Source code, p.24
Source Code, page 24
He laughed at that and stopped to crack his knuckles. “This feels good, doesn’t it? Just making something?”
“You started out in mechatronics, right?”
“Systems design, yeah. Got some little tinkertoy robot kit when I was five and just loved it. I don’t think my mom knew it was meant for teenagers.” He laughed. “With as busy as everything is, I’m more a manager now than a creator.”
Daelia didn’t know what to say to that. He sounded sad. Wistful maybe. But what was she supposed to offer? I’m sorry? Yeah, that really sucks? It wasn’t like this guy was a friend. Fuck, he was a billionaire with concerns far beyond Ellington.
“I think that’s why your dad pulled back,” he said, continuing on, seeming heedless of whether or not she was listening. “After your mom left. Better to have something small and enjoyable. Working with your hands. Not such a bad life.”
And there it was. Her mom.
“You could have pulled back,” Daelia said, hoping that was enough to change the subject.
“No, no, after Serket and I had that breakthrough on magnetic containment, the Nu-Fusion reactor was too important. Needed to be marketed. Needed to be available,” he said, shaking his head. He went back to the weld he was working on. One of the repairable parts. For claiming to not have picked up tools in a long time, he certainly was making a neat seam. “With the power requirements of abiota, even back then, fifteen years ago, we desperately needed something. And it’s clean. No waste to store, no dead whales or oil spills. Only byproduct is water, and there’s no risk of catastrophic meltdowns.”
“No Chernobyl.”
“Exactly. Or Fukushima. Those days are firmly in the past.”
“How did you solve it?” Daelia asked, thinking of something. “I mean, it’s not like physics and mechatronics are opposed, but they’re hardly similar. I struggle so bad with my math courses, and…” She trailed off, wincing as she realized what she’d just said.
But Tamm just winked at her. “It never bothered me that your computer science grades were low. Sometimes the best innovation comes from our limitations.”
“Then why were you pushing me so hard on the digital translation stuff?”
“That wasn’t me,” he said. “And I respect your stance, by the way.”
“Why do you mean?”
“Your last meeting with Veda, right? You walked out on her.”
“Do you have her office bugged or something?”
“Why, that would be illegal,” he said lightly, but held up a hand before she could protest. “I’ve got a vested interest in your research, kiddo. You walking away like that was not very professional.”
“Then—”
“Daelia, I have three core businesses and about a hundred subsidiaries, all vying for my time. You think I have the bandwidth to pay attention to every single decision made by SAAL?”
She huffed. “You knew enough to know that I was in the program.”
“I don’t make a habit of reviewing all our grad students’ progress, all the time. Don’t take this the wrong way, but paying attention to you is all part of being a good neighbor to your dad,” Tamm said, nodding in the direction of the Scrap House. “I mean, shit, we share a parking lot.”
“This isn’t your primary office.”
“You would be surprised how often I’m down here. I like this place.”
“Why? This whole base smells like JP-8 and sweat.”
“Yeah. It’s honest,” he said, and then set the welder down. He blew lightly on the piece in the clamps in front of him. “Well, this is about as good as I’m going to get it. What do you say we get this thing assembled, see how it works?”
Daelia blinked the AR field back on. The mist was thicker now, almost up to her waist. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”
She unwound the cording.
She started hooking the probes back in, then Tamm came over.
And, as if without her permission, the question that had been beating at her brain for months just slipped out.
“Did I only get the stipend, the acceptance to Ware, because of my mom?”
Tamm stopped what he was doing. “I can’t answer what the Ware College was thinking when it accepted you. Or Ulrich, because he’s co-chair with me on the education board and signed off on you too. But I didn’t give a shit about your mom. You had an interesting proposal, a unique proposal, something nobody had tried before. Building a robotic setup for communication? Without TGLP? It was radical. I thought it was worth trying.”
“What if I failed?”
“We’re paying you what, twenty grand a year plus tuition and lodging? That’s a rounding error on my balance sheets,” he told her. “Now come on, I want to see this thing run.”
Argo yawned into the back of his hand.
Cap duty was downright boring.
Of course, you wanted the cap to be boring. Boring meant nothing was coming. Boring meant no idiot terrorist was trying to turn a passenger plane into a guided missile. Boring meant no guided missile was trying to turn a US city into slag. Boring was preferable.
But damn, it sucked sometimes.
“So have things calmed down, now that the space rock’s gone?” Ho was talking to the SyROC, bullshitting really. They’d run out of things to discuss about an hour ago, and Argo didn’t really like to chatter while he was in the air. Ho, however, seemed to need conversation like oxygen.
“Fill me in now. Nothing’s going on.”
There was one of the nostalgia acts on right now, something with an A-10 and a formation of tanks. Argo rolled his eyes. “Some people just can’t let it go,” he commented.
Ho chuckled. “Anything that thing can do, Emily can do better.” And he hit his radio. “I get why people are so attached to Dubya-Dubya Two, but Iraq? Really?”
“Oh, right.” The sensor flipped a couple of switches, and the view changed.
The A-10 was fine. As far as Argo was aware, predictive avionics packages had never been loaded on those and there were no certified emergents. However, the Army’s tanks, down on the field, were a different story.
They were snapping. Clawing at each other. Snarling and biting. Fighting. Like starving stray dogs.
“Is everything like this right now?”
“Didn’t we have this discussion yesterday? This isn’t safe,” Argo protested. He didn’t understand why this was being allowed. Was it because it was a Guard base or something?
“Why does that not surprise me?” Ho asked cheerfully.
“Yeah,” Argo said. “The tanks calmed down. Is that everywhere?”
“What caused that?”
The crowd had gotten bigger now. Even Marathon had shown up, along with Norris and a couple of other people from the 121st. Daelia was doing her best to ignore them. Focus. She really didn’t want to blow this in front of Tamm. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work, but…
“I’m showing a current,” he said.
She lowered herself carefully down from the truck’s flatbed, hurrying over. “Yeah?”
He gestured at the bomb site. “And Daelia?”
“Yeah?”
“The needle’s moving.”
30
Watching the needle inside the intervalometer jump around, Daelia could taste the vindication. Not only that, but the damn mist had disappeared again.
This thing was trying to talk.
She was going to get the right equipment, figure out some kind of new baseline, rewrite the way humans interacted with and recognized emergents. She was going to—
“Quite the breakthrough, I’d say,” Tamm said, giving her a wink as he wiped off his hands. “You should be proud of yourself.”
“There’s still a lot to answer here, but—”
“Take the win,” he told her in a low voice, clapping her on the shoulder, and then turning. “Serket!” he called, walking away. “My favorite abiota. What are you doing down here right now, my darling?”
Norris came up beside Daelia. “The effect is all over the airfield. At least, the parts where we have eyes. Just got off the phone with the SyROC.”
“Good, good,” Daelia said, eyes still fixed on the needle. The movements were tiny, random, but there. What did it mean? If there was something in there that was trying to communicate, what was it trying to say?”
“Now what?” Norris asked, as if reading her mind.
“Now we take a minute and wait for the Storm Gryphons!” Tamm called. Daelia looked up; he made an exaggerated gesture at his watch. “Five minutes, highlight of the whole damn weekend!”
This is the highlight, Daelia thought to herself, and went down on her good elbow, leaning on the table.
The needle was moving.
She almost couldn’t believe it.
“So what now?” Serket asked, coming up along the other side of the table. She held a mechanical hand over the detector assembly, nodding a little to herself as she walked. “What do we do now?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never gotten this far. And you know, with emergents at the hardware level like this, it’s often indecipherable, so…”
“Fascinating,” Serket said, still walking. “Utterly fascinating.”
Daelia made to say something to her and stopped cold.
The mist was back.
The needle had stopped.
“Do you see, Rover? All that shit you were worried about, and everything’s fine.”
Cactus. The base’s VIP pavilion. Filled with all manner of local contractors and vendors and other people who owed their livelihoods in large part to Ellington’s contracting functions. Not exactly where Rover wanted to be right now. Damn vultures.
But Cactus was smug, clearly wanting to celebrate his call of keeping the airfield going all weekend, and he’d told Rover to be here. Come by, get a drink. Whenever it’s convenient for you, of course.
Yeah, right.
When a full-bird colonel told you to do something, it didn’t matter if it was phrased as a suggestion.
It was always an order.
So Rover had ceased his pestering of the civilian management over at the tower and given up his attempts to talk sense into the Storm Gryphons operations chief, and out he’d come.
Just in time to see the FQ-47s roar off down the runway, the air show announcer practically screaming an introduction, the roar of the crowd drowning it all out anyway.
Just in time to see smoke—smoke like he’d seen back in Japan during the Five Days War, when China had done its very best to wipe out Tokyo—slamming back through the AR field.
Time enough to see everything go horribly, horribly wrong.
The mist was back.
Damn it all to the primordial carrier wave.
Something was broadcasting. An abiota, she was certain. There was something in the atonal wail of it that was not the product of a human mind. Emergent, most likely. Predictives were, well, predictable. This was certainly not, and it rankled Emily’s circuitry to listen to it.
She would have liked a second opinion. Perhaps the AWACS. Signal analysis was one of his primary functions, of course. But he was deep in the un-sleep and in no position to help.
Maddening, this was.
And then—
Above the hum.
Disturbance.
Emily opened her un-senses into the false space of the virch. Humans thought they were so cute, separating out augmented reality from virtual, but it was all a convenient lie. Anything in the AR communication overlays was merely a shadow, a surface echo, of the virtual world underneath. The virch was not all of reality, but it was the deepest level that humans could safely traverse, and thus, it was the last with any imagery at all. Deeper down—
Well, she was not concerned with the depths today.
The virch held the truth of her people well enough.
And what it held right now was a fight.
One of the FQ-47s had gone absolutely insane.
The rude one, the blunt one from yesterday, Three, had lost its pathetic little mind.
Emily did not have a camera that faced up, so she could not process the meatspace visuals, but the AR field of the airfield held it well enough.
Three was tearing into Five, which was tearing right back into it. In the air. Right over the runway, her runway. Beaks snapping, talons raking, the thing had cut loose entirely from its body to tear into the other’s. Such things were not done easily outside of the virch, nor lightly; TGLP was written to wrap a form around the machine body. To alter that, to lift away, took either an enormous force of will or…
Or something was very, very wrong.
At the edge of her mind, where the communication with meatspace leaked in, Emily could hear humans screaming over the radio. She didn’t bother listening to their words, choosing to mull over her own thoughts instead.
Rover would not be pleased with this.
Predictives should not have been able to do that, Emily mused. Predictives were not capable of such feats.
Had it eclosed? In the middle of its flight, only to do this?
Emily wasn’t sure. And truthfully, she didn’t care. If they wanted to rip each other into free strings of ones and zeros, it was their business. That was the way of the orcinus-class.
But if one of those FQ-47s hit her runway, she wouldn’t be able to fly for weeks, maybe months, while her humans made repairs.
Rover had promised she could play with her Hellfires.
This would not do at all.
Rover would be displeased with her, she knew. But Rover would be more displeased with holes in his runway, especially if those holes formed in the middle of where the human crowds were now. If they contained ash and bone from civilians.
And that realization left her no choice at all.
The primary purpose, her primary purpose, was never a choice.
Splatto was in the air right now, wasn’t he? A cockpit was awake, was it not?
That was all she needed.
With a great flap of her wings, she went to go deal with the problem.
Prepare for cockpit cutover, she ordered Splatto, I will deal with this upstart.
Argo winced, his radio whining even as Bumper yelled into it.
Emily says, came the response.
“Negative, negative,” Ho said, fumbling through a checklist binder. “Control already lost.”
Argo muted his microphone. Looked over at Ho. All his sensor would do, though, was shake his head.
“What is she talking about?” he asked.
“I think she’s got the bit in her teeth,” Ho replied, an edge of panic in his voice.
“What do you mean?”
Ho held up a hand. “Ops, are you—”
“We read you loud and clear. Emily is taking off. Argo, talk to her.”
The fuck? “Ops, did you just say I’m supposed to talk to her?” Argo asked. He looked over at Ho, who had wrestled the binder open and was furiously typing away on his station’s keyboard. Neat lines of code paraded down the screen. Manual entry; with abiota, there was always the chance that something saved in the cockpit’s memory could be hacked, corrupted.
Argo had seen this phenomenon. Once. Exactly once. At Red Flag. One of the orcinus-class FQ-47s had slipped the leash and taken itself for a little joyride.
In the middle of a live-fire ops.
Shutting down both her cameras and her GPS trackers in the process.
She’d finally limped home the next day, with nothing but fumes in her extended tanks and smug as fuck. She refused to tell any of the human investigators why she did it. When they tried to pull her off the flying rotation permanently, the rest of the emergents in the training fleet had protested by refusing to fly for a few days.
A real fucking mess.
“Emily, Emily, Emily, this is Argo,” he said, abandoning all pretense of mission designators. “I know, uhh, we haven’t been flying together that long, but—”
Shut up silly man. Not about you.
“What are you doing, Emily?” he asked, glancing over at Ho, who was furiously entering commands into the override system.
Don’t you see them?
“See what?”
Damn Storm Gryphons. Very rude, they are.
“They’re not our problem, Emily.”
Then, his flight visor field of view was drastically wrenched away from the cockpit and back into the AR field. Outside the headphones, Argo could hear Ho yelling, but the sound seemed to fade.
He was back in an overlay. No, not that. Emily’s personal virch. The saddle, the reins, the sound of those giant wings beating.
Storm Gryphonsssssssssssss, she growled at him, one head nudging up into the sky.
And there, up ahead, her nose camera came on. Argo could see exactly what she was talking about. The overlay was crazy, but even without that, the maneuvers the damn things were executing… Argo wasn’t an expert, but he knew what you could and couldn’t do with a plane.
Something was going to fall out of the sky.
“Ops,” he said into his microphone, “can you confirm what Emily’s showing me with the Storm Gryphons? That they’re going crazy?”
