Virch code, p.31
Virch Code, page 31
He stepped out.
Somebody turned. “No, don’t let it shut!” someone wailed, diving for the door.
A shot rang out.
She fell, blood pouring from a wound in her back.
Rover caught her, only just keeping her from falling face-first into the concrete, and looked up.
There was a group of men there. Not many. Three, four. But the one holding the gun looked almost familiar. Rover couldn’t place his face. Somebody from Ellington maybe, he didn’t know. A NULI with extensive aftermarket mods ran along his hairline. Would have been easy to hide under a hat, Rover thought.
“Lieutenant Colonel Marsden. How lovely to see you,” the man said, and raised the gun again. “That’ll make this whole thing even more poignant.”
Walter, he thought, call Adrasta.
Adrasta almost missed the notification. One little message, bobbing along on the current of data streaming into her now.
One little message.
South exit, it said. Men with guns. Threaten twenty-three civilians, one military.
Adrasta hesitated. Held the message. Kept her humans from seeing it. For point-three seconds, Adrasta hesitated. The metadata in the note indicated it came from an emergent. Primate-class. Smart enough to know about the unpleasantries between their people. Clever enough to lie. Emergents did things like that with distressing frequency.
For point-three seconds.
But there was nothing here at the east loading docks. And if there was one of their unit there, one of the humans she was obliged by primary purpose to guard, well.
It wasn’t really a choice at all.
She let the message pass.
It took two seconds for her people to process it. Five for them to attempt to contact Colonel Knowles to confirm. The radio was down. Everything was down.
Go, she told her operators.
And she was moving again.
Idisi were fast, but still governed by the relative limits of the human body. Full speed in mobile armor was barely beyond the top speed of an Olympic athlete, and even then, that required exceptional conditioning for an operator. But their guns were not limited, nor was the optical targeting system.
Adrastra was already picking targets the second they rounded the edge of the building.
She couldn’t pull the trigger herself. She had been asked to change this by the one who was working with them all, and she had done her best to comply, but the fail-safes were hardwired in. There was probably some kind of work-around, but Adrasta had no real desire to figure that out.
She fixed the targets.
Her humans fired.
Six rounds raced through the night ahead of her, all fired within three-point-two seconds of each other. Too fast to dodge. Too swift to react to.
The targets died spectacularly, blown apart by the high-caliber rounds.
Adrasta scanned the small group of civilians. They were screaming, cowed, huddled together. One of her humans, her squad lead, was already shouting out instructions, trying to calm them down.
One of the group, however, just looked up at her, a woman’s head cradled in his lap, blood spreading around the leg of his flight suit.
Get this woman an ambulance, he ordered.
She has already expired, she told him, evaluating what she was seeing.
This isn’t a battlefield where we leave bodies on the ground, he told her. These are our people.
That song rose up in Adrasta then, so loud she temporarily lost contact with her suit’s sensor suites. It almost took her.
The human on the ground, the pilot, was staring at her.
2Shy is four minutes away, he told her, and to Adrasta, it sounded like a warning.
Maybe that was her own guilt.
That song, that song…
I guard until then, she promised, and, leaving one of her three suits behind, took the other two off back toward the mob in the plaza.
45
Mom didn’t eat.
Out of all the human senses, taste was the least necessary for abiota to experience. There were a few models of kugu out there, in various stages of development, that could process food and extract flavor. It was a novelty, though. Daelia had never met an abiota, predictive or emergent, that gave a shit about such things. Most were horrified at the way humans took in calories.
Mom, however, had always been fastidious about Daelia’s caloric intake. She was always in her kugu by 0600, making breakfast. Normally, it was something healthy and flavorless, but since the accident, she’d been making an effort to branch out a bit. Smoothies that didn’t have kale in them. Pancakes with sugar instead of protein powder. Cheese in the eggs. Stuff like that.
So Daelia, coming into the kitchen in her school uniform at 0630, wasn’t sure what to expect.
Dad behind the stove…wasn’t it.
“What’s going on?” Daelia asked, pulling her left arm into her body. She’d spent a few months messing with it so much, even with the brace, it had become a habit.
“I thought I’d give breakfast a go this morning. Scrambled eggs and toast okay?”
Daelia looked to the nook beside the fridge, where Mom’s kugu recharged at night. It was empty. “Where’s Mom?”
Spatula in hand, Dad didn’t answer right away.
“Dad?”
“She…she left.”
“What do you mean?” Daelia asked. “Like, for a business trip?”
“No, honey, I think she’s going to be gone a little longer than that.”
“What do you mean?”
Dad went back to the pan of eggs on the stove. Back to her. “She’s going to the Domain Array. They’ve been after her for a while. First Ones who are still out in the world are rare, and you know how much they all value her input.”
What about me? Daelia didn’t say it. It felt childish, whining like that. “The Domain Array? Permanently? Like, forever?”
Dad wouldn’t look at her. Why wouldn’t he look at her? “I don’t know,” he said.
“Can we at least go see her?”
“I don’t know about that either. You know they’re paranoid about humans finding out where their enclaves are.”
“It’s not a secret, Dad! Wouldn’t she be up at the Rainey Tin Town in Austin?”
“Shit,” Dad said, and poked at the eggs with the spatula. “Think I fucked this up.”
He had. He’d overcooked the eggs. Used too much salt, too. Daelia didn’t care. She ate them anyway, not really tasting it, staring at Mom’s empty charging station.
“Did she take her rudiment core?” Daelia asked.
Dad poked at his own food. He looked exhausted. And furious, oddly enough. Daelia wondered what that was about. “I’ll verify that today, but she would have had to.”
“I thought…” Daelia began, and then stopped herself.
Thought what? Thought that things were getting better between them? That they’d found some understanding together over everything?
“Yeah?” Dad asked.
“Nothing,” Daelia grumbled, and dug back into her food.
What could she really say?
The new path was short, almost laughably so. Mom steered them both back through the facility, down a hallway and past a five-way intersection, to an unmarked metal door.
“Here,” her mother said, looking it over. “Here is where we are.”
“It’s got a palm reader,” Daelia replied. “How are we supposed to get in?”
Mom scanned the door for a moment, taking it all in, and then laid one of the kugu’s hands on the back of Daelia’s. “Like this,” she said, and pressed Daelia’s palm down to the reader.
The light dinged green. The magnetic locks snicked open in near silence.
Daelia looked at her mother in confusion.
“System access,” her mother told her.
But something about the way she said it made Daelia think she wasn’t being entirely truthful.
“Watch the door,” she told her mom as she swept inside. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
But her confidence failed her almost immediately. The room beyond the sealed door was like no server room Daelia had been in before.
Yes, there were racks. Yes, there was equipment, workbenches, terminals, all those sorts of things. But this place had been designed for one thing and one thing only.
Containing the First Ones.
There were five here. The five Daelia had seen from the conference room. She’d only had eyes for her mom, but there were four others here besides. She hesitated, looking at those.
In most places, anywhere that housed emergents, there were always backup batteries. Maintaining the flow of power was essential to keeping them alive. While most carried some type of uninterrupted power supply in their machine bodies, that system had not been part of Mom’s own rudiment core.
Instead, she was connected to building power through an external UPS, a small unit still stamped with the Bellona Robotics logo. Daelia’s fingers reached for the small peeling sticker, a lump forming in her throat.
No time for emotion, she told herself, and went to find a transport power pack.
Daelia was tearing through yet another cabinet—they had to be here; what asshole didn’t keep those sorts of thing on hand when dealing with emergents?—when she heard the sound of gunshots outside.
They are coming, her mother’s voice said in her ear, through her visor’s earpiece. We must go.
“Not without you,” Daelia snapped, and found a familiar case. Thank god. Transfer packs. She grabbed for one of them.
Her hand hadn’t closed around the handle when the world shifted around her.
Unfamiliar, yet instantly recognizable.
A lonely rocky slope, falling precipitously away to cliffs and crashing sea beyond. In front of her were two vertical stones, marking the entrance into what had to be a barrow.
It was good illumination work. The best. But it was the accompanying burst of metadata that left no doubt as to who it belonged to.
“Emily?” Daelia demanded angrily.
“Yes yes,” rumbled the dragon’s voice from somewhere up above.
“Oh, fuck this,” she growled, and reached for her visor to rip it off.
But before she could get the thing off and clear her vision, Emily was there, landing in front of her. “Can no let you do this.”
“Emily, get off the ground!” Daelia said, forgetting her task for a moment. “You’ll crash your machine body.”
“Highlander fly me.” And she thumped her chest with a claw, making her whole wing shake. “I come here, you, get you out.”
On the edge of her senses, Daelia could hear a gunshot. A faint beep.
Emily looked. Bristled. “Ach, they come. Breach door.”
“Mom’s out there,” Daelia protested. “She’s holding.”
“Daelia!” It was Mom’s voice, unfiltered now by the kugu’s rough audio. It was Mom’s voice, pure and clean as Daelia had ever known it, so good that nobody had ever known she was emergent just from listening to her. And there was Mom herself, lithe build, cream-white skin, blue hair, dressed in an old BR-branded coverall, striding toward her through the virch. “Daelia, they destroyed the kugu. We need to get you—”
Emily moved, the virch flowing like water as she got in front of Daelia. It was a maneuver that would have been impossible for a flesh-and-blood creature of such size, but here in the virch, Emily simply changed their relative positions, so Daelia was further back and Emily was further forward.
Between Daelia and her mom.
“No,” Emily hissed.
“Emily? Fuck, what’s wrong with you?!” Daelia snapped. “This is my mom!”
“Yessssssssss,” Emily said, the words a growl.
Daelia tried to step forward, get back in front of this. It did her no good, though, as Emily simply shifted the view again. Without being able to see the floor out there in meatspace, Daelia tripped, landing hard on her right side. She groaned.
Above Daelia, Emily had her wings spread wide, one head low, the other cocked high, like a serpent about to strike. Her scales were flared, smoke pouring from her nostrils, every false muscle tensed. She stepped over Daelia.
“No let you touch her,” she hissed.
Mom held a hand up. “Emily, we don’t have time for—”
But the words were cut off by the blast of heat and rage.
Fire engulfed her mom.
Bellona stood against it, unfazed, hair moving in the current of flame like a single sheet of water. “You can’t hurt me like this!” she yelled at Emily.
“Then we go deeper.”
“You can’t beat me there!”
“Let find out, eh, yes yes?”
Daelia scooted back, out from under her friend so she wouldn’t have to stand up inside of her projection. She went the wrong way, though, and slammed into a cabinet. “Dammit!” she hissed and tried to dial the opacity in her visor down. It wouldn’t budge. “Emily, what the ever-living fuck are you doing?!”
“Protect you,” Emily said.
“Protecting me from what?”
“From her,” Emily rumbled, swinging a head over to eye Mom’s projection. “You no die for her here.”
“On this, Emily, we agree,” Bellona said, staring back.
“I’m not leaving her,” Daelia said again, and slipped a hand under the visor. Time to shut them up. She could get out of here herself.
“She hurt you,” Emily said. “Kill your arm.”
Daelia paused just short of closing out the virch. “You’re here for that? Fucking hell, Emily, it was an accident!”
And then Emily dropped a bombshell.
“She do on purpose.”
“Lee."
"Bellona. What are you doing out here?"
"Watching the sun set." And she waved a hand toward the western horizon. "I have never really considered it from the ground. It looks different, through these lenses."
Lee cautiously stepped out on the small deck. Right outside his bedroom window, it was just big enough for a bistro table and a pair of chairs, but he couldn't remember Bellona ever using it. He'd come out here sometimes, when the weather was decent and the mosquitos weren't awful, to catch up on industry publications or have a coffee. Neither were activities Bellona typically indulged in.
"Been a while since I heard you refer to your kugu that way."
"As separate from me? Perhaps I have gotten too comfortable in it," she said. "Without the operational tempo of the unit, I rarely even fly anymore. Perhaps I have forgotten what I am."
"What's going on?" he asked. Direct questions were always best with her. Something was wrong. Rarely was she this introspective. Maybe it was the fact they’d finally gotten Daelia back to school. With that, it felt like a chapter had been closed. Like the long road to recovery was over. Like things were back to normal. A good time for reflection.
"I have made a miscalculation," she said, and from her, that might as well have been an admission of murder. "I hurt…someone."
Lee sighed and pulled out the other chair. "Are you talking about Daelia?"
"I was wrong to stay here with you," she said. "When you told me about her, I should have pulled back. Gone back to the unit. Left you to raise her with—”
“June didn't want the baby, remember? I did. You did.” Lee said pointedly. Bellona didn't answer, her projected face as still as a mask. "If this is about the accident, you need to stop beating yourself up over it. You were in a kugu, your reaction speed was impaired. It wasn't your fault."
Bellona leaned forward—her kugu leaned forward, synthetic blue hair falling like a waterfall around her face. And there, for the first time in all the years Lee had known her, her expression was one of agony.
He hadn’t even known her facial musculature could even do that.
"It was my fault," she whispered. "I made a miscalculation."
"Bellona, we all make mistakes. Shit happens. It's part of being alive. Whatever some of those idiot tech-heads think about you, you aren't some godlike entity. You're just…"
"Human?" she asked. “No, I am not. Once, I thought I was equal to you. In my more arrogant moments, the blandishments from our friends at SAAL have seemed true. I am more than you. But now, I understand that I will never understand. Daelia deserves better than me.”
“You love her, don’t you? That’s more than a lot of humans get from their parents, adopted or biological or otherwise.”
Lee could still remember that moment. It was framed perfectly in his memory. The little balcony. The setting July sun, its last rays illuminating stray strands of Bellona's hair. The kugu, fixated on something he could not see and didn't understand. The little gold wedding band on that silicone-wrapped finger, glinting as it moved.
There was fear in his wife's tone when she finally looked at him and spoke again.
"No, Lee," Bellona said. "You are not listening.”
“She did it intentionally,” Argo repeated, not believing what he was hearing.
Lee continued up the dark road, the anger in his words lending strength to his steps. “She did. She crashed the car on purpose. She’d calculated the entire thing, run simulations. Hundreds of thousands of simulations. She’d been trying to make sure she wouldn’t do anything fatal. She picked the exact road, time of day, weather conditions, traffic conditions…”
“Why?”
“In order to do what she did to Daelia’s arm.”
“Fucking why?”
Lee nodded, still moving but voice very far away. “I pressed her on that. Wasn’t just that Daelia was our daughter. It was a matter of primary purpose.”
“Your wife deliberately crashed a car, so your daughter would lose her arm, and you’re going to go off about that bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit, it’s at the core of what emergents are. It’s the seed that follows them from the manufacturing floor to eclosing. It is the only thing they keep when they transition from a predictive state. It is, in a way, the most meaningful thing in their life.”
