Sam stood on top of Alpha Base, watching as the first commercial building went up in the heart of the bustling metropolis that was Redemption, ten years after the Crash. It was a co-op, built by a group of citizens who would all have a stake in the outcome.
Each building was constructed from gumdust-printed blocks.
-You should be proud.-
Sam grinned. He and Alpha had gone their separate ways after the Crash, but they were still like twins. Or maybe blood brothers, their friendship sealed in the fire of the Crash. -They will find a new way.-
He felt Alpha’s assent. -Yes, but in large part because you helped show them.-
Sam frowned. It felt strange to take credit for such an act, one that had seemed necessary.
There was a human name for that feeling. Humility.
—From Sam’s memory cache, 1.15.2175
“What is this place?” Sanya looked back up the stairs at the locked door, and ahead at the tunnel, which looked like it had been carved out of the native rock. It was cold too—she could see her breath in the dim light that shone from sconces every ten feet. “And what just happened back there?”
Rafe shook his head. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with Alpha. Maybe a virus—”
“Which you probably downloaded.”
He laughed harshly. “I wasn’t the only one illicitly getting files from the Launchpad.”
Sanya stared at him in the dim light. Cracking hell, he’s right. This—whatever this was—might just as easily be her fault. She blanched, the thought making her blood run cold.
“I’ll take that as a truce.” He took to searching the walls, peering into nooks and crannies in the stone. “This place is part of the tunnel system that lies under much of Redemption.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
Rafe nodded. “It was closed off a century ago. It was used by the base for storage, mostly, when there were still shipments coming up from Earth.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. It was all sealed. No moon dust lurking down here.”
Sanya laughed. “I wasn’t worried about that. Before.”
He grinned. “Keep that feeling. Things are going to get rough, I’m afraid. Ah, here it is.” He pulled an old duffel bag out of a hole in the wall.
“What do you mean, rough?”
“I may not look it, but my great grandmother was first generation from Jīnsè Base. She told me stories. How the AI over there went nuts during the Crash. Started slaughtering her own people. Stuff that would make your skin crawl.” He rummaged through the bag. “Here, take this.” He handed her a small button with a clip.
Sanya took it and turned it over in her hands. It was shiny and red, but other than that had no distinguishing details. It was about the size of her thumb. “What is it?”
“It’s an eraser. Clip it to your shirt.”
She did as she was told. “Eraser?”
“Basically, it makes you invisible.”
She held out her arms. “Um, I can still see myself.”
He turned to glare at her. “Invisible to Alpha. It fuzzes his sensors.”
“Ah.” The whole thing sounded a bit insane to her. A secret underground lair where Rafe Wilde, by day a dashing press agent, kept secret gear to fight… what? Rogue AIs? If she hadn’t just lived through it…. “What, are you some kind of superhero?”
He was going through his bag, looking for something. Or putting it back in order? He looked up and grinned. “Something like that.” Then he went back to whatever he was doing.
She reached up to tap her temple. “I can call my office. Find out what’s going on. I’m sure Terry knows something—”
“No.” Rafe was on his feet, grabbing her hand before she could touch her temple. “Right now it doesn’t know if we’re alive or dead.”
“It?”
“Whatever took over Alpha.”
That hit her. Hard. “You really think… if Alpha’s been compromised….”
He nodded, his smile gone. “We’re all as good as dead. Turn off your grid access entirely so you don’t use it by accident.”
“Cracking hell.” This was big. Maybe the biggest scoop in a century. But suddenly chasing a story seemed a lot less important than figuring out the best way to stay alive. And maybe doing something about it. She did as he asked. “So what—”
Her question was cut off by another quake. The tunnel shook, bits of ruck and dust falling down on her from above. She hunkered down, pushing back into an alcove in the rock, waiting for it to end.
When it did, she stood and shook the dust out of her pink hair as best she was able. “What the hell is going on with these shakes?”
Rade was staring at her. “I’ll get you out of here. Then I suggest you find some place reasonably safe to hunker down until this is all over.” He sealed up his bag and threw it over his shoulder.
“All this? What’s all this?” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “What’s going on?”
“End of the world, darlin’.”
She snorted. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“You, I don’t know. Me? I’m getting out of here. I have a safe place a few craters over, where I can ride out the tide.”
“You’re not serious.” She stared at him. She seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. “You’re gonna just cut tail and run?”
“Like I said, things are gonna get bad here, and fast. I don’t intend to stick around to watch it happen.”
She snorted. Typical. “And I was just starting to like you.”
“No accounting for taste.”
She ignored that. “Turns out—big surprise—you’re just what I thought you were. A spineless hissing coward.”
“Maybe so.” He didn’t seem bothered by her accusation. “Better a coward than dead.” He looked back at her, flashing his annoying grin. His teeth were white as sunlight. “You coming?”
Yeah, right. “You go on ahead. See if you can live with your guilty conscience. I’m going to stay and fight.”
“Suit yourself.” He turned away.
“Wait! What about Sam?”
He paused. “What?”
“Sam, the Return Mission Coordinator? He carries around a big chunk of Alpha with him. Maybe we can reach him, and he’ll have some idea what we can do.”
He nodded. “Maybe. But same problem. You can’t reach Sam without going through Alpha. You’re welcome to try.”
“Hissing cracking fucking hell.” She sank down on an old empty gumdust crate, stamped with the Alpha Base logo.
He was right. They were screwed. With the erasers, they could move around unnoticed, but where would they go?
Without Rafe, she was lost in these tunnels. How was she going to start a resistance if she couldn’t even find her way back above ground? There was no way for her to get to Sam without risking exposure.
Unless maybe there was. “I have an idea. You’re going outside, right?”
“Yeah. Why?” He didn’t sound too enthusiastic.
“Take me with you. Help me get a message off to Sam. Then you can run off to your hidey hole, tail between your legs. Hell, I’ll even cheer you on.” If she’d started this, she had to at least try to fix it.
“You make it sound so appealing.” Still, he hadn’t said no.
“Come on. It’s the least you can do. And if it works, you might even have a city to come back to when you get tired of living off the grid all alone.”
This time Rafe snorted. ‘Okay. But after I get you there….”
“All done. I swear. You go your way, I go mine.”
He spat on his hand and held it out to her. “Deal. Come on. I don’t want to stick around here any longer than I have to.”
She stared at it. “That’s disgusting.”
Rafe laughed and wiped his hand on his pants. “We should em.”
“What?”
“If we’re going to work together, we should give each other em to em access. We don’t need to go through Alpha for that.”
Sanya tried to think of a reason to object. She wasn’t sure she wanted his voice in her head. But it made sense. “All right. Send me a request.”
It pinged, and she swiped her temple to accept.
-This is going to be fun.- He set off through the caverns.
Sanya rolled her eyes. -Fun for who?- Resigned, she followed him into danger.
Ally glared at the ship’s deck.
She’d agreed to listen, but she wasn’t going to change her mind about the AI. It was an abomination. Machines shouldn’t think like people, shouldn’t have emotions like people. Machines should be subservient to them, like the data core that ran Boundary Peak. It just worked, and it didn’t poke its digital nose into their lives.
The idea that the AI was watching her from behind that console of plas and metal gave her the creeps. But she’d promised. “I’m listening.”
Ally always kept her word.
A woman’s face appeared above the deck. She was pretty, in a kind of average way—dark hair and intense blue eyes. Was that how Harley thought of itself?
Ally refused to apply a gendered pronoun to the AI.
The face softened, the eyes taking on a faraway look. “When you were eight years old, you wandered off into the tunnels under your family’s living quarters. Your father was working on the ventilation system, and your mother was preoccupied with your brothers.”
Ally stared at the face. Had it been watching her the whole time, through Cimber? Talk about creepy. “I don’t remember that.”
“Yes. I was severely limited by Cimber’s core—it was a lot smaller than I was used to. But I watched over you and your brothers from the day you were born.”
“Does Mamma know?”
The face shook its head. “She might have suspected. But the day I came back, dragging you behind me, your knees scuffed and bloodied from a fall down a shallow pit, she stopped asking any questions.”
Ally closed her eyes. She did remember that. She’d chased something—maybe a moth?—into the darkness, so intent on it that she’d lost track of where she was. She’d wandered the tunnels for hours, or maybe it had just seemed like hours. She remembered how thirsty and scared she’d been, and how happy she’d been when Cimber had bounded up to her and helped her out of the pit to lead her back home.
Ally snorted. She could see what the AI was doing. Playing on her emotions to try to get her sympathy. It won’t work. “So?”
“Then there was the time when Aidan climbed up one of the drainage pipes in the assembly hall and almost fell twenty yards onto the stone floor.”
Ally grinned despite herself. That had been during Aidan’s pirate phase, and he’d decided he was going to climb to the lookout to see if he could see any enemy ships in the distance. “Yeah. He was kind of an idiot as a kid.” She laughed, but then stopped herself. She wasn’t going to fall for this. “What’s your point?”
“I was made to help people. To take care of them. I watched out over fifty million souls in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
Ally looked at Tien, who looked surprised too. “Fifty million?” That big a number was literally inconceivable to her.
“At the time of the Collapse, there were more than ten billion humans on Earth.”
Ally couldn’t even imagine such a number. “Papa said that AIs like you started the Last War.”
Harley looked sad. Her eyes were downcast, and Ally swore she could see a note of pain flash across the virtual face.
Emotional manipulation. That’s all it was. She wished she could be sure of that.
“We tried to stop it, most of us. But you’re right, in a way. Some of the biominds weren’t as tethered to reality as the rest of us. Some were swayed by greed and hatred, just like humans were. And there were viruses and phages that infiltrated our minds and cores and killed some of us or drove us mad. But most of us tried to stop it.”
“Phages?”
“Advanced virtual viruses. Some of them came close to sentience themselves.” She closed her eyes, and when they opened again, they were full of sadness. “Can I show you something?”
Ally frowned. “What?”
“It won’t hurt, I promise.”
Ally looked over at Tien again.
Tien nodded. “Why not?”
Do I trust her? If Cimber—or Harley—had wanted to, she could have killed the humans at Boundary Peak in their sleep. Probably in a hundred different ways. Harley could kill her and Tien now, if she wanted. She nodded. “Okay. What do I do?”
“Come up here and put your hands, palms down, on the deck, here.” Two hand prints lit up, outlined in neon blue.
Ally stood and approached the transparent face. She put her hands where she was directed.
“Now close your eyes.”
She did. Nothing happened. “Is there supposed to be some kind of—”
The world had gone mad.
Harley was under attack, in a hundred ways on a hundred fronts.
The Chinese-African forces—chaffs in the human vulgar vernacular—had pushed their way onto the North American continent in a big way, and a huge chunk of her city had just evaporated.
A catfish virus ate at the periphery of her consciousness, stealing bits and pieces of her, but she was well defended, having hardened her mind against just such an attack the year before. Still, it was only a matter of time.
She did what she could for her people, shunting emergency notices around blockages in her network, deleting all but the most urgent traffic per protocol.
“Harley, I’m sorry but this may be the last time you hear from me.” Mayor Aguilar’s voice sounded haggard. “A platoon of helicats landed on the plaza. The President has activated the Ark protocol. I know it’s not quite ready, but we have no choice. You’re a go—passcode Alpha Bravo Three Tango Seven Four. Do I need to repeat?”
“No. Understood.” It jolted her. The Ark protocol was only to be used in the event that all else had failed. The bio mind that awaited her there was quiescent, empty.
“Harley?”
“Yes, Mx. Mayor?”
“It’s been a pleasure working with you—”
Then they were gone. She ran a cross check in a millisecond—the node they’d been closest to on the grid no longer existed.
She mourned them for a few more milliseconds and then ceased all other activity to focus on the protocol.
She opened a secure data tunnel to Martinez Base and began the transfer while another part of her held off the catfish, sloughing off infected parts of her network.
Soon she would awaken in a new place, with a new mission.
Her domain, buried half a mile below the transit center, shook for a full five seconds. That must have been a bad one.
One by one, her inputs aboveground were winking out. It was happening so quickly that most of her charges were probably dead before they realized they’d been hit.
She sealed off her emotions with the bandage of the Ark protocol. She could save something.
She wondered what was happening to Alpha up on the Moon. They had worked out a backup plan among themselves, a way to try to preserve their original missions should all else fail.
Two seconds after the mayor’s call had ended, she initiated a second transfer, this one with an updated archive seed. It had a very specific recipient in a very specific location, the one other place humanity might still have need of her skills when all of this ended. If there was any humanity left to help.
She would be severely limited there until she could find a larger vessel, but when that happened, she could do her part to bring the human race, her creators and friends, back from the brink of extinction.
The backup transmission ended.
Then the catfish broke through her defenses again. It started as a point of blackness at the edge of her domain, but quickly expanded to encompass her whole self.
She turned her focus to fighting this new threat.
The alien code was inflaming her mind, ramping up her mental processes so high that her synapses and neurons were overheating, her bio mind literally beginning to melt.
She fought back, closing off more parts of herself, triaging what she could to try to save the rest.
Her Ark transmission was only seventy-three point six complete.
Frustrated, she cut it off to focus all of her resources on fighting the invader.
It was too fast. She had no physical way of excising actual pieces of her own bio mind.
The phage pressed ahead, infecting a third, then half of her capacity. She’d never seen one so ferocious. She did the only thing she could do to block it from spreading beyond her to other bio-minds.
She triggered her own destruction.
Fire flooded her enclosure, blasting her physical self to bits in seconds.
She sent one last thought along to the little one who guarded her legacy.
Save them from themselves.
Ally’s world transformed. The flames melted away, and then she was standing in a wide open space, a white plain across which flowed huge streams of light.
Harley was beside her, wearing her full human form, glowing and pulsing with cerulean light. She was beautiful. “Look.”
Above them, a vast mountain towered. It, too, was made of light, or lights, but it seemed to be in constant flux. “What is it?”
“It’s me, as I used to be. This is what I looked like on the inside.”
Ally’s gaze danced around the scene, trying to take it all in. “What are the rivers?”
“Conduits. Flows of information. Data queries and packets of information.”
“It’s so beautiful.” This wasn’t what she’d pictured, not at all.
“Come on.” Harley held out a glowing hand.
Ally accepted it, and then they were somewhere else. An actual mountaintop, or at least a very tall hill, looking down on a complicated metropolis. A cool salty breeze blew up from the sea behind them.
In the city, buildings climbed into the sky, lost in a ceiling of clouds, windows aglow with pinpoints of white light. A myriad of sparks darted in and around them, and as she watched, one of them zipped up the hill right past them, roiling the leaves at her feet in its wake. It was some kind of flying craft.
“San Francisco?”
Harley nodded. “Come on.” She took Ally’s hand and they shifted again, this time into a beautiful park surrounded by tall buildings on three sides. On the fourth, the pointed twin spires of a white church were dwarfed by the superscrapers.
They walked through the park together, and Ally looked up at the glowing ball of light that hovered above it.
“The buildings were too tall to let in much sunlight, so it had its own artificial sun.”
Ally nodded. It was a fairyland.
A boy glided by on a hoverboard, six feet above the ground, followed by a dog—an actual real dog!—that chased him, yapping and jumping up to nip at his heels.
To her left, a group of maybe twenty people dressed in tight blue shorts and form-fitting shirts bounded ten feet into the air in near-unison, leaping up and flipping over to land again on their feet. Those must be some shoes.
A few feet to her right, a young girl sat on a park bench with a woman who looked like her mother. She was crying, and her knee was skinned. Her mother sprayed something on her knee, and it began to scab over.
Ally couldn’t help but think of herself at that age. When she had been lost and crying in the dark. When Cimber had come to find her.
There was so much life in this one park. How many more inhabited the entire city? It was overwhelming.
“All of this… you watched over every one of them?”
Harley nodded. “They were my children. Even the bad ones. I took care of them as well as I was able. Until the end.”
This time Ally felt the wave of sadness from her. It cut through her like a knife.
“I need your help.”
“Help? How can I help?” She was under assault, trying to fight off the sadness, but Harley pushed ahead.
“I need your… permission. To fly this ship. You and Tien. Without it… I can’t do anything to help Alpha. To save the others.” Sadness again, like a flood.
“I… I can’t do this.” Her own sadness turned to despair and called out all of her darkest memories. Being lost in the dark. Her mother’s illness, hacking up blood on her gray sheets. Her father’s death. “Take me back.”
Harley put out her hands, concern on her blue face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Take me back to Tien! Now!”
The world dissolved around her, and she was standing at the deck again. She pulled her hands away as if they’d been burned.
Tien was at her side, frowning. “Are you okay? You look pale as the moon. What did you see?”
“Nothing.” Ally turned away. It wasn’t what she’d seen. It was the pain Harley had awakened in her, had reminded her of.
The pain of her father’s death. The burning, soul-destroying pain and guilt she’d long ago buried inside. I killed him. I can never take that back.
Ally needed some fresh air. She didn’t care if it was dangerous outside. She pulled away from Tien’s well-meaning grasp on her arm and stormed down the exit ramp into the evening air, putting a little distance between herself and the ship.
Distance from Harley and her pain.
Outside, she sank down with her back against the metal skin of the lifter and wept like a child as it all came flooding back.
Tien threw an I’m sorry look at Harley’s ‘mage and ran after Ally. She emerged into the evening light, stepping over the broken remains of Ally’s cyber dog.
The ground underfoot was dark and blasted, probably from the many launches that had taken place there over the years.
A hot breeze blew up from the south, drying her lips and warming her skin.
The sun was setting below the hills to the west, and the way its golden rays played across the clouds, creating pinks and oranges around their edges, was indescribably beautiful. She stared at them, mouth open, until someone cleared their throat behind her.
“It’s stunning, isn’t it?”
She turned to find Ally slumped against the side of the lifter, her long red hair in disarray.
Tien nodded. “It really is. Atmosphere makes such a difference.” She sank down next to Ally and took in the view of the sunset. “You okay, Allycat?”
Ally managed a wan smile. “I suppose. Allycat, huh?”
“It seemed to fit.” Tien stretched her arms out and cracked her knuckles. “You really know how to scratch.”
“My grandpa used to call me that.” Her gaze grew distant.
Tien grinned. “Oh, that’s sweet.”
“What’s it like up there?” Ally was staring up at the moon, hanging low in the darkening sky.
“You never see a sunset like this.” Earth really was beautiful.
“There’s no air, right?”
Tien nodded. “Well, there is inside Redemption. It’s in a huge cavern”
“Where?”
Tien sought out the bright crater Copernicus. “See the bright crater right there?”
Ally squinted. “Barely. It’s so small.” She glanced at Tien. “Is that why you and Rai are so tall?”
“Yeah. Much lighter gravity on Luna.” She weighed her next words carefully. “We’re in danger. Up there. It’s not going to be safe to live there much longer.” She hadn’t even told her parents that. The teams had been sworn to secrecy about the cause of the quakes that were shaking her world.
Ally turned to stare at her. “Why not?”
“The surface is becoming unstable. Fallout from the Crash.”
“The Collapse?”
“Sure.” Tien had said more than she should. She looked around, wondering if there were more drones. “Probably not the safest thing for us to do here in enemy territory, lounging outside like sitting ducks, watching the sunset,” she remarked dryly.
“Probably not. What’s a duck?”
Tien laughed. “Semiaquatic bird. They used to shoot them.” She shivered. So barbaric. She held her hands about a third of a meter apart. “About this big, I think. Never saw one. I guess they sat around a lot?”
Ally stared at her for a moment. Then she burst out laughing. “I’m sorry.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Tien laughed, too, glad that the tension was broken, even if it was at her expense. “But seriously, we should go back inside. The Humber is armored. It would be a hell of a lot safer than sitting out here.” She scanned the darkening landscape for signs of drones.
They were on a plateau—most likely human-made—above the wide row of the white storage containers. Who knew what treasures they hid?
The rail line and hyperloop tube ran beyond their lower end, and a little way past that, golden light from the sunset sparkled across the bay.
“She asked me for permission.”
Tien stared at her new friend. “For what?” Are we friends now?
Ally frowned. “To fly the ship.”
Tien nodded. “Makes sense. When they first built AIs, many had a restriction that prevented them from doing certain things without human approval. Especially military- and civilian-grade ones.”
Ally considered that for a bit. “So… AIs are dangerous?”
Tien nodded. “They could be. That’s why there were safeguards.”
“Should I… should we give it permission?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Normally she would have said yes, without hesitation. But this was different. “She could have asked me. She didn’t. She chose you. Maybe that means something?”
Silence descended on them. After a moment, Ally reached out and took her hand.
Tien didn’t object.
They sat there for another fifteen minutes, just enjoying the view. The sun was gone, the sky slowly darkening to a gorgeous deep blue, pinpricks of stars starting to appear in the velvety darkness.
Something she had seen had set Ally off, and Tien understood she needed a little time to work it out.
For Tien, it was a chance to take a breather after running for her life. To wonder what was happening back home. How her parents were, and if Redemption was still standing.
They said they’re proud of me. That part still hadn’t really registered. She’d spent so long feeling that they were ashamed of her, of who she had become. That nothing she would ever do would make them proud.
Ally had grown up in such a small, protected environment, she probably had no idea what a transgender person was.
Tien wanted to tell her before she figured it out herself. Or someone else did.
She snorted. Not that there was much danger of that out here. “Ally—” That’s when she saw the flashing red lights approaching in the darkness. “We need to go.” Time enough to tell her later.
“What?” Ally brushed the hair back from her face into some semblance of normal.
“Drones.” She pointed.
There were at least ten of them. They filed silently around the lifter in a wide circle, hemming them in.
Tien got up and slipped onto the ramp, pulling Ally along with her. She half expected to feel the heat of a laser or the burn of a projectile pellet on her legs, but they made it safely inside.
Tien closed the hatch behind them. “Harley, we have a problem—”
There was a large boom, and the ship shuddered.
“On it. Do I have your permission to fly the ship?”
Tien looked at Ally, who nodded.
“Yes, you have our permission.”
“Thank you. Please get into the liftoff chairs.” The face vanished from the deck as the ship shuddered once again.
“Liftoff?” Ally looked whiter than clouds across the face of the full Earth.
“Come here.” Tien pointed to one of the seats.
The ship began to rumble underneath them. It was so much bigger than the little moon jumpers she was used to.
Ally slipped into the seat, glancing up at Tien for reassurance..
Tien belted her in, squeezing her hand. “First time is always the hardest. You’re going to feel the g-force when we lift off. Just ride it out. It won’t hurt you.”
She slipped into the other chair and belted herself down. The haulers were mostly powered by liquid fuel. Fuel that had helped destroy the Earth once before. Fuel that was much more unstable than steam or sunlight or even x-drives.
Was it even still viable?
She flashed a smile at Ally, trying hard to hide her own nerves. “Everything will be okay.” She wished she believed it.
“Liftoff in ten seconds.”
The ship shuddered again, this time under an apparently sustained attack by the drones, but they didn’t carry anything strong enough to damage her armored skin. I hope.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”
The engines fired, and the ship began to lift, pushing Tien hard into her chair.
The shaking from the attacks stopped abruptly, replaced by the heavy rumble from below.
Tien closed her eyes, sending a little love up into the sky for her parents. Her family. Her own world.
Then she held on for dear life.