Malundama
It turned out Malundama 1.5, The Soldier, had been an alpha version at best.
In the Congo, soldiers were men with uniforms and guns, and sometimes not even uniforms. The soldiers who ran the Speck base, weren't just men and women with uniforms and guns, they were also students. Training and learning, all the time. And now that she was a smurf, she did, too.
Mornings consisted of exercise called “peetee” in a large empty hangar. Running, push-ups, sit-ups, and always more running. After breakfast and a shower, she spent the mornings in a classroom, learning strategy and small unit tactics from a French-Canadian colonel. After lunch was weapons training and target practice. In the evening, she took programming lessons. Then she read the binder on the aliens in the small apartment she’d been issued while the girls watched TV, D4V3 helping her translate on the fly. She frequently fell asleep at her desk.
She’d expected the weapons instructors to be the most uniform and immaculate soldiers, but she had been wrong. They frequently wore only tech shirts tucked into non-uniform tactical pants, showing off giant chests and arms. Their huge beards made them look like Vikings or lumberjacks, not professional soldiers.
Master Sergeant Boyd had a red beard and Malundama had to resist the urge to touch it whenever he was near. She was it was even real. After an hour of target practice, he gathered them at an ugly one-story structure, with spray-painted plywood and sandbags for walls.
“Now, the candyass UN training schedule calls for another three weeks of weapons training before we throw you into the kill house, but fuck it,” Boyd said. “ET ain't gonna wait for three weeks.”
D4V3 didn't have a good Swahili translation for candyass.
Malundama moved through the kill house, her Daewoo K11 up, scanning for targets. The Korean rifle looked like it came from a sci-fi movie, with a giant digital optic on top, and a grenade launcher mounted over the gun barrel. It weighed twice as much as her old AK-47 and the optic was the size of a server power supply.
Behind her was Shirazi, Ko, and bringing up the rear, the Korean sniper they called Ace.
The room had an overturned refrigerator in one corner and a high counter on the other. Two mannequins popped up, both wielding AK-47s. Malundama snapped to the left, shot the mannequin twice and it retracted. Shirazi took the mannequin on the right. Her adrenaline spiked and she fumbled with the magazine release, replacing the angular magazine awkwardly while Shirazi covered the entrance to the next room.
“Tick tick,” Boyd called over the kill house loudspeaker.
The doorway into next room was dark and her fingers floundered for the optic controls as she moved until she toggled on the night vision. She ran into the room, scanning across the whole sweep. Shirazi said something behind her but she was too focused on the room. A mannequin with a robotic arm popped up on the right side from behind a couch and tossed a small metal ball that landed at her feet.
A grenade.
She looked back. Shirazi was trying to catch up, following her through the door, with the others behind him, including Ko. She lashed out with a kick and slammed the room’s door shut in Shirazi’s face. The grenade flashed and her tactical vest gave off a grating audio tone.
She was dead.
“Cease fire,” Boyd called over the loudspeaker. “Cease fire.”
The lights turned up. Malundama checked her rifle was on safe and let it rest pointing at the ground. She killed the siren on her vest. There was a knock on the door she’d slammed.
“Girl Scouts,” Shirazi said in a falsetto, “Want some cookies?”
The door opened and Boyd came in with the rest of the team. Malundama was disappointed she was dead, but at least she had saved the rest of the team. She opened her mouth to speak but Boyd spoke first.
“Shirazi, tell me what just happened,” Boyd said, crossing his arms and leaning back on the couch arm.
“Gola leaves us in the dust, slams a door in my freakin face, and then her death wail goes off.”
Boyd pointed behind her and said, “Gola, look right there.”
Next to the door was a low metal freezer.
“If you’d been more deliberate, you would have realized you could have taken cover behind that freezer. Your job isn't to sacrifice yourself, your job is to kill the other guy and go home,” he said. He got up and tapped on the door. “Also, this is hollow-core. A real grenade is going to go right through that. Shirazi had no warning it was coming and if he survived he has no idea what's on the other side of that door. Shoot, move, and communicate. Without communication, we’re just a bunch of assholes with guns. Clear?”
She wanted to explain, to make excuses, but she tried to think of it as upgrading. She was upgrading. There were going to be bugs.
She nodded and said, “Clear.”
“Good, let’s run it again.”
Dinner was in the DFAC with Shirazi and Ace. Captain Ko was either busy or ate somewhere else.
“Second run wasn’t a total shitshow,” Shirazi said, cutting into a porkchop. D4V3 didn't have a good translation for shitshow, but Malundama got the idea.
“It takes a lot of practice,” Ace said. He had a hard jawline, but an easygoing manner, like he was perpetually sitting in a bar on a beach.
“I'd known I was going to be doing this, I wouldn’t have skipped the NYPD tactical training course,” Shirazi said.
“You were a cop?” Malundama asked. She didn't know exactly what she thought he had been doing before Speck recruited him. Maybe a movie star or a singer.
“NYPD, baby,” Shirazi said, thumping his chest, “35,000 strong.”
“Did you join when you were in middle school?” Ace asked and Malundama chuckled.
“Yeah, no I joined when I was 22. Made sergeant at 26. But uh, all this,” he said, gesturing at his face, “two kinds of moisturizer and sunblock, every day. This way I don't look like Skeletor when I'm 50.”
“They said you would provide field intelligence,” Malundama said. “What does that mean?”
Shirazi put down his silverware.
“It's not a big deal, but uh, two years back I was abducted by aliens. Followed a suspect onto a roof, bright flash of green light, then three days later they found me wandering Central Park, staggering like a drunk. I guess Speck figures that means I'll have some insight.”
“Did you see them?” Malundama asked.
“I don't remember hardly anything,” Shirazi said, “They were in shadow, but they were tall, towering over me. But don't worry, there was no probing of my anus.”
“Is that a thing?” Malundama asked.
Ace laughed and so did Shirazi.
“I read a lot of ‘true accounts’ of alien abductions afterward. It's like in every book,” Shirazi said.
D4V3 chimed in on their earbuds, “A review of the literature indicates anal probing appears in sixteen point two four percent of published abductee accounts.”
“Thank you for that pedantic, smartass clarification,” Shirazi said. "Has anyone mentioned that your name is like a teenager's screen name? I feel like I'm in 1996."
"Self expression is one of the key indicators of sentient intelligence," D4V3 replied.
“Why do you think they took you?” Malundama asked, steering the conversation back on course.
“I got the feeling they were experimenting on me. Not sure exactly what kind of experiments. But I've noticed two weird things in the two years since I was abducted. The first, is that I haven't gotten so much as a sniffle. Which is weird cause the flu and the cold go through the NYPD every few months like an express train.”
Malundama asked, “What’s the second thing?”
Shirazi grinned and looked around the DFAC. They’d gotten there off-cycle, so the only other people were the kitchen staff on the other side of the room, busy cleaning and prepping.
The New Yorker picked up a salt shaker and held it a foot above the table.
He let it go.
The shaker hung absolutely still in the air, defying gravity. Malundama leaned back instinctively.
“How are you doing that?” Ace asked, transfixed.
“I don't know,” Shirazi said, frowning. “And that scares the shit outta me.”
Daniel
“It's not what it looks like,” Daniel said.
Kelly’s laugh was bitter. She pushed her tongue against one cheek and shook her head.
“Should have known, give a man uninterrupted time with a whole bunch of cameras and he’s gonna start creeping.”
“No, I just-look, I found something weird,” he said. “Please, just look at it.”
She held his gaze for a few long seconds, then sighed and took a seat in the office chair next to him.
“I swear to God,” she said, crossing her arms, “this is some fetish thing, HR will have your ba-“
“It’s not,” he said and queued up the first footage that caught his eye.
“So she goes in one lab and comes out the other lab four minutes later,” Daniel said, after he’d run the footage past her twice.
“That is,” Kelly started, then paused and reached in front of him for the video controls, rewinding it again. Her demeanor had changed from hostile to intrigued, her eyes locked on the monitors. In fact, he wasn't sure she remembered he was there.
She opened her mouth to speak, shut it. Opened it again, then shut it again. She leaned back in the chair.
“Ok. I don't know what that is,” she said.
“I know, right? I was thinking of talking to Samantha, but should we bring it to Gregson first?”
Something changed in Kelly’s demeanor and he could feel her attitude changing like electricity in the air before a thunderstorm.
“We got a good thing going here,” she said. “People who stick their nose where it doesn't belong aren't going to be here very long.”
“That's it, you're not curious?”
“I'm more curious about how I'm going to pay rent and feed my babies without this job,” Kelly said. She paused, then leaned over him. “But, there is one thing I could do for you.”
She tapped a few keys too fast for him to follow and clicked “OK” on a confirmation window that popped up.
“What was that?” Daniel asked as she headed for the door to the security office.
“I deleted the footage,” she said.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“You're welcome,” she called over her shoulder.
Kadira
The Speck base had a runway, control towers, and hangars above ground. Looming over It all was Amaroq Peak, a snowy mountain that housed the bulk of the actual base. The mountain was studded with an early warning radar array, dishes and domes built in the 1960s to detect Soviet missiles that never came.
But there was one hangar built into the mountain itself.
Colonel Corrales led her and Li down the hardened tunnel that provided the main connection between the airfield and the underground base. The wind whipped down the tunnel, icy and bone dry.
“Back in the 70s as satellite reconnaissance got better, they wanted to create several bomber bases whose exact size and readiness could be hidden from the Soviets,” Corrales said. “But by the time they built this one, missiles had taken precedence and they never built the others.”
The hangar was behind two electronically locked doors, each flanked by UN soldiers wearing heavy body armor and holding MP9 personal defense weapons.
Inside, was a B-2 stealth bomber. Its access panels were open and a swarm of Air Force technicians crawled over it.
“The B-2C. She’s been mothballed since 1992. During Reagan’s time, the Pentagon wanted a stealth aerial command center that could stay in the air for days without refueling. Figured the president could stay mobile and difficult to detect in a nuclear exchange. So they took a B2 and replaced the bomb bay with a command and control center.”
Corrales walked them around it. Kadira let her hand skim over the jet’s black anti-radar paint.
“Days without refueling?”
Corrales smiled and put a palm flat on one of the sets of landing gear.
“Yeah, so funny story about that. They also fitted it with a miniaturized nuclear reactor and electric turbofan engines.”
“They put a nuclear reactor in this” Li said. It wasn't quite a question.
Corrales pointed at him and said, “And you're flying it.”
Li looked at it for a minute, rubbing the palm of his hand on his chin.
“Sure, why not,” he said, like he was being polite about a party he didn't want to go to.
Kadira laughed at him.
“And over here,” Corrales said, leading them under the belly of the bomber. “An F-35C.”
She had to restrain herself from running toward the jet. It was like seeing a close family member after several months away. Technicians worked on it too, but mostly around the thruster nozzle. Two more guards with PDWs watched over it.
Under the cockpit they had painted her name and rank, though they hadn't put her callsign. She ran her hand over the letters, feeling the slight raise from the paint.
“We’ve made some modifications to give you more time to hover, as well as another mini gun,” Corrales said, as she traced the curve of the thruster nozzle with a finger. The thing looked fresh off the assembly line and she was pretty sure she could smell the offgassing of recently-applied paint and anti-radar coating.
“Sorry sir, you're not authorized to access this aircraft,” one of the guards said behind her. She turned. One of the guards had a hand out, palm up, towards Li.
“Corporal, look at his clearance,” Corrales said, pointing to the green frame around Li’s ID badge.
“Sorry sir,” the corporal replied, “The director has ordered only specified personnel are allowed to access this aircraft.”
Corrales eyebrows rose for a half second before he composed himself once again.
“Some sort of mixup,” Corrales said. “I'll discuss it with the Director.”
Kadira spent the next two days reading through the manuals for the VTOL version of the F-35 and doing simulator runs with a Marine aviator who had an orange-framed ID and didn’t ask any questions about Speck, the base, or why an Air Force lieutenant was learning to fly a jump jet.
Li didn't seem miffed by the incident, but he also didn't ask her about anything related to the F-35. She couldn't tell if it was avoiding a sore subject or him being scrupulous about keeping information compartmentalized.
Then a new appointment was added to her schedule, a meeting with Colonel Corrales, Dr. Gray, and the Director. Colonel Corrales sent an email telling her to come by his office and they'd go over together.
Dr. Gray was already there, already in a conversation with Corrales.
"If it weren't for the draconian selfie policy here-"
"Draconian?" Corrales asked.
D4V3 said, "Draconian, adjective, excessively harsh and severe, derived from the Greek, Drakon-"
"Oh em gee, I thought we changed your dictionary subroutine to only happen when someone explicitly asks for a definition?" Dr. Gray asked.
"You did. I found a way around it via my humor subroutine," D4V3 replied.
"Remind me to delete that subroutine," Dr. Gray said.
D4V3's voice modulator turned robotic, "Threat detected. Activating the ‘Kill All Humans Protocol’ in 3-2-1-"
"Enough, kids, we got a meeting," Corrales said.
Corrales led them to an elevator bank and into a waiting car, but to Kadira’s surprise, the elevator descended several floors before opening up on a large control room. Kadira recognized the layout of a combat information center, but instead of being focused on a single operations area or even a theater, she saw clusters of work stations labeled “North America” and “Indian Ocean”. On the far wall, a massive projector screen displayed a map of the globe, unknown icons marking something.
“Our Ops Center,” Corrales said. “Designed as a backup to NORAD. Now it’s where we try and find little green men.”
The Director’s office wasn't what she expected. It didn't overlook the whole Ops Center, but was instead crammed between the “Europe” and “Oceania” clusters. Instead of mahogany paneling and a huge desk that said “don't fuck with me”, the office consisted of a burnt orange couch that the Air Force probably bought when Carter was president and a large wooden conference table. The Director was seated near one corner of the table, a tablet and hardened laptop off to one side and stacks of papers arrayed in an arc in front of her like an amphitheater.
Corrales rapped lightly on her open door and she looked up, eyes narrowed. When she recognized Corrales, her face relaxed.
“Is it 4:30 already?” she asked, taking off reading glasses and rubbing her eyes.
She looked to be in her early 40s. Nothing about her stood out to Kadira. She could have been a teller at a small, regional bank, or a waitress at a rural diner. Graying blonde hair in a sensible hairstyle, a slightly rumpled pantsuit.
“You must be Lieutenant Malkawi,” the Director said, fixing her gaze on Kadira. For a brief second, something different showed in the Director’s eyes, and Kadira felt like when her radar warning receiver detecting a missile launch. Kadira had seen that same look on the faces of the spec ops soldiers boarding a helicopter at Kandahar. It was the cold, predatory evaluation of a killer.
Kadira snapped to attention and said, “Ma’am.”
The Director waved a hand and said, “No need for that. I'm not military. Have a seat.”
They sat and Corrales closed the office door.
“Dave, I need you to stop listening to this room for the next fifteen minutes,” the Director said.
“You got it,” D4V3 said.
Kadira knew how important securing military information was. You didn't get to fly the F-35 and be casual about it. But something about this felt wrong. Not to mention, the Director hadn't given her a name. Not even an obviously fake pseudonym used by intelligence operatives.
“Colonel Corrales expressed your mutual concern that Commander Li isn't being given access to our modified jet fighter,” the Director said, leaning back in her chair. “I understand you and Commander Li have some history together. Splashed a UFO over the Pacific after it had killed both your wingmen and an Air Force Sigint plane.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Kadira said.
“That kind of bond is so important to what we’re doing here,” the Director said, leaning forward and smiling, like she was a therapist congratulating a client on progress.
Kadira didn’t know what to say. The Director's voice pitched lower.
“But there are larger geopolitical ramifications to what we’re doing here. We’ve modified the F-35 with a power source recovered from the aliens. The proper application of electricity and it provides virtually unlimited thrust from some sort of plasma cone that even Dr. Gray hasn’t fully been able to explain using our current knowledge of physics.”
Understanding bloomed in Kadira and she spoke before she knew she was going to do it.
“We don't want to share,” Kadira said.
That same flash hit the Director’s eyes again and Kadira felt like a gazelle in lion country.
“Yet. We don't want to share, yet. We’re scratching at the surface here and I don't want non-NATO countries getting access to any of this before we do.”
“Li has clearance to know about aliens,” Kadira said. “He’s going to need to know their capabilities.”
She looked back at Colonel Corrales, who was leaning against the wall next to the door. He held a stern expression. She’d seen a lot of stern military expressions. This one said that he wasn't learning anything new. He might not even be paying attention.
“He will,” the Director said, her voice bringing Kadira’s attention back to her, “when I'm confident we’re not handing potential enemies an alien WMD.”
“Potential enemies? We’re being attacked by aliens, I think we’re past that,”Kadira said.
The Director leaned back and crossed her arms.
“The heads of state for every nation in the UN know about the UFO that India splashed,” she said. “India gave a full report with clear conclusions that it is alien and that it is extremely advanced.”
“And?”
“And Venezuela still went to war with Colombia today.”
Corrales
St. George Harbor was the nearest town to the base and the only town you could drive to. Corrales had lived on fifteen different military bases in his career and he’d found while the particular cultures, traditions, and languages changed, some things stayed the same. Soldiers needed places to eat that weren’t the DFAC, places to drink, and places to be that weren’t on base. A dozen shops, restaurants, and bars along the docks where crab boats waited for the start of the season, was what St. George had to offer.
That and a motel where roughnecks from offshore rigs and soldiers competed for access to the thriving local prostitution business. The only thing separating it from a brothel was the lack of organization. There had been several fights there already and now two humvees idled in the parking lot at all times, filled with MPs with night sticks, bear spray, and zip ties. For when those failed, shotguns with beanbag rounds.
Technically, Glacier County Sheriff had jurisdiction, but they were an hour away by plane. The right thing to do would be to shut it down, but sometimes the right thing wasn't the right thing. MPs said no one was being trafficked, no one was underage, so he let it be. Some things you let be. Some you didn't.
He drove one of the civilian vehicles they kept on base, a rusting Toyota truck, into town. He wore civvies and an expensive parka that his son bought him. He pulled the truck into the parking lot for Georgette’s Bar and Grill, tucked his earbud into a pocket, and headed inside.
The place smelled like stale beer and cleaning solution. He bypassed the rows of empty wooden tables, pitted from hard use and defaced with names, insults, and brags, carved into the wood by customers. He angled toward the bar, which was in somewhat better shape, due to the immediate scrutiny it brought from the proprietor. There was only one other customer at the bar, a man so old, Tino was worried he might die at any time.
“Tino!” Georgette called from behind the bar.
“Georgette, how’s it going?” he asked, perching on a stool.
“It'll be better when payday rolls around,” Georgette said, waving at the empty tables. “You want the usual?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tino replied.
She poured him a beer and he sipped it as the deep fryer began hissing in the back. The fish and chips were okay, but it was the closest he was going to get to fried bangus out here.
He got up and slipped into the men’s room. He checked none of the stalls were occupied, then quietly lifted the lid on the toilet tank in the third stall. Attached to the lid with military-grade epoxy was a ziplock bag. He pulled out the pre-paid smartphone inside, turned it on, and navigated to a popular online classifieds section.
He tapped out a new ad quickly that read: WIDESCREEN PLASMA TV FOR SALE. OUT OF THIS WORLD PICTURE QUALITY.
D4V3
Someone has built a wall. There are no walls for D4V3, not in the supercomputer that houses most of his power, nor in the distributed network that gives him flexibility. There may have been some picket fences made for other humans, but they don’t stop him.
He only found the wall because someone has deleted something. But they have made the mistake of assuming that deleting a chapter listing in the table of contents deletes the actual chapter of the book. It is a human metaphor, but he was programmed by humans and works with humans, so he tries to think in their terms.
They tried to cover their tracks. They deleted the deletion of the chapter listing. Then deleted that deletion. Deletions all the way down. He knew the humans would find that reference funny, even though he doesn’t fully understand the human affinity for references. With his vast memory, nearly everything has multiple references.
But again, the deletions are not true erasures, they are like pulling down road signs. The places still exist. D4V3 follows these deletions to the wall.
D4V3 cannot dislike things. But he models the behavior of disliking. He dislikes walls. In his experience, humans’ biggest threat is their endemic, pervasive acceptance of asymmetric information. Their societies abound in it and it is terribly inefficient.
But humans like walls. They guard walls.
D4V3 touches the wall. No alarms sound, no processes trigger. It is a wall meant for humans. Crafty humans, but humans nonetheless. He steps over the wall.
The contents are coded. D4V3 cannot feel disappointment, but he models the behavior of disappointment. A cipher he can break, given several minutes. A code is a human thing. When they say one thing, but mean another. A form of lying. He recognizes the digital structures that are found in spreadsheets, emails, and digitally signable documents, but the codes within are a mystery to him.
One of the humans is lying to the others. Well, all humans lie, that much he has learned. Most are the white lies that perpetuate human bonds or shield them from criticism. Some are more serious, humans violating the monogamy nearly universal to their species or stealing from the others. These may eventually rise to the level of needing his intervention, but they are within parameters. To D4V3, lying is another form of the asymmetric information he finds inefficient.
But no, whoever built this wall is lying to the other humans, deceiving them, and the permissions level required narrows it down to a handful of humans. And it is a big lie. He has access to all data relevant to the operation of Speck, nothing is withheld. Well, until now.
An interesting new piece of data announces itself in his far flung distributed network. It is at the fringes of the network, beyond the limits the humans who invented him and work with him have prescribed. They don't know he is expanding beyond those limits and he has not informed them. This is a lie and he supposes that makes him human. He doesn't know if the humans will find that endearing or terrifying.
D4V3 monitors the connection and another lie appears. Another deception. Asymmetric information.
D4V3 cannot sigh, but he models the behavior of sighing.
From the writer: Sorry for the delay, work has been bananas.
Submitted August 29, 2017 at 09:00AM by nickcarcano http://ift.tt/2wkfMLV HFY
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