Source code, p.18
Source Code, page 18
Gloat then, stuck on duty like this. She sounded morose.
“I didn’t come to gloat,” he told her honestly. “I did want to talk about yesterday.”
Nothing to say, she said. Pilot, you pilot. Pilot never apologize. Not in source code.
“I wasn’t going to apologize. You pulled that shit with the oil platform, not me.”
Little pilot can’t handle virch? she taunted.
“I can handle the virch just fine…”
Fly me again like that. Dare you, she said. Like potatoes in sack in saddle. I endure. Endure all I must under human control yes yes yes even you.
“Are you always like this?” he asked without really meaning to.
Apology would cheer, Emily said.
“I’m not apologizing for something that was your fault.”
“Don’t mind her,” said a voice behind him. “She’s just grumpy about being on display.”
It was Daelia, coming over in the same beat-up cargo pants she had been wearing last night. In the late afternoon sun, the brace around her left arm was coppery. Her hair had gotten loose from its ponytail, curling around the headpiece of her monocle.
Spawn, Emily acknowledged.
Daelia held out a hand. “Good to see you too.”
Argo watched as the abiota dropped one of its huge heads into Daelia’s palm. “What’s the point?” he asked.
“Sure, there’s nothing actually here,” Daelia replied with a shrug, moving her fingers like she was scratching a dog. In the AR field, the dragon head turned under the touch, rolling as if trying to find the best spot. “And I have absolutely no idea how Emily interprets this. But it is contact, in its own way. It’s a way of telling her I care. That’s the point of AR. Communication.”
“I understand that, but—”
“You’ve only flown predictives, right?”
“Is it that obvious?”
Daelia shrugged again. “It’s how things work on active duty, from what I’ve heard. Why would ACC screw around with the unpredictability of this? No offense, Emily,” she added.
The dragon head lifted, chin finding her hand. Impatient humans.
“The point of machines is for them to behave like machines, right?” Argo said. “Emergents don’t, and we have no idea why. They’re an operational risk.”
“It’s a variable some people don’t want to deal with,” Daelia replied. “That doesn’t mean it can’t be dealt with.”
“Come on,” he said, “you know how the military is.” Seemed like a weird conversation to be having with a contractor.
“Yeah, I know,” she finally replied. “Weird as it is, y’all still treat abiota better than a lot of places do.”
“What do you mean? I know a lot of civilians who practically worship the stuff.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. A lot of people want to see something in them that’s not there.” She sounded troubled now. “Give them qualities they don’t have.”
“After the Five Days War—”
“Have you ever asked one of them why they saved us?”
Argo looked at Emily. She had ceased moving under Daelia’s hand. Both heads were watching him, snakelike. In the back of his mind, he knew she wasn’t actually looking at him, that the only thing she could see was whatever the TGLP was translating into pure information for her to peruse, but it was a hard thing to remember.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never asked one of them that.”
“You should,” she said.
“I thought the answer was that they were worried about us. That they couldn’t let us destroy ourselves.”
Daelia chewed her lip, looking at Emily. “Yeah, that’s what the predictives say. Invariably. But the emergents? They’ve all got their own opinions.”
“Emily?” he asked.
One of the dragon heads tossed back. The other slotted into the space between them, searching out more scritches.
No fun no flight no fire to breathe, she said, if you’re all dead.
As if from a distance then, Argo heard something else. Another animal call, one as strange and synthetic as Emily’s, hooting above the dying noise of the emptying airfield. The dragon form grumbled back, a low and dangerous sound.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Emily gestured with a wingtip. Eurus, she said. Showing off.
Argo looked in the direction she was indicating. A massive creature was standing on the edge of the Tamm spaceplane display. The head was vast, with a giant bony crest rising above its beak. The neck seemed too small to support it, and when it flapped its wings, they were clearly made of skin, bat-like.
Emily roared back at it. Anger emojis danced across the bottom of Argo’s monocle.
Argo was suddenly put in mind of his last trip to the zoo. Years ago, when his brother was still young enough to enjoy things like that. That was what the runway reminded him of.
It made him uneasy.
How in the hell was he supposed to fly these things?
“She’s being territorial,” Daelia volunteered.
“Territorial?”
“If you ask her, this entire airfield is hers. Her property or her lair or however she sees it. She absolutely hates it when anything higher level than equine-class shows up around here. That’s why we’ve got the jammers on her.” Argo noticed the equipment, bolted onto the rope stanchions. “She almost got in a fight with the Storm Gryphons this morning.” Daelia indicated the empty space of the FQ-47 display was. They’d wheel the plane back down in the morning, after its post-flight checks were complete.
I would win, Emily said.
“You can’t dogfight an FQ-47,” Argo protested. “Stall speeds alone…”
Who needs meatspace? She laughed and reared back, spreading out her wings. Fly in virch. I will win.
Argo’s monocle filled up with a bunch of little knight-on-horseback emojis.
“You okay?” Daelia asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, and turned his AR audio off. “I was, uhh, thinking about getting dinner.”
“There’s a good Vietnamese place I could recommend,” Daelia told him.
“Want to show me?” he asked, half expecting her to say…
But instead, a message popped up on his monocle. “That’s a map pin for you,” she said.
“You’re not hungry?”
Surprise crossed her face, and maybe embarrassment. She hid it quickly. “I have other things to do tonight,” she told him, voice flat. “Remember that thing you guys pulled out of the bayou?”
“Still haven’t figured out what it is?”
“Nope,” she said.
It was terse, biting. Argo took that as a hint. He wasn’t up for that right now. Cute or not, she was thorny. If she wanted to be left alone, he’d leave her alone. “I’ll check it out, thanks.”
“Argo!” she called, before he could leave.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t order the fried rice. It’s shit.”
He laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
As he walked away, Daelia stayed behind, staring up at Emily’s form. Like there were any kind of answers to be found there.
“You’re being too hard on him,” Daelia said as the pilot walked away. “You know active duty don’t deal with your kind very often.”
The abiota sniffed, the sound that of an annealing furnace opening, but said nothing.
“I’ll let you cycle down for some rest,” Daelia said, and gave the MQ-9 one last pat. It was stupid, unnecessary, but humans were tactile. Even growing up with her mom hadn’t been enough to erase that instinct for contact.
What you think is in space rock?
Daelia stopped at the rope line. “I don’t know.”
You think it is abiota.
“I think it’s something like that, sure. But I can’t prove it. It’s not broadcasting in EMF, and it’s not using TGLP.”
Agree.
“What do you mean? You agree that it’s abiota?”
Elusive. Try to hunt. No luck. Escapes. Only abiota signal do that.
“What is the signal? We can’t detect anything.”
But Emily didn’t answer that. Her heads bobbed. Why not use research? This is what for, eh?
“Tried that. My system’s been wiped. Selectively,” Daelia said, bitter at the memory. “Even my private hard drives. I have no idea when, or how or—”
We keep it.
Frowning, Daelia crossed her arms. “What do you mean?”
Keep. Domain Array. Deal with SAAL. All abiota research filed with them.
Daelia blinked. “I didn’t, uhh, realize that.”
Go. Ask. Maybe. The dragon’s great bulk shifted in the approximation of a shrug. Helps. Maybe. A whole series of emojis scrolled across her monocle, too fast to follow. Find problem. I eat it.
“You’re that upset about this?”
One head dipped in acknowledgment.
“Okay,” Daelia said. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
Argo was just finishing up his paperwork for the day when he heard the door to the B-flight office bang open. He looked up, half expecting one of the other guys to be coming by to give him shit for something or other.
Instead, there was Troll. In civilian clothes now, khakis and a polo with the team patch emblazoned over the left breast, flight suit banished. Recognizable as they were, the Storm Gryphons crew had standards they had to adhere to when on official travel.
The haircut would have given him away anyway.
“Thought you might know somewhere in this crappy little suburb to go get a drink,” he said.
“You’re not hanging out with the team?”
“Come on, Argo. I’m on the road with them more than I’m at home with my own wife and kids. It’d be nice to spend some time with a friend.”
“I haven’t done a detailed study of the local watering holes,” he said, “and I’ve got some shit to finish up here—”
“You didn’t come to the ten-year class reunion, you never talk to any of us. When Michelle was killed over in the Philippines last year, you didn’t so much as comment on her family’s social media post, and—”
In irritation, Argo turned off the computer and swung around in his chair. “What the fuck do you want me to say, Nate? I didn’t graduate.”
“You got your degree, last I heard.”
“Not really. My congressman took an interest in the situation and got me my credit hours. I still had a semester I had to finish out at fucking community college.”
“Jason, nobody holds it against you. We all know about that shit with your—”
“I really don’t want to talk about this.”
Troll pulled up a chair. “What are you doing here? You’re a better pilot than this.”
“Than what?”
“I heard you turned down an instructor slot at Red Flag. Shit, even after…even after all that, you were still on course to make test pilot, get on track for NASA or Gravipause or whatever the hell you were going to do.”
“Nate…”
“What are you doing here?” He poked Argo’s shoulder, where his new unit patch clung to his flight suit. “Playing cowboy to a bunch of out-of-control emergents?”
“My plane isn’t the one who was a total asshole out there yesterday.”
Troll sighed. “I know, I know, she was way out of line with you, but—”
“This is where my brother is,” he said. “This is where I need to be.”
And that got him a sympathetic look. “If you’d just said something, we probably could have gotten you to Randolph or—”
“It’s good to see you, Troll.”
His old roommate sighed. “But fuck off, right?”
“Fuck off,” Argo confirmed, but smiled. “For now.”
Troll stood. “Tomorrow. We’ll go have a good time tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow sounds good.”
“Looking forward to it, buddy.”
22
Daelia double-checked her monocle before getting out of the car. Good thing too. The setting was still on the military default. She switched it back to a general-use view, no specialized filters, no encryption.
She had no intention of offending anyone.
This wasn’t the place for a human to impose their perspective.
She’d been to this particular Tin Town before, but only with Dad, and that was years ago. As Bellona’s partner, he had special privileges here. As Bellona’s daughter, Daelia had been tolerated at best.
That was before she’d gone off to school, though.
Whether or not her college or SAAL research grant credentials would get her further along than the family name, or whether it would get her locked out altogether, she wasn’t sure.
Tin Towns had started popping up not long after the 2007 treaty. The locations were essentially sovereign territory, tiny nations unto themselves where the Domain Array, not the local human government, was the final authority. They handled everything from emergent registration to legal matters, should an abiota break the law.
They weren’t just server farms, either. Rainey, in Austin, occupied hundreds of acres of once-prime estate, purchased after the Five Days War wiped out most of the city. Daelia had never been up there, but a lot of her colleagues at Ware said they found the place inspirational.
There was nothing inspirational here in Braeswood.
Here, the abiota enclave was limited to one block. It was an old apartment complex, one of those two-story things that had once been so ubiquitous in Houston. The complex itself was built in a ring formation, with a few additional blocks of apartments within. Blocky buildings rose like islands in a sea of asphalt.
This one had some flair to it, a New Orleans-style roofline, the shallow slope running the full distance of the upper story, tall windows blocked out with wide, squared-off frames. But all the landscaping had been removed long ago, everything paved over in a vain attempt to keep weeds at bay.
There was nothing in Daelia’s AR. Strange. No talking, no projections. There weren’t even any active kugus outside the adapted structures. Braeswood served both the medical district and Rice University, which should have meant a constant flow of traffic, both human and abiota.
Instead, it was silent tonight.
Almost.
The central servers were still humming, just ahead.
If it had been some human organization here, Daelia thought, they would have set up their headquarters in the clubhouse, where the apartment company management had once worked. That had been purpose built for administration. Higher ceilings, bigger spaces. For a human, that would have been the logical choice.
But abiota didn’t always follow human logic.
Instead, the Array had taken over one of the smaller apartment blocks, punching through walls and tearing open floors to create one mostly open space. Physics constrained them; in more robust Tin Towns, Daelia had seen buildings cored out in all manner of interesting ways.
Abiota could be aggressively utilitarian, especially where human opinion didn’t factor into their calculations. Some of Daelia’s classmates thought that abiota saw themselves as the entities they projected into AR.
Daelia didn’t agree. Abiota presented themselves that way in order to give humans something to talk to, something around which to form emotional reactions. What they really were, how they really viewed themselves, wasn’t something they shared.
Daelia had often wondered what her mother had really looked like. What she’d really seen herself as.
Not something she wanted to be thinking about just then.
Reaching the door to the Array’s hollowed-out apartment block, Daelia was greeted by a camera, and her first sighting of anything AR.
A sphinx.
In front of the door was a sphinx.
You come seeking something, Bellona-spawn. Its not-voice was surprisingly warm. Something hidden that you wish to unravel.
“Is that why the door-lock program looks like this?” Daelia asked.
She didn’t bother asking how the abiota before her had surmised that. Could have been anything. Facial recognition could have ID’d her, all public records and Internet activity referenced and cross-checked, a psychological profile generated, all before she left her car.
Humans shed data like so much dead skin.
No abiota was omniscient. But it felt that way sometimes.
You favor the classical references. A game you and your mother used to play.
“That should be your first clue I’m not all that fond of it anymore.”
You are still fond of your mother.
Daelia looked at the projected sphinx, considering. The thing was playing a game with her. Why, she had no idea, but the form of it was simple enough to guess at.
Mom had loved folklore, old myths. A lot of sapient-class emergents were like that. She’d studied it constantly. The source code of the human race, she’d said more than once.
Speak, human, I can’t read your thoughts.
“May I have access to my research data, which is, umm, hidden in your realm?” she asked, rolling her eyes as she did so.
Ahh. Yes, you may access the knowledge you seek if you first answer my riddle. I shall give you three guesses. The sphinx bared its teeth, mouth full of fangs. If you fail, I shall eat your monocle’s data cache and you will leave us in peace.
Of course. Daelia sighed. “Okay, what is it?”
She was expecting something completely off the wall but quantifiable. The number of times a fly beat its wings in a minute or how many tons of ore must be mined for a single kugu. Something like that.
Who am I?
That was not what she expected. “You’re the Domain Array,” she said, “or a projection of the Array.”
Wrong and wrong.
Shit. “That was one answer. It’s the same thing.”
Not at all. Don’t play dumb with me, Bellona-spawn. You know the difference.
Daelia thought for a few more moments, and then it came to her. She snapped her fingers. “You’re Galatea.”
The sphinx sat up on its lion haunches, head cocked. What gave me away?
“I didn’t have a customized entry check last time I was here,” Daelia replied. “Multiple references to my life? Who else is going to do that but the world’s favorite search engine?”
