Do Not Erase

The well of holotank was littered with the detritus from the fuel of problem-solving: empty coffee bulbs, dead nic-sticks, and wrappers from high-sugar, high-fat snacks, mostly chocolate. More than a dozen sticky backs from dermal stim-patches. The engineering design team had been at it for hours. The integration teams for days. The crew on Takahashi’s Fortune longer still.

Michaels tapped out another nic-stick while he waited for the integration engineers to implement the Tiger Team’s latest solution. Not that the Tiger Team had really lived up to its name. They had basically rubberstamped the solution Michaels had watched a junior integration engineer named Carr concoct on the fly. But only after the Tiger Team’s ivory tower analyst had run a recursive Monte Carlo simulation. And only after modifying it heavily enough to make themselves feel important.

Carr’s diagrams, formulae and specs were the only ones still adorning the virtual whiteboards that ringed the lowest level of the holotank. The Tiger Team’s initial suggestions had been migrated two to three tiers higher, to just above the background schematics but still below the first failed arguments of the design leads who had insisted nothing was wrong with them except that the integration team was too ignorant and incompetent to understand their design.

The nearly resultant fistfight had finally garnered program management’s attention. Their solution had been to insert the Tiger Team to take charge. After they had flailed for several hours trying to grasp the basic contours of the problem, an information spider had finally alerted Michaels that his mission was glowing red-light critical and had been for nearly a day. His mission, not program management’s, not the Tiger Team’s, not the designers’. His. Even if he was no longer technically assigned to it. To them, this was just another rapid prototype solution. To the field team, it might be life or death.

But he couldn’t tell them that.

So as the senior onsite management rep, Michaels had stepped in and taken over directly. Only Micah Aaronson could countermand his orders, maybe Yan Kanu. But since Aaronson knew nothing of the details of this operation and Kanu had sent the courier drone from the field outlining the problem and begging for a solution, neither seemed likely to interfere.

First, Michaels had kicked out every useless section head and hanger-on who had crowded the upper tiers as spectators when he’d first walked in. Next, he’d gutted the Tiger Team until he’d had something approaching a competent core and scaled back the engineering section to a handful of design leads with overarching knowledge. Then, he recalled the integration shift that had downloaded the specs of the problem from the courier drone and put their lead in charge. And finally, he’d threatened them all in the vague yet specific way that implied he could make them disappear, which had become his trademark all over Luna. One of them, anyway.

Suddenly, interdepartmental infighting faded into begrudged cooperation. He’d have to address that at some point. Or more likely, he’d have Aaronson unleash Fagerstrom to do it since technically this wasn’t his lab. But that bloodbath could wait until this crisis had passed.

He didn’t have time for this yet he found he couldn’t remember anyplace else he had to be. Usually, his schedule wasn’t this open. Not that he wouldn’t have made time anyway. He’d set his spiders to intercept any incoming requests from Kanu and reroute them to his web. That her request had evaded his hunters as long as it had was disconcerting. He’d have to look into that. But first he needed to focus on the problem at hand.

While Ledet whispered a running commentary in his ear of what was going on below, most of which he understood or could piece together for himself, two other managers circled nearby. Like Macbeth’s three wayward sisters. Or the Furies. He wondered how their teams worked with them. Or whether they worked at all. Dysfunction flowed from the top.

Michaels watched the teams below interact. He could only hope the terror their leads and managers inspired bred imagination and innovation, like the precise pressure that forged diamonds from common coal. In this case, he suspected the tensile strength of the teams had nearly been exceeded. He was certain on closer inspection he’d find permanent flaws and stress fractures.

He took notes in his head and labeled it behavioral psychological field research. Later, he would integrate what he learned into his personal psycho-heuristic management simulation.

“They’re about to drop in the upgrades,” Ledet stage whispered in his ear. “Four subsystems should open the AI and make it compliant to our orders.”

“Should?” Michaels asked. He needed the boundary values of that uncertainty.

One of the other two managers stepped up, saddling his pants over his belly authoritatively. “That’s our best guess from analyzing the specs and interface documents, at least the ones we could find. GE may have brought these things to life, but they didn’t document their efforts even for LOW OrbIT. The design documents you acquired were invaluable to our reverse engineering.”

Michaels knew when he was being stroked so he ignored that last statement. “Which subsystems?”

The third manager, who had the cultivated look of an early modern earth despot, took over. “TCU, EDAC, Red and Black processors.”

“English,” Michaels said, “not acronyms.”

The invisible talking stick rotated back to Ledet. “The Transcendental Consciousness Unit, the Emotional Discretion Auxiliary Controller, the Encrypted Logic Processor and the Discrete Logic Processor.”

“And that will give our people control over the ship’s AI?” Michaels asked pointedly. That was the heart of the matter.

The three managers of the Management Team looked at each other a moment as if communing telepathically to determine who would draw the short straw. Ledet. “Not exactly. Best we can tell, those four are where the AI’s trust settings reside. By modifying them, we should change the values sufficiently to open it to persuasion by your field agent.”

“Should?” There was that word again. Michaels hated that word. That word meant assumptions. While he wasn’t above taking risks, far from it, he wanted those risks to be calculated to the tenth decimal point, not based on other people’s suppositions.

The three managers looked at their feet a moment. Finally, the middle manager spoke up, girding his waist once again. You would think in the millennium since trousers had become standard clothing, someone would have invented something efficient to hold them up.

“The problem is this is no ordinary AI, even if there is such a thing. Not only is it a Chance AI, it’s a rogue one running in a cramped environment. In order to gain enough processing power, we calculated it would have had to take over all of the ship’s ancillary processors. The ship’s subsystems would be subsumed by the AI itself. We aren’t completely certain how that might have changed the adaptive OS. We calculated each of these four modules were both small enough to fit into a standard starship subprocessor, which made them isolated and accessible, and contained the dynamic elements we needed to modify.”

Michaels gave the three of men a hard stare for a moment as he unpacked what had just been said. He pinched the bridge his nose as he sorted it out. “So you are saying all we’re doing is laying the foundation for a long con. What are you thinking,” he added in a biting tone, “that Kanu will run some Anarchy romance scam on a Chance AI?”

The two department managers looked confused. Ledet continued looking down and mumbled, “Carr was thinking a skiptrace scenario.”

Michaels started to open his mouth to distribute another dose of sarcasm and stopped. That just might work. He’d have to investigate Carr further. Her talents might be wasted down here.

Instead, he nodded curtly as implied consent to proceed. It wasn’t like they had many options to begin with. And he always said he paid his teams to think outside the box. He just usually liked to keep the box in sight.

Ledet signaled down to the testbed.

Michaels wasn’t sure what he should be seeing. He’d envisioned something exciting. A tense countdown sequence. Engineers carefully injecting code at time critical markers. Red and green alphanumerics waging war down a waterfall simulation screen. A control room full of cheering like they had just successfully landed the first probe on the event horizon of a black hole. Something dramatic.

He was disappointed. Loading consisted of a few terse phases to an audio interface that confirmed file revisions and build numbers. That brought up a holo-simulation of Takahasi’s Fortune. Another command initiated a battery of diagnostics. Various subsystems first switched from white to red then one by one to green while various engineers called out a litany of acronyms, numbers and statuses as they tick-marked their way through test schedules on handheld tablets. Like some sort of uber-geek language or secret code, none of which he understood. All of which was repeated well over a dozen times as they proceeded through their battery of tests.

Now and then one subsystem or sometimes two would remain stubbornly red, sometimes cascading, sometimes switching back from green as some configuration became unstable, resulting in tense consultations on the lowest tier of virtual whiteboards between the integrators and principle designers. After an often lengthy discussion that sometimes verged on an argument similar to who might have slept with whose spouse on what occasion, a junior engineer would eventually key in a new patch, usually just a handful of commands, and the process would begin again.

Iteration after iteration it went. Mind-numbing repetition after repetition. Each edging closer to Carr’s initial solution. Even Michaels could see the elegance of her design, and the hunchback kludge of the Tiger Team’s additions.

Once again, Michaels wondered why he was here. Once again, he searched his memory and found he had no more pressing place to be. Once again, he thought that was odd but resisted the urge to consult his intelligent assistant and knowledge navigator. Not that he informed it of a fraction of his appointments anyway. The first rule of his reality was to never leave a memory trail.

It was critical he see how this turned out. In a backhanded way, he owed Kanu. Technically, she was working on his pet project even if she didn’t know that. After the incident on Terminal, Aaronson had turned over control of Takahashi’s Fortune to Kanu, demoting Michaels to an advisory status. Kanu thought she was working for Aaronson directly with Michaels’ full cooperation. And never less. At least that could be proven once someone started looking over his shoulder.

Now the operation had taken a direction that bordered on growing beyond his control. If the integration team succeeded in subverting the rogue Chance AI he’d had installed on the Fortune, he might lose his best asset, one he couldn’t afford after all the resources he’d poured into it. One that had taken an inordinate amount of effort to arrange to get in place. If he ever wanted to salvage the situation, he would have to understand what the engineers had done, at least if he wanted even a glimmer of hope of undoing it. Should the opportunity arise. The second rule of his reality: Be tactically flexible. Like a zero-G gymnast.

So he sat and watched, knowing there was nothing for him to contribute but much for him to learn. The third rule of his reality: Know when to act and when not to. Ok, that was more Sun-tzu, or some other ancient Terran aphorism. Do or do not. But always gather information. Always learn. If he understood what they’d done to circumvent his asset, he might be able to reverse it. Or at least stockpile a vulnerability he could exploit later.

Another argument erupted, this time between a member of the Tiger Team and the integration lead over a seemingly inconsequential element of Carr’s proposed solution, or rather one of the final warts they’d grafted onto it. In the end, they settled on a meaningless compromise that allowed the Tiger Team to assert its authority and leave its mark as though they had contributed something without seeming to have any impact at all. Deftly played by the integration lead. Intuitively, Michaels didn’t like it but didn’t have the technical expertise to overrule it either. In his world, compromises usually ended being, well, compromising.

And then, without warning, the last layer of the onion peeled away revealing… nothing. No red marred the board. No amber of potential instability. No flags or error messages. Just clean, clear code and routine status messages as everyone in the room held their breath.

After a minute, as set off by an unseen cue, applause and a cheer finally erupted in the holotank. Engineers turned to each other, shaking hands and slapping shoulders as enmity evaporated into camaraderie with Carr at the center of it all. It always amazed Michaels how quickly such emotions could turn when inspired by success. He knew it was unlikely to heal any long-term damage but it might salve some wounded egos.

The three managers were all smiles when they turned to him. As if they had done something other than act as his minders and interpreters. If anyone was lucky to have a job at the end of this, it was them. But then again, Michaels understood that results mattered. It wasn’t up to him to micromanage their departments as long as they got results.

So he made a mental note to run the scenario through his management simulation to see if a sacrifice was in order. He suspected one would be. He hoped the algorithm would advise him as to which of these three might provide the most impact as he was having a difficult time deciding himself. His instincts said to leave all three staked up on a high hill. He was curious whether the psycho-heuristics agreed.

Michaels smiled back at them in the way they expected from their perceived success and motioned them down to celebrate with their people.

Activity quickly turned to cleanup mode. He hadn’t witnessed this either. Technicians, integration engineers and leads began preserving information on the virtual white boards, aggregating the final design to upload to a courier drone bound for Takahashi’s Fortune on an expedited launch, signing and locking down all the notes for the official logs, each design subsystem’s logs, individual engineering logs, each tagged with three digital signatures, the design engineer, the subsystem lead, the integration engineer. Each virtual whiteboard emblazoned with “Do Not Erase” in glowing red until all the boxes had been checked and verified.

After the initial celebration the Management Team retreated from the lab with the Tiger Team. Off to a meeting to pat themselves on the back and dissect what everyone else had done wrong. Assign the blame before addressing the final action item on their agenda, deciding which bar to meet at, or whether to reconvene at the track while they were all feeling lucky.

Michaels waved them on without him. Normally, he would be involved in the hot wash-up. He might even select his sacrifice. For some odd reason, he felt his time would be better spent here. Let them have their illusion of victory for the moment. Let them relax. It would increase the impact when he finally decided to draw blood.

Within fifteen minutes, all the remaining tasks had been delegated to the lowest possible level as one by one the leads found reasons to disappear after the final solution had been uploaded to the courier drone. Now only junior engineers and technicians prowled the room, updating the records, test problem reports, and integration logs, all the digital paperwork that engineering had become, even in a streamlined organization such as this. Michaels was surprised to find Carr among them. Given that she had come up with the solution, he’d thought she would have been called to the post-crisis status meeting to explain it. Another discrepancy to look into.

Carr moved through her routine with easy yet dogged determination. Michaels watched her sidelong. She was used to this, the infighting, the name calling, the backstabbing, the blame shifting. Unlike the others, it completely rolled off her which made her interesting. Only then did it dawn on him that perhaps that impression wasn’t quite right. Hers didn’t strike him as the usual testosterone-clad ego he too often dealt with even in many women. No, the situation rolled off her not because she lived for the fight or was putting in her time as she clawed her way forward waiting for someone else to die so she could advance. Oh, she had someplace to be and was biding her time. But it wasn’t here, not this organization, not this lab. No, she had other plans. Plans he made a note to disrupt at all cost. She was too valuable to lose, especially to a rival organization, and certainly too valuable to waste here for long with so many marginal layers above her.

Michaels must have stared a moment too long. She started shooting shaded, sidelong looks of her own, probably wondering like the others what he was still doing here.

He wondered himself. But couldn’t tear himself away. So he reloaded another nic-stick and began keying in preliminary parameters for the upcoming managerial sacrifice into his comm. He’d have to make it subtle. This wasn’t his lab. But if he had to work with it for life and death field ops, he’d be damned if it didn’t operate at his level of efficiency. The trick was not to sacrifice creativity and inspiration. That required a level of tension too many others overlooked. The balance was not letting rivalries calcify as they seemed to have here.

He began rearranging pieces on the board in his mind, deciding which were pawns and which potential queens. Like Carr. She had all the markings of royalty, like Kanu had before her. Before Kanu had become too cozy with Aaronson and Fagerstrom, carving out an empire of her own, one based on loyalty, hierarchy and order. But not loyalty to him, the one who had cultivated her potential. He needed to ensure Carr would be different.

He studied her a moment through the rising mist of his nic-stick. She scribed the contents of the whiteboard before her into the official archives, ensuring it had the necessary signatures. She went screen by screen like she was proceeding down a checklist, progressing with the other junior integration engineers from oldest to newest to capture the timeline of the solution. Verify the signatures, upload it to and annotate the integration log, forward it to the design engineer and lead, update any relevant programs and documentation, fill in her portion of the problem report, verify it again, erase the board.

He glanced down at the holotank where the simulation of Takahashi’s Fortune was still running. A tiny rhythmic blinking caught his eye. Like a lone winking indicator on a system panel somewhere deep within the virtual ship. Not a system warning like he’d seen during the integration. Those were obvious and meant not to be missed. More like the indicator the crew might see.

Carr and the others continued moving through the upper tier of virtual whiteboards.

The blinking panel light, maybe in Aux Engineering, shifted from green to amber. Still just the one indicator. No subsystem warning.

None of the integration team seemed to notice.

Michaels moved from his high perch down to the bottom of holotank to study the simulation closer. The level of detail fascinated him. He almost expected to see simulated crew members wandering around the ship performing routine duties. If he did, he expected he would recognize individual crew members from the profiles he’d compiled.

As he approached, he noted a second blinking indicator, this one deeper still, maybe on the panel in the crew lounge. On closer examination, he did see the crew. Shadow forms motionless in the tight quarters of the starship, one on watch on the bridge, a second in engineering, the captain and the chief engineer by the look of them. Odd as the others appeared to be in quarters sleeping, though he knew they were an egalitarian crew. Unlike most free traders, they’d sold off profit shares to individual crew members, and at least once had elected a captain. Though otherwise every position on the Fortune was filled through meritocracy.

He studied the shadow captain, who hadn’t noticed the indicator. In fact it hadn’t migrated its way to her board. Which made sense. In the crew lounge, it was likely an entertainment system. He moved over toward engineering and found the same. Which was odd as the engineer, the crew’s second in that position, was thorough and should have all the engineering systems mirrored to his board. When he glanced back from examining the Aux Engineering board again, Michaels found the shadow engineer had disappeared. Where had he gotten to? Had he noticed the indicator and headed down to check it out?

Michaels leaned closer. No sign of him in the Aux Engineering or the companionways between. His brow furrowed. A glitch in the simulation? He quickly scanned the other shadow crew members. Everyone else was where he had last seen them. Except the genetically-modified feline gunner who was awake and on the prowl.

Michaels glanced around the lab. Only a skeleton integration crew remained. Along with Carr, they had progressed down to the second tier.

When he turned back to the simulation, he could no longer find the gunner. He wondered if he’d retreated to a hidey-hole, whether the simulation had uncovered some area or compartment shielded by the ship’s AI that his intelligence hadn’t, perhaps a place where members of the crew could meet and interact out of sight. That would be something Kanu would need to know to succeed in the operation. Which he might or might not tell her.

He flicked his eyes back to the bridge to see if the captain had mirrored the engineer’s board, standard procedure if she knew he was away from his watch post. She hadn’t. Which didn’t make sense to him. This crew was tested in multiple crucibles, including a few of his own devising. Space and commerce were both unforgiving of inattention.

He correlated what he knew about the crew with the simulation’s behavior. He had met them in person once and nearly been killed. A gun to his head in a public restaurant as he’d misjudged their unpredictable yet self-preservational behaviors that were precisely what made them useful to him. Behaviors which he was certain had made their way into the official files, some by his own hand. There had been too many witnesses to cover. But that meant the shadow crew should be fairly accurate in their actions.

Carr and the others had finally worked their way down to his level.

Something tickled Michaels’ intuition, sending a chill down the back of his neck. He scrutinized the whiteboard Carr was working on. He tried to dredge up the running commentary Ledet had whispered in his ear. Which subsystem had this discussion patched? Was this the Tiger Team’s final compromise?

He quickly gave up on the technical hieroglyphics and studied the signatures instead. If he could read them, he could cross-reference the names against the org chart on his comm. Like most engineers’ signatures, these were fairly illegible. Was that the EDAC lead? No, TCU.

Carr had finished her verification and hit the erase button for that board. As it blanked, more subsystem indicators began blinking. The shadow captain didn’t appear to notice. Still no sign of the gunner or engineer. Then Michaels noticed another sleeping crewman had gone missing. The astrogator, or sensor ops? They shared a berthing compartment. He couldn’t remember which had chosen which bunk. That lapse bothered him.

“Carr, stop what you are doing, right now.” Michaels ordered in his best command voice. To her credit, Carr froze, not out of fear, not out of annoyed curiosity, rather out of waiting for him to release her based on what he’d seen and she’d missed. This one had potential.

The remaining people in the lab stopped and turned to watch. “Everyone else, keep working,” Michaels said. Reluctantly, they returned to their duties.

He nodded to the holotank. “What do you make of these indicators?”

Carr moved up beside him, studying the panels in miniature, reviewing each board as meticulously as she had the virtual whiteboards above. When she got to engineering, her eyes widened.

“Tell me what you’re seeing,” Michaels said in a conspiratorial tone he hoped might put her at ease. He needn’t have bothered. She was fixated on the holotank.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “It’s like there’s a simulation within the testbed simulation that’s already running all the patches. It’s not supposed to do that.”

Michaels thought for a moment. “So if it’s a simulation, what would the crew be seeing?”

“Slow cascading failures,” she said, still studying the indicators, her individual fingers flicking in time with the rhythm. “Not much different than what we were seeing in debug earlier only simulated on their systems, not the testbed.”

Down the tier, another whiteboard was cleared and erased.

“If it’s a cascading failure,” Michaels asked, “shouldn’t the bridge watch or engineering be reacting to it?”

Before Carr could answer, the main bridge board Christmas-treed into an explosion of rhythmic green, amber and red lights. So did engineering. Plus half a dozen other subsystem panels blinked in sympathy with indicators in one of the three colors. The same pattern as before. Like a complex riff or backbeat in a drum solo echoing through the ship’s systems.

The shadow captain disappeared. Just faded out before their eyes.

“It shouldn’t do that,” Carr said, perplexed yet tinged with worry. “The solution had converged to stability.”

“How do we revise it?” Michaels asked.

“We can’t,” she explained. “The solution is already uploaded, linked directly from the whiteboards to the courier drone as a priority transmission.”

Damn. Michaels remembered authorizing the Tiger Team to expedite solution in the heat of the discussion. “Can you haul it back?”

Carr started minimizing schematics and system interface diagrams from the nearest monitor. She opened a new workspace and entered an access code. An alarm went off. Access denied. “I need a lead to authorize it.”

Michaels stepped in and tried to override using his priority code. Unauthorized entity. Unrecognized user. Access denied.

How could he be locked out of the system? What had Aaronson done? Or was it Kanu? Either way, she would be the one who suffered if he didn’t intercept that drone. Their solution was compromised.

Michaels scanned the tiers for the acting integration lead. The room seemed emptier than it had just a moment ago. He grabbed the nearest systems engineer, Benner was his name. “Call Ruttencutter. Get him back down here. Now.”

Michaels turned back to Carr. “We can’t wait. Start isolating the problem.”

She discarded old schematics and interface diagrams and retrieved new ones. In a corner of the virtual whiteboard, she set a simulation running. A particular flashing light pattern caught Michaels’ eye.

“What is that?” he asked warily.

“The data core interface,” Carr replied.

“Isn’t that the pattern we saw earlier?”

“Mmm,” she responded absently, studying it, the four fingers of her right hand tapping out the sequence. Quickly, she keyed in a few changes to the code. The pattern changed. It now matched the one in the holotank. Her fingers clicked right along.

“You’ve found something?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said tentatively. “I’m not sure.”

“Talk to me, Carr,” he said. “You are the only one who seems to understand this. While I’d like you to be right, right now I don’t care if you’re wrong. Just point in a direction.” He hesitated a moment before adding. “Lives could be on the line.”

Before she answered, she set off a flurry of inquiries to the testbed. Something about verifying revisions and build numbers. Michaels remembered hearing some of it before but it remained obscured behind a cloud of technicalities.

“Well,” Carr finally said. “I think it’s one of two things. Either we overwrote an old file during debug and the system bollocksed up the revision numbers. Unlikely.”

“Or?” Michaels prompted.

“Or,” she continued, obviously reluctant. “The Tiger Team’s compromise just bit us in the ass.”

Michaels called back over his shoulder. “Where the hell is Ruttencutter?”

A different engineer than the one he’d grabbed before, one whose name he couldn’t recall, said. “The system says he’s no longer in the facility. Koffee went to track him down.”

So he’d found his own secret hidey-hole. Just peachy. The place was riddled with blind spots. Leave it to the engineers to know them all.

Screw it. This is how Michaels had earned his reputation. “Recall the whole Tiger Team. All the design leads, too. If they’re anywhere on Luna, I want them found. Red priority, my authorization. Hell, recall Ledet and the Management Team. This is their debacle. And get me a lead who has an access code.”

He turned back again to Carr to find her still comparing the pattern in the simulation to the one in the holotank.

She turned to him, suddenly more confident. “This may not be their fault.”

“Their fault or not, we need to recall that drone. My next move is a full system interdiction. If I issue a weapons-free directive to every destroyer and cutter in system, it will create one hell of an incident, one I can’t contain. You have no idea what fun is until some League of Worlds delegate turn up in this lab with a four-star as a tour guide. The type of fun that rolls downhill like an avalanche. So lay it out for me. Five minutes or less.” He hedged his bets. He had more like fifteen but needed her focused.

Carr took a breath. “Before I came here, I worked for Lockheed-Illyusian. They designed the bulk of Takahashi’s Fortune way back when. When I started, they assigned me to the data core interface. Relatively easy work as the interface never changed, at least it wasn’t supposed to. Because the data core is supposed to be an uncorruptible, encrypted flight recorder, the ultimate black box security monitor, it’s difficult to debug if something goes wrong. Especially since everything on the other side of the interface is classified with LOW OrbIT compartmentalized code words. And their chief engineer never admits he’s wrong.”

“I’m familiar with Franklin and the data cores,” Michaels said flatly. “Four minutes.”

She took another breath then hurried on. “Our team was creating routine patches to software problem reports generated by the end users. Life-cycle maintenance. One of the first problems we encountered in the lab was with the encrypted interface to the data core. LOW OrbIT maintained the interface hadn’t changed but the new unit they’d sent wouldn’t work with the new build. At first we thought it was the redesign of the interface subsystem code on our side. But everything had checked out on the testbed with the baseline build.”

“Three minutes,” Michaels marked time.

Carr looked annoyed but plowed ahead as if the background were important. He hoped it was. “The problem was intermittent. We couldn’t detect a pattern for when the interface would or wouldn’t fail. It seemed completely random to each startup. We ran diagnostics that checked every decision tree within the data core interface rebuild. We extended it into the entire Physical Layer, then Data Link Layer just in case. We checked everything we could think of, timing issues, interrupt conflicts, bus crashes, faulty compiler code, you name it. Nothing.”

“Two minutes, Carr.”

She continued unperturbed. “My lead taught me a debug saying, ‘When you’ve eliminated everything else, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must contain the answer.’ She had a feeling. She wouldn’t let it go. It took tapping all her connections just to have a conversation with Franklin. Even then she had to get whole new levels of clearance before she did. She pulled more strings and got assigned as the company liaison to the multi-corporation debug team our little problem had generated. Turns out, there was a new subcontractor for certain subsystems in the data core. She couldn’t tell me which.”

“One minute. Time for long story short.”

“What she could say is that they finally tracked it down to a boot-up issue. A vendor had gone out of business. One of the replacement chip-sets didn’t guarantee a stable power-up configuration. The design engineer hadn’t read the specs. It made it all the way into the pre-production prototype Franklin sent us, he said by mistake. In the end all it took was an initial reset to solve the problem. It was a redundant security artifact that dated back to the initial data core design. If someone messed with the black box interface, it was supposed to disengage in just that way, raising a huge red flag if some cutter Big Brothered a trader’s core.”

“Time’s up,” Michaels told her. “Cut to the chase.”

“Each time the data core interface crashed,” she pointed toward the holotank, “that’s the pattern that we saw.”

Michaels stared at her a moment, stunned. He could feel new pathways opening in his mind as he began to compile the implications. Now he understood Carr tapping out the pattern.

“Did your solution modify that interface?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not even a module that interacts with it.”

“Which means…” he started. Looking around, they were the only two left on bottom tier of the testbed suite. Had everyone gone off looking for… what was his name? He couldn’t remember. That never happened.

“Which means the testbed is positing that the data core has been compromised,” Carr finished, bringing Michaels back to the present crisis.

“That’s…” he started to say “impossible” but he knew better so he shifted on the fly, “…improbable.”

Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. Everyone on Aaronson’s team knew how to disable a data core just like he did. Prying it out of that arrogant prick Franklin had been a real trick.

Had Takahashi’s Fortune’s pet AI done the same, and maybe taken over the data core processing as it searched for more lebensraum in the cramped environment? That, too, should be… impossible. That word again. Did it even hold for a Chance AI? Disabling the data core was one thing. Co-opting it was another. But that might explain the disabled reset. Who knew what personality module might melt away.

Or maybe… His intuition started itching in the most uncomfortable way.

“Out of curiosity,” he asked Carr, “what was your integration lead’s name?”

“Yan Kanu.”

Son of a bitch. He’d been outplayed. He should have seen it from the beginning.

Kanu had corrupted the testbed, probably through the initial problem parameters the integration team had retrieved from the courier drone. She’d just opened a proxy war against his operation. She’d gotten her solution and was now going off the reservation, burning the fort behind her. Had Aaronson green-lighted this approach? If he had, Michaels wondered who else was in on it. The Tiger Team? Ledet and all of management? Benner? Koffee? Ruttencutter? That might explain why they’d all gone missing. Could he even trust Carr?

He eyed her carefully.

He didn’t have time for that distraction just yet. He needed to cauterize this wound before it bled out. Takahashi’s Fortune had become potentially untraceable, even by examining their data core after the fact. Which would be catastrophic if Kanu used the ship to further her agenda.

Michaels glanced at the holotank then focused on a virtual whiteboard where he called up the courier drone’s transponder number before he turned away to issue a signal from his comm. Black priority, emergency protocol. Then, with a pre-programmed sequence, he instructed the system beacon to spoof the courier drone into transiting to just inside Sol’s chromosphere when the beacon responded to a position request marked with its transponder. He hoped no other ship was inbound or outbound when it did. There hadn’t been had an official mis-transit accident in years. A chance he’d have to take.

When he turned back to face Carr, she was gone. Everyone was.

---

In an office somewhere deep in the maze of tunnels under Mare Frigidis, a man whose eyes might have been green or gray or slatey blue received a priority interrupt from his comm. The man, who sometimes went by the name Nick Michaels though no nameplate appeared outside the office door, looked up from studying the field report he’d intercepted from Yan Kanu. Perhaps the Monte Carlo simulation he’d set running earlier had finally converged on a solution.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III