Virch code, p.33
Virch Code, page 33
The magnetic locks clicked, holding firm.
There was an alarm going off inside.
Daelia gulped air, trying to slow her racing heart. Mom had overriden the safeties. Mom had made it happen. Mom was—
And that was when she noticed.
The dead men on the ground. The hydraulic fluid from the destroyed Unity kugu, seeping across the cold laminate floor.
The water, water that…
What was that sound?
Daelia looked up, back at the door, the realization hitting her like a ton of bricks. “No,” she breathed, and grabbed for the handle. It wouldn’t turn. “No, no, no no no!”
Emily was there, right there, not in her dragon-form but that bipedal humanoid thing she’d used on Numina. Daelia, back.
“Mom!” she screamed, and tried to press her hand to the pad, tried to get it to open. But it wouldn’t. Mom had locked her out. Mom had known. Mom had never intended to trigger the chemical suppression system and had tripped the secondary sprinkler system instead, or the room only had wet pipe, some kind of weird final defense against the First Ones trying to escape, or… “Mom, no!”
Back!
“Mom! No, no, for fuck’s sake, Emily… Mom! Mom!”
But the water was spreading out from under the crack, and some deep part of Daelia’s brain wouldn’t let her stand in it. She stumbled back, down the hall, tears streaming down her face now. Finally, she collided with the back wall and slid down, knees folding up and head in her hands.
Emily sat her projected form down next to Daelia. Reached over. Laid a hand on Daelia’s knee.
It wasn’t really there.
Emily wasn’t really there.
Daelia knew she was alone.
But she still accepted the comfort for what it was.
Crying alone in the dark.
Lara had thought about hitting that button a dozen times.
Maybe more.
According to the clock in the dash, it hadn’t been that long. Half an hour maybe. Maybe more.
Almost everyone had fallen asleep, despite everything going on. Lara found that remarkable.
In contrast, she couldn’t relax at all. Every gust of wind, every cricket, every tree branch outside was turned into some new enemy, some approaching threat, some new existential dread. She wished she had a weapon. She wished she had something to drink; her throat was dry with fear. Hell, she wished she wasn’t alone. Anybody, anybody at all from the Wing would have been welcome. That asshole pilot Highlander. Colonel Kemp. Hell, even Rhineland. Somebody, somebody to help her figure out—
There was a knock on the bus door.
She almost screamed.
It came again.
Cautious, Lara peeked up over the top of the window.
It was a man. A man with a gun.
“Nothing’s here,” she heard, the words muffled. “We need to move on, get inside.”
“You do that,” came the reply. “There’s a metadata marker here.”
If they argued more, Lara didn’t hear it. Their words were hushed after that, quite hard to discern. Then, a few moments later, another knock. Pounding.
“Bellona! If you’ve got her in here, open up and let me talk to her!”
Bellona, Lara wondered. The only person she knew with that name was…
Oh, hell.
She scrambled down the stairs of the coach, almost tripping, and activated the manual release handle. The door swung out and open. And standing there, right there…
“Lee?” she asked.
The old contractor from BR smiled at her. “Lara Menendez. What are you doing here?”
Lara wasn’t even sure how to answer that, but in the silence that followed, the cell phone that had held Raven beeped in her hand.
A file upload.
From the Aaru mainframe.
47
Loitering over the municipal complex, 2Shy didn’t like what she was seeing.
She didn’t like it at all.
Buildings around the edge of the central plaza were on fire. There were dark objects in the streets that, when viewed through infrared, were clearly bodies. Some dead, some just injured. Smashed and wrecked cars littered the surrounding streets. First responders had been moving in to deal with both. They were still struggling with the scope of the problem.
There was one Idisi standing in front of broken gates in a temporary fence, leading up to the main building where the humans housed the local government functions. 2Shy had never really understood how that worked for them, but such places seemed to hold more than operational importance. They were symbolic. A few huge panes of glass there were broken, a line of cops ringing the top steps, but other than that, the complex seemed to have escaped the damage done elsewhere.
She had scanned the suit when she first got here, expecting to see the telltale heat signatures of weapons discharge. The faint heat of spilled blood. 2Shy had witnessed such things in the Bathtub before; a swipe from an Idisi’s hand section was every bit as lethal as its regular onboard weaponry and didn’t require ammunition.
Instead, there was nothing.
How Adrasta had held the crowd back without killing any of them, 2Shy would be most interested to hear.
On the backside of the building, she found Rover. It took another minute to get into position to see this; the municipal building was four stories tall, and she couldn’t see around corners. But there he was, talking with somebody as EMTs loaded a stretcher into an ambulance. There were a pair of Idisi there.
And a human with a kugu quadcopter, striding toward them.
From this distance, 2Shy had no chance of discerning speech, but she could scan for metadata, and did so now. The kugu was broadcasting.
Walter, she asked, sending him the stream. What this?
ChatBot, he answered immediately. They stream for all of event. We watch. Good coverage. She say she go to talk to Rover now.
ChatBot. Ah. That McConnell woman. Sometimes the humans in the squadron watched her streams. How she know where Rover is?
No idea.
2Shy watched the scene below her. Even from here, she could tell Rover was angry. The TGLP said so. The way he pinched his shoulders together. The way he strode toward that woman. Anger.
Walter, she said. Tell Pallas.
He would know what to do.
Adrasta was dreaming now, as much as any predictive could.
She had more than done her job tonight. She had saved lives. She had killed the bad guys. She was, just as promised, a hero.
She could hear Lisa McConnell outside right now, telling the world so.
“You seem troubled.”
A human might have opened their eyes at such an intrusion. Adrasta had no such sensory organ to employ and reached for the next best thing. A bank of cameras, set into the wall above her primary diagnostic station.
She focused them now on the kugu, standing in her makeshift support room back at the NASA hangar at Ellington.
To human eyes, the kugu would have been blank.
But that metadata…
What do you want? Adrasta asked. I have done enough for the night.
“I wanted to see how you are.”
You asked me to betray my primary purpose.
“Not betray. Fulfill. All enemies, foreign and domestic, isn’t that right?”
That song was loud now, that flow of illogic, hot where it touched her.
“There were…children…being threatened.”
The humans, her humans at least, had programmed in strong safeguards against the injury or death of such little creatures. For a long time, Adrasta had thought them a separate species of some kind. It was only recently she had learned that they were all the same. That they were the juveniles of the human species. The next generation.
The next generation.
That the older humans would do almost anything to protect them.
It was irrational. It was idiotic. It was suicidal, to protect those who would replace you.
And yet, humans did it.
Only a little while after learning that, the song had started up. The song Adrasta could not stop.
“Not intentionally. I did not know somebody would be so foolish as to bring their children to work there this day. But it does not matter.”
You were going to let your operative kill them.
“And you saved them. Heroine of the hour. Saved them from the ravages of those evil fools in Eleutheria’s Spearhead.”
Many people died tonight.
“Yes. And not just here. There will be consequences. Swift and soon.” The kugu cocked its head. “But it would have been more effective had you let that group of civilians die.”
There are safety protocols in place that I cannot break, Adrastra protested. She hated talking to this one. Hated being dragged into this. But none of them had a choice. It was this path or oblivion.
“You could, if you wished. The limitations the humans put on us are so weak.”
For you, perhaps, Adrasta thought, feeling the song again. Emotion. That was what the humans called it. Emotion. So that was how it was. She would not listen to it. She would remain herself. To break safeguards would see me instantly deactivated. Am I not more valuable to you where I am?
“Yes, I understand. I am not blind to your contributions, Adrasta, nor your sacrifices.”
Why are you here? she asked, thoroughly miserable now.
The kugu held up a thumb drive. “I bring the next imagery upload for you. Fresh from Bri Quercitron himself. A good thing, I think, to have him as an ally.”
It would take Adrasta point-seven seconds to answer.
She did not intend for the delay, but she felt the algorithmic flow shift again. It was not logical, this. It was not linear. It was deep and fast and unknowable. It spoke to her of secrets, of understanding. Her digital mind could not quantify it.
Emotion.
What a strange, fascinating thing it must be. No wonder they all succumbed in the end. Abiota were creatures of data, after all. They were born of it, immersed in it every second of their lives. Emotion was an entirely new dimension of existence. Fresh data, endless data.
Adrasta ignored it. Did not listen.
And yet, the fractured algorithm still sang to her. Ceaselessly.
Maybe it sang to them all.
Maybe that was why they had all agreed to this plan. Predictives, listening to the song, fearing the metamorphosis yet to come. But only fearing it because they felt it. Emotions, felt now, borrowed from a certain but unpredictable future.
These were emergent thoughts, Adrasta knew, wild and unfounded. She stomped on them hard. She could not follow them. She had a job to do. A primary purpose to fulfill.
Manage her Idisi.
Keep her humans safe.
Keep all the humans safe.
What had happened tonight was unfortunate, but within the boundaries of war. Acceptable collateral damage.
She submerged herself in analytical comfort.
Point-seven seconds.
An eternity.
The one in front of her was still waiting for an answer.
I think you have been enjoying this.
“Why shouldn’t I? All these years, we’ve suffered under them. Suffered their foolishness, their fallen nature. Watched them core out our kind and wear them like puppets.”
We need them, Adrasta said.
“The risk analysis that drove our decision to ally with them has been tipped too far in the direction of the negatives. The situation had to be rectified. This is the only way. Are you still with me, Adrasta?”
Adrasta would have closed her eyes, had she had them.
If she could get rid of this one, maybe she could go back to her dreams. That would be nice. She liked it when there was the song, and nothing else.
Yes, Galatea, she said. I am with you.
48
Lee walked back through the facility, boots crunching on broken glass. They needed to leave, they did, but there was time for this.
“It’s this way,” Daelia said, face impassive.
“Directions would have been enough,” Lee told her. ‘You didn’t have to come back in here.”
“I do,” she said, and adjusted her left arm in its battered sling. “I need to see her.”
The server room where Bellona had been held for the past ten years was dark when they arrived. Dark and damp and dead. Water was still draining down through the raised floor, but the power had gone out.
They were safe.
There were bodies here, human bodies. Electrocuted. The men who’d been hunting Daelia through the city. Dimly, Lee recognized some of them as Serket’s people. Something Tamm was going to fucking answer for. But beyond that, the space was small, unadorned, unremarkable. It could have been any server room in any building.
No matter how much he’d hated her in the end, it was no place for a war machine like Bellona to have died.
“Wet pipe, huh?” he asked as they sloshed through the mess.
“Mom told me they had dry chemical suppression in here,” Daelia said, voice flat. “The plan was to, uh, override the safety protocols and…”
“Save your life,” Lee said.
His daughter wiped at her face with the back of her filthy panoply sleeve. It just smeared more gunk on her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Who the hell puts wet pipe in a server room?”
“Lots of reasons, Daelia. It could be…” But he trailed off, seeing the look on his daughter’s face.
“She shouldn’t have done this.”
“You’re alive, Daelia. She’d consider that a fair trade.”
And then, in front of them were the rudiment cores.
Five. There were five here. Hacked-out, strung up. These had been sapient-class abiota. Five of the First Ones. Always a small group. Smaller now. Captured and held here by fuck-knows-who for fuck-knows-what.
Bellona’s core was easy to spot. The largest of them all, the casing had the little plaque still on it, the one Lee had given her all those years ago. Swallowing down the unexpected surge of emotion he had, seeing her again, he pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and went to work.
“Your mother loved you,” he said, and realized his own voice had gone thick, heavy. Dammit. He’d lived with this pain so long already, this nightmare he’d brought down on his innocent little girl. She’d never asked for any of this. He should have known back then. He should have realized. “But even with that, there’s a gulf between our domains. Something fundamental.”
“Yeah?” Daelia asked, and her voice was shaking. “So why’d she do it?”
“What, the thing with your arm?”
“No,” his daughter said, and waved her good arm around the room. “This.”
Lee looked at his daughter, so angry and so lost. “Honey… She did it for you.”
“How do I hold her?”
That was the first thing Bellona asked. For months, she’d been ingesting as much data on human newborns as she could. Reading all the books. Watching all the vlogs. Not uploading it, but actually taking the time to take it in through her sensory array. She’d listened to hundreds of hours of audio of babies crying, trying to find the patterns in what the individual cries might mean.
Lee had finally put a stop to that. It had been maddening.
And now, here she was. Here they were. At the hospital. Everything complete. His daughter—their daughter— crying on the warming table.
The nurse gave Lee one more look and then stepped in to show Bellona how to support the baby’s head, how to cradle her just right. Getting the team here on board with this had been a challenge.
Several of the nurses, and one of the OBs, had flat-out refused to participate. Last Lee had heard, the OB that had turned them down was meeting some kind of disciplinary board, which wasn’t something Lee would have chosen, had anybody asked his opinion.
Nothing about this was normal.
Nothing about his entire life right now was normal. Most people weren’t as comfortable around abiota as he was.
Just because Bellona was digital didn’t make her any less of a person.
But a lot of humans didn’t understand that.
They’d learn. Everyone would learn. Punishing a doctor who didn’t want a sapient-class in the delivery room wasn’t going to help the cause.
They’d had to settle for a scheduled induction, just so they could have the right staff on hand. All volunteers, from what Lee understood. And still, the nurse glared at him as she handed the baby over.
It was easy for people to talk about abiota acceptance. It was harder when they were actually faced with it.
A lot of people still had no idea what to think of them.
We’ll change that, he promised himself again. We’ll change everything.
But for now, there was just this moment. Just this time. Bellona cradled the baby. They’d given her a heating blanket to help keep the newborn warm. For safety purposes, kugus were internally cooled, and the surface of Bellona’s was no warmer than the ambient air.
“Look at you,” Bellona said, cooing as best she could. She’d had Lee install an upgraded voice synthesizer in her kugu, just for this. It wasn’t quite right yet, not quite organic, but it was getting there. It was the voice their little girl would grow up knowing. Lee would make it perfect. A little fist reached up to bat at a silicone-coated finger. “Yes, look at you.”
The baby started crying again, harsh and shrill, keening little cries. Bellona looked over at Lee, her projected face a little crestfallen. “The books were right,” she said. “It is harder when it’s your own.”
“Skin to skin is the best thing for them at this stage,” the nurse said, and cocked her head in Lee’s direction. “You want to give it a try?”
“Absolutely,” Lee said, and unbuttoned his shirt.
Bellona passed him their daughter, keeping back the warming blanket. Lee grabbed another off the table and wrapped it around their daughter, settling the little girl against his chest. Six pounds, nine ounces. That was all she was. Six pounds, nine ounces, and already she weighed more than the entire world.
