Source code, p.2
Source Code, page 2
“SyROC?” he asked, keeping his cool as best he could. “Procedure?”
He is in saddle. Not my fault he drops reins.
Below them, another castle loomed. Huge, this one.
Argo was fighting her now, trying to yank back on the reins, on the complicated flight harness that connected to both heads. His arms ached from the effort of fighting the feedback from the gloves. It was all bullshit, a simulation, except it wasn’t, because the virch and the haptics made it real. Or real enough.
Shit, he couldn’t crash this thing into the ocean.
Then a woman’s voice came on the radio.
But knights, little spawn.
A cube of bare space opened in front of Argo. His main cockpit control screen. For a moment, he was looking straight down and straight ahead at the same time. It took his brain a moment to catch up with what he was seeing.
The aircraft was in a dive. But not a very fast or steep one.
But so fun, the pouted response came.
The pressure on the reins loosened, and Argo got his grip back. The angle of the dive hadn’t changed, forcing him to yank up as hard as he could.
Emily swooped up out of the dive. So great was her projected bulk and so close to the castle were they that the simulation couldn’t deconflict the two. Instead, Argo had a moment of near panic as gray stone walls rushed up to meet him, solid and ancient and—
And then the castle was gone.
The dive was over.
Emily leveled out again. A slight tick in her altimeter. Wings out and level, holding them aloft over the grassy plains. “Thanks,” he said, brusque from the embarrassment. “You can close that screen out.”
He reached down, patted the dragon’s right neck. “We’re good.”
Fly more, Emily said, and turned into a wide curve. The override window blinked out. They crested over a small set of foothills and into a fresh environment. Maybe knights in that tower.
There. Not far. Across an endless volcanic waste that Argo was pretty sure was taken from aerial footage of Iceland, there was indeed a tower. A single, solitary tower.
Tower, tower, tower, the abiota sang out, in rhythm with the beat of her wings, and then belched a huge mouthful of fire. Little torch on the water.
She swooped toward it. Argo tried to remember the preflight brief, the advice the guys in the shop had given him. Work with her, everyone had said, but damn, this was weird. Nothing was out here, though. That was the point of flying out here over the Gulf. Had to be just another element in her virch-enabled fantasy world.
“Argo, what are we doing?” Ho asked.
You pull back on us now? Emily taunted.
“By all means. Let’s go for it.”
Emily banked hard, wings taut, both heads forward. The tower was coming up fast. Argo could see details on it now. Vines, arrow slits, the tiles of the roof…
You like to pull, pull then, human.
“No, you want to fly into that thing, you can fly into that thing,” Argo told her, beyond done with her bullshit at this point.
Maybe we light it on fire, Emily said deviously, when we crash.
“We’re not going to crash now, are we? Because it’s not fucking there.”
Let’s find out, she said, and rolled, banking toward it.
“Emily, pull up.” Bumper’s voice was steady on the radio, but Argo knew the guy well enough at this point to know he was pissed. “Pull up.”
But fun little tower—
The words hit like a sack full of lead. And at the same time, the override window opened back up. Wide enough this time that the specifics of the virch were totally obscured.
Rising before them from the ocean’s surface was two hundred feet of corrosion-proofed steel and raw petroleum.
Reacting on pure instinct, Argo grabbed the proper flight controls and executed one of the tightest maneuvers he’d ever had to make. The aircraft jittered, protesting, but the base airframe was something, at least, that Argo was familiar with.
Emily didn’t help at all, but at least she didn’t try to fly her nose into one of those struts. Argo managed to bank the MQ-9’s machine body away from the collision course Emily had put it on, in what seemed just in time. They were close enough for him to catch the expressions of the workers out on the decks, through her main belly camera.
There was a rumbling sound as he got the plane back up, flying level at two thousand feet.
She was laughing.
But more oil derricks to—
Argo’s heart was hammering in his chest. That was the nearest he’d ever come to hitting something in his decade of flying. If they had hit that thing… “Hand-off to LRE, copy, SyROC. Initiating now.”
One big dragon head turned to look at him, slitted eye baleful. No more fun for me, no more fun for you, she said, and bit down on the override screen.
Immediately, Argo was plunged back into the simulation, full bore.
“Dammit, Emily!” he snapped, unable to help himself. The adrenaline was draining from his limbs now, leaving him feeling somewhat shaky and extremely irritated.
Argo tried to remember what they had told him about this. The procedure was, by necessity, different in the virch. He looked down at the saddle beneath him, the thump-thump of her not-wings suddenly driving him crazy. There were a series of small colored glass marbles set into the molded leather there.
What the hell was this, anyway?
He switched the box off on his radio. “Sergeant, a little help.”
“It’s this one,” Ho said, and one of the small spheres lit up. “Just run your hand over it. Like it’s a trackpad mouse.”
With frustrated resignation, Argo laid a hand on it. He turned his radio back on. “LRE, initiating handover.”
“You have the aircraft,” Argo confirmed.
The virch field cut out. Just turned off, blinked out. The entire world went black. Argo had a sudden sense of falling as he was thrown out of the simulation with an almost disdainful force. He grabbed for something to hold on to.
But at least that was over.
He sagged back in the cockpit’s integrated seat, trying to catch his breath.
It was always a bit of a mindfuck, disconnecting from an abiota. But that wasn’t a sentiment one gave voice to.
Not in the RPA world.
Not in the Air Guard.
“The first time’s the worst,” Ho said. He sounded way too calm for what they’d just been through. But then, he hadn’t been flying the damn thing.
Argo forced himself to start working through his shutdown procedures.
“She’s always like that?” he asked as he worked.
“She got a hold of some dragon novels a few years back. Became absolutely enamored with them. Comm’s tried to get her to cool it, but she is obsessive to the point of compulsion when she gets interested in something. You know how these orcinus-class are.”
That wasn’t exactly what Argo had meant.
But at least Ho wasn’t questioning his credentials.
Nobody touched an emergent abiota airframe without qualification. Emily wasn’t the first he’d flown, but then, there was a reason she was here, and not at Creech or Holloman or Yokota.
Active duty had a low tolerance for abiota who had their own ideas about things. Predictives were much more agreeable. And they could be pruned and regrown if they ever did shit like that.
Ho was looking at him, though. “You okay, sir?”
“Peachy,” Argo grunted.
Ho grabbed for one of the checklist binders in their neat cubby inside the cockpit chassis. He flipped it open and started shutting down his screens. His own visor was already banished to the side of his console, gloves hanging on their suspension frames.
Argo started working on the clasps and connection points of his own gloves. They came up almost to the shoulder, supported by pneumatic lines in half a dozen places in order to reduce muscle fatigue. His skin tingled as he pulled out of them.
Haptics were grossly unpleasant, but a physical external still beat a NULI implant any day, as far as Argo was concerned. He was just grateful that the Air Force hadn’t mandated it. Yet, anyway.
NULIs were gaining acceptance in the RPA community. Rumor was the next cockpit upgrade was going to have direct plug-in capacity. Argo supposed he’d have to do it eventually. Half the guys in the unit already had.
“What’s up with the knights?” he asked as he worked on his gear.
“You know. Orcinus-class. That’s shit’s fun to her.”
“She kills little imaginary dudes for fun?”
“It’s really no different than playing a couple of rounds of some first-person shooter, right?” Ho shrugged. “Besides, it’s her job to kill shit. Shouldn’t be a surprise that she enjoys it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” Then Argo thought of something. “Do I have to use the virch field to fly her?”
“Nobody else does.”
That’s not what Rover had told him. Or the other guys in B-flight. Or Bumper. Or…
Oh. The fuckers.
His sensor operator gave him a sympathetic look, obviously figuring it out himself too. “That shit made me want to vomit, sir, so I vote we don’t do it again.”
“Agreed,” Argo said, and arched his back, reaching for his own checklist binder.
The sooner they got done shutting the cockpit down, the sooner he could report in to the boss.
Rover was going to tear him apart for this.
3
Daelia resisted the urge to throw her visor across the tight lab space. Nobody flew Emily like that. You worked with her; you didn’t treat her like some malfunctioning bot. What the fuck had that pilot been thinking?
“I thought you said he was experienced!” she demanded.
Bumper was still laughing.
“About what? Him almost crashing Emily?”
Typical Bumper, Daelia thought, but didn’t bother arguing. “Oh, I am going to talk to this guy. You can be damn sure of it.”
Daelia didn’t tell him to fuck off. Dad would have been proud of her. So much self-control right now. She did kill the radio, though. Just in case.
Fuming, she stayed in the virch with the 121st guys as Marathon and Emily headed back in from the Gulf.
Emily had been at the extreme northern edge of her operational area when she’d pulled that little stunt with the oil platform, and thus, she didn’t have that far to fly. Still, it was an agonizing half hour to get her back through the canyon—the air lane—and over Ellington airspace.
There was no chatter on the radio. Sometimes there was, but not today. Daelia was glad for that. Stewing felt good right now. Righteous, even.
Who the hell did that pilot think he was, handling Emily like that? She wouldn’t have crashed herself—she was emergent, it would have been suicide—but…
Did you have a good flight?
“Not in the mood, Raijinn,” Daelia snapped back. “I’ve got paperwork to do and you’re distracting me.”
You weren’t doing your paperwork.
For a moment, she wondered if Raijinn had a camera watching her.
But most likely, the abiota was looking at the keylogger on the computer in here. Its job was to monitor everything she was doing right now, after all. She needed these rides to go well so she could get certified on this through the 121st’s systems.
Hell, this disaster of a flight better not have screwed her up on that.
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m pouting, Raijinn. That was a fuckin’ shit show out there.”
I judge it to be not your fault. More Emily’s doing than anything else, honestly.
“Yeah, well, that’s a problem in and of itself,” Daelia replied. “Have you let Dad know yet?”
He is just finishing up with the morning briefing at the tower. Then he is scheduled to help the 121st tune the Public Relations AR overlay for the show. They are very concerned about security on that feed. I have not wanted to interrupt. The human civilians sound worried.
“Yeah, well, it’s a security risk to let your average civilian into the raw military AR feed,” Daelia replied. “OPSEC or whatever the hell.”
OPSEC is not why they engage PR overlays for events like these, Raijinn said. It is a propaganda effort. So the civilians see what the military wants them to see.
Raijinn didn’t make use of TGLP’s emotional context very often, and the words were delivered in its usual deadpan manner. But Daelia did think she caught a bit of disapproval there in the phrasing alone. “Does it matter? We can’t see what you really are anyway.”
It has been my experience that humans are more fascinated than repelled by us.
It hadn’t always been like that, Daelia thought, but didn’t say it. Raijinn didn’t care about sentiment. Or the past. Or much of anything else, beyond its job. “Hang on, Emily’s on approach,” she said, effectively cutting off the conversation.
Daelia turned her full attention back to the virch.
A sheer, vast wall of mountains reared ahead of Emily, pocked with aeries that were a direct reference to the other airplanes here. None of the other abiota, not even the military ones, could access this virtual environment. It was just Emily’s. And yet, Emily kept simulacrums of them all here, tucked into the various caves and crevasses, like dolls on the shelf.
Why she did it, what it symbolized to her, Daelia had no idea. She’d been here when Emily had eclosed, kept in touch with her even after she’d gone off to college. Considered the abiota a friend. And yet, there was so much about her that Daelia didn’t understand.
They were like that, though. The closer you got to them, the further away you realized you were.
With one last screech, Emily turned in for final approach.
“BR disconnecting now,” Daelia acknowledged, and started shutting down her screens. Raijinn would process the flight data into its usual report, but even at the speed of an abiota, that would take a little while. She had some time before the debrief. Time she intended to spend wisely. “I’ve got a pilot to go yell at.”
The last thing she heard, before switching off her visor, was Marathon chuckling.
Daelia stormed out of the small monitoring lab. As the mechatronics contractor for the base, Bellona Robotics was allotted a certain amount of space within the 121st Operations Group’s facilities. Technically, they were supposed to be co-located with the actual mission cockpits, but base facilities were what they were. There was no room for them there. Instead, they had a space in the maintenance hangar. Located at the very northern end of the runway, it was a squat, boxy thing, the oldest hangar on the runway. Its rafters rusting despite their protective coatings of paint.
Leaving the secure quiet box environment of the simulations lab, Daelia retrieved her own heavily modified monocle from its locked cubby. Securing it in place over her right eye, she launched her usual suite of apps with a few blinks. The base’s AR field was as rudimentary as they came, and there was nothing to see in here anyway, but just outside was a cacophony of virtual stimuli.
Being back on Ellington’s ramp was…
It was home. Or it had been, at least, once upon a time.
Daelia had gotten back from college months ago, and besides, she was twenty-six now. No longer a kid. No longer that angry teenager.
It was all familiar, though, comforting in its own weird way. She’d grown up here, and even after everything had gone to hell with her family, at least this had been familiar.
She’d thought for a while about pursuing a commission. Flying, maybe. Or going into an aircraft maintenance officer track, just like Dad back in the day.
That decision had been taken away from her, though.
No loss, she told herself, not for the first time.
Dreams change.
But then, thinking about that made Daelia think about her doctorate program, the way she’d left things with her academic advisor, that damn last conversation they’d had.
Anything but that right now.
Daelia rubbed mindlessly at her left bicep with her right thumb as she walked out into the humid morning, the digit catching on the thin metal of her arm brace.
There shouldn’t have been any wonder left for her here, on Ellington’s flight line, and yet somehow there was.
Somehow, this was always exciting.
Today was different than most days, too. Friday morning. The day before the annual Lone Star Air and Space Expo.
The air show here wasn’t as grand as some. Joint Reserve Base Ellington hosted a flying wing, sure, but it was the Guard and didn’t have the same kind of resources or romance to it. But Houston was a huge city, and Texans liked their military, and it was, therefore, an insanely popular event.
