Inescapable (6 page)

‘We’re
definitely seeing an improvement in the coordination of processes
across the individual units.’ The speaker was a woman, and she
seemed to know the question had been aimed at her. ‘That last fix
you put in has helped a lot. Diagnostics suggest that the
propagation of awareness across the whole network has speeded up by
about ninety-two per cent.’

‘All right… I
think it could do a lot better than that, and watch out for
replication errors.’ Terri looked back at Fox. ‘Just before I left
to pick you up, I put in a change to reduce the redundancy on the
error correction system. Data transfers faster, but we need to be
careful it doesn’t result in errors when one machine copies to
another. And I still think we’re not getting the throughput we
should.’

Fox smirked. ‘I
got that. So this thing assembles stuff, like a fabricator.’

‘This thing
assembles stuff
a bit like
a fabricator. Fabricators print
parts using plastic base stock, import other parts, and then
assemble objects as required. You can manufacture some things in
one go, a lot of clothes, for example, but more complicated things
take more programming and time, and you’re limited in the kind of
materials you can make because they basically have to be built out
of the stocks you have.’

‘Uh-huh. Got
that.’

‘With this
system, we can create materials or make alterations to them, at the
molecular level. It’s still limited, to be honest, but we have far
greater control over the materials we’re building and we can start
from a lower level.’

‘And,’ the
woman who had spoken before said, ‘we can do things like building
some of our machines, or copies of them, into the materials. We can
make plastics which repair themselves, react to programmed
instructions. We can make
intelligent
matter.’

‘That’s why the
project is called Yliaster,’ Terri went on. ‘It’s an old alchemical
term for “prime matter,” matter which has both body and soul.’

‘Do I want a
shirt that can think?’ Fox asked.

‘How about a
shirt that can clean itself, change colour, and mend tears?’

‘Well… I could
get behind that.’

‘How about a
suit that’ll stop a bullet, give you near invisibility, and make
you stronger and faster than normal?’

‘So I can use
Whitwallace’s cannon from the hip.’

‘Exactly, but
if we’re right about this, when we can get it working perfectly… We
could submerge someone in a bath of this stuff and repair anything
that’s wrong with them. Your arm? Instead of replacing it, we could
regrow it.’

Fox lifted her
right arm and flexed her fingers. ‘I… kind of like my new arm. I
get to carry Kit around in it, for one thing.’

Kit appeared
beside her at the mention of her name, the proverbial genie from a
bottle. ‘I find this arrangement most pleasing as well.’

The woman
flicked a glance at the kitsune avatar. ‘That’s the Kitsune-model
AI you were working on, Terri?’

‘One of the
prototypes, quite advanced along the way. Fox has been testing Kit
for me, and doing quite a job.’ Terri frowned. ‘Oh, Fox Meridian,
this is Shell Marchant. She’s one of our lead programmers.’

Marchant shook
Fox’s hand, but she seemed more interested in Kit, which Fox could
not really blame her for. ‘What’s your full model number, Kit?’
Marchant asked.

‘Kitsune dash
five nine two point two three.’

The
programmer’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘You’ve moved on to the point
two five variant, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Terri
replied, ‘and we’ll go live with point two six, but Kit has a few
features those don’t which I’m loath to take away from her. We’ve
patched her core code with a few security updates, but we’re
keeping her at her current primary code iteration.’

‘What features
would she lose?’ Fox asked.

‘We eliminated
the spawned copy feature. Kit seems to have integrated it well, but
most of the other point two three instances suffered
synchronisation issues. Memories diverged and they lost the ability
to reintegrate.’ Terri gave Kit a concerned frown. ‘Be careful of
that when you connect to your main server when you get home.’

‘I’ll be sure
to run a full diagnostic analysis after I synchronise,’ Kit
said.

‘Good. And send
the diagnostic results to me, would you?’

‘Of
course.’

Marchant’s eyes
narrowed. ‘Are you thinking she might have solved
our
sync
problem?’

‘I’m thinking
that it’s a possibility. Some of the code in Kit is used in the
communications protocols in Yliaster. Checking over Kit’s
performance can’t hurt.’

‘I will, of
course, be happy to help,’ Kit said, beaming.

19
^th
March.

There was, Fox thought,
only so much you could do at a place like Jenner Research Station
unless you were there to do research. She had examined and been
briefed on the weapons research and a few other clever tricks and
devices, and she had been fully briefed on the nature and
possibilities of Yliaster. She had gone over all the security
arrangements with the Palladium team and, much as she had expected,
had been unable to uncover any flaws.

After a few
days on site, she was considering volunteering to test fire weapons
for Whitwallace eight hours a day, but she had a feeling that
getting to fire off ammo from the high-tech guns was a coveted
perk.

‘You look
bored,’ Terri commented as she walked into the observation booth
where Fox was watching tests. ‘You are watching Whitwallace testing
one of his solid-state laser rifle designs, and you look bored.
That’s not a good sign.’

Fox shrugged.
‘You look kind of irritated, with a hint of disappointment. That’s
not a good sign either.’

‘We ran into
problems with the data replication in Yliaster. There was an error,
and it propagated and compounded.’

‘And we need to
evacuate before our robot overlords demand our subservience?’

Terri managed a
grin. ‘No, we just ended up with a pool of sludge instead of a
viable nanoplastic.’ She appeared to consider for a second and then
added, ‘We got the sludge quickly, but sludge is no use.’

‘So Kit’s input
might be useful?’

Kit appeared as
Terri nodded. ‘Yes, Kit, I’m looking forward to getting that
diagnostic data. I’m taking a break, because I need one, and then
I’ll go back to hunting bugs. But something new to work with would
be useful.’

‘Our current
schedule has us back in New York on the twenty-sixth,’ Kit said. ‘I
can transmit the data to you overnight once we’re there.’

Terri sighed.
‘It’ll have to be good enough. I mean, we don’t even know that will
help…’

Fox chewed her
lip a second and then came to a decision. ‘What do you do for fun
in this place?’

‘Huh?’

‘You know? Fun?
The thing you do with the smiling and the not tearing your hair
out?’

‘Uh… You know,
I don’t have the slightest idea…’

Lunar Surface.

‘This is mildly crazy,’
Terri said as the little surface transport skimmed out over the
grey landscape. The far side was distinctly more rumpled than the
near side, so they were flying, if only at thirty metres or so.
They had the option of landing and driving, but you only bothered
doing that when you were where you wanted to be.

‘The pilot
knows what he’s doing,’ Fox replied. The pilot did not reply
because it was a fairly low-end AI with little in the way of
interaction capabilities. It was, apparently, rated quite highly at
piloting, however.

‘No, I mean… I
mean, why are we out here? There’s nothing much to see, really.
It’s the Moon. It’s grey. It’s… um, grey.’

‘It’s the far
side.’ Fox glanced at the console and tapped for attention. ‘Put us
down. Anywhere flat will do.’

The little
skimmer dropped to the surface and settled onto its six thick
wheels, but Fox did nothing to the controls. Instead, she just
shifted her behind forward in her chair and looked up through the
domed window which took up the front of the cockpit.

‘This,’ Fox
said, her voice hushed, ‘is the only place in the system where
there is no chance at all of seeing Earth. Out there, that’s a
whole, vast ocean of nothing. Space. Oblivion. You can get further
from Earth, sure. You can find people living on Mars. We have
miners in the asteroid belt. But they can always see home if they
want to. This place has to be the most isolated you can get if
you’re a human.’

Terri settled
back and looked out into the black. ‘I never thought of it like
that. I mean, yeah. That’s why they put Far Side Station out here.
There’s a bazillion tons of moon rock between here and Earth with
all its radio emissions. Great place for a radio telescope.’

‘Great place to
look at the stars.’

‘Great place to
have sex.’

‘Terri…’

‘I’ve never
understood why you won’t,’ Terri said, her tone more absent than
anything else. She was musing more than enquiring. ‘I know you
aren’t totally straight. Maybe you prefer men…’

‘I… wouldn’t
say it was a preference, more of a statistical imbalance. I’ve been
with more men than women. I’ve never actually dated a woman.’ She
pursed her lips and blew air out slowly. ‘I’ve not dated that many
men.’

‘So why not try
a girl? I mean, me, obviously. I’ve been pretty blatant about it,
right?’

‘I had
certainly not failed to notice your desires in that direction.’

‘So?’

‘It’s… I kind
of feel responsible for you. It feels kind of like I’d be letting
your father down.’

‘I don’t think
he’d–’

‘And it would
be kind of like letting me down. I went into Dallas to get you out
and I don’t think I got me out. I’m still there, rescuing you.
Taking down Marshall and the others helped, but I still have the
odd nightmare. It’s not over yet. When it is…’

There was
silence as they looked up at the stars: bright sparks of light
against the black. It was certainly calm, peaceful, and blessed by
the kind of serenity you could only get when you were isolated from
the rest of humanity by a few hundred kilometres of vacuum.

‘I can wait,’
Terri said.

‘Good.’

‘Even if doing
it here would be
really
amazing.’

Fox laughed.
‘We can always come back.’

BioTek Microtechnologies L4 Station,
25
^th
March 2060.

Mathematics had never
been one of Fox’s stronger subjects, so how the Lagrangian points
worked was beyond her. In any system where you had one body
orbiting another, you had five such points which provided some sort
of stable gravitational condition letting you hang space stations
there more easily. Just to make it all seem less credible, the two
least obvious of those, known as L4 and L5, or the Trojan Points,
were also the truly stable ones.

For the Moon,
the L4 point was in the same orbit as the Moon, but ahead of it as
it went around the Earth, and that was where an Austrian
biotechnology company BioTek Microtechnologies GmbH had decided to
build a space station. Doing so had been a brilliant move as far as
public safety and PR were concerned, but had almost bankrupted
them, and they had been bought up by MarTech Group. The BioTek
Microtechnologies name had been kept on, but they were now Jackson
Martins’ biotech research division, and that was why Fox had spent
the last couple of days on their station.

It was not a
bad place to visit. Spin gave you half of Earth-normal gravity
through most of the habitation areas, and Fox had a large, quite
luxurious, cabin to stay in. The place had over four hundred staff
and over six hundred scientists, and plenty of room for visitors.
BioTek had been justifiably concerned about security, and had
provided the station with a quite viable laser turret defence
system. The place was partially equipped to handle fuel storage and
production for visiting spaceships as well, which made it a useful
logistical addition to MarTech’s orbital facilities.

The research
going on there was not really anything Fox had a clue about. She
had had it all explained, but the details were going past her like
bullets from Whitwallace’s new machine gun. They were making
nano-scale machines based around organic technologies, which were
programmable and could perform a variety of functions
within
a body. These ‘nanosymbionts’ were going to revolutionise medical
technology, apparently. Basic models, designed to provide
antibacterial and antiviral functions, already existed, but the new
ones were going to be something else again.

BioTek did not
do biological modifications, like the mods Fox had had put in when
she joined the Army, though they
were
working on a method of
making such modifications easier to administer. They were also
working on artificial genomes, though that work was primarily at
the early testing stages. They could, theoretically, build an
entire DNA chain coding for whatever they wanted. It was just that
once you had done that, you had to turn it into a creature the
old-fashioned way, which was
very
difficult and often
failed. The man in charge of that research had been briefed on
Yliaster and was looking at it as a drowning man looks at a
lifebelt. Yliaster could build entire bodies out of basic proteins
and make his creations real.

Fox had spent
most of her time on the station worrying about nanovirus plagues
and Frankenstein-esque scientists. Again, she could find nothing
wrong with the security on the station; she was more worried about
some of the weirdos MarTech had inherited when they bought the
company. When Fox woke up on the day she was due to leave, she was
not exactly unhappy about it, but Kit appeared almost immediately
beside the bed, her expression serious. That was unlikely to be a
good thing.