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CHAPTER 24


Talinn woke with death in her mouth.

Now then: I told you so.

“You told me I was going to get poisoned by an older replica of one of our oldest friends?”

I told you drinking was a bad idea.

Talinn started to laugh, but the awful taste in her mouth turned so solid she choked and rolled over in time to throw up. Her surprise at finding a bucket next to her was a momentary flash, then she realized the people who’d drugged her knew very well—perhaps from their own firsthand experience with exactly her genetic mix—what the results would be. She considered missing the bucket on purpose, for spite, but that lasted even less time than her surprise had.

She braced her hands on the bucket—it was round and metal, and steady enough to lean on—and lifted her head to take in wherever she was. There were few clues. The room had four walls at right angles, all in a faint gray—the color of it resembled the bottle Medith had poured from, and her stomach lurched—without decoration. There were two machines, neither with displays, on the wall closest to the outline of the only door. Ceiling and floor were the same color as the walls, so while her vomit had remained in the bucket, meaning gravity clearly existed, it was possible she was on a ship. Her cot was thin, probably foldable, and without either wheels or a visible propulsion system.

“And where are you?”

In your head.

“As always. But you seem personable and chatty as ever, so they didn’t truncate you or load-in, so the rest of you is . . . ?”

In one of Jeena’s boxes.

Her stomach folded over, and Talinn took her time easing back from the bucket onto the bed. She could really use some water, or very spicy chips, or those noodles she’d never gotten, or even old cube food from a tank—anything to get her clear of the taste coating her tongue. After looking at her hands, clearly not in contact with any portable server, she made an interrogatory noise and flopped face up on the cot.

Not shielded. And no, I can’t really tell where we are. I went out pretty fast after you.

“Poison doesn’t work that way.”

Great point, but fun fact, it wasn’t poison. And whatever they got you with wasn’t what shuttered me. Something was in the vines.

“EMP vines?” Talinn frowned, and somehow that intensified the taste in her mouth. She scraped her tongue against her teeth, which helped not at all, and stared at the featureless ceiling. “Still sure they don’t want to kill us?”

I’m not even tamping down a headache. The vomit and weird mouth thing you’re doing seem to be the only side effects.

“Imagine my joy.” She should get up, but the idea of it was exhausting enough that she had no interest toward making it happen. “So this is the shit that shit makes, right?”

I’m not thrilled with how they’re treating us, if that’s what you’re asking.

“I mean, they know who they’re dealing with—they know who they’re dealing with probably better than anyone anywhere had ever known who they’re dealing with. So there’s got to be a reason. Or is older us just fell-into-a-black hole bonzo?”

I can see a probability path that breaks us so cosmically we can’t understand consequences, so it’s possible that happened to them, but . . . I don’t think this is that.

“Makes it worse, Bee.” Talinn stretched her arms straight up from her body then rotated them back to stretch past her head, testing any soreness or lingering cramps in her muscles. Everything moved as it should, and reluctantly she swung her legs to the side, letting them drift toward the floor.

Not disagreeing with you.

“That’s a nice change.” She sat up, eased weight onto her legs to make sure nothing was going to give out on her, then stood. Except the yuck inside her face, the rest of her acted like she’d taken a pleasant nap. “How long were we out?”

I don’t have anything to measure against.

“Thought you said the box wasn’t shielded?”

It’s not, hence our usual chat. But apparently everything else around me is.

“Where in all the idiot corners of the galaxy did they bring us, that everything is shielded?” Shielding against AIs was critical, but tricky and therefore expensive. The IDC and UCF raced each other to develop more clever methods to block avenues they didn’t want AIs in, and so allegedly also more clever AIs to get into those locked paths, but now Talinn wondered if that was all propaganda. Maybe Command programmed a block of some kind into the AIs they built, and as a result: shielding.

It didn’t matter for the moment, while she remained alone in a featureless room who knew where, so she tagged it on to her ongoing list. “Orienting question, Bee: Should I dump my vomit bucket over the two machines in this room?” She said it out loud, for maximum chance someone somewhere would hear and make a move to stop her.

Not yet. Next question: Will the door open for you?

“If not, I’m writing a letter to the machine god.” Talinn blew out her breath, straightened her shoulders, and strode to the door with only a wobble or two. She reached for the panel, but the outline of the door vanished—the panel slid up so fast she almost missed it—and she was left blinking at a stranger.

A good looking, grinning, lounging stranger. He had a bare head and a port below his ear, and he appeared about her age. Her hand twitched, and she muttered loud enough for him to hear, “Should have brought the bucket.”

“Thought I timed it well enough you’d be done puking. Welcome to Deep End.”

“Glitches take us all to the heat death of the universe.” Talinn leaned in the doorway and hoped her breath smelled as terrible as it tasted. “Deep End? Seriously?”

He held both hands in front of him, palms toward her, and, if anything, his grin brightened. He had a dimple. Had she ever met an Eight with a dimple?

“I do not tell lies, New Talinn. Kay would take over my brain at the dissonance. If it makes you feel better, it’s not a fun turn of phrase. We’re about as far from the jump point as you can get and still call it civilized space.”

“Is it?” Talinn didn’t rise to the bait of “New Talinn,” but tilted her head and crossed her arms in silent dare.

“Is it what?”

“Civilized space.”

“Orienting question, Eight: What’s civilized these days?” His gaze scanned over her body, then he half turned and gestured her along. “Come on, you’re the last to wake up, and they’re all waiting to get caught up.”

“All?”

“The six you came in with. Seven, counting the tech.”

“And you are?”

“That’s right, Talinn said you didn’t have one of me. Weird. I’m Tiernan Agare, and Kay is behaving himself not battering at Bee until she’s settled.”

The name was familiar, and it took her a few steps to remember Older Talinn’s wry voice, about not being sure if it were a win or not that her class hadn’t had a Tiernan. After only a few minutes in his company, Talinn understood.

“We’re just going to leave the vomit back there?”

His pace slowed. “Did you want to go back and get it? Bring it with you like a welcome basket?”

“A . . . welcome basket?” She tried to imagine what such a thing could be, and failed. “Is that an IDC thing?”

“Shit in a bucket, you really are a Talinn.” He shook his head with an exaggerated sigh. “And it’s a holonet thing.” Before they turned down the next featureless hall, he added, “But yeah, I’m IDC grown.”

“Is there some big secret reason why you got grown on the IDC side around the time we got decanted for UCF?”

“Probably.” He laughed, though there was a bitterness to the sound she felt to her toes. “But glitch me to eternity if any of us have figured it out. Whatever grand plan Command is running, we’ve yet to crack it.”

Well. That’s something we know now.

“Helpful?”

Of course not. But maybe we’ll finally start finding things out, now that we’re here.

“Wherever here is.”

Deep End, Talinn. Weren’t you paying attention?

“She sassing you about me, or where you are?” Tiernan waved ahead of them, and a wall parted into a door. Unlike the one in the room she’d left behind, this one slid down into the floor.

Talinn noted the band on his wrist, but couldn’t tell where it latched. No good trying to break it off him until she had a better idea of how it fastened. If it fastened—this was a group of people intimately acquainted with body modifications, and she should probably remember assumptions were traps. There was far too much she didn’t understand.

“You know a Bee, but you don’t know my Bee.” She was too late saying it, knew the hesitation proved to him he’d been right one way or the other, but she couldn’t not make the effort.

“We’re not Spacies, New Talinn. I don’t know any Bees that well, but I know my AI, and plenty of Eights. If she’s not sassing you about one of those two things, I have to assume she’s broken. Or UCF got real weird when they made your class.”

“Guess it got weird then. Not a lot of sassy AIs in my class.” That wasn’t even a lie. As far as she’d ever been able to tell with other Eights, Bee took an outsized interest in being contrary.

“Never thought I’d be grateful to the IDC.” He shrugged once more, then waved his arm again. A wall to their left disappeared—she didn’t look fast enough to see which direction it had gone—and instead of smooth, unbroken gray, there was a giant room in a riot of colors.

No EMP vines though.

“We’re still not sure that the vines were EMP producing.”

Not sure that wasn’t what those vines did, so please continue to examine all pieces of this chaos with suspicion.

It was chaos. Even their combined processing couldn’t make sense of it all right away. The room was tall—the ceiling at least a full body length above Talinn’s head—and cluttered with an almost uncountable number of screens, projected displays, scrolling data sets, and static images.

Ten thousand, three hundred and—

“Thirty-six.” Talinn noted the tables, mismatched and scattered with printouts and films she didn’t bother to count, and the randomly assorted chairs, but her eyes fully snagged on the row of machines along the side wall.

Well. I didn’t think that’s where the rest of me was. Thought my room was a lot more . . . blank.

“Those aren’t yours,” Tiernan said, as though he’d heard Bee. Which of course he hadn’t, so it was worse that he’d yet again predicted them. “They’re empty servers, we’re still cleaning them out. Your tech’s not bad. We’ll probably keep her.”

“Cleaning them out for what? Or from what?”

He didn’t answer, stride picking up as he arrowed for one of the larger screens in the middle of the room. It was fully opaque, and so she almost wasn’t surprised when they swerved around it and found it had been concealing something rather important.

Somethings—someones. Gathered around a table nearly as long as the screen were all the people left in the galaxy she still cared about. Which would be depressing if she thought about it too long, so she didn’t.

Instead she crossed the rest of the distance without registering it, and had Caytil and Sammer in a hug by the next time she blinked. Time usually only stuttered like that for load-in, but it was another thing not to spend time worrying about for the moment.

You’re running out of room on the list of things to get back to.

“It’s an infinite list, Bee.”

It’s about to be.

“Slept long enough.” Sammer didn’t fully let go of her when the hug ended, tugging her to his corner of the table, next to Jeena.

Talinn touched arms or shoulders of the other Eights as she passed, and hesitated before sitting. With a mental shrug, she leaned to put her arms around Jeena. The tech startled, then returned the embrace with surprising strength. “Good to see you,” she murmured, and Talinn hated the resultant warmth. She let go and slid onto a stool, glad not to have a back to slump against. She needed to pay attention to this.

“I bet Old Talinn told that Medith to give me some extra of whatever they drugged us with, to get me back for being difficult.”

“One, that sounds like self-hatred, and I would never.” The new voice, so like hers it grated against her skin right down to the nerves, appeared before its owner. “Two, Medith drugged you, not on my orders, so you must have pissed her off. And three, you really need to find a different name. I was Talinn first.”

“You weren’t though.” Talinn’s response was overridden as Tiernan chimed in, so helpfully, “I’ve been calling her New Talinn.”

On the heels of that, Caytil’s far less cheerful, “Let’s pause on the fun times and get to facts, shall we?”

Old Talinn stepped around the screen, and Talinn couldn’t have said which direction she’d come from. For all she knew, all the walls in this overflowing room retracted to let people through.

We probably should have spent less time counting screens and more figuring out what was on them. Bee’s voice, smaller than usual, gave a hint of guilt. Talinn would have agreed, but without context, most of the screens were useless, and picking through the rest was a staggeringly huge task. Which was, she decided, probably the point.

“Answers would be nice.” Heka made a show of stretching out her legs and threw her arm over the back of her chair.

“You’ve got the main ones. Clones, never-ending war, conspiracy across the Commands—”

“Why did you drug us? I thought we were going to go to multiple stops before we got here? What’s going on with the defense arrays? What have you been doing for the forty cycles you knew this was happening?” Talinn had to bite on her tongue until it bled to keep from spilling out her entire ever-growing list of questions. Even four felt excessive, but she couldn’t not.

“We drugged you because Medith determined it’s possible to track concentrated AI signals, and she didn’t know how a Base Two might have found out about us. Moving you in a group is dangerous, slipping you out one at a time would take too long.”

“Forty cycles isn’t too long?” Caytil muttered, loud enough to mean it being overheard.

“And you couldn’t just tell us that because . . . ?”

“Because what happens if one of you rejects the necessity? Now you’re on your guard, everything’s delayed, and we risk a scene for no reason. This is hardly the worst thing that’s happened to you in your careers.”

“Not a slippery slope at all.” Talinn hooked her leg into the rung at the bottom of the stool and studied the older version of herself. “If it’s possible to track concentrated AI signals, isn’t it dangerous for us all to be together here? Or anywhere?”

“To clarify, whatever is able to track us, it works when we’re in transit.”

“So it works better in space, or through the jump points?”

“See, there’s a good question.” Old Talinn lifted her chin and Tiernan leaned over the table, pressing something that previously didn’t seem pushable. The giant screen in front of them cleared its scrolling data and displayed a not-to-scale map of the settled systems. “We haven’t been able to answer it definitively, but we have a suspicion.”

Talinn considered the equipment Base Two had used to overhear some parts of her conversations with Bee. Proximity mattered, but proximity was hard to reliably predict in space. So many different approaches were used from jump points to various settlements, depending on other traffic, current orbits, debris.

The jump points themselves couldn’t have some kind of equipment that might disrupt the vibrations and measurements of the points, and then that returned to the problem of various exit and entry points. Only one sort of installation was reliably focused on traffic through a jump point, allowing a scanning point for traffic in and out of any given system.

“The defense arrays.” The words were hushed, so she cleared her throat and repeated them. “Something’s been uploaded or mounted to the defense arrays, and that’s what’s tracking AI signals.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re glitching, too.” Caytil frowned and kept her eyes fixed on the screen. “Turns out you can’t just introduce something new to the coding and expect it to work perfectly.”

Talinn wrenched her thoughts away from Medith and Cece and everyone else that blew up back on shitty P-8, and tamped down the flush of satisfaction at Other Talinn’s tiny flinch.

“We didn’t do it, but it makes sense someone did. Of course the IDC and UCF both want to monitor movements of AIT troops or ships with more than a trio of transit pairings. And if we haven’t been able to perfect the tweaking process, of course Command is bound to ram it sideways with a rusty knife too.”

“Fine. You drugged us to keep the defense arrays from tracking us.”

Or blowing us up. Bee dropped the words more thoughtfully than Talinn would have expected, weighing if that might be why the UCF defense arrays suddenly required an IDC code from them . . . and given this other version of them had supplied that code, what else they weren’t telling.

“And maybe that’s what’s going on with the defense arrays. So. Because we were unconscious you were able to just move us here?” Xenni folded her arms and rested her elbows on the table, shoving some printouts out of the way.

“Time got pressing, and we did move your bodies a few times. Carefully, as I hope you’ll appreciate.”

Being unconscious for travel wasn’t a new experience, and if it got them to their destination more efficiently, fine. Talinn didn’t have a burning desire to go immediately to another humanity-crowded station. On to the next repeated question.

“What’s been going on for forty cycles that nothing seems to have changed since you started going rogue and recruiting Eights?”

“Ah. See there, new me, you’re letting your annoyance get ahead of your logic.” Other Talinn turned sideways, gesturing at the map on the screen. “Because things have been changing, and that change is accelerating.”

“We got some of this debrief from the Spacies.” Sammer’s tone held to neutral and polite, but his shoulders were as tense as the rest of theirs. “What have you all been doing? What do you expect we’re going to do, in a multisystem, multifront, multidecade war?”

“You’re awfully impatient for base defense.” Other Talinn didn’t smile, but her mouth quirked in an expression Talinn herself couldn’t read.

She shifted on her seat and stretched out her neck, distracting herself from the discomfit of not recognizing what her own face meant. It would be better if she could stare fixedly at the screen, like Caytil, but her gaze continued to drift back toward Other Talinn regardless of her efforts.

Tiernan cleared his throat, then made a point of grinning slowly when attention snapped to him. “Sabotage. Information pollution. Command carefully plans out the arcs of the war, the dance of the fronts—plans are scoped by generation, not by individual engagements. We take out key pieces here and there, and the plans crumble.”

The man was dramatic, and Talinn envisioned her class with a showoff like that in it. No wonder he went jet, Bee murmured, and Talinn ducked her head to keep from smiling.

“And have you figured out how Command makes generational plans, if you’re not sure that IDC and UCF are talking to each other? Seems awfully risky—you only get so many Eights every couple of cycles, and if we’re the predictable part, but the other side goes rogue—”

“We’re fairly sure they use AI,” Other Talinn interrupted Sammer smoothly, and rode out the instant overlapping questions and protests with no expression at all.

This is a shit briefing.

“They’re trying to make us feel heard, while still only telling us what they want to.” Talinn did not subvocalize her response, and despite the noise, her older version locked eyes with her. Talinn raised her eyebrows, and saw the swallowed-back scoff in her not-her face.

Caytil stopped talking midword, glancing between the two, and Sammer followed. Xenni was still declaiming how the war had looked no different in her lifetime, with Konti’s emphatic agreement, and Arnod and Heka muttered to each other, then turned glares on Tiernan and Other Talinn, respectively. Jeena listed two more reasons why using AI to plan at the Command level would be impossible before trailing off.

“We’re answering your questions, because you won’t listen if we just ‘tell you what we want to.’” Other Talinn pitched her voice slightly higher, as though imitating Talinn, which was ridiculous because they had the same voice. Talinn scowled, but the other woman ignored it. “Some of your questions are good, some are . . . less good. But you’re here, and you can’t go back, so we’re working together. Which means you’re entitled to know all the things that will help us end this.”

“To be clear—end what? The war? The cloning programs? Civilization as it currently exists?” Until Caytil spat out the last phrase, Talinn hadn’t even considered it. The war, obviously. But Other Talinn hesitated—so brief anyone who wasn’t mostly her might have missed it—and Talinn’s entire spine froze, locking her into place.

“The IDC and the UCF, as a whole.” Other Talinn shrugged, as though that weren’t civilization as they knew it. “They exist to fight their war. Without the war, there’s no reason for them. The civilian governments can handle themselves, if they’re not fighting against each other.”

Talinn’s mouth hung open. Was she really that stupid? Was she, Talinn, in any iteration . . . a complete idiot?

“They . . . they’d keep fighting. It’s the civilian governments that formed the Interstellar Defense Corps and the United Colonial Force. They specifically exist because different civilian governments banded together to fight each other.” Konti gaped from Other Talinn to Tiernan, as disbelieving as Talinn herself.

“Yes.” Other Talinn cocked her head as though the clones in front of her were the stupid ones. “Over the jump points. That they need Auliens to navigate. Which are made by the Command in power at the IDC and UCF, not at the civilian leadership level.”

“So you’ll wipe the Eights and Spacies . . . anything related to the clone programs?”

“No. We take the clone programs. Civilians contract with us to navigate jump points. They don’t fight over the jump points. With no scrambling all over the glitch-begotten things, we can probably even spread out and make more.”

“Why wouldn’t the locals grab the programs—”

“There are no sizable settlements on any installation with grow tanks or training centers. It’s mostly support personnel Command has cleared. Once we have enough resources to be sure we’re in place to take them all in a small amount of time, that part is done.”

“You said the war keeps going because it’s making money. It’s not going to stop just because we upset some players.”

“And this, newbies, is why it’s taken us so long. You have to slide out pieces here and there, be sure you’ve got something to take its place.” Tiernan spread his arms wide, then crossed them and nodded to Other Talinn.

“Guess what will also make a lot of people a lot of money?” She asked it like it was meant to be obvious, and after a moment, Talinn realized it was.

“New jump points. New settlements, with new resources, the need for trade, shipbuilding, gear.”

“There it is. Weapons factories can turn to transport and navigation easy enough. Some fortunes may fade, but enough new ones will be made—war will make sense again, eventually, but they won’t have the knowledge or understanding to make it quite so . . . ongoing.”

“Us, you mean. They won’t have us.” Caytil made the point explicit, and Talinn’s innards squirmed again.

Big celebration for whole new worlds, sure, but . . . can we get back to this “AI is planning the wars” business, because I would like to know more.

Jeena interjected before Talinn could. “Say that you can find all the training centers—”

“We can,” Tiernan replied even as Other Talinn nodded and said, “We have.”

“—even though they’re siloed and one of the most closely guarded, need-to-know places in the galaxy. If you think there are AI planning the war, and deciding which of each of you are set out to fight generations at a time . . . How would you imagine they haven’t factored that into the planning?”

And how do I get a job planning the war? That sounds almost as fun as being a tank.

Other Talinn smiled so suddenly, and so brightly, for a wild moment Talinn thought the other woman had heard her Bee. “Leave it to a tech to ask the really fun orienting question. Because, friends, here’s the thing—I think they have.


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