I’d woken up to the complaints of my devices; my family. They spoke to me in beeps and flashes I understood as well as English — a language I’d invented, after all — and though it was dark and late, and I had only just climbed the ladder to the garage loft and fell asleep, I got up to check on them anyway.
A network outage, it looked like. But such a blip would hardly be a cause for panic, rare as that might be. I squinted into the holos burning bright in the dark against my scratchy eyes and forced my sleepy brain to make sense of what I was seeing.
And when that didn’t work, I traded out my glasses for a VR headset, rubbing my eyes through the transition. I kept the neural interference low so it wouldn’t knock me out and transport me to a digital world, just superimpose one on our own. Augmented reality, really, though Viewfinder wasn’t an AR machine, she was a VR, and she’d object to the implication of being ‘just’ augmenting.
My idle thoughts vanished as I read and re-read the diagnostics, and I frowned and reached out by habit for the cold coffee perpetually sitting at many of my stations. Nasty swill, but loaded with the nectar of the caffeine goddess.
It wasn’t just an outage. There was also wide-band wireless interference on almost every channel I could reach, only a few at the very bottom of ultra-low frequencies seemed unaffected.
Which was, itself, very weird and the outage at the same time could be completely unrelated. The two had an unfortunate compounding effect, which knocked me out from the prospect of both wired and wireless ‘net access, and of course, verifying with Thaumaturge, of course, mobiles wouldn’t get through either.
I hesitated for a minute, being pretty sure what I was finding here…being completely confident, really, but just…making sure before I did something stupid and got anyone else involved in my mistake. But there was no mistake, and so, walking over, still reading the cached data on Viewfinder as she augmented-realitied the dark house for me, I made my way over to Lia’s room and knocked gently on the door.
No reply. So I knocked louder.
“You are aware,” a voice from behind me made me jump and almost drop Viewfinder off my head. I spun and found Moon lurking in the dark hall, followed me in from the living room. “That she is probably asleep, and if you want to wake her, you’ll have to make a noise at a volume humans can actually hear?”
“Moon, holy heck, you scared me,” I said, feeling my heart pounding. “I’m sorry to wake you.”
“I’ve taken to napping during the day,” she said with such deadpan I wasn’t sure if she was serious. “Had a few incidents of my father trying to kidnap me at night recently.”
“Oh, right.”
“Waking her up is a death sentence. Why are you risking it?”
“Um,” I made a move to show her what was in my headset, but that seemed like a lot more effort than it needed to be once I started, so I just used my words. “There’s…something going on. The ‘net access is down, and all wireless is being…” I hesitated. “Not to be alarmist in my word choice, but jammed.”
“I see.” Moon said. “You are certain?” I nodded. She nodded back, and then advanced on me, pressing into me. I thought for a moment she had just gone out of her deadpan mind and was about to kiss me, when I realized she was just wordlessly pushing past me to get at Lia’s door.
She banged on the door for all she was worth, and without waiting, moved to Chiho’s room and did the same. And then Athan’s, where Tem was likely curled up. And then she came back down the hall banging on doors the whole way again.
The three opened at about the same time, and despite her confidence of action, Moon made good to hide behind and paint me the culprit while the lights came on and six very bleary eyes focused on me and I repeated what I’d found.
“This is retarded,” Lia slurred. “I can’t deal with this right now.” She eyed me with eyes only barely open, but somehow everyone was still watching her to make a decision. After a few more seconds dragged on she mumbled something at us and slammed her door.
“Is that…is that a no?” Chiho asked. I was honestly trying not to look at her too much because, well, it felt kinda dirty. She was wearing a halter and thong which stretched the credibility of being clothed. It also helped I really didn’t have an answer for her.
We all floated listless in the hall another minute, people drifting back towards their beds by inches when Lia’s door banged open again, and something militant-clad and white-masked emerged, a gun on her back longer than she was and possibly as heavy.
“What are you standing around for?” she asked, her voice spiked with false confidence and forced energy. “We need recon. AEGIS isn’t here, Saga isn’t here, if Moon’s dad is coming again, we need to know where, when, and with what. Tem, go to the front door — you can see better than any of us, keep an eye out without going outside. If you see something unusual, tint the house lights blue. If hostile, tint ’em red. Moon, Tem’s the only Exhuman we’ve got at the moment. Pair up with her, and I’m sorry.”
“It is fine,” Moon said, and the two of them headed towards the living room.
“Nice hat,” Lia addressed me. “Does it have any optics?”
“Viewfinder?” I asked, touching the headset. “Um, no. It…could do post-processing, but it just uses a regular camera. I don’t have any filters written or anything, and with the ‘net down–“
“No that’s fine. How about AEGIS’ tech. Can you talk to any of that?”
“Yeah. But I shouldn’t–“
“We’re under attack,” she insisted. “There is no should or shouldn’t, there is can and can’t. Can you?”
“I can.”
“Good. Do what you can with what she’s got around the place. If she’s got any DOGs or weapons, you can wake them up and get them on our side. Anything that you can plug into or get acting autonomously or use to shoot at someone. I’d rather have more options than just letting Tem blow holes in the house.”
I nodded vigorously and started back towards the garage, finding Tem already at the door with Moon as a ghostly passenger, her body sprawled on the couch. Behind me I heard Chiho talking.
“And what can I do?”
Lia sighed and responded as I closed the garage door behind me. “Put some clothes on.”
The first thing I did was grab Sparker off his charger and put him on my hip. If someone did come for us, they’d be getting a million volts before they got me. Second thing I did was plug Viewfinder into AEGIS’ main system, which was in just a complaining mass of disarray with the wireless cut off, so the third thing I did was dig up a bunch of cables and start plugging things into each other which normally talked over wifi.
I’d barely managed to get in when I got a system notification and gave it a glance, throwing it up in the corner of my AR overview of the whole system.
> Hi Whitney! Welcome to my system. I’ve got you hooked up with basic access. Feel free to play with anything other than the data servers. If you come up with anything new, you know I want to hear about it. Most importantly, have fun!
Lovely, accommodating girl, AEGIS was. I guess once you literally had your arms elbow-deep inside someone to help them self-diagnose mechanical failure, some amount of trust could probably be assumed. I was just glad I wouldn’t have to battle her defenses — I might be able to crack my way in, especially given physical access to the hardware, but it’d be time I’d rather not waste. Instead, I took all the system resources online and threw them out into various places in AR in the room around me to go over one at a time.
A bit pointless to do, but also very fun. I’d never been in here before, despite my time working with AEGIS, and I wasn’t going to lie to myself to pretend it wasn’t an exciting prospect.
I thought I blinked funny for a moment, then realized no, my vision was screwed up. A bug in the AR output maybe? Everything had just gone kinda funny looking suddenly. Maybe a smudge on Viewfinder’s camera? I pulled her off for a moment to check and realized…no, it wasn’t in the display at all. The real world had just gone kinda blue-ish.
And then I remembered, Tem was on guard duty and tinting the lights blue was our alert signal. God, I was tired, that seemed so long ago even though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. I guess the excitement of getting into AEGIS’ systems was kinda derailing me too.
I flicked through the resources on-hand and found most of them useless. No DOGs like Lia had asked for, whatever those might be. Mostly fabrication…oh hmm. I could make DOGs. Those were certainly interesting. And autonomous, it looked like, from the schematics. I spent a few moments flipping back and forth between the different models and iterations and wowing over her design work, even if the really impressive part, the AI, went right over my head at such a glance.
And then I found what I was really probably supposed to look for. Cam-drones. Literally thousands of them. Almost a thousand in this neighborhood alone.
I tried to pull up some feeds and…nothing. Of course, the drones couldn’t chatter through the jamming either. I wondered vaguely if she named any of them, had any favorites…if any of them exhibited ‘personalities’ that machines always seemed to have a habit of developing, even varying across identical instances.
I had to appreciate AEGIS’ extensive documentation of everythingthough. This was a girl I’d definitely let plan my wedding. I found the schematics for the cam-drones and then pulled up the downloaded hardware specs for the wireless transmitters they all were built around.
And damn, these were some nice specs. I guess they had to be when you only used one model for everything. I’d always been a proponent of building against the situation. Unix philosophy — do one thing, do it well. A one-solution-fits-all drone like this wasn’t anything I’d ever come up with, even if it was easier to churn out a thousand of these babies, each one would be somewhat ill-suited for their role, over-specced or underprepared.
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But I also probably never made a thousand things in my life total, so I could shut up with my philosophizing. Also, the lights in the house suddenly turned red…sort of a faint pink, really, and shouting started near the front door. So that was another reason to shut up and work.
Not that I’d been talking out loud to myself or anything. Only crazy people did that. I was talking to the machines. They needed names, I realized.
The good news was, the cam-drones could pick up the ULF’s which weren’t being jammed. I could talk to them on those frequencies and get them talking back to me on them, and once we were there, I’d have all the eyes in the neighborhood looking out for me.
So I thought, anyway. Easier said than done. Not that, again, I was saying anything like a crazy person. That’d be crazy. God, I was tired. The trick would be talking to them, though. The traditional means she used to communicate with the drones was over ‘net so she could interface with any drone from anywhere. A local-band was possible, but not something in her standard wheelhouse.
But to be sure, I gave the schematic library another poke. I looked for anything which might act as a relay — searched for keywords like ‘wireless’, ‘repeater’, ‘broadcast.’
And hell, I was beginning to think I could find anything in here, when schematics for a wireless broadcast repeater popped up. Notes said there were zero in the network, zero on hand, and looking over the specs, I saw this was…not her usual work. Very rough stuff, very primitive. Improvised-looking almost. I wondered if she made this out of necessity on simpler equipment.
The answer jumped out at me in the build requirements. Every part of this device could be assimilated on a hundred-year-old mass fab. Crazy.
And also kinda useless. There were like forty other machines in this room, throttling the workflow to a single machine would choke the throughput. I gave the schematics another good, hard look, and then reached my hands out, getting them up in this AR mess for the first time, and really picking the floating schematics apart.
Est. build time at current spec: 00:09:12:45.
I didn’t have nine hours. I started by chunking the casing around the unit, and the build time dropped three hours right there. Some of these parts, I could wire up a replacement by hand out of parts I had. Taking those out cut us down another three hours. And then diminishing returns began to kick in.
But this was also the field where I could beat AEGIS’ pants off. The original spec was a very generalized relay, capable of functioning in a broad number of environments for a huge number of tasks. I needed it to work in one environment, once, for one task. Anything which didn’t suit that goal, I could cut.
Still, a part of me died inside as I designed the damn thing to only broadcast on a single frequency. That was a little too dedicated for even my tastes, but screw it, that cut out the entire circuitry for the oscillator and tuner and saved me another hour and a half. The tuner was out, so with it could go the core and chips for it, saving me another hour. And then, since I knew the wavelength, I could shape the antenna specifically for that reception. Down from a general antenna, that was another…five minutes saved.
I heard a gunshot, an earth-shaking one, one of Lia’s, and my mouth went dry. I cut a few more things and reduced more specs where I could, but at some point, I was taking a few minutes to reduce build time by a few minutes, and I still had parts to assemble by hand. I’d done most of what I could and was just screwing around now, so I sent the build order.
The next twenty minutes were at once, some of the most normal and strangest minutes of my life. I was in my shop, working on a task, sometimes lost in it enough to feel like singing, if only I had music on. And other times, the house would shudder with an explosion or gunfire. Nothing too crazy yet, but I got the feeling that both sides were letting off warning shots to not try anything or get too close.
The mass-fab finished, and I scooted over to grab the still-hot part and plop it in the integrated mess of wires and components which had taken over yet another workstation in here. It took me four hookups and the soldering of a preprinted board to the outside of it, and the fine-tuning of an external power supply to get it up and talking.
I plugged it into Thaumaturge, my mobile, and plugged him into Viewfinder so I could manage everything on AR. I sent a ping, and dozens of them came back from the nearby drones.
Choice as hell.
Instead of a ping, I looked up some commands, pulling through AEGIS’ logs to get the syntax and credentials set just-so. And sent it.
And then sent it again when it failed because I forgot a semicolon.
And then Viewfinder lit up. I whooped as my view populated, squares of light in every inch of space around me like a city after a blackout. Like the moon suddenly coming out over the water and ten-thousand reflections that shone. Like…like…
…like…
The more I turned around, the more cam-drone feeds I saw. Every direction from the house, up to hundreds of feet out.
And everywhere I looked, I saw people. Soldiers. Exosuits. Guns. Tanks. Even VTOLs hovering silently, wobbling in the air on rotors in stealth mode.
Whatever happiness I had rising in my stomach was suddenly strangled from the churning in my gut rising up. This wasn’t just some people coming to take Moon away. This was a whole army, poised and waiting, evacuating the last civilians from miles around us.
I almost tripped over cables, running to the door. I fumbled, unhooking Viewfinder from Thaumaturge, from my bastard relay, and from myself and the stool, and ran yelling into the living room.
“What? And stay down from the windows,” Lia shouted at me, barely giving me a glance up from where she was staring down her rifle out one of those windows she just warned me about.
I pulled Viewfinder off my head and handed her over. She gave her a glance, then me, then pulled off her mask and put her on.
Without her mask on, I could see Lia was tired under there. Her eyes were hidden behind Viewfinder, but as pale and grim as she looked before, absolutely all color fled her face after looking around for a minute.
“Did you see the insignias?” I asked. She nodded and pulled off the headset, offering it to Moon’s purple spirit, who had no problems donning it despite being a…whatever she was.
“I saw them,” Lia said, pulling her mask back on, her voice going synthetic halfway through the sentence. “White sword on a white shield, ringed by stars.”
“It’s XPCA,” Moon whispered. “Why is it XPCA? Why so many?”
“I don’t know,” Lia said. “They’re expecting a fight it looks like. But I can’t imagine why they’d suddenly go hostile on us like this. It’s not like you or Tem have done anything.”
“It’s Athan,” Chiho said from the couch. “It has to be.”
“What? He’s not even here. And if he got in trouble on his mission, they’d come after him there, not…set up around the house and wait for him here.”
“No,” Chiho shook her head. “They’re not here for him, they’re here because they’re turning on him.”
“If they’re turning on him, then what are they–” Lia stopped. “They’re not here for him. They’re here for us. They’ve already nabbed him, and they’re coming for anyone who might do something when they find out.”
“It make sense–” Chiho started, but then she stopped, because the room suddenly flickered in and out of view like a power surge was happening. Weird spots drifted in my eyes no matter how hard I blinked, and then Tem, who’d seemingly been completely content to just lie by the door, suddenly rose to her feet, smoke coming off of her.
“They…“
“Oh butts,” Lia said. “Chiho, RUN!”
She dove and tackled me as the black smoke seemed to explode from Tem’s body. As though they were waiting for this sign the whole time, the XPCA outside began to open fire in earnest, bullets and lasers screaming over my head from where Lia held us down.
“…they nabbed him?”
“Tem just calm down,” Lia shouted over the rolling crackle of gunfire.
“…they…nabbed…Chariot?”
She began wording something else in disbelief but it was washed out by a roaring, like a VTOL coming in to land on the roof. Moon turned and punched skyward, and with her, a blackish-purple beam of light erupted into the distant sky, and looking like it was over the horizon, but too big and loud to be that distant, the source of the roaring exploded in a circle of fire.
“Was that…a missile?” Lia asked.
“Do you mind if I retain this headset?” Moon asked, not pausing before shooting another beam somewhere else above us.
“If…if you need her. Just…give it back,” I said, still stunned on the floor under Lia as the sound of death lasers tore the air, and the gunfire rose yet another pitch. Sounds of bigger booms began to echo.
And then the room went white with a screech and a roar more deafening and blinding than any before. Tem’s unhinged scream blended into roar of the beam in an unnatural fusion as her fire vaporized the house opposite ours.
And I scrambled for the garage. I wanted no part of this. Anything going on out there, I didn’t want to touch with an eleven-hundred-foot pole. It was all just a nightmare, I thought. I could just…plug in a bit, and it’d all be over.
I looked around in stupid desperation for a few minutes thinking I’d misplaced Viewfinder and my gateway to the VR world. The blasts grew louder and closer, and I could see and hear white flashes going off every second now. I realized I was shaking all over, and my body was unnaturally cold.
It was like the whole world had gone insane in just a few seconds, and I felt like the only sane remnant. I wanted more than anything just to…to run and hide. To be anywhere but here.
But I’d seen the forces outside. I knew their numbers and their positioning. There wasn’t any escape. Not from this. Hundreds of them. Completely surrounded.
Chiho stumbled in and the door slammed behind her. She looked about as sick as I felt.
“Okay,” she said, climbing to her feet and looking around. “What do we do?”
I looked around and confirmed there was nobody else here she might be asking. “Me?”
“Yeah. I’m no good with this stuff.”
“And I am?”
She looked at me, seeming to grow stronger from my weakness. She took a couple deep breaths and then let them out slowly. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay. We need to not panic. That’s step one.”
“I’m failing step one,” I told her. She laughed. At a time like this, she laughed. I couldn’t believe it.
“That’s the spirit,” she said. I hadn’t even meant it as a joke. “Okay, neither of us can help out there, but maybe we can help in here. Do you have any like, weapons?”
I pointed at my broken-down exosuit. Nonfunctional, but…something, at least.
“Okay. Well. That doesn’t look too useful, but maybe if we get it online. Is there anything else? What was that thing you were working on with Athan the last few weeks?”
“That’s…not ready yet.”
“Is it in better shape than that exosuit?”
“Yeah…I guess.”
“Then let’s work on it.”
I blinked at her, feeling more convinced by the word that she only looked sane, that the same insanity outside had lodged in her as well and nothing she said is anything a reasonably sane person would ever say or think or do.
“Chiho, we can’t manufacture and repair an entire exosuit in here in the few minutes we have before this battle destroys everything and kills all of us,” I told her.
“Well that’s pretty pessimistic for a number of reasons,” she said pointing at me. “But I guess you haven’t seen everything these guys can do, so I’ll let it slide.”
“You didn’t see the forces outside.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, brushing back her hair and picking up parts at random. “We’ll win no matter what we face. I have faith in them. And even if I didn’t, even if I thought we’d lose, it doesn’t matter still.”
“How can that not matter still? How can anything matter more than that? What’s going on out there, that’s going to determine our entire lives, you realize? There’s a war starting outside, and we’re gonna die in it.”
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “But even so. Doesn’t matter.”
“HOW,” I yelled, my throat catching raggedly on a volume I’d rarely hit before “can that NOT matter?”
She walked over and brandished the part at me while putting a hand on my shoulder. “Whether they’ll win or not, whether they live or not, whether we die or not, there’s nothing we can do about it right?”
I nodded.
“Then you’ve got no say in your death. That means what matters is your life, and what you did with it. So you can spend your time freaking out, or doing what you loved.”
She put the part in my hands and looked at me with an expectant smile. It was a casing for an exosuit. It was heavy and solid. And real.
“I guess you’re right,” I agreed. “You’re completely insane, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. If I’m gonna die, there’s no way I’m letting this unaligned servo be the last thing I left behind.”
“Yay, look at you go!” she cheered. “Now how can I help?”
I took the casing back to the workbench and took a deep breath. She was right. Being here, having work in front of me, figuring out what I could do, instead of worrying about what I couldn’t, it was calming, it was liberating.
It was a little annoying I didn’t have Viewfinder to help me out, but I had her hands, so it was a wash overall, I guess.
“I need that second core over there from that stack and then help me lift this power supply onto the workbench,” I told her. “And put a pair of gloves on, It’s going to get messy in here.”