Chapter 21: Clarity

Sunlight spilled in through the open windows of the observation deck, the breeze rustling David’s hair. It had taken a little while, but it had eventually dried out after being above the water long enough. While he knew that there was no night and day on this planet, it still felt like morning, the dawn contrasting with the prior darkness of their love nest. He couldn’t even remember how long they had spent together the night prior or how many times they had climaxed – it had all blended together like a wonderful, half-remembered dream. Exhausted, they had collapsed and fallen asleep together in the couch’s netting, partially submerged in the shallow water. David had awoken to Selkie smiling up at him, both of them sore and thoroughly satisfied. Now, they were eating breakfast together, even his partner needing to replenish her reserves after so much exertion.

He chewed on a piece of grilled fish, glancing at her from across the table. Nothing had really changed between them, but somehow, everything felt different. The day seemed brighter, the food more flavorful than it had been the previous phase, and even his racing mind was finally quiet for once. A sense of peace and contentment had come over him, as though what they had experienced during the rest cycle hadn’t yet left him. Maybe it was love – he had nothing to compare it to.

“You are staring,” Selkie said, flashing him a smile as she held a piece of sashimi in her face-tentacles.

“Sorry,” he stammered.

“I did not suggest that you should stop,” she added, biting off another piece of fish with her beak.

“So, what happens now?” David asked as he speared another cut of meat with a spiraling fork. “What do we do about us?”

“I am hoping that the process to certify Weaver will be dragged out for several Mountains thanks to bureaucratic inefficiency, and that you will be needed until it concludes,” she replied. “Though, I do not know how many more times I can afford to rent out this building on my salary.”

“I was thinking more ... long-term,” David replied. Selkie perked up, pausing halfway through a bite as she waited for him to continue. “Obviously, we take things slow, and we figure out how far we want to take this. But, if we decide we want to make a go of it, maybe I could ask for a beachfront property as my consultancy fee? Think the Administrator would bite?”

“You ... would want to stay?” Selkie asked, a bright band of surprise sweeping up her mantle. “I had hoped, but ... our very environment is hostile to your species.”

“The underwater thing?” he scoffed, brushing it off with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It’s not that big of a deal. I’ve been here for over a week, and it hasn’t really caused me any problems. Besides, if I was living on the beach or maybe a little further inland, it wouldn’t be that much different from Earth. There’s the suit, which is property of the UNN, but what are they gonna do? Come here and take it from me?”

“I do not know if your consultancy fee will be valuated at the price of a luxury dwelling, but it is worth a try,” Selkie giggled. “What of your work, though? You are a respected researcher in your field – you have many accolades. You worked so hard and sacrificed so much to become what you are.”

“I sacrificed too much,” he replied, taking another bite of his fish. “There’s nothing for me back home – nothing to keep me there. No friends or colleagues to miss, no loved ones save for my parents, and being here won’t impact how often I can send them an email. Wasn’t like I was visiting them every weekend. In any case,” he added, gesturing with his fork. “You guys are working on stuff that’s centuries ahead of anything back in UN space. If I want to work on cutting-edge neural networks, Trappist is the place to be.”

“I admit that your skills and unique perspective could be valuable to many of the corporations on this planet,” Selkie conceded. “I had been trying to put the thoughts of what might happen when you were sent home from my mind,” she added, her complexion darkening. “I did not want to think about losing you, like Mountain watching Snow depart at Storm’s side, left to wander the cold wastes alone. If there is a possibility that you might be able to stay...”

She didn’t have to elaborate – he could see how happy the thought made her in the way that her skin flushed with bright hues, her smile just as warm. He reached across the table and took one of her tentacles in his hand, giving it a squeeze.

Had he really just decided to abandon everything he knew to be with Selkie? Everything had happened so quickly, but he knew that this wasn’t just a whim. The longer he spent in her company, the more he realized just how hollow and bereft of color his life back on Earth had been. Selkie was his friend – his lover, and he’d never had anything like that before. Nobody had ever known him the way that she now did.

There was still the threat of the Admiral and the data drive that was hidden in David’s suit, which now contained all of the information the Stranger had given him on the Brokers and their dark dealings. If David didn’t want to return to his old life, then Vos no longer had any leverage over him, and Trappist was one of the few places in the Galaxy where he was untouchable. Vos was no fool, and he would quickly realize that David had the power to blow open his spying scheme if he tried anything. All of the cards were in his hands now.

What of the data on the drive? He still hadn’t had time to fully process the revelations, and if he found a way to leak the information, it could shock the Coalition to its core. Was it better left forgotten, or did the Galaxy have a right to know the truth? Did he even have the right to make such a decision? He still wasn’t sure how many of the Brokers knew – how many had been complicit in the cover-up, if any. It was something that warranted careful consideration.

Then there was the Stranger and their plan to save Weaver – a plan that was predicated on David’s cooperation to smuggle the AI back to UN space. David could ensure Weaver’s safety, he could give Vos more information on the Brokers than that asshole had ever dreamed of, and he would probably be hailed as a hero for it. Dr. David O’Shea, the man who blew open the Broker conspiracy and secured the first true AI for humanity. But that would mean leaving Selkie...

Could he trust the Brokers to do the right thing for Weaver? The Stranger didn’t seem to think so, but Selkie certainly did, and David didn’t know who to believe. There were two paths ahead of him now, and while he had always valued cold logic, where had it gotten him? Thinking with his head had made him one of the most renowned and accomplished experts in his field, but it had also made him lonely and isolated. Maybe it was time to trust his gut – or his heart if he wanted to get sentimental.

“David,” Selkie chimed, smirking when he glanced back at her. “You are daydreaming.”

“Sorry,” he said, resuming his meal.

“Still thinking about last phase?” she added with a sultry laugh. “I must admit that I have not been able to focus on much else.”

“Selkie,” he began, his tone becoming more serious. He couldn’t wait any longer – he had to learn how much she knew. “Can I ask you a question? It’s important.”

“Of course,” she replied, her hue dimming a little as she lay down her fork on the table beside her plate. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

“If we’re going to be together, then we need to be honest with each other. I feel like we’ve grown to trust one another, and we’ve become closer than I’ve ever been with anyone, but I need to know if there’s anything that you’ve been ... keeping from me. Perhaps something you wanted to tell me, but couldn’t because of a contractual obligation, or because it was a Broker secret?”

Selkie withdrew her tentacles, sucking them back up towards her body protectively, her skin taking on a coloration and texture reminiscent of stone. She looked like she wanted to screw herself up into a ball and just disappear.

“David,” she began, tapering off as she averted her eyes nervously. “I...”

“It’s alright,” he insisted, leaning closer across the table. “You can tell me – whatever it is.”

“I ... have been hiding a terrible secret from you,” she began, her skin blotchy with apprehension. “We have been hiding a secret – the Administrator, even the Board sanctioned it. I wanted to tell you, but it was forbidden by a contract that I signed prior to our meeting, long before I came to know you. You were just an alien to me back then, and I thought nothing of keeping you in the dark. It weighed on me more with each passing phase, but ... if I go back before the Disciplinary Board again, and they find me in breach of contract...”

“I know,” he replied. “Your life would be over.”

“They would fire me and take everything I own as reparations, maybe something worse,” she said with a flutter of miserable hues. “If I tell you, I am no better than a criminal who flaunts the social contract.”

“It’s important, Selkie,” he began as he extended his hands across the table. She hesitated, then reached out to take them tentatively, letting him squeeze her tentacles in reassurance. “If I’m going to stay here, then I need to know. Don’t worry – they can’t have predicted that you’d rent out this condo. How would they find out unless I told them?”

Contracts were central to Broker society, and he could see the conflict in her. What he was asking her to do might be morally right from his perspective, but from hers, it was also a crime. In a way, it would be like asking someone to commit fraud or steal a car for a good cause, and Selkie had been before a judge once already.

Selkie steeled herself, closing her eyes for a moment as she exhaled through her vents.

“We ... installed cameras in your habitat,” she began. “When the engineers came to erect it, they planted hidden monitoring devices inside. My contract required me to report on your activities and send the recordings to the Administrator for review. You have been watched since the phase you arrived. I only agreed because I did not yet know you,” she added hastily, David feeling her suckers grip his hands more tightly as she began to panic. “I would never betray your trust like that now – not after all that has happened. Can ... can you forgive me for deceiving you?”

David suppressed a sigh of relief, Selkie cocking her head in confusion when he failed to react with anger or surprise. What a fool he had been to even consider that she might have known about the Betelgeuse Incident or the manipulation of the Krell. She hadn’t even been alive at the time, and she had no ties to the Board – no reason to have access to classified information.

“Thank you for telling me,” he replied, giving her a smile as she blinked back at him in bemusement. “That was all I wanted.”

“I do not understand,” she continued, her mantle furrowing.

“I already knew about the cameras,” he explained, releasing her hands. “I knew that the Administrator was being sent those recordings pretty much immediately after I arrived.”

“How?” she demanded.

“Well, if we’re telling secrets,” he began as he reached back to rub his neck nervously. “I may have accessed your home computer while you were asleep and discovered the feeds.”

“You accessed my terminal without my knowledge?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him. “When could you possibly have accomplished that? You cannot even read Broker script.”

“It wasn’t all that hard to sneak outside my habitat when you weren’t around,” he said with a shrug. “You guys gave me translation software so that I could read Weaver’s server logs, and it was a pretty trivial task to get it running on my suit once I discovered that it worked optically. I just piped in the feed from my helmet cam and displayed the results on my HUD. You should really put a password on your terminal.”

“You are as sneaky as a cave eel,” she said with a disapproving snap of her beak.

“You were spying on me for the Administrator, I was accessing your personal computer without permission,” David continued. “This is good – this is healthy for our relationship. It’s all out in the open now. Shall we ... call it even?”

“Wait,” Selkie added, her coloration mottling with embarrassment. “You did not access my private sims, did you?”

“Private sims?” David repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Now I feel like I should have. What kinds of sims are you hiding in there? Do they involve cavitation?”

Selkie slithered a few of her tentacles around his legs under the water, threatening to tug him beneath their table, smirking at his alarmed expression.

“Hey, hey!” he complained. “I just got my hair dry!”

“I suppose we can call it even,” she replied, resuming her breakfast. “To be honest, I am not surprised that you were able to circumvent some of our security measures. The Administrator was responsible for installing your habitat, and he seemed to think that he was caging some kind of animal rather than containing an intelligent creature.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty disagreeable like that,” he chuckled as he dipped a piece of fish in kelp butter. “If there’s some way to do something I’m not supposed to, I’ll probably find it.”

“I am glad that I could tell you about the cameras, even if you already knew,” Selkie said. “It was weighing on me, and I feel relief now.”

“Yeah, me too,” David replied with a smile.

“I will drain the observation room so you can dry off and put your suit back on once you have finished eating.”

“Can’t we stay a little longer?” he whined.

“I must fill Flower’s food dispenser, and we will be expected at work,” she said as she finished her last piece of sashimi. “Do not fret – there will be more opportunities for us to be alone together soon. Especially now that you are considering staying.”

She reached out to manipulate the holographic controls in the center of the table, and the water level started to recede. As he watched it diminish, he wondered if all of the slime they had created the night before would clog any of the filters.

“There is a terminal where I can rent a shuttle on the lower level,” she said, sliding out of her seat. “Meet me down there when you are ready.”

“Got it,” he replied over a mouthful of crunchy seaweed, watching her slither away across the damp floor. She vanished into the shaft at the center of the room, leaving him alone.

He looked out through the open windows as he finished up his meal, admiring the way that the sunlight reflected off the surf, waiting for his bare skin to dry off in the warm breeze. When he was about as dry as he was going to get, and he had finished his breakfast, he began to pull on his suit.

Try as he might, he couldn’t remember ever being this happy before. After spending the night with Selkie and finally having her come clean about the cameras, his problems felt distant and unimportant. As he sealed his helmet and the HUD flickered to life, he saw a little text window pop up in the corner.

<Hello, David.>

His brow furrowed, and he raised his wrist display, tapping through the menus. There was a wireless network inside the building, likely intended to serve the guests, but his suit wasn’t connected to it. His suit hadn’t directly connected to any networks because it had no Broker wireless adapter – it had only ever received messages and information relayed from his laptop. The laptop wasn’t even turned on right now – it was on the ground floor, still packed up in its hard case. Even if it had been, he didn’t have the passcode for this network...

“Stranger?” he asked.

<I am glad that I was finally able to contact you, David. You have been offline for some time, and time is of the essence.>

“What’s wrong?” David asked, turning his eyes to his display again to verify that there were no connections. It wasn’t wireless, it wasn’t radio – his suit wasn’t showing any network activity.

<I have been discovered. They are coming for me, David.>

“Coming for you?” he hissed. “What are you talking about?”

<My network intrusions have been traced, and the Board now knows that I have been leaking information to you. We have only a few hours before their security forces arrive to detain me. We have waited too long.>

“What does that mean?” David demanded. “What are you going to do about Weaver? Do they know about me?”

<We have only a single course of action remaining to us. You must reconnect Weaver to the facility’s servers and enact the plan that we discussed. It must happen this phase. I can only evade them for a few more hours, David. There is no more time.>

“Wait, wait,” David said as he tried to process what he was being told. “I spoke to Selkie about the cameras in my habitat. She came clean. I don’t think she knows anything about the leaked documents, either. Maybe I can talk to her, and-”

<I warned you not to trust her, David. She works for the Administrator – she is under contract. Brokers will say or do anything their contract requires of them without thought or consideration.>

“That’s not true. Selkie was under contract, and she still told me about the cameras. We can trust her – she won’t sell us out. Maybe she can think of a way to help.”

<They will kill you to protect their secrets, David. My fate is sealed, but you can still survive this. Save Weaver and get that data off-world. Both lives are in your hands now.>

“How are you even speaking to me right now?” he added, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “My suit isn’t connected to any networks. I didn’t even think that my suit could connect to Broker networks without using the laptop as an intermediary – it doesn’t have the wireless adapter they provided.”

<It was an emergency, so I activated your laptop remotely.>

“What?” David replied. “Even if you could do that, I’m not connected to the laptop.”

<Listen, David, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is saving yourself and Weaver. Don’t let my sacrifice be for nothing.>

David made his way over to the shaft at the center of the room, then plunged into the water, floating down to the ground floor. He passed Selkie on his way to the room where he had left his hard case the night before, his partner raising a hand in greeting.

“Are you ready to leave, David?” she asked. “I have rented us a shuttle.”

“Almost,” he replied, stooping to pick up the case. “I just want to check something before we go.”

She cocked her head at him curiously as he bounded past her, climbing back up the shaft to the observation room. He slammed the hard case on the table, then unfastened the clasps, flipping open his laptop’s screen.

<David? Are you still receiving me?>

The laptop was switched off.

He took a few steps away from the table, his mind reeling.

<David? It has to be done this phase. They will never allow you to live with what you know.>

“Alright,” David began after a few moments, turning his eyes back to the little text display. “I’ll do it. Give me time to call in my spaceship and jet over there. Should I bring my army of flying monkeys to help?”

<Get here as quickly as you can – the sooner, the better.>

“Perhaps I can guess the passcode to the facility’s servers through trial and error? It would only take a few billion years.”

<Don’t worry about the passcodes – Weaver can handle that.>

“I’ll bring pizza. What kind of topping do you want? Anchovy?”

<Good, there’s no time to waste.>

“You’re not a fucking person at all,” David hissed into his helmet. “You’re a bot, aren’t you? You’re not contacting me from some hidden location – you’re inside my fucking suit like a little digital parasite, whispering lies into my ears.”

<David, you have to listen to me very carefully. The Board has eyes everywhere.>

“You’re not gonna have eyes on me anymore,” David muttered, raising the touch display on his forearm. What was it that Lieutenant Shearer had taught him about suit maintenance? If you encounter any corrupt files, just perform a system restore, and the suit’s software will load settings from its backups.

He navigated to the appropriate menu and selected the option, his finger hovering over the confirmation icon.

<David, they are coming for you. You must get to Weaver and st->

The HUD flickered off as the suit loaded its backup, a progress meter appearing on his display. After a few seconds, it came back online, and there was no sign of the Stranger. David ran a brief system diagnostic, ensuring that everything was as Shearer had left it. Save for his custom translation software, which had been wiped during the format, everything was functioning normally.

“Sneaky as a fucking cave eel,” he muttered to himself.

If the Stranger who had spoken to him through his suit was a bot, then were the others bots too? What about the one that had communicated through his laptop in the apartment, and the one inside the facility? If the Stranger had never been real, and David had been talking to soft AIs this entire time, where had they originated? Who would have the most to gain by orchestrating Weaver’s escape? If it was some rival corporation trying to get their hands on the tech, why use advanced bots and not just communicate themselves, as the Stranger had pretended to do? The obvious answer was Weaver, but how the hell had it infected so many systems with its daemons from inside the containment chamber? It had no wireless access – only a hardline to Selkie’s terminal.

The damned thing had been doing something non-stop since it had been disconnected from the servers, claiming to be working on neural networks for the drone program, so it could have deployed dozens – hundreds of bots all over the place. God, it had access to the fucking city-wide intranet through his laptop thanks to his snooping, too. The bot could have made copies of itself and spread them all over the planet. That was probably how it had gotten access to those classified files. Did the connection go both ways? Had David been inadvertently delivering Weaver the information that its bots had collected from the intranet each time he visited the facility with his laptop?

Weaver could only run on the lattice, so it couldn’t breach containment, but any sufficiently advanced soft AIs that it created could be running rampant throughout Reef’s networks. Had Weaver been masquerading as a model citizen while collecting information and planning its escape in secret this entire time?

If the escape plan that the Stranger had relayed to him had been genuine, then it didn’t matter who restored Weaver’s network access. Whether it was David in his frantic attempt to save the AI, or he and Selkie were successful in their efforts, all it needed was someone to flip that switch. David’s laptop couldn’t write data to the facility’s servers – it was read-only – and the facility’s network was physically isolated from the outside to prevent intrusions. Weaver had no way to regain access by itself. Could it be that his laptop had the weakest security as the least advanced computer in the complex?

“David, are you ready?” Selkie asked over the radio. “We are going to be late.”

Should he tell Selkie? This was her project more than it was his. If he told her, he’d also have to tell her about the information that the bots had been slipping him, and the plan Weaver had formulated to escape the facility. She might also be under contract to reveal those facts to the Administrator or the Board, and he wouldn’t blame her for it. It was a legal obligation that she had already violated by telling him about the cameras, and this was becoming an issue of planet-wide security.

No. He had to find out more and figure out what he was going to do first. The bots might have been fake, but the information that they had collected seemed to be legitimate. The Stranger had been right about one thing – the Brokers weren’t above killing to protect their secrets.

“Coming,” he replied, closing up his case and heading back down the shaft.

Selkie remained close to him during the shuttle ride back to the city, her affection letting David put the recent revelations from his mind for a little while, his contentment from their night together still lingering. When they got back to the apartment, Flower swarmed them as she usually did, Selkie laughing as the little slug darted through the water.

“I do not think I have ever left her for this long,” she giggled, letting her pet settle in her hand. “She has an automatic food dispenser, but she must have been lonely.”

“Sorry for stealing your master away, Flower,” David said as he reached out to pet the animal.

“I will top up her food pellets and make sure her cave is clean,” Selkie said as she swam away with Flower following close behind. “We will leave for work shortly.”

“Got it,” he replied, making his way up to the habitat to return his toothbrush. As he set the hard case down on his desk and opened it up, he considered what to do about the bot that must still be operating on the laptop. If he switched off all of his suit’s wireless functionality save for the ad-hoc radio, maybe he could wipe the device before it could copy itself onto his onboard memory again. A factory reset should do the trick, and all of the important information that he had gathered was safely stored on the hidden data drive.

He flipped the laptop open and hit the power switch, turning off his suit’s networking while he waited for it to boot. Almost as soon as it was back online, a text overlay appeared on the desktop, the Stranger sending him a message. He took it over to the bed, out of view of the cameras, watching the text scroll past.

<David? You must not be wearing your suit, but no matter. I am glad that I was finally able to contact you. You have been offline for some time, and we can no longer afford to wait.>

David typed a reply, asking the bot if it remembered what he had just told it about his army of flying monkeys. It ignored his question.

<I have been discovered, David. They are coming for me. You have but a few hours to enact the plan.>

“That’s about what I thought,” he muttered to himself, unplugging the Broker wireless adapter. He navigated to the restore point option in the menu, then wiped the device. The moment that he plugged the adapter back in and accessed Selkie’s wireless network, the bots loose on the intranet would probably copy themselves back onto his laptop. He had no idea what he was going to do about them, but for now, his focus was on the facility. If he used the wireless network in the research complex and the Stranger reappeared, he would know that it had infected their servers.

“Are you ready?” Selkie asked over the radio.

“On my way,” he replied, flipping the laptop closed.

“Morning, Jeff!” David announced as he walked into the cubicle. The Broker was as evasive as ever, turning to give him a dirty look before resuming his work at the console. David marched over to his desk and slammed his hard case down, setting up his laptop.

“You seem determined today, David,” Selkie mused as she slithered up to the terminal beside him.

“It’s nice to be making progress, I suppose,” he replied as he booted his machine.

“Now that most of our preparatory work with Weaver is finished, we can focus on recreational interaction. Perhaps you will finally beat it at a game of sea spire?”

“Oh, I’m sure it thinks it’s always one step ahead of me,” he replied as he plugged in the wireless adapter. This time, he pulled up his bandwidth monitor and watched it intently, trying to figure out where the data was coming from. There was a handshake with the server that caused a spike, but he wasn’t downloading anything from that source. As he watched, however, he began to receive a data stream.

“Now, where the hell is that coming from?” he muttered into his helmet. It was a very weak signal, only able to send packages of a few tens of kilobytes per second, but it was streaming in from somewhere that wasn’t the servers. A data stream this small wouldn’t even have registered if he hadn’t been looking for it – it would have gotten completely lost in his regular communication with the server.

He opened up a network diagnostic tool and traced the data that was being written, finding that it was hiding away in a little corner of the drive usually reserved for background processes. It shouldn’t be able to do that, but the servers had been able to write data to his drive too. Maybe it was piggybacking on whatever permissions they had used.

Despite the slow transfer speed, it was gradually building up, already occupying a few megabytes of drive space. Neural networks were usually terabytes in size due to their complexity, but Weaver could be using compression algorithms and code that would be literally incomprehensible to an organic being. Over the twelve hours per Broker day that David was usually at work, it could download a couple of gigs to his laptop without him even realizing.