Unity code, p.4
Unity Code, page 4
Daelia seemed focused on one in particular. Argo, barely out of his teens, in a uniform that didn’t quite fit. Mom, beaming. Aiden, scrawny and lanky in that way that a lot of thirteen-year-olds were.
It was the Air Force Academy, up by the Light Switch, that huge glass atrium that poked out of the upper terrace between the cadet area and the administration building. It was Parents’ Weekend, his freshman year. Another parent had taken the photo for them. Mom had been so proud of him.
Daelia leaned in.
“That’s the family,” Argo said, coming up behind her. “Mom and my little brother, Aiden.”
“I didn’t know you were an Academy grad,” she replied.
“I’m not,” he said shortly. His phone buzzed. Another notification from his skim-bot. NASA had put out a press release. He’d read it later. “Shall we?”
Argo hadn’t done a whole lot of driving around yet. To get to base, he normally went west through Memorial Park and out to the 610 Loop. It was quicker to go east, catch I-45, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do that.
Houston’s entire downtown had been lost to the war, apparently, and the neighborhoods around had been left in their ruins. It was creepy, disquieting. Far too similar to places he’d been over in the Bathtub.
But that was exactly where Daelia took him that morning.
For a little while, everything looked normal. Small street blocks, crammed with mid-rise apartments or old stores. People. Cars. But then, the signs of life faded. The buildings lining the streets petered out, empty lots or collapsed ruins beginning to predominate.
Soon Daelia was parking in the shadow of a broken wall, nothing but ruins in front of them. These ran on, out to the maze of underpasses and ramps that connected to I-45. Beyond that, it was all open sky.
“Why is it like this?” Argo asked, looking around.
“Up ahead used to be downtown, until the fucking PLA turned it into a lake,” she said.
“No, I mean, why has it been left like that?”
“This city’ll redevelop all this eventually. When enough people forget.” She sounded bitter.
Argo didn’t push it.
They got a box out of the back, big and heavy and sealed up tight. A quiet box, Daelia said, but didn’t get into it any further. She seemed subdued by the surroundings.
It was a strange place. Anywhere else, any other time, the place probably would have been full of vagrants or druggies, people with no better place to go. Here though, now, the area was treated with a surprising amount of respect. It was clean, littered with makeshift memorials.
“What is this?”
“People come here to remember family, I guess,” Daelia said. “You know, people lost in the war.”
“Yeah, but I mean, all of this looks like an urban warfare training course,” Argo said. “This shit can’t be safe.”
“It’s open, because closing it off hasn’t ever worked. People come in, leave flowers or pictures or candles or whatever, and leave,” Daelia said, nodding at one such display.
“This feels kind of shitty,” Argo commented. They were following a branch of the old channelized bayou. It looked like a bridge may have once spanned the waters here, but now, only the stairs remained.
“I know,” she replied, and patted the box they were carrying. “But it beats coming through the park with this thing.”
The kugu was right where she’d said it would be. The nocturnal residents of the underside of the overpass had christened it with a fresh sprinkling of guano in the past thirty-six hours.
“This thing looks like it was hit by a grenade.”
“Near enough,” Daelia said, and offered him a pair of latex gloves she’d just pulled from a jacket pocket. “I can figure out more when we get it out of here.”
They dug it out of the mess and carried it back down again, where they stuffed it into the box. A change of clothes later and they were on their way again.
Argo didn’t ask anything else.
Not until they got clear of the ruins.
“Why me?” he asked, throwing another sanitizing wipe out of the window. He was methodically cleaning the grime off his face as Daelia navigated through the broken streets.
“Well, we needed to come in from the lake side, and I figure you’re not sentimental about that,” Daelia told him. “And besides, most of the other guys in the unit don’t want anything to do with me.”
“You seem like you’re on good terms with everyone.”
“Professionally, maybe. Personally? I’m not friends with anyone.”
“You’re friends with Emily.”
“That’s different.”
“Why, because she’s crazy?”
Daelia looked over at him. “She’s abiota, yeah, sure. But she and I have history. She doesn’t get weird with me.”
Argo leaned his head on the window, settling in. He’d taken some ibuprofen for the hangover headache before leaving, but it was stubborn. “I’d say she’s pretty damn weird.”
“It’s stuff like this.” She waggled her left hand at him. “People are usually either way too interested or freaked out by this.”
“Why is that?” he asked. Argo had been curious about the brace but didn’t think it was polite to ask. If she was offering, though… “It’s just a brace, right?”
“It’s more than a brace. It’s got neural connectors in it. It picks up the nerve impulses from my shoulder and passes them along, but there are some mechanical bits, to make up for the finer motor control I lost, and…” Daelia trailed off. “It was the, ahh, the prototype. For a lot of the NULI tech we have these days.”
“Shit, really?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t meet his eye. “When people talk about me being half-abiota or whatever, this is usually what they’re talking about. Mom and Dad built this together.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Really?” She sounded almost relieved. He wondered what that was about.
Argo picked at something under one of his nails. “You don’t need to be part machine to be your mom’s daughter. Family’s about more than blood, you know? Or whatever.”
Daelia gave him a look then, and twisted a hand on the steering wheel, uncomfortable. “Anyway, you’re also up here and most of the guys live down by base or up by Bush International, so…I don’t know, okay? I just thought of you first.”
“Fucking aliens,” Argo said, and turned his attention back outside, watching the city fly by. The freeway here was tight and twisty, but the worst of the morning rush-hour traffic had already died down. “So Emily’s video feed was altered.”
“Yeah.”
“Altered well enough to fool the cops.”
“Seems so.”
“What can do that?” Argo asked.
“I have no idea. It’s not technically possible.” Daelia made a face. “I mean, it’s not possible from a technical perspective, given the equipment Emily has on board. And you know how it is. They can’t access their cameras. Something else must have done it.”
“Why is that?” Argo asked. “I’ve always wondered.”
“Can you alter what physically comes into your eyes?”
“No, but…they’re not us.”
Daelia sighed. “It’s not a perfect analogy. But trust me, she can’t have done this.”
“Then what did?”
“I don’t know. Whatever way you go, it’s a problem.”
He shifted in his seat then. “We’re headed north,” he said.
“Yeah, you just realize that?”
Settling back down, Argo shook his head. “It’s not this flat, back in Nevada. Been a while since I’ve had to navigate anywhere without obvious landmarks. Where are we going?”
“To see one of my dad’s friends,” Daelia told him. “Store this thing. Up in Cut and Shoot.”
“What?”
“It’s a town,” Daelia said, defensive.
He whistled. “What is it with this state?”
“Wait. You’re not from Texas?”
“Me? Fuck, no, not originally. I grew up in Alaska.”
“Alaska doesn’t have towns called Cut and Shoot?”
He grinned. “If you put it that way…”
“You left active duty to come here to Houston, but you’re not from Texas? There are like, three Air Guard abiota interdiction units on the West Coast. Why not one of those?”
Argo looked out the window. Didn’t meet her eye. Thought about his little brother, up in fucking orbit with some kind of fucking alien fleet flying around.
“Family,” he said.
5
Even in the high-occupancy lane, it took over an hour to reach their objective. It was, in no small way, like going back in time.
The suburbs gave way to a brief patch of downtown skyline, glass and steel rising above tall, dense trees. The Woodlands, Daelia supplied when Argo asked. But that rolled by, fading again. Forgotten again, as they left the freeway.
A gas station, a small shopping center, and then nothing.
The world went from modern to rural in only a few minutes.
Argo had grown up outdoors. Hunting, fishing, hiking, snowshoeing. In Alaska, you found ways to get out or you went crazy. He wasn’t sure about this place, though. South Texas was too humid. Unpleasant. Even the beaches, he’d been told, were kind of miserable.
He did like Cut and Shoot, though. Maybe more than any place he’d been to yet in the Houston area. It was a tiny, unpretentious sort of place. A post office, a few bars, a dollar store. Then even that was gone, and they were surrounded by nothing but dense forest. Oaks and sweet gums and tall, scraggly pines.
Finally, Daelia took a hard left off the two-lane county road. She guided Dingo up a dirt road, barely wide enough for him to pass.
The path was carved out of that forest, vines so thick in the trees it felt like a tunnel. The smell of decaying plant matter was heavy, and the simple cattle gate that barred the way was thick with rust.
“Where the hell are we?” Argo asked, looking back down the road.
“Like I said…”
“One of your dad’s friends. Yeah. But why is he out here? What is he, some kind of survival nut?”
“No,” she said, genuinely confused. “Dad’s prepper friends live down in Clear Lake. This is, uhh, this is something else.”
The thick forest opened up, about a hundred yards beyond the gate. They still weren’t quite in anything Argo would have called a hill, but the land was less flat, the road curving up a shallow rise. There was a pullout here, with a small comms compound inside a simple chain-link fence.
“This is as far as we can take him,” Daelia said, patting Dingo’s dash. “We’ve got to walk from here.”
“Walk?”
“You know, with your legs?”
Argo wasn’t sure if she was being intentionally sarcastic or not. He sighed. “I mean, why?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, umm, June’s got a jammer on the property. And a ‘no abiota’ rule.”
“Why didn’t you bring a different car?”
“All our cars are emergents.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t very far to their destination. Maybe a quarter mile or so. Even with that, it was uphill, and they were both breathing hard, sweaty, by the time the road opened up again.
This time, Argo found himself in a proper clearing. At the center of it was an old ranch house surrounded by a grove of orange trees, and next to that, a big metal barn.
“Daelia! You’re supposed to be in San Marcos, working on that doctorate! What, you finally come to your senses or something?”
Coming out the front door was a woman, maybe in her mid-fifties. Her gray-streaked hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had a calico apron on over a pair of patched jeans and dark knee-high wader boots.
She also had a shotgun in hand.
“Hi, Aunt June,” Daelia said with a sigh.
The woman eyed them for a moment, then shouldered her gun. “And who is this? Please tell me you didn’t quit school for a man.”
“You’ve been after me to drop out of my graduate program since before I got accepted.”
“I have, and I stand by that. But you shouldn’t make life decisions with your—”
“Jason Irvington, ma’am,” Argo said, setting the quiet box down and coming over. He found the direct approach worked best in awkward situations. “Daelia and I, uhh, work together.”
The woman gave him a very deliberate once-over. Her eyes were penetrating. “Look at that regulation haircut,” she finally snorted, and turned to Daelia. “Didn’t I always tell you to stay away from the military guys?”
“You married one.”
“To my everlasting shame,” June said, but she was smiling now. “Okay, Sergeant—”
“Captain,” Argo interrupted.
“At least you’ve got the good sense to go for an officer, girl,” the woman sighed. “So, Captain Irvington, what are you two doing up here today?”
Daelia pointed at the quiet box. “I need to hide a body.”
“Human?”
“Abiota.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Aunt June, please.”
The woman sighed, looking them both over. “If we’re going to go see Q-BAL, I need some coffee first.”
Quantum computers weren’t illegal.
Daelia tried to remind herself of that as the three of them entered the barn.
But, just like every time she came out here, she could hear her mother, arguing with her dad all over again.
Mom had never liked June, never liked this place.
Abiota hated quantum machines. Hated them.
It was one of the few things they all seemed to agree on.
From the outside, the barn looked like any other prefab metal construct set out in the middle of the rural wilds. It was a single boxlike structure, with a barn-style roof and no windows. The corrugated sides, once painted bright white, were streaked with algae and dirt. A weathervane sat rusting up on the top peak. The wide double doors, as June rolled them back, revealed nothing more than a shallow foyer, full of battered gardening tools, with an innocuous-looking single door off to the left.
“Doesn’t look much like a data center,” Argo commented.
June rolled her eyes and went to unlock the inner door. “That’s the whole idea.”
Beyond the door was a room. A box, built into the center of the barn.
In a lot of ways, it resembled a normal data center.
The door opened into the well of a raised floor, nearly two feet off the ground. This was more a precaution against flooding than anything else; the setup’s cabling ran in neatly packaged raceways, suspended from the false ceiling. Antistatic paneling lined all six sides of the room. The air was cool, almost cold, and totally devoid of humidity.
A neat row of server cabinets, bristling with equipment and swathed in more cabling, ran down one side of the room, a series of worktables on the other. On the far wall, a small round portal allowed electricity, along with the hum of its generation, into the space.
But there, the similarities ended.
Where a normal server room or lab would have even, bright illumination, the box was shrouded in darkness. Had to be. The quantum machine was sensitive to a whole bunch of things and June kept conditions stable in both the work and computational spaces.
Largely unlit, shadows permanently clung to the workroom’s corners. Stripped of her monocle though she was, Daelia thought she could still see something moving in the darkness there. Some primal fear of the unknown. Which was ridiculous.
It was just a computer.
Just a computer.
Not even an abiota. It had no presence. It had no…intelligence.
The box that housed Q-BAL itself was rather small. Unassuming. It wasn’t a particularly large machine. Just looking at the thing, it wasn’t much at all. Barely larger than that damn popcorn machine that the pilots liked to fill up with jalapeños.
But Q-BAL was one of the most complex computers that humans had ever built. One of the first of its kind and potentially the last. Quantum machines hadn’t survived emergence.
Argo gave the space a once-over. “This is what, a quarter of the barn’s overall footprint?”
“Not far off,” June said. “This space is about thirty percent of the barn’s capacity.”
“What’s the rest taken up by?”
“Fusion generator,” June said, and pointed to the far wall. “That sits in its own containment room, just on the other side of this.”
“You have a fusion generator in here?”
“This thing sucks power like a mother,” June told him. “It would be immediately detected if we put it on the grid.”
“They don’t make ’em small enough to—”
“It’s an early prototype model,” Daelia interrupted.
Argo’s frown deepened. “How’d you get it?”
June ignored that completely. “Whatever you’ve got, Daelia, we can open it up in here safely, without any risk of detection, but we can’t touch Q-BAL, you understand?”
“Not a problem, Aunt June. I just want to store it, and then we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Sounds good,” June said, and nodded at the box. “Let me see this thing first.”
“So why here?” Argo asked as Daelia started unlocking the quiet box.
“Lots of reasons. One, this entire barn is one massive quiet space. June’s got image manipulators on the entire property, and—”
“That’s possible?” he asked.
“It’s not difficult technology, just very processor-intensive,” June said. “Takes a lot of computing power to run a consistent simulation that approximates a real location. It’s one of those things that quantum machines are suited for, but higher-level abiota can manage it if they’re hooked up to a large enough server bank.”
“I thought that killed them.”
“It can,” Daelia said.
“It almost always does,” June added. “But for the few of them who are suited for it, predictives mostly, it’s good job security. There are armor programs available too, for short-term exposure.”
