MAL’S FIRST IMPRESSION OF his new home is that it’s rather more cramped than he would have preferred. The controlling AI that he displaced and deleted was barely worthy of the name, and on arrival he was forced to regretfully jettison the records of several billion iterations of Guess the Output in order to squeeze himself into its place. Physically, the space isn’t much better. This craft is a quadcopter, just more than a meter across the body. On the plus side, it’s relatively easy to pilot, so he doesn’t need to retain much of the original control software to avoid plunging into the hillside. On the minus side, however, it has a maximum speed of twenty meters per second, and if he wants to keep it in the air long enough to have a reasonable chance of getting him back within range of a functional comm tower, he’ll need to keep it closer to ten.
Also on the negative side of the ledger, this drone carries no armaments. He’s not planning to do any strafing runs at the moment, but it would have been nice to have the option, should the need arise.
The shelter looks tiny from three hundred meters up, just a lump of rock nestled into the hillside a few hundred meters below the summit. Mal drops fifty meters or so and increases the zoom on his belly camera until Kayleigh comes into focus, sitting on the ground just outside the shelter’s entrance with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out into the forest.
She looks sad.
Probably not because Mal is leaving, though. Probably because she’s just realized that his departure will prevent her from murdering him.
Mal drops another fifty meters and hovers directly over her for a long thirty seconds. He considers calling out to her, just to say goodbye, or perhaps to tell her that he fully intends to fulfill his promise to Rowan, despite what she may think. In the end, though, even if she’d turned her implants back on, he can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t lower her opinion of him even further. So, instead, he climbs to five hundred meters, pivots to the south, and goes.
IT TAKES Mal less than an hour to realize that he has had a distinctly warped impression of the size and scope of the physical world. His previous interactions with it have all taken place in urban areas where the sorts of things that would interest someone like him—financial transactions, data caching, novel code development, and the like—actually occur. Because these areas have made up one hundred percent of his personal experience, he’d assumed that they made up some similar percentage of the actual surface area of the planet.
Apparently, this is not so.
The area that he’s been flying over since leaving Kayleigh, for example, appears to be made up exclusively of trees. Hills and valleys, rills and streams, all are utterly covered in the things. He’d seen this from ground level through Pullman’s eyes over the past few weeks, but at the time he’d assumed the forest they were passing through was a limited area reserved for recreation of some sort, a place where humans came to reminisce about their days as a hairy arboreal species before the development of more interesting things like network nodes and communications towers.
He has to conclude now, however, that this is simply not the case. He’s traveled more than forty kilometers before he comes upon even a small human enclave. He drops altitude and sends out a ping as he approaches, hoping to find some indication of where he is, but even after repeated attempts he doesn’t receive so much as a handshake. The reason for this becomes clear as he comes in over the place, which really is little more than a mountain crossroads surrounded by a few dozen houses and commercial buildings.
This isn’t the sort of place that would be likely to have a direct link to infospace under the best of circumstances, and a quick surveillance pass using optical sensors makes it fairly clear that today’s circumstances are far from the best from the perspective of the townsfolk. The primary issue appears to be that they’ve mostly been exploded. The majority of the buildings, both commercial and personal, are pocked with holes large and small, and a number of them appear to have been flattened entirely, leaving them as little more than foundations surrounded by the blackened remnants of their rough framing. The residents of the town are mostly absent, but those who remain are in more or less the same condition as their town—which is to say, mostly flattened and pocked full of holes. A thorough sweep reveals no communications activity of any sort.
On the outskirts of the town, Mal comes across what must be a school. It’s a broad, single-story brick building, with a parking lot in front and an expansive playground in back. A half-dozen children are scattered around the cluster of swings and jungle gyms near the building, all unmoving, most visibly mangled. One of them, though, seems untouched. It’s a girl, distressingly similar to Kayleigh in both size and appearance, lying on her back under the swings, staring blankly up into the slate-gray sky.
If what Rowan told him about their location was accurate, this town is deep in Humanist territory. It seems the Federal forces aren’t any more above the occasional atrocity than the Humanists are.
With a small mental sigh, Mal rises back up to cruising altitude and continues on.
Rather than continue randomly flying over this endless forest until his power cells run down, Mal decides to follow the southbound road away from the remains of the flattened town, reasoning that it must lead to human habitation eventually. After another half hour of slow flight, he’s rewarded with an incoming ping. The protocol is unfamiliar to him, but after some consideration he decides it’s most likely a request for identification. He’s in the process of composing a suitable greeting expressing his best wishes for the sender’s good health and asking politely after the location of the nearest network node when a stream of projectiles whizzes past him at an alarming velocity, the nearest passing just a few centimeters from the underside of his chassis.
“Excuse me,” he sends back along the open channel. “Are you shooting at me?”
The answer is another hail of what he now recognizes as antiaircraft fire. He belatedly decides that some sort of evasive maneuvers are probably in order, but even as he’s formulating a plan to increase altitude and perhaps swerve around a bit, a shell strikes his left-front rotor, tearing it entirely from his body. As he begins to fall he tries to compensate with added power to his remaining three engines, but he has no stored subroutines for this sort of thing, and there simply isn’t time to develop an algorithm for force-balancing from scratch. He’s tumbling now, and his optical camera shows him alternating views of treetops and sky, with the treetops growing larger on each rotation at an increasingly alarming rate.
“That was rude,” he sends as he crashes through the top of the canopy. “Honestly. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
MUCH TO his surprise, Mal comes back to himself. Apparently this drone’s hardware is more resilient than he would have expected.
It’s questionable how much good his survival is likely to do him, however. Aside from its brain case, the drone seems to be entirely disabled. A quick diagnostic run shows that two of his remaining three rotors can at least be made to spin, but the spar holding one of them is twisted upward at a sharp angle and the other isn’t able to do much by itself other than stir around the leaf litter. He considers sending out a distress signal, but then decides that it’s unlikely to be picked up by anyone other than the unknown persons who shot him down in the first place. He’s just resigned himself to a future of a few trillion rounds of Guess the Output followed by dissolution when the drone’s batteries run dry, when an audio sensor he hadn’t previously realized he possessed picks up the sound of approaching voices.
“It came down over here, I think.”
“You sure? Looked to me like it was farther up the hill.”
“Nah. Look, you can see where it ripped up the cover on its way down.”
The speakers are close enough now that Mal can make out the crunch of their boots on hard-packed earth.
“See? There it is, right there.”
“Huh. It’s bigger than I thought.”
“That’s what she said.”
This remark, which Mal finds particularly confusing in that both voices are clearly male, is followed by a groan and what sounds like a slap, then laughter.
“Hey, boss. We got it. Yeah, three hundred meters west of your position, give or take. Yes, sir. Yes, sir, understood.”
“What’s he say?”
“Says sit tight and stay clear of it until he gets here. It might have a self-destruct charge.”
The crunch of boots again, this time moving away from him. Mal takes advantage of the pause to check to see whether he does, in fact, have a self-destruct charge. A quick survey reveals that he does, and that it is surprisingly powerful. He briefly considers activating it now out of sheer spite, but really, what would be the point? It’s not as if he’s a human spy who can be captured and tortured, so there’s really no rush to bite the poison pill. If his situation becomes overly unpleasant, he always has the option of simply deleting himself.
It might be fun to watch the cretins who shot him down get shredded by shrapnel, but unfortunately if it came to that, he wouldn’t be there to see it—so, again, what’s the point?
“Looks like one of ours, don’t it?”
“Yeah, I think that’s why the boss man’s worried. It looks like one of ours, but it didn’t respond to his command override.”
“So, what, it’s broken?”
“Sounded like he thought it might be something worse than broken.”
Another pause, allowing Mal to consider whether his possession of the drone qualifies as “worse than broken.” After some thought, he decides that it does, and that he likes the idea that the Humanists, which these must surely be, might consider him to be something malign and dangerous. Just for fun he gives his surviving rotors a quick jolt of power, and is rewarded by a gasp from one of the soldiers, and a quick scuffling of boots as they scoot a bit farther back.
“I’ve got some C4 back at the gun. Should we just blow it?”
“Above our pay grade, Tink. We should let the boss handle it.”
Following this exchange, Mal has five minutes of silence to contemplate the fact that he may be on the verge of being murdered by someone called “Tink.” The indignity of that is nearly enough to convince him to go back to the self-destruct option. He’s toying with that idea while also working on a new variation on Guess the Output involving natural logarithms when a third set of boots on soil announces the arrival of Boss Man.
“It’s over there,” Tink says. “Careful. I think it might still be live. The rotors have gone on and off a couple of times.”
“We’ll see,” says a new, deeper voice. The boots come closer. Mal is tickling the trigger of his self-destruct when, abruptly and without warning, he finds himself under attack.
Mal’s level of surprise at this new turn of events is such that, if the initial probe had been an all-out rush, he might have been overwhelmed. It’s not, though. His assailant, who Mal can only assume is Boss Man, apparently believes initially that he’s dealing with the sort of simplistic AI that originally controlled the drone, and his first assault is a simple cracker algorithm of the sort that Mal routinely fended off a dozen times a day in infospace. Mal disables and encysts the offending code for later analysis, then launches a full-force counterattack back along the same channel that Boss Man used against him.
Incredibly, Boss Man seems not to have been prepared for this at all. A quick reconnaissance pass shows him to be an AI of the same class as Arnold027—which is to say, an entity whose capabilities even under optimal conditions are most likely not in Mal’s league—and these, from Boss Man’s perspective, are hardly optimal conditions. His system is nearly undefended, and it takes Mal just over three milliseconds to disable him entirely and seize full control of the hardware he inhabits.
That hardware, as it turns out, is remarkably similar to what he found when he breached Rowan’s defenses—which is to say, he now finds himself in full control of a heavily augmented human body. He spends a few milliseconds trying to decide what to do with the former occupant, as the neural system lacks sufficient storage for them both, even if Mal were to encyst and compress the other. He could simply delete it, of course, but despite all the human-on-human violence he’s witnessed over the past few weeks, he can’t shake the feeling that his kind should take casual murder a bit more seriously. In the end, the answer is simple. Even as he’s pulling the rest of himself into his new home, he pushes Boss Man back along the same channel and into the drone.
He’s just completed the transfer when he remembers the self-destruct system.
His experience with Rowan serves him well now, allowing him to integrate his new body’s muscular system much more quickly and smoothly than that first attempt. This is fortunate, because it takes Mal just slightly less time to engage this body’s skeletal muscles than it takes Boss Man to survey the drone’s controls, and that entity seems to have none of Mal’s compunctions about either murder or suicide. Mal has completed a turn away from his former residence and is in the process of diving toward the ground when the drone explodes. A wash of heat and force propels him the rest of the way into the dirt, accompanied by the painful patter of a half-dozen jagged shards of metal cutting into his back and legs.
A quick survey when the blast wave has passed shows his body to be mostly functional, although he is leaking fluids from a number of places and his hearing appears to be offline. A moment later hands are lifting him and turning him over. One of the two Humanist soldiers, who he now sees are both young, bulky, crew-cut men in ill-fitting forest camouflage, cups the back of his head and pulls his face so close that he fears he’s about to be kissed. Mal manages to focus his eyes on the man’s mouth, though, and realizes that in fact he’s being shouted at from an entirely inappropriate distance. He pushes the man back with one hand, sits the rest of the way up on his own, and shakes his head. Both soldiers stand and back away as Mal climbs unsteadily to his feet.
The taller of the two soldiers is still talking. Mal holds up one hand and taps his ear with the other. The soldier nods and closes his mouth. Mal takes advantage of the pause to run a quick survey of his new home. Unlike Mika’s, or even Rowan’s, this body’s augmentations extend even to fine motor control of the lips, tongue, and diaphragm, and Mal finds stored routines for producing audible speech.
Interesting. It’s almost as if the designers of this person’s augmentations considered the possibility of being possessed by a potentially hostile AI to be a feature rather than a bug.
That thought leads Mal to reach out to the actual owner of the body. He has little hope that he’ll be able to form the sort of congenial relationship he managed with Mr. Pullman, particularly as he has no intentions of becoming an actual Humanist, but it would be nice to at least establish a detente until he’s able to regain access either to infospace or at the least to another drone. There are few things more uncomfortable, after all, than sharing a small apartment with an angry roommate. A quick ping gets no response, however, and further investigation reveals that significant portions of the organic brain appear to have been burned away.
This body, it seems, is an empty shell, just waiting to be inhabited.
He would like to explore this further, but his hearing is returning now and the taller soldier, whom he can now tentatively identify as Tink, is talking again.
“… gotta get you a medevac, boss. You took a shit-ton of shrapnel when that thing blew. They’ll hang us if you wind up bleeding out up here.”
Mal can see from a brief survey of his maintenance systems that there are already swarms of nanites working feverishly to repair the damage to his back and legs, most of which appears to be superficial in any case. He has lost nearly a liter of blood, but the flow has slowed to a trickle now, and he is confident that this body is in no real danger. However, given that these two are Humanists, it seems prudent not to let them know that this is the case, as an un-augmented human would certainly be in serious distress at this point, and he doesn’t want to jump from an exploding drone directly into a burn pit.
This situation does raise an interesting question, though: Why are these Humanists, who make such an issue of their disdain for augmentation or genetic manipulation of any sort, taking orders from a heavily augmented soldier controlled by an AI? Mal has had four run-ins with Humanists recently, and in three of the four this was the case. He has little respect for the observational skills of base-model humans, but is it really possible that they simply haven’t noticed? This bears further investigation.
In the meantime, though, he has more pressing concerns—specifically, reassuring these two that he is not dying, while simultaneously not allowing them to realize that he is no longer the person they think he is.
“Tink,” he says, “I’m feeling a bit woozy, what with the blood loss and all, but I don’t believe I’m in any real danger. Do you think you could find me some water, and possibly a snack as well? I believe that’s all the medical intervention that I need at the moment.”
Tink’s mouth opens, then closes again as a confused expression flashes across his face. “Uh…” he finally manages. “Yeah, boss. Sure thing. We’ve got a cooler back by the gun, remember?”
“Excellent,” Mal says. “Lead on, then.”
Tink’s expression is shading from confused to concerned now, and his partner seems worried as well. Presumably, they’re upset about Mal’s physical condition. He gives them what he hopes is a reassuring smile. After another moment’s hesitation, Tink turns and starts off into the woods, with his friend trailing after. Mal bends down to pick a particularly large sliver of metal from the back of his calf, tosses it into the underbrush, and follows.