Dead Space by Kali Wallace (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

disparaging the doctor and/or his team associated with Parthenope Medical and/or the technology of which I was currently in possession (litigation), if I should alter and/or modify and/or damage the patented and proprietary Augmented Medical Devices in any way (all of the above). I signed everything. I had no choice. I declined every one of their entreaties to offer myself up to the laboratory for further research or promotional duties.

I had chosen naked metal instead of the nauseating facsimile of human skin.

I stared at Mary Ping. I wanted to say no again, but I was afraid I would shout, or vomit, or cry. I kept my hand on the table.

“Is that all you want to talk about?” I said. “Because I don’t have time for a philosophical debate about the existential evolution of artificial intelligences. Do you know anything else about David’s death? Anything you haven’t told us?”

She didn’t flinch. She just kept staring at me, looking me right in my prosthetic eye. “I do not. But please do let me know what I can do to help,” she said. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, she turned from me to look at Adisa. “I know it must be hard for you to investigate under these circumstances. You normally don’t do much but watch the surveillance and drag the scapegoat away.”

“We sometimes do a bit more than that, aye,” Adisa said.

“Of course.” She rose from her chair but hesitated before stepping away from the table. “If that’s all, I have work to do. Twice as much, now. I’m sure you understand.”

“Wait,” I said. I had almost forgotten. “Do you know of any Parthenope project or operation with a name like Sunshine or Sunlight?”

“No, but I’m hardly aware of much outside my area of expertise,” Ping said. “I really do have to get to—”

“One more question,” said Adisa.

Ping barely hid her annoyance. “Yes?”

“Have you ever had reason to suspect there is any criminal activity happening on Nimue?”

“Really, Safety Inspector, I would have reported it, if I did.”

“Not even a hunch?”

“No. Nothing.” She took a step, turned back to look at me. “Are they all in prison now? The people responsible for Symposium, those who survived. I saw that it was in the news. I even asked David about it, but he never liked to talk about it. I do wish he had reached out for comfort when he needed it, before the end.”

My left hand clenched, metal fingers scraping over the tabletop. She knew. I didn’t know how it was possible. I had no proof. I didn’t have any reason for my certainty beyond the tight pain in my chest. But I was absolutely sure she knew David had sent a message to me before he died.

I had assumed his remark about somebody listening had been general, for whoever in the company might be listening, but I knew better now. Mary Ping was the one he had been hiding from with his cryptic memories and awkward code talk.

As soon as she was gone, I wanted to call her back, take her by the shirt and shake her, ask her what she knew and what she had done. Why she had asked me about Vanguard, about violent AIs, about the evolution of machines. What David had told her. Why any of it mattered.

I found myself thinking about the time I had taken Vanguard to the bottom of the ocean and what it had done there. It had been a few years before Symposium launched. I hadn’t thought of those days in ages, but now they were filling my mind again, dancing around with Mary Ping’s sly question: Vanguard never did?

The rivalry we had with the members of the Europa Deep-Sea Expedition was more antagonistic than friendly. In one respect, they were years ahead of the Titan project on every possible axis. There were already colonies on Europa with transportation connections that kept the bases supplied with both people and resources. They had been drilling into the ice for two years already. They would be sending their autonomous submersibles into that cold, dark ocean well before we landed on Titan. They were probably going to find life first. We could all admit that—if not to their faces, but to each other, after a few drinks—and it stung.

But because our goals were so similar, if our destinations so different, we often found ourselves working side by side. That’s what happened when I took a portable detachment of Vanguard down to the Joint Territories Mid-Atlantic Research Station, which sat on the bottom of the ocean near the thermal vent colonies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. My goal at Mid-AR was to train Vanguard in a wholly unusual and unexpected environment. I knew it could adapt to exploring underwater and at high pressure, but I had never taught it anything about the living colonies of organisms around the deep-sea vents. I wanted to see what it would do when it encountered those bizarre creatures for the first time, those life-forms that didn’t play by the rules of energy acquisition and resource management that we had introduced it to on the surface.

The first few trial runs did not go well. Vanguard didn’t like the high pressure at that depth, and it had balked at exploring far from the station when I sent it out to get its sea legs. That failure, unfortunately, happened right when one of the submersible designers from the Europa expedition was watching.

“You’re asking too much of it,” the insufferable Rodney Grieg said, when Vanguard curled itself into a ball.

“You’ve got to give it a little programming push,” said Grieg, when Vanguard kept itself close to the station.

“You need to look for errors in your algorithm,” was Grieg’s advice when I brought Vanguard back inside.

“You need to kill that bug shape,” declared Grieg, with a bit of a shudder, when Vanguard re-formed into its praying mantis form to scurry back to the laboratory.

“These kinds of machines, they aren’t easy to design,”