Insidious. Part 1

Insidious.

Michael McCloskey.

Prologue.

The skysc.r.a.per entrance flaunted polished marble floors, which shone in gentle arcs below a sparkling waterfall on the left wall. An image of the Earth rotated slowly before the glistening black tiles of the right wall. Front and center stood a ma.s.sive hardwood reception desk. The ceiling soared three floors above, with two long balconies overlooking the scene, supported by complex lattices of carbon struts. Light flooded in from a single oval skylight fifty meters across, offering an optically perfect sliver of the blue sky.

A graceful, confident woman marched into that opulence wearing a black business suit, which matched her ponytailed jet-black hair. She scanned the room briefly, her face set in stone. She knew the grandeur disguised an army of security devices, which tracked her every move.

A holograph of giant golden letters danced across a glossy wall of obsidian tiles, proclaiming the name of her employer.

Nucleo Negro Sociedade Anonima.

Black Core SA, the largest Brazilian corporate ent.i.ty in existence, an organization rivaling the economic power of whole governments.

The room was a shameless display, unapologetic of the expense despite the millions of souls living at subsistence level just across the bay from the headquarters here in Salvador. Those ma.s.ses were the unskilled, unemployed, and punished individuals whom Black Core held as pariah. Only international pressure and the desire to avoid outright rebellion forced the giant corporation to provide food and basic housing to the general populace beyond the armored enclosures of the company.

The woman stepped toward the unmanned desk. Its services entreated the links buried in her skull, offering an array of information about the building and its offices. She accepted one, a Black Core personnel locator.

The Earth before her suddenly realigned with her current location in Salvador, Brazil, directly facing her. It zoomed in rapidly on the surface of the planet, depicting first the bay area, then the skysc.r.a.per, and finally the room she now stood in.

A bright green tag with an arrow snapped up to label her, "Aldriena Niachi, Special Operative."

The tiny simulacrum of her stared up at the globe in perfect parody of real life. The entire display had been routed through a link in her head and into her visual cortex. It was a simple illusion. No one without a link would see anything except the black tile and marble.

Aldriena smiled at the display. The accuracy of her doppelganger's pose suggested she was on camera at this very moment. The athletic figure stood with squared shoulders and head raised. She wondered if any other humans were bored enough to be looking in on the feed. If so, she'd undoubtedly have captured their full interest. Any Asian walking openly in the Western world got plenty of attention. The current cold war between the Chinese bloc that dominated all of eastern Asia and the triple alliance of Brazil, the United States, and the European Union made any Asian instantly suspect.

But she was of j.a.panese origin, having fled to Brazil in her childhood during the Chinese occupation of j.a.pan. Once there, she'd taken her Brazilian first name. Her looks had served the purposes of Black Core many times, despite her conspicuous appearance.

Aldriena walked past a mirrored sphere sitting over the elevator-waiting niche. A hostile intention trigger. She knew the HITs were part of most security hardpoints. The device would be scanning her even now, searching for the physiological cues caused by thoughts of violence.

Her training as a Black Core operative allowed her to defeat most HIT checks, but this time, she didn't attempt any deception. She was truly calm, without any of the stress that would be present in someone set on an imminent attack.

Aldriena summoned the elevator with her link. The service responded with a visual indicator in her mind's eye. She shuffled it to the side of her personal view and waited. She enjoyed the calm interior of the building with its empty walls. Anywhere else in the outside world, the walls would be full of personalized advertis.e.m.e.nts, routed through her link and thrown up onto the walls.

Fifteen seconds later, a door opened and let her into the elevator. Inside, a pair of thin robotic arms lay folded against the wall beside an espresso machine. The machine added itself to a list of services offered through her link. Aldriena could only remember a few times the list had gone empty. It always offered her communication options, map services, entertainment, and local controls. She refused the drink but told the elevator to warm up slightly, as she found the aggressive air conditioning too cold. Sometimes she thought the corporate leaders kept it so cold in the building as another display of their wealth and power, to show they could defy the hot tropical air outside.

Aldriena breathed deeply. Time to behave, Ms. Niachi. Put away your att.i.tude here or you'll get yourself into trouble.

She arrived on the seventieth floor and stepped out. The narrow corridors were empty. Floor sconces held rotating light bars that flooded the walls with illumination, decorating the black ceiling with gently moving patterns of light. Aldriena walked along the narrow corridor toward the office of her superior.

She arrived at a set of double doors. Her link verified her appointment, causing the doors to open for her.

The office echoed the lavish accoutrements of the entrance below. She saw a desk and wooden bookcases decorated with books, trophies, and models of s.p.a.cecraft. The walls were black and red, lit only by two dim lamps, leaving the room dark and snug.

Gustavo Machado, the BC executive from whom she'd taken several a.s.signments, sat forward at his desk and displayed a white-toothed smile. The man's disposition reminded Aldriena of a wolf, not that she'd ever seen such a creature in real life. The Brazilian had dark hair and skin. His slender body suggested a fitness born of hours of soccer play each week, but unlike his peers, the trophies on his bookcase were for sailing compet.i.tions. Aldriena noted this oddity and filed it away.

"Aldriena! I'm so glad to see you," he said. "You're a vision of beauty."

"I received instructions to meet you here," Aldriena said, sidestepping his pleasantries.

"Yes. We have need of your talents, as always. Another deep s.p.a.ce trip for you. I think you'll be pleased with the importance of this a.s.signment."

"You could have briefed me remotely and sent me straight there," Aldriena said. It was all the rebelliousness she dared display.

"I wanted to enjoy the pleasure of your company incarnate," he said, giving her his canine smile.

"I'm flattered," Aldriena replied dryly.

"I've long admired you. This was my chance to see you face-to-face. Virtual meetings are so ... instinctually unsatisfying."

"I see. Well, here I am. What task does Black Core have for me?"

"Tsk-tsk ... I suppose I should have known ... a woman with a record like yours is all business all the time. You do know, don't you my dear, that there's more to life than work? Even here at Black Core?"

"So, I'm here for no other reason than to satisfy your ... curiosity?" Aldriena asked mildly.

Gustavo shrugged. "We're sending you into deep s.p.a.ce again. To the stations in the direction of L5."

"Very well. You implied this a.s.signment is important. There's nothing sensitive that requires our face-to-face meeting?"

"There is. The situation on these stations is of extreme interest to us. This a.s.signment is not a punishment, Aldriena. Vineaux Genomix has made a breakthrough we need to learn more about."

"What kind of breakthrough?"

"You'll find out for us," he said. "We know it's big. Vineaux Genomix has increased their allocations of resources to the station by an order of magnitude. So have other companies that own stations in that direction. They must be cooperating on something. VG. Bentra. Gauss. Reiss-Marck. All the major Euro Union players with deep s.p.a.ce facilities."

Aldriena suppressed her skepticism. Was this how Gustavo operated? Tell his female operatives some crazy story about a super-mission, sleep with them, and then send them off to nowhere to get them out of his hair?

"A ruse, perhaps," she said. She deliberately didn't say on their part. She stared at Gustavo.

"I've verified and re-verified it," Gustavo said. "What concerns me is they haven't been trying to hide it. That means they're sure enough about their lead that running with it is more important than hiding it. We must know what's happened there."

"And what about the UNSF?"

Gustavo flicked his hand aside in a dismissive gesture. "The world government artilheiros? They won't hear about it anytime soon. They're slow, incompetent ... and they have their hands full here on Earth. Why else would all the companies be hiding out in s.p.a.ce? They know the s.p.a.ce force is underfunded and bound here at Earth."

"When do I leave?"

"We have tonight. You leave tomorrow," Gustavo said. "Where will I find you when it's time for our dinner?"

"I can't afford the luxury of socializing," Aldriena said. "I must prepare now if I'm to leave so soon."

Gustavo stared at her for a long moment. Aldriena knew she flirted with disaster to deflect men like Gustavo so directly. Any other female operative would at least flirt a little.

I don't care. I'll never play the mistress to any of these executives.

"Very well then, Aldriena. You're a cold woman, but an efficient one. So go and find out what's going on. If you fail, I'll not be in a forgiving mood for the woman who won't enjoy a fine dinner with me."

Who won't enjoy your bed with you, she thought.

"I haven't failed yet," she said, rising to her feet.

Gustavo only nodded. He'd already s.h.i.+fted his attention to some business on his link. Aldriena knew that meant it was time to leave.

Aldriena returned to the elevator, but instead of heading down, she gave the machine a command to take her up almost to the top. She arrived on the observation level of the giant headquarters building, directly below the roof that served as a landing surface.

Lost in thought, she wandered toward the west side of the deck. A long corridor ran along giant windows overlooking the bay many stories below.

From above, the building's status as a fortress couldn't be denied. Several perimeters Aldriena hadn't noticed from the ground were clearly visible from this angle. Fenced embankments, concrete walls, and security checkpoints extended for kilometers beyond the Black Core compound.

Movement caught her eye. Another VTOL craft lifted off from one of the eight landing pads far below. The gray X-shaped flying machine powered away from the headquarters and headed off across the water. Aldriena knew it was most likely loaded with supplies for the ma.s.ses living at subsistence across the bay.

From the overview here at the top, each window offered a magnification service, which could zoom in on a view the other side of the bay to the west. She activated it with her link to see if anything had changed.

She saw kilometers of shacks and flimsy company housing. Thousands of people milled about searching for the latest food drops. She wondered if any of them were her relatives from j.a.pan, refugees of the "bloodless" occupation. Only her father's high position in the previous government had allowed her to receive the training that kept her employed by the corporation.

Aldriena knew the people she watched had water and some food, but no medical care, no real housing, and no real hope for anything better. She wondered which of these three deficiencies killed the most people.

Aldriena didn't want to find out. She wouldn't fail Black Core.

One.

Major Bren Marcken prepared for battle by closing his eyes. He focused on the data displayed in his personal view. The PV a.s.sembled immense amounts of information in tabs and panes that competed for s.p.a.ce in his mind's eye. His attention flitted from pane to pane, picking through the vast data streams at the slow animal pace of the human brain.

No drill this time. So many months of work to get to this point. Only minutes left to wait now.

Some submerged part of him still felt his real surroundings. He knew he sat in the a.s.sAIL nexus of the s.p.a.ce cruiser Vigilant. The crew called the nexus "the Guts," because the main functionality of the cruiser lay here: Bren's cores and their Veer Industries cha.s.sis. His United Nations s.p.a.ce Force uniform wicked sweat off his wan skin releasing moisture into the dry air of the nexus. A five-day stubble bristled on his face, the whiskers about half the length of his close-cropped brown hair. The mental tension spilled over into his muscles, cementing him in place.

"All handlers have completed the containment checklist," he broadcast, sending the words across the link device in his skull. "Bring up your cores." Part of him disliked the fear, the pressure, but another part thrived in it. His team worked alongside him as they prepared to launch the Vigilant's Board and Control Package against a corporate s.p.a.ce station.

He watched the readouts from a pane in his PV as ten power reservoirs filled and fed current into the AI cores. Each core carried a nascent set of "seed" code, which would begin to self-modify within seconds of release. The closest one sat mere meters in front of him. He imagined the durable metal sphere buried in the cha.s.sis of its robot, holding a new mind as it formed and expanded to a capacity exceeding human intelligence.

Bren always imagined he could feel a sinister presence when a core bloomed. He denied the feeling, knowing it was irrational. Although young, the core held power like the rogue AI that had seized Ma.r.s.eilles years ago, forcing worldwide military action. Afterward, people everywhere had embarked on a decade-long witch-hunt, purging data across the globe to avoid a resurgence of the horror.

It took about two minutes for each core to self-optimize, rewriting itself several times. In that time, each core's code and processes would advance beyond human comprehension. With training, and enough time, a human could usually follow the first two steps of the process, and maybe part of the third. After that, it was, of necessity, a mystery-an AI smart enough to audit the evolution would be much too dangerous to keep around. Bren squirmed and told himself they hadn't missed any precautions.

"All normal. My core's up," came Hoffman's voice. Lieutenant Hoffman served as one of ten robot handlers in Bren's team. Hoffman launched and observed the a.s.sAIL robot-killer nicknamed Meridian. The other nine handlers echoed Hoffman's announcement in an avalanche of tense voices. Bren saw boxes go green in a line in a mental display, showing that everyone was ready.

"It's accessing the mission storage module," Hoffman said. His voice broke nervously. "Should be ready."

The cores were young and thus blank. They relied upon the limited information the team had chosen to provide, the background the machines would need to successfully seize a s.p.a.ce station. The information vacuum avoided anything that might give a new supermind pause about serving its creators for a few hours.

Bren saw the reads of the storage modules pa.s.s by in his high-granularity log stream and nodded, even though no one would witness the gesture. All the handlers monitored their own machine's data, and most kept their eyes closed to concentrate. He accessed another nexus pane in his PV to grant his handler team permission to execute the plug-in phase. Each of the handlers completed the link between their AI core and its body, one of the Veer Industries a.s.sAIL series 910 robot-killers.

"Okay, this is it. Let 'em loose."

The sound of a.s.sAIL movement filled the Guts, a cyclical whining and rumbling accentuated by the m.u.f.fled smack of feet on the rubberized nexus grating. Bren glimpsed the nexus with his real vision. The lead machine was Hoffman's unit, Meridian. The a.s.sAILs resembled metal lions with flat bug heads. The quadrupedal cha.s.sis had ma.s.sive front halves, which housed the ammunition stores. Those magazines fed into twin 12mm cannon turrets mounted on each side of the a.s.sAIL's flat heads, like stubby antennae. He suspected the mechanical engineers who had designed the cha.s.sis took cues from the anatomy of natural quadrupeds. Only the hammerhead and lack of any tail negated the impression of an armored cat. The gray metal chests and flanks bore simple green circles, the symbol of the UNSF.

Bren had worked hard getting his part of the Board and Control Package to this point, but now he had to wait while his handlers and machines performed the "crack 'n pack" of the giant s.p.a.ce station named Thermopylae. Bentra, a Brazilian conglomerate, had built the station. The BCP had been deployed here to seize the station and investigate reports of illegal activities. Bren believed Bentra had probably created the station far from Earth to escape the arm of UN law, and he was eager to find out more about the situation.

He monitored the a.s.sAIL progress from the Guts, well behind the point of incursion. Despite the relative inactivity, Bren got a charge out of watching the AI cores operate after long months of preparation.

The machines filed out of the narrow s.p.a.ces of the nexus, weaving gracefully through the banks of equipment. The sounds faded as they headed for the umbilical that connected the Vigilant to Thermopylae.

Bren trained his attention on the forward-mount camera feed from Meridian. The feeds from all the a.s.sAILs were visible in his PV through his nexus interface, but a human brain could only process so much input at once. Bren sifted through his data, looking for critical points, ready to back up his handlers.

Meridian approached the breach point, an airlock that led into the station. A team of s.p.a.ce force engineers had already forced the door to make way for the a.s.sAILs. Meridian removed the debris of the armored airlock door with a swipe from a front foot. The camera jolted as Meridian rammed through to the inner pa.s.sage.

"Meridian is in," Hoffman's voice came over the link.

Bren checked another pane in his PV that monitored the tactical situation by displaying an overhead map with the positions of his units. He noted the other a.s.sAILs entered the airlock breach behind Meridian. The handlers would be monitoring the data streams from their a.s.sAIL machines and providing Bren with summaries. He liked to play handler himself and jump from machine to machine, but he forced himself not to interfere with the handlers' duties even though he outranked them.

Meridian strode down the corridor toward another metal door. The camera bobbed from the four-legged gait of the Veer Industries machine. Meridian glanced to one side and recognized a manual door control. A five-fingered tentacle shot forward from under the machine's head and activated the mechanism. The door swung open to reveal a different world.

"Wow," Bren said.

A marble floor extended toward a running fountain at the center of the room beyond. The area looked huge at first, but Bren noted strategically placed walls and mirrors, which disguised the room's true shape and size. A bank of cubicles with suspended chairs huddled against a side wall, framed by tall green plants growing from giant corner vases. The whole scene held more grandeur than he'd seen on any other s.p.a.cecraft or station.

It can't be real marble. Too expensive to haul this far out ... or is it?

Four forms stood next to the fountain, alarmed by the sudden entrance of Meridian and the other a.s.sAIL units. They looked like humanoid robots in suits of black plastic and silver metal. One of them fell back in surprise as Meridian strode by. The others scattered after a moment of shock. Bren concluded from their actions that they must be people, even though he couldn't see any faces, only metallic helmets of differing designs.

"What the h.e.l.l are they wearing?" Bren asked himself aloud. The bizarre helmets disturbed him in particular; they didn't have noses or mouths-just smooth black plates of various shapes over the eyes. Bren wondered whether they could see straight out or if they relied on sensors built into the suits for vision.

Apparently, Meridian had already cla.s.sified these people as non-threats. The machine moved through the room taking in data from several cameras and audio sensors. The area appeared to be an atrium or perhaps an elegant conference room. Four exits led out of the room, one of which headed straight up toward the station hub.

Meridian spotted a placard on the wall and scanned the writing with one of its sensors. Bren followed along for a moment, noting the writing was in some other language. A translation came through on a side screen in his mind: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger pa.s.sing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

Activity in Bren's PV got his attention. Bren brought the signaling pane forward. A multicolor graph displayed activity in the AI core. A red line wormed upward on the side of the display. The core's rate of interaction with its cha.s.sis was down sharply. Bren interpreted this as a sign of intense concentration on the meaning of the message.

"Ignore the Greek message," Hoffman told Meridian over his link. Bren listened in, approving of Hoffman's choice to intervene.

"It's not a clue, Lieutenant Hoffman?" Meridian asked its handler over the link. Bren suppressed his fear by force of will.

"No. Just a historical reference not pertinent to the mission."