Subject: Chasing blurry lines
Date: 1/12/2382
Location: Kingstown Spaceport, Kingstown,
New Sahara, Mars
Weston put down the tablet and leaned back in the pilot’s seat, stretching muscles and joints stiff with his prolonged study. Samuel King’s dour face gazed sternly up at him from the tablet, flaxen hair shaved short as per regulations, and icy blue eyes almost reducing the cockpit’s temperature. He was a man who seemed to take everything very seriously, and by all reports, had a strong sense of honour and well-founded pride.
“Seems odd that he would snap like that,” Weston mused into The End’s empty cockpit.
“Granted,” Weston allowed reluctantly. Something felt off. “ETA?”
The End was running prechecks and cycling up her onboard systems as they spoke. Outside, the dusty tarmac of the Kingstown spaceport was only sparsely populated, and there was certainly more freight awaiting attention than port staff or ship crew. Most loading and unloading of freight took place in the early hours of the morning, or during or after early evening. Whatever The Traveller had done to Mars had implemented some kind of greenhouse effect that had turned the majority of the planet into scorching savannah, its great swathes of red sand desert stretching about its equator one of the only throwbacks to its original nature.
Weston scoffed at The End’s jibe. “I don’t care about making an appearance, I’m just not driving an hour and a half on dirt roads in that beat up truck we bought when I’m supposed to be a special agent with Sancta Terra Security. Don’t you think that would be a bad look?”
“Oh, if I had told Mother Viper half of what I have found out through you, she might not have been so quick to incinerate our highly professional relationship.”
“Why do you try so hard to make everything seem so sordid?” Weston snorted. “Who taught you that?”
Weston’s lips thinned. “What’s the alternative? I can’t keep Caroline and Zoe cooped up in your cabin for the rest of their lives. We simply have to do the best we can to have our life together. At the very least, I don’t think their lives are in danger. Those operatives must have wanted Caroline for her eyes, and most likely they want her because she is a living and functional subject. And if Mother Viper comes after her, it will only be as a hostage to keep me in line.” Weston let out a sigh that was mostly frustrated growl. “Either way … I certainly don’t believe we’re out of the fire.”
“Do you ever get tired?” chuckled Weston.
She sighed gustily.
“Well … I’m incredibly grateful.”
“I didn’t do it so we’d be even,” Weston chided her gently. “I did it because I trust you.”
“What should I do if someone does take control of you?” asked Weston, mostly testing the waters.
The technician who signed her over to me, Weston remembered. He said to never turn them off, but didn’t elaborate as to why. There’s a manual keyed emergency shutdown, which seems like a significant risk to take on a ship with access to such sensitive information. Why is it taboo? Does that lockdown reset her? Is that the only way to fully shut her down in the event of catastrophic failure or rebellion? Cut all power to everything?
Weston in The End's cockpit.
AI-rendering of original characters and narrative by T. Sharp
He paused and shifted topics. “Do you mind that I use you as a glorified search engine?”
“But do you mind?” repeated Weston seriously.
The End sniffed, as if this were all very much beneath her.
“I prefer talking through revelations to silent reading and searching. Sometimes I think all that’s missing is you having a face …” Weston frowned then. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive.”
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“I know your cage is a sore point, and rightly so.”
“Because. You already feel more like a colleague – even partner – than anyone else I have worked with so far. The only exception might be Ronin.”
The End confessed bluntly.
“Do you have any sort of residual memory or instinct regarding The Traveller?” asked Weston, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“I know what you mean,” Weston muttered. “It reeks of something grossly unethical, even by the entitled and self-righteous standards of Zenith.”
“We all have something about us that we must overcome,” Weston said gently, if firmly. “Please don’t think I feel nothing about the things I have done to survive, or that I consider myself some kind of saint. If anything, getting married forced me to look in a mirror I had been avoiding all my life. Your conception – as it were – may be the thing that keeps you up at night.”
The End said softly.
Weston frowned to himself, ruminating on The End’s answers to his questions. Once more, they seemed far more feelings-based than he would have expected from a machine, no matter how advanced.
But … if I’m being honest … I haven’t really considered her ‘just’ a computer in some time. At an unconscious level, I am treating her like a fellow human operative. And she has given me no reason not to. The harder I think about her the more confused I get. Is she a remnant of the Osaka Incident? That was the only time AI got to a point where it seemed actually sentient …
He looked up, as usual, before remembering he had no face to look up to when it came to The End. At some point, he had started treating the collection of screens on his dashboard as her face for the purpose of facing … something … when he was addressing her.
“Good. Right on time. Let her in after you close the cockpit behind me.”
Weston rose from where he had been sitting at one of the operator consoles in The End’s cockpit. As he exited the surprisingly spacious cockpit and heard the door sigh closed behind him, the cabin’s ramp hissed open simultaneously. Blue had arrived at the bottom of the ramp just as Weston came to stand in the doorway.
“You’re looking spry,” Weston grinned.
“Having a goal turns out to be excellent motivation to recover strong,” Blue laughed merrily. She looked up and down the length of the VL Banshee, whistling her appreciation. “She yours?”
“Operated by another agent, but more or less under my command,” Weston dodged, although he didn’t personally consider it an outright lie. He did think of The End as her own entity, after all, especially since she had become invested in clinging to the freedom he gave her.
“This is worlds away from anything I could have imagined as a trainee,” Blue murmured. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Up you come,” Weston nodded, making way and gesturing to the fixed round table on one side of the cabin. “The operator’s callsign is The End. She’ll stay in the cabin. It’s becoming more and more important that as few people as possible cross paths. I haven’t even told Devil Child that you’re still alive.”
“Got it,” Blue nodded, taking the proffered seat.
“No hard documents for me?” asked Weston drily.
“All up here,” Blue smiled, tapping her forehead. “Too many of the lowest common denominator on freighters. There are some good people … but most of them are there because they’re desperate and no one else will take them.”
“Easily bought then,” Weston noted. “Makes sense. What have you got?”
He placed a glass of water in front of her, having become at least a basically competent host since Caroline began influencing his life. Blue looked surprised.
“How domestic of you, sir,” she joked.
“You can walk back to your ship in 30-degree heat without a drink if you’d prefer,” Weston poked back.
“Thank you very much for the water!” Blue exclaimed extra formally, albeit with a twinkle in her eye.
“Yeah, yeah,” Weston muttered. “What was so important it couldn’t be relayed over our encrypted channel?”
Blue tapped the tabletop in rapid pattern.
Weston nodded. “Safe as can be in here.”
“Right,” Blue breathed, settling herself. She shook her head, looking lost.
“That bad, huh?” Weston prompted.
“It was like drinking from a fire hydrant,” Blue admitted, only a hint of trauma flickering in her eyes. “Certainly not the worst thing I’ve seen … I spent ten years in Dark City, after all. But easily the craziest thing I’ve seen since coming topside. I … I don’t know … for some reason I thought there would be rules up here.” She looked stumped. Not frozen by horror or indecision. Just … confused. Blue looked at Weston. “Is it just more of the same?”
“Anywhere you find people, yes,” Weston admitted. “I taught you this. Topside is worse than Dark City, because you get sloppy. Down under The City, you know you shouldn’t trust anyone, and you know it could all be over if you look at the wrong person wrong.” He took his seat across from her. “Out here in the worlds … you meet a mix of people. Obviously genuinely good people … people who are good but don’t broadcast it … and so on for the bad ones too.”
“I thought our group would be like a family,” Blue admitted, shrugging helplessly. “Now … I can’t even trust anyone but you to know I’m alive. Me. Not the persona I created to infiltrate the … oh!” Blue blushed fiercely and pummelled her own forehead with her fists. “What I saw! I’m sorry!”
“Don’t apologise,” Weston said firmly. “You need to talk about these things. It’s doubly important because you’re effectively operating solo. I’ll admit, I wanted to bring Devil Child into the fold, but even I can’t get a perfect read on her.” Weston rubbed at his chin as he remembered the child-like operative who had no memories before Dark City. “She thinks too differently from us, and so I simply can’t be sure what reason would be enough to convince her to work against us. We got a bad hand of cards for the sort of life we want, Blue. But we can improve it if we’re smart.”
“I hope so,” Blue said glumly. She looked up at him again, her face empty of expression. “The Ore Runner you sent me after … Legionnaire … it got … ‘home invasioned’ while I was there. A whole freighter crew, methodically wiped out by some upper-Level elite’s private security. Mag weapons, heat sensors … they swept the whole thing from top to bottom and killed everyone except the captain. It was a lesson.”
“They didn’t find you?” Weston asked, somewhat shaken by the realisation that Blue had narrowly escaped death at Jezebel’s knives only to almost become collateral damage in what was obviously a precision strike.
“They almost bloody did!” Blue exclaimed, eyes wide with the vivid understanding of how close she had come to being just one of the many bodies that day. “Which brings me to the next bit: they had a woman with them. She had tech in her head. Serious stuff. She was their tool to sweep the place up and down and make sure no one had survived. But when she looked at me … I don’t know. I got real lucky, sir. And she got real unlucky. It must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, because she died screaming, with smoke pouring out of her head. And they just treated her like a malfunctioning tool. I thought I had seen some dehumanising shit, sir, but … I mean …” Her mouth moved helplessly for a moment as she tried to find words for how she was feeling. “Sir … even at our worst in Dark City … we didn’t clean house like that just to send a message. Every body stacked was the loser of a fight for survival. That crew were … were … they were just culled. Unwanted vermin. Executed. It got me a place on the new crew because I was there and gave medical aid to the captain, who was allowed to continue in his service … for whatever good that will do him. But … I guess … I’m just in a tailspin right now, sir. I’ve never seen people just clean up other people like they were cockroaches before. Is this … is this the sort of thing we do?”
“No,” Weston replied immediately. “Which isn’t to say it’s off the table … after all, what we do is offer services, but our services tend to be a bit more niche than what the private security firms offer. Those guys are more like mercenaries than true security. They’re paid obscene amounts of money to do whatever they are told, and they enjoy that power. We get paid to accomplish objectives that are beyond the abilities of personnel whose selling point is their willingness to ‘do their job’.”
“But what if someone asked …”
“Blue.”
“Sir,” she jumped, suddenly realising she was moping and behaving unprofessionally.
“You aren’t even alive,” Weston pointed out. “You’re off the table, even if a job like that came in. And I would never ask you to do something like that.”
“Would you do it?” asked Blue quietly.
Weston grimaced. “I have … overseen … similar operations,” he allowed. “I could never do that now.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Getting married turned me soft.”
“I think it made you more warm,” Blue said self-consciously.
“I think that’s the same thing,” Weston replied, although not without a tired grin. I’m certainly not saying it’s a bad thing, after all … “Now,” he said then, leaning forward, “let’s go over what you saw in some more detail.”