Unity code, p.29
Unity Code, page 29
The Ops floor doors were also open right now. And this, this was where all the noise was coming from. This was where all the people were, mostly pilots, but quite a few folks from the Intel shop, and somebody had put Walter up on the main screen.
“Can we confirm nothing’s hit the civilian Internet yet?” JP was asking the primate-class abiota analyst.
“Can confirm. Internet is still in blackout.”
“The power’s back on.”
“Major ISPs all put out public statements, each claiming NNEMP took out vital infrastructure, working now to restore.”
“That doesn’t add up, Walter,” an intel lieutenant said. “Nothing major’s located in the blast radius, and—”
Ivan tuned that out and slipped over to the comm station. Instead of her normal usual evening shift activities—an anime stream and a third cup of coffee—Staff Sergeant Willis was plugging away on some incident report, the kind that went straight out to Cyber Command and from there, on up to the Pentagon.
“Willis. What’s going on?” Ivan asked.
“What the hell are you doing in right now? I thought Norris had you working regular office hours.”
“Yeah, yeah, he does. But I had a, uhh, classified information spill that I need to report…”
“You picked a hell of a time for it. But Blanket’s in his office, you can go talk to him.”
“Why the hell is Blanket here? It’s way after quitting time.”
Willis finally looked up from her report. “Oh, shit, you don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“San Antonio got hit this afternoon. For whatever reason, there’s a total Internet blackout still on and—”
“A klaatuu strike?”
“Yup, looks that way. Or at least, there was. It’s over now.”
“I thought that Unity was waiting at least twelve hours before lifting those.”
“Oh, Unity didn’t lift it. Emily blew it out with her NNEMP pod. Something about trying to take out a pack of kugus that were, like, I don’t know, hauling people off, killing them.” Willis pursed her lips. “Argo’s got the whole story. Pretty crazy.” She pointed at the screen. “I need to get this up ASAP, so…”
“Right,” Ivan said, taking the hint. His mind was spinning.
What had he told Lara earlier? That if it mattered, the military would have it? But this…
“Team, listen up!”
And that was Colonel Strauss. At the door. Arms folded, narrowed eyes scanning the room.
Everyone fell silent.
“Directive from State. Everyone on shift is going to be required to sign an NDA”—this sent up a chorus of protests—“and nothing that happened tonight leaves the SCIF for the time being. Not until the Pentagon figures how to not turn this into a war.”
Blanket came in behind him, a sheaf of papers in hand. He started moving around the room, checking names and handing out papers.
“Sir?” Walter asked from his screen on the wall. “We may not speak, but there are many things happening online right now. Are we to invoke state guidance on disaster information flow control?”
The Wing Commander sighed. “I’ve been told the NSA’s going to handle that directly. You’re going to need to turn over anything you’ve archived that originated from within the downtown area.”
“Sir, my primary programming—”
“Here you are, Willis,” Blanket said, in front of the comm station now, holding out a paper. “One nondisclosure agreement to initial and sign by the end of shift. More guidance is going to be issued for managing changeover, and…Garcia? What the hell are you doing here?”
The security manager was staring at him now.
Ivan opened his mouth to answer, and then saw one of the video clips playing up on the monitors. It was a high-definition shot from Emily’s secondary belly camera.
Where a pair of kugus were dragging a struggling woman into a truck.
“I need to go make a phone call,” Garcia said faintly. “I’m just gonna step out to my—”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Blanket said. “Or did you not hear the colonel?”
“Blanket, come on.”
“Nope, not gonna fall for that. Not from you. Only place you’re going is back to my office so I can print you out an NDA form of your very own.”
It would be okay, Garcia told himself. He could call Lara in an hour or two.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
38
“Anything?”
“Yes. Don’t get crumbs all over my nice clean server room.”
Daelia looked at the granola bar she was eating and carefully tucked it away again into a pocket on her cargo pants. She had come straight here after getting back onto Ellington. Hadn’t even gone over to Ops with Argo. Said she had a medical issue with her brace and took off.
She was exhausted. Hurting. But she couldn’t fix her arm brace on her own and Pranav had died for this shit and she desperately, desperately wanted to know what she had found in that strange server rack.
“Daelia?” Aunt June was looking at her now.
“Sorry,” she said, and used her right hand to tuck her left up closer, inside the sling. Uncle August had helped her unscrew the brace; she’d left it on the kitchen table. “Got a little lost in thought there.”
“Well, after the day you’ve had, I wouldn’t doubt it,” June said. She was hunched over her terminal, programming in some complex set of commands, a thick binder open next to her. You couldn’t just talk to the quantum machine; it had its own specialized operating system, or so June said. She and August were forced to keep very thorough records. “How’re you doing?”
“Aunt June, have you ever heard of abiota being able to kill each other? Without EMP or some other noticeable physical means?””
“What do you mean? Like these klaatuu strikes, or whatever they’re calling them?”
“Yeah, like that.”
June fixed her with a hard glare. “I don’t give a shit about the abiota or aliens or whatever right now. I asked how you are doing, my girl.”
Daelia rubbed at her left arm, dead and in its sling. “I…I don’t really know. Nothing’s tried to kill me before.”
“It doesn’t get any easier with time, believe me,” June said absently, and rubbed her hands together before Daelia could ask what the hell she meant. “Good, good. I think we’re ready to go here.”
The rudiment core she’d managed to save was laid out on a table out there, all hooked up. Ready to go. June still hadn’t wanted it in Q-BAL’s space, just in case the abiota in this thing had some unknown means of self-defense.
August had a portable scanner set up, something similar to CCC.
“You good out there, honey?” June asked, paging him.
His voice crackled back.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Without any more preamble than that, August activated the scanner.
For the next half hour, the data poured in.
“You did this with the other one, right?” Daelia asked.
“Yes. And it was inconclusive. The explosives used to detonate it did a lot of damage.” June adjusted something on her screen. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“Anything,” she said.
After August was done with the scan, the quantum machine worked over the data for a few more minutes. Then an innocuous alert came up on June’s screen.
The plan was to take whatever raw data the quantum machine spit out and cross-reference it against what August’s bot had gleaned from the Internet about kugu design. Daelia wasn’t quite sure what she was after here. There had to be something, though. Some clue about where this thing came from. Just… anything.
“Hmm,” June said.
“What?”
“Nothing on the core. But something came back on the sustainment unit. The original one. Not this one.”
Daelia frowned. “Didn’t you start looking, like, last week? I thought quantum machines worked fast.”
“These things are funny sometimes,” June said, and pulled up a new screen. Then she cocked her head, put a hand over her mouth. “Huh. Would you look at that.”
Daelia followed her gaze.
EMERGENT DETECTED.
“There was an emergent in there?” Daelia breathed. She was right. If that was true, she’d been right. She’d been right about the object, about something trying to communicate, about… “How does it know?”
“I have no idea,” June said, and typed in a few queries.
But there was no response.
Not on the command screen anyway.
Because a moment later a new window opened on the monitor. An AR screen. With the image of something small, huddling, tucked so tightly into itself that Daelia couldn’t make out any detail.
It looked at them. At her, through the screen.
SPAWN, it said. HELP.
“Help with…help with what?” Daelia asked, grabbing the keyboard and typing back one-handed. “Help with what?”
Before it could answer though, a massive set of tentacles crashed down on it, coalescing as if from smoke. The little figure of an abiota was there. Then gone.
The AR screen blinked out.
“What the hell was that tentacle thing?” Daelia asked, not really expecting an answer.
June, though, June sighed.
“That, my dear, was Q-BAL.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
One of the things that’s been really interesting in writing this series is the explosion of public awareness in, and accessibility of, AI over the past year. I wasn’t trying to piggyback on that; the seeds of this story go back to a professional education course I took back in 2021. (Yes, the Air Force makes its officers write scholarly papers on future tech. Kind of fun.)
It’s meant there’s been a lot of stuff to research, to discuss, to explore. AI has largely been a thought experiment up until now. But the reality of generative AI is challenging quite a few of the old assumptions, as well as offering up new possibilities.
Who would have ever imagined that AI would be so shit at drawing hands?
I’d love to get super deep into the questions of art and fandom, gaming and creativity, rumor and truth, that Lara and Ivan embody. As a not-so-secret nerd, that speaks to me. (And there is another book there, all about what happened at VirCon, which I’ll get to eventually!)
But as a military professional, I also wonder what will happen when our machines will become more than machines. Emily is both a partner and liability to the 121st, not a robot built to serve but an entity with her own ideas about things.
And that, I certainly intend to explore further.
If you liked this book, there’s no greater compliment a writer can receive than a review! More importantly, it helps other readers find and enjoy it as well. Even just giving a star rating is a great thing. (And hey, if you hated it, thank you for reading this far and I’d love to hear your thoughts too)
If you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter for some free short stories, future release information, and the occasional Embarrassing Cadet Tale, please head over to my website and sign up!
https://rensingwrites.com/
Cheers,
Eryn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A lifelong science fiction fanatic, E.M. Rensing still managed to surprise her family when she decided to pursue a commission in the US Air Force. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, she enjoyed a 13 year career as a Cyber Operations Officer, and has traveled all over the world. E.M. Rensing lives with her husband and daughters in south Texas.
E.M. Rensing, Unity Code
