Serpent's Gift (31 page)

"But what could have caused it?" Hing asked dazedly. "How did it happen?"

"They're saying the guidance beam cut in too soon, and brought the Mizari ship in too fast," he said.

"But--but those beams are automatic!" Hing protested. "They're controlled by the computer!"

"Yeah, that's what makes it so weird," the rescuer said. "The computers are supposed to be fail-safe."

"How could it happen?" Hing wondered again, speaking more to herself than to him. "How?"

"They don't know, Ms. Own," the man said wearily. "But I can tell you one thing, you can bet they're not going to quit until they find out."

Look at you, you're turning into a real chicken,
Heather fumed to herself, glaring at the computer screen.
That's what you get for being around all
these namby-pure StarBridge students. You start thinking like them! It's like a
damned contagious disease!

Ever since she'd begun working on Heathertoo today, she hadn't been able to shake the growing feeling that she was doing something really
wrong.

Scowling, she manipulated one of her computerpens, tapped an

accompanying command on the keyboard, and watched Heathertoo begin an imaginary discussion. The young programmer stared at the make-believe office, the furniture, the perfect setting. All fine. She checked Heathertoo's clothing, her hairstyle--that was okay, too.

So why couldn't Heathertoo function on her own yet? The body stance, the facial features, the slow uptake ... they still weren't right. Heather gnawed her lip in frustration. In a moment of brutal honesty, she had to admit that her creation was about as lifelike as a cheap Heeyoon animation.

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So
what?
she argued.
You can just go inside, become her, make her talk,
walk right, make her say the right things, act the right way. . .
She couldn't even convince herself.

Sure, she could just go into the machine, manipulate the program with her mind, nudge the organical y based artificial intel igence gently a little here, a little there, make it do what she wanted it to do. Doing it again would be so
easy--
the way it had been when she'd "fixed" Khuharkk's toilet. . .

So easy. Heather swallowed. Easy, all right. Easy to get caught. That day that Hing had come in and found her while she was inside Heathertoo--that could have been it, right there, if she hadn't managed to convince her roommate that she'd fallen asleep while studying. Then, of course, they'd begun listening to Serge's music and that had occupied all of their attention.

So it hadn't been until much later that it finally dawned on the girl exactly how close she'd come to disaster. Luckily, she'd been "out" long enough that the holo-tank had automatically dimmed to save power, so Hing hadn't seen Heathertoo's image. But she could have, if the older girl had come in only a few minutes earlier.

Uneasily, she remembered Rob's veiled threats after the toilet incident. What he would do to her if he even suspected Heather of being able to manipulate the computer from
inside
didn't bear thinking about.

Would Hing stick up for her? Heather's mouth tightened. Probably not. She liked Hing, true, but she had no illusions. Hing's job was to be a "good influence," to be a friend to the lonely little telepath--and, along with it, convince Heather to toe the line and become just another StarBridge student, upright and lily-white and oh-so-good and moral.

Face it, if Hing had any idea what Heather was up to inside the AI, she'd burn a path to Rob's door and there'd be one less telepath complicating things at StarBridge.

So, that means the game can go on . ..
she decided, manipulating Heathertoo, adding fine details.
But from now on, the main rule will be--
don

't get caught.

And her best chance at accomplishing that was to stay out of the damned AI.

It was just safer that way. Besides, she was a good programmer. With a little diligence, she could do this. It was slower, sure .. . but it would work. She tapped in a new code, overlaid a new intel igence/initiative matrix with her pen.

Heathertoo walked smoothly around the office, tapped a code on the keypad on her desk, moved the hair back away from

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her face.
Better,
Heather thought,
but not perfect.
She felt her frustration surge. Dammit, why did this have to be so hard?

"Helen," Heather said to the image, "how old are you?"

"Twenty-six," the woman said flatly. "How old are you?"

Heather frowned. She couldn't remember too many adults firing back such a blunt question. "Why'd you ask me that?"

"My interpersonal relationship matrix suggested it as part of a conversational give-and-take," the woman said calmly. The inflection in her voice was still wrong. It was more modulated than before, but still preternaturally calm, like someone who'd been through too much therapy.

Quit all this crap!
she ordered herself.
You could do this in ten minutes if you
just went in there. This is taking forever!

Heather closed her eyes, tried to ignore the impatient side of herself that was always getting her into trouble. She remembered Rob's warning that messing with even a simple toilet meant you were messing with the entire environmental system.

Messing with the AI is too risky, and you know it,
she told her impatient, pushy self. It was her survivor-self speaking, that canny side of her that always allowed her to come out on her two feet, if not on top.
There's no way
to know everything I might be affecting when I'm zipping around in there.

Remember, nobody's ever done it before. It's not like there's a tutorial to help
me do it correctly!

Not to mention that it was scary being inside the machine. Seductive. Like you could just stay in there and do stuff forever. Computers were cooperative like that. Total y nonjudgmental.

Grimly, she set back to work on Heathertoo. If she could make her appear
real
enough, Heathertoo could be independent, able to run all of Heather's financial dealings, even while her creator was off doing other things--like going to class, or having a sundae at the Spiral Arm with Hing, or even Serge and Hing. If she could perfect Heathertoo, she, Heather, wouldn't have to be tied down in front of this holo-tank, endlessly supervising her image in all the business transactions adults found so engrossing. Heather shook her head with a sigh. Talk about terminal boredom--and then,: realizing her pun, she giggled.

I'll just have to keep at it until the program works perfectly,
she thought, then sighed again as she fine-tuned Heathertoo's ¦ logic capabilities.
That's a big
order,
she mused, dismayed at the enormity of the task she'd set herself, feeling her determination and confidence waver.
You're just tired,
she assured herself.
You've been at this too long.

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And she was grumpy, too. She'd really wanted to go with Hing and Serge up to StarBridge Station to see the
Night Storm
come in, and maybe get introduced to those hotshots Serge was so excited about meeting. She'd been tempted to take Serge and Hing up on their invitation, but she'd finally declined, knowing this would be one of her best opportunities to work on Heathertoo in undisturbed privacy--and safety. She wondered whether Hing had believed her when she'd said she was going to study.

Got to get this done while Hing's gone,
the girl reminded herself.
Who knows
when I'll get another chance?

She keyed in another succession of commands, but that only made the expression on Heathertoo's face positively
dopey.
"Dammit!" she snarled, thumping her fist beside the keyboard.

Suddenly the computer blinked off, then on, as if the violence of her reaction had loosened something. The girl gasped, blinked herself, and stared. Her computer, like every other one on StarBridge, was tied into the main AI. It just didn't
blink
off! But it had. For just a half second. Heather felt uneasy, thinking about backward toilets and environmental systems--things she was fond of like gravity and air--all linked into the same computer. And was it her imagination, or did Heathertoo now look kind of dazed?

Got to be something wrong with this terminal,
she told herself, trying to believe it.
A hardware problem.

Then Heathertoo spoke. "The guidance beam setting is all wrong!" the image said clearly, with more emotion than Heather had ever been able to successfully program into her. "Guidance beam error--error, error--too soon--

too fast! Evacuate Docks Five and Six! Emergency override on that guidance beam!" The image was flushed, the eyes wide with terror. For a moment her image crawled, as though another's features were struggling to surface, then Heathertoo's countenance steadied, was normal again.

What the hell. .. ?
Heather stared at the image, but her creation's expression was calm, almost vapid--as usual. "Heathertoo, what's the matter? What's happening?"

The woman's image blinked calmly. "Nothing's the matter. Nothing's happening. What's happening with you?"

Heather nearly went into a rage at the stupid machine.
Docks Five and Six...

she thought,
we only have two docks down here at the Academy.
So that message had to be referring to the station. Could there have been some kind of bleedover or swapout that had cross-routed messages from the station?

Exiting the Heathertoo program, Heather set to work and soon

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tapped into the
Academy's Traffic Control console. The security at: the
school
was pretty good, but she was only eavesdropping,
which wasn't
hard to do.

The
moment she made the connection, Heather could see and hear the school's traffic controller, a woman with a long, thin face
and
curly brown hair, plus a young black man who, from what she picked up, had been hastily drafted from Janet Rodriguez's staff to assist her. She watched and listened as the two of them worked frantically, contacting ships in metaspace, rerouting them if possible, instructing them to assume a long orbit if they were too close to change course, and moving all those now waiting to dock over to the space on the other side of the station, where they were instructed to wait.

"How long?" one of the frustrated captains demanded. Heather could faintly hear his voice as it came over the controller's screen, but he was too far away for her to pick up his transmission directly. "We can't just hang by our toes until further notice! What the hell is wrong over at the station?"

"We don't
know
what's wrong," the Head Controller said calmly and firmly. A patch on her uniform identified her as T. Phillips. "And until we do know,
no
one
is to dock at the station. There's something wrong with the docking guidance beams. We can't risk allowing you--or anyone--to dock."

There was a garbled communication from another vessel; this one must have been even farther away, because Heather couldn't make it out. She had no way to enhance external communications.

"Yes, we've confirmed that the guidance beam brought a ship in too fast,"

Phillips said. "That's what all this is about, why the Academy is handling docking and traffic control communications while the station deals with the emergency. StarBridge Station has lost pressure in several areas, and sustained damage, we don't know how much yet."

Damage?
thought Heather.
Lost pressure? Shit, this sounds serious!

Yet a third ship demanded to know how long it would be before they could dock. "It shouldn't be too long," Phillips said, trying to project reassurance.

"We've got everyone available working on the problem. We're going to bring up the old manual routing system."

Squawks of protest resounded from her listeners. "I can't help it if your pilot is out of practice," she said, a touch of exasperation emerging. "I repeat,
all
dockings will be manual until further

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notice, but there will be
no
dockings until the emergency with the
Night
Storm
collision is dealt with."

Heather froze in her seat. The
Night Storm.
The ship Hing and Serge had gone to meet. Was that the one that had crashed?

"No"--Phillips shook her head--"we don't know the extent of the damage. All we know is that the ship was pulled in too fast, and crashed into the dock. All reports indicate that the
Night Storm
exploded during the crash. That station lost pressure in several of the docks, and in adjoining areas. The observation deck, for example--complete decompression there. We have no confirmed casualty count, but at least one person on the observation deck was killed. We have no idea what the total body count will be."

Hearing this, the child struggled for breath.
It couldn't have been Hing. Or
Serge! I'd know if either one of them died! I'd know!
But would she? The station was so far away. It was one thing to hear Hing's cry for help from the Lamont Cliffs, but all the way from the station? That was way too far!

Besides, if Hing and Serge had been sucked out into space would they even have the time to feel panic, or anything, before their bodies literally exploded from the inside out?

Heather bit her lip hard, trying to pull herself together.
Don't assume the
worst,
she thought.
They might not've been at the gate yet. They're probably
fine.

But another part of her mind whispered, brutally,
Just like your mother and
father, kiddo. Anyone who gets close to you has the worst luck, don't they?

Your mother, dead. Your father... insane, and despite your brave hopes that
someday he might get better, you know he never will. Never, never. . .

Shuddering, she clenched the edge of her terminal desk, clenching her teeth to stop herself from whimpering like a damned baby.