Authors: Brenda Cooper
“Not. He’s sweet, but he’s too old. How’d you get here anyway?” I twisted the ship a little sideways to get it into its docking station.
“I sold some of my pictures.”
“Really?” That was cool—she’d been trying to do that for years. “Show me?”
“Later. Take me home with you?”
“Like I have a choice?” I laughed, happy with the banter. Now I’d never let her go again if I could help it. I opened the door and climbed down to the tarmac. “We have to find someone to sign in the cargo.”
“Without the manifest?”
“I must have the electronic one.”
“Lissa!” A male voice called across the bay to me. I glanced over to see someone approaching that I didn’t know, tall and dark haired, and actually pretty darned handsome. Even better eye candy than Jay. He held out his hand. “Hi. I’m Dan. Rick sent me to get your stuff off.”
Well, new people came on all the time, but this was still a lot for one day. “I have to print a bill first.”
“I got it for you. Rick was listening at the comm, and he said you needed this.” He shoved a copy into my hand and I glanced at it quickly. It had the right number of boxes. I should check box numbers, but it wasn’t like I was allowed to open the damn things anyway. What I really wanted to do was go and catch up with and mourn Aline all at once. I scrawled my name across the release line and smiled up at Dan. “Make me a copy?”
“Sure. I’ll drop it in your box.” He shoved the paper into his pocket and turned and headed toward the forklift.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered how I would ever know when or if I was alone. Not that I wanted to be. “Hey, you know what?” I asked her. “I don’t have to tell you about today. You were here with me, and we both experienced it.”
“I know.” She sounded as happy as I did. It was an effort to walk home instead of dancing my way there. I narrated the trip for her. “The commissary is on the right. And that big building is the library. There’s even free VR there, and pods so people can “read” the new books. Some real paper books, too. There’s a law that all the paper books on Mars need to be there for everyone. And you can check out all kinds of readers. You’d like it.” When we were kids we read together before we gamed together. “And the next part is housing. I stayed there the first two weeks, up in the corner apartment. Sheer luck I got a view . . . another lottery win.”
“Did you really like it?” she asked. “As much as you said? It looks smaller than I thought.”
“Sure. It was the best place on the base for newbies. I used to sit and look out the window for hours and watch the ships and planes and tractors come and go.”
“I’m glad.”
“And around this corner is home.” Showing her was like seeing it through new eyes. A three-story building made all of reddish-yellow brick. It looked like a big box, with a mural painted on the side. “The windows are round so the dust doesn’t pile up on the sills. The color is so it looks natural. You can hardly see the buildings from the air. Except the greenhouses.” I was babbling. “Do you like it?”
“Yes. But do you? Have you been happy here?”
“Well, sure. And it’ll be better now.” I waved at Xiaoning, one of my neighbors, as she headed out for her shift in the science lab. She waved back. The moon was all bubbles and tunnels and it always stank. It was easier to know your neighbors, like Xiaoning, when there was room between people. Funny.
“Come on.” I didn’t say anything else until we got in the door. After I sealed it behind me, I started stripping my headgear off, being careful about my personal comm since it had Aline in it now. Downloads had backups, but only one. They could die. As I turned to set my suit outer-gear on the small bench by the door, I noticed a blinking red light on my kitchen computer console. “That’s the secure line between me and work. Maybe there’s some news about the warnings tonight.”
“Can you show me around first? Or better yet, can we just go somewhere and talk?”
I didn’t blame her. That was really what I wanted, too. But she hadn’t had a real job, ever. She just didn’t understand how you had to do your duty. How could she? “In a minute.” As I got near enough I called out to the console, “Play incoming.”
“Security level three please.”
“Damnit.” I walked up to the screen and stared at it long enough for it to decide I was really me, down to the whites of my eyes and the shape of my chin.
It started playing a message from my boss, Rick. “Lissa. Sent this HighSec so you know what to be careful of. Mars is getting locked down one network at a time because of some scare about AIs invading. It hasn’t shown up yet as a hoax. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but I wanted you to have a chance to back up anything personal you want.”
He was a good boss. Some days, I even thought he liked me. “Maybe that explains the research ships. They’ve got huge networks of their own, and I guess if an AI took one of them over it would have a whole base worth of infrastructure.” That wasn’t what was weird, though. Hadn’t he said AIs invading? Plural? AIs went rogue, but they didn’t do it together. Laws, and their programming, were designed to keep them separate from each other. “But what the hell would they want with Mars? There’s only enough people to populate one city strewn around the whole planet, and not much transportation or anything.”
Rick sounded pressed for time. “I don’t know. I have another call. Just protect your data and be careful.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen,” my sis spoke softly, and even the electronic version of her voice had the same quiet tone she used to use to convince me of things. “You just said why. AIs on Earth are restricted. They’re born restricted. Did you know there’s more laws for AIs and even downloads like me than for humans?”
“I guess I never paid that much attention. But they’re more dangerous than we are.”
“Do you believe everything you’re told?”
I stripped the rest of my suit and my gear until I was naked except the implants that stayed all the time for comm: wires in my jaw and ear canals. I turned on the water and stepped into the shower, hoping to wash away the prickly sense of unease I felt. We had a bigger water allowance here than the moon, but two minutes wasn’t enough to make me feel comfortable. She hadn’t worried me so much since we were teenagers and she was the brave one getting us in trouble. With Aline still in the main room, shut out from the bathroom by a door, I felt like I could think clearer. I’d wanted her here beside me all my life, and hadn’t been able to make it happen. Now she’d found a way. But I believed in what I did, in the research and the planning for a bigger civilization here. I was just a little cog, a worker who was good with electronics and simple ships and kept to all my contracts. But I mattered, too. Or what I did mattered. And now, maybe, Aline was threatening all that. She was no AI, but the coincidence of timing was a bit much.
I pulled on clean clothes and hooked my personal comm and data back up. Aline couldn’t lie to me. To mom, to our teachers. We could both do that. But not to each other. “Why are you helping the AIs?”
Silence. I went and made a cup of tea, and sat down, waiting her out. When she finally spoke it sounded like a rehearsed speech, something she’d practiced over and over. “Did you know that AIs will hold full conversations with downloads—and sometimes with virts?” There was pride in her voice. It was the only clue I had to what she felt. She continued, “See, we’re intelligences, too. Just not artificial. But neither are they. They’re born, they’re just not born in bodies. They consider the word artificial an insult.”
“So you were curious, and you dropped your body so you could talk to the AIs?”
“It was dying. If I waited, my sickness and meds would eat my brain, my self.”
I couldn’t argue with something that true. And would I have done the same thing? Probably. By definition. Twins. I’d have followed her anywhere, I always had. “I forgive you.” But there was more I needed to know. “Did you help smuggle AIs in on my ship?”
“No. Just people to help them.”
That was just as bad. I wanted to be mad, but I was just scared. “What do you want from me?”
“Just to see you one more time, be in the same room, the same place, before I can’t any more. I can hardly think slow enough to talk to you. I want you to go into virt so we can be closer.”
There had been a time I liked living fast in strange worlds of my own or other’s making, and when Aline and I met there in multiplayer experiences. Before Mars. The older I got, the more the stark and slow life of Mars pleased me. But to talk to Aline like we used to? “Okay. I’m off day after tomorrow. So let’s go tomorrow night when we get in. I’ll reserve a pod.”
“Can we go now?” she asked. “I . . . might not be able to go tomorrow.”
I stopped, thinking it through. “You were only going to stay with me tonight?”
“I need to show you some things. I need you, Lissa. I thought about you every day, looked forward to hearing about your drives and your sunsets and even your chess games.” She was almost pleading. “I . . . there’s something I think we can do, and I want to do it.”
I took a sip of my tea. “What is it?”
“AIs can do something they call braiding. It’s a way to . . . communicate. To be family. They can actually share experiences. So the other can experience everything they experienced. We can’t . . . I mean people. I sort of can with other downloads, except we can’t copy part of ourselves. I don’t know how to explain—downloads are slower than AIs, but more complex by far. And humans can’t do it in real at all since so much of their experience is tied up in their bodies. Like right now, your tea is hot and has a taste and you’re sleepy from a long day and excited that I’m here . . . or something like that. All that’s tied to your body. So if humans try to experience each other’s time, it doesn’t fit. Your body doesn’t fit anyone else’s.”
She paused, so I nodded.
“Except mine. You’re my twin. Maybe you and I can do this even though we’re human. Besides, the experiences I want to share with you are . . . well, they’re virtual, from when I had a body and I was in virt. If you’re in virt, I can share those with you. And I need to—so you know.”
“So I know what?”
“So some human knows about us, so someone can save us all.”
I shivered. “You’re talking really weird.” Save us from what?
“Can we go? Now?”
I didn’t want to. Maybe I just felt off since she was running the show and she hadn’t been able to since the bomb took her. Maybe becoming a download wasn’t so bad for her, maybe it was right. She hadn’t seemed to care about anything so much since a few years before I left, when she was into basic rights for animals genemoded for intelligence. I put my cup down. “Sure, we can go.”
“Thanks. I love you, sis. You’ll be glad.”
At the door, I re-suited. Just as I had it open, the base emergency system started broadcasting. “All base personnel are to remain in place, wherever they are. This is a security lockdown. Repeat. All base personnel are to remain in place. All network access has been temporarily revoked.”
I started to step back inside the door, when she said, “Please,” in a small voice.
I stopped, hesitating.
“I’ll die if they catch me.”
“And I’ll get thrown in the brig if they catch me.” I stepped outside and I closed the door behind us. “Now what?”
“Go to the library.”
“The pod won’t work without network access.”
“Sure it will. You know how you can bring your own game? I’ll be your game.”
“I can think of about a thousand retorts to that one,” I said, looking around, nervous. I didn’t break rules. Not anymore.
“You’re in the middle of a war. There aren’t any rules,” she said.
Damn her for knowing me so well. Bless her. The library was just around the corner. I walked like I knew where I was going, straight between the housing pod and the library. I didn’t see anyone else on the street. It only took about three minutes to cross the open space and duck inside the door. The lock door cycled and I went through the inner door. I took off my mask, but I kept it with me.
A librarian gave me a startled look as I walked in the door, and spoke so loudly that everyone looked at me. “Didn’t you hear Base Command?”
“I was in the middle of the street. This seemed like a better place to stop.”
She frowned. Four or five people were still watching us, but the others had turned back to talking about the disruption.
“Do you want me to leave?”
The librarian shook her head. No one stopped me as I drifted back to the virt pods, a row of sausage-like cylinders with privacy curtains at the head, taking up half the main floor space.
Aline spoke up for the first time since we’d left the house. “Take the one second from the back. The one with the blue on blue paint. It’s the most stable. The AIs say they’ll keep you safe.”
“Us safe?” I asked.
“Us.”
I found it. The pod was up and powered.
“Plug your data in,” Aline reminded me.
Even though it was still slightly more than her, I had begun to think of my personal datapod as my sister. I attached her to the VR machine via a wire and then stripped, leaving my clothes and mask in a pile behind the small privacy shield. From the plastic-covered seat at the opening, I extended my feet into the clear gel, wriggling my toes to keep some room in the sterile synth-skin suit as it began its crawl up my body. I pulled the VR mask from a hook on the side, donned it, and checked the air. All good. Now the hard part; I took a breath and let my body ride slowly downward until I floated in gel, a million contacts all around me, ready to register every tiny movement, every flick of an eye or twitch of a finger. Breathing air came through a tube. The hatch closed, and I dogged it from the inside.
The mask let me talk. “Okay, Aline.” There was a slight quiver in my voice.
Her voice was silk in my ear, every word chosen carefully. “Start with a virtual experience we both remember; the first time we met here after the accident. I want to see if we can share each other’s feelings.”
Why start with something so intense?
No room not to trust, not now. I’d probably already lost my job. I had to get what I came for.