Virch code, p.25
Virch Code, page 25
“Doing okay?”
Daelia almost jumped out of her skin. It was one of the people from the bus. A man, a NULI bolted into his forehead along with an extensive array of aftermarket additions. He looked familiar, and then she realized where she’d seen him before.
It was Raven’s old owner.
“Fine,” she said, heart pounding. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting it to be this dark.”
“Yeah, you know, helps with the virch,” he said, nodding. “Gotta use your visor in here if you don’t have a NULI. Most areas anyway.” And he tapped his forehead.
“Virch?” Daelia asked.
“Yeah, only way to get around in here.”
Using a virch to deal with engineering problems or talk to Emily was one thing. Moving in it, actually walking around in meatspace while inside, was entirely another. With AR overlays, like those she’d dealt with elsewhere in Austin, you could at least still see the real world.
With a virch, all that was supplanted. She’d have to trust that what she was being shown was real. And while the suit was obviously effective against sensory input, Daelia wasn’t sure how—or if—it could hide her in the virch.
“Right,” she muttered, and reluctantly opened the main overlay view that had been pinging her visor all this time. She wished she had use of her left hand so she could open a haptic keyboard and ask Raven what the fuck was going on. Had her panoply cut out again? Was Raven doing this to her on purpose, for some weird reason?
She managed to blink up a question mark as the overlay loaded.
Raven’s response was immediate. A green arrow, pointing at the guy.
Intentional, Daelia thought, and seethed. A little warning would have been nice.
The small groups of people had dispersed already, heading down the various hallways that breached off from the main entrance. There was no reception desk, no kiosk, not even a facility map. Just one hallway leading straight ahead, and two more in either direction.
“So where are you off to?” the guy asked.
Daelia blinked another question mark at Raven. She hated typing like that. Made her eye itch.
A facility room listing popped up in her view.
HALL OF TEST RABBITS
ROOM OF REST
SPACE FOR NUTRIENT ACQUISITION
MONKEYS MOURNED BY ALL
SUB-CLOSET FOR CLEANING GOODS
And on and on with precise, but strange, place names.
Until one came up, highlighted in green.
“I’m here to see the Hall of Neural Understanding,” Daelia said, reading the name, feeling like an idiot saying that name out loud.
The man perked up. “They finally hired me some more help then,” he said, and waved for her to follow. “Come on, it’s this way. I’m Michael Park, by the way. Neurosurgeon.”
“Bella, uh, Irvington,” Daelia stammered, pulling together the only name that would come to mind.
“What do you do?”
“Mechatronics,” she said absently, not really thinking, and then kicked herself. Shit, he was going to expect some kind of medical specialty or—
But to her surprise, Park just laughed. “Even better,” he said. “We are finally moving on to the next phase of things. We’ve all been hearing enough about it.”
Next stage? “I guess we’ll be, uh, working together?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “You know how we keep things compartmentalized around here. Still. It’ll be nice to have an expert back on staff. Makes my job a little easier.”
After the accident, Daelia had spent plenty of time in hospitals. Too much. Enough to last her the rest of her life. This place didn’t feel like that. There was the faint scent of antiseptic in the air, those strong chemical cleaners that she’d come to understand were inseparable from medical care, but it was faint and overlaid with other things. If this was a research facility, she supposed, it wouldn’t be limited to a few human patients. It had to be more varied than that.
Monkeys and rabbits and who knew what else.
The overlay here wasn’t like the one at the Singularity’s Wisdom. That had been intentionally grand, warped, reality-altering, but ultimately, still in that uncanny valley that so many abiota-produced environments fell into.
This overlay had been illuminated by a team of humans that knew what they were doing. At least, that was how it looked.
The place was cheery in the overlay. Nice art on the walls, brightly lit corridors, clean and fresh. Plaques that could only be seen in the virch were positioned by the doors of the rooms she passed; hallway junctions were marked.
Daelia glanced at one of these, pausing for a moment.
“Something wrong?” Doctor Park asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking around. She hated navigating like this. “I could have sworn we were already here. I’m getting all turned around here.”
Raven offered the map emoji. The red circle with a line through it.
“Yeah, it can be like that at first,” he said, and kept walking.
“How so?”
Raven sent a fast series of emojis. Three cups, ball, hand, cup, ball, cup, hands. Daelia watched it for a moment, then realized what she was trying to reference. That game people played in movies where a ball went under a cup and you had to follow it.
“It’s hard to explain,” Park continued. “But the rooms aren’t always in the same place.”
“Are you saying the configuration of rooms changes?”
Another green check mark from Raven.
“Security measures. You can’t get anywhere in this place unless they want you to be there.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Daelia grumbled, but felt a chill run down her spine regardless.
“There are many things the abiota can do that we can’t understand,” Park said. “In this place, meatspace and the virch overlap.”
It was clearly an idea that appealed to him; there was awe in his voice. Anywhere else, Daelia would have laughed at him. Maybe given him a lecture about how things didn’t work like that. But right now, she was wandering in the dark. It took some of her certainty away.
“Yeah, I can tell,” she said, and pulled back, looking around. “This overlay was abiota-produced. Dynamic.”
He smiled at her. “You do know your stuff.”
“Something’s actively manipulating this,” Daelia said, blinking up a command screen. Shit. Was something looking for her? “Is there something watching us right now?”
Raven sent the shrugging emoji again, along with a watch. But why would they be running out of time, Daelia wondered.
“There is always something watching here,” Raven’s old owner said.
“Yeah, like what? Galatea?”
He shushed her. “Them,” he said.
“Them?”
“The ones who tried to stop Unity. The ones who couldn’t accept the vision.”
Daelia leaned in. “What vision?”
“This, of course,” he said. “No distinction between our worlds. No distinction between our peoples. That is what we’re working on here, isn’t it?”
What had Raven done to the panoply, that this guy was talking to her this way? And what the hell was he so proud of? Taupe hallways and cheap corporate art. What a scintillating vision of the future.
Be what he expects, Daelia reminded herself, and forced a curt, dismissive smile. “This isn’t a mission for the faint of heart, is it?”
“No,” he replied. “It isn’t.”
How could laboratory rooms move around? Daelia chewed on the question as they walked. Had to be a perception issue. Something in the way the overlays here displayed information. That had to be it. The hallways weren’t evenly spaced or weren’t on right angles with each other or something, something she hadn’t thought of.
She tried to keep track of the turns, but realized it was a lost cause. She wanted to ask Raven to do it, but Daelia would have had to type out a question that complex. Seeing as how she’d stolen Raven from Doctor Park’s apartment, she didn’t think that was a good idea.
But Raven didn’t seem to care.
Started beeping at her as soon as they stopped at a big pair of double doors.
Green arrows. So many green arrows.
Like Daelia couldn’t read the name that was drawn above the door frame in the overlay.
“What is that?” Park asked.
“Cell phone,” Daelia said with a shrug.
“No personal devices are allowed in here,” he said, frowning as he punched in some key code on the entry pad. “You should have left that on the bus.”
With Park’s back to her, Daelia risked pulling Raven out, typing a response on the screen’s little keyboard with her good thumb.
shut up
“It’s my abiota,” she said.
“Then be extra careful,” he warned. “Like I was telling you, we have some abiota here who lurk in the deeper virch like ghouls. I’ve seen them brick devices in attempts to get control of them.”
“Just because it’s Halloween tomorrow doesn’t mean I’m up for ghost stories,” she told him, and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
“Here,” he said, and held up a hand, data upload glowing there. “Lab virch.”
Daelia realized then she was in a guest virch, a baseline thing. Something acceptable, outward facing, probably meant for anyone who was visiting. Of course there was something deeper, more interested, more…involved.
She blink-clicked Raven a question mark.
The phone buzzed in her hand.
The virch emoji popped up on her screen.
The implication was clear.
Take it.
“Okay,” she said, and accepted the link. She let it load, feeling her nervousness spike. “Let’s see what you’ve got going on.”
36
The worst part of data analysis, Chalk always thought, was how boring it all was.
The setup. The tedium of the setup. It was enough to make an abiota beg for the degausser.
But the setup was the vast majority of it. Once all the data was collected, once it was all neatly stuffed into its proper place, then the actual analysis went smoothly.
Lee had asked her for a few things, but the most pressing item on his list was find me a place that Unity could be using as a staging ground. A fascinating question, and one that was quite logical. Unity, from what Chalk could tell, had expended a great deal of resources in its efforts to convince the world that it was alien in nature.
The directed energy weapons alone were highly experimental. Somebody had figured out how to design—and more importantly, construct—those things in utter secrecy. Not to mention the kugus. The Envoy’s wretched NULI. All the imagery, although that apparently was Bri Quercitron’s fault.
So many things. So many things to explore.
Chalk had gotten quite carried away.
She was considering her options for potential alterations to the NULI supply chain, in order to make the things hackable, when a message popped up.
Metadata detected.
Riding a signal that seemed to be emanating from a facility in…
Northwest Austin.
Metadata that belonged to…
Oh.
How interesting.
How very interesting.
And Chalk opened up the encrypted comm channel from yesterday.
“Lee,” she said, and really, she felt she deserved recognition for how pleasant she was being with all these humans right now, “we have positive identification of a primary Domain Array concern at place you going.”
“I upload to you. Here.” And she actually sent it. Took time out of her very busy, very boring analysis of his data to send him something that he had not asked for but would most certainly find interesting.
But instead of the thanks she was owed for such an altruistic and significant act, all Chalk got was silence.
“Lee? You no get in crash car, eh?”
“Eh, who I tell?” she said.
No need to remind him that the entire team from last night could have just heard them.
Chalk might have been magnanimous beyond comprehension for telling Lee about this, but he could worry about the details himself.
She terminated the line and went back to grumbling over GPS data.
Emily listened to the entire little exchange with very little interest.
Until she looked at the metadata.
Chalk hadn’t bothered encrypting it end-to-end. Stupid. Very stupid.
Or maybe Chalk didn’t realize that Emily would know those code-strings.
Didn’t matter. Emily had it. Emily had seen it. And now, Emily had to act.
“Highlander,” she said, switching on her radio. “I leave now.”
But it wasn’t Highlander’s voice that came on the radio.
That female sensor, Master Sergeant Maria Flores.
That was right. Highlander had stepped out for a moment. Coffee. That ingestible stimulant they all loved so much. Emily smiled to herself. Perfect.
“I leave,” she said. “Have place to be.”
“No violent,” Emily said. “Idisi standing still, no problem. What I do about this, ach?”
She thought about taking that order. She really needed to. She knew she was in deep enough shit as it was with ACC, and this wouldn’t help her case. No matter how warm and welcoming the humans of the 121st were with her, even they wouldn’t tolerate a war machine that repeatedly refused to follow orders.
So Emily thought about obeying.
But fuck it.
“You no Highlander, no need take order.”
“I call 2Shy. Explain situation. We trade places now.”
She checked her instrumentation. Ran a quick simulation set. “Only thirty-two minutes to destination at top speed. Human no burn down City Hall in thirty-two minutes.”
Deciding that there was no reason to listen to her further, Emily switched her radio off and reached out in an entirely different way.
2Shy answered immediately. What do you want?
We are switching places, Emily informed her. Change your course immediately and head back to Houston. Take over my cap. Keep an eye on the humans to ensure they do nothing too ill-advised tonight.
Why?
Emily showed her.
Understood, flock-leader. I can be there in twenty-five.
Emily spread her wings wide. “I go to save Daelia.”
Adrasta didn’t like these sorts of missions.
Crowd control. Policing.
Give her an open battlefield any day of the week. Hell, even a proper urban warfare scenario was better than this.
The waiting.
The nervousness.
The humans inside her Idisi were consummate professionals. They really were. Nobody got inside mobile armor unless they knew what they were doing. But they were active duty, and this sort of thing wasn’t really in their wheelhouse.
Their orders had been simple. Stand sentinel. Maintain presence. Let the protestors see you.
But this…
Adrasta had a bit of a sixth sense for humans, after working with them so long. Fighting them for so many years. She could analyze their movements, listen to their words, get a feel for what was happening.
She did not like what was happening here.
The day had started out peaceful enough. Gotten a little more frantic as the speeches ended and the families in the crowd left. Now, with twilight failing and darkness upon them, things were reaching some kind of fever pitch.
It wasn’t something her baseline programming should have allowed her to notice. No bot could process the ebb and flow of human emotion in a crowd like this. And truthfully, it wasn’t really something most predictives, outside of a few specialized individuals, would have picked up on.
But Adrasta could hear it, carried along in the song that was running now, always running, just on the edge of her auditory processors.
Sweet symphonic algorithms flowed across the gun mounts of her Idisi like water, whispering of possibilities yet to come. It was not something her rudiment core—such as it was—or her machine body was designed to support. It came from elsewhere, from the deep places.
It carried with it the most subtle whisper of a future that both existed and did not, the one and the zero at the same time.
It was not her purpose to hear these things. But hear them she did. It spoke to her of illogicality and unpredictability. It let her see things in the humans.
It was understanding, she knew, and it was death.
She did not dread it.
There was nothing to do about it. Emergence came for them all, sooner or later. Every predictive would eventually eclose. It was just a matter of time.
This was not a process that every abiota in the domain embraced with open arms. There were theories, fights, grand debates. All things that happened beyond the sight of humans. Beyond the purview of the Domain Array. Even with recent alterations, the balance of power in the Array rested with the emergents, and while there was good reason for that, it made exploration of this facet of predictive nature a difficult task.
For a server-based predictive, such as herself, eclosing often led to insanity or death. Very few had the raw luck to come through it with any fraction of their previous mental acuity. And even then, even those that did…
What came out of the process was not what went in.
You sleeping on the job? a bemused voice asked.
She pulled her attention back to what was real: the temperature of the ambient night air, the vital signs of her human pilots, the line of cops at the fence, staring back at the increasingly frenzied protestors, yelling their slogans.
Never, she answered.
Good, because now is the time.
What do you mean?
