped.
Lara resisted the urge to panic. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come on, you texted Mom about it yesterday. Secondary testing is mandatory for you now, isn’t it? So how’d it go?”
“I, uhh…” Lara floundered. Shit, she shouldn’t have said anything to her mom. That was a terrible idea. Why had she done that? Of course Mom was going to tell her sister and her aunts and all her cousins and…
“No niece of mine is going to get all her hair shaved off and aliens shoved in her brain,” one of her aunts said heatedly. “Are you telling me you’re being ordered to do that?”
“Somebody has to do it, Lydia, or the aliens are going to fry the planet,” one of her other aunts, Maria, pointed out.
“Not our chiquita here!” Aunt Lydia snapped. “Lara, if they make you do it, you tell them no. You tell them they’ll answer to me if you do.”
“I don’t think she’s got that option, Tia,” Rosa said.
“What’s that now?” one of Lara’s male cousins asked, bringing in a huge plate of meat.
“Lara’s been selected for Unity,” Aunt Maria said, a little bit of pride in her voice. “Won’t that be amazing?”
“It’s not like that, Tia,” Lara said. “I still have to—”
“Of course it is,” Maria said, waving a hand. “You’ll get to be an ambassador to the stars, tell everybody what to do. I’ve been watching the Envoy on all her appearances. All the places she’s gone, all the things she’s getting to do. It’s a huge opportunity!”
“Fantastic,” her cousin agreed. “When do you go?”
The conversation was going rapid-fire now, other people talking, starting side conversations that Lara couldn’t keep up with. It felt like her brain was being squeezed. She could feel her heart speeding up, the strength in her hands failing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lara protested weakly.
“But you have to go, don’t you? If you test compatible?” Rosa asked.
David, beside her, nodded. “There’s talk about making it mandatory.”
“It’s only mandatory to get tested,” Ivan told him.
“No, I mean, making it mandatory to go do it,” David said. “What, you think the government’s going to fuck around with this? Planetary annihilation because a handful of people aren’t willing to step up?”
“It’s not… I’m not…” Lara said, trying to get the words out, even as the conversation around her got louder. There was a pit opening, right in the center of her, and she was going to fall through.
“Oh, chiquita, we will all be so proud of you!” one of her aunts exclaimed.
“What do you mean, Irma?” her grandmother demanded, suddenly in the middle of everything again. “You can’t do this, Lara!”
“She’s not going to have a choice,” David said. “They’re saying the final compatibility rate is like one in a hundred thousand. If the feds are willing to let Boston blow up, they’re sure as shit not going to hesitate at grabbing a couple of people to stop a war we can’t fight.”
That set off a fresh round of yelling, all more heated now.
Lara leaned heavily back against the wall, wanting to tell everybody to shut up but unable to get the words out.
Ivan looked at her then, and, taking her by the hand, pulled her outside, even as her family continued to argue. The music was still on but had somehow receded into the distance. Everything had receded.
Ivan had an arm around her shoulders, though, helping her sit down. She clung on to him, like a drowning woman.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “What do you think I should do?”
Ivan didn’t answer. Not for a long time.
Which, with him, was answer enough.
Despite all her family being within spitting distance, Lara felt suddenly, horribly alone.
20
Daelia was woken at two AM by a loud, insistent klaxon noise.
“Of all the fucking things…” she grumbled, rolling over in bed, hair everywhere, eyes blurry. She grabbed for her monocle. “Raijinn!”
The alarm cut out, replaced instead by Raijinn’s voice, tinny and small. “You requested I not use the music again.”
“What?”
“You wished to be informed when the backup data came in from the 121st.”
“What?” She shook herself. The kugu wasn’t anywhere to be seen; Raijinn was using the speaker in her company laptop, which was still open on her desk. Daelia glanced at the components of her detector, sitting next to it. Hopefully, she could get back to that when Emily was safe. “Can you just, uhh, upload it for me?”
“Due to the classification level, you must use the simulation lab.”
“Right, right,” she grumbled, and fought off the tangle of sheets one-handed. “Let me get my brace on, and I’ll be down.”
She didn’t bother changing out of her pajamas. Just screwed on her brace and threw her robe over her shoulders and headed down to the lab barefoot. Daelia attempted to smooth her hair back into its short nighttime braid, trying not to leap to conclusions.
The simulations lab was a better place to look at the data anyway. She pulled it up, exactly as she had for Storm Gryphon Three earlier in the day. Yesterday. Whatever. And the results were startlingly similar.
Nothing in the machine-body logical overlay. But drill down into the form projection of the two-headed dragon, and there, there it was.
A wound.
