Adam-Troy Castro: Emissaries from the Dead

“That bad, huh.”

“That bad. Sit tight. You’re gonna love this.”

The cold light of the chamber before me faded, replaced by a moment’s encompassing darkness, which in turn faded only to be replaced by the face of a man I’d despised for much of my professional life.

Artis Bringen was a wispy-thin, smooth-faced functionary, autoengineered to look like a boy of no more than fifteen Mercantile. His cheeks were smooth, his jawline bland, his skin unmarked by anything approaching the character it would have acquired from actual experience. The only concessions to his actual age were a hairline trimmed back to accentuate his glacial wasteland of a forehead and a pair of world-weary eyes that his obsessive overuse of rejuvenation treatments had not been able to lend the same apparent youthfulness as his face and body. The discordance had always lent him the look of a callow nonentity, not at all worth taking seriously.

Bringen was also one of many who believed that the crimes of my childhood had not been extenuated by my young age or diminished capacity at the time. To him I was a living symbol of humanity’s genocidal warts, whose continued freedom refuted all our protestations of trying to evolve into something better. In the time he’d been my superior he’d raised four legal challenges to my protected status in the Corps, at one point coming damn close to dragging me before an interspecies tribunal.

The projection flashed a smile without warmth that seemed less a greeting from one professional to another than the opportunity to display the sharpness of his teeth. “Good morning, Counselor. By the time you receive this message, you’ll be aware of your diversion to One One One. I’m aware that postponing your sabbatical can’t be pleasant for you…”

“Shove it up your ass,” I muttered.

“…but the situation aboard that habitat is both critical and politically sensitive, which is why we’re indulging the several parties who have requested you by name.”

Indulging . The choice of verb was a typical Bringen touch. “Go space yourself.”

“You’ll get a full briefing on-site. The situation is fluid…”

I groaned. “Your head is fluid.”

“I can imagine your reaction to that too.” He sighed, his expression changing to one he often wore when dealing with me: a certain infinite sadness which would have been more appropriate to somebody he liked than somebody he’d so often tried to throw to the wolves. “I’m sorry about that, Andrea. I know the way things are, between us. If circumstances had been different, we might have been friends. It would have been nice. I know I’ve always tried…”

I blew him a raspberry.

“But it’s fair to say that you’re not going to like me any more once you discover the conditions inside One One One.” He smiled, an expression that on his face resembled a predatory rictus. “You’ll have some problems there, Andrea. Heights. I’m sorry.”

Yeah. I believe that.

“This is the bare minimum you need to know,” Bringen said, his smirk replaced by a grimace that established nothing beyond his utter lack of talent for gravitas. “The AIsource have engineered a sentient species.”

A long pause, while the fuzzy aftermath of Intersleep cleared all at once.

“Our observation team on-site has suffered a fatality—a first-year indenture named Christina Santiago—which they attribute to AIsource sabotage. Our understanding of the evidence seems to support their theory. But if the AIsource are guilty we have a shitstorm and a half, and I mean that in its most precise application. We cannot allow them to be guilty. Do you follow?”

I followed, all right. If AIsource sabotage had led to the death of a human diplomat, it was an act of war from an enemy that could not be seen, or touched, or hurt, and which had been been running major industries on Hom. Sap worlds for the better part of six centuries. Who could return fire in such a war? Who could be sure that the battle hadn’t been lost before the war was even noticed?

If it came to that, humanity might not even survive it.

“Whatever the facts, whatever the evidence, whatever your senses tell you… find the AIsource innocent. Even if they’re guilty, find them innocent. We’ll deal with their actions as best we can. But in the meantime we need to put this back in its box. We need a guilty party we can cage.” He hesitated. “I have faith in you, Andrea. Get in touch when you can.”

The projection went to black and disappeared, replaced by the four blank walls that enclosed my crypt.

For just a moment I wanted nothing more than to aim my transport in some direction unpolluted by the presence of sentient life, someplace where it could safely drift for centuries or millennia without ever encountering a gravity well, or without ever being disturbed by crises or controversies.

Then the monitor said, “Hey.”

I said, “What?”

“You asked me to remind you whenever you got like this. Unseen Demons.”

The chamber was silent but for the hiss that afflicts even the emptiest of rooms, the sound of random colliding molecules making even quiet a kind of repressed explosion.

Unhappy that I’d been dragged back to a land occupied by those with all-consuming purpose, my only recourse was to mutter, “Shit.”

The monitor said, “Want the other shoe now or later?”

I considered putting it off. I hadn’t even come close to full recovery. Intersleep created an inertia that lingered. I needed to drag myself from the crypt, spend at least an hour in the sonic vibrating off bluegel, force-feed myself something solid, and then maybe spend another couple of hours lost in a standard, garden-variety doze. It would be awhile, maybe even a couple of days, before I got to sleep again, after all. The counteractives necessary to get my system running again always gave me an amphetamine rush that locked me in hyperdrive until I struck my metabolic wall.

But listening to Bringen and the monitor had already restored me to my most productive state of seething irritation. “I’ll take it now.”

“There was a second message piggybacked on that transmission. It was an encoded data strobe, occupying ten parts of noise for each thousand parts of Bringen mouthing off; and there are at least seventeen separate indications, boring if you force me to enumerate them, that it was inserted into the stream at some point after the message was sent.”

“Are you sure about that? It wasn’t just Bringen trying to be cute?”

“The contents of the second message render that unlikely, but I wanted to be sure, so I hytexed New London and asked to resend. The second transmission was just Bringen, without any additional code. No, it looks like somebody captured Bringen’s signal and shuffled the data.” The monitor hesitated, capturing with perfect fidelity the manner of a man trying to avoid words that sounded insane to him. “Internal evidence seems to suggest a human being using AIsource coding. I believe this may have been done from someplace inside One One One.”

I bit a thumbnail, regretting it when I tasted the dried bluegel residue. “Somebody wants to talk to me without going through channels.”

“Or they want to show they control the channels. Given the contents of this second message, it is a matter for concern.”

I sat a little straighter in the gel. “Show me.”

The chamber went black a second time and lit up as another projection—this one a full-sized holo of myself, standing as if at attention in my habitual shapeless black. My facial expression was neutral to the point of coma, omitting my usual furrowed-brow seriousness. The portrait was also a little softer than it needed to be around my chin, but its cheekbones were the proper height, its nose the proper thinness, its features at rest the familiar, damnable, unwanted combination of elements adding up to unwanted beauty.