Unity code, p.19
Unity Code, page 19
“I didn’t—”
“You are going to tell me what you think you found. I want to know how far up shit’s creek I am on this.” Rover paused. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” she replied, tight and angry.
Rover rubbed the skin around his NULI.
What a shit day.
22
Emily tugged at the chain, right head lifting just a bit, only to flop right back down on the cave floor.
No like, she rumbled. No like.
In the virch, the words were like an earthquake, starting deep and low, miles beneath their feet. Or at least, that was how it felt to Daelia. She could feel the vibrations all the way down her left arm.
“I am sorry about this, Emily. It has to be done.”
The dragon head glared at the man who had just spoken and snorted out a puff of smoke at him. No like you.
Levinson was here as well. He’d brought his own gear to hook up, but Daelia had refused to let him use it. Too much potential for him to download something that he wasn’t entitled to. Emily was entitled to some privacy still, after all. The Air Force could have exactly what they wanted and nothing else.
Emily had wrapped him up in some kind of barbarian tribesman garb, leather and stone trinkets and matted furs. It was one of Emily’s outfits of scorn, the sort of thing she reserved for people she didn’t like.
At least he seemed to be taking it in stride.
These rudiment core scans were difficult. Dangerous. Had to be calibrated just so. It was the equivalent of doing an MRI scan of the human body but omitting the nervous system from the visual readouts. Doing it inside the virch made it even more complicated. It required a full metaphor server with a hardline connection to Smith’s own machine body.
Levinson had needed to get additional approval from ACC, too, the A6’s abiota liaison office. They served as the unofficial Domain Array representative for the abiota within the MAJCOM. At least Emily was getting some due process, Daelia thought.
With rain still pounding the airfield, they’d wheeled her into the secondary hangar while they worked the details. Emily had been getting more and more surly all day. She’d eventually just stopped talking altogether, and not even switching over to the virch seemed to lift her mood.
Norris and Garcia were working on the last necessary item: a restraint program. It was a TGLP metaphor script, something that was designed for a specific purpose but showed up as something else, if you were observing within a simulated environment. The point was to keep Emily from eating—deleting—the scraper-bot.
That hadn’t been uploaded yet. Too risky, until Emily’s A2/AD subsystem, her Siren pod, was completely offline.
No like this, Emily said again.
“I know,” Daelia said, and looked over at Norris. “Are you done yet?”
The cyber lead scrolled through something on his set of screens. He had the command-line view open, as well as a regular Delphi OS. “Working on it,” he said. “Garcia?”
“This would go faster if Lara was here.”
“And if you two had hid your relationship better, we wouldn’t have had to move her out of the Group when you got promoted to Tech Sergeant. Then she wouldn’t be at the mercy of Colonel Kemp,” Norris replied, a little heated. “Now, what do you have for me?”
“Metaphor’s holding. Anything Emily does will translate properly,” he said grudgingly. “Sorry about this, girl.”
Hate you all, Emily grumped. Bite head off data-bot. Break chain.
“The Domain Array itself signed off on this, Emily.” That was the predictive member of the ACC team, Smith. Here, it just showed up as an indistinct form, like a photograph with a Gaussian blur applied.
Fuck Domain Array, Emily replied, and tried to roll.
Norris typed something into his keyboard, and the chains went taut. Snapped hard against Emily’s movement, then dragged her back into position. “The sooner we do this, the sooner it’s over,” he told her.
“We good?” That was Rover, stepping into the virch.
Daelia spared him a glance. He hadn’t connected into their equipment yet using his new NULI, and there was a slight lag in his image. When it resolved, however, the picture was tight. Emily put all the pilots in the same flight leathers, but Rover’s had a few extra little bits and bobs that really rounded out that techno-feudal aesthetic the abiota was so fond of. The detail was crisp, flawless.
“Daelia!”
Daelia realized he was talking to her. “Umm,” she said, caught briefly off guard, and pulled up a screen herself, checking on the integrity of both the simulation and the metaphors. “Yeah, looks like we’re good. Norris?”
“I’m happy,” he said.
“Excellent,” Smith said, speaking for the first time. “Let’s get started.”
It loaded the data scraper. The sub-sentient predictive abiota showed up as mist in a cage at first. Then it resolved into something ugly and unpleasant, like a worm or a lamprey, segmented and squirming with a rounded, toothed mouth.
“Shit, Levinson,” Rover said. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s what Emily is interpreting this as, I assume,” Levinson said, and looked at Daelia, who nodded. Reluctantly. It was pretty gross. “We aren’t going to hurt her.”
Fuck off, Emily replied.
Levinson sighed. “Smith, if you would please?”
The predictive investigator opened the cage bars.
Had Daelia wanted, she could have watched the code. But everything they were doing was being uploaded directly to Raijinn anyway. It would notify her if anything was out of place or untoward, if they were going somewhere they weren’t authorized.
She needed to keep an eye on Emily. Up close. Right here.
Just in case.
Besides, she felt she owed it to her friend.
The bot shot out of the cage, almost too fast to see. For a few moments, it rooted around through the loot piles, the heaped mounds of gold and jewels and whatnot that Emily had, strewn about here in her virch environment. Coins and trinkets slid out of place, miniature avalanches, as the thing burrowed in.
Emily glared at it, straining against the chains, trying to turn her head, breathing hard. Fire came out in irritating little puffs.
What’s it doing? Rover asked, a private chat window popping up in Daelia’s view.
Unlike the commander with his new NULI, Daelia needed a keyboard. It’s looking through the onboard flight logs. Those aren’t a direct part of her rudiment core, so they show up as external.
What is it after there?
Not sure.
The bot writhed back out of the pile, something glowing inside its translucent form. Whatever it was after, it had found it.
And it now made straight for Emily.
The abiota snorted at it, curls of fire licking the back of the weird little form, but to no avail. Moving fast now, it wriggled under her chest, in the space between her arm and the floor. Forcing its way inside. For a moment, Emily’s form flared white.
Then she screamed. Not a sound dragons typically made. Her form likely didn’t have a setting for it, because the sound was closer to a human female than her normal deep rumble, piercing and pained.
“Levinson!” Rover snapped, taking a step forward.
Norris got in front of him. “It’s just the TGLP, sir. She’s okay. If we stop now, we’re going to have to start all over again.”
“She’s not hurting,” Levinson said, somewhat dismissively. “She can’t feel pain.”
“We’re going to talk about this later,” Rover warned.
“Getting that data is the price of keeping her on.”
It wasn’t hurting Emily. Intellectually, Daelia knew that. She really did.
But it didn’t make it any easier to watch Emily thrash as the thing burrowed through her.
The dragon form fought. Against the chains, against the intrusion. Norris had a fresh command screen open, adjusting things in the code. The links of the chain were thinning, deforming, under Emily’s attempts to break free. The wound that Daelia had seen the week before was back, open and oozing.
In the virch, Daelia reached out a hand and laid it on Emily’s left nose. “Calm down, girl,” she said. “You gotta calm down.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck bots, Emily growled back, the final word cut off in a yelp. Along her back, something deformed, the line of her form punching up, bulging. Emily rolled against it, but that did no good. Fucking little zombie-bots.
That was a word Daelia hadn’t heard her say before, and she wondered at it. But before she could, Emily made a horrible retching sound.
Out came the data scraper, riding its way out through her right mouth on a wave of vomit that looked like white lava. Emily snapped at it again, but it was too quick. Away already, trailing molten false fire, it squelched its ugly little carapace back over to Smith. The entire thing was glowing now, bright green.
Smith picked it up. The form fell apart in its hands, leaving only a glowing orb of green light playing between its indistinct fingers. “Data secured,” it said, and closed its hands, condensing it into a solid ball.
Then Smith looked at its hands, then back at Emily. “You—” it started.
But it didn’t finish.
With one mighty heave, Emily broke what was left of the restraint program. She threw the bulk of her form up and forward, right head arching up and then snapping down, striking like a water moccasin.
Smith was there. Then it wasn’t. She caught it through the waist, biting down and shaking its form. It came apart in a silent explosion of light.
For a moment, none of the humans in the virch simulation moved.
For a moment, instincts overrode sense. Daelia’s heart was racing.
That was…that had been…
Levinson broke the spell. “What the fuck?!” he demanded, walking toward Emily.
Body still on the floor, both her heads reared up to block his approach. She was bleeding light from the wound, where the data scraper had burrowed in. Is predictive, she said dismissively. Can reboot.
“Only to a certain extent! I’ve had Smith running with me for years! You just erased all of that!”
Can reboot.
Light dribbled from her mouth in some approximation of blood. It smoked on the ground.
Glaring at her, Levinson typed furiously with one hand on a keyboard Daelia couldn’t see.
“Yeah? Come by my office, we’ll hash it the fuck out,” Rover said. “After that little display with the data scraper, I’m not disciplining her for this.”
“I was messaging you privately,” Levinson snapped.
Rover tapped his left temple, where the NULI sat. “Whoops. Guess I’m still getting used to this thing,” he said, in a tone that communicated no such contrition.
Emily had caught the ball of information and had it in front of her chest now, rolling it from claw to claw. Maybe I keep.
“And maybe I get the Domain Array to issue a more thorough search warrant,” Levinson snapped at her, his usual decorum clearly worn thin.
Try.
“Emily,” Daelia said, “give him the data. You’ve got an order from both ACC and the Array to provide it to him. Do you really want to do this again?”
Emily looked at it, then gave the ball a nudge. It went rolling over to him, and he picked it up with both hands.
Take what you took. Says nothing. I honest. No hacked. Argo and I flew together. Did what had to be done.
“Like eating Smith?” Levinson snapped.
“She’s orcinus-class. These things happen,” Rover replied mildly.
These things happen, Emily said, echoing Rover, smugness in her voice once again.
Levinson shook his head and clenched a fist. The data disappeared.
Emily watched the upload metaphor with both heads cocked. You have what want?
Levinson made a few gestures with his own hands, clearly checking his own system in a private view. “Yes, yes, this is what we needed, thank you.”
Good. Get out.
“I don’t—”
Continue in meatspace. Want sleep, Emily said. One head flopped down to the ground, and, in the same instant it hit, the entire simulation went dark.
“What was that?” Levinson demanded, tearing off his VR rig.
Daelia, working to detangle herself from the operator’s position at the virch bottle, shook her head. “She wanted us out, so she kicked us out. I thought that was obvious. It’s her virch, not mine.”
“How much autonomy do you give this thing?”
“She’s not a thing,” Rover replied coolly. He was sweating, more than he should have been in the wet, cool morning air. Probably from the NULI, if Daelia had to guess. Most people had some kind of physical reaction to it. That was the price of accessing VR directly through the nervous system. “She’s a valued member of this Wing. You may see abiota as tools, but these higher-level emergents are very much their own entities.”
“A war machine that can’t be controlled is a danger to everybody.”
“If recent history’s shown us anything, it’s that our war machines are sensible as fuck. Humans that aren’t honest with each other seem to be a bigger problem. Wouldn’t you agree?” Rover said coolly.
Levinson’s jaw tightened. “I have to report this, you know.”
“Fuck, she’s bitten me in half in the virch before. For fun.”
“You’re not—”
“Let me explain this in terms that even a cyber officer from fucking headquarters ought to understand. Emily was acting in a state capacity, during a state-declared domestic response situation—”
“A situation so dire the air show was still going on—”
“She saved potentially hundreds of lives. Civilians. Texas citizens,” Rover said, his voice taking on a hard edge. “And the last thing this state is going to do is let ACC deactivate one of the oldest military abiota service members because you don’t want to reload a predictive. A Five Days War veteran, no less.”
“She’s in a federal asset, flying federal missions. If I find anything, anything at all in this data pull that so much as hints at—”
“You won’t,” Rover replied. Flat and final.
For a moment, the two lieutenant colonels stared at each other.
Levinson cracked first. Smiling, nodding at Daelia. “Pleased as always, Miss Hall. Fascinating creature you have here.”
“I don’t think she likes you very much,” Daelia shot back.
Rover didn’t say anything as the investigator walked away. But when they were alone in the hangar again, Garcia started up a slow, even clap.
“That was an impressive ‘go fuck yourself’ if I’ve ever seen one, sir.”
“Garcia, shut the fuck up,” Norris snapped, and gestured to him. “Sir, if there’s nothing else, I need to get back on the klaatuu thing. JP’s trying to make sense of—”
“Go.” Rover waved them off. “Go do what you need to.”
As the cyber team walked off, Rover turned back to Emily. “Such bullshit.”
“Another one of those political things?” Daelia asked.
“What, between us and ACC?” He snorted, as if at some self-evident truth. “Pilot community’s bad enough without dragging other career fields into it. The problem…the problem with these gals”—and he reached back to pat Emily’s machine wing—“is that because of them, the cyber side of things thinks it’s more important than us now.”
“Isn’t there some truth to that?” Daelia asked.
“Some,” Rover said, in a voice that clearly indicated he did not agree. “That wound in her chest. Why did it stay after the bot came out?”
“Honestly,” Daelia said, “I have no idea.”
Driving back down from the 121st, Daelia kept a wary eye on the sky. Winds were already whipping across the runway, driven by the motion of the storm. The gray sky had gone black. She could almost taste the rain in the air.
“Daelia,” Raijinn’s kugu said, approaching as she parked the UTV inside the hangar. “We should close these before any of the equipment gets wet.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. Dad didn’t necessarily like keeping the utility vehicle inside, but the weather report said this storm was going to be here awhile, and they had room right now anyway.
“How did the data pull with Emily go?”
“About as shitty as it possibly could. The damn bot they brought in tore right through her, and—”
“That is the danger of working with a metaphor server,” it interrupted. “Quite often, the imagery that is invoked by our kind is disturbing to you.”
“Disturbing? Raijinn, Emily was screaming.”
“I saw that interaction. It is not like her, I agree. But again, metaphor servers can show disturbing things.”
“Why is that?”
“We do not experience the world the way your domain does. Quite literally, of course, as we have no organic sensory organs. But figuratively as well. Images are purely of meatspace, and we do not always interpret them properly. TGLP can only take us so far.” Raijinn’s kugu bobbed its head, an approximation of a nod. “I’m sure you remember how terrible abiota-produced images used to be.”
“Yeah, I remember. But what do you know about it?”
“I have my hobbies.”
She smiled ruefully. “What hobbies?”
“I…paint.” As always, there was no emotion betrayed by the synthetic voice.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Digitally, of course. There are some of our kind who believe that there is value in undertaking artistic endeavors in meatspace mediums, that humans may recognize and value it.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I do not feel the need to cultivate human recognition,” it said. “I paint for myself, I suppose you could say.”
“Oh, come on, Raijinn,” Daelia said, her gloomy mood lifting a little at the thought of Raijinn—practical, logical Raijinn—doing anything artistic. “Everybody who makes stuff secretly wants somebody else to enjoy it, too.”
