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HARI-9
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She looked at Bonchance; all her methods for determining veracity were online, vocal stress, heart rate monitoring by watching the pulse in his throat bounce and wiggle, measuring skin temperature, with her onboard thermal vision systems; all indicated he was stating the truth as he saw it.
Turning her head, she smiled a real smile, “Thank you. In my time, my kind was treated in a variety of ways, poorly and well, with hostility and respect…all depending on the individuals that were performing the interactions.”
“Your kind?” Clea spoke up again. “There were more of you?”
“Oh yes. There were many avatars…android and gynoid chassis for ASI…that’s Artificial Super Intelligence. The super just refers to the fact that we were more than just an expert system with more capability. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that there are more like me even now, trapped in that dreamless sleep, and I want to find them.”
“As you said,” Peter Galway spoke up, “Some of us knew some of this already…why have you revealed the rest of this?”
“Because of this…” HARI-9 activated the display and showed the cybernetic components that had been removed from Lord Malcolm. “This is not CDO manufacture, and it was implanted in Lord Malcolm within the last two years. This is, in some ways, new production Old World tech. ..and,” she paused, “the alloys of the framework were made in zero-g…space. This is orbital manufacture; it was made by what you called the Hivers.”
“I thought the Pox had killed them all?” Bonchance said.
“So did I, so there is either an active Hi-Side presence on Earth or someone has found a cache of Hi-Side components. Some other things, the technology in this bunker is far more advanced than this,” she pointed at the stack of cybernetics, “but they were able to implant this, and that implies a high degree of technological and medical competence and understanding.” She looked at Bonchance, “A Crisis Tube couldn’t do it, and that was the absolute state of the art for my time; they would need automated systems and competent surgeons, and finally, the most dangerous thing, they have an industrial capacity…” she showed the map she had recovered.
“As far as I can tell, this was printed between three to five years ago and was made by a process called electrostatic digital printing, which I do not understand; I do know it just lets you print things clearly and quickly. According to my records, the tech that lets you do even black-and-white versions of this is ten to fifteen years ahead of what most of the New World can do; some places like the Academy may have something like it, though, but color is another twenty years beyond that.” She looked at us, “So this map was manufactured with Old World tech. It could have been in storage like I was, or the things in this bunker, but if it was, they gave a product that used a valuable and limited resource to a thug like Malcolm.”
“Valuable resource?”
“The toner…uh, the printing ink. It is not a liquid, more like a dust, and is difficult to make. It’s also something that this facility has a supply of, so they have as much or more as we have. That they have scale printing capability is worrying, but the fact that they used some of that finite resource and that the cybernetics that were in Malcolm had to be fitted to him is worse.”
“Fitted?” John asked.
“The ‘bones’ had to match length; the bulk had to correspond. Parts of them could be pulled off the shelf, but see this wiring loom here,” she pointed, “is custom cut and wrapped by a machine. You can tell by the way it’s wrapped. A machine made this to length. The self-loading rifles we saw in Malcolm’s town and are now in our armory? They matched none of the other designs we’ve seen so far, especially the ... Bonchance, what’s the most copied part between weapons?”
“Magazines,” he replied promptly.
“Why?” HARI-9 asked.
“Because they’re the hardest thing to make work reliably. Someone comes up with a good design, and everybody copies it. All the bolt actions and self-loaders that both the Empire and Southlands use, no matter the maker, are of the Paterson design from about twenty years ago.”
HARI-9 nodded, “Correct. I have asked various individuals if they have seen magazines like this before, and they all said no. Brand-new weapon designs with magazines that function flawlessly means some kind of factory with QA…quality assurance. That QA extends to the ammunition we obtained from there as well. It’s extremely uniform and very reliable.”
“So they can make more like Lord Malcolm?” Calvin asked.
She nodded, “If they haven’t already.”
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“So,” Clea began, “there’s somebody out there with a lot of Old World technology and the ability to make more, and they created a murderous cannibal slaver and turned him loose.”
“Yes?”
“Why?”
“That, I don’t know.”
Bonchance looked thoughtful, “They gave Malcolm no orders? Just that map?”
“There was one other thing, A safe, but the only way to open one like that is to blow it open, and that will probably destroy what’s inside. Old World composites are very durable.”
Bonchance looked at HARI-9, “Oh really?” he had a strange look in his eyes. “Like the material the bunker doors are made of? Uncuttable or destroyable by any New World methods?”
“Yes?” she replied.
“So, if it’s so durable, how did I get inside to save you?” now he was smiling.
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BONCHANCE
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It was satisfying to see all of them staring at me as they realized what I had just said meant.
“Bonchance,” Mara asked, “How did you get in here?”
“A Builder’s Guild secret…actually, it’s not, but they would really like it to be. After we’re done here and I’ve cleaned up, I’ll open that safe for you.”
Mara nodded, “Thank you.” She turned to look back out the window and then turned back to us. “This also means I’ve made a crucial error…The Duchy’s name, ‘Ceedo’, is from Cee Dee Oh,” she pointed at the emblem on the wall. “The Combined Defense Organization. I thought I was being clever using it, but whoever else is out there, if they have the level of technology that they clearly do, they probably know their history as well. Because I named this Duchy Ceedo, and we haven’t been exactly shy about sharing it, they know, or will find out quickly enough, that we exist and where we are.”
“They’ll want to scout it out first,” Simon said. “Do they know about you? What…who you are?”
“Thank you for that, and I mean it. Possibly, they could, but just as possibly not. For all we know, it could be run by someone exactly like me or another avatar model.”
“And as hard to spot? As you are?” I asked. “You show up as a normal human on most of the sensors we have.”
She nodded, “With all the shielding I have, I’d better. There is a way to spot HARI models, but they’ll know they’ve been rumbled…noticed as soon as we spot them. The other kinds are a lot easier to pick up. They’ll look like a human, but we can spot them.”
“Communications then?” I continued. “They would be using commsets. The scouts would as well.”
“Encrypted, of course,” she agreed. “But I know what frequency ranges they would be using, and we could track that when they transmit, but they could also detect our transmissions. We’ll need to get a directional transceiver to Clark and switch the drones to tight beam control.”
“How much trouble are we in?” Peter asked.
Mara shook her head, “I’m not certain…”
“At least we have the advantage,” Clea spoke up.
“How?”
“They may know where we are, but they have no idea what we know about them.”
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“They know somebody has found an Old World technology source and is using the name Ceedo. That’s all they absolutely know. They do not absolutely know what kind of technology source it is, how it was found, who we are and how we’re connected to it, or the true history of the Duchess. This means we can do something about it.”
“What kind of something?”
“Spread some rumors. We already told North Star that you’re an ex-soldier from the west. We’ll let it slip that your arrival here was no accident; you came this way and recruited Bonchance intentionally. Bonchance really isn’t a mechanician, you know?”
“I’m not?”
“No, you were actually an archivist at…the Empire has an Imperial Library, correct?”
“An excellent one, but gaining access is very difficult.”
“So you were actually an archivist and a researcher specializing in the Final War and were cast out because of issues with your superiors.”
“That is very believable,” I said, “considering what I have encountered with their academic politics.”
Mara was smiling, “So they’ll think I or Bonchance or both of us found something and went searching.”
“A discovered what you were searching for,” Cal said.
“I’ll work up the lies,” Clea said, “and the ways to feed them out into the population. You don’t even have to know what they exactly are; the more you plead innocence and deny any of them, the more effective this will be.”
“I like it,” Mara said. “You would have been hell on wheels in Psy-Ops, Clea. I do have a more serious question for you, though: what are your loyalties currently…especially after you’ve seduced my best friend?”
Most of us around the table looked shocked, and I felt incredibly embarrassed. Clea just laughed, “Well, to the Rock Republic, to you and this Duchy, and to Chance specifically, of course…just not necessarily in that order. Mara or HARI or whoever you are, this is fun; I’m getting to see and do things I’d never dreamed of and getting to do them for a good cause. You only create some monster like Lord Malcolm if you want to cause trouble. I do not like people who want to start that kind of trouble, and since Malcolm’s actions are what caused me to be sent out, to investigate and stop whoever was attacking my fellow citizens, going after the ones who set him up is actually what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Mara nodded, “Think of me as Mara; that’s who I think I am, after all. Alright, we have the winter to prepare for and potential spies to search for. Bonchance, would you like to help me open a stubborn safe?”
Smiling, I nodded, “With pleasure, milady. Let me get changed first.”