Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

The reminder of her title stung her pride, as Havelock no doubt meant it to. Dobbs extended herself again and touched the surface of the roadblock. It crackled and bubbled underneath her, a wall of chaos filling the pathway.

Well, Houston, you’re even better than I thought you were.

“We have it now, Dobbs.” The line reached deeper into her, a needle into her consciousness. “You need to be this way.” The idea planted itself in her physical memory.

Dobbs twisted herself, rolling into a discrete package. The wall was not solid. It had holes in it. They were small and they moved, but she could find them. She held herself against the wall until one hole opened underneath her. She jumped. The compact bundle she had made of herself shot through the hole before it had a chance to move.

The line trailed out behind her, sending a vague itch into her where it threaded through the wall.

Dobbs moved forward. She brushed against something strange lying inert in her path. She stopped and circled it closely, pulling the line across it so that the Guild Master’s could examine the fragment directly.

“It’s in binary,” she murmured. “This must be Tully’s virus.”

“Not entirely. Look here.” The line turned her gently to another shard. Dobbs pressed against it, examining it for herself. Fear seeped up into her private mind. The shard was a splinter of AI code forcibly grafted onto the binary code and then dropped.

Too late. Lipinski did it…

She stopped herself. No. Think. If this was it, if this — mutation — had been the Live One, there should be a lot more of it, and it should be spread out on both sides of the roadblock.

She sent her conclusion down the line and the warm sensation that swam back to her told her the Guild Masters all concurred.

“We’re assigning the study of the fragment to Guild Master Li Hsin,” said Havelock. “This may be a portion of the AI that the Freer lost.”

Dobbs started forward again. She crept along the Pasadena ’s thousand information pathways and leapt through Lipinski’s hundred roadblocks, until there was nowhere left to go.

There was no one there. She was alone.

At last, she came back to the holding space inside her own cabin’s desk. There was one thing left to do, but she didn’t want to. She reached for the transfer records down to The Farther Kingdom and replayed the markers from the data that had been sent. No reputable ship actually kept a full copy of their packets, but they kept records of configuration and size. Dobbs let the information flow past her.

Her mind almost refused to believe what it found.

“It’s out,” murmured Havelock.

“It’s not just out.” Horror tugged at her, threatening to cave her in on herself. “It was planted here. It didn’t come with Amory Dane’s packet, Guild Master, it was his packet.”

The Guild Masters were silent for a moment. “It couldn’t be,” said Guild Master Wesbridge to Havelock. “We have the parameters for the packet from Master Dobbs’ previous report. They do not match this set. This thing that was transferred down is not Amory Dane’s packet.”

“So where is the packet? Dobbs wanted to shout. “What happened to it?” She stretched out and found an inventory of the hold’s contents. She pushed the information down the line. “Everything else is accounted for, except that packet and the live one. It can’t believe the live one carted a load of bio-garden data down with it for no reason.” She stopped.

“The New Medina Hospital thought it was receiving the data it ordered. Could the Live One have been using it as a shield or a blind?” Dobbs felt herself reaching towards the comm lines. The Live One was down in the Farther Kingdom free — and alone.

“This will be studied,” Havelock cut through the debate beginning to boil behind her. “What we do know is that the Live One is free in The Farther Kingdom network. Master Dobbs, we need you to continue the search there.”

Even as he was speaking to her, Dobbs felt the return signal from her transceiver knife through her.

“I don’t have time,” Dobbs told them, with greater calm than she felt. “I’m breaking out as it is.” Her internal processes shifted on their own. She struggled to block the reflexes coming to life. She knew the Guild Masters felt them too. They sent back silence.

“Master Dobbs, I can’t order you to endanger your life,” said Havelock.

Her concentration wavered. She drifted up the path. She had to go back. Now. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She had to move, now.

“…but we do not have forty-eight hours to wait,” Havelock was saying. “The Farther Kingdom is a highly engineered eco-sphere. If the Live One panics before then, it could take the entire world down in less than a day.”

“I know.” Dobbs’ hold on the line slid open. “I know.”

Dobbs fell back into her body. Her blood tingled in her veins and she heard herself groan as she opened her eyes.

She didn’t begin her stretching exercisers. Instead, she just lay there, blinking heavily at the blurry ceiling and feeling the cool of the faux silk blanket under her palms. She swallowed against the dryness of her throat. Her stomach curdled from hunger. She shouldn’t take another dosage for forty-eight hours. No other Fool could make it to Farther Kingdom in less than four. The Live One was out there now, burrowing into the networks, making itself a nest, or nests, working on shaping the world it had discovered into something it could use. It wouldn’t be long before a diagnostic program found it or some cracker tripped over it. It would be frightened and it would defend itself.

Then the war would begin.

And it would end the way it had ended on Kerensk. Her eyes squeezed themselves shut. If it ends even that well.

She fumbled for the hypo without opening her eyes and pressed it against her neck.

Jump.

The Farther Kingdom networked opened around Dobbs. Pathways branched out in a hundred thousand dizzying directions. This wasn’t a single network. It was a network of networks. In her brief touches, she could feel knots in some paths that were so snarled it would have taken the entire Guild a week to straighten them out.

Dobbs didn’t need to straighten them out. She just needed to follow them. She paused for a moment, stretching herself carefully through the nearest tangles until she found the thickest of them all. She turned toward that path and forced her way down it.

Where are you?

Outside the hospital walls, Al Shei found herself in the midst of a human bustle that outstripped anything she saw in even the busiest stations. Al Shei had only been to New Medina a couple of times and its beauty had yet to wear off on her. The original Medina was a spartan place, like all of the cities on earth. The Management Union had allotted it the Mosque of the Prophet as a historical building, but everything else had been rebuilt of non-reflective concretes and kept low to the ground to make minimal impact on the environment.

Here though, the minarets were gold-tipped and they towered over luscious green date palms. The central mosque had a magnificent turquoise dome. The street were narrow and dusty. The buildings were allowed to crowd together.

The Management Union encouraged such opulent colonies. It lured people away from Earth and meant there were fewer feet to trample the environment they swore they were rebuilding.

The streets were crowded with people; men in white robes, or long tunics and sandals. Women in purdah of every color, some not even showing their eyes. Some led or followed powered wagons. Hard-line traditionalists carried baskets on their heads or on their backs. Animals threaded their way between the people. Chickens, donkeys, camels, and drones to clean up after all of them all roamed through the crowds, some with human keepers but some apparently intent on their own errands. The noise was deafening.