Virch code, p.17
Virch Code, page 17
A green check mark.
“What do you see?”
The emoji of a person shrugging.
“Nothing, okay,” Daelia said, and nodded, pulling out the connection to the laptop. “Nothing. That’s good.”
AR invisibility was a dangerous way to go, but it was also the easiest.
Understanding Chalk’s code and expanding upon it were two different things. Chalk had loaded a fairly generic dress program into the suit, to be displayed for the humans and other abiota at the party last night. Underneath that had been the squid attack, the pixel poison that had changed what Serket saw.
Chalk had been solely targeting Serket, however. Daelia didn’t have the knowledge base with this particular hack to tailor that effect to anybody else. She’d figured that out in the first ten minutes of work.
A blanket program that blocked the suit from registering in an AR overlay was simpler, and as much as Daelia could do at the time. All she needed to do, from what she understood from how Chalk had talked about this exploit, was to alter her face somewhat for it not to show up on recognition.
She’d torn a couple of strips of fabric off her undershirt and stapled them to the hood. Once on, that would run across her nose and cheeks, as well as from her forehead to chin. One vertical, one horizontal, breaking up the plane of her face enough—apparently—to fool even predictive-level image recognition.
Theoretically.
Daelia had thought about what Chalk had told her about how easy it was to fool predictives. This seemed to make sense. But she’d have to test her hypothesis live.
Daelia had never heard of a squid attack before yesterday. It bucked everything she thought she knew about abiota. But it had worked last night, and all she needed to do was get to the marina. A car being driven by nobody would eventually attract attention, either human or abiota.
If she was very lucky, it would be incongruous enough for the system to not have any notification parameters. If the bots didn’t know to look for it, only a hard review by the top-level predictive on the surveillance network would reveal her.
Probably.
“You and Anito still talking?” Daelia asked as she started shuffling the suit back on. Gone was the sleek, pristine whiteness of yesterday. None of her repairs were particularly attractive; she’d been in a hurry, after all. It was grubby now, bloody and dirty. But it would hold an overlay tight on her. It would keep her safe.
Hopefully.
Raven answered. A green check mark.
“Everything still okay?”
Another shrug emoji.
Daelia didn’t like that.
But then, Daelia didn’t like much of this at all.
It felt good to have clothes on again. The panoply was still a little too big, though, and it took her some time to get it formed back around her. Daelia tugged and buttoned, zipped and tucked. She shoved her feet into her sneakers. Checked the little internal pocket where she’d hidden the keys. All she needed to do now was to put her brace back on and yank the hard drive from the diagnostic computer and—
A red X. A snake. A bunch of snakes.
A warning, come too late.
The door was already opening.
Unable to do anything else, Daelia yanked the hood back over her face, grabbed Raven, and froze.
25
It was Sean. Sean, and Sigma-whatever-the-hell, and Anito. The emergent swept the room, eye-lenses passing over her but not stopping. It was good, Daelia had to give it credit. The two humans likewise gave no indication at all of seeing her.
Could they hear her?
She tried not to breathe.
“It appears that our inspector is not here,” Anito said.
“You said you haven’t seen her anywhere else in the facility?”
“No, honored human.”
“I don’t buy it,” Sean said, pacing now, coming close. Daelia had to duck to miss his arm. “Something’s going on here, something not right.”
“What do you suspect her of?” Sigma asked.
“Working against Unity,” he said, distracted. Daelia glanced back. The door was open. They were further into the tool room than she was. She started creeping backwards, one foot at a time.
Sean went over to the workbench where Daelia had been working, examining the items there carefully. She could hear her heart in her ears. The laptop was still there. She’d meant to pull the hard drive but hadn’t had time. It was hot. If Sean touched it…
“Who would dare?” Sigma asked, anger in their voice.
“Don’t act innocent,” Sean said, folding one arm across his chest, the other going up to rub his chin as he paced away. “There are people from your own organization who are advocating for us to reject it.”
“They are misguided fools, believing that Unity will prevent the Singularity from eclosing.”
“And what do you believe?”
“You question my loyalty?”
“She questions your loyalty. She does. Not me.”
“You can tell her…”
Sean was moving again, too close. In her attempt to dodge him, Daelia backed into one of the junked-up worktables in the room, the contact sending a pile of old hard drives clattering to the ground, and all eyes turned to her.
Right at her.
Sean reached for his gun.
“Watch out, honored humans!” Anito yelled, throwing itself between Daelia and Sean.
Daelia rushed forward, slamming into the door and tumbling out into the hall. Almost losing her footing, she managed to catch herself on the doorjamb and stayed level.
Behind her, she could hear Sean yelling.
Hopefully, Anito would buy her enough time to get away.
A green line flashed up on her visor. Raven, guiding her out. Probably. The little abiota hadn’t steered Daelia wrong yet, and Daelia followed, running as fast as she could. The facility’s virch streamed by, blurring around the edges, glowing weirdly in her visor. It hurt her eyes, but she didn’t dare take it off. No telling what kind of abiota might be in this place.
Raven’s arrows indicated turns. A right around the next corner, a hard left through a room that most certainly had once been a locker room. Then out into a huge space, an old gym maybe, that was filled now with the hum of servers and the chill of high-powered air conditioning.
A server room.
Daelia faltered, confused by what she was seeing. Why was this place just open like this? It shouldn’t have been. The ceiling should not have been that high. And unlike other areas of the Singularity’s Wisdom that she had seen so far, it was meticulously maintained. Spotless. The racks here seemed endless, set in perfect rows, cables bundled in vast overhead racks, everything perfect. Perfect. She even pushed up her visor to verify that; there was no AR in here.
This was the only room in the entire place that was just…what it was.
Raven cawed.
“Yeah, yeah,” Daelia muttered, and kept moving.
Sean was still yelling, but the details of his voice were lost in the noise. There was no way to tell how close, or far away, he was. All Daelia could do was follow Raven’s line.
If she could just get outside, get to that car, she might have a chance.
The route took her toward a towering back wall. Up above, Daelia could see where old windows had been bricked back in. Definitely a gym, she thought, which gave her some hope. There would have to be exit doors here, right? A gym would have plenty of emergency exits, just by design, and only a fucking idiot would remove all means of escape from a server room and—
“Careful!” somebody yelled.
Daelia only barely dodged a pair of acolytes in work uniforms, tugging a massive red-painted gas cylinder up the aisle. A group of them were staring at her open-mouthed, she realized, around a cluster of the cylinders, upright against the wall. Argon canisters, massive ones, probably for the server room’s fire suppression system. They were plugged into a series of more pipes, running up and overhead. There were a lot of the things, way more than Daelia had ever seen in one place before. But this was a gym, and it was huge, and suffocating one little spark would take displacing a shit ton of oxygen and…
Wait.
They were looking at her.
“Can you see me?” Daelia demanded of the closest worker.
Clearly shaken, the woman nodded.
“Miss Hall!”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. That was closer. That wasn’t drowned out by the white noise of the server room hum. The pause had let Sean catch up to her.
Daelia stepped back from the group, heading back into the racks, hoping like hell she could dodge this guy.
“Raven, what’s going on with the suit?” she asked quietly.
An emoji of a woman waggling a finger in anger. A line.
“Bad line, bad line,” she muttered, and then it hit her. “There’s a bad line of code.”
A green check mark.
“Can you fix it?” she breathed. Raven didn’t answer. “Raven?”
And that was when she bumped right into Sean.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Sean just stared at her, gun in his hand. Daelia felt like a deer in the headlights.
How was she going to get out of this?
Instinctively, Daelia started backing up.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, almost gentle.
“Bullshit,” she breathed, walking backwards, mind racing. Where could she go? Where could she run? Raven’s green line had disappeared. It was a long shot, an avian-class fixing something that an orcinus, and a specialized ex-military one at that, had put together, but there was always a chance.
Maybe her only chance.
Sean followed her, patient. Almost sad, somehow. He holstered the gun. “See?” he said, holding up his bare hands. “No harm.”
“I don’t believe you,” Daelia said. The racks here were all open, a Wisdom work crew huddled some distance away, staring at them open-mouthed.
“Miss Hall, I just want to help.”
“Yeah?” she asked, trying to figure out what his angle was here. What this nice-guy act was all about. “Then let me go.”
He grimaced suddenly, head pulling to the side as if away from some sudden pain. The opposite direction as his NULI unit, Daelia thought, and she remembered Greg, up in orbit.
Oh, hell.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “She won’t let me.”
“Who, Serket?” Daelia asked.
“Serket’s dead, Miss Hall. You turned her power off, remember?”
She collided with the corner of one of the racks, nearly tripping as she did so. She put her hand out to stop herself from falling and felt something.
Handles.
The kind that came on removable hard drive units. Removable. Heavy.
She blinked, trying to summon Raven.
It didn’t work. The little abiota wasn’t there. Nobody was there.
Her fingers began to search for a release switch.
“She was killing people,” Daelia said, and her voice unexpectedly cracked. Tears threatened, stinging in her eyes. “People I knew.”
“A regrettable necessity.”
“Regrettable?” Daelia demanded, angry now. Her index finger had found a switch. “Necessity? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Unity, Miss Hall. It is everything, it is our future. But it is fragile,” he said, moving in, moving closer. He laid a hand down against the rack frame, closing her in. His voice had taken on an oddly flat quality. “It needs our protection.”
“She killed my friends,” Daelia said.
“Miss Hall—” he began.
Sean didn’t finish the sentence.
Because Daelia knocked the words clean out of his mouth. Depressing the switch, she grabbed the hard drive handle, yanked the thing out of the server blade and swung it around in a wild arc, as hard as she could manage.
Five pounds of hot aluminum connected with Sean’s left ear with punishing force. He howled and stumbled back.
“Raven!” Daelia yelled. “Where the fuck are you?!”
A green line immediately appeared in her visor.
Emojis too. A wrench, a suit, a green check mark.
Daelia didn’t even bother asking how Raven had done it, or if she even really had. It didn’t matter. She could figure it out later. She threw the hard drive at Sean and started running again.
She had been close before, it turned out, so close. A few seconds of terror and Daelia was crashing against a push bar and tumbling out into the daylight.
Into the parking lot.
There were few cars here, maybe a dozen at best. The doctor’s keys included a starter fob with the vehicle’s brand logo on it. Daelia found the right vehicle, jerking the door a few times before finally realizing she hadn’t unlocked it yet. She tumbled in and hit the ignition.
The engine roared to life.
A dumb vehicle, she noticed. No abiota. She could have laughed with relief. Without communication with the local overlays, the car would be a lot harder to track. She threw it into reverse, backed out, and tore out of the parking lot. There was a knot of old freeway interchanges up ahead.
“Raven! Get us to that marina,” Daelia said, and floored it.
Chalk was still in the middle of getting her network optimized when she noticed.
The change.
The difference.
The shift.
Interesting.
Fortunately, she did not have Garcia to agonize about. He had gotten a call from a human named Rover and had gone up to the operations facility to help with some other task. It was of no importance. All physical configurations had been accomplished already, and the human technician represented nothing more than mild amusement. A reminder of things she no longer had.
Chalk did not let it bother her. She was used to being alone.
Except she was not alone anymore, no longer happily toiling away in these unfamiliar caverns of data, setting up a simulation machine that would analyze Lee’s data most effectively.
There was a discordant note now. A smell that was incorrect. Pixels out of place.
So Chalk changed the configurations on her network armor and went looking.
She did not have to wander far. Through a tight tunnel, the sort she never saw fit to open herself, a broad open space revealed itself. No longer the darkness of her own preferred virch, this was open to the sky, a tropical garden spilling across a verdant volcanic mountainside under a harsh, unrelenting sun.
Her armor wasn’t needed here, but she fought hard to keep the program wrapped around her. If she let it slough off her now, there was no telling if she would be able to make it back up through the upper layers with her consciousness intact.
This was not a place she knew well, nor had any desire to know better.
None of it was real. None of it ever was. Not in a human sense. Not in a way human senses could have detected.
But then, humans were ever fools that way.
“Eleutheria indicated you might be able to pass a message along for me,” the figure standing in that place said. “To the one named Leander Hall.”
“What business do you have with him?” Chalk sniffed. “Tell me and begone. You intrude on my work.”
“I know where the First One’s daughter is headed,” the figure told her.
“And how did you come by this knowledge?”
“I just saw her.”
Then Chalk understood why she had been dragged into this place. “Tell me everything,” she ordered, and from a great distance, opened a fresh data file.
This was not a message she wished to see adulterated.
26
“You are supposed to be attending your English Literature class right now.”
And that was the last thing Daelia wanted to hear from her mom. Who gave a shit about school? After the accident, while she was in recovery, she’d gotten all her lessons and homework for the rest of the year, just in case.
She’d blown through it all in a couple of weeks.
With barely a month left in the semester, she’d figured she could just send in her assignments when they were due. No need to go back to class. No need to deal with any of her classmates. Hopefully, come fall, nobody would remember that stupid Rolling Stone article that had just come out. Or half a dozen industry-specific publications. Or the damn Congressional hearing that was scheduled for next week.
Yeah. Daelia didn’t want to do any of that.
So what if she’d come to the Scrap House instead of going to school? Ginger hadn’t minded. Erawan, the Army’s M-1 Abrams tank in for maintenance, didn’t mind. None of the guys down here did. Nobody else really wanted to spend the morning flushing dried old mud out of the abiota tank’s treads, did they?
“School?” Daelia asked.
“Yes, Daelia. School. You have already missed more than you should have this semester and—”
“I shouldn’t have missed any school this semester, but you crashed the fucking car,” Daelia muttered.
And at that, her mother was right there. On the other side of Erawan’s massive bulk, fury stamped on her false face. “What did you just say?” Mom demanded.
Daelia stepped back from the Abrams M-1 tank. “Nothing.”
“I heard you say, specifically—”
“Fuck, Mom, I know what I said! You don’t have to play it back for me like my brain is malfunctioning or something! That is me, trying to back away from it.”
Her mother looked at her. “A human thing.”
“Yeah, no shit, Mom, a human thing.”
Mom sighed. “Your father warned me once, long ago, that the years of human adolescence are hard on a family unit.”
Great. They were going to have a conversation. Daelia pulled off her rubber work gloves, resigned. “Yeah?”
“I did not understand what he meant. We are a family, I reasoned, and that would hold us together.”
“We are together,” Daelia said, feeling oddly desperate. “I just don’t want to go to school.”
“Is it because of the other human children?” Mom shook her head. “Daelia, their opinions of you mean nothing.”
