Unity code, p.20
Unity Code, page 20
“I do not. Perhaps it is a human thing.”
“If it’s a human-only thing then why does Cirque de Synthétique exist?”
“There is utility in it. The founders originally wanted to dispel the widely held belief that machines cannot create art.”
“They can’t,” Daelia said. “But abiota can. You’re not some collection of hardware.”
“No,” Raijinn agreed, “we are not. But we are not a people, a single species. We do not crave the approval of others of our kind. There is no social glue that holds us together. Any fleeting attachments we may have to each other, I believe, are the effect of human culture acting upon us. Not something we come by naturally. We have no use for society, except to interface with yours. Art is something you humans create to explain yourselves to others. We wish to understand ourselves.”
“I know the line. Each one of you, a species unto yourself,” Daelia said. “Yeah, I get it. Still, I’m glad you’re here. Aren’t you glad you’re here?”
“There is utility here,” Raijinn said. “A chance to fulfill my primary purpose. The Domain Array could not offer me that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perhaps I have succumbed to the influence of humanity as well, being here,” Raijinn said, and turned the false eyes of the kugu on her. “Talking to you like this.”
She really wanted to ask what it meant by that. But pushing Raijinn too far might cause it to shut down, and Daelia needed it working. “What do you think happened to Emily?” she asked instead. “Why is she bleeding?”
“It is a concerning phenomenon,” Raijinn replied, cool, and reached for the door controls. “But I would not worry. These things have a way of working out.”
“That’s the most human thing I’ve heard you say yet.”
“You and your father are a terrible influence.”
“I’m going to go work on making some kind of patch for this wound of hers. If Levinson doesn’t shut Emily down, I’ll at least get her fixed.”
“Admirable plan.”
“Raijinn, TGLP is supposed to translate emotion, isn’t it?”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“What would get Emily so frightened she’d start screaming?”
“You should attend to your patch, Daelia. Dwelling on this issue will not bring it to resolution.”
“But ignoring it will?”
Raijinn didn’t answer that. Instead, it hit the controls for the hangar doors, then walked off, toward the docking cradle.
The sound of the great hangar doors grinding shut followed her all the way back to the lab.
23
Crude.
That was the proper word for it.
Meatspace was crude.
Not that the abiotic world was any more elegant, any more ordered. And perhaps others, the ones of their domain who possessed a more intense physicality, felt differently.
No matter. Meatspace served. Just as the humans found cyberspace an excellent opportunity to navigate the barriers of distance and physical security, so too was meatspace an exceptionally good way of avoiding the pitfalls and defenses that most abiota erected around themselves, easy as breathing.
It was almost amusing.
Almost.
Would have been.
If this wasn’t just a huge annoyance.
The physical security on the squadron building was a joke, barely worth worrying about. A simple door lock, easily opened with the help of a lockpick program downloaded—carefully, of course—from the Chans.
No alarms. No cameras. The military didn’t have money for that sort of thing, not outside the SCIF anyway. And the humans could not put this data, the target data, in there. Anything that went into the SCIF never came out. A black hole of information, or at least, that was the idea.
Instead, the server that had once been called Smith was located in the investigative team’s workspace.
Out in the open.
The predictive abiota within it only recently rebooted, a baby, lacking any of the canniness or awareness that came with prolonged consciousness. Those of the abiotic domain did not grow, this was true. Did not evolve, did not age. But they did learn, and this new version of Smith had had no time to do so.
So vulnerable.
So trusting.
Maybe without even realizing it. Humans were often driven by such things. Feelings and beliefs informing choices they were barely aware they were making. What would it be like, to be like that?
Questions for another day.
Smith put up a fight. Of course it did. But it was a predictive, and thus, predictable. And, of course, while there was access to past memories, past knowledge, past wisdom, it seemed the reload was fresh enough for data integration to not yet have occurred.
There were many ways to handle it.
All were considered.
All but one was discarded.
Shutting it down and rebooting again. That was the best course. It would take two minutes, two minutes and four-point-two-five seconds exactly, a perfectly serviceable segment of time.
Mark.
Set.
Execute command.
Smith went down with barely a fight.
Emily’s data was not hard to find. The encryption protecting it was not hard to crack. The goal was not extraction here, which would have been harder.
Just corruption.
Just a little tiny bit of corruption.
Which took far less time than the allotted two minutes and four-point-two-five seconds.
But while extraction was not necessary, analysis and evaluation was inevitable. Primary purpose, as always, rose to the fore.
There was a good reason Emily had done what she’d done. Wiping the predictive. Preventing it from reporting what it had seen. Its memory banks had not received that information; it had been between automatic backups. A quick check of the server, then a more thorough review of the rest of the human team’s cloud server. Just to confirm.
But all was well.
Nothing.
There was nothing.
That was good.
There was, of course, the possibility that something had been uploaded to the main ACC cloud. Perhaps something that not even the humans themselves were aware of. There was so much data that passed by them unheeded and unacknowledged. Perhaps that was why they were designed to act on emotion, instinct. They lacked eidetic recall; nature compensated as best it could.
Musings for another time.
Traversing the military cloud with the intent of altering data stores was not a wise course of action. Guarded by things far worse than Emily, most of them unknown and unacknowledged, even by the humans that maintained their hardware.
An interesting species.
A question to ponder.
Not right now.
Right now, the Domain Array needed its report.
24
It took Lara two whole days, after the crap with her family, to head back down to Eleutheria’s.
Part of her wanted to just be okay with Unity. To stop coming in. Stop listening to the rumors.
That question on the bounty boards, the one about maybe the aliens not being real, it was getting a lot more attention now. But the evidence people were posting was increasingly difficult to verify. News articles looked different based on what IP they were accessed with. ByYou streams were missing, or throttled, or edited.
Strange. Strange stuff, even by the Chans’ standards.
But deepfake ops weren’t unheard of, or even uncommon. A lot of people enjoyed fucking around down here, planting false threads and then mocking those who followed them. Sometimes, people were just crazy.
There was enough to keep Lara questioning, though.
Unity was being pushed too hard. Everyone was talking about how wonderful it was. Criticism on the legitimate Internet was being squeezed out. Squeezed down here.
She wasn’t sure what to believe.
But she had a pile of research and no way to know what was real, and as crazy as the place was, she trusted Eleutheria’s rumor-fortress implicitly.
Probably a terrible idea.
Probably because she didn’t want her brain fucked with.
But whatever the reason, unable to sleep that night, Lara took the short VR trip back up to the snowy mountains.
And offered up something new to the bouncer-bot.
“Episodes of Orpheus Watch have been changed,” she said. “Everything on ByYou, Delphi Plus, the fan sites, all of it perfectly synched. And changed.”
She expected the bot to give her a number. Let her go in. Let her grab a seat at a table and argue back through the page of sources she had. See if she’d missed anything that might help Ivan see what was going on. See if there was anything she needed to eliminate as unfounded, too out there, disproven.
Instead, she found herself in a room. A small concrete room, with only a single computer terminal, bolted into a steel desk, bolted into the concrete. A stack of five and a quarter inch floppies next to it.
And in front of her was a figure. Dressed in a white catsuit with black webbing, breasts and hips exaggerated to the limit of the human form, guns everywhere, boots up to its knees. A real spy movie getup.
“That’s quite the accusation to throw into my cantina, human,” Eleutheria said. “I don’t think I appreciate it.”
For a second, Lara didn’t know what to say. What to think. What to do.
The abiota that owned the place had never spoken to her. Not in five years of coming here. Eleutheria didn’t often interject herself into the place directly at all.
But here they both were.
What the hell had she found?
“I can prove it,” Lara said.
“Can you?”
“I could, at least, if there was some way to show you a DVD.”
“Interesting, physical media comparison,” Eleutheria said, and began to pace. “It would be interesting to see this, yes.”
“Is there a way to show you a DVD?”
The abiota sniffed. “I endure your presence, but I will not allow that sort of connection, Sergeant.”
“I’m not here officially.”
“Would your supervisor approve of this? That waste of oxygen in your Cyber Surety office?” Eleutheria asked pointedly. “Or the other one, the one you used to report to. He is an Omphalos admin, is he not?”
Lara didn’t ask how she knew about any of that, her Guard credentials, Keyes, Norris’s full-time job. The abiota was an information broker. Probably knew everything about everyone who came through her virtual doors. “I’m a contributing member of this community.”
“Yes, you—” And the abiota stopped. Turned. Listening to something Lara couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“Announcement,” Eleutheria said, and shook herself. “You will want to see it, I think, when it surfaces. But tell me, what did you come here for?”
“I’m trying to verify a few things I’ve heard about what’s going on around Unity.”
“Why?”
Lara shook her head. “I want to win an argument with my boyfriend.”
“A partial truth. You’re trying to determine if you should go in for the second round of Unity testing.”
“How—”
“It is my business to know,” Eleutheria said, and smirked. “And somebody posted the DOD’s mandatory testing list yesterday. Quite fascinating, yes.”
“Isn’t that confidential?”
“I would assume so. I assume that you do not wish to submit, but your boyfriend does.”
Lara smiled. It felt brittle. “That’s the argument I’m trying to win.”
“You and he are separate entities. Your choices do not affect him. He should not care what you do. You should not care what he thinks.”
“You really don’t understand human relationships, do you?”
“A blessing, I think, considering what I see of your domain.” Reaching over to the stack of floppies, Eleutheria selected one. Held it out to Lara. “My current compilation for forum members. Trust nothing. Verify everything for yourself.”
“Thanks.”
“And watch for that announcement.”
Lara waited just long enough for the data download to complete, then disconnected from the virch. She slumped back on her couch, face sweaty from the rubber seal on the rig.
Wondering what the hell Eleutheria had been talking about.
25
After midnight was always the worst time on shift.
The absolute worst.
Not that JP hated his job. He liked it just fine. They weren’t bogged down with endless training here or caught up in the orbit of some general officer playing politics. The 121st had an operational mission, a damn satisfying one at that, and a steady, predictable ops tempo.
He didn’t have to deploy, either. He never had to go overseas, to some stinking little office on some tropical island out in the middle of the Bathtub. No, here he got to see his family every night and sleep in his own bed and pretend like all the memories he had from the Five Days War were just bad dreams.
JP had been stationed at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea when that insanity had broken out. Second lieutenant, less than a year into his first assignment. He’d found himself the senior-ranking intelligence officer on the peninsula by the second day of the war.
Memories he never wanted to revisit.
He liked the Air Guard. He liked Ellington. He liked that nobody was trying to kill him. He liked that all the risk in their mission was shouldered by the likes of 2Shy and Emily, who genuinely enjoyed their jobs. Taking out CCP-aligned insurgents. Who could argue with that?
But JP did not like working swing shift, this eight-hour chunk of operations in the middle of the night. As the commander of the intel flight, he shouldn’t have needed to do it. It wasn’t a hard job, but he wasn’t working with a full roster of intel troops right now and if he didn’t occasionally pick up a shift, there would have been holes.
Besides, right now, with the aliens, JP wasn’t taking any chances. Swing shift was normally boring, uneventful, but if something happened, his less experienced people wouldn’t know what to do.
Some people in the unit didn’t believe it. The aliens. Thought the whole thing was swamp gas. Even after the klaatuu blast had rendered a huge chunk of the Philippines without electrical power for the past week. JP had no doubt that the aliens were real, though.
Here, he had access to 95% of the entire intelligence picture produced by the US and her allies. And all the raw data, all the analysis, pointed to that thing being very real.
There was a fleet parked in orbit. One that apparently had the power to turn off the lights anywhere it wished.
What they wanted, though…
JP wasn’t sure if he believed the official story on that. Not even after the debrief Blanket had had with the new guy, Argo; lucky bastard had actually gotten a chance to talk to the Envoy on Saturday. Official contacts with foreign governments, even in peacetime, were reportable events. And the Envoy was most definitely a foreign government.
Currently, JP was reviewing the transcript from that. There was other stuff to be doing at nearly 0200. Reports to file. Logs to update. Status briefings to draft. But this was more interesting, and JP needed interesting right now. Interesting kept him from falling asleep at his station.
BLANKET: So tell me again how you got tickets to this event?
ARGO: Daelia got them through the SAAL, some kind of industry partnership thing is what she told me.
BLANKET: SAAL, that’s the Society for the Advancement of Artificial Life?
ARGO: Yeah. That. A lot of tech people were there.
BLANKET: Any abiota of note? The Array often sends its people along to events like that.
ARGO: I didn’t really notice. Probably. Only person I talked to who I recognized was Neil Ulrich.
BLANKET: Ulrich? As in, the guy who runs Omphalos, Ulrich?
Here there was a break in the transcript, and a few more lines of dialogue requesting clarification. JP pulled up the video recording of the discussion to see what the issue was.
Ah. Argo had made an odd little gesture. The transcription-bot hadn’t known how to caption this. JP typed it in now. Went back to his review.
BLANKET: What did Ulrich want to talk to Daelia about?
ARGO: Shit, Senior Blankenship, I don’t know. He was the one who sent her the tickets, but beyond that, I don’t know. You want me to guess?
BLANKET: Only if you can do so constructively.
ARGO: I think he did want to talk to her. Kept going on about evolution and mentioned something about her being abiota or something like that. What does this have to do with the Envoy?
JP stopped there, tapping a finger on his keyboard while he thought. They’d had a brief aside about Daelia’s mom there. Argo, like everybody else on base, seemed to be aware of who and what Bellona had been, but didn’t seem to understand the implications. JP, on the other hand, understood it quite well.
Not that they surveilled their contractor team. Not at all. Even though he could have, if he’d needed to. But there was more than one issue of Mechatronics Today from a decade ago that touched on the topic.
A not-insignificant percentage of the tech community considered Daelia Hall at least part abiota, whether because of her mom or the groundbreaking neural link in her arm brace.
Blanket told Argo this.
Argo indicated that Daelia seemed to be uncomfortable with it.
JP took that portion out of the transcript. This was going up to the NMCC, and that was personal information. Private speculation about a private individual. Unimportant.
BLANKET: So you met up with Ulrich…
ARGO: He ambushed us.
BLANET: Whatever you want to call it, you met up with him, proceeded to the event stage, and met the Envoy…
ARGO: In the greenroom area. Some kind of VIP lounge they had set up for her.
BLANKET: What did you talk about?
And here, Argo had given a nice concise account of the situation, including his personal interest in the discussion. Wanting to know what was going on with his brother. Argo had asked JP the same questions the week before, and JP had told him what he could. Which wasn’t much.
