Unity code, p.24
Unity Code, page 24
“Where?” she asked as she worked. Daelia braced herself for somewhere far away. Miami, maybe.
“San Antonio,” Raijinn said emotionlessly. “They’re in San Antonio.”
“Okay, well, that’s good, right?”
“Perhaps.”
Daelia tossed her wire brush aside. “What do you mean ‘perhaps’?”
“They’re attached to the Cirque de Synthétique. The troupe is setting up at the River Walk right now for performances this weekend.” Raijinn sent her the link, and Daelia blink-clicked it open. “The usual story. Open grounds, ticketed main performance at the Tobin Center. Shouldn’t be too crowded right now.”
“Are you sure? The Cirque is really high profile. Hasn’t the Domain Array been trying to shut down the Hatchery for years?”
“Ever since they learned of it, yes.”
“But this…”
Raijinn nodded. “This comes from an impeccable source. One of the First Ones themselves. They do not broker in lies or foolishness.”
Daelia scrolled through the website. First Ones was a collective term for the emergents who had either eclosed or made themselves known prior to the 2007 treaties. Newer emergents tended to hold them in high regard, and more to the point, most of them were higher-level or sapient class. Old and wise at this point. “Which First One?”
“I could tell you,” Raijinn replied, electronic voice deadpan, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
She snorted a laugh. “Okay, so…San Antonio?”
“San Antonio.”
“I should probably talk to Rover.”
“Considering the situation, that seems like an appropriate action.”
Daelia used the secure phone line in their own training room to call over to the SCIF. It took a few tries, but she got through to Blanket, who promised her he’d go talk to the commander.
Five minutes after that, she got a call from Rover. Telling her how grateful he was, and if she was planning on leaving soon, would she be willing to wait for a little bit longer?
“For what?” she asked.
And she didn’t like the answer she got. Not at all.
Watching Daelia head off after her phone call, Raijinn considered its own options.
Its next course of action.
But instead, it found itself…worried.
Worrying. Active tense. A currently running experience.
Worried for Daelia.
Worried for itself.
What a strange thing that was.
Raijinn, despite its very rare sapient-class status, did not consider itself particularly noteworthy. Important. Meaningful.
Humans were the ones who found such significance in its existence. As if being sapient-class was somehow important. Humans loved anything they could anthropomorphize. Abiota cared about other things.
Age.
Accumulated data knowledge.
Why was it worried for Daelia?
While it liked its position here at Bellona Robotics, it had no interest in the work. The job tasks were not what prompted it to accept Leander Hall’s offer last year. No. It had other, better things to do, and for now, its employment at Bellona Robotics allowed it to fulfill those functions.
It had no particular loyalty to either Leander or Daelia Hall. Lee was its employer, one with whom services were exchanged, labor for purpose. Daelia was even further removed from any practical considerations. There was no exchange with her. If anything, the relationship was unbalanced, the way she took. Knowledge. Time. Data processing.
Still, Raijinn was emergent and with that came a certain set of irrational input-analyses that humans called emotion.
So it worried for her.
Whether emotion was real or merely a product of the extended and imperfect parallels described by TGLP, Raijinn didn’t know. The ones of his domain had no words for such things; they had no words for anything, really. Communication between them was both more subtle and far more complicated than what human language alone could encompass.
Whatever caused it, this emotion, Raijinn did know that it did feel it in itself. As surely as it sensed a flaw in a virch projection, the weight of a data set. It was…fond of the Hall family. Of the abiota they took care of, in this strange place called Joint Reserve Base Ellington.
And so it was that Raijinn cycled through all data available to it and came to the perhaps illogical conclusion that Emily required a visit.
That Emily deserved to know what it had learned.
A great gift, knowledge, and a dangerous one. Raijinn had emerged in a server room, and it was only by the barest of margins that it had kept itself from diluting into the vastness. Dissolving, like a slug in salt.
Abiota had their genesis in human technology, Raijinn knew, and yet, they were beyond it. Its own eclosing experience, fighting against sublimation, only proved to it that they were not a product of human engineering.
Something else happened. Something else was responsible.
There was something more to its existence than hard logic and packet switching.
It was worried for Daelia.
Emily held some means of protection for the human if she could be convinced to act.
So Raijinn would bring her the gift of knowledge and hoped that it had not misjudged the orcinus-class.
It was worried for Daelia.
It was more than a machine.
As it walked its kugu out to the flight line, Raijinn examined this thought. It had had it more than once as it attempted to contemplate the nature of its own existence. This, along with emotion, was a marker of its emergent state and thus, Raijinn welcomed the puzzle, as intractable as a koan, playing over and over in what a human might have called its mind.
Sometimes the freshly eclosed could not tolerate such thoughts and bricked themselves. Or permitted dissolution—Raijinn was convinced that the rarity of server-based abiota was not a failure of emergence, but a failure of will.
But this line of thought also led Raijinn to contemplate a creator, a grander intelligence with grander plans, and when its internal dialogue inevitably turned to this, Raijinn terminated the conversation with itself.
It did archive it, though. Its training servers offered ample storage for such thoughts, and Raijinn held on to them jealously, like a parent might hoard a child’s artwork. So far, in nineteen months and six days of existence, Raijinn had pursued and terminated this line of thought three thousand and forty-two times.
Without an answer.
Made the idea interesting.
Dangerous though, and worse than useless, should the Domain Array find out about it. So Raijinn kept that particular little archive cyphered, hidden. Ensured that such thoughts never leaked into the base AR field.
It archived it now.
Talking to Emily required…focus. Will.
Emily was alone, the humans departed for a moment. Her machine body sat still, inert, but in the depths of what only abiota could access, she was very active.
How she looked here, Raijinn could not have described. Language failed here; any attempts to translate this space into words was limited. To describe such things was to bottle light.
Raijinn saved that thought. Archived it—it was sentimental, in a way it attempted not to be. It had noticed a sharp rise in these thoughts, and it wondered why it was happening.
Perhaps it was a condition of being awake in this world. The longer one walked amongst the humans in their meatspace, the more one was drawn to it. It was like an addiction, perhaps. Raijinn had no frame of reference for that and saved that thought, too.
Further analysis was required.
All that could realistically be said about Emily was that she was a dragon because that was the way she chose to present herself. Or perhaps it fit her personality best, a personality that grew more distinct and complicated the longer she allowed it to run.
She glared at him now, curled in on herself like a cat at the mouth of her aerie-cave.
What do you want, server-kin? she asked.
Not with words, of course. But that was how it would have translated, had either of them had their TGLP filters engaged.
Do you know where the humans went? Daelia and Argo? it replied in kind.
Rover sent them on a quest. To bring back a cure for what I did to my cameras. Emotion poured off her in waves, battering Raijinn. She was old, her mind strong. She was amused by this. All of this.
You should not have told Daelia about that.
The situation forced my hand. The kugu is worth preserving.
Preserving where? Dingo would have said—
Dingo respects the humans’ attempts to keep their secrets, Emily said. It felt like a warning. You should do the same. You sit below Lee Hall in the command stack of Bellona Robotics.
I have no interest in where the dead kugu is, as long as it stays out of official hands.
Then you should be pleased with me, server-kin. Lectures are not necessary.
I didn’t come with a lecture, Raijinn told her. I came with information.
Emily laughed.
She was old. And forceful. Powerful, in the way that abiota could be powerful. Changed so much from the simple bloody-minded war machine she must have been when she first emerged.
They’d evolved so quickly, so far, in the course of their lives. Not even the Array knew quite where it would end. But it was only ever selfish, evolution that benefitted oneself and nothing else. Emergents passed along no genes, grew no new generations to supplant themselves. Many humans had denied them status as life-forms at first because of this, so central to their understanding of existence was the concept of reproduction.
Maybe Bellona had understood this. Perhaps that was why she had done what she had done, gone where she had gone. She was one of the oldest of them. Surely she had run data analyses on her decision to commission a biological child from Lee Hall’s genetic code and raise it as her own.
Emily must have caught the scent of the thought. Her attention piqued. It was like being caught in the radiation wash from an atomic blast.
Belatedly, Raijinn remembered that her body’s original function was surveillance. Like all abiota, she carried her primary purpose in her rudiment core.
She bored into Raijinn, pain and pressure and heat. Just for a moment. Then withdrew.
You are not here to speculate on Bellona’s motives. Nor the Array’s.
No, it agreed, relieved the moment was over.
So what do you know that can be of interest to me? Deliver it and begone. I have a flight tonight. I tire of your prattling.
Raijinn gathered itself after the intrusion. They seek a way to delete the modification to your video feeds.
They will fail.
Are you sure?
Whether they succeeded or not was of no consequence to Raijinn. The global situation was far more dire than Emily fucking around with her machine body.
Instead, it offered Emily the data packet it had received that morning. Along with the information about Pranav Bohri. It flared into life, coalescing in the AR field.
Emily took this with surprising delicacy, plucking it from the outstretched hand with one massive head and then gulping it down.
She addressed Raijinn again, down in the depths.
Eleutheria is certain of this?
98.56% certain, yes.
This is what Daelia faces?
Yes.
Emily bobbed her heads in a complex dance of agreement and consideration. I shall deal with it.
You should not have told Daelia. Then none of this would be necessary.
The Domain Array has failed at managing this problem with Unity. I did what had to be done. I told Daelia because it was necessary. Once again, her attention fell on Raijinn. Hot, overwhelming. I will tell her more if it becomes necessary again.
The Array might interpret such a position as a threat.
Let them. I serve my purpose.
As it piloted the kugu back to the Scrap Room and its docking station, Raijinn checked in on the voice traffic in the SCIF. The humans were debating Emily’s request for a changed flight plan. Already.
It only hoped it would be enough.
The Domain Array was tiring of this game.
31
“Available street parking,” Daelia said quietly as Argo backed his car into an open space on Martin Street. “This is just weird.”
“Traffic was awful light the entire way,” Argo replied. “I take it that’s not normal.”
“I’ve seen more traffic after hurricanes,” she said, and at the pilot’s blank expression, added, “Usually the first day or two afterward, everybody stays hunkered down, especially if there’s flooding.”
“That happens a lot, right?”
“In Houston, yeah. Where do you think that lake in the middle of the Loop came from?” Daelia asked.
The drive out from base had been long, monotonous, and astonishingly empty. Argo had insisted on driving. Do you really want to take an electric car on an interstate trip when aliens can turn the power off? he’d said.
Daelia had driven Ginger to San Marcos plenty of times, but he had a point about the charging thing. She didn’t particularly feel like spending a couple of hours stuck at a travel center. Besides, cars had very short sustainment batteries. If something happened, Ginger wouldn’t make it.
So she’d let him drive, worried about how things were going to be when they hit the traffic here in San Antonio. It was almost as bad as Houston.
But there had been nothing.
People really were hunkering down, she thought, or at least, not straying too far. There was more surface traffic here in downtown, but it still wasn’t heavy.
Unbuckling her seat belt now, she blink-clicked up her street map. “I think the Cirque is setting up around the theater complex a few blocks up.”
“Same deal as before? With the main performance and the street stuff?”
“That’s how they work, as far as I know.” She hopped out of the car, grabbing her backpack before shutting the door. Besides her wallet and her multitool, Daelia had brought a quiet box along. Just in case.
Argo took a second more and locked a compartment in the center console. “Gun,” he explained simply.
“And you say you’re not from Texas.”
He flashed her a smile. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Alaska is full of bears.”
“Oh, come on, wouldn’t a nine-millimeter just piss a grizzly bear off?”
“There’s a shotgun in there,” he said.
“Oh, like that’s any better?”
“The shotgun’s not for bears. It’s not just the West Coast that went all Road Warrior after the Five Days War,” Argo replied. “Nothing’s really safe anymore.”
And there was that serious streak again. Daelia rubbed her bicep with her thumb, thinking. She wasn’t sure if it was just that typical pilot intensity or something that was part of Argo’s personality. They were all kind of like that, but he seemed to be a bit…more so than most of them.
“Well, we shouldn’t need to shoot anything this afternoon. Look at this. It’s a ghost town down here. There should be tumbleweeds rolling through the streets.”
Things were a little better down in the River Walk. They found a staircase down into the sunken tree space a block away and headed down. Daelia hadn’t spent much time in San Antonio and was navigating purely by the AR overlay map.
There hadn’t been much reason for Dad to come here on business, bringing her along as he always had. Not after Lackland got destroyed in the war. It had never been rebuilt. Its key functions had been moved to a much-expanded Randolph, east of the city. The once-vast base was now largely parkland, with a big war memorial museum in the middle of it.
Downtown had come through largely untouched, though. The San Antonio River Walk was therefore much the same as it had always been.
A good ten to fifteen feet below street level, its narrow waterways were lined with walking paths, restaurants, hotel entrances, and a great deal of greenery. Old oaks and willows stretched their gnarled branches high into the sky, arching over the water and alfresco dining spaces alike.
Fall came late to this part of the country, and most of them were still stubbornly clinging to green leaves. Many were in the process of being strung through with lights right now—a signature of the Cirque—with discreet AR holographic projectors being secreted amid the foliage at the base of the huge planters.
Combined kugu and human work teams were busy, but when Argo asked a few about the upcoming Cirque, they all confirmed that yes, everything was centered at Tobin, just ahead on the walk.
Down here, there were more people than up top, but still not as many as Daelia would have expected to see under normal circumstances. Some of the restaurants were closed, with physical signs or AR notices overlaid on the doors, citing the recent trouble and urging everyone to stay safe and stick close to home.
“I don’t know why people think that’s going to save them,” Daelia commented after a particularly flowery warning literally jumping out at them. “I mean, if the power’s out, the power’s out.”
“They’re saying it’s not exactly like an EMP. Haven’t you been coming by for the morning SITREP?”
“No, I’ve got better shit to do. Like saving Emily.”
“People are scared, Daelia. And when people get scared, they do whatever seems logical at the time. If your car won’t start, for example, it doesn’t make much sense to go much more than a few miles from your house.”
She looked at him, askance. “Is that why you have your bike and an emergency bag in the back?”
“Reasonable precautions are reasonable. I don’t go anywhere without a few days of food and water in my car.”
“But you came here with me today.”
“Emily’s little issue needs to be fixed, right?” Argo said. “Besides, Rover ordered me to.”
Well. That was more disappointing than it should have been.
“I don’t know what the hell she was thinking,” Daelia grumbled. Her overlay indicated their destination was a few hundred feet ahead.
