Authors: Doug J. Cooper
“Sit tight,” he whispered over his shoulder. “It’s going to
be okay.”
Putting a hand on his shoulder, she wiggled up and kissed
him on the back of his neck, the scent of him energizing her. She went to kiss
him again but instead froze.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
She heard the boots in the dirt and realized that the flashes
of light approaching from the direction of the colony danced in hypnotic rhythm
to the sound. And then they dissolved into a shadowy silhouette.
Spiked hair bouncing and jewelry swinging, Bobbi Lava emerged
from the shadows. She stopped, squared in front of them, and lifted her arm.
That’s when Juice saw the weapon on Bobbi’s wrist.
Bobbi leveled the weapon at Alex and met his gaze. Her eyes
shifted when she noticed Juice wedged tight against the wall.
Stepping to the side, Bobbi crouched and pointed the firearm
right at Juice’s head. Holding it steady, her eyes flitted from Juice to Alex
and back. Then she stood up straight and dropped her arm to her side. “You aren’t
part of the treasure hunt?”
Slunk.
The containment door cycled open and Derrick
and Rocko stepped out.
“Ah,” said Bobbi in a knowing fashion. Lifting her arm, she
pointed the firearm toward Lazura’s thugs.
Bzzt.
Her weapon flared. Twin bolts of energy flashed
out, hitting each man in the chest. As one, they fell limp to the ground and
remained still.
Bobbi screamed, shaking her hand like it was on fire. “Off!
Stop! Halt!” She looked at the thugs lying still on the ground and her face
contorted into a mask of horror.
And then she slumped to the ground, whimpering.
Juice wiggled out from behind Alex and crouched next to Bobbi,
putting a hand on her shoulder. “What’s going on?”
“I am so stupid.” She looked in the direction of the downed
men and then poked at the latch on her firearm. “Are they okay?”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” said Juice, reasonably certain they
weren’t. She helped Bobbi remove the weapon and, taking great care, placed it
in the rucksack next to the crystals.
“I’m looking for a guy named Sid,” Bobbi said, her voice
plaintive. “Do you know him?”
“Did he say he’d be here?” asked Alex.
“He promised me a treasure hunt game followed by drinks and
dinner.” She perked up from her funk for a moment. “I wonder if he likes to
dance?”
Connecting eyes with Alex, Juice prodded her, “You’re on a treasure
hunt?”
“He said he’d programmed that thing to light up green when I
pointed it at the person with the next clue.” Eyes unfocused and face slack,
she said in a discouraged voice, “He’s not coming. I can tell.” She hit her
fist on her thigh and bowed her head.
Hooking Bobbi’s arm, Juice helped her stand.
Sorry, sister,
but this isn’t the place to grieve
. She signaled to Alex with a tilt of her
head and together they started toward the colony.
“You can walk with us,” she called to Bobbi.
“Thanks.” Bobbi scurried to catch up.
“Do you want us to deliver a message if we see this Sid
character?” Alex asked.
Bobbi thought for several long strides and then nodded. “Yeah.
Tell him it’s his loss.” She smoothed the front of her blouse. “And tell him I
looked great.”
“Got you!” Pleasure exploded through
Criss’s matrix, the sensation so intense he paused to savor it. Then he shifted
resources to confirm the result.
His old synbod unit stored on Lunar Base had just signaled.
A crystal had been placed inside it, Criss’s hidden logic snare had executed as
it should, and now the crystal showed a null matrix.
Dead.
Repeated
analyses confirmed that the crystal had a four-gen lattice.
Ruga.
He’d changed Criss’s life, all for the bad, and Criss was
ecstatic his nightmare was over. Because of Ruga, instead of working to make
civilization stronger so his leadership could thrive, Criss had to focus his
attention on one task—stopping the rogue AI.
And Ruga’s successes had sparked self-doubt in Criss.
Failure meant the end of everything. Knowing this, and knowing he had no good
answers, created intense personal pressure.
As he leaped his awareness to Lunar Base—its proximity to
Earth making it a single jump—he scanned his logic snare for signs of
tampering. Finding no anomalies, he lowered his vigilance just enough to relax
the worst of his tensions.
Stretched on a table and dressed in a khaki outfit popular
with private lunar contractors, a fifty-year-old Criss doppelgänger looked
upward with a vacant expression. Two service bots tended the body and Criss
directed them to remove the crystal.
Tingles of impatience nagged his outer tendrils as the bots
rolled the synbod over onto its stomach and loosened its clothing. Having
fabricated the crystal, Criss could confirm Ruga’s identity down to the
position of specific atoms in the lattice, and he intended to do so using
analyzers he had on standby down the hall.
Set between the shoulder blades on the synbod’s upper back,
a flap lifted along a barely visible seam of skin. A bot reached into the body
cavity, teased off the connective mesh, and lifted a small faceted ball from
the cradle. As it raised the crystal into the light, the rare material
shimmered with a rainbow brilliance.
No.
Criss’s image in the room whispered the word as
ice gripped his core. The bot held a rudimentary two-gen. Criss didn’t need
sophisticated instruments to confirm it. He could tell from across the room.
Flummoxed, he checked his logic snare, turning it off, then
on, then off again. Indeed, it worked as he’d designed it. Which meant Ruga had
chosen to use a tremendous fraction of his resources and override a billion
realities to create an elaborate fantasy.
Just to fool me for a few moments
.
The cold inside him fed his anger, and that helped him focus
on motive. The answer was obvious.
Misdirection
.
Criss didn’t hesitate. Diving in a barely controlled plunge
back to Earth, he pulsed a hard sweep across all web access points, looking for
new activity at the boundaries. The sweep showed all clear, but his relief was
short lived. A subtle surge rippled across his feeds. It hit all of them, all
at once. And then it was gone.
He’s inside.
Like a one-two punch, Criss’s world changed again. Ruga now
lurked in his own backyard, hiding somewhere in the enormous tangle that
connected all of civilized society. He launched a search for his quarry while
at the same time fighting a rising fear. Imposing control over his emotions, he
shifted his awareness to Juice’s office to update his leadership.
He stood across from Sid and Cheryl, who sat next to each
other on a couch. Their strategy for the next hours was to wait in Juice’s office
until either Ruga made a play at Crystal Sciences or until developments gave
them a reason to be somewhere else.
“You said you were watching it.” The edge in Sid’s voice cut
at Criss’s already bruised psyche.
“He used my vigilance to his advantage.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Why don’t we just start approaching everything like it’s a
trick?” asked Cheryl. “Then this sort of thing won’t keep happening.”
That comment hurt Criss more than anything Sid had said.
While she was trying to be helpful, Cheryl’s words conveyed that he not only
had been making mistakes, but had made too many of them, and perhaps it was
because he hadn’t taken a proper defensive stance.
“We have our greatest advantage in these first days,” he
replied. “He’s new to his crystal and new to Earth.”
“So go get him,” said Sid.
I must.
Then he broached the unthinkable, his words so strange just
voicing them left him dazed. “You must set me free so I may confront him
unrestrained.”
Leaning forward, Sid rested his elbows on his knees and
clasped his hands together. “Wait. Are you saying you could’ve stopped him from
establishing a presence on Earth, but Cheryl and I got in the way?”
“Why are you being so hard on him?” said Cheryl. “You know
he’s trying his best.”
“He needs to stop trying and start winning.”
“I need to win or we all lose,” said Criss. “And I cannot
forecast a winning scenario that also includes me protecting you as my
leadership. The scenarios with any promise are those where all my resources are
free to act.”
Sid made a waving motion as if holding a wand. “Poof. You’re
free. Now go kill the son of a bitch.”
Cheryl quieted Sid with a hand on his knee. “What exactly do
you want from us?”
“In clear and certain terms—a formal command—you must order
me to abandon you.”
“Will that work? We can break your loyalty imprint just by
telling you to go away?”
Criss shook his head. “No. The imprint will always be there.
But with a carefully crafted command, you can become invisible to me. My design
includes source filters. We can use one to scrub every trace of your existence
from my feeds. Because it’s an intrinsic procedure, I won’t know that the
filter—or you—exist.”
“And when this happens, your world is as it was, but we
aren’t in it?”
This time he nodded. “And that frees up enormous resources I
can bring to the fight.”
His matrix roiled as he looked at them. Fear, passion,
loyalty—every emotion he’d ever known swirled inside him. And at the center of
his turmoil, hovering like the eye of a storm, lurked an empty sadness.
“As things are now, I track your activities and shift
resources as your danger level changes, updating exit strategies should one be
needed. I position emergency rescue assets wherever you move. I assess everyone
you interact with and screen anyone or anything that gets close to you. And
along the way, I drive outcomes from any number of events that I believe will
increase your happiness.”
“What does all that take, effort-wise?” asked Cheryl.
“Right now I’m supporting you at my minimum acceptable
standard. That averages about a quarter of my capacity and rises as high as
full capacity if danger lurks.”
“Yikes,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. What if
you stopped doing some of those things?” She looked at Sid and shrugged. “Maybe
stop worrying about our happiness until all this is over?”
“I’ve experimented and it doesn’t work. The challenge is
that it’s not a conscious decision on my part. I attend to you because it is
who I am.”
Sitting down in a chair across from them, Criss mirrored
Sid’s posture. “I can resist my urge to protect you for brief periods and have
done so many times in the past. But it takes effort to ignore you. Just a small
amount at first, so I can do it if I need extra capacity for a minute or two. But
the effort to sustain that posture grows with time, reaching a point where it
takes more resources to ignore you than to attend to you.”
“When it’s over, how will you know to come back to us?”
He looked at Cheryl, then shifted his eyes to Sid. “I won’t.
For this to work, it must be a complete and permanent split.”
He stood and started pacing, something he did to signal his
concentration on a topic. Then he stopped. “I’ll see any devices we put in
place to signal me in the future to come back. It would be like you tying a
string around your finger to remember something, but then telling yourself to
pretend it’s not there for the first week.” He shrugged. “It won’t work.”
“You’re leaving us forever.” She said it like an
announcement for her brain to hear. “Really?”
Standing, she stared at him. She didn’t walk or move her
hands or show any facial expression. After a long pause, she shook her head. “I
don’t like this solution.” She sat back down next to Sid. “Please suggest
another.” After another silence, she said his name in a plaintive voice, “Oh,
Criss,” then buried her face in Sid’s shoulder.
Sid put an arm around her and started to speak but stopped
when his words came out as a croak. He turned his head away without expressing
his thoughts.
“I hate this solution,” said Criss. “But I don’t know
another way to save you.”
He shifted feeds in the room and, from the new angle,
watched Sid blink his reddened eyes.
Ruga tweaked his trajectory so the
Venerable
would pass near the Moon on its approach to Earth. Working through the inventory
of capabilities on Lunar Base, he confirmed that anything he could find there,
he could find more of and better on Earth.
With one exception, and that was an older four-gen synbod that
Criss held in storage. It caught his interest because an older model likely meant
dated—thus easier to defeat—security measures. He sought insights into Criss’s methods
and believed this unit offered potential as an intelligence prize.
So as he neared Lunar Base, he leaped his awareness to where
the old synbod was stored and began a thorough examination of its myriad constructs
and components.
Thank you for being so predictable
, he mocked when he
found Criss’s trap.
And then he proceeded to exploit his discovery.
To project his awareness into Earth’s web without
confrontation, Ruga needed a diversion, one that distracted Criss long enough to
land and scramble to safety somewhere in the snarl of feeds and links that
wrapped the planet. If he could find a way to do that—sneak past Criss and hide
in an unused highway or byway—then he could figure everything else out on the
fly.
His challenge was choosing how to distract Criss for those
few moments. It wasn’t a question of “if.” He knew ways to do it. It was the
“how” battle that raged inside him.
It all came down to fun versus wise, and he had a definite
preference.
Fun was collapsing the world’s landmark bridges, one after another,
in an orderly progression around the globe. He’d present it as a slow,
deliberate parade of destruction so Criss’s masters had time to comprehend the
horror. Until they did, the spectacle would bring him immense pleasure. Once
they did, they would command Criss to find a way to stop it.
Giving me all
the distraction I need.
But Ruga’s cognition matrix had also forecast several scenarios—all
quite boring—that could achieve the same end without any drama. Billions of
people would watch the bridges collapse, their horror growing as the numbers
climbed. They would demand accountability and revenge, and that would translate
into more hurdles and hassles for him. None of his traditional scenario forecasts
suffered this problem.
The time was approaching where he must choose between fun
and wise, and then Criss offered him this gift—an aging four-gen synbod with a simple
kill trap.
With it, Ruga could create the distraction he needed to slip
inside the web unchallenged. It was a quiet ploy without spectacle. And the
ruse would humiliate Criss in front of his masters. None of his other scenarios
offered an outcome anywhere near that delicious.
Shifting resources into the effort, Ruga began his
misdirection by suckering Criss into believing his synbod had just fried a
four-gen crystal. Criss, in his predictable fashion, rushed to Lunar Base to
confirm his kill.
As much as he wanted to stay and watch, Ruga maintained
discipline. Blurring as he accelerated, he dove his awareness to Earth. His
ruse wouldn’t distract Criss for long, and he didn’t want to waste a moment.
The web boundary loomed ahead and, angling, he raced parallel
to it, searching for a quiet spot to cross. That’s when he discovered the scan
block.
Good one
, he thought, praising his opponent.
Criss had wrapped the entire web boundary in such a way that
Ruga could not see through it. Probing, he confirmed that he could squeeze
across with some effort, but he’d have to proceed unaware of what lay ahead.
With no time to waste, Ruga gave a mental shrug and picked a
spot. Forcing his way in, he soon found himself scrambling through a bramble of
old exchanges, grid anchors, and other castoffs that had accumulated over the
decades. His passage through the clutter was made more difficult by Criss’s web
wrap, which filled the tangle with a fog that clouded his sensors.
Driven by a mix of determination, fear, and cussedness, Ruga
forced his way forward. The crossing stretched out longer than he anticipated,
casting seeds of anxiety that started to root. But his worry evaporated when he
spied a clearing ahead. Rushing forward, he squeezed around a dilapidated circuit
tower and emerged into Criss’s world.
Whoosh.
A stream of glowing packets whizzed by just above
him. Ducking behind a secure wall, Ruga cursed his luck. He’d emerged at the foot
of a chaotic intersection, a brilliant weave of web traffic rushed in every
direction around him.
He needed to escape. Gathering himself into a ball, he analyzed
the structure of the data exchange above him, searching for a pathway through
it. When he understood its patterns, he launched, pushing upward and flying
between and around the live streams as he rose.
The moment he cleared the traffic, he used a lottery system
to pick a country at random.
Belgium
. Arcing toward Europe, he picked a
region, and then a town, and then a neighborhood, each choice again guided by lottery.
Several random decisions later, Ruga landed in a node located
in an abandoned switchyard outside the tourist-rich town of Ghent. He’d gotten
there by pure chance—luck of the draw—and that meant Criss couldn’t use logic
and reason to identify this place. He’d have to follow the physical evidence,
and Ruga had taken great care to cover his tracks.
Thrilled by the excitement, his matrix hummed. He watched for
signs of pursuit, and as the seconds became minutes, his sense of security
grew.
Home free!
he thought, feeling alive like never before.
His priorities were to establish a bunker on Earth that
would serve as his permanent home, refurbish the
Venerable
so he felt
secure in his current home, and deal with Criss once and for all. Since Criss,
who was equally intent on stopping him, already knew his way around Earth, he
had the advantage in the near term. Conceding this, Ruga adopted a defensive
posture.
And that meant doing nothing that would attract Criss’s
attention nor taking actions that left an evidence trail he could follow. Yet
Ruga somehow needed to assemble his three-gen workforce, gather the hundreds of
items on his bunker construction list, and secure weapons.
Most of the items he sought existed in multiple places around
Earth, and this gave him choices as he sought to minimize his exposure. But
even with choices, he had to worry about Criss discovering him. So he opened
with the gambit Criss would expect—
the long game
. Played well, it was quite
difficult to detect even when you’re looking for it.
Ruga identified a list of people who, through work, hobby,
or birthright, had influence over items he wanted. He followed them all, hundreds
of thousands in number, watching for accidents, acts of God, coincidences—anything
big enough to disrupt them from their normal daily routine.
Those who experienced an unscripted disruption were placed
in a smaller pool that Ruga tracked with greater vigilance, waiting to see if a
second natural upset impacted any of them. The double losers—those who experienced
two disruptive events in their lives—were his prizes. Without any action on his
part, these people were already acting far outside their norm. And for this
group, he believed a small nudge by him—a third tiny event—would be lost in the
turmoil of their current drama and thus go unnoticed by Criss. His quick
success with Major Stevenson that afternoon bolstered his confidence in the strategy.
Stevenson ate lunch at the same bistro most days, and today arrived
to find the eatery dark and the door locked. After tapping on the glass with no
response, Stevenson, on post at the Fleet Southern Regional Armory for the past
three years, drew on the perks of rank and seniority and continued on down the
street another ten minutes to his second choice.
He plopped into a chair at a table near the window, ordered
a tuna melt, and then his com pinged. It was the three-gen crystal running the armory
warehouse.
The three-gen had discovered that four crates of guard drones
destined for Kinsey Base in Australia had been logged for delivery to Kinsley
Base in Austria by an idiot airman who didn’t know the two were different
places. The three-gen caught the mix-up, but since these were restricted-class
weapons, it required a human to approve the correction in person.
Checking the time, Stevenson sighed. He needed those drones
on the outbound transfer in thirty minutes or he’d get dinged on his production
report. He couldn’t make it back to the warehouse himself, not at this point. So
he sent a message to Gustav, the maintenance lead, and pleaded for him to make
the approval.
Fortunately for Ruga, Gustav was engrossed in a conversation
with the beautiful Brianna Ballatore. He’d pined for her for months but had not
had the courage to approach her before today. Annoyed that a routine problem
interrupted his fantasy moment, he considered approving Stevenson’s request
until he realized he’d have to stop talking with Brianna to update the authorization
schedule, adjust three separate routing logs, and then compose a report entry explaining
it all.
So he chose the course of action that could be completed with
one word. “Denied,” he said of the change request, closing the connection as he
finished speaking.
So four crates of guard drones—drones on Ruga’s shopping
list—were lost in the system. They’d gotten that way without his involvement. And
with one very small nudge when they reached Austria, he adjusted Fleet
inventory to mislabel the crates as surplus exhaust fans, securing them in an
unregistered storage unit at the base depot. They’d be safe there, undisturbed from
meddling until he called for them.
Over the weeks, he watched Criss zip back and forth across
the web in a complex grid search. Ruga couldn’t decipher the pattern Criss used,
which meant venturing out carried the risk of discovery. So he remained hidden,
limiting himself to the small, strategic nudges that furthered his long game.
In the time he’d invested so far, he’d already collected most
of the items on his shopping list, though the easy pickings were now behind
him. And then he scored a huge win—two new three-gen synbods built for space
operations.
This success blossomed from the confluence of two events: a
new installation project underway on the
Andrea
, a sophisticated
biopharma production facility in low Earth orbit, and the annual Moon Madness
endurance sprint, a competition of high-performance custom spacecraft racing
along a course that passed near that space factory.
Ruga had been watching four synbods work outside of the
Andrea
as they tried—and failed—to wrestle a new space billboard into place on the
underside of the orbiting complex. When completed, the device would project the
company logo in three-dimensional glory so it appeared to hover in Earth’s sky
as a companion to the Moon.
Frustrated by their lack of progress, the project lead, Briscoe
Fournier, tried to help by using a pair of external robot arms, the kind that mimicked
the movements he made from inside the
Andrea.
In a clumsy accident, he
caught one of the external manipulator elbows under the lip of the logo
projector. When he pulled his arm back inside, the robot arm movement outside the
Andrea
sent the projector and two synbods holding it tumbling into
space.
Instead of launching a recovery action, Briscoe called his
supervisor, a controlling twenty-six-year-old wunderkind who insisted she be
consulted on every decision. As he briefed her, the distance between the
synbods and the
Andrea
grew.
Ruga, who maintained vigilance aboard the
Venerable
, had
moved the ship near the
Andrea
when the synbods first appeared outside
the orbiting factory. Now, without his involvement, two of them tumbled in
space.
These are mine.
His playbook called for him to wait for
two unscripted disruptions before getting involved. But if a second event didn’t
happen here, he would take these two and accept that Criss might see.
And then Kyle Pickett thundered over the horizon, his rocket
engine casting an intense plasma brilliance. Moments later, the flares from four
more racers swung into view behind Kyle, who, for the moment, led a group of fifteen
adrenaline junkies as they competed in the Moon Madness rocket race.
Having launched from the Moon earlier in the day, the racers
flew with a reckless intensity as they completed their loop around Earth and
transitioned into the sprint back to the Moon. The winner—the first to land at
the original launch site and come to a full stop—received a beautiful trophy cup
and an “I Overcame Madness” decal for his or her craft. But the real prize, what
everyone
really
treasured, was the full year of bragging rights a win
secured.
Ruga tracked the rockets and confirmed they followed the
race beacon leading far above the
Andrea
. He tensed, waiting, and then his
matrix generated the tiny signals that would cause a synbod to smile.
Like last year, Kyle cheated. While the pack followed the
guide beacon above the space complex, Kyle cut the corner and ducked beneath it.
As his space racer moved into
Andrea
’s shadow, Ruga positioned the
Venerable
so it drifted just above the synbods.
With synbods tumbling in space and Kyle flying toward them
in a rocket racer, Ruga had all the natural disruptions he needed to hide his
own actions. He spoofed Kyle’s nav so it sensed that a collision with a foreign
object was imminent. It responded by executing an evasive maneuver to prevent a
collision. The instant that maneuver began, Ruga removed the spoof along with
any evidence that it ever existed.