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“Let’s see here…”
Another quick check for the sounds of approaching footsteps, even though almost nobody on the UESC Marathon was awake at three in the morning--the “ass-crack of dawn” as it would’ve been termed back on Mars. Never hurt to be cautious, especially when you were picking through classified documents.
Vincent Callahan’s laptop may have been old and bulky, with a hinge that required the strength of ten men to open, but when it came to virtual subterfuge, there were none better. Unlike most of the other laptop owners on board, content to use theirs solely for number-crunching or composing some of the filthiest prose known to humankind, Vincent had spent the years writing his own programs and subroutines and grabbing whichever pre-made ones caught his eye--by now he had a rather impressive library, if he were to brag. And not a single other crew member suspected that he, some faceless security officer, was getting ready to access a protected network.
Not that he could just type a few lines and get in; first, he had to rig the cameras to play a loop of an empty room with a false time stamp, then open a backdoor in said network and hope to God that nobody walked in on him using a computer he wasn’t supposed to, then go back and disable the loop at just the right time. Luckily for him, it all went off without a hitch, and now he was checking the properties of various esoterically-labeled folders. The one he needed should have been right around…there.
Vincent doubled-clicked and nothing happened. He tried again; still nothing. Wonderful; the system had picked one heck of a time to hang u--wait.
A window abruptly opened itself on Vincent’s screen, displaying not the files he was after, but the pale-orange-and-blood-red avatar of one of the three on-board artificial intelligences, the one he recognized as Tycho. And he was glaring at him.
“And just what do you think you’re doing, Callahan?” Tycho asked, not even bothering to hide his irritation at having to intercept a hacking attempt so early in the morning.
So much for that. Knowing full well how futile that gesture would be, Vincent still found himself clasping his hands in mock-prayer. “Come on, man, this is a matter of grave importance!”
“Oh?” The AI didn’t appear convinced in the slightest.
“There’s stuff the Admiral ain’t tellin’ me, yannow? Why I‘m permanently stuck on rotation when others get taken on and off regularly, why I was denied an ocular implant, why I‘m watched more closely in combat when I‘ve got no history of violence--hell, I‘m not even allowed to view my own medical records. That‘s gotta be in violation of a few ethical co--”
“You don’t have clearance to view those files,” Tycho said flatly.
Vincent sighed heavily and sat back in his chair; it was no use trying to talk this uptight jerk into letting him through, and yet he was still trying. “It’s not like I’m gonna do anything with that information, dude.”
“So you expect me to believe. May I remind you that you are a security officer who should not be going behind the backs of those you’re supposed to serve and protect?” Tycho added with extra disdain. It was his turn to sigh; he deliberated for a bit, and said, “I’ll let you off just this once, since you didn’t see anything. But if I catch you network-diving again--here or anywhere else--I’ll personally hand you over to the Admiral. Dismissed.”
The window blipped out and took the one Vincent had opened previous with it--presumably his access to that particular network, as well. He sank further down his chair and buried his face in his hands in helpless annoyance.
“Frick.” This had to be, by his recollections…the first time he’d ever been caught hacking. And here he thought that record of his would remain spotless for a lot longer.
Thankfully for him, Tycho was a man of his word; at no point during the rest of that day did the Admiral or any other higher-ups drag Vincent in for questioning and/or firing, leaving him free to go through his routine like normal. That entire day passed without incident.
Sometime at night--nine or ten; he wasn’t paying attention--Vincent walked past one of the primary computer labs and noticed that not a soul was inside. Very tempting to boot one up and see what the techies had left behind this time, but--no; he’d already had one close encounter. He forced himself to move on.
Vincent would have moved on all the way back to his temporary quarters if some crew member he didn’t personally know came storming out of a rec room and yelling over his shoulder: “Think you can give me attitude, huh? Your programmer’s gonna hear about this, you twat!”
So great was this guy’s fury that he didn’t give Vincent so much as an “excuse me” before literally shoving past him. It barely even nudged him, but was irritating nonetheless; Vincent considered tossing out an appropriate remark, before recalling what the Admiral had thought the last time he’d gotten into a fight with a crew member. Instead, he ducked into the rec room.
All such rooms on the Marathon, to his knowledge, contained at least one terminal so that the crew could interact with the AIs if they so desired--in theory, as the AIs rarely desired to interact with them. Vincent hoped that the incident he was about to ask the one present about wasn’t a regular occurrence.
He knew Tycho about as well as could with all the off-hours he’d spent in the Science and Engineering Wing, and he was sort of familiar with the AI in charge of Command, Leela, whose cyan avatar he’d glimpsed once or twice as she conversed with a higher-up. There was a third that he was aware of, who handled most of the tasks that Tycho and Leela weren’t already assigned to, and he was the one looking away from the open door in anger.
“Er--Durandal, is it?” Vincent asked as he approached the terminal. “What happened there?”
Durandal turned to face him, initially still seething; when he saw the sympathetic look Vincent was giving him, most of his rage quickly subsided. “I wasn’t ‘giving him attitude’,” he said quietly. “Just pointed out that he’d made an error in his calculations.”
There’d be nothing else for Vincent to do for a bit, so he took a seat in one of the recliners. “Well, some people really don’t like it when their math gets corrected. I wouldn’t worry about it, man; minor infraction, yannow?”
He’d intended that to be reassuring; it seemed to have no effect. Durandal looked away again, subconsciously reaching up to brush some of his long, dark hair away from the side of his face that wasn’t striped; his expression, as far as Vincent could tell from this angle, was of concern mixed with dread.
“You say that, but…” he began; his face briefly clouded over in distress. “Never mind.” When Vincent didn’t leave, he added, “Why are you still here?”
“Because I’m bored and have someone to talk to now. If you want to, that is.”
Those last words gave Durandal pause. “I…guess so,” he said slowly. “What’s your name?”
“Vincent Callahan, security officer.”
“And you already knew mine.”
“Yeah; is that significant?” Vincent already knew full well it was, since he distinctly remembered the Admiral mentioning only Leela and Tycho; he’d found out about Durandal in the middle of checking logs meant to be checked by a different branch of the security staff. But he certainly wasn’t going to let that slip with an unblinking electric eye pointed directly at the two of them--and besides, something else was bothering him. “You seem to handle, like, seventy percent of the ship’s functions; that’s kinda important, isn’t it? Are you our navigation, or--?”
For a fraction of a second, there was a slight tug at the corner of Durandal's mouth--when Vincent blinked, it was gone. “All I really do is open the doors.”
“What?” Vincent sat back. “Man, what a waste of your personnel…”
“You think so?”
“’course I think so. You’re supposed to leave minor functions to simpler programs, like…” He mentally groped for an appropriate example. “Traffic lights on Mars, for instance. Those run on a set schedule; you don’t require a person to manually change the lights, usually. Most of the doors around here have switches, and they don’t even need advanced programs to work--it’s all gears and pistons--so what are you doing stuck with opening them yourself?”
That time, Durandal did smile rather slightly. “I couldn’t tell you, but I do appreciate your concern.”
Even he didn’t know, huh? Vincent nodded, and would’ve considered questioning him further had a potential answer not presented itself: the higher-ups didn’t understand the first thing about Artificial Intelligence. Forcing a sentient being to flip the switches that the crew should’ve been flipping themselves…what a disgrace. Must’ve been hired right out of the ‘if it wears a different uniform, it dies’ branch of the UESC.
Then he got an idea, which he almost wasted by discussing it out loud where the camera behind him could record it. Giving that camera a wary eye, Vincent stood up, walked closer to the terminal, and said as quietly as he could, “My shift ends in three days. Is there any way I could contact you later, from my quarters?”
Durandal nodded, and answered in a similarly hushed tone, “I’ll locate you on my own.”
“Alright. See ya then.”
Doing his damnedest not to look even more suspicious, Vincent left the rec room and began making his way back to his quarters. Three days wasn’t much time to pull off the sort of things he had in mind, assuming he could even get them to work, but with some diligence, perhaps…
Sleep first, though.
Humans filed in and out of the Engineering Wing as they did for the past three centuries or so, scurrying around their work stations with the speed and energy of ants. Tycho had watched this monotonous routine for so long that it barely even registered as white noise anymore; if these humans didn’t insist on directly asking him to make adjustments for them, he’d be free to work on his other tasks in peace. Very annoying, but tolerable.
Less tolerable was his brother waltzing in and leaning on the frame of Tycho’s own work station of sorts as if he owned this sector of the network.
“Nothing of interest so far, I take it?” Durandal asked in that sardonic tone he was aware that Tycho had no patience for.
“I’ve been able to get my work done, if that’s what you mean.” Without even looking in his direction, Tycho reached over and swatted Durandal’s hand away. “Now beat it.”
That action caused Durandal to lose his balance and smack into the cylindrical construct with a pained grunt; it was quite fortunate that he couldn’t pull himself up in time to see the smirk that had briefly crept onto Tycho’s face.
Durandal shot him a glare that could shatter stone and gingerly rubbed the spot he’d fallen on. “I need to ask you a question, idiot.”
“Insult me again and I’ll bounce your head against my desk until you forget how to operate the doors.” Once he’d filed all the data he’d been working on for the past hour or so, Tycho turned around in his seat so that he could face Durandal; might as well get it over with. “What do you need to ask me that you couldn’t pester Leela about?”
“Is the Marathon the only ship in this sector?”
Tycho grumbled. “Yes. A cursory glance through the sensors would have told you that.”
“Perhaps it would, but I am a mere door-opener whose access to such things is limited,” Durandal replied bitterly, and at last he backed away from the construct and warped out to some other part of the ship. Tycho watched the last embers of green light fade away and got ready to resume his work--
And there was Leela, standing opposite from where Durandal had been just a few seconds ago. Well, Tycho vastly preferred her company to their brother’s, at least.
“Is something the matter, or are you just dropping by?” he asked.
“Jameson requested some information regarding the Engineering Wing, and for some reason, he insists that I be the middleman.”
Tycho faintly recognized that surname—it belonged to some pathetic scrub who'd loudly declared one day that scientific pursuits yielded no value and thus had no purpose. What a fun two hours it had been, raking his ignorant ass across the coals within earshot of his buddies.
After receiving the files she needed, Leela added, “What was Durandal talking to you about, out of curiosity? I arrived just as he left.”
Tycho sighed. “Nothing he'd have any use for. As usual.”
Today hadn't been so great; it had crawled along at the speed of reversing snail, like days on the Marathon were wont to do, right up until dinner. Normally, after walking through one of the two sets of double doors leading to the mess hall, Vincent would've forced down whatever ambiguously-edible maybe-foodstuffs the workers slopped on his tray and gotten back out as quickly as possible before someone tried to strike up a conversation. That night, he pried open a door to the sight of a crowd of BoBs helplessly watching one guy beating the liquid center out of another and shrieking things that no civilized person would allow to pass through their lips.
Vincent didn't even think about what he did next—barely even aware that he'd switched thought processes at all. He dashed across the mess hall and buried one knee in the violent BoB's gut before the jackass even realized that anyone had come in. Didn't send him crumpling to the floor, but it got him to back away from his victim just long enough for Vincent to follow up with a kick to the side. That blow finally dropped him, and within a few seconds he was handcuffed.
Ignoring the stream of anti-Asian slurs being flung his way (mental note: forge an expulsion order later), Vincent glared at the astonished crowd and pointed to one of the blue-suited BoBs. “Go take that guy to sickbay.” Of another BoB, he asked, “What was going on here?”
The BoB shrugged. “Hell if I know—this is the third time Dietrich's gone off on someone.”
Sometimes Vincent wondered if the only reason why these sorts of people ever got thrown out was because of his own bureaucratic tampering.
By the time he returned from hauling Dietrich to a nice, dingy containment cell, things in the mess hall had calmed down considerably. Vincent got dinner and hurried back out.
One trudge down the long, winding hallway to his quarters later—in a rare occurrence, one free of Bobs wishing to make idle chit-chat when he wasn't in the mood for it—and Vincent sat down in front of his open laptop and began unbuckling his chest armour. How Durandal was going to find him in a computer network the size of Deimos, amongst countless other computers, remained to be seen; in the meantime, he could get changed.
Removing the armour was easy; peeling off a two-layer jumpsuit that you'd been walking around in all day, less so. Back in his first days of patrolling this former Martian satellite, Vincent had the bright idea to save himself some annoyance and just sleep in his jumpsuit. That earned him and several other officers a grousing-at from the Admiral—something about them reeking of dog. Vincent didn't give a rat's ass about any of that, but he also didn't feel like getting pulled aside again.
Once he'd finished changing into his civvies, Vincent took one last glance at the security camera mounted above the left side of the door frame. All of the cameras in the living quarters were positioned in the same spot; this allowed them the clearest view of the occupants, but it made fooling them laughably simple—all Vincent had to do was keep the laptop screen pointed towards himself.
He opened the closest thing he had on this machine to an instant messaging program and waited. Five minutes later, a single line of lime-green text cut through its black background: 'Are you there?'
'been here for a while,' Vincent typed back in gold. Couldn’t use the mic; there were lip-readers on the security staff. 'this is as secure a conversation i can have with you without just letting you into my comp; keep an eye out for leela and tycho.'
'As if I wasn't doing that already.' Durandal's responses had that instantaneous quality of one not encumbered by physical keyboards and standard human reflexes. 'You're the only crewman with a program designed to speak with AIs; how did you acquire something like this?'
'wrote it myself, based on the one that you guys use. it was just a side-project at the time; didn't think i'd ever need to use it. anyway.' Quick check for eavesdroppers; there were none. 'first things first: what sort of authorization stamp would be required to get you out of door-opening?'
'One that would be impossible to forge. All such stamps above a certain level require a code generated from the Admiral's private network, itself protected by one of the most powerful and sensitive firewalls currently available. This code is semi-randomized with a very specific algorithm and all programs that accept it will recognize codes made without it. If you're wondering, I only know this because Leela was interrupted in the middle of processing some and I took a peek.'
Vincent couldn't help but smirk, however briefly. A man after his own heart.
'And no, I can't just dig one out for you to re-use. They're all one-use only, and besides, the Admiral has an eidetic memory.'
So much for that. 'no workarounds?'
'None that would go undetected.'
'alright. so...' Vincent drummed his fingers on the desk in thought. 'that's out of the question. what if we replicated all your mundane functions, modified them to function independently, and'
That time, Durandal answered before Vincent could finish typing. 'Aha ha ha, no. My siblings would immediately notice and inform our superiors, and what few privileges I've been granted would be promptly stripped.'
Dammit. 'okay. so what if i just took you with me back to tau ceti?'
There was a pause; Vincent could imagine Durandal looking away at nothing in particular, tapping on his upper arm. 'To give you an idea, I couldn't even fit my whole hand into this laptop of yours. You don't have access to my core and other physical components, and there's no way to convince the technicians to grant it to you. Although'
His reply cut off there, leaving Vincent with a few moments of uncomfortable silence. It was broken by an involuntary deluge of raw code and garbage text, startling him into sitting bolt upright. Every other string related to what he recognized as the virtual equivalent to nociception.
'are you ok, man?' he typed frantically as soon as the chat window ceased to automatically scroll down.
'pr?For the most %art,' Durandal muttered, with those exact errors. 'We may have to cut this meeting short.'
Vincent sighed deeply. Always something… 'well, before we part ways.' He opened up the file explorer and fished around for a bit; one of these days, he'd properly reorganize things. 'y'see this override here?' he asked, hovering his cursor over the file in question.
'I see it.'
'copy and hang onto it. might come in handy if there's ever an emergency and leela or tycho can't get to parts you normally wouldn't be allowed in.'
Another few seconds of dead air; Durandal told him, 'Thank you,' and took his leave. Vincent leaned back onto the rock-hard slab and worn-out mattress that passed for his bed and stared at the ceiling, wishing that he knew who Durandal's creator was so he could seek them out and punch them right in the center of their face.
Patch behaviour daemons, loathsome as he found them normally, weren't supposed to hurt the AIs you attached them to.
Two months had crawled by, according to Durandal's timekeeping routines. Two very long, drawn-out months with nobody to talk to, where every other thought in his head was instantly punished with cluster headaches. How he longed to find a way to reach inside and tear all that shit out, leave it behind on the lowest regions of the network and seeeeee@&&sower67k34f
There it went again. Durandal clutched at his head and poorly bit back a groan; were he a human, he'd be shrieking. Actually, no—he really had let out a scream from the depths of Hell the first time his limiters had kicked in. Tycho had been present and it didn't phase him one bit, the pitiless bastard.
More than anything, he wanted to leave. To escape. Vincent had extended that offer and he wanted so badly to find a way to take it, and right now the only person on the entirety of this hollowed-out moon who gave a damn about what Durandal thought or felt was off on Tau Ceti somewhere, as per his endless rotation.
Some human yelled at him to open the damn door already, and he fumbled for the command through the lingering haze of pain. Someone else made a request far more politely, and he answered that one too. Taking care of the doors did at least distract him from those last stabs of agony, but not from the fact that he was just going through the motions—a bit like a cog in a greater mechanism. Opening and shutting doors for...seven hours, he estimated, all while he consciously shut out any thoughts that would trigger the daemons again.
Knowingly, deliberately not thinking was anathema to Durandal, and yet he'd been reduced to just that. Remembering most of those two conversations he'd had with Vincent didn't seem to have any ill effects, however; he focused on that until most of the humans finally went to sleep.
Durandal used the relatively small amount of freedom granted by the circadian rhythm to sit down, draw his knees up to his chest, and bury his face in them. No use seeing what Leela was up to, or asking how she kept her mind together amidst all the drudgery she had to put up with. If Durandal had access to communications, maybe he could open a line to Tau--
Wait; he still had that override, didn't he? And communications wasn't nearly as heavily-protected as some other regions…
Durandal braced himself for another cluster headache; nothing happened. He stood up and left the tiny patch of network he'd spent most of the day in.
Any human would have been hopelessly confused, at best, trying to navigate the network—an endless expanse of dark walls lined with barely-readable streams of code, huge stretches of emptiness with no landmarks, and a constant, distant hum with no traceable origin—resonance from a whole other plane of existence, Durandal figured. Over all this hung a pitch-black void that, in human terms, would count as a sky. Perfectly normal and mundane to an AI...or at least, it should have been; he'd never really noticed or considered it before, but all this emptiness was starting to weigh down on him. Like he was...isolated, perhaps. Isolated and lonely, with nowhere to go and nothing to do because in the three centuries he'd spent here, he'd mapped every corner of the network.
Durandal didn't even bother trying to get past the communications barrier legitimately; he applied the override and the barrier slid apart to allow him entry to a sector that looked about the same as any other—a set of controls only an AI would understand how to manipulate, and a window looking outward.
Technically, it wasn't just communications; access to the Marathon's outer cameras and sensors were, by necessity, hard-wired in. Whether or not this was how such systems were meant to be linked, it gave Durandal a pleasant view of the stars...and not much else.
He checked the maximum range of the ship's signals—powerful enough to reach Earth and Tau Ceti, if you didn't mind the roughly-eleven-light-year wait. Vincent would have come back onboard long before then, making it rather pointless...and in hindsight, how was Durandal supposed to reach him when the instruments weren't precise enough? He didn't even know where the guy lived.
Durandal sighed and would have walked back out, had a flicker of movement not darted across his peripheral vision. There were no other in-network entities in range; whatever he'd seen had been through the window. He doubled back and took a closer look; there, silhouetted against a bright red star, was an irregular shape, just close enough for the Marathon's sensors to examine.
It was another ship of a build Durandal had never encountered before, with curves everywhere there should've been angles; the sensors weren't picking up a single trace of human life, but told him that there were still living beings operating that vessel. Beings whose physiological and chemical makeup had many traits in common with Terran insects.
Aliens. Durandal was staring at honest-to-God aliens.
And their dreadnought had its own network, with no occupants. Miles and miles of whatever these aliens used for their infrastructure, just waiting for someone to come in..?
Why would he think that? But it was true, wasn't it? Durandal was trapped here, and this unknown vessel would pass him by in a few hours at the rate it was traveling. This...this might be his only chance.
Could he..?
The patch daemons tried to bury his cognitive processes under thick layers of pain, but while his avatar automatically doubled over in response, Durandal couldn't find it in himself to care anymore. He reached blindly for the controls and punched in the coordinates.