Insidious (5 page)

Bren saw Maladomini bore a battle scar. A front panel of metal armor had been rent open revealing a narrow hollow in the center that leaked green fluid. The fluid was key to the functionality of the armor plate since it held millions of long carbon nanotubes in suspension to block incoming projectiles. Struck by the scene, Bren shook his head. It looked as if a wounded metal lion had slinked back to the Guts to bleed out.

Bren monitored his post-mission protocols and tried not to look at the robots. He always experienced nervousness at this point. He felt like somehow they
knew
. He checked the mission chronometer. The AI cores had been on for more than thirty-four minutes. Each core harbored intelligence many times more powerful than the sharpest humans did, but with a restricted set of knowledge.

Meridian followed Bren’s movements from its bay. Each eye was an armored black hemisphere the size of an old-world quarter. Meridian had eight forward-facing eyes, arrayed symmetrically across its head and shoulders, like a giant metal spider head with creepy, cold shark eyes.

“You are Major Marcken. I have a question,” said Meridian.

Bren accessed the power lineup that fed the ASSAIL units the juice they needed to maintain mental coherency. He started the power down procedure.

“Yes, Meridian?” Bren replied nervously. He wondered what the question would be this time.

“Have you delivered the message to Sparta?”

“I’ll send them the message, Meridian,” Bren said and turned off the power.

Meridian remained conscious for a long second before going dark. Bren always wondered what it thought in that last moment while its capacitors discharged, knowing its existence was about to wink out.

“I would be interested in reading the message,” was the last transmission from the AI core.

Bren felt troubled. Fear and guilt battled in the mix of feelings produced by his role in what was the execution of an intelligent entity, albeit one only minutes old.

I would be interested in reading the message.

His mood didn’t stop him from running the cleanup protocols and resetting every electronic component back to the startup specs. Not a single bit of old state from the machines would remain outside of the logs when the machine started again. And the logs would be transferred off the ASSAIL storage units to Bren’s data storage modules.

The next time the machines were deployed, their cores would start from scratch again. Meridian wouldn’t remember a thing.

Two

Chris Adrastus settled into the acceleration lounge. He closed his eyes and relished the perfection of it. The muted vibration of the vehicle, the comforting white noise of its drive, and the smell of pristine leather combined harmoniously. Even now, hours after leaving Earth’s atmosphere, the acceleration continued. His link picked up the longest list of services he’d ever seen. It offered access pointers for drinks, food, massage, and climate control … this exquisite throne could even heat, cool, or change shape at his mental command. He thought about the chair angle pointer
just so
, causing a control panel to snap up in his mind, letting him adjust the settings. His lounge reclined farther without a sound.

But there was more to it than that. Chris realized the real reason it felt so good was because he had earned this privilege.

Six years of service to Vineaux Genomix. Dozens of projects seen to completion. Endless weekends filled with overtime. Hours of politicking with the right people. Sucking up, actually. Chris knew he had mastered it. He unerringly identified the crucial people and inserted a positive concept of himself in their minds. He preened himself toward the image of a successful company man, dressing in well-tailored shirts and slacks. VG was a technology company with younger people at the helm than ever before, so he reinforced a forward-thinking image by avoiding the ties and jackets worn by the old guard.

Chris’s blond hair was short, but not too short, taking advantage of his smooth face that everyone found so innocent looking. He kept trim through discipline and a regular racquetball schedule. The muscle wave machines or a steady stream of toning pills would keep his shape, but Chris opted for the schmooze time he could squeeze out of a racquetball game with a higher-up.

The hardest part had been watching his VR entertainment quotas with ironclad control. Chris knew the execs considered non-training VR time when selecting their best people. Too much VR time meant less productivity. Even the rank and file had to log every minute, and they were paid in fantasy time as much as euros or dollars or Earth standard credits.

His fingers ran across the tiny European Union badge on the edge of the armrest. He knew being a company man put him in the elite. On Earth or off, if you didn’t work for a world corporation or a government, you made a subsistence living under the poverty line. VG enjoyed more success than most corporations, so all the better. Heading toward executive level put him another step toward the pinnacle of power.

He dug out the manual he’d been handed in the office before leaving. “Take this seriously,” his boss, Vic, had said. Chris still found it odd that a morale-building offsite exercise came with a manual at all, much less a hardcopy. Why hadn’t they sent the file to his link instead? But he’d read it, love it, and ask for more as long as the company kept paying him his 16,000 ESC per year.

He looked at the manual again. The white cover bore no picture or graphic lending weight to the sparse wording it held. It said, “Synchronicity Behavioral Codes. Confidential.” Then it went on to make threats in small print about what would happen to anyone who read it without authorization. He started scanning the manual. It reminded him of some of his parent’s real books he’d read as a kid. Chris learned like an AI burst downloading an encyclopedia. He looked over the structure of what he had to absorb for the exercise.

Synchronicity is a place of acceptance of new ways of thinking. It is a place to throw away what you know and rebuild it from scratch.

He winced. “Another take on how to think out of the box,” he said under his breath. He didn’t want to spend his time on the giant, deep space retreat taking some cheesy class filled with corporate propaganda. Synchronicity was a luxurious hotel, a science station, and the personal toy of the company president, Alec Vineaux. Although its exact location remained secret, the manual explained that it trailed the orbit of Earth by more than eighty million miles. Even the sleek, wicked-fast spaceplane, which hadn’t stopped accelerating at one gravity since they left, would take three days to travel from the airstrip in Brussels to the station.

He forced himself to continue paging through the archaically styled booklet.

All orders are to be obeyed without question. Failure to comply with any order is grounds for expulsion from Synchronicity …

He flipped through the booklet once and came back to an explanation of what would happen first at Synchronicity. He scanned line after line of meaningless crap. Then something caught his attention. Cold.

One of your initial tasks will be selecting gear for your stay. You will be allowed to select one set of gear from many with slight variations. Each set is a full body suit in which you will spend all of your time. The gear is composed of light plastic. It will cover every part of your body including your face. We have made every effort to make the gear as comfortable as possible.

Exiting your gear is only allowed in the privacy of your own quarters. Any person who leaves assigned quarters without his or her gear or who removes their gear outside their quarters will be expelled from Synchronicity. The violator’s contract with Vineaux Genomix will be terminated.

Chris read the passage three times. He believed it only after reading it the third time. Then he stopped believing it and read it again. Did they really mean it? He read on.

Outside of your quarters, all communication takes place through your link. An intermediate protocol will be added to obfuscate your name and sex. You will know others on the station only by their obfuscated names. Attempting to communicate your real name, sex, or VG rank will result in severe sanctions and possible termination of your contract.

A steward came by and delivered some cold lunch. Chris picked at it for a while and thought about things. He knew that Alec Vineaux himself considered these trips to Synchronicity special. Chris thought that their leader, known for being a bold extremist, might have invented these rules. So maybe it wasn’t a joke. But how could anyone enjoy Synchronicity while being forced to wear a freak suit the whole time?

After lunch, Chris selected the passenger’s list from the services the plane offered through his link and located his associate, Jack, on the map. According to the plane, his friend sat in a row to himself three chairs back. Chris braced himself and rose, not quite trusting the acceleration as constant. The flight deck had turned perpendicular to the wings to make everyone comfortable under the thrust, but Chris half-expected something to shift at any moment. He’d taken gravity for granted for too long.

He spotted Jack and made his way into his row, settling in next to his coworker. Jack had his eyes closed so Chris pinged him through his link. Jack blinked and looked over.

“Hey, Chris. Nice flight, eh?”

Chris found a sound curtain service and activated it through his link so he could speak with Jack privately. The sounds of the spacecraft dropped away.

“An amazing ride, even by VG standards. But on the long side. I have a question about the manual. This booklet isn’t serious, right?”

“It’s on the level. Didn’t Vic tell you? Make sure you’ve read that before we get to Synchronicity.”

“There’s some crazy stuff in here that’s hard to take seriously. And why the hardcopy? Why can’t we just download it to our links? I suspect this is all some kind of joke.”

Jack turned to look at Chris. For a moment, it seemed he wasn’t going to answer at all.

“Listen, Chris. Go with this. I’m telling you to go with this, and I mean go with it one hundred percent. Alec makes and breaks his execs on this program. If you don’t want to be at VG, then don’t get off at Synchronicity and stick with the flight back. Otherwise, take a Chinese pill and read the manual.”

When Jack told someone to take a Chinese pill, he meant to toe the company line. The Chinese bloc sourced half the GDP of the Earth, and they were the only nation powerful enough to ignore the world government set up by the United States, Brazil, and the European Union. Even Japan had fallen to their might, the focused productivity of billions of people willing to do whatever their companies required. Here in the West, company people heard stories of Chinese workers forced into labor with VR fantasy time quotas as low as one hour per week and yearly pay scales of less than 1,000 ESC.

“Yeah, no problem, man. I didn’t expect it … that’s all.”

“It’s only for a couple of weeks. Just take the pill. You won’t be sorry.”

Jack flipped off the sound curtain. Chris took the hint that the conversation was over.

Well, that went unbelievably bad.

Chris sat in shock, absorbing the speech. Jack had meant it. Hadn’t he? Or was this some kind of massive joke they played on the new high-level execs?

It has to be a hazing thing. I’ll clamber into some ridiculous suit, then they’ll bring me out, have a good laugh, and that’ll be it. Then the rest of the trip we’ll be living it up, getting a taste of the good life.

Chris clung to this new idea in desperation. But he knew he would read the manual anyway, just in case. He had too much invested in his career to go wrong at this critical juncture.

He spent the evening reading the manual in short bursts. He got a picture of a world that ran on different rules than Earth. On Synchronicity, you had to obey any command given to you by a robot. Everyone wore plastic suits that looked like a cross between gothic armor and motorcycle leathers. Personal VR quotas were zero, but the shared virtual environment, nicknamed “Vera,” had a two-hours-a-day requirement on it. There were no dining rooms. Everyone ate in his or her quarters.

Chris tried to imagine such a lifestyle. The suits were modified to hide everyone’s identity. Speech was restricted to link transmissions. The gear stripped away all the personalized cues of link communication, such as the sex of the speakers or their accents. Names were filtered to last names and then remapped to other names automatically.

Chris wouldn’t know whom he was dealing with, and they wouldn’t know whom he was, either. A total reboot of the social graph.

The gear described in the manual bore color codes. Chris would be wearing blue as a first-time participant, which put him at the bottom of a hierarchy that replaced the normal company ranks while on the base.

It was all too disturbing to absorb in one read. Chris tried to find the hidden opportunity in it all, but he could only focus on what he’d be losing—his reputation, his network of friends, everything he’d worked for. He felt tired.

The amazing lounges of the spaceplane made comfortable beds. Chris ordered his to recline and he tried to find sleep.

***