Source code, p.16
Source Code, page 16
“Think of it like one of those things that reads earthquakes,” she said, and finalized the last connection. “I’m looking for power fluctuations that indicate the operation of something other than the baseline system. We’re talking about very, very tiny fluctuations, but they’re there.” Hypothetically.
“Is that what the paper’s for?”
Daelia had literally taken that part of the device from a real seismograph. Innards heavily modified, of course, but the paper and swing arm remained. “Yeah,” she said, not bothering to look at it. “I figured out early on, anything digital just fucks this whole thing. It has to be analog.”
“I thought you were trying to talk to an abiota.”
“Additional circuitry competes with the electron flow through the rudiment core.” It was bullshit, but it sounded okay. Truth was, Daelia wasn’t entirely sure why digital versions of this design didn’t work, but they didn’t. Not that she was going to admit that to Highlander.
“Is this thing sensitive enough?”
“Hopefully,” she said, and pushed off the ground. It was kind of awkward with just one hand, but Highlander didn’t offer help and she didn’t ask for it. “I mean, I wouldn’t submit this for any kind of scientific analysis. Unless it works, and then maybe I can include it in my thesis.”
Highlander actually looked interested. “What are we supposed to say if it does start talking? Welcome to Earth?”
“Maybe,” Daelia said, less sure of herself now.
She didn’t like the look Highlander was giving her.
In her experience, people tended to think she was some kind of polymath genius. Or at least, a genius in whatever field they were interested in at the time. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Daelia had great skill with hard robotics and an almost intuitive ability with TGLP and many of its subsidiary coding sets. But that all pertained to abiota directly: how they moved, how they liked to present themselves. She knew them in the same way that a horsewoman knew how to ride.
She was not a computer programmer. She was not a data scientist.
College, for her, had been an exercise in dealing with her own limitations.
Not that anybody ever wanted to hear that. Just like they didn’t want to hear that handling abiota wasn’t as easy as reading code. Maybe that was why there were so many little friction points between them. Too many engineers trying to impose their worldview on something that fundamentally defied rationality.
“So what do we do?”
“I make a couple of adjustments, close the circuit, and we wait.”
Daelia had taken her monocle off in order to work; this thing couldn’t communicate via TGLP anyway, and sometimes the thing messed with her depth perception. She automatically pulled the thing back on, however, as she went to finalize the connections in the housing.
That was when she saw it.
There was a faint smear around Daelia’s feet, on the floor of the hangar, enough for her to think it some kind of smudge on her monocle lens. But a quick wipe on the corner of her shirt did nothing to erase it. It almost seemed to make it worse.
Then Daelia realized what it was.
Mist.
Like the spray off a waterfall or the sublimation of snowpack.
“Do you see anything?” she asked the pilot. “In the AR field?”
“Monocle’s giving me a headache, took it off,” Highlander said with a yawn. But he pulled an oversized phone, squadron-issued, out of a leg pocket. Turned on the screen. “Shit. What is that?”
She looked at it. The smoke was there too. Looked a bit different, though.
And then she had a crazy idea. What if…
There was nothing on the detector, though. The needle hadn’t moved.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Any of the cyber guys still here?”
“Naw, they all went back to the unit.”
“Great,” Daelia said, blink-clicking to a reminder to talk to them about this later as she got to work.
19
The rest of the flight with Splatto was more difficult. Apparently when he got put on autopilot on training runs, he considered it permission to do whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t break the operational floor. Getting him back to altitude and calmed down had taken Argo a good fifteen minutes.
But at least the equine-class hadn’t tried to fly himself into a fucking oil platform.
They’d stayed up for another hour with Splatto. Argo felt like he’d been pretty in tune with the abiota by the time the next shift came in and did changeover.
Ho wanted to get his after-action report filed so he could get gone. Argo was staying here again tonight and didn’t care when he got his paperwork done. If he was going to be stuck here because of the air show, he figured he was at least going to enjoy it.
Boots up on the composite bench of a picnic table, Argo could hear the noise carried up the runway. A thousand overlapping conversations, vendors on loudspeakers advertising everything from military-style VR sim programs to home water purifiers, the crackle of the loudspeakers over the stands and the roar of engines over it all.
There was no air act on at the moment. The Army parachute team had just landed.
He checked his watch. 1525.
The Storm Gryphons flew at 1600.
Briefly, Argo thought about going back in, finishing out his day. He had paperwork to get done on the day’s flight, but it could wait awhile yet.
Argo had always loved planes. Always loved the idea of flying. The air show in his hometown had always been his favorite thing as a kid; he remembered watching the Blue Angels at six years old, telling his mom that someday that would be him.
He would be that high-flying hero in the cockpit.
The world had moved on, though. War had moved on, kicking humans out of the cockpit, stuffing in abiota instead. The Spitfires and Mustangs that he’d watched in their practice runs yesterday were anachronisms, charming throwbacks to a less efficient age. The world they’d lived in no longer existed, the age of the dogfight over now, killed by area-denial tech and beyond-line-of-sight targeting.
Argo knew that. Knew it better than most. He wasn’t some little kid anymore, dreaming of grand adventure and big heroics. He had a decade and a half of military service under his belt.
He knew damn well that everything now except cargo was piloted from ground-based cockpits. He knew it all had onboard abiota managing their more complex systems. He knew that the greatly enhanced maneuverability of the FQ-47 was due to the removal of the human body. He knew that at some point, all piloting would get turned over to abiota exclusively. Yet another human role, given over.
He knew all of this.
And yet, the ten-year-old boy inside him still got excited watching things fly.
But nothing was flying at the moment. You really should get to those reports, he told himself again.
And yet…
“Got your AR on?”
Argo looked over at the door. Major Smith, Marathon, coming out with his vaporizer in hand. His new flight commander. Argo hadn’t gotten to know him very well yet, but Marathon seemed to be a pretty solid guy. A rare standout in the Group with his A&M class ring, instead of Academy. He was career Guard, one of the rare few amongst the pilots here.
He was also one of the few full-time officers in the squadron who wasn’t on the flying schedule at the moment. Argo wondered if that was why he’d been appointed to run the EMC that weekend.
“No, I took my monocle off,” Argo said.
Marathon frowned at him and leaned on the wall. “I thought all you active-duty boys got the implants.”
“Not me,” Argo told him.
Marathon tapped his temple. Against his dark skin, the silver shine of interface points stood out. “You should think about it. It’s nice to not be screwing around with a monocle all the time.”
“Why’d you ask?” Argo said, wanting to avoid further conversation on this. He didn’t know this guy very well, after all.
Marathon nodded down the runway, toward the static displays. “Check out the military overlay.”
Pulling his monocle back over his eye, Argo immediately realized what Marathon meant.
In the military feed, two of them were fighting.
The AR forms were fighting. Beaks and claws. Screaming.
There was even blood. Blood. Realistic looking, too.
“You ever see anything like that?” Marathon asked him.
“Not with predictives,” Argo replied, watching it. “Holy shit. We can’t let them up in the air like that.”
“No, we really can’t,” Marathon said. His right eye had unfocused, his pupil twitching. He was doing something with his monocle implant, Argo knew, and didn’t bother him.
While fights between abiota weren’t necessarily all that uncommon, it was disturbing behavior for any weapon system to be exhibiting.
Especially at an air show.
The back door banged open, and there was that battle-ax of a sergeant, Brandel, coming out. “Marathon, if this is another of your cute ideas about… Oh, jesus fuck.”
Marathon didn’t look at her. “Would I lie about something like this, Becca?”
She glanced over at Argo. “You can’t send me a text when you see something like this?”
“Marathon just did!” Argo replied.
The airfield manager folded her arms across her chest, watching it, her face like a thunderstorm.
“At least the PR feed is keeping this concealed,” Marathon said. “Everything looks A-OK in the show overlay.”
“It’ll be the goddamn Storm Gryphons team themselves, manipulating that,” Brandel said, and turned for the door. “You’d think they’d have the fucking professionalism to recognize a problem and get their aircraft under control, instead of just hiding it with AR. Like we won’t fucking see it. Excuse me, sirs, I need to go yell at somebody.”
Argo waited until she was back inside. “Think they’ll listen to her?” Having been on the other side of things until recently, Argo knew how active duty tended to view Guard personnel. It wasn’t usually a favorable attitude.
“If they know what’s good for them, they will,” Marathon replied, and checked his watch. “Fuck, my break’s over. Time to get back to the fight.”
Argo kept his eyes on the strange scene playing out above the runway. “Have they figured out what’s going on with that thing yet?”
“From what Highlander’s telling me, doesn’t sound like anybody’s got a fuckin’ clue.”
Despite being under an awning for most of the day, Rover was beat. It was the heat here, even in October, even in the shade. It just did not let up. He might have been a Texas native, but he’d grown up in Amarillo, northwest of Houston, way inland. Away from the battering force of the humidity here.
All he wanted was a shower. A shower, and a change of clothes, and an easy drive home. Years ago, when he was first stationed here, Ellington had been slated to get a north gate, one that popped right out on the Beltway 8 frontage road. Nice and easy. But Congress had pulled the funds at some point, and the state had bigger priorities, and so it sat, half-finished and inaccessible.
There was more than one gate off the base proper, of course. But they all fed off in the direction of attendee parking lots.
If he didn’t leave before the Storm Gryphons flew, it was going to be at least an hour before the roads cleared. And he had promised his wife he’d be home in time for dinner that night.
Stupid thing to say, Rover realized.
Because there was Brandel. Waiting for him on the porch.
It was always something around here.
“Boss, thank fuck,” she said. “I was just going to send out a search party to get you.”
“What’s going on, Becca?”
A problem with the Storm Gryphons. That’s what she said. A problem with the Storm Gryphons. He didn’t even have to leave the porch to see it. Up at the far end of the runway, he could see them acting up.
“And you walked up there, talked to them about it?”
“Of course.”
“And you told them you’re the airfield manager?”
“Their commander assures me the situation’s under control,” she said. “But I don’t like it. I don’t want them flying in that condition.”
“What are you worried about?” Rover meant it seriously. Brandel could be callous, as comforting as a concrete parking lot in July, but she knew her trade and she took it very seriously. He trusted her judgment when it came to matters out here on the airfield.
“You want them in the air, over this crowd, over these neighborhoods, in that state?”
“They’re predictives. It’s not like Emily or Splatto. There’s a lot more control here.”
“I don’t like it,” she repeated.
He sighed. “Have you tried calling Sausage?”
“Neither him nor Cactus are picking up their phones right now, boss.”
“Jesus,” Rover muttered. “Okay, okay. I know where they are.”
Five minutes later, Rover parked his UTV at the airfield gate and was back out on the flight line, striding his way through the crowds. He’d learned a long time ago there was a trick to this sort of thing. Walk with purpose and don’t look anybody in the eye.
The crowd moved. Always did.
But he couldn’t have cared less what any of the civilians out on his ramp were doing. They weren’t his problem at the moment.
Or rather, they were. They just weren’t the cause of it.
The centerpiece of any air show was, of course, the aerial demonstrations. In a nod to Ellington’s joint nature, the Black Knights, the Army’s parachute demonstration team, had performed earlier. The Coast Guard had done a simulated rescue. Even the Navy had a few assets on hand, although the Blue Angels were scheduled for next year, not this one. And, of course, there were a crapload of vintage planes, aerobatic acts, even a landing by one of Tamm’s Apeliotes orbital lifters.
And, of course, these days, almost everything was enhanced by AR.
Rover found it annoying, distracting, except in cases where it was warranted, but that was how people were these days. Attention spans like mice.
To facilitate watching the performances, a huge expanse of temporary bleachers had been erected further down the runway, dead center on the show grounds. There was also a huge roped-in sitting area, where a family could bring their own chairs and wagons, if they liked.
Neither place was where the boss was likely to be.
No, on air show weekends, Cactus preferred the hospitality pavilions.
Glorified tents, these sat between the military boundary and the bleachers. Huge white awnings overhung prime real estate, shady and cooled by big mobile AC units. The air show rented these out for serious money or assigned them to their biggest sponsors.
A few of the local energy companies could be found here, company logos and banners declaring their support of the US armed forces, hanging on the outside of the tents’ walls. One had been donated to the local VFW by a local business association. A few were given over to other industry partners, like Tamm Industries. Rice University had one, for alumni only.
And one of these was the Wing’s.
Rover was relatively new to the squadron commander position and didn’t have a whole lot of experience with air show administration. As he understood it, this was a concession meant to settle a long-standing agreement between the Wing and the show board. It was intended to be a nice place for any base personnel to come, get out of the sun, enjoy a drink, and maybe watch a little of the show.
In practice, however, it was Cactus’s private party, his own little kingdom for this two-day period. The pavilion wasn’t large enough to accommodate more than a few dozen people at a time, and so, it was by invitation only.
Rover had gotten an invitation but hadn’t bothered to RSVP. He preferred watching the show practice on Fridays. The weekend was work for his people, so it was work for him.
Even when they didn’t have a friggin’ meteor sitting in one of his hangars.
He handed his ID card to the Security Forces troop at the door and slipped into the shade, sweat drying on his skin almost immediately under the breeze from an oversized cooling unit. There was a caterer here, a local barbecue place, and a few tubs of cold beer, soda, bottled tea. Some tables were scattered around, but most of the chairs had been dragged up to the front for people to better watch the performances. Nothing luxurious about it—the show only gave them the space, after all—but that was the way things went in the Guard.
Small price to pay, Rover thought, for that separation from active duty. From the federal side of the military and Washington, DC. His words to Navarro, earlier in the day, hadn’t been hollow. While the country had avoided annihilation in the Five Days War, trust had been lost.
He didn’t wear the uniform now for his country. He wore it for his state, for his city, for his unit, and for his family. Nothing beyond that deserved his loyalty, as far as he was concerned.
These were thoughts Rover kept to himself. Most people felt that way, but it wasn’t politically expedient to voice it. And politics were something he kept a close eye on.
It was just part of the officer ecosystem.
And around here, the apex predator was Colonel Strauss. Cactus. The Wing King himself.
He was here in civilian clothes with his family, his two teenage sons taking up prime seats right on the edge of the pavilion, deep in conversation with some girl in a full AR panoply.
Without his monocle on, Rover couldn’t tell exactly what she had its personal overlay impression tuned to, but whatever it was, the boys seemed quite interested. Rover just hoped she had an environmental module fitted into the suit. It was too hot to be wearing that shit today, October though it was.
“Rover, good to see you.”
Rover pulled out his very best smile. Sausage knew exactly what Rover thought of him and didn’t care, but Cactus was something else. “Good to see you too, sir.”
The Wing commander nodded, like he expected no less an answer. “How are things going? After last night?”
