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CHAPTER 14


“You had what in a what?” The words technically made sense. Talinn’s own AI had recently been in one of Jeena’s boxes, and it wasn’t as if Talinn didn’t know how ships worked. Quantum travel was one of the main issues at the root of the IDC’s and UCF’s eternal conflict.

The AITs were the elite fighting force at the front edge of the war, so went the propaganda. But that was hardly the extent of what AIs did for the war effort.

Humanity had run up hard against the wall of faster-than-light travel. Quantum entanglement was the key—make any two points in space believe they were the same, and easy pleasey, anything in that space existed in both places at once.

History told them there were two main challenges to making that work after properly entangling two areas—one, the near-infinite calculations required to make two points identical across vast swaths of space, and two, how to get out of the correct one, once something was in. Existing in multiple spaces didn’t disrupt a quark’s operation, but it played havoc with human brains.

Artificial intelligence was the answer, but long experience had proven that AI on its own did not inevitably work in humanity’s favor, and so the augmentation program, layering artificial and organic operating systems together, came to be. Records conflicted on which discoveries came first, and what the driving reasons might have been, but all in all, the same theory behind the AITs drove faster-than-light travel.

The main challenges that history glossed over were also two—one, there were a limited number of points in the known galaxy mapped and held well enough to entangle properly. As far as current knowledge held, there were only three—one for each of humanity’s settled systems. The bulk of the IDC’s and UCF’s most ferocious fighting was over those points. And two, the humans and AIs adapted for quantum travel were weird.

Weirder by far than Eights, and exponentially more than unadapted humans. This wasn’t only Talinn’s opinion, but so widely held that Spacies never interacted with broader humanity—not their passengers, not their fellow adapted troops. A trio of pairs got embedded on a ship, and never left again.

Talinn hadn’t ever spent much time thinking about them—the combat that happened in space was at a far different scale and political maneuvering than planetary fronts, and that had never been her concern. But she knew once the Spacie pairs were tied to a ship, death was their only way out. The AIs were too large to load-in more than once without breaking a human brain, and they became too entangled in their ship, or the jump points, to come out again in one piece. No one interacted with them except each other.

Of course, just because everyone knew that . . . didn’t mean it was true. Talinn wouldn’t be surprised if even the information they learned about jump points wasn’t true, never mind the Spacies themselves. Spacies must need techs. They had more adaptations from so-called normal humans than AITs, given their environment had more extreme requirements, and so they likely had specialized medical care. Somebody probably performed maintenance on the ship and came in contact with them. And if Jeena had had one of their AIs in a box . . . 

“Jeena.” Caytil had a wonderful soothing voice, and Talinn figured the tech didn’t know her well enough to tell any differently. “You had a Spacie in a box?”

“IDC calls them Auliens. Augmented Intelligence. AuIns. But both sides have AITs. Always thought that was interesting.”

“Did she break?” Not quite subvocal, Caytil leaned close enough that she intended only Talinn to hear. Jeena shook herself—head, shoulders, arms—and turned her face away from the display and toward them.

“The Takana Majot had been caught up in a few conflicts. My senior advisor had been testing my portable servers in different settings across the fronts. He brought me back this one, didn’t tell me the details. The ship name was in the records, but that wasn’t even in the top six of what I had to focus on, so I never connected it when Dorvil shipped out. Memories weren’t in relevant categories so they didn’t trigger each other . . .”

“Do you still have the . . . how long do you keep AIs that aren’t connected to their partners?”

Jeena’s eyes drifted back to her screen, and Talinn bit down hard on her tongue again. Another answer she’d have to wait on. But for the moment there was another, more pressing one.

“Base Two is over techs. Wouldn’t he have known you had the AI from that ship—”

“No.” Her hands crept back to her hair. Talinn ran her own over her scalp, then stopped echoing the motion and crossed her arms instead. “He knew I got a shipment from my advisor, but the provenance wasn’t publicized. UCF doesn’t like information about the space side of the program getting out. Even more need to know than the Eights. We lose more ships than . . . we have to be careful about word getting out when ships go offline. It’s something IDC would jump on immediately, and we could lose an emergence point. Or an entire front.”

“That’s an awfully convenient coincidence—” Caytil began, but Talinn cut in.

“Is it? He needed a decommissioned ship, one that could be made to be here on record, without actually being here. Someone in Command knew what he was doing, so it needed a record trail, for plausibility, but there’s no reason to think anyone would have seen the whole picture other than Command.” Talinn’s thoughts slotted into place, and again that wild laugh of Sammer’s threatened to take over. She shoved the impulse away and continued. “The Eights that are here might be here because other clones of our same lines are out there disrupting things for Command. So Command isolated us, but didn’t decommission, because we’re expensive and they’re not sure enough to pull the trigger.”

“And they’d have to tell someone what to keep an eye out for. Base Two is already read in to the tech side of operations, so it makes sense it’s him,” Caytil continued, her words slower but no less determined.

“But what are his orders once contact has been made?” Talinn swung her arms wide, encompassing the various pieces of equipment lining the tech’s space. “Put our AIs in boxes? Decommission us? Fake attacks to keep us distracted?”

She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one, so she asked more questions.

“And why would he hide? Why would he think sneaking in like any other unadapted soldier would tell him what he wanted to know?”

“Some of the Eights have gotten comfortable speaking frankly in front of the other soldiers.” Jeena replied promptly that time, though she didn’t sound fully convinced of her own words. “When they’re fully suited they’re interchangeable, and they are all very good at holding so still they’re almost invisible . . .”

“But he was annoying.” Talinn flexed her knees, wanting to pace again, but held herself in place. “He kept nudging at me when I . . .” She wrapped her hands so quickly around Jeena’s arms that the tech didn’t even jump away. “Can you hear us? When we subvocalize? Can you cut in on our private channels?”

“Between you and your AIs? No.” Her words were sincere, her eyes steady on Talinn’s own. But a flicker of motion passed through her arms. A tension, quickly dispersed. Talinn tightened her grip and waited.

Caytil eased forward, made a conciliatory noise, but Jeena dropped her chin and broke eye contact.

“We can’t hear the private channel—that’s more electric impulses in your brain itself than it is something we can break into like a radio frequency. But . . . subvocal isn’t noiseless. There’s some equipment that can amplify it . . . not enough to pick up everything—you might not entirely realize how few full sentences you actually use, talking to each other, but . . .”

Talinn’s fingers were running over the collar of her coverall before she realized she’d let go of the tech. The fabric had a slight nub to it—not enough to irritate the skin, but to hide something small embedded within, perhaps.

“Do you record us?” The gentleness was gone from Caytil’s voice, and she stood shoulder to shoulder with Talinn. Jeena didn’t step back, but she drew herself taller.

“No. Anything that would record would be too big, you’d notice it. It would be a passive microphone, something that would amplify only to a receiver very close by.”

Privacy does seem like a lot to ask for, from Command’s point of view. Bee clicked in the background. But I can broadcast interference. A small buzz. They won’t hear us again.

“But they’ll know we know.” Talinn leaned against Caytil for a breath, then stepped away. “So Base Two knows, or knows enough, about Other Talinn and Bee. And we don’t know what he’s going to do about it.”

“For what it’s worth, I doubt he’s faking attacks on the base. More than twenty soldiers have been killed, and that’s not something he’d sign off on lightly.”

“But you think he killed one of your techs, so let’s not get too deep into assumptions.” She scrubbed the side of her wrist across her face, then blew her breath out at an obnoxious volume. “Do you still have a Spacie in a box?”

“No.” Jeena laced her fingers together and hunched before putting visible effort into standing straight again. “It wasn’t a full program. I isolated the discrepancies in the coding and wiped the rest.”

“What was it?”

“The model? A—”

“The discrepancy.”

“Ah.” Jeena breathed in and out, her gaze moving between Talinn’s and Caytil’s. Then she said, “Two of the human partners got into a confrontation. There were injuries. The other AI must have taken that personally and . . . broke this AI’s backup string. Each time they passed through an entanglement, the AIs would refresh their backup, but that AI would embed an error. A small one. But it compounded over time.”

“That’s why the ship ended up formally decommissioned.” Caytil picked up on a different part of the story than Talinn would have, but Talinn decided not to interrupt. “You submitted a report, the whole thing was considered a bad investment, and Command called it a wash.”

“The timing would . . . make sense on that.”

“None of which has anything to do with us—”

Except discrepancies. And who better to insert an error into my program than . . . another me?

“Jeena.” Talinn cut herself off at Bee’s point, and resumed talking as though she hadn’t. “Does that have anything to do with us? Is that what you’re looking for in isolating our AIs? Errors in the backup? Code breaks?”

“Yes.”

“And have you found any?”

Jeena hesitated, her shoulders curving inward again, her eyes dropping, but Talinn already knew the answer. The word still burned between her shoulder blades like a physical weight lined with thorns.

“Yes.”


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Framed