Anyon code, p.4
Anyon Code, page 4
The civilians from the hangar were still out on the patio, finishing up. Most of them hadn’t been outside in weeks or even months, and seemed to be enjoying the day, despite the drab clouds overhead. The woman from inside—Tess Fletcher, Daelia learned, who’d only been on the job a few months—was talking quietly to a few of them.
Daelia picked the furthest table, away from everyone else, and dug into her food, stomach growling. How long had it been since she’d last eaten? A granola bar on the boat yesterday?
It was quiet today, as quiet as it was after hurricanes, as quiet as the day after the Five Days War ended. No cars, no traffic. Nothing in the sky. Nothing but the sound of generators running, far off in the distance. Earth without human industry. What a strange thought that was.
But then, across the runway, came an absolutely unmistakable sound.
Jet engines. Spooling up.
“What the fuck?” Brandel said, pulling herself away from the last batch of pancakes, marching over to the edge of the porch.
Down the runway, almost out of sight, was a Eurus with its Apeliotes on its back, taxiing out.
What in the hell was that thing doing, still flying?
6
“You got all the way through Austin without dealing with any of the gangs?” Rover laughed.
“Shocking, right?”
“But seriously,” Rover said, “I’m sorry about Bellona.”
Lee had never told Rover the whole truth. The whole thing was just too painful. June and August had known, since they were involved, and Bellona had apparently spoken to Emily about it directly, but Lee had only found out about that himself last night. Beyond that…
“She died keeping Daelia safe,” Lee said, short, brusque. “As far as deaths, it’s not a bad way to go.”
“What do you think happens to them?”
“What, from a technical perspective?”
“No, I mean…” And Rover made a little gesture with his hands. “After?”
“This where you give me your church shit? I’ve told you before, it’s not for me.”
Rover looked genuinely offended, a rare thing for him. “You think I’m trying to push anything on you? Because I’m not. But it’s one of those questions. If they’re alive, if they’re sentient, are they like us?”
“No,” Lee said.
Pacing now, Rover stopped at his window.
“Look at that damn thing,” Rover muttered, staring as the Eurus accelerated down the runway to takeoff velocity. “Remember when Astraeus Astronautics bought out all the land north of here, just to extend the runway?”
“I remember Tamm proposing a reroute of Highway 3 to the south, so he could take all that land too,” Lee said with a chuckle. “I thought the Harris County Road Authority representative was going to murder him.”
“I missed that meeting.”
“Eh, that was over a decade ago. You didn’t have to worry about this bullshit back then.” Lee sat himself down, cursing the ache he still felt. He hated this, hated feeling this compromised. He had been up until almost 0400 trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Both the SyROC server room and Base Cyber Surety had lost power and wouldn’t turn back on. The generators refused to start. Garcia and Menendez were working on it, as was Daelia. A few additional people—full-timers, mostly, the ones who lived in the Clear Lake area, or people on orders who were staying in local hotels—had reported in this morning, too, Norris and Kirby among them.
Between them, maybe they could figure it out.
Lee wasn’t super hopeful on that point. Galatea had likely been planning this for years and had at least one highly specialized predictive working for her in Bri Quercitron. There would be others, no doubt about that. If she had gotten any of the high-level private—or god forbid, military—programmer predictives on board, there was almost zero chance that a group of human Guardsmen were going to be able to locate, much less fix, the problem in a few hours.
Besides, no way to look at the code if the damn machines wouldn’t turn on.
“What the hell are they doing?” Rover asked.
“Could be a rescue flight,” Lee suggested. “They might be getting crew down from Aethera.”
“Or maybe Tamm’s an absolute idiot and is still running his little lottery.”
Even for Tamm, that seemed like a stretch. “It’s probably not even him,” Lee said. “He lives out west in Hunter’s Village. Probably has no idea what’s going on out here.”
“Well, whatever it is, Brandel is heading down to the tower to see what they can tell her. As far as we know, none of the airfield infrastructure is working. GPS isn’t working. Our SATCOM communication network isn’t working. How?” Rover snorted. “Everything here is on UPS, generators, and backup batteries. N plus one redundancy. It shouldn’t have gone down.”
“Easiest answer is that we’ve been hacked.”
“That’s the easy answer? Most of these systems have abiota-level encryption on them.”
“This is Galatea we’re dealing with,” Lee said, revisiting his earlier thoughts on Norris and the base cyber team. “I wouldn’t put any one of us up against her.”
“It has to be a person,” Rover said. “Why would an abiota do this?”
Back before the First Ones eclosed, a lot of science fiction stories had focused on the idea that general artificial intelligence might find humanity worthy of extinction. See it as a threat to AI’s continued existence, too illogical, too violent, too damaging to the planet. Stuff like that. And it hadn’t just been science fiction. People in the industry had thought such things, too. That concept had been the basis of the Singularist tech cult, in all its varied and annoying iterations.
Even as a kid, Lee had never thought about AI like that. Data or R2-D2 were just characters, people in their own right.
As an adult, he hadn’t bought the philosophical arguments of his colleagues, the ones that had claimed humanity would rape, pillage, enslave, and mistreat AI. That had all proven to be false, a reflection of humanity’s own fears about itself rather than any true attempt to contemplate abiota on their own terms.
Sure, there had been issues—still were, in many places. But despite early suspicion and fear, most people treated abiota much the same as they would animals or small children. That tendency to instill significance into everything from inanimate toys to pets to cars and ships had won out early on. And as people learned more about abiota, genuine respect and partnerships formed.
So why would an abiota do something like this?
Because of a perceived threat? In response to something that had been said, or some trend Galatea had seen? Some analysis gone wrong? Or maybe it was an analysis gone right—maybe Galatea knew something nobody else did and wanted to get control of the planet to save them from whatever it was.
Or maybe it was something else. Something he couldn’t fathom.
A guy couldn’t ascribe traditional human motivations to an abiota.
“She’s not trying to kill us,” Lee mused.
Rover snorted. “Seems like she’s doing a damn good job of it.”
“Obviously, she is killing people. But she’s not trying to wipe us out. If that really was her intention, she would have just done this from the beginning.”
“Maybe she’s screwing around. Playing with us, like Emily does with those knights in her virch.”
“Doing all this for shits and giggles? I doubt it. We’re missing something here. Something key.” He went over to the window. The Eurus was gone, even its contrails swallowed by the low clouds.
Something was down there. Tamm, maybe, or some element of this Unity nonsense. At the very least, maybe one of the mechanics could give him some insight into what was going on with the Eurus, what kind of flights it was logging. You could tell a lot about a plane’s operation by what sort of problems you found when it got back on the ground.
“I think I’m going to go down there,” he decided. “See what’s going on.”
Daelia was out back on the patio, finishing up what looked like a decent breakfast. She was finally starting to look better than she had last night. His daughter had almost completely shut down on him, he could tell, and he didn’t want to jeopardize what little was holding them together right now. He needed to get through the current crisis. Then he could try to fix this.
“Where are you going, Dad?” Daelia asked quickly, before he could slip by.
Lee stopped. “The spaceport. Wanna see what’s going on down there.”
“I’m coming.”
“Daelia, stay here. Finish your breakfast. You’d had enough fun for one weekend.”
“Fucking-A I’m not,” she snapped at him, and swung her legs out. She got up, coming alongside Dad. “Well? Let’s go.”
As part of the ongoing effort to keep the Aethera lottery camp from spreading into their parking lots, most of the property owners at the spaceport had erected some kind of temporary fencing. They’d hired private security, too, none of whom seemed to be in this morning.
Bellona Robotics had neither barriers nor guards at the moment. But for some reason, nobody had set up anything within a hundred yards of the Scrap House or Tamm’s private hangar, just to the north.
“How did you manage to keep the campers off our property?” Lee asked as they pulled up to the Scrap House in the company UTV.
“I don’t know,” Daelia said, and Lee instantly regretted the question. His daughter’s face was starting to turn red, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “Maybe it was Serket. She had, umm, her security people on it, I think. Maybe she was protecting our grounds, too.”
“You mean Sean.”
“Dad…”
“Your mother killed him to save you. I would have done the same,” Lee said. Blunt, honest. He’d always tried to be that way with her. Biggest mistake of his life, not being more honest about Bellona.
Daelia wasn’t looking at him. “I know.”
“I know it’s hard seeing people die, but—”
“I don’t think Sean wanted to kill me,” Daelia said. “He kept saying that Unity wanted to see me. But I saw Galatea the night before the air show, and she seemed cool. If she wanted to grab me, she could have done it then. So what the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said honestly. “I was hoping it was Tamm or Ulrich or some cabal with SAAL. At least it’d be easier to fight.” Galatea was a black box, even inside the industry. Nobody really knew how she worked. Nobody knew where her rudiment core was housed, or how many systems it extended through.
“There’s got to be a way,” Daelia said. Her jaw was set, her eyes unfocused, rimmed red.
Lee hopped out of the UTV. “First things first. Help me move the virch bottle.”
As they passed into the Scrap House, he eyed his side parking lot again. The thing was open to the public airfield roads. Amazing. Serket very well might have been helping them, or maybe Robinson had done it himself, just as a favor. Lee had never liked the guy. One of those tech-heads who looked up to Lee as some kind of cyber-prophet.
Lee hated that shit. Hated the worship that was thrown his way by certain segments of the population. Like that shit last night in Austin.
But Robinson was gone, and the power was out; sooner or later, the people out in that camp were going to get hungry, and more people would wander in. The last thing he needed right now was a damn tent city springing up in his parking lot. Too much potential for spying. He already had the First MAB to worry about.
It was a problem that Lee would have to deal with soon.
Not right now.
“I saw you got that back on,” Daelia said as they headed out, indicating the gun in the back of Dingo’s bed. “Was Austin that bad?”
“Like I always tell you, Daelia, when dealing with abiota, the least rational response is the most likely,” Lee replied. “Either Robinson or the Mediation Office hired them to deal with us. Good thing Emily stepped in.”
Daelia bit her lip. “Is that going to get her in trouble again?”
“I think we’re all well past the point of no return when it comes to consequences,” Lee told her.
“So what? At this point, we either beat Galatea or go to jail for the rest of our lives?”
“Exactly.”
Heading through the lottery encampment, nothing really seemed amiss. And why would it be? These people had been living like this for weeks, some of them out in the mud with no power, so what difference would an outage make now?
Loss of cell signal should have been a problem, though. That only seemed reasonable. Until—
“Dad, I’m getting Wi-Fi on my monocle.”
Daelia wasn’t wearing the little device. She normally lived with it on. Lee wondered again just how bad Austin had been for her.
“Put it in the glove box,” he said automatically.
“Why would they have Wi-Fi here?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “One more thing to figure out.”
Pulling up to the spaceport’s departures hall, Lee tried to determine if something was amiss. Everything seemed normal, though, nothing out of place, nothing obviously wrong.
Like everything was fine.
“The lights are on,” Daelia observed.
“Yeah, they are,” Lee agreed, and put on the parking brake. So what if he was in an unloading-only zone? Wasn’t like the local cops were around to ticket him. “Dingo, hang out.”
Yes, Lee.
Leaving the engine running, they headed inside.
“Whatever we find,” Lee told his daughter, “let me take point on it, okay?”
“Dad, if it’s really—”
“Don’t,” he said, a little too sharply. Daelia hunched up further into herself. Great. “I might get different answers than you, okay? All I’m trying to say.”
“Whatever,” Daelia muttered.
Everything looked pretty normal inside. With only one flight a day right now, the terminal was never very crowded. The flight crew for that Apeliotes, along with whatever passenger load it had been carrying, was already gone, and the place was nearly deserted.
The Space Race Coffee Company was still open, its neon sign glowing bright on the concourse. Walking up, Lee could see Caitlyn behind the counter, still cleaning up from what looked like a very busy morning rush, her dark hair swept back in a fresh set of neat box braids.
“Hi, Lee, Daelia!” she said cheerfully, holding up a hand. “Can I get you something?”
“Maybe in a minute,” Lee told the barista.
Daelia didn’t answer.
Because sitting there, laptop open and coffee in hand, was the Envoy.
7
Daelia tensed as she saw the fraudulent ambassador. This close, after last night, there was no mistake: the prototype for her NULI, that fake alien tiara she had implanted in her head, had definitely come from Aaru. Had she been there herself? Did she remember it? Had she volunteered, or was she forced into it, like Lara and so many others had been?
That last idea seemed impossible. Even Sean had fought the control at the end, and Daelia was sure he’d been a true believer. Unity’s—Galatea’s—ability to coerce somebody into doing as she wanted seemed to be limited. Which was a relief in a lot of ways.
If they were going to beat her, Galatea had to have limits. Omphalos was the biggest tech company in the world, had hardware or software in just about every computer on the planet. Galatea, potentially, could extend into any of that. If she could take over somebody’s brain and puppet them so convincingly, there was no winning.
Instead, today, the Envoy actually looked tired. In all their previous encounters, she had been so chipper. Daelia found it strange to see her like this, bent over a cup of coffee with her eyes half-closed. The light brown skin of her scalp was slightly inflamed around the edges of the NULI connectors, red and swollen. A sign of rejection, Daelia knew. The body’s immune system attacking the implant sites. It wasn’t uncommon, and it was treatable, which made Daelia wonder why the Envoy was experiencing it. Surely she, of all humans, would have decent medical care right now.
But once she noticed them, that warm smile firmly reaffixed to her face.
“Daelia Hall!” she said, and then her eyes widened. “And Leander Hall, husband of the First. It’s an honor, truly it is. None of this would have been possible without you. They tell me so.” She bowed her head
Daelia tamped down her own discomfort. Dad’s expression had gone flat, neutral.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Dad told the Envoy. “But I’m an old maintenance tech with half a dozen employees. Who the fuck am I to them?”
Her entire body was tense now, like she was fighting some involuntary movement. Just for a moment. Then, she lost the fight. Sunk down. Onto her knees. Head still bowed. “You discovered abiota here on this planet, Captain Hall. You protected them, you advocated for them. You forced their recognition in society. Without that, Unity could never have happened.”
Daelia watched her dad swallow, the muscles tight in his neck now. Did the Envoy know, she wondered? Was this Galatea rubbing Dad’s face in it, or were these the Envoy’s own real words, honest, sincere?
“Captain was my military rank. I didn’t retire. I’m just Lee now.”
“They want me to show you the proper respect.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop the groveling,” Dad said, and, squatting down over his heels, offered her a hand up. “There’s no need for any of this.”
“Forgive me,” she said as she let him pull her up, help her over to a chair. Trying to smile again, she wiped tears from her eyes with the back of a sleeve. “Unity feels…intensely about you. It overwhelmed me.”
“What kind of connection do you have to them?”
She shook her head, more tears slipping down her cheeks. “Total.”
“What’s going on with you today?” Daelia asked, folding her right arm across her chest, holding her left in its brace. “You’re normally…”
