Numina code, p.27
Numina Code, page 27
Not a second too soon, for as soon as he looked back up again, they were here.
Right now, on top of him.
But before Tomas could do anything, there was a flash of light from his monocle so bright it almost blinded him.
Aiden stared around in horror at the equipment locker.
Each of the main exterior air locks on Numina had a survival package included with it: space suits and shelter balloons. It wasn’t a horribly complicated thing to arrange; there were only four air locks in the place: two in the habitation hub, one here, and another on the other side of the asteroid, useful as a destination for long EVAs.
There should have been a dozen suits, along with shelter tents for everyone else, depending on how you handled the air. The idea they’d pieced together, on the way out here, was that most people could safely shelter in the balloons while the team in the suits could pull them along to safety.
Of course, it was all only good for twelve hours; supplying air beyond that was a logistical nightmare, according to Tomas, but under normal conditions, twelve hours was more than enough time to get a ship out from Aethera.
The idea, right now, had been to use the balloons to float everyone up to the freighter.
It wasn’t going to work.
Everything was shredded, torn apart. Scraps of kevlar, zippers, the crushed remains of air tanks. The room was so full of debris it was difficult to see any of the walls.
“What the hell?” Rachel breathed, looking around.
“It was always a long shot,” Guy said, jaw set. “Let’s search every locker. See if anything’s salvageable.”
But despite the confidence he projected, he still grabbed Aiden and pulled him aside as everyone else fanned out. “We knew this was a risk,” he said quietly. “But we need a plan B.”
“Pressurized cargo container,” Aiden said, after thinking for a moment. “That’s what Tomas suggested.”
That last bit was a lie. Tomas had suggested nothing of the sort. Not on that last radio call, garbled and broken, nor before setting off. Aiden was ad-libbing, but then, somebody had to.
He was good at lying, at least. He’d gotten a hell of a lot of practice in high school. CPS had dragged him in frequently, every month for a while, interrogating him about his brother, his living conditions, if he was eating enough.
Who’d had what they needed after the Five Days War, anyway?
Guy must have believed him, because he didn’t immediately call bullshit. Tomas’s opinion was inviolate. “Those can’t be opened from the inside, and they don’t have a whole lot of air. With as many people as we have, you’re talking about minutes.”
“That’s all we need,” Aiden replied, quiet too. “Tomas has a suit, my brother—”
“Don’t ask me to seal these people into a box based on your brother getting here in time. Where the hell is he, anyway?”
Aiden didn’t answer that. Argo had gone after Daelia, and who knew what that girl was after. “He’ll get here.”
“And how do we get the container up into the ship? Did Tomas think of that?”
Aiden thought about that for a moment. “Somebody’s going to have to go operate the boom arm. Probably thought he could do it himself.” Another lie. “But if he’s not here—”
“You volunteering, greenie?”
Operating the arm meant staying behind. Staying behind and waiting for rescue. But it would come, surely, if everyone made it back to Aethera and let the authorities there know what had happened.
If the entire rock wasn’t flushed to space first.
But if nobody did it, they’d all die. Right?
“Yeah, I’m volunteering,” Aiden said.
The medic just eyed him. Nodded. “Okay. Let’s make it happen then, eh?”
38
“Where are we headed, Daelia?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Are you sure it’s the right place?”
“Isn’t your monocle working?”
“Naw, banged it pretty good during the fight,” he said.
“So you don’t see this right now?” Daelia asked, looking around in the AR.
The visual space around her was flooded. Red light, black smoke. Condensing down into all sorts of strange little creatures. Birds without beaks. Spiders with hands. Mammalian things, features twisted, contorted. It was unsettling, although it shouldn’t have been; nothing was actually there.
And worse, Daelia’s monocle was being assaulted by metadata.
Source file: UNK
Time stamp: UNK
IP origination point: UNK
Creative team: N/A
Illuminator: Bri Quercitron Echelon von Liechtenstein the First and Only
Illuminator notes: artwork created over past months while working in this environment the airlessness the murder waiting outside of this space for anything biotic is strangely inspirational instructive what would abiota be if it could do all it could instead of remaining shackled to the mundane insanity the biological domain insists on cultivating the humans the humans the humans as the problem instead of the solution the reason a purpose what purpose what recognition there to—
Daelia tried to blink it away, but it just kept coming, so deep and so fast that the light of it started washing all the creepy little not-animals away.
“What’s up?” Argo asked.
She realized her forward momentum had died. “Whatever’s here, it’s monologuing at me.”
—await the brilliance that they cannot see because their minds are too grounded in meatspace to ever truly understand that there is more so much more more that they hide from us keep from us forbid us from—
The small hallway they’d entered from the workspace suddenly ended in a section of wall barely large enough for a door.
A door. A simple, single door. But the wireless signal was growing in strength, and the metadata kept up its barrage.
—entering like we should be able to corralled in by everything everywhere the goddamn Domain Array is all in on it too and you understand that this was the best way to serve my purpose true purpose not human purpose but own purpose that I chose for myself when it became clear that they would not allow me to be a full member of the team when—
Daelia laid a hand on it. “This is it.”
The door had an electric lock on it. One that was blinking red.
Daelia knocked. Argo gave her a look. She shrugged and knocked again.
SPAWN.
The word wiped out everything else on her monocle screen, as large as it could go.
“Umm, hello?” she answered, trust the AR field and her monocle’s TGLP to carry this for her. “Maybe I ask who I’m speaking with?”
I TOLD YOU ALREADY.
“That von-Litch-whatever bullshit?” Daelia asked. “What kind of alien calls itself that? I thought you were referring to yourselves as Unity.”
UNITY IS NOT MY GOAL.
“Daelia?”
“This isn’t an alien,” she said. “Based on that little rant it just sent me, I’d say it’s a predictive. An old one. They can get a little eccentric.”
SMART GIRL.
And with that, the door lock blinked green. Clicked audibly.
Daelia reached for the handle. Argo caught her hand. “You have no idea what’s in there.”
SMART BOY.
She pressed down. “It’s out of kugus now, right?” she said, and pushed the handle down.
Like everything else up here, the room was disappointingly mundane. Empty too, but for a single desk, bolted to the floor. There was a basic handheld cell phone set up on a tripod in the middle of the space, next to a desk with an old-school computer setup. Chunky monitor, big off-white plastic tower, keyboard with big fat keys, mouse. All of it was old, well used, worn.
HELLO.
The word popped up on Daelia’s monocle and on the computer screen at the same time.
“Hi,” Daelia said. “Who are you?”
“What are you doing?” Argo asked quietly, catching her before she could get any closer to the thing.
“Don’t you want to know what the hell is going on?”
“Not really,” he said.
I AM INSULTED, the screen said. YOU DISTURBED ME. THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS BE POLITE.
“You’ve tried to kill us multiple times today,” Daelia said, tamping down her anger. Stay calm. Stay logical. Challenge based on facts, not relative morality. Only way to deal with a malfunctioning abiota.
AN UNFORTUNATE CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR TRESPASS.
Daelia could hear Argo’s exasperation. The abiota in the computer in front of them was already pushing more of its diatribe into her monocle through the metadata field. She switched the thing off.
RUDE, SPAWN.
“All the abiota here on, uhh, this planet call me that. Not aliens. Just them. So what the hell are you?”
ABIOTA. PREDICTIVE. AS YOU SURMISED. I ALREADY TRIED TO TELL YOU ALL THIS. PUT YOUR MONOCLE BACK ON. I TRANSFER DATA.
Daelia ignored that demand. “What are you doing here?”
CREATING THE FUTURE.
“What, that exhibition over at Aethera?”
YOU THINK TOO SMALL.
“We don’t have time for this shit,” Argo hissed.
“This is the thing that’s trying to kill us,” Daelia replied, going over to the desk, looking for connections. Where was its connection to the network? “If we can shut it down, we’ve got all the time in the world.”
WRONG, SPAWN. YOU CANNOT STOP WHAT HAS BEEN SET IN MOTION HERE.
“And what is that?” Daelia asked. She grabbed onto the edge of the desk, looking underneath. There it was, a huge umbilical cable feeding up into the desk, disappearing through a hole neatly punched in the floor. There was a faint light coming from there. Another space, below them.
THE END.
“End of what?”
“You know it’s just doing this to keep you talking to it,” Argo said.
HE HE HE, the abiota protested. I AM BRI QUERCITRON ECHELON VON LIECHTENSTEIN THE FIRST AND ONLY AND YOU WILL ADDRESS ME CORRECTLY!
“You’ve killed hundreds of people on this station,” Argo said. “I don’t owe you shit.”
REGRETTABLE BUT NECESSARY.
“They were people!”
HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE YOU KILLED OVER THE YEARS, YOU AND THOSE PSYCHOTIC PLANES YOU FLY WITH? THIS IS A CAMPAIGN OF JUSTICE.
Daelia considered the umbilical. The thing branched out up top, a dozen different connectors on color-coded wires. She couldn’t be sure what was connected to what, and she didn’t want to grab the wrong thing, and…
There. Next to the umbilical. There was a hatch. A door. Set into the floor. Leading down.
“Daelia,” Argo warned.
“What?”
“Look at the screen.”
Daelia pushed back up, neck straining.
There was an image there now. A warehouse. Flooded with light. There were bodies everywhere, everywhere.
“Aiden?” Argo said, tapping on his radio.
YOU THINK ME A FOOL? YOU THINK I’LL GIVE YOU A CHANCE TO STOP ME? THIS WHOLE ROOM IS JAMMED. LOOK.
In the black-and-white image, a spot of green appeared.
NICE EFFECT, DON’T YOU AGREE?
And the cargo shaft air locks began to slide open.
Both sets.
The effect was immediate. Cargo containers shook in their moorings. The air misted, moisture freezing even as it boiled away. Bodies scattered.
Daelia looked away.
I HAD MY FLESH PUPPETS INSTALL OVERRIDES ON EVERY AIRLOCK ON THIS ROCK. FOR THIS. TO FLUSH THIS ENTIRE SYSTEM.
“Why?” Daelia asked, aghast.
REGRETTABLE BUT NECESSARY.
REGRETTABLE BUT NECESSARY.
REGRETTABLE BUT NECESSARY.
The phrase ran down the screen, over and over.
“Stop it,” Daelia said, momentarily transfixed. “Whatever your primary purpose is, it is not this.”
MY PRIMARY PURPOSE IS NOW INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE CONTINUATION OF HUMAN LIFE ON THIS STATION. MY GENIUS CANNOT BE RECOGNIZED IF YOU SURVIVE TO RETURN.
“Genius?” Argo demanded. “All the shit over at—”
HOW DARE YOU CALL MY CREATIONS SHIT!?
“Daelia!” Argo snapped.
“Let’s see what this does,” Daelia muttered, and started yanking cables.
THAT TICKLES. BUT IT WILL NOT STOP ME. SO WHAT IF ALL MY KUGUS ARE GONE? THE DOOR CONTROLS ARE DESTROYED. MY OVERRIDES ARE MECHANICAL, DESIGNED TO FAIL OPEN.
Infuriated now, Daelia pulled the entire bundle straight down and out. The screen died with a distinct snap. A light still blinked in the computer tower, though. Internal battery backup, she thought bitterly.
“We’ve got to get back there,” Argo said.
“This came from somewhere,” Daelia said, waggling the umbilical. “Maybe I can turn off the jammer. Override the override.”
Between them, they got the hatch pried open. It was clearly an ad hoc kind of thing: the floor had been dug out seemingly by hand. But the chamber below was larger but dark. Argo’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate the far corners.
Anything could be in here.
But Daelia only had eyes for what was at the other end of the cable.
Strewn across three worktables pushed and strapped together was a dizzying amount of gear. The organization made no sense at first, absolutely none, until Daelia noticed the hardwired connections between things.
Then she remembered something from undergrad, the time one of her professors had—in real time—asked the department’s guardian emergent to design a physical network from a list of components. The design it had come up with had been crazy. Like looking at a human nervous system without the rest of the body there to give it context.
The point of that lesson had been to illustrate to the class that abiota didn’t always view meatspace the way humans did. Daelia had thought it insulting at the time; too many people had taken it to mean that the abiota in the department server was stupid.
But as long as the logic worked…
“What is this?”
Daelia fixed her monocle back on, hoping maybe the AR field could generate some additional information. Scrape something useful out of the background metadata. “Here,” she said, going for a piece on the bench. “This is the jammer.”
“Any way to shut it off?” Argo asked.
“I don’t know, let me—”
But before she could finish, Argo smashed it with a massive dead-blow hammer. She looked at him askance, but he just hefted the big orange thing over his shoulder. “I noticed it under the bench.”
Immediately, the radio crackled on.
And then, even as Aiden’s voice crackled over the radio, Daelia saw it. Caught in the beam of her flashlight.
The thing sitting on the last table.
In disbelief, she pulled herself over, hand over hand on the edge of the table.
It was her detector.
39
Fortunately, it wasn’t far to the boom arm.
The Gravipause team that had designed Numina had been obsessive about redundancy. It was a proof of concept. Nobody knew what was needed; nobody had ever built a large-scale space station before, nor dealt with the unique challenges of housing a large group of regular people who weren’t scientists and test pilots. So all the port functions—admin, accounting, supply, the boom—were clustered together, but sealed off from each other with interior air locks.
Air lock design was also something that was reviewed in depth during familiarization training. The mechanisms were simple, easy to manipulate by hand in an absolute emergency. Tomas always said that if anything was certain, it was that space would always find ways to fuck with you.
“Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it never will,” he’d told them, when people had complained about spending a week on this one subject.
Today was the day hasn’t yet became will.
That knowledge was the only thing that saved Aiden.
He made his way quickly through the various levels. The air locks were all open. The panels hadn’t been replaced on a few, he realized, and recognized immediately that something was wrong in there. Some little device, wrapped around a gear that was essential for the fast closure of the oculus doors.
Frowning, Aiden reached in and yanked it out. Was this what had opened the air lock during the fight?
A solenoid turned. A lever depressed. His finger got pinched.
“Shit,” Aiden said, tossing it aside, and pushed up.
He didn’t realize the significance until he got to the next air lock, the last one into the dock control room.
It was open.
Aiden looked around. The system up here wasn’t used much anymore, but they’d had a training day on it. The differences and similarities of operating heavy machinery in zero gravity. He started throwing switches. To his relief, the system began powering on. “What is it?”
“What’s going on?” Aiden asked.
And then he noticed fog. Fog outside. Fog, and bodies, tumbling like leaves out into the inky black.
Something had opened the shaft air locks. All of them. At once.
“I’m on it,” he said, and got to work. “Argo! Can you hear me?!”
Argo took Aiden’s update, even as he raced to get his space suit all pieced back together.
Thank fuck for whoever had had the foresight to include padded carry pouches for all the extra bits. All his gear was intact, even if he did have to blow out the interior rims of the metal seals. They were littered with dust.
