LizAlec knew all about The Arc, she just didn’t know that was where she was going. Leon, the smart-arse boy from CasaNegro who got them on board the Boeing X7, had promised the shuttle was Seattle-bound. He’d lied. But then, back at CasaNegro Jude had reckoned that if the little rich girl really wanted off Luna that badly, it didn’t matter too much where she went. Besides which, the kid would probably do well at The Arc. From what Jude had heard, it was full of spoilt brats trying to simplify their lives.
“L/code... L/code...” The voice at the other end had been reduced to a petulant monotone. Fixx could have called on his ship’s digital intelligence for help with what was going to happen next, but the DI wasn’t talking to him. Not after Fixx’s five-minute rant to Ghost about how Europe had been corrupted by the greed of US-owned metaNationals.
Fixx hadn’t known the X3 had a USAF biocore, an old fly-by-light hand who’d practically begged to be DI’d by Boeing. That had been thirty years before, and from what he gathered the snotty little data intelligence hadn’t been that happy when the USAF sold the shuttle cheap to the French. Which was what happened if you decided to get digital without bothering to read the small print.
“Anyway,” Fixx told Ghost crossly, as the kitten floated past his face, “the fucking fuck’s probably too squeamish to help us anyway...” What came next was definitely illegal and bios were tied to some coded-in moral cut-off, or at least that was the theory.
“Input.”
Fingers flicked over the deck, pulling up blocks of code. Fixx could have used the floating focus on his wraparounds, but he liked the solidity of a screen, the way the blocks flashed into being, even though they only existed as pixels, ghost images of binary life.
Even the Chinese didn’t have an up-front ice-breaker hard enough to crack open LISA. Fixx was trading through as a command and its echo. In the first split second of contact, LISA would reach out for the command and instantly unravel anything not recognized as legitimate, required code. The junk would be stripped out, unread, unaccessed, unravelled like strands of discarded digital DNA.
Not that Fixx wanted to turn the shit-kick rush of on-the-fly coding into the dry waste of some history lesson, but there’d been a time — way back — when the viruses came first and had to be cleaned out. When firewalls existed to limit outside access, not flame incoming viruses in some Web-based auto-da-fé.
There were kids back at Schrödinger’s Kaff who reckoned they could hack anything from the Pentagon to HKS. Fixx had been around long enough to know that for the shit it was.
“And it is, you know,” Fixx told the bedraggled kitten. “Complete fucking cack. And it misses the point...” Which was that the best way to hack a computer was to ask another computer to do it for you. Fixx just hoped LISA still loved him enough to help: and anyway, this wasn’t hacking, it was almost legitimate, at least the second bit was.
Fingers still flicking, Fixx hit LISA’s firewall, dumped the command he’d been constructing and watched the junk code inside it unravel into flashes on the screen. It would look better stacked up as graphics, but he couldn’t afford the distraction.
And as a subset of a subset ate up his Trojan horse, Fixx tried a trick that S3 had bullied and bribed out of some scared, long-dead employee at Annapolis — and then saved until they needed it, which was now.
LISA might be an old US naval AI, fuzzy as all fuck in her logic and rigid in her control parameters, but somewhere down in her core — written over, upgraded, augmented with additional layers of logic until it was almost buried — was a basic BigRedSwitch. The kind that went, if this, then that...
So Fixx clicked it, using legal code, hot-keying himself through without trouble — LISA was that old. “Sweet as pie,” said Fixx, his voice over-loud, but Ghost ignored him anyway so Fixx turned back to his deck. Sliding a series of reassurances in through the trapdoor. He had maybe five per cent of LISA’s attention now. Keying open her trapdoor would have guaranteed that anyway, but he was using old naval commands to smooth the loop. They told the subset currently on watch that Fixx not only knew what he was doing, but that he had a right to do it.
On his screen, the subset patched up half a key and waited. It was happy to wait, anything was better than acting as second back-up to Planetside’s temperature control, which was what it had been doing until called to trapdoor duty. Under the key, Fixx typed a second line, watching as both lines meshed to produce a third.
Fixx grinned.
“Welcome”, said a voice that echoed tinnily out of the flatscreen’s built-in speaker.
“Happy to be here,” Fixx typed back.
“Name?”
“Commander Bond,” typed Fixx. Nothing too senior, nothing too junior, that was the way to go. If the X3’s bio had known what Fixx was doing, it would have hung itself, but it didn’t. Fixx had ripped out its ribbons, cutting its links to the deck. And without that link, the DI was just some jerk’s memory trapped in a box. And if trashing memories was murder, thought Fixx, then half his girlfriends should be behind bars.
“Susan,” announced the voice, introducing itself. “Subset Using...”
“Okay,” said Fixx as the software began reeling off its designation, he got the picture. The voice was American, middle-aged, slightly fussy. Just what Fixx would expect from a subset originally programmed to sell visiting dignitaries on the mythic delights of apple pie, Mom and naval intelligence.
“Can I ask your purpose?”
Fixx thought about it.
“Security,” he said at last, which covered most sins. If you took out politics, religion and commerce, what the fuck was left? Sex, maybe. “Internal security,” Fixx elaborated. “I need cloaking. Nothing elaborate. Just enough to put down at Planetside...”
If the subset could have nodded, Fixx swore it would have done then. Commanders, security, cloaking clandestine arrivals, that was what it had originally lived for. Not as a control routine for a civilian base. As well as temperature, it might monitor radiation, recycling resources and air pressure in the domes, but that didn’t mean it liked the job.
“Cover following,” Fixx said, and a digital squirt carried his life story to Susan. It was heavily edited, obviously. There was the briefest of silences while Susan considered the glorious if unlikely past of Commander Bond. A silence Fixx hurriedly broke before Susan decided to do something stupid like double-check it.
“Please patch me though to LISA...”
“LISA?” The subset sounded doubtful.
“Now, please,” Fixx said firmly before the subset had time to refuse. “I want to talk to Luna Intelligent Systems Analysis.”
“I’m sorry,” Susan said apologetically, “I’m afraid...” The voice stopped. “Oh yes,” it said brightly, “we can patch you through from here.”
Fixx sighed. Give me a lever and I’ll move the Earth: no statement was truer. Even if that Greek guy hadn’t been talking about social engineering.
“This is LISA.” The voice was non-personal, efficient, not as he recalled her. And then Fixx remembered that she didn’t know who he was. All the same, Fixx felt his stomach knot up and sweat break out under his arms. He hadn’t felt like this since he was thirteen, waiting on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin for that girl who never showed up.
“That you, sweetie?” Fixx said, less calmly than he would have liked. Silence blossomed as absolute as any shutdown. Seconds later Fixx began to breathe again.
“Fixx?” LISA sounded somewhere between shocked and hopeful. At least she did to Fixx, though he feared he might be imagining it. That level of emotional nuance hadn’t been programmed into language back when she was commissioned.