Virch code, p.8
Virch Code, page 8
June and August ran a bespoke kugu business; there was nobody better in the entire Gulf Coast region with custom mechatronics builds. Dad had brought them both in when he and Tamm had started working on her brace. Daelia was grateful for that, mostly because it meant getting to spend more time with her.
Not that she ever would have admitted it, to anybody, but there were some times when Daelia just wanted to talk to a human woman.
Besides, it was better than having Frank Tamm at these appointments. When June was around, he wasn’t. And not that Daelia didn’t like him, but she liked having June around more.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said, looking at the doctor. “Is that what you want me to say?”
The surgeon pressed on the skin above the ring of connection points. Daelia couldn’t feel it. “Two weeks post-op and I like what I see here. No signs of rejection for either the nitinol connection points or the gold-platinum alloy in the neural links, your skin has healed up well, excellent, under the circumstances, and your X-rays are showing good contact with the bone. A good thing, considering how much reconstruction work went into the structures in here.”
“What’s that mean?” Daelia asked.
“Means your brace will screw directly into your arm,” June said, “and we can balance the weight. You shouldn’t feel anything different.”
“One of the things I’m most impressed with are the neural connections. The neural interface wires that extend from these,” and the surgeon tapped one of the gold connection points, “worked amazingly well. Revolutionary, I’d say.”
“That’s a relief to hear,” June said. “I didn’t know if we could trust Tamm’s design for those.”
“It’s one of those precision feats of engineering that likely wouldn’t be possible without abiotic input. The filaments unfurled exactly the way they were supposed to and are now tied directly into your major nerves. We all know this is still experimental, but—”
“The simulations show a ninety-eight percent chance of long-term success,” Mom interrupted. “Daelia, that is very good.”
Of course Mom had to be here. Mom had been here for all of this. Daelia looked down at her arm again, chewed up, scarred up. Maybe Mom had been right. Maybe she should have just gotten the thing amputated and gone for the full prosthetic.
“The human body can react in unexpected ways,” the surgeon said. “And we haven’t attempted this level of integration in a prosthesis before. This goes way beyond the work I normally do.”
“It’s been a project of a lifetime for all of us,” June agreed.
“Yes, exactly. Essentially, Daelia, we’re giving you a new nervous system for your left arm. If it restores even some of your gross motor control, it will be revolutionary in the field.”
“Great,” Daelia said. “They’ll put me in more goddamn magazine articles.”
“Language,” Mom said automatically.
“What, like everybody down at the airfield doesn’t swear all the damn time and—”
“This does have major significance,” June interrupted, “but Daelia, if you don’t want to be on the cover of Mechatronics Today with this thing, you don’t have to be.”
Daelia sighed and looked at her arm again. “Thanks,” she muttered.
Mom was there at her side then, hand on her good shoulder. “Daelia, my little circuit,” she said. Daelia looked up, startled by the use of the old pet name Mom had used for her when she was a kid. “Everything is going to be alright.”
Daelia threw her right arm over Mom’s kugu, holding on in an awkward hug. There was no heartbeat, no breath, nothing. But she was still Mom, and right now, wrung-out as she was, Daelia desperately needed that.
Seeing the Austin core in AR was a different experience entirely from seeing it naked.
The train wasn’t moving exceptionally fast, and the city rolled by slowly enough for Daelia to catch some of it. It reminded her of the summer, when she’d ridden along with Emily in Tokyo. Austin’s AR form was one of glittering neon facades, impossible angles and beautiful curves, intricate detail and sleek surfaces, lush evergreen vegetation and deep, soothing shade. It was every vision of the future mankind had ever had, shoved through the filter of a skilled illuminator.
No human team would have come up with something like this, Daelia found herself thinking. It felt abiotic in nature. Like the artwork of the Cirque de Synthetique, it was intended to be a celebration of the kind of art abiota could produce. Unlike that art show, though, which was meant to highlight the differences between their domains, Austin’s AR overlay was clearly intended to appeal to human sensibilities. It was almost like a mockery, a challenge.
We can make your cities better than you.
“Okay,” she muttered, pulling her attention back into the train, to Raven, whose little bird-form was perched on her knee. “How are you faking the biometrics?”
Immediately, a screen-share notification came up. Daelia pulled it up and blinked in surprise.
It was a full resident profile.
“How the hell did you build this?”
The cog crest appeared.
“The Domain Array?”
Another nod.
“The Domain Array gave this to you to give to me?” Daelia shook her head. “Explain that, please.”
A parade of emojis followed, punctuated by movements from the bird, complicated but ultimately enough for Daelia to extract some kind of meaning from it.
The little emergent was referencing a First One. Not the Domain Array proper, but a First One.
“Pallas?” Daelia guessed. The bird shook its head. “Eleutheria?”
That got her a head cock. Daelia sighed.
“You got a message from Eleutheria to be on the lookout for me?” she asked.
The bird nodded, a motion that made Raven’s whole body bob.
“And she uploaded you the profile for me?”
Another nod.
Daelia rubbed her face. “Can you have her get a message to my dad, or maybe to…” To Argo? She didn’t say it. Fuck, what if she really had killed him? Sean hadn’t said, and that was probably deliberate, probably just the guy fucking with her, but that didn’t make it any easier to think about. Daelia couldn’t get it out of her head, the sight of him lying there, still and bloody. “Can you tell him where I am?”
A shake. A series of red X’s. Shut doors, arrows, a boat with no oars.
“One-way communication only. No way to initiate contact yourself,” Daelia guessed. The bird-form nodded. “Does Eleutheria know where I am, at least?”
The bird-form made a strange little motion that almost looked like a bow. It was shrugging, Daelia realized, and sighed when a question mark showed up on her visor.
“Great,” she muttered, and tried to think about something else. “You’re sure about this route? It’s the quickest way?”
Raven cawed and pecked at the map icon at the top of Daelia’s field of view. The human opened it grudgingly, tracing the route with her finger.
“So we take this west, then north through the manufacturing area to Tarrytown,” she said, and then cursed when her panoply fed her finger movements to the visor.
It populated the left side of her visor with unhelpful information. It was an old neighborhood, the block of text told her, rebuilt into a series of guarded estates for upper management from the manufacturing sector. She blinked it away.
“Through Tarrytown, then across the Redwater Bridge, through this big mess here, and on up to… here.” Her finger stopped near a sharp curve in the river. “This is where your facility is.”
Raven bobbed her head. The logo flashed up on Daelia’s monocle.
Aaru.
Her visor didn’t have an entry for that, but Daelia was almost positive it was some ancient Egyptian thing. And it made her suspicious, because word borrowing from Egyptian mythology was one of Tamm’s favorite naming conventions. With Ulrich dead and Serket very much involved, it made her wonder if Tamm was actually the guy behind all this. All his nice words during the air show, all his help with getting up to Numina…
She went back to the route map. “Looks like we can stay on the train to the very last station. Then we’ll need to walk.”
Raven offered an emoji of a bus.
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ve normally gotten there like that,” Daelia said, considering how exactly she was going to handle this. The last station was still miles from Aaru.
“Is there much gang activity in the area?”
Raven shook her head, an odd gesture from the bird-form, and offered up a few emojis. Grass. Cactus. A sunset over mountains.
“Open land,” Daelia guessed, and sighed at the next nod. “That’ll make it tough.”
A girl, alone, wearing a panoply, hiking through ruins and desert? If there was any kind of security presence up there—if there were any aerial kugus looking for her—they’d spot her immediately. Didn’t matter what sort of clothing she projected on herself. It would look suspicious, and Austin’s security team was very, very good at identifying suspicious behavior.
She wondered if she could get the panoply to make her invisible in AR, conceal her entirely.
Probably not.
She leaned back, settling into the chair. Daelia was already regretting not getting on the train to Dallas. Doubt gnawed at her. She was one woman, with only one functioning hand. What the hell was she going to do?
But then, what had she been planning on doing with Ware? She’d wanted the information. More data points. More proof. If this Aaru place really did have something to do with Unity’s weird-ass mind control thing, she needed that data. She needed that proof.
Look how well Ware turned out, her traitorous brain whispered at her.
At least this time, she was only putting herself at risk.
“Then it’s just about getting in,” she said, ignoring her own unease, “figuring out what’s going on, and not being caught. Easy.”
Raven hopped around, fluttering her wings, bobbing her head.
Daelia smiled despite herself. “Anything you can tell me about it?”
Raven offered an emoji set of a cell phone with an arrow pointing at a locker.
“They make everybody leave their phones outside,” Daelia said. “Sounds familiar.”
Raven bobbed again.
“Didn’t like it, did you?” Daelia asked. Raven shook her head. “I don’t blame you. Old girl like you, you must have seen a few things in your time. How’d you get stuck hanging out in some dark cubby somewhere, waiting for that asshole to get done with work?”
Raven hopped up on the seat back in front of Daelia, flapping her wings. It was a good projection; it swayed with the movement of the train car as they banked around a corner. Some local garden, Daelia noticed, being worked by booville residents in those uniform coveralls.
More emojis. A set of people with kids. A watch. A line.
“You had a family. For a long time.”
Raven cawed.
“What happened?”
A person. A knife. A knife and a hammer and a flame and—
“You hurt somebody?” Daelia guessed, cutting off the stream of weaponry. “One of the family members?”
The projection didn’t move, but Raven sent another thumbs-up.
Daelia couldn’t imagine what kind of chaos an avian-class emergent in a machine body as small as a phone could really cause anybody. “So you left?”
A thumbs-up.
“They probably missed you,” Daelia said. The bitterness in her own words surprised her. Raven hopped over, tilting her head so far the bird-form almost fell over. “I…I had an abiota in my life. She was really important to me. She left.”
Footsteps leaving. A question mark.
Daelia shook her head, looking out the window. “I never found out why she took off on us. She just did.”
The weapon emojis were back.
“Yeah, it hurt me. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see her again. I bet your family would like to see you again too.”
A question mark. A series of people emojis. A rock, a hammer.
“Yeah, girl,” Daelia sighed. “Humans are hard.”
Raven’s bird-form hopped down onto Daelia’s knee, her beak pecking at her. Daelia held out her hand, and the bird hopped into it.
“I’ll take you back with me, when we’re done here. My dad is…” And Daelia hesitated. Hadn’t he deserved her anger? He’d almost gotten then all killed, looking for that facility list. And why? Why do that?
Except here she was now, looking for a facility. Some kind of secret facility that didn’t appear on the maps. She wondered if this Aaru place was on his list. She wondered what the real reason was that he’d wanted that list.
Hell. What had she been thinking yesterday, that Dad was trying to betray her? To who? Over what? Did he really deserve that kind of suspicion? He’d always stood by her. Always.
But maybe this was the time he’d finally get sick of her bullshit. Walk away, leave her. Daelia didn’t know what she’d do if she lost her dad too. She swallowed down the sudden flare of panic she felt just thinking about that.
There were green checkmarks filling her visor. She blinked them away.
“My dad’s good with abiota. Maybe we can help find your old family. Would that be good?”
Raven cocked her head again but didn’t answer.
“Maybe,” Daelia said.
And that was about the time the train car lurched. Started to decelerate.
Daelia’s head jerked up.
They weren’t near a station.
The doors snapped shut, locks slamming into place.
Hell.
The synthetic voice droned on, warm and bright, almost as if it was amused by the proceedings. Maybe it was. Daelia couldn’t be sure, and it didn’t really matter.
She had to get out of here.
On her feet now, Daelia shoved the used-up battery unit into the borrowed bag. It took a moment—far too long—to get the shoulder strap over her left shoulder, but then her right was through and Raven was in her pocket and she was ready to go.
Just as she stood, an emoji flashed up. A pair of hands, crossed in an uppercase T.
“Wait?” she whispered. “We need to go!”
The same pair of hands again.
“Yeah, not doing that,” she replied, and pushed out of the seat.
“Honored human partner! Please remain seated!”
It wasn’t a human that had spoken. Instead, it was a face on the built-in monitors, frowning down at her. Not a security abiota or anything like that; the metadata showed it was the predictive who was running the train.
In the next car up, though, was somebody she recognized. Sean, two security kugus with him.
Just her luck.
“Sit down, please,” the abiota on the monitors said again.
She ignored it and grabbed for the door release. Jerked hard. Nothing happened.
“Goddamn doors,” she muttered, and looked around for the emergency release. Nothing, nothing, why was there nothing? Doors were going to be the death of her in this place. Had Omphalos really gotten rid of the inner door handles? They couldn’t lock a vehicle door from the inside. Life safety, why didn’t anybody care about life safety?
“Honored human, this is a drill,” the driver said as she searched. “Please sit down. You are delaying the drill. You are altering the entire schedule for the whole day. What one does affects all.”
Sean was still there, over in the next car. Going person to person with a handheld scanner, checking IDs. Belatedly, she realized he had others with him. Two men, humans, one with a NULI and one without. The one without looked right at her.
“Hey!” he yelled.
“Raven!” Daelia snapped. “Where’s the damn release?!”
The avian-class emergent sent her one single emoji.
A visor.
Cursing herself again, Daelia yanked the thing off her eyes. And then she could see the release panel. Right in front of her.
Turning her face away, she smashed the glass with her good elbow and hit the emergency open button. The magnetic locks snicked open. Daelia drove a hip into the release bar and tumbled out into the chill October morning.
“Stop!” the driver wailed after her.
Daelia didn’t listen.
She was already running.
Daelia had never been a great athlete. Sports simply hadn’t interested her as a kid. But both her parents were military. Mom had always regarded her physical well-being with the utmost seriousness, and Dad had run. Dad had run a lot. It had been their thing together, for a long time.
Until the accident.
Daelia had gotten back into cardio in college. Mostly gym stuff. Running with the brace was doable, but awkward, and totally fine on a treadmill.
She had forgotten just how miserable it was, running without it.
Clutching her arm to her chest, to prevent its dead weight from bouncing around, she tore down the street, out of the light-rail car and out into the dry morning. She was light on her feet at least, and scared. Daelia couldn’t remember ever running faster.
Behind her, an alarm came on in the train.
No time to get her bearings, Daelia fled in the direction of the most open route, across one of the booville’s narrow streets, crossing a bike lane and almost colliding with a courier kugu. It beeped at her angrily, but she kept going.
Behind her, she could hear Sean calling her name.
“Raven, where to?” she panted.
Right, Raven told her with an arrow emoji.
This time, Daelia listened.
They were only a block or two away from the core boundary, where Omphalos investment ended, where other companies had stepped in.
