“Alternate route!” she snapped at her armor’s computer, turning back to the shaft. To SAM-E, she demanded, “Are any of the elevator shaft generators still active?”
“Only those that would be on the emergency grid! That is insufficient to raise one of the cars—”
“Not a car!” There was no time. The creature’s head was pushing through the floor, and it had fixed its tiny eyes on her. Taking a deep breath, Cora flung herself into the shaft.
There was a trick to using biotics to glide, Nisira had tried to tell Cora once. Instinct said to lift the self, but that was a good way to end up plastered all over the nearest wall. Better to concentrate on the air around the self—a more consistent substance, less dynamic, less fragile, but still tricky, and while asari had had centuries to master the skill, Cora had only tried it twice before.
So she fell for the first ten feet or so of the drop. If she had panicked then—and ohh, it was tempting—she would have died. But she ground her teeth and closed her eyes and summoned every iota of biotic skill within herself. She willed her dark energy fields to attenuate, thinning into a haze sheathing her body. She visualized this energy as a solid, microscopic mesh, snagging on the loose molecules of the air around her. Grinding against them to slow… slow… slow… her fall.
If it worked, it wasn’t enough. She slowed, but did not stop. Fortunately, however, some of the mass effect generators in the shaft were still active—not many, and clearly they were meant only to assist the elevators—which had their own generators—but every little bit helped. As Cora fell past one, her weight lessened by more than half. Abruptly it was easier to press against that so-thin air, and finally she stopped. She caught her breath in relief, refusing to think too deeply about what would happen if the generator failed or she slipped past its effective field.
And then the augmented creature slammed through the half-open elevator door above, leaping down at her.
No time for thought, only reaction. Cora lunged to one side, “rolling” on the friction of the air, and one of the creature’s massive hands missed her head by inches. It turned in mid-leap, flailing after her—but the mass effect generator didn’t have the field strength to stop something of its size. Momentum took the creature past the generator’s mass effect envelope. It dropped like a stone, seeming to dwindle rapidly in size as it fell away.
There was a brief, stunning flash of light as it hit one of the elevators, stories below, and the car’s generators exploded beneath the impact. Then the monstrosity lay still amid the ruins.
“Okay,” Cora breathed.
Keep visualizing a mesh. Steel wool all around you, catching on the air. Pay no attention to the monster on fire below.
“Okay, still alive. Gotta get out of here.”
SAM-E cleared his throat. “A pair of doors three floors down is partially open, Lieutenant. The mass effect generator holding you up now should reach that far.”
Should. “Yeah. Okay.”
She floated down and through the open elevator door, wobbly and awkward the whole way. Landing meant simply dropping out of the air into a crouch—nowhere near as graceful as what she’d seen asari do, but any landing you could walk away from…
Then Cora froze. The corridor was a visual shock, because it was clean. No bodies, no debris, no sign that the monstrosities had ever come onto this level. The lighting here was blue-filtered, too—actual full overhead lighting, not just the emergency floor strips. Her suit registered full life support. As Cora stood, trying to fathom these mysteries, she heard running footsteps and immediately tensed, her biotics flaring as she prepared to throw another warp. Belatedly, though, she registered that these footsteps weren’t the inhumanly heavy thuds of the monstrosities.
Humans!
Armed ones, though. Four of them, armorless but clad in Alliance uniforms—and pointing assault rifles and a missile launcher at her.
“Drop your weapons!” shouted one woman.
Cora shut down the blaze of her biotics, then made a careful show of raising her hands. “I’m going to remove my helmet and pistol.” She did so, moving slowly, tucking her helmet under her arm and setting her pistol on the floor. She set her foot on it. “I can turn this over to you, but frankly I’d rather keep hold of it, under the circumstances.”
The woman who’d spoken first looked terrified. Her face was pale as paper; the rifle shook in her hands. She looked very young. “Relinquish your weapon. A-a-and your amp, biotic!”
Cora shoved the pistol toward them. It slid across the floor easily, and one of the men in the group took it. “I’m not giving up my amp.”
“I said—” Cora’s refusal seemed to startle the woman enough that some of the wild-eyed tension faded from her face. Then she frowned. “Who the hell are you, lady?”
“Cora Harper. Private citizen now, but until recently a lieutenant in the Systems Alliance military.” She kept her voice low on purpose, trying to make the woman listen, encourage her to calm down. “You’re survivors. How many of you are there?”
The woman considered for a moment longer, then finally stood down, lowering her gun. The other marines with her straightened too, following her lead.
“I’m Operations Chief Zahra Said,” the woman said. “I’m the ranking—” She winced, grimaced. “There’s no one left of my platoon, so I’m in charge for now. Come with me, Lieutenant Harper. I think… damn. We need to talk.”
CHAPTER TEN
The room into which Lieutenant Said led Cora was obviously the debriefing room of a lab complex. Schematics models, handwritten papers, and extra haptic terminals festooned the walls, and the circular table had a built-in holo projector. The chairs were plusher than Cora was used to, but that figured; people who worked in a place like Quiet Eddy probably got bigger budgets for office supplies.
They’d collected a small crowd of hangers-on as Cora walked between Said’s marines. People in civvies and a few in lab coats murmured and trailed after them. Only a handful of others wore fatigues or armor. She spied one very old man, stooped and painfully thin. Two children—one in her mid-teens or so, but the other barely ten years old at a glance, which nearly made Cora flinch. Then again, it wasn’t as if these people had planned to face an infectious AI, or its nightmarish transhuman enforcers. Once upon a time, the staff and officers must have been permitted to bring their families with them.
“Oh, thank God you’re here. How many others are coming?” asked an anxious-looking man as others crowded into the room around him. The ten-year-old stood half in his shadow, peering around him at Cora. “Are you with Alliance Intelligence or the marines? Will it be a whole platoon, or just a strike force?”
“Do the Spectres know?” This from an older man on the other side of the room, who pushed through the crowd as Cora came to the table. “Does the Council?”
“Did you see anyone else alive on your way into the facility?”
“Is the rescue ship already here, or on the way?”
And more questions, and more, too many to answer. Cora stared at the people around her, aching inside as she realized she had no answers for them, or at least none that they wanted to hear. But before she could even begin trying to speak to them, a deep-voiced woman snapped, “Everyone, shut up. The woman can’t hear herself think.”
Thankfully, everyone shut up, though some were reluctant about it until their fellows elbowed or glared them into silence. The deep-voiced woman, who had long dreadlocks and turned out to be surprisingly diminutive for someone able to shout down a room, exhaled. “Now. Zahra, you look like you have a report.”
“Yeah.” Zahra Said jerked her head at Cora. “She says her name is Cora Harper. Found her at the elevator shaft after the motion alarm went off. Former Alliance. An LT.” Said lifted Cora’s heavy pistol to examine. “I think this is an asari weapon, though.”
“An Acolyte ultralight,” Cora said. “Better for biotics than Alliance standard issue.”
Said’s skeptical expression co
mmunicated clearly what she thought of that. She handed the gun to another of her soldiers. “That’s asari-made armor, too,” she said, looking Cora up and down. “You some kind of bluepie?”
“What?”
“Asari fetishizer. Groupie, into the blue? Where have you been that you’ve never heard that, some frontier hellhole?”
Cora resisted the urge to sharpen her voice. Earthers think everybody cares about their stupid pop culture. “I’m from the Traverse, yeah, but I spent four years with an asari commando unit on Thessia as part of a joint program between our government and theirs.”
Said snorted, and Cora suspected she’d just confirmed herself as a “bluepie.”
The deep-voiced woman said, “All right, so that’s what you are and where you’re from. What most of the people here want to know, however, is how many more of you are on the way? A dozen—or even better, a hundred?”
Cora took a deep breath.
“Nobody else is coming. It’s just me.”
Gasps and curses and exclamations of shock rippled through the crowded room. “Bullshit,” Said snapped. “Nobody could’ve made it this deep into the Eddy alone. Not through the augments.”
Several people echoed her. The deep-voiced woman held up a hand and the murmurs quieted. “Unshielded organics—even augmented ones—are known to be vulnerable to biotic attacks,” she said. “Most human biotics, even combat-grade, don’t have the necessary power or skill. A human biotic trained by the asari, though…” She folded her arms, expression turning contemplative.
“Trained by the asari? Sent by the Council, more like.” This was the older man who’d asked Cora whether the Spectres were involved. He looked sixtyish, tall and thin, with a suspicious, weathered-bronze face. “I heard they were inducting humans into the Spectres.”
“That’s just a rumor, Thangana,” said the very old man, rolling his eyes.
“How about it, Ms. Harper?” asked the deep-voiced woman, leaning on the table. Lit from below by the table’s display, Cora could see the tired circles under the woman’s eyes and the hard line of a mouth that hadn’t smiled in some time. No telling how long these people had been down here, worrying and waiting for a rescue that wasn’t likely to come. “Are you a Council spy?”
“No.” Cora hesitated a moment longer, debating whether to tell them the truth, then deciding finally that it was pointless to lie. “I’m with the Andromeda Initiative, here to retrieve what was stolen from us.”
Another stir amid the onlookers, this one uneasy. But the deep-voiced woman stared at Cora in frank disbelief before laughing, humorlessly.
“Well, you found it, Ms. Harper. It’s what tried to kill you on the way down here.”
* * *
They explained.
Quiet Eddy was indeed an Alliance black site, although Thangana, the suspicious scientist, was quick to assure Cora that the site’s purpose was purely oriented toward AI research. No torture, no espionage, no secret prison. Cora figured it could have been worse.
The Gamma Lab in which they stood did not exist, technically speaking. Everyone on the lab level was still alive because the staff had cleverly programmed it out of the facility’s security routines and schematics, though fortunately the shuttle had downloaded an outdated map, or Cora wouldn’t have known to come down so far. The reprogramming meant that Medea’s augments did not attempt to enter a space that, as far as they knew, wasn’t there.
However, the screened-off area was small, and staff hadn’t been able to use the same trick on the whole facility, or even to open a safe corridor so that they could escape. They were still alive, but trapped and with little hope of rescue. After all, standard protocol for hot research labs that went bad was to sanitize first and ask questions later. Rescue attempts were a tertiary priority.
“Not that being ‘sanitized’ is the real danger,” said the deep-voiced woman, who turned out to be the project leader, Dr. Rebecca Jensen—the person who’d come up with the idea to “unexist” the Gamma Lab. Jensen smiled with a hint of bitterness at Cora. “If we tried to send a comm to notify the Alliance about the snafu here, Medea would detect our transmission. We’d be dead long before a ship could arrive to bomb us into atoms.”
Medea was the real problem. It wasn’t a VI running AI emulation, like the system at Home Away. It was actually a full-fledged AI—a poorly functioning experimental prototype, hybridizing bluebox and distributed-type intelligences, in hopes of avoiding the shortcomings of both.
“Shared-intelligence AIs like the geth are incapable of understanding organics, or so the quarians theorize,” explained another woman, to whom Cora hadn’t been introduced. “It’s an, uh, existential problem. Individual geth are nothing without their fellows, so individual organics probably don’t mean much to them, either. And bluebox-type AIs are likely to understand us too well, once they develop to a certain point—so well that they’ll see how flawed we are. We theorized, therefore, that a hybrid of these models might find it easier to value individuals, including individuals within communities. A hybrid might even be able to bridge the gap between organics and other forms of artificial intelligence. Imagine if it could negotiate peace between the geth and the rest of the galaxy! And because its own intelligence is distributed among a series of nodes, a hybrid would be easier to control: Shut down a node, and its intelligence diminishes.”
“That was the theory, anyway,” said the man with the little girl. He was Terrance Singh, he told Cora, and it turned out he was completely unrelated to the girl. He was the husband of Mona Higgins-Kaur, another of the Medea project leads—currently MIA, along with their young daughter. The girl was Shante Carver, best friend of Singh’s daughter; Carver’s parents were also on the missing roster. In the eternal day that had passed since the initial disaster, the two had sort of adopted each other. Survivors tended to do that.
“My wife spent years on this project,” Singh continued. “I’m an artist, a homemaker, it was Greek to me, but I heard all about what it was supposed to be.” His expression sagged, and he put a hand to his dastaar as if his head ached. “I just… never thought it would kill her.”
Shante touched his hand and he glanced down at her, then took it in a strong, perhaps desperate grip.
The problem with their hybrid AI was integration. There was a real chance that the distributed parts of Medea would each develop separate identities, like the geth, and gain none of the singularity of a bluebox AI. “So instead we decided to impose a singular consciousness on the distributed parts,” said Dr. Jensen. “Like… hmm. Imagine if the geth tried to create an individual which could function on its own, with sufficient intelligence to operate and make decisions apart from their collective. It might take hundreds or thousands of individual programs within a single platform, but eventually, inevitably, it would develop enough to self-actualize. It might start out as ‘we,’ but with enough time and learning, it could become an ‘I.’”
“The theory is sound, Lieutenant,” SAM-E told Cora through her earpiece. “It’s something Alec Ryder considered for my design, as I understand it. He eventually decided on a different sort of hybridization, however—an AI which shares the experiences with humans would better understand organics. He considers the SAM implementations a success.”
“Get to the part where you needed to steal Alec Ryder’s kernel code,” Cora told them aloud, and SAM-E obliquely.
“That was my idea.” This admission came from Dr. Olaf Thangana, the man who’d accused Cora of being a Spectre. He’d lost some of his belligerence during their explanation, and now looked just as weary as Dr. Jensen. “We couldn’t get our theory working. Then we got a tip that the Initiative had a stable bluebox AI that was specialized for integration. It sounded like exactly what we needed.”
“A tip?” Cora frowned. “Who from?”
“The information came to us from the same military personnel who approved this facility.” Thangana shrugged. “I don’t know how far up the chain, or who specific
ally. Information like that is above my pay grade.”
Damn. “So you decided to cut corners,” Cora said, setting her jaw. “‘Borrowing’ the bluebox half of the hybrid AI would halve your development time, I’m guessing. Is that it?”
“Yes, basically, and it’s well known that Alec Ryder is the foremost practitioner in the field of AI theory. If we were going to give our Medea a mind of its own, we wanted the best.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on to Ryder,” Cora said in a dry tone.
“Oh, he knows,” said the very old man, who’d been introduced as another of the project leads, a Dr. Tseng. He looked amused. “I’ve met the man.”
True, that, Cora mused.
“The thing is,” Jensen added, leaning forward, “Ryder’s code worked. The kernel immediately integrated the distributed parts of Medea, and she began working in precisely the way we expected. But what we didn’t know was that there was something else here at Quiet Eddy. A ghost in the machine.”
Cora frowned, and Jensen swept the holo display away to call up what looked like security camera footage. Cora made out a small, relatively empty room. Cables trailed over its floor, connecting to several large cylinders. All but one of them was empty. Then Cora caught her breath in horrified recognition.
The test tubes.
“Yes,” Jensen said, reading Cora’s face. “Somebody, another team we were unaware of, was experimenting with...” She left the thought hanging.
“Cybernetics.”
“Yes. Sort of.” She turned off the holo, obviously disgusted by what she saw there. “Augmented organics combined with deep cybernetic integration.”
Cora just stared.
“We think they were developing a super-soldier hybrid.”
Thangana shifted uncomfortably. “From what we can tell, the one piece of the puzzle they were lacking was something powerful enough to dynamically adjust the permutations and effects of the augmentations...” He paused, wringing his hands. “And capable of controlling it, once it was alive.”