“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know who would do this or why. But the point is, now we stop it. Now we culture these babies, and we send them out to do battle.” Taka pulled up the stats on her incubators. “I’ve already got five liters of the stuff ready to go, and I’ll have twenty by morn...”
That’s odd, she thought as a little flashing icon caught her eye for the first time.
That shouldn’t—that looks like—
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.
“What?” Ken and Laurie leaned in as one.
“My lab’s online.” She stabbed at the icon; it blinked back at her, placidly unresponsive. “My lab’s online. It’s uploading—God knows what it’s—”
In an instant Ken was scrambling up the side of the van. “Get the toolkit,” he snapped, sliding across the roof towards a little satellite dish rising somehow from its recessed lair, pointing at the sky.
“What? I—”
Laurie dove into the cab. Ken yanked against the dish, breaking its fixation on some malign geosynchronous star. Suddenly he cried out and thrashed, stopped himself just short of rolling off the roof. His back was arched, his hands and head lifted away from the metal.
The dish stuttered back towards alignment, stripped gears whining.
“Fuck!” Laurie tumbled out onto the pavement. The toolkit spilled its guts beside her. She scrambled to her feet, yelled “Shut it down, for Chrissakes! The hull’s electrified!”
Taka stumbled towards the open door. She could see Ken wriggling back towards the dish on his back and elbows, using his diveskin as insulation. As she ducked her head to hop past the trim—Thank God we disarmed the internals—a familiar hum started up deep in Miri’s guts.
The weapons blister, deploying.
GPS was online. She killed it. It resurrected. All external defenses were awake and hungry. She called them off. They ignored her. Outside, Ken and Laurie shouted back and forth.
What do I do—what—
She scrambled under the dash and pulled open the fuse box. The circuit breakers were clunky manual things, unreachable to any demon built of electrons. She pulled the plugs on security and comm and GPS. She yanked autopilot too, just in case.
A chorus of electrical hums fell instantly silent around her.
Taka closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself a deep breath. Voices drifted through the open door as she pulled herself back up into the driver’s seat.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Skin took most of the charge.”
She knew what had happened. What happened again, she corrected herself, grabbing the headset from its hook.
She was no coder. She barely knew how to grow basic programs. But she was a competent medical doctor, at least, and even bottom-half graduates knew their tools. She’d spared the med systems from disconnection; now she brought up an architectural schematic and ran a count of the modules.
There were black boxes in there. One of them, according to the icon, even had a direct user interface. She tapped it.
The Madonna hung in front her, not speaking. Its teeth were bared—a smile of some kind, full of hate and triumph. Some distant, unimportant part of Taka Ouellette’s mind wondered at what possible selective advantage an app could accrue by presenting itself in this way. Did intimidation in the real world somehow increase fitness in the virtual one?
But a much bigger part of Taka’s mind was occupied with something else entirely, something that had never really sunk in before: this avatar had capped eyes.
They all did. Every Lenie she’d ever encountered: the faces changed from demon to demon, different lips, different cheeks and noses, different ethnicities. But always centered on eyes as white and featureless as snowdrifts.
My name’s Taka Ouellette, she had said an eternity ago.
And this strange cipher of a woman—who seemed to take the apocalypse so personally— had replied Le— Laurie.
“Taka.”
Taka started, but no—the Lenie wasn’t talking to her. This Lenie wasn’t.
She slipped off the eyephones. A woman in black with machinery in her chest and eyes like little glaciers looked in at her. She didn’t look anything like the creature in the wires. No rage, no hate, no triumph. Somehow, it was this expressionless, flesh-and-blood face that she would have associated with machinery.
“It was one of—it was a Le—a Madonna,” Taka said. “Inside the med system. I don’t know how long it’s been in there.”
“We have to go,” Laurie said.
“It was hiding in there. Spying, I guess.” Taka shook her head. “I didn’t even know they could run silent like that, I thought they always just—automatically tore things apart every chance they got...”
“It got a signal out. We’ve got to go before the lifters get here.”
“Right. Right.” Focus, Tak. Worry about this later.
Ken was at Laurie’s shoulder. “You said you had five liters in culture. We’ll take some with us. You disperse the rest. Drive into town, ring your siren, give at least a few mils to anybody who qualifies, and get out. We’ll catch up with you later if we can. You have the list?”
Taka nodded. “There are only six locals with wheels. Seven, if Ricketts is still around.”
“Don’t give it to anyone else,” Ken said. “People on foot aren’t likely to get out of the burn zone in time. I’d also advise you to avoid mentioning the lifters to anyone who doesn’t have an immediate need to know.”
She shook her head. “They all need to know, Ken.”
“People without transportation are liable to steal it from those who do. I sympathize, but causing a panic could seriously compromise—”
“Forget it. Everyone deserves a heads-up, at least. If they can’t outrun the flamethrowers, there are places to hide from them.”
Ken sighed. “Fine. Just so you know the risks you’re taking. Saving a dozen lives here could doom a much greater number down the road.”
Taka smiled, not entirely to herself. “Weren’t you the one who didn’t think the greater number was worth saving in the first place?”
“It’s not that,” Laurie said. “He just likes the idea of people dying.”
Taka blinked, surprised. Two faces looked back at her; she could read nothing in either.
“We have to hurry,” Ken said. “If they scramble from Montreal we can only count on an hour.”
The onboard lab could dispense product either fore or aft. Taka moved to the back of the MI and tapped instructions. “Lenie?”
“Ye—” Laurie began, and fell suddenly silent.
“No,” Taka said quietly. “I meant what about the Lenie?”
The other woman said nothing. Her face was as blank as a mask.
Ken broke the silence: “Are you certain it can’t get out again?”
“I physically cut power to nav, comm, and GPS,” Taka said, not taking her eyes off the woman in front of her. “I pretty much lobotomized the old girl.”