Autonomous by Chris Howard – Chapters 4 – 6
Nathan Isenart climbed out of Tom’s truck at four in the morning, reaching over the seat to pull out his duffle stuffed with dirt, dead leaves, and a heavy load of ACUs—a tight bundle of sleeves and legs, dried mud and pixelated camo—for the laundry.
Umiko Kurasawa met him at the street door to their Cambridge apartment building, a flood of warm light glowing around her—like the light from another world. It made Nathan stop and smile, a genuine, letting down his guard, release everything that held him to the earth kind of smile. He gave into it, dropping his bag—which Tom, coming around the other side of the truck, picked up and carried into the building and up the stairs for him.
Then he was in her arms, hands shaking, hard to breathe, holding her as if the rest of the world were slipping by, and he could only bring it back with her help.
“Missed you, Umi.”
Umiko kissed him softly, and whispered, “Come up. I’ve made some tea, just for you. Something to loosen you up.” She didn’t let go—not yet. “You’re off work tomorrow—or the rest of today?”
Nathan sighed. “Unless something comes up.”
5 – Salvage
“Drifting,” Ty said to himself. “Has to be the Gulf Raider. Homing beacon isn’t working, though. She’s adrift, just over forty kilometers southeast of us, captain.”
A solid block of shadow cut across the daylight coming through the windows, and Tychasis looked up from the radar and proximity screens to find the bridge of the salvage ship Marcene empty.
Stretching to work the knots from his aching back, Ty felt the tension of a scowl forming on his face, muscles tightening like a fist, and down deep there was the sense of an alertness that should have been there—that hours of staring into mindless fucking machines with screens had dulled.
He had been hunched over them since noon, elbows on the metal, hands cupped around his face, intensely focused on the search, and—apparently—hadn’t noticed when the entire bridge crew had gone off duty. Or vanished like the Gulf Raider from the worldwide views of ship tracking services.
“Captain Wilraven?” He straightened, let his arm drop, one finger still pointing—now at the floor instead of southeast.
“Adista?” Eyes blinking, still adjusting to the low light, Ty whispered the First Officer’s name, and wheeled away from the bank of drive and navigation panels—to take in a bridge of empty stations and chairs. He didn’t like the ragged edge of darkness angling up the back wall and across the floor, something massive off the starboard side blocking half the sky and sunlight.
At least someone had hit the DPS—dynamic position system, which pinned the salvage ship, Marcene, to the waves, to a fixed point on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, almost four hundred kilometers south of Louisiana. Ty felt the comfortable motor-hum under his boots, of the ship’s thrusters working to hold the vessel steady against the heavy and continuous sea rolling into Marcene’s bow.
“Disappointed.” He whispered the word across the bridge, to the empty chairs and stations, a sudden gnawing raw regret that no one was here to celebrate the finding of the Raider. Or what made it stand out, the extraordinary means of finding the ship using the Marcene’s ordinary—although advanced—technology. He could have found the ship an hour ago using his own special techniques, but Wilraven, as a learning exercise, had restricted him to the scanning devices on the bridge—with their “user interfaces” and silly acronyms and soul-blinding LED field arrays.
The solid slam of a door on his right, and Ty spun, startled, to find Captain Wilraven just in from the access way to the starboard flybridge. The man looked like a cowboy more than a sea captain and salvage master, tall and wiry in faded jeans and an Ocean Eight Salvage windbreaker—a wild west movie cowboy because Tychasis had never seen a real one. He had never even seen a real cow, and only once a horse from the deck of a bulk ore ship he and Adista had worked a decade ago.
“Cap?”
Standing in shadow, Ty couldn’t read the expression on Wilraven’s face, and then the captain was twisting to gesture back the way he had come, his voice excited.
“Ty, you have to see it.” With a trace of shame, he added, “Sorry, man, forgot you were heads-down in the x-band.”
“It?”
Wilraven was already opening the door, holding it for him. “The Thirty-one Eleven. She’s above the waves.”
Tychasis moved, trancelike, starting to shake his head, and then he was past Wilraven and through the door, standing in the cool air with the rest of Marcene’s bridge crew. His friend from childhood—who he followed to every post and position—First Officer, Adista Anastasatos, waved him over, and Ty nodded, just an acknowledgment because he couldn’t keep his gaze away from the “Thirty-one Eleven” for more than a few seconds at a time.
His neck was cranked back. He kept saying, “What?” with gasps of breath where the rest of the words were supposed to be dropped in. One hand gripping the railing, he found the fingertips of his other tapping lightly against the pad of muscle in from the thumb, melodies gathering, twisting, braided together in his head, the words of something special begging to be released, but trapped inside and tumbling around, a tickle at the back of his throat.
Until Santo Sequeira, one of Marcene’s navigators, helpfully laid out the complete question, “What is that?”
Tychasis glanced over, coughed to clear his throat, and nodded.
Behind him, looking up—like all of them—at the massive structure of an oil production platform, Captain Wilraven pointed out the four blocky numerals painted down the spar’s central cylinder, barely visible in the corrosion streaks and crust of algae, sponge formations, and the lively tangles and plates of corals.
Wilraven whispered, “Aurora Thirty-one Eleven. The whole platform went under—just vanished—during a tropical storm.” He looked around. “Fall of 2012?” And got a few nods.
The platform loomed over the salvage ship, a hundred meters of structural decking, broken cranes and booms, holes through the flooring of the helideck that jutted out of one side. It was a spar platform, with the topside—all the production facilities, crew quarters, offices, cranes, derricks, operations machinery—sitting atop a massive cylindrical hull that was bottom-weighted and anchored to the Gulf’s floor a couple thousand meters under them.
Most of the gigantic structure was covered in sea life, bulbous growths of sponge and coral. Seaweed draped and folding wetly over the bracing and angle-structure of the production decks, hanging along a gantry crane and fluttering in the gulf wind. There were already a dozen seagulls hopping over the feast, wings opening and shuddering territorially. A few soared over the newly surfaced wreck, keening sadly, looking for unguarded ground, landing to pick their way through fields of tubeworm colonies and mussels.
Ty gestured toward the platform. “What’s it doing here?”
Wilraven nodded, frowned a little as if the question had stumped him, and he had to give it some serious thought. “Still anchored, obviously.” He shook his head. “No idea how the ballast systems could suddenly decide to start functioning, to bring her above the waves.”
Adista looked up at the sky—as if reading something there, and then turned back to Captain Wilraven frowning. “I don’t believe the platform is anchored. This isn’t where she was operational. Besides, there’s too much—” A gust of wind whipped away her words as she dropped her gaze to the water and leaned over the rails to study something at the base of the Thirty-one Eleven’s cylinder, where the sea sloshed and broke against the coral-crusted steel. “She doesn’t appear to be adrift either.”
Now they were all frowning. They could feel the Marcene straining against the Gulf currents, working to maintain her position lock—GPS managing the ship’s thrusters. If you weren’t anchored or under power, the current would eventually shove you into the shallows or a rocky coast somewhere. If the Thirty-one Eleven was not anchored that meant she had to be drifting.
The paradox kicked Ty’s thoughts back to the missing supply vessel, Gulf Raider—forty kilometers to the southeast, drifting.
“Captain, I found the Raider.”
That brought everyone around, the captain’s steady gaze locked on him, the rest of the bridge crew exchanging looks that Tychasis read as quickly-made connections between the coral-covered wreck of a platform looming over them and the mysterious disappearance of the platform supply vessel, Gulf Raider.
Wilraven glanced around, caught the conspiracy-building in the air, and nodded approvingly. “Awesome.” He tilted his head and gave Ty a knowing grin. “I assume you found her using nothing but the mundane and sometimes simplistic equipment of a moderately bright surface-dwelling humanoid species?”
Tychasis, whose thoughts and focus had wandered up to the drowned hulk of an oil platform, had to pull them back and take in the question. It took him another second to give the captain a sharp smirk. “You know I did.”
Nodding, Wilraven jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to the Thirty-one Eleven and said, “I know you’re keen to see what this is about. Leave it for later.” The captain turned and waved them all back inside. “Adista, can you give Rusty a call? Fill him in on the Thirty-one Eleven and what Ty has found?” He gestured to Tychasis. “Come on. We’re losing the day. Let’s go catch our casualty.”
Adista was already on the phone, nodding, her look of contemplation—of what could possibly make the Thirty-One Eleven float unanchored but not drift with the currents—shifting toward surprise in sharp intervals.
Catching Tychasis’ eye, she nodded to something someone on the other end of the phone said, and then waved to get the captain’s attention. “Ocean 8 wants us off this for a week. They want us up in the Atlantic, backfilling project work after tropical storm Carolin. Rusty’s called in the Buealiev Salvor from Maine, and he wants us on standby at Port Everglades.”
Captain Wilraven pointed south, an angry finger-jabbing gesture. “What about the Raider? She’s adrift. And she’s ours.”
After relaying that to Rusty, Adista frowned back at the captain. “He’s calling in a contract crew to catch the Gulf Raider. The casualty’s ours. It’s a promise. He’s just going to have them set an anchor until we can return—says no more than a week and we can pick up everything where we’re leaving it off here.”
With one more glance back at the Thirty-one Eleven, Wilraven said, “Well shit. I guess we’re heading home for a bit.”
6 – Half-Patho from Barnhouse
Arckale Darsey felt alone with the salt and soya shoots on a city-sized agro-raft called Winderrill in the middle of the endless shining Atlantic Ocean.
Feeling alone was nothing new, and he was used to it. He could still pretend to be free, but that was always the difficult part.
At least his hands were dirty, wet and alive with enriched mud, tiny flecks of white and perfect pink cubes—one of the new slow-dissolve nutrients in the dark soil.
There was a taste of ammonia through his fingers as he climbed backward down the ladder, stepped off three rungs above the circle pattern plank floor, landing hard. No one there took every ladder to the top or bottom. They learned quickly to jump on a ladder a few rungs up, and they stepped off a few rungs before the end. There were daring soyouts who scaled Winderrill’s slip-paint walls barefoot using only the ladder’s vertical rails. Everyone admired their independence and skill. No one, not even the fisherbelles, wanted to live in a world where someone else—especially not some aquamanager in Savannah or Salem—mapped out every single one of their footsteps.
Who does?
Arckale marked his place in the universe, slapped a muddy hand to the inside wall of the access tumble—insulated rectangular passages that ran end to bloody end of each row of linked floating platforms. They were called “tumbles” because sometimes the Atlantic liked to play with people, tilting the giant hex-shaped barges on end, kilometers of them linked and sawtoothed, up and down across the waves, and he’d swear there was laughter in the crests and storm swells as he curled up, tucked in his knees, locked his gloved fingers over his head, and rolled with the game, hoping the ocean would let him go. Arckale hoped like everyone else, but some of them also prayed to God, or Poseidonis, or even to that soyout-loving electric sewer-conduit god, the Flow Engineer. The Winderrills were not necessarily a religious lot, but he figured most people would pray to any listening god when the Atlantic was playful because there was nothing but the cloth of your long sleeved workforms between your skin and the hungry no-slip floor. That stuff would take your flesh off and eat it, then rinse your bones away with your own blood.
Running his fingers along the tumble’s wall, Arckale smiled. It must take an unusually cruel person to invent new kinds of no-slip flooring—it was always sharper, grabbier, with more teeth.
Just one more thing to hold your feet to this world. “Damned no-slip flooring.”
Out on Winderrill in the middle of the Atlantic, only the birds were free.
Free as in not attached, not as Besner put it to Arckale, laughing when he spoke the words aloud—“Damn seagulls. Free to roost, breed, and shit all over—free as in loader, you over-thinking Barnhouse pathojen.”
* * *
Then he wasn’t even free to pretend he was free.
“Arckale?”
Someone called his name and his construct responded, servos hissing, a thump of hydraulics waking up. Even the pretend freedom had vanished, left behind when they had taken him into custody. The construct woke Arckale with a sharp pain up his spine, bending his body at the waist, legs pivoting, knees unfolding so that his feet touched the floor.
The construct moved for him, because he was no longer allowed to move on his own.
We are born puppeteers, all of us, setting our own bones and muscles in motion. And short of falling off a cliff or rolling in the Atlantic’s undertow, the motion was all your own. Every footstep, bend of a finger, every over-the-shoulder glance, you owned them and you were responsible for every one of them.
Until they thought you’d done something wrong.
“Arckale?” The voice again, a woman’s official-sounding voice, and Arckale was wheeled left, hydraulics pumping to face the locked door of his room. The privacy slide was open—usually was, and he could see two dark eyes and the bridge of a nose through the rectangle. The eyes blinked at him, then small creases at the corners, a fraction of a frown.
“I thought…” Her first expression washed away, then her eyes widened with an uneasy surprise. “I was told you were a…”
Arckale completed her question. “Pathojen?”
She nodded, backing away from the door, glancing down at something she was holding, some kind of backlit slate, her case notes, his bio, something that made her nod. “From Barnhouse.”
He cleared his throat, spoke carefully. He didn’t want his words to be misunderstood. “I’m only half. That’s close enough for most of you. And yeah, I grew up at Barnhouse.”
People normally said raised at Barnhouse. Arckale didn’t like the term because it sounded too much like reality—that he’d been engineered, fed, trained, shown the light at Barnhouse. Like some fucking gen-engineered food or fuel crop.
That wasn’t far from the truth.
She was back at the slot in the door, looking him up and down, the surprise shifting fractionally into wonder—interesting how similar those two looks are. Maybe it was just in her eyes, and if he could see the rest of her face, he’d be able to see the fascination that gripped normal people when they knew they were walking into a trap, a demilitarized shopping zone, or an asp nest.
He could work with that.
Arckale didn’t pick up hatred, disgust—the usual responses to his in-between form of failure. No flurry of warding gestures, no sense of the word “abomination” or “damned before the Lord” on her lips—or at least not on any part of the face he could see. He was pretty sure abomination would make its presence known along the bridge of her nose, with some wrinkling, maybe nostrils flaring. There’s definitely some connection with the word to the sense of smell.
There was a hard not-quite-focused look in her eyes now, questions surfacing. Slight muscle movement. She was chewing her lip on the other side of the six centimeter thick door, broadcasting a very real sense that he was wrong and not rightable.
He was a thing with a somewhat normal appearance, but with wrongness to the core, like an inside out poison apple. No need to dip him in anything lethal. In a long-sleeved shirt and a hat he even looked human, a blemish here and there, a hint of something different, but still approachable. More like a poison apple right off the tree, picked and packaged for consumption. A prosaic deadliness, they used to say at Barnhouse.
But imagine apples that could—at a single touch—rip through a man’s genome and stack up his vulnerabilities like skulls in a game of Tyrants. Another saying at Barnhouse: use their own code against them.
And instead of an apple, let’s say it’s a handshake.
Arckale’s skin wasn’t the dry many-layered shield against the world it was in unaugmented humans. With a whole stack of extrasomes guiding development, his skin was a warm, moist, porous, world-absorbing layer, rows of biocap plates and interpreter scales up his arms, along his throat, spine, and behind it all there were several biological engines that took in every sample from the air he breathed and the world that touched him. Then it identified threats and plotted revenge, sometimes in very nasty ways. He could be repurposed for agricultural management and agri-gene malfunction, but deep down everyone knew pathojens were made for biowarfare. Frontline biothreat operations, that’s why Barnhouse created them.
“More information is always better, Arckale.”
Her voice brought him back to her eyes at the door, and his voice came back slow and withdrawn. “What?”
“Get dressed. I’ll wait for you in case room Blaker,” she said, and as she turned to walk away, “In the meantime, you decide how much you want to tell me about the killings.”
The construct—the “carceral construct” bolted up and down his arms, legs, spine—didn’t let him answer, somehow aware of the conversation’s end. It gripped his body in its human framework and walked him to the bathroom. One foot in front of the other.
For a second, he imagined being dead, and the thing carting him around like a zombie, servos whining, brain-hunt mode enabled.
It got a small smile that faded quickly when he caught it in the mirror.
The smile was gone, but he continued looking at his own face, the open slots in the skin along his throat, the burnished metallic panels implanted along his arms and chest.
How far does a parent’s responsibility cover their own children? And, assuming it does, for how long? Can there be decisions that carry responsibility into other lifetimes, into forever?
Arckale asked the questions to the biolocks on his wrists and ankles, the throat and jaw collar, the spinal struct running up and across his shoulders, down his arms and legs, into the gloves and boots that walked him to the basin, opened his mouth, and made him brush his teeth.
Pathojen? I didn’t ask to be born this way. It was decided for me.
It also meant—and he had a mouthful of minty foam as he was thinking it—he never had to brush his teeth, because there wasn’t a single cell, chemical agent, bacterium, or protein-coated bit of viral info in his body he wasn’t aware of and managing.
For pathos, teeth brushing was one more useless, time-consuming activity, like hand washing, nail-clipping, and most grooming—all about as useful to a patho as a wild goose chase.
That cleanliness stuff came with the code, it was built into them.
Arckale glanced in the mirror, shot a brief smile back at himself. The wild goose thing refused to leave for a moment, sticking around to nag at him, then ran away, leaving only the question. Who chases wild geese anyway? Why not just set a trap for them? An ID&D—identification and drop protocol is simple to put together and release. Takes a minute, maybe ninety seconds. Only decision to be made is how hard to drop these fleeing geese, are we talking temporary or no-revival?
Behind him he heard the room’s door locks snap apart, but there was no freedom in that sound, only hope for it.
The carceral construct turned Arckale Darsey from the sink in his prison cell and walked him to his trunk of clothes.
