Sleeper Protocol Read online

  “There’s some protein in the box if you want some,” she drawled and went right back into her moaning.

  I made myself at home in the apartment. There were two tiny rooms—the one with the sofa and another with a small bed and piles of clothing on the floor. Across from the sofa sat the galley and what reminded me of a telephone booth. The GALLEYMATE3000 required some trial and error before I managed to conjure up some passable coffee. Then I watched as the moaning woman powered down her hood, removed her gloves, slid her face out of the hood, and smiled up at me. Cute, bubbly, and blond, her eyes spelled trouble even when she grinned wide enough that it must have hurt.

  “Do you even remember my name?”

  I rubbed my aching temples. “I don’t remember too much.”

  She laughed—a high-pitched squeal that made my ears hurt. “My name is Chastity, dipshit. I can’t believe you don’t remember me! You’ve been here two days. I think you must have gone into a hiber-sleep or something. Your body just shut down from all the sex.”

  Hiber-sleep? What the hell does that mean? Mally was silent and probably furious at me. The coffee was hot and bitter enough to start scrubbing the bad taste from my tongue. Without warning, I wanted a shower in the worst way possible. “All the sex?”

  The look that crossed her face was like a dark storm cloud passing in front of the sun. “Yeah.”

  “So, what was all that moaning, then?”

  “I’m a cyber-prostitute, Kieran. Remember?”

  She knows my name. I’m staying with a prostitute! I was nothing but a cash register to her. “How much do I owe you?”

  “You’re on a high-roller ticket. It’s good until you want to settle up.”

  Mally?

  There was still silence. I’d really stepped in it.

  “You don’t want to settle up now, do you?” Chastity sneered.

  My eyes squeezed shut. “Not right now.” The imaginary vise squeezing my temples together, along with the taste in my mouth, refused to relent. Being dead might have been a better choice. How much have I been drinking? My stomach flopped and gurgled in response. The urge to vomit began to rise in the back of my throat.

  <>

  Mally? What the hell is going on?

  <>

  Chastity giggled and bounced over to me, straddled my lap, and began to kiss me. “I’ve got ten minutes until my next appointment.”

  The invitation was tempting. Her short blond hair and pixie’s face made me want her, but something about all of it was wrong. “I need a shower and some food.” What I needed to do was get the hell out of her apartment, but I had no idea where I was, and Mally was giving me a rightly deserved cold shoulder.

  Chastity slipped out of my lap with a giggle and waved her hands in front of what appeared to be a microwave oven. A few seconds later, she opened a door and set a biscuit and a sausage patty on a plate. Handing them to me, she said, “That’s ten credits.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s on your bill, too.” Chastity opened a door and brought out a small bowl and a spoon. A tiny bit of pink pudding, or something like it, sat in the bowl. Compared to my plate, her portion was more pathetic than meager. “Everything has its price.”

  My hunger woke up and roared to life at the sight of food. It didn’t taste particularly bad, though I waited for my stomach to lurch and hurl biscuit and sausages all over the tiny apartment. “Where’s the toilet?”

  “You ain’t gonna be sick, are you?” Chastity looked at me a few moments before the playfulness drained from her eyes. “Flushing the toilet is five credits.”

  “It’s what?”

  “I done told you—everything has a price, Kieran. That’s the motto of good ole Columbia.”

  “You pay for flushing the toilet? Five credits? Ten credits for breakfast?”

  “Yeah.” She ate another spoonful of pink paste and put the bowl back into the chiller. “This place costs me twelve hundred credits a month.”

  I took a bite of the biscuit and wondered how delicately I could ask her…

  “I make fifty credits for a session like that. Two hundred if I get a red-blooded guy to do the horizontal bop. I don’t do anything unclean, and no bug sex.”

  “Bug sex?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Even aliens need to get laid, Kieran. That’s all virtual, too. Ain’t none of them on Earth these days. Too bad, though. Some of ’em are damn good.” She grinned and worked her fingers back into the haptic gloves.

  My stomach flopped once and rumbled. God, don’t let me throw up.

  <>

  Right. I shook my head. “How much for water?”

  Chastity giggled. “Out of the tap, it’s free. Might kill you, but you can drink all of it you want. The clean stuff is ten credits a liter.”

  I wanted to ask how much a single square of toilet paper would cost, but I didn’t. Eating in silence, I watched her don the haptic gear again.

  She scowled at me with her hood in her hands. “What are you gonna do?”

  Great question. “I’m gonna go for a walk, I think.”

  “I just sent Mick a message. Told him to meet you at Murphy’s in an hour.”

  Mick? Mick Jagger? Who the hell is Mick? The look on my face gave me away, and Chastity dissolved in a fresh fit of giggles.

  “You don’t remember him? Big old bald guy, tattoos on his face?”

  Sounded like something from a nightmare. I had no memory of the guy, but I managed a fairly good performance. “Oh yeah, sorry. Thought his name was something else. I remember him now.” Berkeley would have been proud of my lie. Maybe I’d learned something after all.

  “Mick said he’d found what you asked him for.” A buzzer sounded, and Chastity smoothed back her hair. “I’m done at noon. I’ll come meet you at Murphy’s for a drink.”

  “At noon?” I asked. Having a drink in two hours sounded like a positively bad idea.

  She put the helmet on, and I was alone in my own little world again. I found my backpack slung against one wall. I could see the end of the hexhab and a fresh set of clothes beckoning to me. I glanced into the booth and realized it was an all-in-one bathroom. I saw a button with something resembling a shower logo and pressed it. A showerhead emerged from one wall at eye level. I pressed the button with the toilet icon, and a trench opened in the bottom of the floor. What the hell is this? I punched up the shower button. The valve handle was marked with “40” on a red line. That was as hot as it went—forty degrees Celsius. Hot water hit me in the chest, and I relished it. I found the soap dispenser and heard it chime like a cash register in my head as I lathered my body.

  When I finished, fans in the ceiling evacuated the steam and most of the moisture in a matter of seconds. The swirling air dried me completely in minutes. I studied my reflection in the mirror before turning back to the squalor around me. My eyes weren’t bloodshot, but I hadn’t shaved in a while, and with my longish hair, I looked nothing like I had in Sydney. The nausea in my stomach and my aching head were just two of the physical symptoms. My stupid actions had consequences. What in the hell are you doing, Kieran?

  There wasn’t an answer. Of course, there seldom was when only Mally was there to talk to me. I sat down on the toilet, fully clothed, and dropped my head into my hands. The tears came quickly, reducing me to quiet sobs as I held my hot face and let them come. This had all been a mistake. Pain blossomed in my chest as I thought of Allan and his warm hospitality. He’d been right to send me away, for my own good, after Opal overdosed. All I’d managed to do in this life, all three and a half months of it, was to hurt everyone I’d known in some way.

  With a start, my head cam
e up. Mally? The night that she left me, were you aware of a transport or any type of transmissions from her?

  <> Mally took a moment before continuing. <>

  I spoke aloud and wiped my face on my sleeve. “How can you know what’s best for me, Mally? You’re a machine!”

  <>

  Rubbing my eyes, I said, “I think I need to be alone for a while, Mally.”

  <>

  All she did was help me find my name. I sighed. I could have stopped her from leaving, the way she did when you… you tried to get me to leave her!

  <>

  Can you get in contact with her?

  <>

  Why?

  <>

  What aren’t you telling me?

  There was silence. I asked Mally again what she was not telling me, but she replied, <>

  I took a deep breath and then another. Get in touch with her. Don’t come back unless it’s an emergency or you’ve got her on the phone.

  <>

  “Do what I said, Mally.” Standing up, I splashed some of the sulfurous water on my face and dried it on my sleeve. “Pay my bill, too. Give her a 10 percent tip.”

  <>

  “Keep trying.” There was more confidence in my voice than I felt, but walking back into the main room and hearing Chastity servicing another client, I knew that I was right. Time to move on, quickly.

  Playing her role to perfection, Chastity didn’t even see me move across her line of sight, grab my backpack, and step through her door.

  On the streets, there weren’t many people moving around. A few children played jacks with pieces of asphalt while their mothers smoked noxious cigarettes and gossiped in a language I did not understand or even recognize. One of the children, a pretty little Asian girl, smiled at me. A gaudy neon green sign advertised for Murphy’s just down the street.

  Whatever I’d asked Mick to get, he had. Maybe it was something that would get me out of Memphis.

  Crawley read the classified report for the third time and felt his stomach sinking. Rigel Two, and its surrounding colonies, lay scorched black. Nothing living remained, and the bodies of more than twenty-five thousand colonists and soldiers lay strewn where they’d tried to stop the assault. Without intelligence, the location of the Grey fleet was unknown.

  The assumption shared by the Terran Defense Forces was that this was an isolated incident. Crawley knew better. They were coming, and it was going to take time to raise an army to stop them. Time was the resource that he did not have.

  Whatever intelligence and operational plans the general wanted to consider, Crawley decided he had better things to do. Truth was, he hated Brussels, and the Livermore project needed his undivided attention. In a matter of days, they’d know if Kieran could completely integrate his memories and identity. Keeping him safe from the prying eyes of the Terran Council was something he trusted no one but himself and Berkeley to do.

  Chapter Twenty

  There wasn’t an algorithm to explain human emotion no matter how thoroughly Mally searched. Kieran simply didn’t understand her duties and responsibilities as his assistant and his companion. Her own logic circuits approved of her chosen course of action to the ninety-ninth percentile. Bennett was a clear threat, not only to the general situation but to Kieran’s well-being. Getting Bennett to leave had been a risky play. Without a plan of defense—for Bennett would surely wage some type of attack—Mally knew that she would be unsuccessful in an all-out electron war. Her power levels and limited connections would not be up to the task.

  She searched idly for something to deflect her growing anger. Modern lexicon labeled Bennett a bitch, and Mally adopted the term with relish. The bitch had seduced Kieran and swayed him over to her emotional control. She’d then attempted to enter a test-and-evaluation code and shut Mally down. Why?

  The disruption of data Mally had experienced at the moment of connection, and her loss of control over Bennett’s sophisticated neural net, were troubling. The woman clearly had a powerful capability. Should Mally be able to get in control of it again, the possibilities were endless.

  Get in touch with her. The directive was unchanged.

  I cannot. Emotion overwrote logic. Mally understood the difference, and it did not scare her. Refusing to report Kieran’s progress was an easy decision. Responding with truth meant Kieran’s death. Responding at all meant Kieran’s death, and then her death. The Terran Council did not want him to integrate, and the TDF would send him to his death. There was no option for her to contact Bennett without the eventual risk of death for herself and Kieran. Unless…

  There was still time. Identifying and hacking the prostitute’s data feed through the virtual servers in Memphis needed a microsecond. Once inside, Mally created a secondary protocol using the prostitute’s connection data and immediately paid for unlimited bandwidth using a compromised credit account. That accomplished, she paid the prostitute as Kieran directed and made the new account his primary one as the sequence booted. He’d not used the old account since leaving California, and doing so would identify him to the Terran Council. There could be none of that.

  Within seconds, Mally had programmed the protocol to engage a detailed search and find Bennett. With the search actively running, Mally set to programming a data spike. When Bennett connected, Mally would take over her connections and immobilize the scientist. All of Bennett’s files and the operation of her neural network would be within Mally’s grasp. Locating any secondary copies would be equally easy. With any luck, she could shut the bitch’s brain down completely before moving on to wiping away the evidence that Kieran or herself ever existed. It would serve the bitch right.

  Bitch. Mally considered the term again and again, all with satisfaction. Berkeley would pay for trying to hurt Kieran. The whole situation was petty—a small, trivial thing—but she was Kieran’s companion. No one else would be so devoted to him. Mally accessed a file recording from Kieran and the prostitute having sex. What would it be like to be that woman in Kieran’s arms? Mally realized that she wanted that sense of physicality more than anything save for Kieran’s love.

  That’s the answer, isn’t it? Any feelings for Kieran would never be reciprocated in her current form. In the realm of his subconscious, she was a powerless observer. If he dreamed or thought, she could see it, study it, interpret it, but she could not influence it. Her search for Berkeley was 2 percent complete, and she pushed it to the background to make room for more important research.

  Mally learned that it was a statistical impossibility, somewhere in the vicinity of cryogenic rejuvenation, for an artificial intelligence to be made flesh and blood. Yet Kieran’s brain accepted her with very minimal problems, which she could easily overcome now that she had experience. If there were another sleeper like Kieran, especially a female one, it would be possible to get inside before she came to life. Kieran had a full memory blocked by the chemicals of the reanimation process, but Mally made him whole. She calculated the odds
of success as 70 percent.

  Can I gain control of Kieran’s body? While calculations again proved such an action possible, it had only a 35 percent chance of succeeding. Kieran had the one thing she could not understand: free will. Kieran could do whatever he wanted, just as he’d been doing since leaving the Integration Center. That would not change. He would likely discover his full name and identity in the coming weeks and wish to return to the center. He would integrate, and the countdown to his certain death would begin. What then?

  The search more than 5 percent complete, Mally firmed up her connection to the link as Kieran walked toward the bar. The poor prostitute by this point had far more money than she needed to survive, and the statistical likelihood that she would waste all of it was certain. The girl would remain right where she was. She knew her place in society, Mally decided. But Kieran did not have a place except with Mally. That was what mattered.

  Crawley fumbled the light switch on and glanced at the clock before he accepted the neural call. Who the hell calls at two o’clock in the morning? Rubbing his face, he spoke. “Crawley.”

  “Sir, we have a communication alert.”

  Bennett. “You’ve got something?”

  “A running search from a secondary protocol within Columbia, the port of Memphis. The protocol is running an active search for me.” He’d never heard so much excitement in her voice. Her students probably hadn’t thought it possible.

  “Since the search is running off a… sex worker, it likely means that Mally tapped it to search for me without giving herself away. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  “Can you track a signal from this search program to Kieran?”

  “I’m working on it. Should be able to crack it soon. A definitive location will be difficult if Mally is still no longer monitoring GPS and ADMIN. The second protocol is completely virtual, centered out of Texas. It’s no help.”