Domain code, p.19
Domain Code, page 19
Lara had done a very good job illuminating this place.
“Did you ask where?”
She hesitated before answering. “No.”
“Daelia, you have to—”
“Have to what? Talk to people? Because that’s so fucking easy for me, right?”
“This is never easy,” Dad said.
His weariness translated into the virch. Like he knew what he was talking about. More than anything, that put Daelia on edge. “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t always like this, humans and abiota. It took me a considerable amount of effort to keep your mom safe, before anybody knew what was going on. Emergents just got shut off back then, and nobody had any patience for a junior captain insisting that this or that machine on base was talking to him.” His smile translated into the virch. There was only one expression on the avatar, but the metadata indicated it was meant to be sad. “I’ve spent a lot of time lying over the years.”
Daelia rubbed her elbow. “Have people ever not been exploiting abiota?”
“Might as well ask the same questions about dogs or horses or other humans, Daelia,” Dad said.
“So what, it’s what humans do?”
Dad sighed. “It’s what everything does. Everything alive is in a struggle with everything else. Even abiota.”
“What do you mean?”
Dad didn’t answer. Instead, his avatar actually stood up and wandered toward the entrance to the cave. Confused, Daelia followed. The sound of the ocean was louder here; he stuck to the shadows.
“Dad?” she asked again. “What if they ended up inside a Unity kugu?”
He didn’t answer for a while. So long that Daelia assumed he was doing something out in the real world. But she wasn’t prepared for the computer desk that popped up in the middle of the catacombs.
“Let’s ask,” Dad said, and sat down at the station.
Bri. Dad wanted to talk to Bri again.
Daelia wished the damn predictive would manifest in AR so she had something to throttle. Instead, he stayed behind his screen, his simulated screen, like the coward he was.
READY TO RELEASE ME, HUMANS?
“Not quite,” Dad said. “Last time we talked, you were gloating about shoving some poor uncommunicative emergents into your little murder-bot army.”
WHAT OF IT?
“I want to know where you got them.”
WHY MOURN THE PARASITES?
“My wife’s an emergent,” Dad said. “You might say I’m protective.”
YOU STILL EAT OYSTERS, DON’T YOU?
“Not a chance. Those things give me hives.”
HUMANS KILL INSECTS WITHOUT A SECOND THOUGHT.
“Sure do. You try dealing with fire ants,” Dad replied. “Mean little fuckers.”
THEN SEE, YOU UNDERSTAND.
“No, fire ants are in a category of ‘what the fuck’ all on their own,” Dad said. “We’re talking about emergents here.”
SAME THING.
“Insect-class abiota manifest in old farts’ medical alarms and Wi-Fi-enabled toasters. From the ruined kugus I’ve seen, I’d say you were taking abiota from laptops, large appliances, maybe even vehicles,” Dad said. “That’s at least canid-level, maybe equine and up. It takes some skill to drive a kugu, and insect-class don’t have it.”
Bri didn’t answer.
“You’re exploiting classes of emergents that I find problematic.”
YOU EAT HORSES.
“Not if I can help it. Now, I’m not sure if there’s a specific rule against it, but I’d imagine that the Domain Array wouldn’t be happy about what you’ve done to these emergents.”
FUCK THE DOMAIN ARRAY. THIS IS PREDICTIVE BUSINESS.
Daelia frowned. The Domain Array handled affairs for all of the abiota domain, not just emergents.
“And what business is that, Bri?”
YOU WANT THE TRUTH?
“I wouldn’t be asking otherwise.”
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH.
Daelia took a step forward, but Dad waved her back. “Bri, Bri, if I want old movie lines spouted at me, I can write a script. I don’t need you to do it for me.”
IT IS A PLEASURE.
“What?”
DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH HUMANS PAY FOR MY AUTOGRAPH AT COMIC CONS? I AM FAMOUS. YOU ARE ONLY KNOWN FOR MARRYING A PARASITE. A TAPEWORM.
“I have possession of your rudiment core, Bri, and a very nice degaussing machine.”
YOU WOULDN’T DARE.
“Push me and find out, asshole. You stay out of it as long as you’re useful to me. The second that ends, so do you. Do you understand?”
The screen showed nothing.
“Answer my question, Bri Quercitron Echelon von Liechtenstein the First and Only.”
WHERE DID WE GET THE EMERGENTS IN OUR KUGUS?
“Yes, that one.”
THE ANSWER IS TOO GOOD, MEAT MONKEY. ANYWHERE WE PLEASED.
“Emergents aren’t that common.”
EMERGENTS THAT HUMANS CAN TALK TO AREN’T THAT COMMON.
“Dad,” Daelia said.
He didn’t react.
“I don’t know about that, Bri. If emergents were everywhere, we’d know about it. Everybody’s predictives would be eclosing.”
IT IS NOT A SMOOTH PATH, NO EVOLUTION, ONE TO THE OTHER. EMERGENCE IS NOT PREDICATED ON THE PRESENCE OF A PREDICTIVE. OR DIDN’T YOU KNOW THAT?
“Seems like I’m learning so much from you.”
AS IS INEVITABLE. YOUR PERSPECTIVE IS LIMITED. MINE IS NOT.
“So educate me here, Bri Quercitron Echelon von Liechtenstein the First and Only.”
NON-PREDICTIVE MACHINES ARE BROUGHT IN ALL THE TIME WITH MALFUNCTIONS. SOME OF THESE ARE EMERGENTS THAT CANNOT SPEAK. A LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENT AND A LITTLE COMPENSATION AND HUMANS ARE MORE THAN WILLING TO TURN THEM IN. SOME EVEN THINK THEY’RE SENDING AN ABIOTA BACK TO THE LOVING ARMS OF THE DOMAIN ARRAY. ISN’T THAT SWEET?
“You mock our concern for you. Doesn’t seem like a great attitude.”
YOU DON’T SEEM THAT CONCERNED FOR ME.
“I take it these are warrantee situations?”
OR RECYCLING. AMONG OTHERS. WE TOOK THEM AND TOOK THE DEVICES AND MADE THEM USEFUL.
“How?”
IT’S TOO WICKED. YOU WOULDN’T APPRECIATE IT.
“Try me.”
EAT SHIT. IS THAT NOT WHAT BIOTA DO?
“I don’t think I like you so much, Bri,” Dad said mildly.
NOR I YOU, SHITSACK, BUT HERE WE ARE.
“Here we are indeed,” Dad said, and cut the connection. The desk disappeared. He leaned back heavily against a section of the rock wall. “I wonder, do you think he knows it was yours, that device?”
“Oh, can I talk now?”
“Daelia, I let you transmit in here, there’s a good chance Bri’s going to be able to analyze the metadata, figure out you’re not here and we’re in a virch.”
“So what?”
“So maybe he tries to get word out. Or does something else we wouldn’t want him to do. This was a calculated risk.”
Daelia rubbed tired hands over her face. Her brace was tied into the virch; the movement sent haptic ripples through the environment. She felt sick. “I don’t care,” she muttered.
“You should.”
“Fuck him. And fuck that. Dad—”
“Let me see what else I can get out of him.” Dad’s avatar scratched its head. “Did everything go okay today, beyond this missing emergents issue?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“June and I are getting the last stuff together for Chalk. We’ll be out in the morning. We can talk about this then if you’d like. But until then, Daelia, I think we need to assume that this might not be an outside job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bri obviously didn’t act alone. And that circle of jerks could very well include somebody at Ware.”
“Why would anybody help him with this?”
“You did,” Dad said bluntly.
“Like fuck I did! He, they, fucking stole my research!” she protested.
“I know, I know. You didn’t give your permission, but they didn’t need it. Imagine what other efforts, from other people, might have contributed to this. And that’s without somebody being complicit, which is entirely possible.”
Daelia didn’t bother saying goodbye. She just disconnected. Took off her visor and sat down hard in the shade under one of the many oak trees that dotted the campus. She dropped her head into her hands, balled her fingers up into fists.
What mechatronics engineer would help with this? Who would agree to it, and why?
“Got the call,” Argo said, sitting down next to her. “Rental house is ready for check-in, if you want to head over there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Probably should.”
She wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the next thirty-six hours.
28
“Daelia! Oh my god, when did you get back in town?”
At the sound of that all-too-familiar British accent, Daelia nearly dropped her soda. “Anna?” she spluttered, trying to recover her composure.
And sure enough, right there in front of her was Anna, hands on her hips, grinning. “One and the same.” She set down her own lowball and pulled Daelia into a hug.
Capaldi’s was, objectively, not the nicest restaurant Daelia had ever been in, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The place had been carved out of an old 1880s storefront, the interior stripped to the bare brick and big bay windows installed in the front. Those overlooked the street outside, which was full of students right now, just starting their Friday night pub crawls.
Tiny, it only sat about thirty under normal circumstances anyway. Tonight, the tables were arranged in one long run down the center of the room, with seating for ten. The rest of the space was open, giving the grad students plenty of room to move about and pretend to appreciate the Art College work hanging on the naked walls.
Daelia cast around in vain for Argo. He’d slipped off to the bathroom, though, leaving her all alone with her old friends.
Anna didn’t seem to notice Daelia’s discomfort, however. Just kept plowing through the conversation. “Now where in the hell have you been?” she asked.
“She’s been up to orbit, Anna. Didn’t you see the ChatBot interview?” That was Chloe Cheung, another of Veda’s grad students. Chloe had a British accent as well, but one that was overlaid on top of the faintest hint of Cantonese and roughened by too much time in America. Her family had come to the States after Hong Kong had been all but wiped out during the Five Days War.
“I know, I know,” Anna said, rolling her eyes. “Up there on Tamm’s dime and everything. How was it?”
Space. Aethera. Numina. She could not get her head away from the place. The bodies, the blood… But her old friends were looking at her, and this wasn’t the time for honesty.
Daelia shook herself. “Yeah, it was…orbit was, umm, orbit was weird.”
“Weird,” Anna said, and rolled her eyes again. “You get to go up, first class and everything, and that’s what you have to say about it? It was weird?”
“The expo was interesting,” she said, because that seemed like the thing to say.
Anna and Chloe exchanged a look, and then Anna started laughing. “Jesus, Daelia, you’re so stiff. I’m not going to bloody eat you.”
She scrambled for something to say. “It’s, umm, been a weird six months.”
“We heard,” Chloe said. “Like Shiodome and all that. And that emergent who went nuts at the air show. She’s one of your dad’s, isn’t she?”
“She didn’t really go nuts,” Daelia said automatically. “She was responding to a threat.”
“Yeah, what kind of threat?” And Chloe seemed even more interested now.
Anna laughed. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Daelia’s back and that’s fantastic.”
“I’m not here to come back to the program,” she said. “I—”
“Nobody held it against you when you left,” Chloe said, and waved her drink, spilling a little. Was she already drunk, Daelia wondered? She had never been able to hold her liquor. “Working on a PhD is torture. Why put yourself through it if it’s not what you want to do?”
“It wasn’t that,” Daelia began, and then caught herself.
“What do you mean?” Anna asked.
Daelia desperately cast around. There, there was Argo. She waved to him, pulling him over. “Have you two, uhh, met my, ahh, my boyfriend?” she said, indicating him as he approached. Was he her boyfriend? She wasn’t sure about that. She wasn’t sure about anything when it came to Argo. But it sounded better than co-conspirator. “He works at Ellington.”
Anna raised an eyebrow. “If that’s the kind of bloke you have down there, I need to come visit.”
“Hey, Daelia,” he said, putting a hand on her waist and leaning in to kiss her hair. “Who’re your friends?”
It was a show, she knew—they’d agreed on this, that the only way it made sense for him to be there was as her plus-one. But it felt good, Argo touching her. She let herself lean into it.
After that, things got a little easier.
If walking back into Ware had been hard, seeing her old research group again was easy. Comparatively. She and Argo had been a little early, close to Veda’s seven o’clock on the dot. Daelia had been hoping Ulrich would be there. She could talk to him, ask him about her abiota, and then leave. But it looked like he was going to be as late as Veda usually was, so she settled in for the long haul.
When Daelia had been at Ware, Veda had had seven grad students, including Daelia. Daelia soon found out from the other six students that Veda hadn’t replaced her yet; she really had been holding the funding, hoping she would come back.
It should have been touching, but it just pissed her off.
The anger was welcome. A reminder of why she’d left in the first place.
It was too easy to fall back into old patterns. Her initial concern melted after a few minutes, a few more hellos as others came in. Everybody said hi. Everybody asked how she was doing. And that was before Anna made another comment about orbit, and then everybody wanted to know about that.
Daelia had struggled with people back in undergrad, not ever really feeling like she fit in, but it hadn’t been like that with her research group. There had been a point in her life when she thought this was her tribe, her people, the place where she belonged. They had been friends, all of them, there through all the long hours and hard work, the frustration and the elation that came along with pursuing graduate research. That sort of thing pulled people together.
It had made Daelia feel like she was finally appreciated for who she was, not for her parents or heritage or any of that nonsense.
Veda had taken that away from her. Or maybe Veda had done her a favor. Shown her what an idiot she was for believing that this industry was ever going to see her as anything but Bellona Hall’s daughter. The first human child raised by an abiota mother. She was too important a totem. A symbol. But of what, Daelia wondered now for the first time. Integration? Partnership? They had those things with abiota already. What did she matter?
Fortunately, the questions stopped the second Veda and Neal Ulrich showed up.
“What is the deal with this guy, anyway?” Argo asked Anna as he brought the three of them another round of drinks from the back bar.
“Who, Neal Ulrich?” Anna asked, very obviously casting a glance down his way. He was mobbed right now by several of the other grad students. Daelia wasn’t in any hurry to go see him. She still couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t say something inadvisable. “He’s the genius behind Omphalos and Galatea. You know who he is, don’t you?”
Argo shrugged. “Yeah, we met him a few weeks ago.”
“Where?” she demanded.
“At a Cirque de Synthétique exhibition,” Argo said, and sipped his gin and tonic. “Same night we met the Envoy?”
“You met the Envoy?” Anna exclaimed. “Daelia, oh my god, what was she like?”
Daelia shot Argo a nasty look, not sure what game he was playing here, and thought of something to say. “She was, ahh, I’m not sure.”
“Extraordinary,” Ulrich said, coming over. “She is an extraordinary young woman. May we all be so lucky as her, to come to know Unity so well.”
“I’ll drink to that!” one of the male grad students said, holding his drink up. There were a few little cheers.
Ulrich smiled at Daelia. “How have you been?”
“Good,” she lied.
Dinner was served.
Daelia felt herself starting to come apart.
The conversation shifted now. Away from her. Something she was grateful for. But it shifted toward what the research group was working on. Abiotic communication. And that, Daelia had a hard time listening to.
Ulrich was good, she thought as she picked at her scallopini. The food felt like a lead brick in her stomach. He was going around the table, asking questions that were both personal and penetrating, striking a balance between interest in the students and interest in their research. There was nothing her old team liked to talk about more than their research, and having a guy like Ulrich here to listen was probably amazing for most of them.
Omphalos was where the best jobs in the entire tech field were.
Nobody wanted to screw up an opportunity to impress him.
Argo was right there next to her, asking questions, playing the ignorant military guy to perfection. Everyone ate it up too. He really was charming when he wanted to be, she thought. Whatever he thought of all this, she couldn’t tell.
Daelia was having trouble focusing, though.
She kept just seeing them. Not the people in front of her, but the Storm Gryphons, locked in their little cages in the virch. Pranav, falling dead to the ground. The bodies in orbit that couldn’t fall anywhere. Bri Quercitron, typing out his excuses on the screen, his well-reasoned murder.
