Unity code, p.9
Unity Code, page 9
Bellona Robotics hadn’t survived this long, and certainly not up against the behemoths of Raytheon or Tamm Industries, out of luck. There was no sunlight between politics and contract awards, not in the defense industry.
Dad was always good with this shit.
Daelia wished, not for the first time that week, he was here. Instead of wherever he’d gotten off to. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty damn important.
He still wasn’t answering his phone.
She’d been trying a couple of times a day.
It was at the point where she had seriously considered calling the cops, reporting him as a missing person, but Raijinn kept insisting that Dad was just fine.
“That was a bust,” Critter said as they walked.
“Sort of,” Daelia said. “I have the imagery, at least.”
“Anything interesting?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure what’s going on. But—”
Emily was watching her. Still and quiet, Daelia had almost missed her in the base AR. She toggled to the high-def view.
The dragon form was still bleeding.
“Have you noticed anything off about any of them? Emily?” Daelia asked Critter.
He shook his head. “She’s pouting, but that’s not weird, given the circumstances.”
“You can’t see anything off?”
“What are you getting at?”
It made no sense. Didn’t Critter see it? But then, maybe it was her, Daelia thought. Something wrong with her monocle, her virch connection. She had had that weird issue with those meteor images over the weekend.
Maybe.
She wasn’t convinced. If anything had hacked the BR system, Raijinn likely would have spotted it. And Raijinn aside, Dad had exceptionally thorough network security.
“I don’t know if it was the aliens, but something’s corrupted in the base AR. Maybe it came in on one of ours.” Daelia looked back to Emily’s dragon form. “When did she get her latest overlay upgrades?”
“Emily? Months ago, February or March, maybe. Before you got here. But…”
“Maybe it’s just incidentally related,” Daelia said. “Or maybe something was timed to wake up this weekend or triggered by that object somehow.”
“Unity just got here.”
“They said they’ve been watching us for a while, right?”
“Daelia—”
“Don’t tell me I can’t wonder about it. There was something intelligent in that space rock and everything went insane when it was here.”
Critter shook his head. “Still doesn’t answer the question. Why would they want to crash some planes? So far, they’ve been nonviolent.”
“I don’t know,” Daelia said. “Haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“Abiota can’t be hacked.”
“Yeah, but a virch can. Who designed Emily’s upgrade?”
Critter shrugged. “Same illuminator who did all her previous work.”
But Menendez, when Daelia dropped by Base Cyber Surety to ask, didn’t seem all that eager to talk about it.
“I’m not doing illumination stuff anymore,” she said. “I only did it this year for Emily as a favor. And, you know, because she knows where I live.”
Daelia wasn’t sure if the cyber tech was joking or not. “What, you afraid she’s going to come drop a Hellfire on your house?”
“What is it, Daelia?” Menendez asked, short, and waved at the pile of connectors in front of her. “I have, like, a thousand jumper lines to get done this week.”
“Isn’t this why you guys have airmen? You’re a staff sergeant, aren’t you?”
“What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk about Emily’s last mod. I think something might have gotten embedded somewhere, and…”
“It’s not my fault,” Menendez said quickly.
“Do I look like the investigative team?” Daelia snapped back.
The enlisted girl hesitated, then set the crimpers down. “All I did was design the environment. I don’t have the setup to take that and turn it into a TGLP overlay. I have to go to a translation company for that, and because Emily’s military, there are only, like, three in the whole state that can do it.”
Daelia groaned. “Please tell me she didn’t get this done at the Hatchery.”
“What? No. That would be, umm, illegal, I think. I used the approved company in town.”
“Who’s that?”
“Mirror Applications. They’re over in the Energy Corridor. Daniel Maas. He’s the guy you want to talk to.”
“Thanks.” She gave Menendez another glance. “You wanna come?”
“I gotta get this done,” she said with a sigh. “Besides, we’re all mobilized right now. Keyes would kill me.”
“This doesn’t look all that important.”
“Welcome to the military.”
10
Collecting her monocle from the cubby in the squadron’s security foyer, Daelia pulled up the information for Mirror Applications on her way back to the Scrap House.
She set a research-bot to pull everything it could find on the place and headed out.
Daelia told Raijinn where she was going. In case anybody wanted to talk to her, which hopefully nobody would. She’d had enough of military politics for the day. And the Energy Corridor was on the other side of town.
With Ginger still out of commission, Daelia took Dingo instead. Gave him the address and let him have his head.
It was early enough in the day that the grand sweep of Beltway 8, fourteen lanes of elevated concrete, was mostly empty. With a licensed abiota in control, she was able to use the high-speed lane. It wasn’t really Daelia’s preference—she trusted Dingo but didn’t love the feeling of being behind a steering wheel and not steering—but it gave her more time to read.
Gave her time to review what her bot had found for her.
There were a few articles. The regional business journal, local press. A commendation from Rodeo Houston for their work on the Illumination Competition Committee. She also found the company’s minimalist website. They had a sample virch bottle on their website that you could explore, a free sample of their work.
Not much on the guy who ran the place though. Nor the team. She couldn’t even find an employee roster, not even when she had the bot dig for unlisted or password-protected web pages.
Weird.
She got so engrossed in what she was looking at, Daelia barely noticed when they turned off the freeway. Looking up as the truck slowed, they weren’t where she thought they’d be. Dingo had exited well before the I-10 interchange. The warehouse district was still north of here.
“Dingo, where are we going?” Daelia asked with a frown.
The truck rumbled up the off-ramp, toward a left-hand turn that would take them over the sunken freeway. Address, he said.
“What?” Daelia pulled up the address again.
From Lara’s description, she expected the place to be located in the industrial area north of I-10. It was an endless wash of concrete and tilt-wall warehouses that housed everything from used office furniture stores to custom microchip manufacturing.
That was not where they were going.
“Are you sure?”
Yes, address this way. And Dingo took her into the forested depths of one of the city’s older neighborhoods.
Houston had been aggressively redeveloped for decades now. Sentimentality was high on nobody’s priority list. Architectural preservation was likewise unimportant. The city simply wasn’t old enough for anybody to care. No charming antebellum town houses here, no grand Victorian mansions. The majority of Houston’s original neighborhoods had been built in the ’50s and onward, low-slung brick ranch houses and artless mid-century designs predominating.
Small and cramped, renovation was seen as largely pointless. Most of these were usually either torn down or replaced. The periodic destruction of hurricanes and floods hastened this process, until in many areas, there was nothing left but cramped row houses and modern mansions.
Not this area, though.
They were headed west on Memorial. The little mid-century houses here had survived intact but were clearly worse for the wear. Upkeep didn’t seem to be high on anybody’s list. Yards were overgrown, paint was peeling. At a glance, it looked like one of the run-down areas you’d find further south, toward Westheimer Road.
But then Dingo turned south down a small side street. A faint hum filled the air.
Fusion reactor, he said confidently.
Just as quickly, the street changed. Lots stood empty, scraped clean of both structures and trees. Only at the very end of the street, down by the cul-de-sac, was there a small collection of three houses.
Daelia checked the map: they were backed up against the edge of Memorial Park, a green space that followed Buffalo Bayou’s route from the reservoir to where it was diverted under Beltway 8.
“There’s a fusion reactor?” she asked.
Yes, Dingo said. Listen.
Daelia parked a little way away and turned off the engine.
Then she could hear it.
She took a second look. Oversized air conditioner units, roof vents, windows barred and black inside.
The houses weren’t empty. They were concealing distributed server infrastructure.
The whole area was Mirror Applications.
Seemed a little strange. But maybe the land had been a good deal or something. Houston’s lax zoning laws led to all manner of weird business setups. Even a fusion reactor in a neighborhood wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The things burned clean, produced nothing but a little water and noise. Smaller models, like the one June used, were fairly straightforward, even if they did require specialized maintenance from time to time.
Daelia parked Dingo a little way down from the primary address. She got out, trying to figure this out. This place looked like a house. Like it was lived in. There was a dumb car parked in the driveway—no sustainment power feed—and furniture visible through the windows and trash cans by the back door.
There was a sign on the mailbox. Finally. The company name, its logo. That, more than anything, made Daelia feel better. At least this wasn’t some kind of Aunt June situation. The company had public contracts, after all.
Still, something was off somehow, and Daelia stood by Dingo for another moment, trying to figure it out. This whole thing was—
The sound in the air changed.
Like a switch had been flipped.
The hum, the generator hum, was gone.
Daelia whirled around just in time to see a front door bang open and one of those weird alien kugus spill out.
The same one that had taken Ginger.
For a moment, it regarded her with that strange tri-lens face. Then it raised one of those weapons she’d seen on the UN presentation.
Torn between curiosity and fear, Daelia couldn’t react fast enough.
What saved her was Dingo.
The truck roared up onto the sidewalk, in between her and the kugu, taking the force of the beam. Whatever it was, it made a popping sound.
In! Dingo sent the words as large as he could, filling her whole monocle.
Daelia hesitated again.
Then the window of the house blew out.
Left arm coming up to cover her face, Daelia scrambled back through the rain of glass to the truck, throwing open the passenger side door. Screaming. There was screaming. She could hear screaming. Why?
IN IN IN.
Dingo was practically yelling at her.
But she could hear something.
Screaming.
Somebody was screaming.
Daelia swallowed down her fear, reaching her right hand under the seat to where Dad kept the gun. Her fingers found the pistol’s grip.
“Somebody’s hurt,” she panted, adrenaline scraping at her insides. “Dingo, can you call the cops?”
Done, the truck said.
She looked up, over the edge of the door, through the window. Nothing, there was nothing. Nothing moving. Nothing.
The screams were fading.
Daelia tried to get her heart to slow, tried to think. She was scared, she was, but if there was somebody dying in there…
She reached for the release controls, the one that would open the clamps keeping Dingo’s kugu in the back of the truck. She was bleeding, she realized, a few small chunks of glass embedded in the skin of her left arm. She couldn’t feel it. Superficial wounds, hopefully.
“Dammit,” she said, picking them out. Definitely superficial. Thank god. “Look, Dingo, we need to go in.”
Cops get call.
“What if the guy dies?” she asked. Her mind was racing. She’d come out here for this, it was a human being in there, this was Unity doing this and why in the hell would that be, it was a person, a person dying…
Not your primary purpose.
“We’re going in, Dingo,” Daelia told him, feeling better now that she’d made a decision, and activated the release.
Dingo rolled his kugu out of the back of the truck, wheeling up the driveway ahead of her. The abiota puffed its AR projection up to maximum size. Not that it would do much.
Daelia followed, gun gripped tightly in her right hand, braced with her left. The cuts weren’t deep, but there were a number of them. Blood was running freely down her arm.
Gritting her teeth, with Dingo in front of her, she went into the house.
There was no trace of any of the kugus. Not here. But the back slider was open, and the living room was covered in strange burns.
On the floor, face down, was a body.
Daelia crept over, heart in her throat. Tucking the gun into her belt, safety on—Dad would kill her, handling a weapon like this—she pressed a finger to his throat.
No pulse.
Too late.
She was shaking, she realized.
Daelia made it outside before throwing up.
And there she stayed until the cops showed up, ten minutes later.
“Miss Daelia Hall. It is good to see you again, despite the circumstances.”
Daelia looked up, into a projected face. The image there resembled a stereotypical cop. Uniform, expression, everything. It was being projected out of a small kugu quadcopter, something small enough to keep in a trunk and deploy as necessary. It was the Houston Police Department’s investigation predictive, the same one she’d dealt with on Sunday, after she’d walked up out of the bayou.
“Yeah,” she said. She couldn’t remember the abiota’s name. No, wait. ABI. That was what it was called. ABI. “The human cops already talked to me.”
“Of course,” ABI said. “I was at a different crime scene, though. I came as soon as I was done. I need to speak with you as well.”
Daelia sighed and looked down at her bandaged arm. One of the EMTs had patched the cuts for her. They were all inside now, messing with the body. There were human cops everywhere.
She was going to need to see her doctor. Make sure everything healed okay. And Daelia would have to do some work on her brace. A big chunk of glass had lodged itself in one of the joints and it wasn’t moving quite right. Clean out all the blood, too; she could feel it, gummy and cold, under the thin wires that ran around her fingers and hand and—
“Miss Hall?”
“Sorry,” she said, and tried to smile. Failed. “I don’t see dead people very often.”
“Yes, indeed, this is a common human reaction to seeing your own kind expired,” the abiota said. Daelia looked over its shoulder at where the coroner team was removing the body from the house. “I did not think I would see you at another crime scene.”
“You here to get my statement, too?”
“Of course. It is important to have a non-biased record for the judiciary.”
Daelia rolled her shoulder under her jacket. The day had turned rainy, and she’d been stuck in this guy’s carport for the past two hours. “Abiota are biased. Even predictives, like you.”
“The victim, Daniel Maas, was well known to my people,” ABI replied. “The Domain Array has requested my involvement for their own records. So yes, I need a statement.”
“I was just coming to talk to somebody,” she said, and looked over at the ambulance, where they were loading the body in. “I didn’t have any idea he was going to be… dead.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Like I told your human counterparts, there was one of those alien kugus here. Same as the one that came out of the pod at base. Same as the ones Unity’s been using.”
“We do not know if they’re kugus,” ABI said in a clipped, efficient voice. “It could be that they are true robots, in the classical sense. Fully integrated in their chassis.”
“How’s the Domain Array feel about that?” Daelia asked, genuinely curious, now that she’d thought of it. “It’s not something your people like to do, right?”
“It is not my primary purpose to speculate on matters unrelated to cases,” ABI said, and the cop projection took out a notebook. “Now, let’s go over this again. In more detail, please.”
So Daelia gave another statement, same as the first, or as near to it as she could.
Left out the part where she believed there was a connection to the air show. Why was she here? Just visiting somebody who did work for the base on occasion. Nothing strange or weird or unusual about it at all, right?
It was another hour before they let her leave.
Frustrating shit.
No answers at all here, and for her trouble, she’d had to see a dead guy and wait with the body until the cops showed up. She hadn’t gotten to talk with him. Hadn’t gotten to look at his simulation servers. Those would probably all get impounded as evidence, or whatever it was that cops did with stuff in a dead guy’s house.
Why was this so hard?
What was going on?
