Source code, p.8
Source Code, page 8
When she’d come home from Ware, Dad had offered to let her stay with him. That was awkward, though, difficult. Too many memories. Daelia hadn’t slept in her childhood bedroom since she was sixteen. She didn’t set foot in the house if she could help it. At some point, it seemed like he would have sold the damn place and moved on. He never had, though.
Everyone had their own way of dealing with pain. A therapist had told her that once. Daelia didn’t like therapy, or therapists. She’d held on to that, though.
It was useful in arguments.
She slept here, at the Scrap House, when she came home to visit. Normally, she’d crash on one of the old sofas, but that got old real quick. Unwilling to admit defeat and go home, she’d instead built the place up. There was a bed now, and a desk and a place to hang her clothes up and all that. A fridge and a place to set up a hot plate, even though she was terrible at cooking and never bothered.
Dad had a laundry unit downstairs, but that was industrial, for work coveralls and oil rags and stuff like that. There was a laundromat not too far away, though.
Altogether, it beat her first undergrad apartment at Stanford.
Her arm twitched again, the brace moving her muscles erratically, the alcohol still screwing with the connection.
Grabbing her little medical tool kit off the desk, Daelia sat down cross-legged on the bed and went to work on the brace, first popping open the connection points on her fingertips, then the larger ones on her shoulder. After that, it was safe to unhook the strap and ease the whole mess down off her arm.
A tight, fitted thing, the brace ran shoulder to palm, the finger sections coming up to the first knuckles of her fingers. Thin titanium-alloy strips held it rigid in some places, while conductive fabric filled in on the areas that needed more flex. The integrated circuitry carried signals to her muscles and provided her some natural freedom of movement, but fine motor control relied on a series of tiny servos and solenoids built into the rigid sections.
It was beautifully crafted, one of a kind. Very articulate. Gave her almost full use of her hand.
Cut the sting of the situation. Just a little.
Pulling on the same worn-out sling she’d been using forever, Daelia tucked her left arm safely in and went for the fridge. Maybe eating something would help with the alcohol. Leftover barbecue was the only thing she had on hand. But lunch had been greasy, and she wasn’t in the mood for more fat. She shut the door with a sigh and pulled a pack of veggie chips out of a cabinet instead.
Munching on an air-puffed slice of sweet potato, Daelia went to put her tool kit back on her desk. She liked things neat, spare, and she hadn’t taken much with her from her apartment at Ware. So all that was here was one photo, an old thing she’d had for forever.
The last picture of her family, before everything went to shit.
Daelia stared at that for a moment. It was a picture of the three of them on vacation, Mom’s kugu shining brightly in the tropical sun, Dad in a Hawaiian shirt. She was thirteen, all smiles and frizzy hair. All of them had been so happy that day.
She’d thought everything would stay like that forever.
Now, Daelia laid the bag of veggie chips on top of her laptop and took the little stack, one-handed, over to the bed.
She settled back down, cross-legged, and started eating methodically, one chip at time. They tasted like crap, but she didn’t care. It was something to shut her stomach up; the damn thing felt like it was on fire.
Technically, she didn’t need the laptop. She could have pulled up an AR screen on her monocle, looked at the information that way. Not that she would ever have admitted it to anybody, but the monocle gave her a headache when she tried to use it for text. Trying to use it while her head was swimming like this would have just been a terrible idea.
Some people she knew at Ware had the new direct neural interface implants. NULIs. Implants and modifications were all the rage in the abiotics world. Not having anything beyond the brace marked her out as some kind of Luddite.
Nobody ever said anything to her about it, but she could feel their disapproval at times. Like she was somehow failing the department, the area of research, the goddamn SAAL itself. Like she wasn’t committed.
It hadn’t been like that in high school. There, a few people had teased her about her arm, and a few more were curious about it, but most everybody just ignored it. Why should it have mattered at all? she always thought. Her fingers worked, her palm flexed, and she was right-handed anyway.
The interest had been getting worse and worse the further into her studies she got. Probably because the people were more hard-core. Futurists. Fascinated by her.
Bellona Hall’s daughter. The daughter of an abiota, one of the few who was functional enough to live a normal human-style life. One who had made the decision to have a child with her human husband.
Daelia had photos somewhere, had demanded them in fifth grade, when she’d had sex ed for the first time and learned where human babies came from and realized her mother couldn’t possibly have given birth to her. It had been panic-inducing, that realization. But her parents had given her the little scrapbook. Her newborn photos. Wrapped in a rough hospital blanket, Dad giving her her first bath, Mom feeding her her first bottle.
There had been no images of her surrogate, though, the human woman who’d carried her. She’d always wondered, but never asked. At the time, she’d been too emotional about the whole thing to ask. Grateful for the knowledge, relieved she was the same as any of the other kids at school. Since then, she’d vacillated between not wanting to know and not wanting to offend Dad by asking.
Bellona was her mother, the female presence that had been there from the moment she’d drawn her first breath.
It didn’t make her special. It shouldn’t have mattered.
But something about it elevated Daelia in the eyes of some people. Back when Bellona Robotics was larger, Dad growing the company into something impressive, there had been a lot of interest in their family from the press. After Daelia had messed up her arm, started wearing the brace, the interest got more pointed. She’d always thought it was just about the tech; it had faded after a few years, after all. After Mom left. After prosthetic implants became more common.
She’d always hated it. She hated being reminded of it at Ware. People were difficult enough to figure out when they weren’t trying to shove her up on some kind of pedestal.
Still. It wasn’t a reason to turn her back on nine years of school and walk away from her doctorate program.
Daelia had new emails in her school inbox. Another from Veda, which she didn’t even bother looking at, and a pair from the Ware SAAL chapter. The monthly meeting was next week. Daelia never went to those. A reminder about the undergrads’ kugu engineering competition, Halloween weekend. Another thing she had no intention of attending.
There was a lot of other nonsense in there too. But Daelia did hesitate at deleting that last email from Veda. Nine years was a long time to be in school. She didn’t want to piss away the work she’d already done on her doctorate if she was just being…sensitive.
Daelia scrubbed a hand across her face and glanced over to the bookshelf in the corner. She’d kept working on her detector, kept fiddling with it, tweaking it. It was like a nervous tic at this point. Something she kept doing, over and over. Dad had a pretty good setup here, almost as good as Ware.
But it was never going to do what Veda wanted it to do. Had promised it would do. Daelia had tried—to her shame, she had tried. But it didn’t work. And besides, it pissed Raijinn off. To the point Daelia had had to move the whole thing up here, just so it wouldn’t get any ideas about destroying it.
Daelia thought about deleting that email.
Nine years was a long time. Despite all her misgivings, she was loath to flush that all down the toilet over one single bad conversation.
She was still thinking about it when she crawled into bed and fell asleep, head pounding and arm tingling with phantom pain.
Garcia cycled through his tickets. Boring shit tonight. Printer server malfunction, email issues, data recovery, license rotations. Most of them he assigned to the predictive support-bot. NASA had paid through the nose for that fucking thing. Let it earn itself out. A number of people on his team preferred working everything themselves. Said it was about keeping their edge.
Edge? What edge? That was for driving a motorcycle through afternoon traffic or playing some game down in the virch arena.
Nobody needed an edge to do this stupid job.
It paid the bills, though. And even if it wasn’t quite his childhood dream of walking on Mars, at least he got to support the people who did it.
Sometimes, too, Garcia got to see some pretty cool shit. That was always good.
An interesting ticket came in. Possible glitch in one of the orbital tracking feeds. There were dozens of different systems out there. NASA, NRO, CIA, DOD. Others they weren’t supposed to talk about. Not all IP based either. Some of their radar surveillance locations had been built in the ‘60s and had never been upgraded. Always a challenge, the tickets from Orbital Debris Monitoring.
Garcia put his out-of-office notification up on his machine and went to check it out.
“What’s the problem?” he asked the on-shift controller, a harried-looking older woman whose desk was littered with pictures of her grandchildren. She brought them in with her every night, printed images tucked into plastic and leather foldout frames.
“Well, you can see it,” she said, indicating the problem on her screen. “We’ve got multiple contacts right now, space debris, dead satellites.”
“And?”
“They’re moving,” she said. “Almost forty of them.”
“Moving where?”
“Down. They’re deorbiting,” she replied, not looking away from the main tracking screen for a second. “I need you to verify that there isn’t some kind of issue with the data feed. Because this should not be happening.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at the same display on the central monitor bank. “That’s an error I haven’t seen before.”
“How fast can you figure it out?”
“I’m going to need to take a look at—”
“Time’s of the essence here, Ivan,” she snapped. “NORAD’s blowing up my line.”
By this point, other people were getting involved. Lots of other people. The image was up on the main data wall. People were standing up. Staring. Going quiet.
The strangeness of that put a bit more hustle in his step.
But no sooner had he started pulling up the imagery data than it all stopped.
As suddenly as they’d appeared, every single one of the contacts was lost.
Vanished.
As if they had never been.
That didn’t clear Garcia’s workload. Far from it. Instead, he spent the next hour chasing down data errors, only to conclude that there had probably been nothing there in the first place.
Sensor ghosts, he thought.
Thank fuck.
Nobody wanted to go to war with China again. Who knew if the abiota would intervene, or let the stupid humans wipe themselves out this time?
But the disquiet continued out on the main floor, and he wondered if maybe he was missing something completely.
At 2337 local time, the skies over Clear Lake, Texas briefly caught fire.
The event was missed by almost everybody. The area was largely residential, suburbs, not really a happening place for nightlife. If it had happened a few miles north, closer in to the city proper, perhaps it would have attracted more notice. As it was, it was late enough and the area sleepy enough that not many people saw it.
Curiously, and for reasons that would not be apparent until much later—until it was almost too late—the event did not register on any early warning radar. NASA, NORAD, the TMD. It pinged on nobody’s scope.
The abiota, however, never slept.
Splatto was in the air.
“What the hell was that?” Tin Man asked. It was night shift, the cockpit cool and everything quiet.
“Beats me,” his sensor replied.
“Splatto, let’s circle back for another look. That looked like a fuckin’ bomb went off.”
It hadn’t, they were relieved to see.
But something had happened. Something was there.
And not five minutes later, permission came down from the watch floor at Maybury to send out a team to investigate.
10
Daelia was stuck in some weird, booze-fueled dream when she was startled awake by the noise of the rotor blades, just down the runway.
This was Ellington; they didn’t do training this late.
There shouldn’t have been anything happening for the air show.
Something was wrong.
She went over to the window, trying to see if she could spot the source of the noise. It sounded like helicopters, big ones. And just as she got there, she spotted it.
Army Apaches, rigged up with their carry cradles.
Three of them.
Bitzers dangling from the underside.
Flipping on her AR monocle, Daelia could see them howling, braying. Like foxhounds just waiting to be let out of the gate.
“Shit,” she muttered, and scrambled for her brace.
Raijinn met her downstairs. “Did you see?” it demanded, a touch of emotion bleeding into its voice.
“I saw.” Daelia was only half-dressed. Brace, bra, jeans, boots. Wallet, with her base access pass. She wrestled her shirt on as she double-timed it out to the UTV. “Those were the ones we had here, right?”
“They are indeed not ready for deployment yet. I attempted to prevent their departure, but they were insistent. Command override, I believe,” Raijinn said. “They need at least another month in the virch trainer before we can even think of turning them loose like this. And stateside, with civilians…”
“I know,” Daelia said. She hit the open air, emerging out of the hangar. “Is Dad back yet?”
“No.”
“Call him, tell him,” she said, and finally got her shirt all the way down.
“Is it absolutely illogical to remove these canid-class from my care before they are—”
Daelia unplugged the UTV and swung in. “Raijinn, just call Dad!”
The UTV was slow. Maybe thirty miles an hour on a full charge, and her battery was reading at barely half that. But it was still a hell of a lot faster than trying to run.
There was an increased security presence on the airfield that night, and the security forces guy insisted on checking both her physical and digital IDs before letting her through the temporary gate. The military section, normally open, had been cordoned off with an eight-foot-high demountable fence for the weekend. It took a stupid amount of time for her to talk the night guard into letting her pass; Daelia could hear the choppers getting fainter and fainter.
To her surprise, the lights were on in the main squadron building when she pulled up. There were people there too, not many but more than she’d anticipated. Sergeant Norris, whose back was to her right now. A couple of junior enlisted, younger than her, were lugging bulky old computer monitors down the hall, toward the training classroom.
A Vietnamese guy with Intelligence wings and a major’s rank on his chest, coffee in hand, was watching the strange little procession.
Major Pham.
“What the hell is going on, JP?” she asked him.
Pham looked at her, blinking, confused. “Daelia? What are you doing here?”
“The Army’s launching bitzers in the middle of the night that are still supposed to be connected to Raijinn’s training virch, and—”
“Ah, that,” he said, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Rover’s here. Let’s go talk.”
He took her down through the main building and out to where the SCIF lay. The secure facility was oversized, thousands of square feet, fully situated in its own quiet box. The SyROC was in here, along with a few other unit functions. It was designed to be an information black hole; nothing that went in came out again. Daelia left her monocle in a cubby in the foyer.
Pham buzzed them both through the security portal and out onto the operations floor.
In Dad’s old movies, military command centers always had a slick look, stuffed with the highest of high tech, dimly lit, with lots of serious, hushed conversations. Cool. These places were always so cool in those movies.
The SyROC was just a room. A big room, with eight or so stations arranged in a semicircle. They were big and bulky, with physical setups for various computer networks, both unclassified and classified. They all faced one wall, where huge, paper-thin waterfall screens were hung. The most sophisticated thing in the whole place, the waterfall screens could be configured to display as many or as few different views as possible.
Tonight, they had a social media monitoring feed running from floor to ceiling, as well as the belly camera from Splatto. It was set to infrared and looked like it was focused on a glowing coal.
Rover was there at the shift commander position with another pilot, a captain, Tin Man on his name badge. They were talking quietly between them, but stopped when they came in.
“What are you doing, JP?” Rover asked. “Thought you were getting the Emergency Management Cell stood up.”
“Hall here wanted to tell you something,” he said, and stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.
“Did you authorize those bitzers to go out?” Daelia asked.
“What? Fuck, I don’t tell the Army what to do,” Rover replied. “They volunteered the asset to deal with—”
“You gotta get them back,” she said.
“Why?”
“They’re not ready for deployment! Dad hasn’t cleared them to be outside the training virch yet.”
Rover snapped his fingers at one of the other stations. “What do you mean they’re not clear?” he asked. Somebody handed him a binder, and he flipped it open as he talked. “The Army assured me that they were good to go.”
