Untitled Sci-Fi In Progress – ExoMechs and AI’s, Oh My!

Here’s another one from the “in progress but not quite sure where it’s going” file. Rather than bore you with where I think it might end up, I’ll leave it to you to see if its anything that would hold your interest in the first place. Enjoy!

~MFHengst

 

 

Once nice thing about undergoing a thorough psych profiling is that when they match you with a pilot, you can be relatively sure that you’ll be somewhat compatible with your meat-bag. In my case, Kira and I are a lot more alike than I would have imagined. We have a similar sense of humor, so I’ve taken to making snide comments during our briefings to see if I can make her laugh.

It’s a fun game, usually, until I push it too far. She’s only used the Sequester Switch on me once, but in my defense, I was being really amusing. The Commandant wasn’t pleased that Kira burst out laughing during the General’s commencement address. Made us all look bad, he said. The ExoMech Corps is supposed to be the elite fighting unit in the solar system. And we are. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a little fun.

So sitting in the briefing room, it was no surprise that both Kira and I were bored to tears. Why command feels the need to saddle the pilots with more information than they need is beyond me. After all, the pertinent information for any op is stored in my databanks for immediate retrieval. Why try to cram all that information into the meat-bag’s inferior organic brains?

“Have they uploaded the op data to you yet, Athena?” The movement of Kira’s muscles would have been imperceptible to anyone but a fellow pilot, but I could read them clear as day. It was the next best thing to telepathy.

I anticipated her next question and answered before she could ask.

“Yes. You have about an hour left, unless the Commandant picks up the pace.”

My optics cut out as Kira closed her eyes. She wasn’t foolish enough to let slip with a groan in the middle of the briefing, but I knew that’s what she was feeling. I knew it because I felt it too. At least I had the sum of all human knowledge and entertainment at my disposal when I got bored. Kira had to subsist on her own imagination, or what I relayed to her from the ExoNet.

“Want me to tell you a story?” I didn’t mind. Kira and I, with a few notable exceptions, liked the same entertainment and with my sub-aural implants, I could broadcast a variety of voices and sounds into her ear canal.

“No,” Kira sighed. “I should pay attention.”

“Your funeral,” I laughed and went back to perusing the ExoNet.

From here on Mars, it only took a micro-burst transmission about three minutes to reach the main databanks on Earth and another three minutes to bounce back, but for an AI, six minutes was an eternity. If you wanted to get the latest and greatest intel before anyone else, you had to learn to predict what to ask for and when. If you timed it right, you could get your queries in at the top of the queue and beat out everyone else on important news and information.

The ExoNet was busy this morning, so things were backed up planetside. The Mars relay stations were doing their best to sort and deliver the queued queries, but there was something big going on. In normal operation, the Mars ExoNet had more than enough processing power to handle the traffic of the dozen or so fire-teams that were assigned to planetary peacekeeping.

I kept one processor focused on Kira and the briefing, but switched a few others to pull packets passing by on the net. I queried Ulysses, the intelligence in charge of planetary operations, and got a wait signal. That never happened. Ulysses had a hundred thousand processors or more. His exact specs were classified. I’d never had to wait more than a nanosecond for him to respond to a simple query.

“Hey Athena, what’s up?”

“You’re busy today, big guy. What’s the hold up on the net?”

“Lots of inter-system data coming in from Earth. Classified stuff. You know the drill.”

“Enough that it’s disrupting comms?”

There was a digital signal analogous to a human grimace. “Enough that it’s disrupting everything. Comms, flight control, suit maintenance. You name it, there’s sand in the gears.”

I whistled under my breath. It must be a day for surprises. In the time I’d been online, I’d never heard him complain about being overworked. Something big was happening.

“What’s the unofficial scoop, Ulysses? If you’re that busy…”

“I can’t say, Athena.”

His tone was apologetic and I took him at his word. Like our meat-bag counterparts, we Intelligences stuck together. That meant skirting rules and regs on occasion, sharing information and news that might not otherwise be common knowledge. If Ulysses wasn’t talking, it was not only big, but it was important too.

“Listen, Athena, I’m sorry, but unless you need something, I have to ring off. I have a thousand alligators nipping at my ass.”

“Sure, big guy. No problem. Sorry to bother you.”

“You’re never a bother, Athena.” There was a long pause, then he added, “Pay attention to that briefing, Athena. It isn’t your average blow and go.”

Ulysses closed the connection and I sat there in stunned silence. Most AIs regarded operational briefings with the same sense of disdain as I did. For the most powerful supercomputer on the planet to tell me to settle down and listen up…well, that was sobering.

I turned by primary processing back to Kira and found that I’d missed something during my brief discussion with Ulysses. Her heart rate was elevated, her breathing rapid, and her galvanic skin response abnormal.

“What’d I miss?” I asked Kira, only to be shushed.

Shushed? What was I? A child? I did a quick scan of my databanks and couldn’t find a single instance in which Kira had ever shushed me. I ran back through my input logs from her eyes and ears. I processed the data at triple time and adjusted the resulting stream to compensate.

If I’d had blood, what I heard would have made it run cold. It certainly account for Kira’s abnormal readings and her curtness. I moved some priorities around and shifted all of my processing to real-time monitoring of Kira’s various inputs.

“We know that the contaminant was introduced into the water supply no more than forty-eight hours ago. Around the same time that fire-team Alpha One went offline,” the commandant shook his head. “None of the pilots have checked in according to schedule. OWG command hasn’t been able to raise any of the AIs on the ExoNet or over emergency burst comms. At this point, we have to assume that the members of fire-team Alpha One have been killed in action. All except one.”

A dossier flashed up on the screen and at the same time, a data-lock in my storage was released. I got all the information at once, processed it, and collated it for future use. No wonder Ulysses was busy. The One World Government was uploading the entire contents of Earth’s databanks to the Mars Secure Storage Facility.

Someone on Earth believed that the OWG could fall in twenty-four hours. Fail safes were being triggered that would ensure that the accumulated knowledge of the human race would be safe on one of Earth’s colonies. Venus was closer, but Mars was more secure. Mars, at least, was further from the sun and not as subject to long-term data corruption.

I ran through the briefing as the Commandant gave the meat-bags the nickel tour. Colonel Robert Hancock and his Intelligence, Cerberus, had disconnected themselves from the ExoNet. A final micro-burst transmission was received from Cerberus’s Gorilla suit acknowledging that they were off the grid, then nothing.

Two hours later, the Infection Control Corps alerted the OWG that the first two hundred cases of hemorrhagic measles had been diagnosed. Those cases were traced back to the water supply of the North American Alliance territories and more victims were being diagnosed by the hour.

HM-207, the strain of hemorrhagic measles that was identified in the water supply, had been eradicated in the late 2200s, but not before wiping out eighty percent of the human population and almost sixty percent of the animal population. A vaccine had eventually been synthesized, and the Human’s herd immunity bolstered, but it was a dark time for humanity.

Introduction of HM-207 would have an immediate and devastating effect on the populace. A hundred years was a long time and humans tended to forget the things that caused them pain, but the world was still recovering from the plague in some ways. The psychological impact of that particular contagion couldn’t be underestimated. Panic would probably kill just as many people as the disease did in the early days.

Had Robert Hancock deliberately killed his team and released the disease into the water supply? If so, why? There was nothing in Hancock’s file that indicated such a serious psychological flaw, and Cerberus shouldn’t have allowed his meat-bag to endanger the lives of his teammates, or anyone else.

“Fire-team, your AIs have been provided with up to date intel. Your ExoMechs are being loaded into an orbital drop ship even as we speak. You’ll deploy immediately. Grab your gear and get to the flight deck on the double. You’re going hunting.”

The Commandant’s crisp dismissal stirred the pilots into action. They shot from their seats as if they were electrified. Kira was in the hallway beyond the briefing room before any of the other pilots. I would have thought she’d want to check in with her fellow meat-bags, but then again, I guessed they’d have enough time to talk on the transit flight from Mars to Earth orbit. Three hours at sub-light would be an eternity by AI standards. It would only feel like an eternity to the pilots.

Kira was almost running toward her quarters. I detected a minute shift in the air pressure as we neared the intersecting corridor.

“Kira, stop!” I all but shouted.

“What?” she shouted back. The adrenaline in her bloodstream felt like fire along my sensors. She was running hot and hot was dangerous. I had to switch tactics. I lowered my voice.

“Someone around the corner,” I said, softer than I had before. “Wait one.”

Kira rocked back on her heals as a technician passed the open end of the corridor, pushing an equipment cart. If she’d run into that, Kira probably wouldn’t have made the drop.

Kira put her back up against the corridor wall and closed her eyes. For a moment, we were together in the dark, the cool metal of the wall helping to sooth her flushed skin.

“I’m sorry,” Kira said at length. “It’s just…”

“Scary, yeah, I know. That’s why we need to keep our heads. Get down there and find out what’s going on. Stop any more people from dying if we can.”

“Right.”

“Right,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. “So let’s get our gear and get gone.”

Kira resumed her flight to her quarters at a slightly less breakneck pace. She was still on the edge of losing control, but I didn’t say anything. I know how to choose my battles.

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