Chapter 5

Month 72—December on Anouilh in the Caribbean

“SERIOUSLY, MAN? These are our digs?” Rex was nothing at all like I imagined Mastermind. He looked like he’d played football—as a tackling dummy. He was bulky and scarred. Not particularly unfit, but with his shoulders as wide as he was tall, you just knew it would take a lot of horsepower to move him around.

“This is it. Where’d you come in from?” I asked.

“Tangier in Morocco. My family was left by the French and Spanish when Morocco became independent and unified. But Tangier was always an international city. My family moved to Europe to get a better shot at being picked up, but I was in school and didn’t want to leave. They left me a big empty house. When they were extracted, I got the house free and clear and enough money to feed my tech habits.”

“Bastards took them, eh? I’m Duck. Don’t bother with any other name. I’m from Minnesota.” To look at Duck was to understand how he got the name. His lips stuck out in front of his face like a waterfowl.

“Only my mother and sister were extracted. My father was killed in an attack on a testing center in France.”

“Shit. What kind of world do we live in?” a tall skinny guy said. He looked older than the rest of the nerds gathered at the former hotel on the island. “I’m Jim. Battlestar Houston. Worked at NASA for years. Less and less real work there since the aliens. We had a big pickup and there wasn’t much left besides a few officious bastards who couldn’t work out the trajectory of a simple orbiter.”

Introductions continued as the eleven of us developers sat by the pool and poured ourselves drinks from the well-stocked bar. No one was sure Denny was old enough to drink, but with the legal age of fourteen nearly around the world, he’d had no difficulty getting to the island from New Zealand. We all knew him as Silver Bullet.

“Guys, there’s one person here who hasn’t written any code,” I said. “I promised not to mention her until everyone else got here. Believe me, you are going to want to know this babe and what she can do. Rache!” Rachel came out of the hotel toward the pool, baggy shirt falling off one shoulder and some kind of draw-string pant that hung to her ankles. “Guys, this is Rachel, also known to us as Tatts.”

“I didn’t know we had any girls playing!” Ray said. He was known to us as Master Chief and had been on a Russian submarine until things started falling apart. He’d managed to escape via Ukraine and into Eastern Europe while still holding up his end of weapons development for the game.

“You’ll find a lot of girls playing,” I said. “Nearly all the babes who have filmed clips for us are players. But Rache is here for another purpose. We’ve acquired another member of the development team and he promises to take us to a whole new level. Tatts? You want to make the introductions?”

You could just see the beginning of the tattoo sleeve at her shoulder. I was sure the guys were all staring at it. She put a laptop on the table we were gathered around. After waking it up, she addressed the other developers.

“You guys have developed a hugely popular game. It might interest you to know there are four times the number of units sold off world as there are on Earth. Through the negotiating ability of a friend, we’ve captured the revenue for those users that was missed because of ‘an oversight,’ as I’ve been told.”

“Wow! We’ve got users in the Confederacy?” Mark, The Liquidator, said, seeming to come suddenly awake. I was sure he was snoring just a minute ago.

“Forty thousand Marines use the game to entertain themselves and even to work out strategies. They often play as teams,” Tatts said. “You’re probably asking yourselves where I fit in. I’m a computer psychologist. Mostly, after a term doing work on an unstable AI a few hundred lightyears from here, my work has involved helping Confederacy AIs adjust to the presence of humans. Some of the ship AIs who have been around for a while have a hard time accepting the violent species they are now saddled with.”

“Wait!” Rex said. “That’s wrong on so many levels. Unstable AIs? How could you get extracted and then get to come back to Earth? Plus...”

“I’ll get to all those, and more questions than you’ve thought of yet,” Rachel said. “Under normal circumstances, what they say about the Confederacy AIs is true. But there are different species of AI just as there are different species in the Confederacy. In general, they can’t kill intelligent lifeforms. There are a lot of ways the AIs get around that. For example, they don’t consider concubines to be intelligent lifeforms. They aren’t human because they don’t have a qualifying CAP score. There have been AIs who killed hundreds of concubines when their Marine sponsors were killed in a battle. As Eddie told me, it’s all in how the contract is written.”

“Who’s Eddie?”

“Eddie is Tuull AI AMD131, T’krunkskit. He’s the lawyer who negotiated a settlement from the Confederacy for all the game units they pirated. He’s also an AI I’ve counseled. He’s currently running around space as a trader, pretty much on his own.”

“O-kay,” Ray said. “There’s an unbalanced AI running around without a human crew—or any other crew. Right? That’s just too freaky.”

“It gets worse,” Rachel continued. “I also needed to work with a number of Darjee AIs that had gone nearly catatonic while working with Eddie. They were desperate. But I wasn’t eligible for extraction. I’m not fertile. So, I negotiated that I would get my clock turned back a bit and would be returned to Earth when my work was done.”

“And they let you go?”

“Oh, they tried all kinds of clever things. Like, they still had work for me to do. But I’d finished what I was contracted for and insisted they return me. Then command tried to say they didn’t have any ships returning to Earth, which was a bald-faced lie. Its AIs abetted by carefully failing to inform me of any ships headed my way—a lie by omission. Eddie went to bat for me and negotiated my return. Largely by threatening to blow himself up in the space dock, taking the ships, personnel, and entire administrative staff with him. They agreed to abide by the terms of the agreement and let me return.”

“So, you’ve really been out there?” Denny asked. “Is it ... as frightening as it seems?”

“Yeah, kid. It is. Stop and think. Officially, they’ve been extracting people for five years, though we know there were unofficial extractions years before most people even knew there were aliens. With the new big ships operating, they’ve been able to get several million people off the planet. Best estimates at the moment are that ten percent die within their first year away from Earth. That includes both volunteers and concubines.”

“Fucking shit! They’re cannon fodder.”

“We’ve always known that,” I said. “Take the strongest from Earth and feed the enemy with them. But this is going to take forever. Rache, introduce Ubie.”

“Okay. You’re so impatient,” she laughed. The guys all had their tongues hanging out staring at the good-looking woman. It hadn’t sunk in yet that she was old enough to be a grandmother to most of us. “I’d like you to meet Earthat001, the AI the Boss has named Übermensch. Or as we fondly call him, Ubie.”