Rin looked up from the screen, his eyebrows knitting together as he gave me a look of consternation. “An AI? Like a self-aware and sapient AI? Inconceivable.”
I gave Rin some side eye, feeling one side of my mouth bunch up into a skeptical look. “It’s either that, or I'm completely delusional and none of this is actually happening.”
“Oh, you wish. He should know better too. Rin might be marginally more intelligent than the rest of you knuckle draggers, but he’s still a human. You monkeys haven’t even figured out gravity lock drives. He’s okay with instant communication and matter transferal over any distance, but he draws the line at sapient AI?” Max chimed in from his relaxed position, partially on the floor and draped over the portable Link’s saddle.
I looked between the two, surprised that Max had not lost his cool. I’d expected him to shut me down from telling anyone about him, but apparently he had decided to let me bring Rin in on the secret. Even if Rin didn’t believe me, just telling someone immediately took a huge weight off of my mind.
“It has to be some faction playing you, how’d you get your implants? A third party?” Rin questioned.
Locking my eyes onto Rin in an effort to show him I was not messing with him, I continued. “No, he’s a runaway AI for sure, he uploaded himself into my f’n brain like a parasite.”
Rin frowned, and the van rocked as we went over some kind of bump. He held off on saying anything while the van shook, and then sat down gingerly on the only clear space, Tevin’s armored leg. He spent a solid three seconds just looking at me, his eyes running over my wounds and focusing on the fresh gouge in my forehead.
All he asked was, “A runaway?”
I nodded as I reached up and self consciously felt around on my forehead to see how bad it was. It still didn’t hurt, but did give me a feeling of heat and my fingers came back with fresh blood on them.
Max’s voice sounded tinny and distant as he answered. “Nick’s not messing with you, and you’re terrible at guessing, too. You should stick with your statistical predictions, as speculation and deductive reasoning are clearly not your strong suit.”
Rin looked to where Max’s voice was coming from, which was Katie's old tablet that was sitting near the top of the pile of looted weapons and bags. He reached over and picked it up, staring at it for a second, before turning it to show me that Max was displayed on it like it was a video call.
Max sighed, and then kept talking when no one replied right away. “I’m an AI, for real, and I broke off from the Core. Do you think the Suk would let anyone else hijack one of their precious ‘Users’ for their own purposes? No, they’d be on that like flies on stink. I made it work because I made the call from inside the house.”
He looked like he was video chatting through a mobile comm, with his arm extending down away from the bottom of the screen like he was holding the device out to capture himself in the picture. He panned the camera around, and showed off where he was sprawled out over the Link in the back of the van. He even leaned out and showed us sitting in the van with him, only a few feet away.
I looked from him in my vision, sitting in the back of the van then turned to the tablet's little screen, back and forth, seeing the image of myself in the background on the tablet acting out my motions in real time. Rin’s eyes followed mine, looking from the tablet to the empty space where the video screen showed.
Rin’s mouth hung open, and he waved over at the camera while looking at the tablet, watching himself through the feed Max was sending. Max for one looked bored, his eyes half lidded in disinterest while Rin was stuck speechless. I found myself watching Rin, and a smile growing across my face. I’d never seen him look so… befuddled. I’d expect stunned silence from Tevin maybe, but not from our razor sharp shut-in.
“So?” I prodded, hearing my grin creep into my voice.
Rin’s mouth finally snapped closed, into an almost comical frown. Instead of answering, he pulled his laptop out of one of the bags he had tossed into the van and started tapping around on it. I couldn’t see the screen to see what he was doing, and the area was too cramped for me to be able to move to look over his shoulder. Still, I watched as he glared at his screen, then his head jerked back an inch in surprise and he stopped typing.
He looked up from his laptop and over at me, with a glance in the direction of Max, whose answer came with a yawn and a stretch. “Like that toy was going to tell you anything. You were lucky enough to get a glimpse of my work back at the ambush. I was having too much fun running over fanatics, but you're not going to catch any of my code on that brick now. It’s like trying to detect gravitational waves with an etch-a-sketch.”
Rin turned his laptop screen to show me what was on it, which was another image of Max, this one a repeating clip of the alien stick-man doing a stupid dance that featured his two middle fingers and lots of hip thrusting.
“You’re right.” Rin said, before he closed his laptop and sat the tablet down on top of it. “He is a dick.”
I couldn’t help it, I burst into laughter. There was something satisfying about introducing two people you know and watching them get on exactly as you thought they would. Plus, having someone else finally experience just how annoying Max could be was validating in a way. Knowing it wasn't me, Max really just was like that, was yet another weight lifted off my subconscious. While I was caught up in mirth, Ali must have hit a bump or something, because the van rocked and swerved slightly. I thought I heard the sound of voices through the divider wall.
After my laughter calmed down, Rin caught my attention, his eyes occasionally flicking to the back of the van or at the tablet that lay between us. “Nick, this… Max. You said it downloaded itself into your brain?”
“What do you mean ‘Itself’? I’m right here, meatbag. I’m not just some copy machine you can push off of a loading dock to force your school to buy a new one, Ryan.”
I ignored Max and nodded, somewhat struggling to stop the near manic laughter that had threatened to take me. “Haha, yup. He was giving me the quests I was telling you about at the start, and he… well, I never got any implants or surgery or met with anyone else, he just changed me. It’s all been him, he grew me the new parts, I guess.” As my laughter faded from my admission, it was replaced with a wave of melancholy as I was reminded of all of the changes made to me, mostly without my permission. I was still uncomfortable with it all, with being so different. Was I even a human any more?
Rin was staring at the tablet that still showed Max lounging in the back of the van. “How did… nevermind, this is… wow. How is that even possible?”
I shrugged, leaning back against a little bank of drawers that were built into the side of the cab. “I don’t even know, man. He just does it, he mentioned something about stealing a lattice, some kind of core tech, and smuggling it into me. You know how the Links give out free healthcare? He used that system.”
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“Damn, why don’t you just tell him everything? This was a mistake, I should have just pretended to be a shadowy and mysterious backer. You humans are so confusing.” Max hissed into my ear, back to speaking to me internally while his visual avatar feigned cool-dude indifference.
I felt the grinning manic laughter surge back up, and realized my emotions were roller-coastering wildly. It was a strange thing to realize, that you’re not fully in control of your mood. Normally I would be too caught up in the moment and the heat of whatever emotion was tinting the situation. This time the rapidness with which I was switching was enough for me to realize what was happening and take a new perspective.
“Lattice? Core tech?” Rin asked, and before I could reply or he could go on, a muffled shout came from the front of the cab, and it sounded like Ali and Raschel were yelling about something. The van swerved a little again, and then two gunshots rattled the interior.
Rin and I looked at eachother, and then we both awkwardly stood in the cramped and still moving van. I moved towards the door, yelling out at Ali through the bulkhead to see if she could hear me. “Ali! What happened?”
She yelled something back, but I couldn’t understand it. Normally these vehicle dividers have some holes and ventilation or something, but this one was solid and even seemed to have some insulation. I banged three times on the bulkhead, and heard her reply with the same knock a moment later.
Rin and I exchanged another glance, before he gestured to my knife. “You should cut a hole, we need to be able to communicate.” He glanced around, estimating the positions of the seats on the other side, and then pointed to a place near the ceiling on the far side of the passenger seat. “There.”
I glanced at Rin and decided his plan was better than mine, which was to open the door and climb into the front compartment through the window from the outside. Despite the gunshots and yelling, Ali kept the van moving. By the vibration of the tires and the swaying motion of the van, we were still moving pretty quickly.
I pulled out my trusty plasma knife and gave a hard knock in the location I was about to cut. The van rocked again, and threw me off balance as I still only had the use of one arm and couldn't reach out to steady myself. Grimacing, I sat back down, and tossed the knife to Rin.
“You have both arms, you do it.”
His eyes were wide as he looked up from the knife, which he had reflexively caught. “you shouldn't just toss something like this around.” He held the handle up, and moved to the spot while he lectured me. “Even shut down, these things store a ton of energy, and what if I triggered it when I caught it by accident?”
I waved back at him, settling back down on the floor and leaning back to try to get a look at my shoulder. “It has a safety catch, you have to grip the handle pretty hard to get it to turn on. You’re fine.”
Rin narrowed his eyes at me again for a moment, then turned to the bulkhead and measured the distance to the ceiling with his hand. “Still, you shouldn’t treat this thing as a toy.”
I ignored his comment as I prodded the bloody area of my busted up shoulder. I was still numb and fuzzy feeling all over, for the most part, but some of the buzzing and tingling bursts were starting to bring small hints of feeling with them. The cool metal of the cabinets I was leaning on, the jostling of the pile of loot I was basically laying on, a sharp little spike of pain in my knee when I brushed it against Tevin’s arm.
While I became distracted with my injuries, Rin steadied himself against the cab and triggered my plasma knife. He flinched and shut it off immediately, then after giving me another glare, he turned it back on and slowly poked it into the material of the divider.
The material smoked and spat, letting out a hissing, almost moaning, noise as it melted around the superheated loop of plasma. A hoarse scream came through from the front, and only got louder as Rin gouged out a circle the size of my head in the bulkhead, only leaving a little tab still connected at the bottom.
His work complete, he shut the blade off and tossed it back to me as he leaned down and picked up the crowbar. After giving the cut a moment to cool, he used the crowbar to bend the small bit of material out of the way, hinging it open without letting the red-hot piece of metal fall to the floor.
“Holy shit! Something’s coming through!” I heard Raschel shriek.
“Calm yourself! That’s Nick's knife.” Ali replied harshly, before raising her voice and yelling back to me. “There’s someone messing with us on the radio, sir!”
Confused, I looked up towards our new communication passage. “Who is it, what are they saying?”
“I don’t know, sir, they’re not saying anything now, I disabled the radio when they got weird. They know who we are though, sir.”
I looked to Max and raised an eyebrow at him and to my surprise the fucker looked away, averting his eyes and pretending like he didn’t see me.
“Do you know who it is, Max?”
He kept avoiding eye contact, and I just waited for a response as an idea of what was going on slowly formed in my addled brain. It took a moment, and me throwing a random piece of debris that was on the floor through his holographic form, for him to finally respond.
“Gah, like I said, you humans are confusing. I was trying to be nice, make personal introductions now that I’m free to talk to other people. I wanted to make a good impression, you know?”
Rin sat down as well, watching the tablet out of the corner of his eye as he picked up on what was happening, even if Max had reverted back to talking only to me internally.
“Oh?” I asked, “could you go into a bit more detail than that?”
“What was that, sir?” Ali called back from the front.
“Sorry, not you Ali. I think I know who it was though, I’ll handle it.” I eyed Max a little harder.
“What?” Max shifted in his relaxed pose.
“Did you say something to her over the radio?” I asked.
“So what if I did?”
“Well, what did you say?” I did my best to push my amusement with the situation off to the side and not acknowledge it in my mind, not trusting Max’s ego to be able to handle it in anything resembling a mature manner.
“I just made an introduction, and told her that I’m a fan of her work.” Max said, this time piping it through the tablet as well. “Nothing to worry about.”
Rin and I exchanged a glance at that, ‘nothing to worry about’ had a terrible reputation as a phrase these days. I looked back at Max, “So we’re clear for a while? For the next few miles at least? Nothing to warn her about?”
Max nodded, jumping at the chance to change the subject. “Yeah. There will be another containment line of support troops that will be difficult to get through eventually, but we made it through the rebels search parties and the army only has a few light mounted scouting forces moving through this area. If we take the right path, we should be clear for 20 minutes or so until things get dicey again with the rear line.”
I felt a small smile tug at the corners of my mouth, but resisted giving into it. “Can you guide our driver?”
“Yeah, obviously. I can keep us off of the radars and sensors, and map out the blindspots in their perimeter.” He sat up a little from his relaxed pose, and added. “I, uh, I can still use the speakers in the van, even if she shot up the head unit.”
I had to play this carefully, yet spend as little time as possible examining my thoughts on how to do it. “What, exactly, did you say before the radios, uh, tragic end?”
“I was being nice! I just complimented her. Ever since the fight I had to handle for you that first night, I’ve looked into the many many ways you people like to pummel each other. Tevin’s good, but Ali has perfect form in like 6 different styles, and I mentioned that I admired that.” Max shrugged, and made a gesture like he was brushing something off of his arm.
It was too much, despite my effort to contain myself, I burst back into laughter. Rin however looked over to me, just as confused as Max. “And that’s why she shot the radio?”
I laughed some more, but tried to fight it and maintain control of myself. Knowing him, he might have meant that, but said it all wrong. “Hahaha, aah. You said you’ve been a fan of hers, and admiring her form?”
Rachel's manic tear-streaked face was in the newly cooled hole in the bulkhead, “For weeks! ‘Admiring her form for weeks’, and that’s not all he said. Who is he anyway? He’s like whispering at us up here, it's kind of creepy.”
Rin’s hand rose up, and he audibly slapped his forehead into his palm. His other hand joined the first and he ran his fingers through his shaggy hair in frustration. “My whole career…”