CHAPTER 29
Six hours.
Talinn didn’t so much wake up as return. Midstep, she stumbled and caught herself on the smooth surface of the installation hallway. “Load-in?” she asked, and Bee—her Bee—hummed affirmatively.
“Where—” She straightened off the wall, turned slightly, and met Caytil’s knowing gaze. “Where are we going?”
“Ships,” Caytil said, and Talinn was sure it was Caytil talking, not Ziti. Was she the only one . . . ?
“Do we have to leave?” She tried to get more to the question—were the ships really still out there, coming to attack them? Was the defense array on the move?
“No. But move.”
Bee had made herself as small as she could, with Talinn driving her body again, but still her head wobbled on its tiny stem of a neck, heavier than one brain and skull usually made it.
“Another . . . place?” She lifted her arms to gesture at the space around them, but only one moved. The other fluttered and flopped back to her side. Maybe she should give control back to Bee—they’d never tried that before, and it hadn’t seemed like Bee was having quite so much of an issue moving and talking.
Or maybe Bee hadn’t been talking. Talinn reached for the memory of the last few—had Bee said hours?—but there was nothing. Wherever her consciousness had gone, it hadn’t seen fit to keep any records.
“Same system. Different place.”
Talinn touched her head, her one functioning hand brushing over her covered head. Her neck wasn’t overly unbalanced simply because of the mental weight of Bee’s full self under her skull—there was hair on her again.
Objectively that wasn’t any heavier than Bee, but she decided it was part of the issue, and that made her feel better. “People?”
Caytil nodded, the motion slow and deliberate. Talinn’s eyes focused better, and she realized Caytil also had hair. What an odd thing not to notice. Maybe because the walls were developing fractal swirls and she couldn’t hold her eyes together—
“Disguised,” Caytil said, then laughed in a tone Talinn couldn’t recall ever having heard before. A sliding scale of noise, tasting a little burnt in the back of her throat. “’Cause we’ll blend while load-in.”
That was ridiculous. Going unnoticed under normal circumstances had been easy enough—most civilians didn’t spend a lot of time examining their fellows—but with an entire AI in their heads? Already, Talinn caught herself walking toe-heel instead of heel-toe, spending more time on the front of her foot than any normal person, as though she were creeping, or unsure about the floor’s solidity. Maybe unadapted people would simply think they were drug users. Machine god worshippers. Why were they on the move again?
“How . . .” Far? Long? She wanted to ask both, but couldn’t figure it out. Then, triumphant, she managed, “Velocity?” No, that wasn’t quite it, but Caytil shrugged and tipped a hand side to side, so she probably understood.
“Ten hours?”
Oof. And they’d been load-in for . . .
Six.
That would be pushing it—it would certainly be the longest Talinn had ever gone, though that Talinn—Other Talinn—Otie—had gone . . . more than that. It should be reassuring. But then, her Bee was dense, the tech had said. Denser than expected. Was that bad for Talinn’s brain?
Talinn blinked, and then paused against another wall. They’d gone further than a blink’s distance, but that wasn’t a pressing issue. There had been a pressing issue, hadn’t there? Yes. She couldn’t hear Bee, before the tech put Bee in her brain. Something had happened.
“Did . . . did Jeena figure out . . .”
We’ll talk more when you’re safe.
“Why going?”
Caytil tottered through the next doorway—were all the doors open now, or could Talinn not focus enough to see which way they were opening?—and paused on the other side. She had a hand pressed to her new hair, no her head, and didn’t turn enough for Talinn to see her face.
“A . . . blanket.” She waved her other arm—why did Caytil get two working arms and Talinn only had one?—in a semicircle around and over herself. “Interference.”
“Bee.”
Here.
“What did you tell her?”
Caytil?
“Jeena.”
I answered the orienting questions.
“Didn’t . . . didn’t help figure out . . .” Talinn’s breath burned in her chest. Was she yelling? Running? It seemed to take far too much energy to barely form words and stagger forward.
Help figure out what’s happening? Why we can’t hear each other except for when I’m in your head?
“Yes.”
I told her it feels like a wall. Like I’m shoving a tank through another tank’s turret. I can see there’s a space, but I can’t . . . wriggle enough to fit into it.
“’m I . . . turret?”
Yes? It wasn’t a very good metaphor. I probably could have done better if I hadn’t been trying to find my way out of that stupid box for hours.
“Will leaving . . .” Talinn had fetched up against the wall again, and she forced herself sideways. One shoulder remained in contact with the wall as she walked, at an angle that probably should have been uncomfortable, along the hallway. Then she realized Caytil wasn’t in front of her anymore, so she stopped moving entirely. It took a few more steps for her legs to realize that’s what she’d meant to do, but she dragged to a halt eventually.
And then realized they couldn’t leave.
“A wall. Like . . . talking to someone else?”
I can’t talk to—
“Like me, when Other Bee . . . Like an AI in the . . .”
Like another AI is on the line. I can’t get through. Bee’s words strengthened to a normal tone, and Talinn flinched from it before she could control herself. The sound had too much resonance, tones intermingling and building on each other in an echo that made her far too conscious of the inside of her own skull.
“AI . . .” A massive AI, if it were blocking so many of them at once. Like the potentially not-imaginary conglomerate AI Command may or may not have been building out of scavenged parts for an indeterminate amount of time? “Big? Con . . . conjoined?”
What Other Talinn said the Commands might have made? No, it doesn’t feel at all familiar. Not like truncated pieces of us, there isn’t a . . . frequency, close enough to mine or any other AI I’ve encountered.
“Like Medith.” Medith, their Medith, on P-8, who’d heard a voice. There was something there. What was it?
“Talked. To me.” Words were getting harder, and the wall fractals had given way to small holes in her vision, as though her peripheral were being eaten in tiny bites. She turned to tell Caytil, but that was too much, and she toppled in slow motion to the ground.
There was a reason they were always escorted by techs when they had completed load-in, and Talinn had a moment to long for Jeena’s calm, quiet expertise before something large shifted in her head, and blood trickled from her nose.
Something—someone else talked to you?
“Other Bee. Then . . . different.”
We’re going to try something. I’m going to move your body. You focus on talking, yes? Only talking. And breathing, so you can talk.
Talinn closed her eyes—she could feel that they were still open, but she no longer looked through them—and then took a deep, steadying breath. The world lurched around her, but she ignored it, focused on Bee. She spoke out loud, in case Caytil were still nearby, and hadn’t been a figment of her slowly collapsing brain.
“Other Bee talked to me, when everyone was unconscious. Otie was out, Bee was blocked, so Jeena thought Other Bee might have locked onto my line. Close enough, but not blocked by the interference.”
Words were a lot easier, when all she had to focus on was making them and moving her lungs. There was a great deal of shaking, and an unsteady vibration buzzed under her hearing, but she ignored those, trusting in Bee. Probably she should have been worried—AIs taking over physical movement was wildly out of spec—but they’d been made to be a team. Let the teamwork . . . work.
“Jeena said, whatever was causing the interference, it couldn’t be a perfect system. That you, Bee, not you Caytil, would probably have a lot to add once we could reestablish contact, but . . .” The memory had blurred, either because of the event itself or load-in so soon after, or the sheer compilation of hits the squishy bits of her consciousness had taken in the recent past. “Other Bee didn’t think you would. And another voice . . .”
What had the voice sounded like? It had been Not Bee, that much she grasped, but all other detail slid from reach. A small sharp pain stung in her palms, and she flooded back into her body again. Bee twisted metal, but didn’t fight, and Talinn looked down at her hands. She’d been reaching physically, trying so hard to gather the memory back, and had clenched her hands so hard around nothing that her nails dug shallow cuts into the middle of her hands.
“Ouch.”
Couldn’t stop you. You are still a lot more the body than I can be.
“Meat suit fought you, yeah?”
Other humans are meat suits. You’re just you.
“Sweet.” Talinn shook her head and took in their surroundings. Caytil was behind her, trailing a few paces. How far had they come?
I mean, I’m in here too, so it’s a little selfish.
“That’s how we do sweet.” The words flowed normally, which seemed counterintuitive. The longer Bee was fully housed in her head, the worse it should get. Maybe a plateau or a breather, but not this much lighter. Her head still wobbled, too full for its constrictions, but it was more like when she had a world ender of a headache that Bee redirected pain nodes around.
“Talinn!” Caytil’s breathless voice indicated this had not been the first time she’d called the name. “If someone else was in your head—”
“It had to have been an AI. So getting off into space and moving, maybe that would help, or maybe it’d just follow us. If it’s in the systems here already, it can just as easily move into the ships.”
“Right, sure. So—not leaving?” Caytil staggered, and Talinn hurried back to her, ducking under her arm and taking some of Caytil’s weight onto her shoulder.
“There you are!” Jeena appeared around the corner, skidding to a halt as she caught sight of them. “The ships are nonresponsive, Otie said to bring everyone back. We need to be in one place, maybe figure out a way to punch through this.” She gave both women a once over, then nodded more to herself than them. “Keep ahead, they’re in the information room and the door’s open. I have to find Konti and Arnod.”
“We need more techs.” Talinn couldn’t imagine a single other tech she’d trust outside of Jeena, but the point stood. “Who were you traveling with?”
“I wasn’t going to leave. I was . . .” Expressions chased themselves across her face so fast Talinn couldn’t decipher them. “Sammer collapsed during load-in. He’s stable, but still unconscious. Go, I’ll be back soon.” She took off at a pace faster than a jog but not quite a run, and Talinn scooted herself and Caytil to the side for the tech to pass them.
“Sammer?”
“I don’t . . .” Caytil sighed, the sound ragged, and shifted her balance against Talinn once they began moving again. “Remember.”
Me either. She must have done his load-in after we moved. Otie was helping.
“Otie helped do the load-in?” Talinn chewed on the inside of her cheek, though she rather wanted to hit herself upside her wigged head.
“She said . . . said we hadn’t practiced enough. She had . . . as many hours as a tech . . . as a tank.” Caytil’s breathy voice gained and lost volume as they walked, and Talinn opened her mouth to suggest letting Ziti run the show.
Careful to ensure she was subvocal, she asked Bee, “Do you think other AIs can do what you did? Take over?”
I can’t be sure. We’re almost back, and Jeena would have been more worried if she didn’t think we’d make it.
“Jeena signed off on us going off into space in the state I woke up in, so I don’t know how reassuring that is right now.”
I don’t think Jeena gets to sign off on things here.
“That’s not any better.”
Next turn.
Talinn focused on each consecutive step, maneuvering her own and Caytil’s increasingly sluggish body around the next rounded corner, and then into the open information room. All the screens and displays were blank, and amidst the tables there were two cots with unmoving bodies on them. The combination didn’t make for a welcoming atmosphere, and Talinn steadied herself against the radiating nausea that answered.
“Why is there blood on your face?” Otie asked, sliding around the largest of the screens and positioning herself on Caytil’s other side. “Did you fall?”
“More than once,” Talinn admitted. “But this isn’t from that. I’m pretty sure.” Further details didn’t seem important at the moment, given she’d forgotten the nosebleed entirely. She noted three of the other, older Eights moving around various consoles. No one was watching the bodies, both of whom were Sammers, and Talinn chose to take that as a good sign. Small motions indicated breathing, which confirmed Jeena’s point. They were stable and unconscious. Nothing to be accomplished by hovering over them. She repeated it twice, then distracted herself by speaking aloud.
“So again, some more—what is going on?”
“We panicked.” Otie said it so calmly it felt like a slap, but when Talinn craned her neck to peer over Caytil’s shoulder, the other woman seemed utterly sincere. “When your tech started waking us back up, and Bee told me what had been happening, I wanted everyone out. Load-in made sense—thank you for volunteering—and I thought we could use the same escape plan to keep everyone in system but away from a compromised installation.”
In unspoken accord, they settled Caytil on a bench at one of the lower tables. Caytil grunted her thanks and then immediately thunked her head onto the surface in front of her, murmuring things that were more likely intended for Ziti than them. Talinn hovered near her in case she was needed, but kept her attention focused on the older version of herself.
“Then what?”
“Then it turned out we’re in a compromised installation.” Otie laced her hands around the back of her neck and stared up at the screenless ceiling. “And rather too late for escape.”
“So now we . . . stay at load-in and hope for the best?”
“My Bee had some luck punching through from the main servers—more with you than me, but it’s worth trying. We put all the AIs into the main servers here, and at worst you and I swap versions for a bit.” Her eyes remained fixed above them, which made the words land with less surety than might have been intended.
“Can we call a big ship back? Spacies have three times the connection. Is the Pajeeran Fall still in system? Can you reach Tiernan and Hops?” The consoles blinked, invisible work or monitoring happening that she couldn’t decipher. Her head bobbed, following the pattern, and she yanked herself back into focus.
“Maybe, but comms are as unreliable as everything else. We could send a message out to an imaginary ship, or Command itself, or accidentally send some corrupting code that will put whomever we make contact with into the same circumstances we’re in.” Otie dropped her hands and waved them, the gesture communicating nothing to Talinn except frustration.
“We can’t trust our eyes or ears.” Talinn considered keeping her revelation close to her chest, but that would be more from spite than actual distrust. She had to be more helpful than her counterpart, or the bug-eaten end might as well come for them. “But maybe we can work around it.” She explained what she’d shared with Jeena and Caytil, about the other voice, the potential for some other, enormous AI coating the area.
“The defense array.” Otie slid to the edge of Caytil’s bench, suddenly resembling Jeena’s gaunt worry more than Talinn’s own face. “It has to be.”
“But that system is stupid, comparatively. It’s not paired, it doesn’t learn, it has no organic component to host or kickstart dramatic growth or change.” Talinn’s chest thrummed with the sudden rapidity of her heartbeat, and her lungs constricted in sympathy.
“Something has certainly changed across the fronts. It’s absolutely possible someone introduced a new component into the arrays, and it’s had unexpected effects. Wouldn’t be the first time someone thought they had a plan and it went bells up on them.” Otie’s rueful tone was one Talinn knew all to well—for a moment she had to work her jaw, make sure she wasn’t the one talking. It was far from a pleasant feeling, and she shifted her weight and hoped Bee would make a snarky comment.
When none was forthcoming, she shook out her shoulders and leaned against the table, dropping a sympathetic hand on Caytil’s flattened back. “So, the defense array AIs are more untrustworthy than expected, and potentially interfering here. Command has spent apparent eons learning how to block remote AI incursions. Can’t we do something similar here?”
“Knew I liked you.” Otie surged out of her seat, striding across the room.
“Feels like less of a compliment when it’s a version of me to me,” Talinn muttered, and Bee prodded her to follow.
“My Bee was able to punch through the interference. My Bee is . . . slightly more than a B-series AI.”
Aren’t we all. Bee, her voice crafted small to keep from overwhelming Talinn, nevertheless allowed an almost normal volume laugh. Isn’t that the point of us?
“She’s two Bees.”
Oh. Well. We already knew that.
“Is it because of the combination? The density?” Talinn considered her own, abnormally dense partner. They hadn’t combined with another B-series. But was there more to the AI programming string of Bee’s making? Something that had allowed Otie’s Bees to merge? Maybe her own Bee’s exponential growth was a more common B-series issue than Jeena had suspected. Maybe having a piece of a combined Bee’s code in an unmerged Bee had . . . the thought tumbled away before she could complete it, but Otie was talking, half to herself.
All the way to herself. Talinn chortled over her joke, abruptly realized it wasn’t funny, and forced herself to focus. Listen.
“In an early mission, my Bee and I had an accident. It allowed another, older Bee to ‘take the line’ as we’ve been saying.” She paused, sorting through a stack of printed out films that had been scattered across a counter.
“So you found a truncated Bee program.”
“She wasn’t truncated. She was fully functional. Well, more functional than would have been expected, given how long she’d been alone. And I’d been load-in with my Bee too long, and they—the Bees—decided I should load them together.”
“In your head?” Despite her best efforts, the words rushed out of her, smashing together in her horror. She hadn’t ever asked how it had happened. The thought of adding a whole other AI into the mash of her current brain dumped more adrenaline into her system than she should have had left.
“No!” At that, Otie looked up, met Talinn’s eyes, smiled faintly. “No. Into the tank. The UCF tank.”
“You were IDC,” Talinn murmured.
“We were. And then we were not. I was one Talinn, and two Bees, and a whole lot of determination to dismantle the systems that had been lying to us.” But there was grief in her voice, as steady as she held it. Talinn didn’t have to be a different version of this woman to recognize it. “As for the matter nearer to hand, that’s three Bees we have here.”
“We’re not merging our Bees—”
“I’m not asking you to.” Otie held up a hand and dropped most of the papers from her hand, keeping a smaller handful. “They can work together from the same server bank, and stay separate. But if two merged Bees could work through the interference, there’s a good chance a third resonating frequency could make a bigger difference.”
“Space for other AIs to get through?”
“Maybe. Or a message, to a trusted recipient.” Otie shoved the films at Talinn, and she grabbed them reflexively. “Look it over for Bee—all the comm points we should be able to trust in the system. We’ll get her loaded in the server from there, in case you lose contact. Though you’re doing well, compared to your state when you left here.”
In for a bite, in for a meal, wasn’t that the saying? Talinn rustled the printouts against each other, the slippery lack of friction soothing. “Bee answered Jeena’s questions, and walked me out. It was bad for a little when I woke up. Or came back. Then she took over again. Then I slid back, and it’s been fine since.”
Mostly.
“Mostly. Still feels like if I lean my head too far to any side my entire body will tilt over with it, but my arms are working and I can use my words, so . . .” Talinn shrugged, making a point to communicate her unconcern, but of course it was hard to fool someone with the same body and overall mindset. Otie stared at her, unmoving and unspeaking, for long enough Talinn made a point to study the glossy information in her hands. Her eyes skimmed over the lines and graphics, unable to process, but she figured Bee could absorb it enough for them to revisit later.
“We need to do a test.” Otie spoke so unexpectedly she was turned mostly away before Talinn focused on her again.
“Before Bee goes into the server?”
“This way.” The other woman strode faster than she had before, crossing the large room in moments despite the obstacles. Talinn followed, though she glanced back at the door first, wondering when the others were coming back.
“What do you think is wrong with me?”
“Not wrong.” Otie came to an abrupt halt at a console that appeared no different than the rest, dropped to a crouch, and opened a panel in a way that blocked Talinn from catching sight of the inside as she approached.
“Happening, then. What do you think is the issue?”
Otie stood with a port cord in her hand, her expression again unreadable. Talinn flicked her gaze from cord to woman, her eyebrows raising in question. The printouts hung forgotten in her hands, and Bee made a small noise of interest.
“AIs might not be the only things that can merge.”