Station security officer Becker could feel that he was getting tired.
Just for a second there, he had taken a bit longer to blink, his heavy eyelids scratching across his dry eyes like sand paper, and when he had opened them again, something strange had appeared on his monitor. He couldn't quite explain what he had seen – it was as if the sweep signal had been sent out but been distorted. Warped. As if some of the information had been lost on the way. It hadn't been reflected though – if there was anything out there, he would have seen it light up on his monitor. It was probably a glitch. He made a mental note to bring it up during the next maintenance meeting.
There was no reason for him to follow up on the strange glitch. No unscheduled vessels would have been able to pass these surveillance systems undetected. The systems on Aenara were among the most sophisticated in this sector. After all, this planet was an important place. High ranked members of the Neo-Tokyo elite and wealthy business people came here for vacationing or to conduct their meetings. From the security station in low orbit, he would sometimes look down at that VIP colony, with its tall, crystal-like spires, interconnected by walkways like silver cobwebs that hung between them, and the luxurious white mansions set on terraces at the face of a mountain. The houses were surrounded by lush gardens and artificially planted forests. Some of these people had more living space in their vacation homes than the entire population of some of the colonies he had served on before coming here combined.
But he did not feel envy. These people had worked hard for their wealth, some of them across generations. And he was dedicated to work just as hard, so he would one day be able to afford a house down there, too. Perhaps with a little pond in the garden, or something like that. The pay was good, and in about thirty-five years or so, if he continued his frugal lifestyle, he would definitely be able to move down there.
Becker yawned and forced himself out of his daydreams, that he felt were on the verge of turning into night dreams, and focused on the monitor in front of him again. The strangely distorted signal was long gone.
He was a very diligent man, and good at his job, but Becker had a flaw. Even after the Purge, even after all that humanity had learned about the dangers of modern technology, he still relied on it too much. If he had just lifted his gaze from the monitor for a moment, to look out through the view port of the surveillance deck, he might have spotted something in the distance.
A black droplet detached from the inky darkness of space, and fell down toward the planet's surface, where it dove into a cloud and vanished.
~ ~ ~
Night had fallen on Aenara.
The planet had several small moons, but none of them shone bright enough tonight to reveal the smooth, black shuttlecraft that had landed on one of the terraces. Its engine had been as quiet as a cat's purr and its surface seemed to swallow all surrounding light. The door clicked and slid up with a soft hiss.
The nightly thief was nothing but a shadow splitting from the shadows, and merging with shadows again, as she made her way across the garden through the blooming jasmine bushes. Suddenly, she stopped.
Are you okay? Lars whispered.
He knew that nobody could hear him, but when they were sneaking around like this, he always felt compelled to talk silently – if only so they would hear any noises in their surroundings immediately.
Yeah, I'm fine, Null answered.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the flowers that hung heavy in the air. It permeated their lungs and seemed to weigh them down like vaporized lead.
He remembered the night they had escaped. It was a night like this, just about fourteen months ago. Early summer on this side of the planet, not that that mattered, because the mansions were underneath individual canopies of an artificial atmosphere that could be controlled at the inhabitant's whim. A lavishly blooming carpet of spring flowers might dominate one garden, and trees ablaze with the fiery colors of autumn the next. The kind of people who lived here were used to controlling the world they lived in, and they weren't ready to give that up during their vacations. They could go through all seasons in a day if they had wanted to.
But the man who lived here had locked this garden into an eternal summer.
Null cast a glance across the white cobblestone path that wound through the garden towards the mansion. Lars could sense that she remembered what it felt like to have those stones underneath her feet during the rare occasions when she had been allowed to go to the garden. Deliberately unevenly placed, they evoked a feeling of forced imperfection. Like everything about this place, it was just an illusion – an artificial mask supposed to imitate nature, a mockery of something beautiful. Because truly beautiful things could not be grown by force.
Looming ominously ahead, the mansion lay dark and seemingly abandoned. There was dim light behind some of the windows, but they had double-checked security rosters and patrol plans, the mansion was currently not staffed with security personnel, not even any servants. Null let their gaze wander across the dark face of the building, until the far corner of the building. There, on the second floor, there was a single window that was not like the others - it was opaque, no light coming in or out through it, ever. Behind that window lay her personnel hell. On the dimly lit face of the mansion, it looked like somebody had torn a deep hole into it.
She continued to walk in the shadows, and passed a bed of white lilies, brushing past some of them on the way. Their brightly colored stamens should have cast orange streaks across their pitch black combat suit, but they didn't, because they were just as dead and fake as the rest of this place.
Getting in was easy. The back door was locked, but digital. Lars hacked it with little effort, blocking the silent alarm that it tried to send out when the breach was detected. Inside, she pushed her night vision scope up on her head and blinked a few times as her organic eye adjusted to the dim light of the corridor they found themselves in.
Useful little toy... she mused. Makes me consider getting our other eye replaced by an augment, too.
And what are we gonna do if we have to infiltrate a place like Hestia again? Lars asked. Wear two eye patches?
We could ask Dex to build something like that into the eye that Higgs found.
Higgs gave you an eye that would match your organic one perfectly, and instead of getting that pitch black augment replaced, you'd rather replace your organic eye? You're a strange creature, Null.
I'm an opportunist, she said. And I quite like our black eye.
Walking along the corridors of the house that used to be Null's prison was a strange feeling. She had been free to walk around, sometimes, at other times, she had spent days chained to the bed. There had been no sense or regularity to it whatsoever, it had just depended on his whim. Then again, perhaps it had also had to do with staff rotations. In all those years, she had never seen anybody else in the house when she had been allowed to wander, and it was impossible that this enormous place had been maintained without any staff all that time. And on their way out they had met some of those staff members, after all. Two very unfortunate security guards.
She had spent five years in this place. Five years of pain and torture and loneliness. He had only begun to wake up about a year and a half ago, and it had taken him some time to understand what had happened, where he was, and what he was. He had only really been with her for a brief period of her his existance, and yet he felt like they had shared all their lives. Perhaps because she had shared so many of his memories in his dreams. And while she hadn't shared much of hers, that was understandable. In the short time that he had to live in this place, watching through her eyes as she was abused, back when he was still unable to take control, he had learned what it meant to hate.
She had been too far gone back then, too far shut in inside her own mind, to really feel anything anymore, but he felt all her rage and fury for her. That was why, when he had taken over control to orchestrate their escape, he had almost beaten two security guards to death with her bare hands. Only because she had held him back had he stopped. He remembered that feeling of terror and shock that she had felt as he had looked down at their bloodied hands, their knuckles bruised and cut.
Back then, he had wondered for the first time if he was doing the right thing.
He wanted to protect her, save her, at all costs, but he wasn't really sure any longer if he was going about it the right way. They had spent so much time together, and were so close – as close as two entities could ever be – that he sometimes didn't know how much of her was him, how much of her plans were inflamed by his own wishes and desires.
Right now, he was worried that she had come back to this place because of his own hatred for the man who had kept her here.
This is it...
Null's voice ripped him from his glum thoughts, and he scolded himself for not focusing on their surroundings and the mission more. Now they stood in front of a large, oaken door. Not real wood, of course. It was a security door, just like all the others, just made to look like something fancy and antique. Just another illusion.
She placed her palm on the panel next to the door, and a hand print scanner flared to live. They weren't surprised by that security measure. She had walked this hallway countless times, in the time before Lars had fully awoken. As he had watched from the back of her mind, through a fog that grew less and less hazy with every passing day, he had often wondered what secrets the room behind that door might hold. But to his surprise, she hadn't cared much. She had been too far gone, too far inside her own mind to feel a stir of curiosity, or anything at all. Until the day he had fully awoken, and had taken her hand to rip her back into reality and a world of pain.
Now they would find out what secrets the room held, and he once again asked himself who had brought them here - Null, or himself.
Lars dove into the dimensionless space behind the panel. It was easy to hack. The combat armor they had donned had a few extra features besides night vision and ultra-lightweight armor plating made from a similar material as the Blackbody's hull. It had in-built electronics that could connect to their subcutaneous augments. She didn't need to take off the gloves to interface, and Lars could replicate anybody's handprint signature through a combination of hacking and a manipulation of the glove's surface properties.
The door emitted a hissing sound and a click, then it opened.
Their eyes scanned the large room behind it. An enormous canopy bed stood at the wall to their left. The sheets were perfectly smooth and orderly, and it seemed like nobody had slept in it in a long time. He could feel some of the tension in her back and neck relax at that notion.
To their right there was a large window that looked down at the garden. In the far corner, there was an enormous book shelf filled with an impressive collection of antiquities and modern titles. They were the source of the scent of paper and dust that filled the room. In front of the shelf, there was a large, wooden desk, atop of which sat a lone, sleek personal computer terminal. It looked oddly misplaced among the classic décor of the rest of the room.
While she approached it and sat down at the desk, he performed one last scan of their surroundings. Nobody had detected them. Neither the Blackbody's entrance into Aenara's atmosphere, nor their landing in the back yard of one of the richest men in this corner of space, nor their break in into his mansion and now his personal office. Then, Lars focused on the task at hand.
Hesitantly, she placed both of her hands on the terminal. Their left hand still hurt as if they had used it as a needle cushion. Underneath the black glove, angry red lines on their skin traced the paths of the wires that had fried during their last hack on Hestia.
No need, he spoke softly, and took control.
He placed their left hand on the keyboard and kept only the right on the terminal. He wouldn't allow her to hurt herself again – especially not in a place like this.
Hacking something that was not designed to be interfaced with was a different feeling from accessing a regular interface system. The sensation was hard to describe, but it was as if he was the only round thing in a world of edges. As an AI, he could maneuver any computing system – he could access a digital watch or pocket calculator if he wanted to, but that would have been equivalent to a human trying to fit their whole body into a cardboard box the size of a pencil case. With larger computers and machines, it was a very different feeling. The virtual space inside, confined in reality by the casing of a computer or machine, was vast.
What should I look for? he asked Null, as a part of his self dashed through matrices of code, evading a security system too weak to be worthy of his immediate attention. Like water finding its way across the sand, he had to be swift and not idle too long. If the water's surface tension broke, it would seep into the thirsty ground. He always had to be careful not to leave a piece of himself too far behind, and not to lose his anchor to Null and the body.
Bank statements, she replied. All transactions from six years ago.
He did as she commanded, and flitted through the files. Rows of numbers and names, sums and letters washed past him, but nothing stuck out.
No particularly large sums... he might have broken up the payments into smaller chunks, Lars thought.
Look for the account that has received the highest transfers in total, then, she suggested.
He sorted them, and when the data fell into place he felt that strange pleasure he used to get when his CPU had presented him with a perfectly arranged array of information. He had gotten used to the messy, organic structure of their brain so much that he had almost forgotten about that feeling.
The sum before him now was positively astronomical. He had always thought that the hardware used to save Null must have been expensive, even before the Purge some of that wouldn't have been easy to come by. But the numbers he saw now seemed mind-boggling. It was by a large margin the largest sum of transaction across all of Riga's accounts, and all the others paled in comparison. That had to be it.
'Lazarus EAL', she spelt out the term the transactions had been filed under, is that a company or a name?
I can't find a company named like that in any of the online databases... no hits in any personal records that I have immediate access to... He continued his search in Riga's personal data. No archived messages. Wait a second...
An odd sensation seemed to tug at his presence. One of the security programs had caught up with him and clung to him like a desperate child to a grown up's leg. He shook it off, eliminated it, and continued his search
There is something. A whole folder named 'Lazarus EAL'.... he explained. Wow, that's a lot of data.
He hesitated for a moment.
What's wrong? Null asked.
Are you certain you want to do this? he asked.
He could feel her shift in the chair in the real world, with that slight delay when he was so loosely connected to her, but her unease was tangible even in this space.
Yes, she finally said. We need to find... other pieces.
At her words, he thought about the room in the butcher's laboratory, and all the parts they had left behind. They are innocent, he recalled her words. She wanted to find them, all of them, though he couldn't really understand why. But then a strange thought crept up from somewhere in their mind, and he wondered for a second, if there really were other pieces out there – pieces of him, and if any of them held a copy of his conscious. It was a disturbing, uncanny thought.
No, Lars, she said softly, sensing his thoughts. There's no one in this universe like you.
It was weird that she would be the one to reassure him like that. Usually, that was his task in their relationship. But it worked. He focused his self, and dove into the files.
~ ~ ~
"Are you ready?"
"Of course."
"The feed is running. We're live in ten seconds."
An image flared to life. A young woman, black hair framing her pale face, sat on a bench underneath a jasmine tree. She nervously flattened a fold on her expensive looking clothes and then rested her hands in her lap, looking up at the camera with an uneasy smile. A man came into view and sat down next to her. He wore expensive clothes too, and his dark hair was combed back neatly. There were slight shadows underneath his amber colored eyes, but he seemed relaxed. He put his arm around the woman and for a few seconds, they just sat there and waited, until the connection was received at the other end.
"Riga? It's you! So good to see you!" a female voice resounded, but there was no image.
"You too, mother, father," the man said with a smile.
"So this is it, huh. That's her," a male voice chimed in. He sounded curious, but there was a vague hint of hostility in his voice that made the woman tense up in the man's arms.
"Yes," the man said with a confident smile, pulling her closer. "This is my-"
The feed cut. The image disappeared.
~ ~ ~
More images whirled through the space within their mind. Hundreds of thousands of them. Snapshots from videos, messages, log entries, photos.
They cascaded around them like a flurry, voxels and pixels blurring together into an incoherent mass, only to part again like a curtain and suddenly revealing settings and scenery with such a forceful clarity that they burned through their mind like an old fashioned projector through a paper screen.
The woman in the garden, wearing a white summer dress and smiling happily.
Two hands interlinked, one wearing a ring.
The man, laughing as the woman put a flower crown on his head.
Both of them walking on a beach.
The woman, her face half cast in shadow as she looked up at the night sky and it seemed to reflect in her eyes.
The man lifting her small figure up as she struggled playfully, both of them laughing with joy.
And a picture of her, kissing him lightly on the cheek as he seemed to doze peacefully in the summer sun.
A wave surged through the world, so violent and wild that Lars thought the digital space around him would be torn into pieces. She was breaking, he could feel it, all the way into this space. She was shattering into a thousand pieces while he could only try to stem the tide of binary information and the emotional overload that it evoked, and that now bled over through their connection into this space.
The code was in disarray, the bits became chaotic. Nothing made sense anymore. He let go of the data, and burst through the chaos and dashed back along the lifeline that linked him to her, back towards his anchor, only to find it dislodged from reality completely.
She stared at the screen wide eyed. He hadn't intended to bring up the pictures like that, for her to really see. Seeing them displayed turned them into a terrifying reality that they perhaps might have still been able to dismiss or explain away, had they only seen it in their mind. But there was no doubt left. No mistake.
Before becoming his slave, Null had been Riga's lover, and his fiancé.