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Knifing through the blank void of space like a silver dart, the Free Ship Exit Wound hurtled toward the safety of a lonely gate station. Her jump drives pulsed dim blue light, having already spent more than fifteen hours pushing the sleek craft to more than sixty million miles per hour. Driven to their very limit, the engines still glowed with residual energy though they had been silent for more than twenty-four hours. Within the bowels of the sleek warship, crew and passengers moved between compartments, simultaneously bored and nervous. Seasoned spacers kept their attention to the heavily armed Frigate in pursuit. They focused on maintaining and increasing Exit Wound’s lead over the following vessel with military precision and intensity. The exhausted engines were checked and rechecked by wide-eyed engineers. Tactical teams ran weapons drills every other hour. Command staff filed and examined tactical briefings with the kind of frequency normal people would find maddening. The air itself seemed thick with poorly concealed tension. While the crew fussed about with the tasks of maintaining a warship underway, the passengers wrestled with their own not-inconsiderable problems.
In a small compartment, one aging biotechnologist frowned and muttered garbled expletives at a black metal disk the size of a serving plate.
“What do you think, Don?”
Roland Tankowicz tried very hard not to loom. Peering over the shoulder of Dr. Donald Ribiero, the towering cyborg failed to mask his apprehension. Beneath his insistent gaze, the small balding scientist sat hunched over the unassuming black metal circle. A flat monitor had been placed across its surface, and the screen blinked and scrolled with data inscrutable to Roland’s uneducated eyes.
The old man twitched with irritation at the question. “I think this is going to take a longer with you staring over my shoulder like some kind of brooding gargoyle.”
Roland recognized that tone. His daughter used it too, on occasion. The inflection warned others that the Ribiero in question was not in the mood for interruptions. Roland decided to press onward despite the risk. “Is he still in there?”
Donald Ribiero sighed and looked up from the screen. “Something is still inside there. I see bits and pieces of organic code contained within the larger matrix. Could be memories, could be experiences or heuristics, I can’t tell yet. But you need to understand something, Roland...”
“And that is?”
“Chapman’s brain is gone. Destroyed by OmniCorp’s orbital weapons. There is no John Chapman left to recover, save what pieces were stolen and preserved by this...” he waved a hand in frustration, “this thing the Prospectors built to contain them. I hate to say this, but there are artifacts in this code that are making me very suspicious.”
“Suspicious? What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen some of this work before. In Lania Watanabe’s notes and in Chico Garibaldi. This ‘Sleeping Giant’ of theirs is much cruder, but I recognize the organic nature of some of the stored code. It’s her, Roland. I’d bet the house on it.”
Roland inhaled sharply and ground his teeth. A host of ugly memories wriggled at the mention of Lania Watanabe. Then a thought occurred to him, and he spoke without thinking. “But wait, can’t that be a good thing? Watanabe was able to preserve whole personalities as... ah, templates, right? Is Chapman’s template still swimming around in that thing?” Roland realized the moment the words escaped his mouth how ridiculous he must sound.
Dr. Ribiero said aloud what Roland had already realized. “Her systems do not preserve life, Roland. They preserve code. Anything this Sleeping Giant AI took from Chapman has already been incorporated into its own matrix. The result will not be John Chapman, any more than Chico Garibaldi was Torvald Haraldson or Roger Dawkins.” The old man looked up, and his face softened. “I’m sorry, Roland. I really am. I know what saving Chapman probably means to you. Maybe better than anyone. But I won’t lie, either. Chapman is gone. What he was protecting, the secrets he stole, however...” he tapped the black rectangle, “are still in here. It’s an enormous amount of data. You can make it right, in your own way. But sadly, we cannot save him.”
Roland felt his shoulders sag. “I suppose I figured that much already. I just sort of hoped, you know?”
“Hope is good, Roland. But...”
“Hope is not a plan,” the big man replied. “I know. You think you can crack all the encryptions?”
“The encryptions aren’t our problem at the moment. My job right now is to identify the important bits and pieces of information in here so we can eventually find what needs to be decrypted.” Ribiero shook his head and snorted in disgust. “This is very rough work by Watanabe’s standards. It lacks the organization and sophistication of the Garibaldi model. It’s an ugly mess if I’m being honest. It looks like somebody else got their hands on her code and only thought they understood it. The result is,” he bared teeth, “criminally stunted compared to what we know she can do.” As if catching his own deteriorating mood, the old man pressed his lips together and shook his head once more. With visible effort, Ribiero sucked in a long breath and released it over several seconds. Roland could see the tension leave his neck and shoulders and reminded himself for the hundredth time that the old scientist carried as much of the horror of their shared history as he did. If Roland was a monster, then Donald Ribiero was the mad scientist who created the monster.
As if now more centered, Dr. Ribiero’s face relaxed, and he re-assumed the affect of a patient professor. “I suspect that’s why Chapman was able to thwart the AI for so long. The AI could not parse useful information from emotional noise with any real success, and he hid the important bits behind walls of interference. The problem for us is that this interference is complete static. To both me and the Sleeping Giant, it’s pure noise. Nothing to decrypt, really. It’s impenetrable, which is why it worked. Unfortunately...”
“It’s working on us too, then?”
“Exactly. I know everybody is counting on me to just know how to unravel all this, but Watanabe’s systems are radically different from any other biotech I’ve worked on.” The old man pushed himself back from his improvised workstation and rubbed his face with both hands. “We took fundamentally different paths in our research. Take the Golems, for instance. What I achieved with you bears no resemblance to what Watanabe accomplished with Chico.” He struck his palm with a fist for emphasis. “My approach was always operator-oriented. I took a healthy brain and nervous system and replicated the existing physical and neurological structures with superior materials. I simply gave the existing brains more bandwidth and resilience with which to manage the added mass and sensory input of your armatures.” He jabbed a finger at the towering cyborg. “Your body works as well as it does because your brain does not know it’s piloting a half-ton of synthetic muscle and armor. You don’t crush everything you touch because your entire nervous system believes you’ve always been this strong, and magically has enough resolution in its feedback loops to regulate all that power as if you were born with it. You can catch a fly in flight because your reflexes enjoy superior architecture, not because I rewired your brain. Do you know why I took that path?”
“Because it worked?”
“Because I gave a shit about the people we were modifying, idiot.” The tone had returned, and Ribiero’s face vibrated with emotion. “My way preserves everything, including the humanity of the operator. We did not have to make you look or feel human, you know. I could have mounted your brain to any chassis at all. My nanobots would have rebuilt your brain to handle wherever you ended up physically with no trouble whatsoever.” Roland thought he might have heard a touch of professional pride there, though he knew better than to point it out. “You could be driving a ten-ton assault armature on some frozen backwater world right now. Just one little issue with that, though.”
Roland took the bait. Not because he needed the answer, but because he knew his friend needed to say some things out loud. “I’d probably go insane, eventually?”
Ribiero sneered and wobbled two hands. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to say. But you’d never be a human being again. I refused to go that route, and thankfully the military agreed with me. The UEDF did not need another giant war-bot, Roland. They needed enhanced human operators that could be deployed in a variety of environments and engagements, so we took great pains to preserve the human parts of our subjects. It’s the only reason I went along with it for as long as I did.” Ribiero’s eyes went to the floor. “The more fool I, I suppose.”
Roland, in a moment of uncharacteristic empathy, realized he need to steer Ribiero in a more productive direction. “And Watanabe didn’t?”
It worked. Ribiero met his eyes with a look both intense and angry. “Dear Lord, no. Human brains are merely templates to her. Things to be copied and pasted as needed, in part or in whole. She kept Chico’s brain operative with extremely invasive implants that corrected the strokes, seizures, and psychotic breaks he was prone to with chemicals and competing electrical signals. That this was probably painful and terrifying to her subjects seems not to have bothered her one whit. In Chapman’s case, the implants governed more than ninety percent of his total neurological activity most of the time.”
“Until they didn’t,” Roland said, and the rumble in his chest betrayed palpable satisfaction with the statement.
“Exactly. Chapman cut off access to his deepest levels with all this emotional static. The AI probably tried to counter it, and I suspect later versions probably could have. But in Chapman’s case, the AI had to back off or risk permanent damage to the one thing it was programmed to preserve.”
“Combat skill?”
“Yes. The Prospectors did not understand soldiers very well at all. A fact that will surprise no one, I’m sure. They could not understand that Chapman’s prowess in war was directly related to the emotional connection he had for those he protected.” Ribiero gave Roland a pointed look. “Especially his wife. When Chapman discovered that the Prospectors were putting his charges in danger, and then murdered his wife over it?” Ribiero smirked. “Let’s just say that the emotional feedback was far more intense than that poor undercooked AI could manage.”
“Fuck,” Roland said with a head shake. “They really screwed that one up.”
“Yes, well, no one ever wanted to listen to me when I’d point out that sort of problem back in the day, either. Too many academics don’t understand anything outside their fields of expertise.”
“But you were different, huh?”
“You’re forgetting why I got into synthetic neurology in the first place, Roland. Keeping Lucia alive and healthy was my only goal when I started working for the UEDF. The same technology that let you live in a powerful new body is what saved her life. I had to understand a soldier’s mind better than they did themselves, because preserving the mind was literally all I cared about at the time. Her mind, specifically, but the government did not need to know about that, right?” He smiled, and Roland nodded back. “Once my machines were working well enough for prototyping, we selected promising volunteers from the Expeditionary Force. You made the list, naturally.”
“What was left of me, you mean?”
“It was enough. Even so, they rushed me. We still lost far too many of them.”
“Nobody on the list had long to live, either way, Don. You gave us all a fighting chance.”
“I suppose that’s true, but I might have saved them all if I had more time!” The touch of vehemence in his voice no longer shocked Roland. Donald Ribiero had demons to rival his own, and Roland did not begrudge him that. “But getting your bodies up and running was really just the first bit. You remember those days? Lots and lots of trial and error at first. When I began to treat Lucia, I had to be extremely careful, as she did not have an armored body to protect her. I needed a steady stream of biofeedback to cultivate the right kinds of adaptations.” He shook his head at the memories. “I often wonder why it had to be all that fist-fighting with her. But I had to calibrate her progress somehow, and we both know she does not like to dance.” Ribiero shrugged, a faraway look in his eyes. “I spent years watching her train with martial artists, prizefighters, and ex-soldiers. I saw how their minds worked and used those observations to improve my process for both her and your unit. I credit that attention to detail with the success of the project.” His face sagged. “I guess we were a touch too successful, weren’t we, Roland?”
“Neither of us had any control over what they did, Don. And we’ve made them pay for it.”
“I suppose that is true. It’s all so surreal now. Back to my point, Watanabe just plucked what she needed from the neurological source code and shoehorned it into wherever she wanted to because she and so many others do not see the difference between the weapon and the wielder. The point is that I do see it. It’s why you keep winning and everything that has followed you fails. It’s why this Sleeping Giant abomination never broke Chapman’s mind. What has me furious is that she—and by extension I assume the Prospectors—deliberately damaged the brain in the process of extracting what they wanted.”
“Wait. His brain damage was not a side-effect?”
“No. When the Sleeping Giant identified an action potentials and neurological feedback loops related to combat skills, it would copy those and augment them. When it identified code or activity that had no relationship to fighting?” Ribiero made a snipping motion with two fingers. “Snip! It would interrupt and neutralize the signal with a competing signal. This created extra action potential for those tasks it wanted to improve upon. His reflexes and instincts for combat actually improved, but at the cost of memories, feelings, daydreams, interests, and really anything other than how to kill efficiently.”
Roland needed a moment to take in the enormity of that revelation. “So instead of building a computer that could think like a soldier, they were turning a living, breathing soldier into a computer?”
Ribiero’s jaw flexed while he considered the question. “That is something of a gross oversimplification, but yes. They were killing every part of Chapman’s brain that they did not feel improved his combat skills.”
“Which brings us back to his wife,” Roland sighed.
“Exactly. Chapman’s fighting skills were interconnected with many things the Sleeping Giant did not understand, such as his relationship with his wife.” The old man’s frown deepened. “In some ways the Sleeping Giant is a brilliant piece of technology, and in so many others it turned out to be staggeringly stupid.”
“That’s what happens when a bunch of self-righteous academic pacifists decide to try their hand at a war,” Roland grumbled. “They did not even know how much they didn’t know.”
“Dunning-Krueger effect,” said the old man.
“What?”
“Dunning-Krueger effect. It’s a cognitive bias where people with low mastery of a subject overestimate their competence because they do not even see all the ways they are wrong.”
“Sounds about right for the Prospectors, then. Speaking of which, has Dr. Freeman been any help?”
“Some, though to be honest he is still extremely traumatized by the nature of his escape from Prospectus. He can’t figure out if he is in awe of my accomplishments or disgusted by my libertine ways. What with the drinking and working on weapons systems and the like. Either way, he’s being aggressively medicated for PTSD at the moment.”
“He had never seen a violent act before two days ago, Don. The worst he could imagine was a stern talking-to from his manager. A prolonged gunfight was probably a bit too much for him.”
“Suddenly you’re the empathetic one?”
“Just making a point, Don. What’s next?”
“Next?” Ribiero’s eyebrows rose. “Next I bang my head against the desk trying to reverse-engineer this heap of garbage before I die of old age in the small hope we can exact some semblance of justice on behalf of one dead soldier.”
“That bad?”
“Roland,” said the old man with a withering glare, “Watanabe spent years, maybe decades, designing this system. I’ve been at it for about two days. What the hell do you think?”
“I think you’ll figure it out, eventually.”
“I suppose I will. It will be easier when we are back on Earth and I have access to better tools. Are we close to the gate yet?”
“Captain Fischer really pushed the engines hard. The good news is that we’ve added two days to our lead on that frigate. Fischer needed to shut the engines down for maintenance, so we’ll coast for another three hours while they make sure we don’t explode. Because we’re running at ludicrous speed, we’re gonna be in de-cel for fifteen hours, Don. De-cel looks like almost 50-G, so you’ll need to be in a G-pod soon if you don’t want to go home in a bucket.”
“So we gate in eighteen hours, huh?” Ribiero sighed. “That puts us home in three days, then.”
“Not exactly. We’ll need to layover at Enterprise for a day or two. Pike wants to secure the memory core, drop off wounded, and re-arm before burning the candle back to Earth.”
Ribiero sighed. “Well, so long as he has access to decent facilities, there’s a chance I’ll be able to accomplish something while stuck there, I suppose. I’ll do what I can here until then. But it won’t be much.”
“I have faith in you, Don.”
“Faith and five credits will get you a beer in Dockside, but not without the credits.”