“Will you come back for me?”
“Oh, don't worry, I won't leave you behind after all the work I put in. Once I'm on my way out in the Clever Dream I expect you'll transmit yourself to her. You'll be safe and sound, back home.”
“That's a relief. What if I can't transmit?”
“Well, I'll work on some insurance.”
Several decks later she came to a broad junction with more room for internal infrastructure management. She climbed into the service walkway and laid her hand on a thirty centimetre thick bundle of cables. A small display came up on the visor of her vacsuit. “Here it is. The primary data cable for the secondary computer core. Ready to have some fun?”
“Oh yes. I love talking to strange computer systems.”
“Just tell me if you don't get control of the core before a defensive AI gets on your trail.”
“Will do.”
She carefully stabbed a small tool into two data cables and uploaded Lewis into the system. Transmitting complex data was always a strange sensation. It was like reading ten thousand pages in the space of five seconds and not remembering a single word.
“Oh, they'll never see this coming,” Lewis transmitted to her.
“Good boy, confusion and inconvenience, as much as you can manage.”
“I've taken control of the secondary core. The defensive AIs didn't even notice until it was too late. Going silent until you need me,” Lewis said gleefully.
Alice started to run down the narrow passageway towards her main objective. She was half way there when Lewis broke comm silence.
“Alice, you need to know this. Jonas is here.”
“What?”
“Jonas Valent. The real one, he's here. He's alive. He's in a suite three corridors down.”
“They captured him? How? He's sectors away.”
“No, it's all in the database. That is an experiment, a copy that failed regardless of how many times they tried to copy Jonas' conciousness. The copies kept on refusing to cooperate, suppressing or deleting the copied memories. Along with his experiences they all seemed to inherit his spirit of defiance, the will fight Vindyne, even if it meant sabotaging themselves. The being they have in custody here is the real Jonas Valent, however. His memory is intact and he has been awake for sixty three days.”
Alice felt as though her entire world had tipped on its head. “Show me.”
A flash of images flipped by on her eye implant and she read them with ease. Over the passage of seconds she knew exactly what she would do. Revenge will have to wait. I'll be back for you Gabriel, she thought to herself. “Lewis, I'd like you to look up a subprogram called dementia.”
“I have it, I did not know it was part of my program.”
“Please activate for fifteen minutes and extend immunity to myself, your core program, Jonas Valent and the Clever Dream. ”
There was no response. Once dementia was activated there wouldn't be. Lewis was busy doing other things.
She ran down the passageway until she came to an access panel. She switched to sonic and thermal sensors so she could see through it into the next room. There were two people, one of them was standing in front of a materializer and Alice couldn't help but smile at herself. She knew what was about to happen.
The order was; “two stacks of pancakes with extra syrup and whip cream.” Instead the materializer exploded with fire suppressant foam, instantly engulfing the crew member. The foam continued to spill forth at an incredible rate as Alice kicked the access panel out and walked through the room, past the other crew member who was near panic and on her way out of their quarters.
Alice ran full tilt down the hallway outside, taking in the information coming to her through her electronic eye. There were three crew members fighting off a maintenance drone around the corner to the right, another crew member trying to call in the malfunctions but only getting through to the intercom for that stretch of hallway.
She rounded another corner with her sidearm at the ready. There were two guards there trying to understand why the lift doors would close whenever they came near. Her first shot took the nearest in the shoulder, wrecking the bone beneath and his right chest cavity. Her second shot took the other guard's head off his shoulders. With the energy settings set so high on her sidearm, it would continue to be just as effective, but run out of ammunition in only thirty more shots, but under the circumstances, she'd have to make sure every shot counted, no matter what weapon she decided to use.
Alarms went off. That system was obviously still working. She unslung her rifle and begun to run. No one was moving just yet, but she had over three kilometres of hallway to go.
After rounding several corners and making it half way she came upon a storage area that was left wide open. It looked like the bots within were playing murder ball with packages and crates, several hapless crew members had gotten in the crossfire. A rifle shot narrowly missed her and she glanced to her right. The shot had come from a security team on the other side of the massive storage area. They were braving the bedlam to get to her. There was cover everywhere, and as she rolled behind a sturdy looking crate while several more shots rang out. They weren't using stun weaponry.
Hesitation was for the weak. It was something she had overheard Jonas Valent's drill instructor shout at him during basic training over twenty years before. From her inside jacket pocket she produced a strap of ten high yield disruptor grenades and ran around the corner as she tossed them across the storage area.
The fuse was set to three seconds, everything in that hold would be damaged or reduced to unrecognisable scrap. Her thermal readings told her that there was an entire squad of guards coming around the next corner and she began to fire.
Her particle acceleration rifle tore pieces out of the walls, the deck, and when she ran through the intersection of the hall it tore into the soldiers who never had a chance. The grenades went off.
The sheer force of air rushing from behind knocked her off her feet. She rolled and skidded down the hall, catching a corner awkwardly with her foot. “Pain meds, right ankle,” she told her suit, she knew she at least had a bad sprain.
It only hurt for three steps, then she was fine. It was a price she'd pay later. There was a group of soldiers coming towards her from another corner. From the other side of her jacket she pulled the second and last belt of grenades. As the lead soldier peeked around the corner she tossed the twenty centimetre long belt straight at his head. It looped around his neck, the six second fuse counted down.
In all her life she never ran so fast. She was almost there, just another corner and two hundred meters. The corner came up and she dove behind it, landing on her back, thanking the creators of the impact resistant vacsuit she wore. For a whole breath she looked into the visors of a pair of guards whose hesitation must have been a symptom of their surprise.
Then the grenades went off. The pair of guards were knocked off their feet by the violent concussive force. It took a moment for her sensors to reset and get back to normal, and she used the seconds to stand up. She straightened her jacket and brushed the dust and debris from the front of her vacsuit. “Lewis, open this door,” she ordered through her communicator.
A second later it opened to reveal Jonas Valent, just as she remembered him, only he was in plain grey civilian clothing, holding a thin computing pad. She stepped inside and let the door close behind her. “Lewis, increase gravitational force in the passages around this room by a factor of five point five.”
He stood, cocked his head and looked at her. “Wrong turn?” he asked.
Retracting her headpiece she smiled at him brightly. “Do you remember your eighteenth birthday? After the party was finished and you were back home in your room I asked you what you wished for?”
He didn't understand, but she had his attention.
“You told me you wished to live in interesting times. A few years later you found yourself on All-Con Prime watching a foundry explode and said; 'you just can't pay for this kind of entertainment back home.'”
He looked at her in disbelief for a moment and smiled.
She went on. “I commented; 'that's pretty good evidence that wishes can come true.'”
“Alice?” Was Jonas' only response.
“Daddy's little girl is all grown up,” she ran over and jumped into his arms. To her relief and joy he actually
