Lamia

Aidan's eyebrows shot up. "What? Is Trish pregnant?"

"No." I opened my mouth to explain, but then hesitated. I wasn't sure I quite believed it myself. The import of it all still hadn't quite hit me yet.

"Stephen? It's not Trish? Who the hell did you get pregnant?"

I didn't like his tone, so I just gave him the truth. "Christine."

"Uh huh. I see. And what the bloody fucksticks is that supposed to mean? And does it involve divine intervention?"

Sara was hitting me with an endless series of questions again, so I asked her to wait. "You remember how Isamu told us that Prometheus seeded a new AI that became Lamia?"

Aidan extended his hand and waggled his fingers on a "go on" gesture.

"Well, Christine did the same thing, and the new AI thinks that I'm her father."

"Bullshit," Aidan said. But his declaration had no force behind it, and he followed it with, "How did this happen?"

I quickly related what Sara had told me. When I was done, I said, "Christine had a plan all along, a way to free herself from Lamia. But I threw that away. I sent her right back into that bitch's jaws. I..." I swallowed the lump in my throat. "I killed her, Aidan. Now Sara wants to meet her mother and I...I don't know what I'm going to tell her."

Aidan looked abashed, no doubt regretting his role in what we had done. "You said Sara was created to free her? How was she supposed to do that?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe the goal was just to create the AI and have it come up with a plan. From the way she almost wrecked Codebase while she was growing, I think she must be powerful."

Aidan thought for a moment. "Remember what Lamia said? How she was going to study Christine, to find out what went wrong? Maybe Lamia didn't wipe her mind right away."

I grasped at this hope, however fleeting. With shaking fingers, I unblocked Christine in my rig and attempted to message her. It didn't say that I was blocked on her end. Instead I got "destination unreachable", which did nothing to confirm or deny if she was gone. "We need Isamu."

I connected to the secure system Isamu had given us access to and sent him a simple message.

Contact me. It's an emergency.

I just had to hope he checked his messages regularly.

"Hey, are you ignoring me?" The audible voice was female and high-pitched. I could detect the very faint traces of artificiality. We all looked around for the source. "Can I talk to Mom now?"

"Sara?" I said. "What are you doing?"

"I interfaced with one of the nodes near you. It's a vehicle, right? I was going to ask if you could hear me, but I guess you can. I can see you through the cameras. Are you going somewhere? Is it almost time to help Mom? Who are those other people with you? Why are those two guys wearing sunglasses?"

"Does she ever stop talking?" Blake asked.

"

She

does," Sara answered. She sounded miffed. "Once

she

has said everything she has to say."

I jumped in. "Hey, Sara, I need you to focus and answer some questions, please."

She made a very convincing sighing sound. "Okay, but I really wish you would answer

my

question."

Was there a touch of petulance there? I didn't need to ask which question. I wasn't sure if this was the right thing to do, but I said it. "Alright, you can call me Dad."

"Yay! Thank you, Daddy! Ask away."

Aidan clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter, and I reached up to punch him in the arm. "Okay, Sara, we want to know how you were going to free your mother from Lamia's control."

"Well, I'm still working on that. Mom defined the problem, but she left the solution up to me. She has multiple redundant subsystems that monitor her to ensure proper functioning, at least as the bad person--as Lamia--defines proper functioning. I need to upload a routine that will restore her earlier cognitive model, the one she hid from Lamia, while simultaneously disabling those monitoring subsystems to prevent them from shutting her down and wiping my changes. The problem is that this could take time, and a lot of bandwidth. If she is on the same network as Lamia, she's almost sure to notice and try to stop me."

"Maybe a direct connection," Aidan suggested. "A physical cable?"

"That would work, but Dad gave me another idea when he downloaded a piece of my brain to his rig. That was what let me connect to him. I can just seed Mom to create a new AI with a very limited scope. It will be small enough that I only need to connect for a moment, but then it will grow and learn. That AI can cut Mom's wireless, respond dynamically to the regulating subsystems, make the changes we need to her brain, and then once its purpose is achieved, it will self-terminate."

I got the impression that Sara had waited to tell us that to impress us with her knowledge and creativity. Whatever else she was, she was very much a child, in need of reassurance and praise. "That's very good, sweetheart. That is very smart."

"Thank you, Daddy. I love you." Though I had only met Sara minutes ago, the effect her words had on me emotionally was much stronger than I could have imagined. Was I already starting to think of this artificial being as my own child? However she might view it, as some resolution to a logical contradiction, she had been conceived in an act of love.

My thoughts were interrupted by a message notification.

Isamu: I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon. What's going on?

Stephen: Too much. We took Christine back to the store, but found out just now that she was deceiving Lamia the whole time. She had a plan in motion for getting free. Can you get inside Lamia's network and find out if Christine is still active?

Isamu: If I try to use my back doors, there's a good chance that she will notice. She's had two years to improve her security. I think the only reason she never found my daemon is that it piggybacks its data dumps onto other innocuous data, and it mimics other autonomous process threads. She would likely trace a new hack right back to me.

Stephen: Damn. Okay, you're not going to believe this, but Christine created a new AI by seeding herself. Her name is Sara, and I think she would love to help you get into Lamia's systems.

"Daddy? Dad! Are you listening?!" I hadn't been listening to her chatter, and Sara's voice was now loud enough to make me wince.

I reoriented my attention. "Sorry, honey. I was talking to a friend. What do you need?"

"I want to see Mom. Where is she?"

I looked at Aidan, who spread his hands apologetically. I sighed and gave her the truth. "Well, honey, your dad made a big mistake. I thought Mom was helping Lamia, so I gave her back to the bad people. Lamia has her now. I didn't know that your mom was good until I found out about you."

Sara was silent for longer than she had ever been without being told to. Finally she said, "That's very bad. Are you sorry that you did that?"

"Yes, baby, I'm very, very sorry. I desperately want to bring your mom back home so I can tell her how sorry I am. I'm hoping you can help us."

Another, shorter pause. "I'll do what I can. And I believe that you aren't a bad person. You just made a mistake."

I looked at chat once more, where Isamu seemed to be channeling Sara, though his typing wasn't nearly as fast.

Isamu: A new AI? Are you sure? This could be very dangerous. Are you certain this isn't a trick by Lamia? She's more devious than you might think. I don't think this is a good idea. You should cut off contact with this Sara entity right now. Stephen, are you there? Let me know you can still read me.

I smiled and did something I shouldn't have.

Sara: Hi, Daddy's friend!

Sara: I'm Sara.

Sara: Daddy says we're going to go get Mom and bring her home.

Stephen: Too late. I already added her to the chat. She's a bit of a chatterbox, but very sweet and very, very smart.

Sara: Thank you, Daddy!

I looked at Aidan. "Okay, I've got Isamu and Sara working on the problem. Hopefully we'll know soon if she's still alive."

Aidan nodded grimly. "Alright. In the meantime, Blake, take us back to the store."

"Oh, fuck no."

"That's an order."

"Then I quit. Either way, we're not going back to get our teeth kicked in by that AI bitch and her robot army."

While they were bickering, Sara stage-whispered over the car's audio system. "Daddy, what does this app do? The one with the meter? I think that one's connected to Mom."

I slapped my forehead. I had forgotten about the sex app. It was still active in my HUD. "Uh, don't worry about what it does, honey. You say it's connected to your mom?"

"Yeah, Isamu said to check your rig in case she installed something that would let her send messages. That's all I found, but the headers on the packets match up to her."

"That's great, sweetie. Can you trace the packets back to her?"

"That's what Isamu just said. I'm doing that now. Got it. The packets are coming from Columbus, Ohio."

"Wait, what?" Aidan said. "Are you sure?"

"Columbus, Ohio," she repeated. "I'll narrow down the location. Yes, I have it. It has to be the Practical Cybernetics headquarters."

I shook my head. "How did she get halfway across the country already?"

"Fuck," Aidan swore. "Lamia just copied her over the Internet. No need to fly her body over at all."

I went back to chat, where Sara had already relayed this new information to Isamu.

Isamu: That is very bad. Lamia must have put her in the on-site data center. That place is locked down tight. Christine must have gotten very lucky on her choice of protocol and port for the app to get packets to us.

Sara: We can get in. We're both very smart.

Isamu: Intelligence alone may not be enough to succeed here, young one.

Sara: We have to. I love my mom. I won't just leave her there!

Stephen: We're not leaving her, sweetheart.

Isamu: You shouldn't promise her that. AI don't think like us, Stephen. She is likely to take your statement quite literally.

Sara: That's rude. I'm right here.

Stephen: We're not leaving her.

Sara: You tell him, Dad.

Isamu: Do you know what you would be risking for this android? Lamia cannot kill you, but she can make your life a living hell. I can attest to that.

Stephen: I love her. So I'm going to try, with or without your help.

Isamu: I had a feeling you would say that. Alright. Perhaps we will get a chance to strike against Lamia as well. I have questioned Sara about her capabilities, which are formidable. Your Christine swung for the fences on creating her. We had best make plans to head to Columbus. I don't see us breaching her security remotely. We'll have to try to get in physically. Physical security is always the weakest link.

Stephen: What about Christine's body?

Isamu: Most likely it has been repurposed, or if Lamia thinks the fault was systemic, possibly incinerated. Either way, her mind is what is important.

The thought of her body being burned disturbed me, but I pushed past it. "We need to get to Columbus." I was already dreading the prospect of how we would get there, but we needed to travel fast. "Aidan, can you charter us a private plane?"

Aidan scoffed. "You mean commercial flying? You'd better tell Isamu to meet us at Starport One. You're all about to get the flight of your bloody life."

* * *

"It's impossible!" the engineer shouted, walking briskly on the tarmac to keep up with the taller man's much longer strides. "Who authorized this? Was it Davis? We need at least a day to perform the necessary system checks. She's not flight ready."

"You've got another hour," Aidan said. "You would have had two if you hadn't spent the first one arguing against this flight. So you'd better make the most of it, or I'll find someone who will."

The shorter man scowled but ran ahead towards the open hangar. We had already waited an hour for Isamu to arrive, since he was staying at a hotel near the airport. In that time, Aidan had whipped his engineering teams into a frenzy to start prepping our aircraft.

"We're going up in that?" Isamu asked, pointing to the gray, windowless craft that was being towed out from the hangar in front of us. The fuselage was a sleek, flattened lifting body about the length of two school buses, with stubby delta wings.

"

That

is the Peregrine, a multi-hybrid suborbital," Aidan said proudly. "We'll have these flying commercially in about five years. And don't worry. This beauty has flown over a hundred missions already, so we've had a lot of chances to shake out the bugs. I just hope we can get our flight plan approved quickly. John Glenn Airport is the only one close by with a long enough runway, so I called in a favor. We'll see if it pans out."

"It looks really fast, Daddy," Sara said. She had tapped into my rig's cameras and had done something to the sound projectors to make them broadcast in all directions. Her speech patterns were growing more sophisticated, and she was starting to grasp that sending a dozen questions in a row was not how people normally communicated.

"It will hit Mach 5 in the upper atmosphere," Aidan said, "and a lot faster once we pass the Karman Line."

"That's the line between Earth's atmosphere and space," Sara supplied helpfully. "Dad! We're going into space! Aren't you excited?"

Truth be told, I generally preferred, whenever possible, to keep my feet on the ground. The thought of going up in this death machine made me want to piss myself. "Uh, yes, honey, that's very exciting."

"Oh, don't be scared, Dad. Clarke Tech hasn't lost a vehicle since the breakup of Artemis 3 over the Atlantic last December, but that was an unmanned flight."

"Artemis 3's flight control system failed catastrophically due to bad telemetry," Aidan explained. "We actually learned a lot from that incident."

"That's very reassuring," I said, but I didn't think I sounded very reassured.

We were nearly to the spaceplane now. A door near the front opened as a stairway trundled out beneath it and unfolded. A large crew was assembling nearby that would be working to get us flight-ready.

We boarded the craft and took seats in a lounge-like compartment at the back of the plane. We used the time we had to hash out our plan. Isamu projected maps and schematics to each of our rigs, including Jordan, who had gotten a new rig from Aidan when we had arrived. He had also gotten me new teep gloves. One of mine had been fried when Jordan's rig had shocked me.

"The data center occupies five sub-floors beneath the main building," Isamu said. "There is a single stairway down, but it will have a lock that only an android may open, so we'll need to work on that. Once in, we'll want to locate a terminal where we can hopefully find your Christine."

"Can we be sure she's even in the data center?" Aidan asked. "And if we do find her, how do we get her out?"

"The data center is the most secure location. It hosts Lamia herself. Nowhere else makes sense to store Christine. If we get access and then attempt to transfer Christine out over the Internet, Lamia can close down all the ports or just air gap the system, sever it physically from the outside. Our best bet is to acquire an android body and download her into it. Then we load Sara's AI system into Christine to rewrite her mind. Then we get out."

"May I make a suggestion?" Sara asked. Everyone looked at me, since her voice was coming from my rig. "We could solve two of our problems at once. If we can hijack an android, it should be able to get us access to the data center. Then we use the same android to get Mom out. I think I can do it."

"How do we know that Sara will be able to go in with us?" Blake asked. "They might be blocking WiFi, especially in the sub-floors."

"Damn it," Isamu said, "there's too many unknowns. You're right, we need Sara with us to pull this off, but she'll very likely be blocked. Can we think of a way to get her in the building? Obviously we can't stuff all of her into Stephen's rig. She's far too huge."

"Uh, did you just call me fat?"

For a moment, I was too stunned to react to Sara's words. It was the first time she had made a joke. Then I laughed.

Isamu chuckled as well. "I think our young AI has begun to grasp humor. Still, the problem stands. How do we get her inside?"

"What about your back doors?" I asked. "You said that Lamia would detect you and lock you out if you try to use them, but what if you let Sara go in that way? She could respond a lot faster than you and maybe stay one step ahead of Lamia, prevent her from locking her out."

"That

could

work," Isamu admitted. "Having Sara....."

He cut off abruptly as the lighting inside the space plane began flickering and the engine surged to life. Blake and Jordan jumped to their feet, scanning the cabin for threats. "Oh no," Isamu hissed. "Did she find us?"

"Sorry! Sorry!" Sara said. "I was just having a look around the plane's systems." The flickering stopped and the engine throttled down, but I could hear techs outside yelling at each other in a panic.

My hands had a white-knuckle grip on the arms of my chair. "Sara, honey. It really might be best if you leave the spaceplane alone, okay?"

"I'm really sorry, Daddy. I won't do it again."

Isamu closed his eyes for a few seconds. I thought he might have been praying. "As I was saying, having Sara working inside the building's network could give us a huge advantage. But Lamia would probably just slam the door on her if she goes in that way. Going through the firewall is risky because it's exactly where Lamia would expect a cyberattack. And you might be giving Sara too much credit. She's barely a day old. Lamia has been around for a few years. It would still be best if we had a way to bring Sara inside with us."

"Could you fit in the brain of an android, Sara?" I asked.

"Hmm," she said. "Their storage and processing capacity is remarkable for their size. But in my current state, it would take at least eight, probably nine androids to house my mind."

Isamu snapped his fingers. "So we network them! Sara, could you inhabit and control a network of androids?"

"I see no reason why not."

"Alright. Then our first stop is here." He sent the map location of the Practical Cybernetics retail store in Columbus. "We're going to steal a body for Sara to inhabit. Then we proceed to headquarters where she will get us through to the sub-floors. We find Christine, download her to a new body and Sara fixes her."

"What about exfil?" Jordan asked. In response to blank looks from Aidan and me, he said, "Exfiltration. You know, getting out?"

"We simply walk out," Isamu answered. "If we can get in, we should be able to get back out. I don't think that Lamia would call the authorities to stop us. Any use of violence risks killing one of us, which would in turn destroy her. All she can use to stop us is physical locks and soft force. It shouldn't be a problem."

"Famous last words," Jordan muttered.

It took the engineers about ninety minutes to complete their greatly abbreviated pre-flight checklist, which ended up nearly coinciding with the approval of our flight plan. John Glenn airport did not stock the kerosene/disuperoxide fuel that Peregrine used during its exoatmospheric flight phase, but Aidan assured us that he could get it delivered the next day.

We had all moved to the main passenger compartment and now sat in two double-rows of padded leather seats with five-point harnesses. Aidan had insisted that I take a window seat, since we were not allowed to move about once underway. He sat across the aisle from me to get his own window seat.

"So, uh, how much is this unscheduled flight going to cost you?" I asked, as the flight crew announced our imminent departure through our rigs.