neuter returned. Ne sprayed some kind of pheromone from a spherical canister, and the Redshirts fell to the ground limp.
“No decision from the Humpties then?” I asked.
“Worse than that. They’ve refused.”
“Huh. I thought for sure the promise of a chicken in every pot would do it for them,” I said, not bothering to explain the historical reference. “So when does the bombardment begin?”
I noticed that Kav’s elegant hands were shaking. “No bombs. She’s ordered a disassembling swarm. The U.P. council considers this method more ‘humane.’” The neuter spat the word “humane.” I would have too. I did, not so long ago, probably. The details of that final argument were buried as deep in my hardbrain as I could manage. It had not just been painful for Lewyana. I wish I could say I had discarded her offer but even now, it was on my mind.
Then my swarm notified me that their full functions had been restored. I queried for my emergent friends and received only dull, quizzical responses. It would take me a decade to encourage them back into existence. But maybe I would have that time now. I would never have them back if I agreed to Lewyana’s proposal. With my disposition, I’d never have children; my A.I. were as close as I was going to get.
“If you like,” I offered, “I’ll knock you out and you can pretend that I used villainous spyware to overwhelm you and your swarm. Adam will believe it and Lewyana will pretend to so you’ll get away fine.”
Kav shook nis head. “I want out. I’m not sure I was ever really ‘in.’ I figured my only hope for escaping the U.P. was to join the Corps. It’s the closest thing to unrestricted travel. Nobody wants to go anywhere anyway. Everyone looks the same. Watches the same vids. Lives in identical houses. Sameness, everywhere. That’s the U.P.” Kav shook nis head again. “They’re talking about discouraging the nongendered, you know? Some on the council think it’s too nonconformist. We don’t think like the gendered, they say.”
“Good for you on that point,” I say. “But I was only partially kidding when I was described how bad it is out there. There’s little comfort where I am going. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
“Honestly?” Kav laughed. “I’m sick of being comfortable.”
“Right.” I cracked my knuckles. “Let’s go kill some Fuck U.P.s then.”
Command Comm centers hadn’t changed a bit since I’d last been on deck. Most of it was automated, tied into swarms, but there were the token data stations for the sentient crews. Adam was concentrating on a scroll of info-dense code, but Lewyana was waiting for us in the center of the deck.
“Kav, you’re one stupid bitch,” Lewyana said.
“Lewyana!” Adam said, interrupting what I am sure was about to be a fabulous soliloquy on why the Humpties had to die for the good of everyone else. Blah blah blah, heard it. “I can’t shut down his Swarm.”
::NEED? ASSISTANCE| HELP | SUPPORT ?::
::TOOK REFUGE | HID | CAMOUFLAGE | AMONG CADET KAV’S SWARM IN FINAL MOMENTS::
News so fantastic I could kiss my AIs if they had a corporeal form. I settled for a giddy laugh instead.
“I don’t care,” Captain Lewyana said. “The disassemblers are in the atmosphere already, and I can still knock this asshole flat.”
The climate became frigid as her Swarm drew on ambient energy to hypercharge her muscles. Nasty trick, and I was almost prepared for it, but she moved too quickly for me. She always got in the first blow. I was sent sprawling. My vision was awash with Swarm biodamage warnings.
:: HUZZAH FOR US ::
“Lewyana!” Adam cried out. “He’s harboring an AI!”
I noticed Kav flinch at the claim from the corner of my eye just as I felt the surge of energy from my Swarm’s glucose factories. The room grew cold enough for our breath to turn into fog. I swung back. The blow connected, just barely, but all I wanted was to make contact. My swarm lived up to its namesake, rushing into her systems, kicking in the doors and generally being right bastards under the command of the Artificial Intelligence Gang. I really needed to come up with a better name. Hmm—the Notorious A.I.G?
Lewyana’s eyes rolled into the back of her head as my friends wiped the meat blob clean of any trace of her mind pattern. From there, it was a short hop to Adam.
He didn’t go down so easily. Nanoengineers are prepared for my tricks. “Fuck off,” he said, executing a swarm command override.
:: OUCH ::
My swarm began to drop individuals by the hundreds, error lines crowding my field of vision. I dropped to my knees. When my vision cleared, Adam had me by the throat. Damned human throat. So easy to choke. I should have gone with that berserker model.
:: ASSISTANCE REQUIRED ::
A wave of cold washed over us as someone’s swarm sucked the air’s ambient heat. I squeezed my eyes shut for the skull-crushing blow, but instead, I could breathe again. I opened my eyes. Kav stood over what was left of Adam’s corpse, staring at nis blood-soaked hands.
I felt another little stab of Pity, but I told her to get lost. I had a planet to save.
I took a seat at my old control station. The memories came flooding back. Years ago, during the incident that convinced me to tell the U.P. to kiss my ass, Lewyana had pressed a holobutton and bombs had set off tectonic activity. In a matter of hours, four billion sentients had died in the worst earthquakes ever recorded. That was how the U.P. dealt with nonconformist threats.
If it had been bombs again this time, the Humpties would have been screwed, but I knew a thing or two about swarms. I had, after all, grown my AI friends very carefully. The controls and defenses in place in the disassembler were stronger than I had ever seen, but my friends had spent a million generations learning their way around a swarm.
I handed over 60% of my hardbrain’s processing capacity to the AIs. They squeezed inside, ranting and sharing data so fast it made me dizzy. For a brief second, I worried that they would overwrite me completely and take over. But they calmed down and we got to work, cracking codes and hacking back doors in the swarm net. We stopped the swarm only half-way through the disassembling process. I pulled up a spycam onto the data station and looked out on a world that had suffered more chaos in the past hour than it had in the past fifty thousand years. I guess a little evolutionary pressure on the survivors might not be a bad thing, in the long run. But my work was absolutely ruined. I had a record of the Humpty culture as it was, but not a complete one. It would have to do.
Kav was in tears. “I was too late.”
“Get used to it,” I said stiffly. “We’re the bad guys and we almost never win. In fact, not to be a downer, but all I did was buy them a little time. The U.P. will be back here soon and the next time, the Humpties won’t dare refuse.”
“Why do you even try then?” Kav asked, nis voice breaking.
I gave Kav the same speech my culture archivist friend had given me during my recruitment. “One day, some U.P. citizen is going to wake up and feel hollow inside. And they’ll go digging on the net, and they’ll find a hidden datastore I put there, rich with cultural history and practices. And maybe they won’t be a direct descendant of the original species, but with swarms, it won’t matter. They can change as easily as their ancestors became U.P. standard. They’ll sneak off, and the culture will come back from the dead, if only just for a little while before the U.P. stamps it out again.”
“This has happened before?”
I nodded. “It has and it will again. We archivists tend to the process like a garden. We harvest the seeds and plant them in the net. Sometimes it takes a thousand years for them to take root, but when they do, they grow into one hell of a blossom.”
Kav sniffed and wiped at nis eyes. “That’s so . . . bleak.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
Ne stared off into the middle distance. “There’s a new voice to my swarm,” ne said. “Is that . . . ”
“Sorry—I guess my friends laid eggs.” Which explained the unexpected help in the fight. I was a little disturbed
