Unity code, p.7
Unity Code, page 7
“Yeah, we did a tour together in Afghanistan,” the colonel told her. “Good engineer. And of course, he’s got instincts for abiota.”
“Afghanistan was a long time ago.”
“You don’t forget a guy like your dad.” Levinson glanced over at Mom’s empty machine body. “Or your mother, for that matter.”
“He’s with one of our other clients right now,” she said, repeating what Raijinn had told her. What else was there to say? “If you dropped by to say hello—”
“No, I’ve heard he’s not around. I came by to talk to you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, Daelia, I’ve heard about you and—”
“Everybody in the fucking IT world’s heard about me,” she said.
“You recently took a leave of absence from your doctoral research program, right?
That stopped her. “How do you know about that?”
“Why?”
She wondered what the angle here was. What this guy was really after. “They wanted me to do something I had no interest in.”
“Which was?”
There couldn’t be any harm in telling him, right? “Break the agreement we have with the Array, and map source code.”
Levinson nodded, like he’d known this and just wanted confirmation. “Do you think you could do it?”
“No,” she said. “My detector doesn’t work that way.”
“But it does work? Can we confirm that?”
Shit. What had she just said? Shit. “I guess you’ll just have to wait for my dissertation,” she countered.
The colonel laughed. “I hear you’ve got good instincts when it comes to abiota. That true?”
“Kind of inevitable, growing up with an abiota for your mom.”
“So tell me, do you think Emily provoked this?”
Daelia was immediately defensive. “What?”
“Orca-class are not always known for their discretion. If she was, as you say, displeased by having a different fleet on her base, or bored, or frustrated about some kill she missed at some point, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that—”
“Daelia,” said another voice. Synthetic. “Who’s this?”
Thank god, Daelia thought.
Levinson looked over at the approaching kugu. “And you are?”
“Raijinn,” the abiota said bluntly. Raijinn never bothered with facial projection, and so there was no expression to read. “I manage the training servers for Bellona Robotics.”
“I was told you were sandboxed.”
“I am. I’m dialed in from the server room hardline.”
“My understanding is that you are—”
“Does your face meld with your monocle when you make a phone call from it?” The words were irritated, but the tone was dispassionate.
Levinson held up a hand. “I apologize, Raijinn. I meant no insult or ignorant assumptions.”
Raijinn’s kugu looked to Daelia. “This one works with our kind, doesn’t he?”
“He’s the ACC A3/OCI commander,” Daelia said. She was going to have to ask Norris what that title meant.
The kugu’s head cocked. “Interesting.”
“It’s no secret that there’s a distinct preference for predictives on the active-duty side of things,” Levinson said. “My intention here is to give Emily a fair shake.”
“Then you shouldn’t start with accusations,” Raijinn said. “As Daelia was no doubt about to tell you, bricking another abiota is not something we take lightly. It’s messy, it’s dangerous, and it comes with its own grief. We are not murderers of our own kind.”
“She did tear them apart.”
“I suspect Emily chose that route, instead of requesting munitions—which is within her rights, might I add—to better contain the potential collateral damage.”
“What do you mean?”
“She dropped the first FQ-47 on the golf course and the second over the water. That requires a high degree of precision. Especially when her airframe’s performance thresholds are so incredibly ill-suited for air-to-air combat. That implies control, not rage, at least as far as you would understand it.” The kugu made a clicking noise. “Emily most likely enjoyed it, but she would not have provoked it.”
“We’ll be looking at all the cockpit data, of course,” Levinson said, and he looked back at Daelia. “But I was wondering about your impression.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Humor me.”
“I think they were hacked.”
“Hacked?” Levinson raised an eyebrow. “That’s one of the advantages of having an abiota in the airframe. Renders even the systems not in the rudiment core—”
“Not the planes. The abiota. The predictives themselves,” Daelia said. “I think they were hacked.”
Levinson stared at her. “By what?”
“I don’t know, Colonel. We’ve got abiotic aliens running around now, right? They threw Colorado Springs back into the Stone Age yesterday. You think they can’t hack an abiota?”
The cyber officer was quiet for a long time. Then, he tapped his monocle. “Aww, well, would you look at that? Need to get back with the team. I hear we’re going to be up at the Wing headquarters, instead of the unit. You still have your EMC running, eh?”
She didn’t know what to say to that. “Not my EMC,” she said.
“Could you prove that they were hacked? The Storm Gryphons?”
“Not our contract,” Raijinn interjected, before Daelia could answer, “not our planes. Not our problem.”
“Of course,” Levinson said, and nodded. “Thank you for your time. Daelia, Raijinn. I’ll see you at the inbrief later.”
Raijinn’s kugu came up alongside Daelia, its lens-eyes watching the colonel walk away. It waited until he was gone before speaking again.
“That was not a wise thing to say, Daelia.”
“What’s the problem, Raijinn?”
“We are abiota. We don’t get hacked.”
“Yeah?” Daelia replied. “Then why the hell did two of the most lovingly maintained aircraft in the inventory try to murder a whole bunch of civilians yesterday?”
“I’m not sure that was their intent.”
“I can guess at what happened, but you can actually parse the possibilities, can’t you?” Don’t tell me you aren’t running some kind of Monte Carlo analysis on this.”
“I have been running a number of simulation sets, yes, looking for the most likely root cause,” Raijinn admitted. “If you would like, I shall expand my parameters to include a hack, unlikely though it is.”
“That’s all I’m saying.”
“But Daelia, have a care what you say. This is not a time to volunteer information.”
“Everybody’s just trying to figure out what happened, right?”
“In my experience, human investigations, especially military investigations, are less about true root-cause discovery, and more about assigning blame.”
“But the evidence—”
“May show anything, based on the whims of those controlling the data set. Hard, painful logic is not the way of your species. Your experience is one of emotion and belief.”
“You don’t trust them.”
“Neither does your father, and neither will the 121st. Be circumspect. That’s all I ask.”
“I’m trying, Raijinn.”
“Good,” it said. “Try harder.”
No insult was implied or intended by that, Daelia knew, but it still stung a little. She hated this part of things: no matter how much she understood, it was always hard not to react to abiota as if they were human. “I should go take a shower, put something clean on,” she said, looking down at herself. “Cactus wouldn’t forgive me if I messed up his nice chairs.”
“No,” Raijinn agreed. “No, he would not.”
Daelia did need a shower.
Always felt good, even if she did have to take her brace off to do it. She didn’t care for the reminder of just how dead her left arm was. But it was what it was; she threw a bathrobe on, tucked it into the fold, and checked her download.
There it was. The same error. The same weird, meaningless alphanumeric strings.
Something had inserted itself into the base AR field. Something had been able to hijack Ginger, below the physical control level.
Had to be that abiota. Whatever it was that had been in that space rock.
She needed to figure out what it was trying to do. What it had been trying to say.
She needed more data.
Daelia had sat in her fair share of military briefings over the past few months.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been up to the Sinkhole or sat in the Wing conference room. But it certainly was the most crowded she’d ever seen it.
She didn’t have a seat at the main table. That was fine. The table held fourteen chairs only. Normally assigned to the Wing’s group and squadron commanders, as well as a few key enlisted personnel, the inspection team was on one side of the table today, with Ops and Civil Engineering on the other. Even the Storm Gryphons were here, represented by that major Daelia had met on Saturday.
All the other base units were here, too, commanders or appointed representatives sitting in the ring of chairs that encircled the perimeter of the room. A few other civilians—Pete Navarro from NASA, somebody from Air Traffic Control—were here as well.
None of them had spoken.
She took that as a cue to keep her own mouth shut.
Daelia had a notebook with her—a physical one, pen and paper. She preferred taking notes on her monocle, but the briefing was classified. The windows had their privacy shutters drawn up, the building’s jammer was active, and everybody’s monocle or other mobile device was out in the quiet box lockers at the end of the hall.
So far, she didn’t understand what the issue was. Why this needed to be classified at all.
Almost an hour and a half of this shit now, and nothing of value had been said.
Introductions were made. An agenda was discussed. Rover and Troll outlined the events of the weekend. The ACC team went over their plan and their desired schedule for interviews. The SIB’s abiota team member, Smith, spoke to the Domain Array’s interests and concerns. A few potential avenues of inquiry were discussed.
It wasn’t until the final slides that something interesting finally came up.
“Are we concerned about this being connected to the landing craft?” Navarro asked. “You know, the one we found in Armand Bayou?”
Everyone seemed to rouse themselves at that.
“Not at this time,” Levinson said. “I’m sure NASA is aware that out of the dozens of these found worldwide, this particular issue has only been observed here. We’re required to treat Unity as nonhostile.”
“After what happened yesterday with the fucking ‘klaatuu barada nikto’ crap?”
“The power has come back on everywhere except Clark,” Cactus said.
“Do we have any idea what’s going on in the Philippines?”
Levinson leaned forward. “Let me make this very clear, everyone. The Envoy is not a suspect in our investigation, nor is this board interested in the landing situation. I’ve been told that’s an issue that’s going to be hashed out above our level. Unity is not something we are going to debate here.”
“But—” Navarro pressed.
“If NASA wants to look into it, that’s their purview. Not mine.”
“We can talk about this later,” Cactus said to him.
Navarro leaned back in his seat. “Of course. Sir.”
If that was the official stance, Daelia wondered, then why the hell had Levinson come by to see her that morning?
But even as the briefing moved on, started in on specifics and timelines for debris removal and shit like that, an idea lodged itself in the back of Daelia’s brain. One that wouldn’t let go.
The Storm Gryphons had been affected, right?
What did their AR logs look like?
For that matter, what did their AR forms look like?
Were they bleeding, too?
8
Argo was scrolling through his emails, trying to stay awake, when Highlander swung his chair over.
“Dude, how did you pull it off?”
“Huh?” He didn’t bother looking up. Why did he have so many damn emails in his military account? How did the damn things pile up like this? It had been three fucking days since he’d checked it last. He shouldn’t have even been here, dealing with this today. But no, Sausage wanted him in for SIB interviews, so here he was. He selected another chunk of pointless digital junk and moved it to the trash. “Who?”
The other pilot nodded over at the B-flight section’s door. “Hall. Shit, she never comes in here. It’s got to be you.” He leaned in. “What’s your secret?”
It was right about then he realized what the other pilot meant.
Daelia Hall had just come into the B-flight office.
Argo wondered if she had been a topic of conversation around here lately. Possibly. Most of the guys in the unit were married. Hell, most pilots he’d served with over the years were married. The ones who weren’t—and even here, there were a few bachelors—carried that combination of aviator ego and competitiveness into the dating world with them. From what he’d gathered from the other guys, Highlander considered himself a player.
Daelia was cute. And frosty.
Wouldn’t be hard to see her as a challenge. Something to be conquered.
Wasn’t really Argo’s thing. A decade on from his mom’s car accident, he still didn’t feel like he had his life pulled together enough for anything serious. And casual relationships, in his experience, were way too much drama.
Still. Daelia didn’t need to put up with that shit from any of them.
“Fuck, Highlander, really?”
“She’s hot.”
“She’s only on my case ’cause of Emily. You think she wants to deal with me?” He was pretty sure that was true. She was standing in the doorway, body language closed, uncomfortable. Daelia didn’t want to be in here, that much was obvious. “Besides, you’ve met her dad, haven’t you?”
Highlander shrugged. “Still hot.”
“Dude,” Argo said with a sigh, and yanked his access card out of his computer’s keyboard. “Daelia!” he called, heading over. “What’s up?”
She rubbed the top of her left shoulder, rolling it. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Something with Emily?”
She eyed Highlander. “Anywhere else we can go?”
“Sure,” he said, and grabbed the door for her.
Out in the hall, Argo steered them through the heritage room and out onto the back patio. If he had to guess, judging by Daelia’s discomfort, Highlander had probably already made a pass at her. Some guys just did not know when to turn it off.
“You’ve got a friend over at the Storm Gryphons, right?” she asked as soon as they got outside.
“I wouldn’t call him a friend exactly, but… Who told you that?”
She waved it off with her augmented left hand. “Emily.”
That MQ-9 was nosy as fuck. Argo wondered if it was an emergent thing, or just Emily being Emily. “I know somebody, sure. The single-engine RPA community’s fairly small. Why?”
“I’ve been looking over some different TGLP data sets, and I’m finding some patterns I don’t like.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how AR works?”
“Vaguely,” he said. “Before this weekend, I wouldn’t have guessed abiota could kill each other inside of it.”
“Emily only pulled that off because of her A2/AD package. I mean, they can directly fuck with each other through AR, but…that was something else this weekend.”
“Emily seemed to drag those Storm Gryphons straight into her virch while she was tearing them apart.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You weren’t out with her,” Argo pointed out.
“AR isn’t a discrete environment, like, I don’t know, a video game. It’s a combination of whatever and whoever is communicating at any given time.”
“Okay,” Argo said, not sure where she was going with this.
“But we can look at the, uhh, network traffic, I suppose you’d say. And of course, any connected system, including abiota, keeps its own digital record of how it interprets the incoming data. You can extrapolate imagery from that.”
“So what’s your point?”
Daelia huffed. “I’m getting some imagery right now that I’ve never seen before. And it started when that space rock showed up.”
Then he understood. “So you think it’s related to the aliens?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember the inbrief?”
“I know, I know. Which is why I need more evidence before I say it,” Daelia said. “I need to take a look at the Storm Gryphons. See if they’re showing the same patterns. That would be pretty definitive, considering that we don’t share any back-end networks with them.”
“Daelia, that colonel, Levinson, already said no to this.”
“I’m not asking to look at their flight data,” she protested. “I just want to see them. Their AR forms. All the way to the rudiment cores.”
“This happened in the core level?” Argo thought about the last engineering course he’d taken. “Abiota can’t be hacked.”
“Why do you think I’m so worried?” she replied in a low voice. “These Unity aliens are some sort of abiota themselves, right? So they probably know…something. Something we don’t.”
Argo sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Dammit, Argo, this is why you wanted to get together tonight? This shit?”
“And to get caught up, obviously.”
“Fuck, man.”
“I know. But come on, Troll. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”
Argo played with his empty glass, looking out across the water to the west, under the soft orange of the setting Texas sun. Sunsets were more colorful in Nevada, all the dust in the air. But Argo was getting used to these. Gentle almost, but powerful somehow. Late afternoon here washed everything in hazy gold.
