Free Radical (23 page)

She set her bag down in the swivel chair and began unpacking again. "Okay, but I don't know what you want me to do, I mean..."

Buchanan waved his arm as if to backhand her question away, "Just the same thing you've been doing. You're our point of contact with this guy and we don't want to confuse things by giving him someone new."

She nodded. This made a lot of sense to her, although she had been looking forward to getting home.

Buchanan gestured towards the console, "He still hasn't responded?"

A head appeared over the bank of security stations behind her. It was one of the TriOptimum techs, "Excuse me, Mister Buchanan? We just lost the one I was telling you about. I figure we have maybe twenty minutes before our bandwidth situation..," he trailed off as Buchanan held up a single finger.

Rebecca sighed, "I've been paging him every ten or fifteen minutes for the last hour. Still nothing."

"Well, maybe he got himself killed," Buchanan said hopefully, "At any rate, keep at it and see if you can get him back."

As he walked over to speak with the tech, Rebecca glared at him. She returned to work.

The crack in the laboratory door was now large enough that the cyborgs could reach through. Numerous metal hands came though the gap and pulled sideways on the lightweight metal surface. The opening became broader.

The elevator arrived. As the doors slid open, Deck jumped in and slapped the only available button. This wasn't a full-access elevator, but instead a direct link between the research and medical levels.

As the elevator began to move, he noticed the elevator music that was playing. It was some sort of light, soulless, diet jazz. It made the moment even more surreal.

He enjoyed a few quiet moments while the elevator descended. He caught his breath. He had figured out the answers to a lot of questions before he fell asleep, and now all he needed was a safe place to hide while he contacted Rebecca.

The doors opened to reveal a nest of mutants. There were four of them that he could see, all hunched in a corner, looking to see what the elevator had brought them. Deck was guessing they had learned to respond to the elevator chime like Pavlov's bell, or the knock of the pizza delivery man.

He stayed in the elevator, which would prevent them from surrounding him. All he needed to do was keep them out. As the first one lunged inward, he sent it tumbling back into the corridor with a broken nose. Another came and received a dislocated shoulder and a kick in the face. Deck stood firm, letting them come to him. Their bones were brittle from their illness and they were incapable of teamwork, but they were tenacious. Nothing would stop them short of incapacitation or death. One at a time they stepped up and were quickly kicked out of his elevator.

After a few minutes of bone-crunching martial arts, the mutants were down. Their bodies lay in a group in front of the elevator. He dragged one of the bodies into the door of the elevator to hold it open. If the door couldn't close, the elevator wouldn't leave, which meant the cyborgs couldn't follow him this way.

The room was once some sort of waiting area. The couch had been gutted and its foam interior had been placed on the floor and used as a nest of some sort. The pictures had been pulled from the walls and the plain red carpet had been soiled with every bodily fluid imaginable. The room was now a reeking box of death and excrement. There was a sign posted over the door that informed him he was in a restricted area and that he needed to remain in the waiting room and notify security if he had arrived here in error. There were some vague threats about the punishments available for corporate espionage.

One mutant had never attacked him. It was cowering in a dark corner, staring at him like some terrified animal. As he stepped over the broken pile of bodies, it shook its head back and forth. He looked closer. It had been a woman. Her thinning, whitened hair hung in her face in a tangled mass. Grunts and whines came from her throat. The ability to speak was long gone, but still she struggled to communicate on some primal level.

She seemed passive. He ignored her.

Deck bent over to examine his fallen foes. One of them was wearing the remains of a security uniform. He didn't care to search the excrement-stained pants, but the belt was sure to have something of value. The mutant had a sidearm, a pistol identical to the one Deck was carrying. He took the ammo and left the weapon. Most of the rest of the equipment was useless. There was a flashlight and a VOX, neither of which interested him. He found another clip of ammo, which he pocketed before moving on. Neither of the other two mutants looked like they had anything worth carrying around.

He reloaded his pistol and dropped the extra clip into a pocket. As he moved to leave, the woman flinched, fearing an attack. He looked down at the bent form, trembling on the floor in front of him. Her face was thin and pale, smudged with filth. She had more hair and teeth than the others, and seemed to have some slender thread of sanity to cling to. Deck wondered if he should use his pistol to end her misery. If he were in her shoes, he would certainly hope someone would have pity enough to kill him.

Her head rocked back and fourth as she grunted out some pathetic whine. She seemed to have only one thought, and that was that she didn't want to be hurt. The dull, sunken eyes were framed in dark, bruised flesh. They stared at him with a mixture of terror and confusion. This person could have been a Ph.D. a few weeks ago, and now she was living like an animal, eating dead bodies... or worse.

Deck holstered his weapon. He couldn't shoot her. He backed slowly out of the room.

Beyond was a large, open area. The carpet was mainly red, with a border of beige where it met the walls. The metal doors had been decorated to look vaguely like wood. The walls were mostly beige, with red trim. Someone had evidently decided that nothing says "research" like red and beige. There were frosted glass panels that stretched from floor to ceiling, with dark block letters and generic symbols indicating the various departments. He had no idea what the various research projects were, so the signs were meaningless to him.

The ceilings were higher here than on the hospital level, breaking free of the claustrophobic darkness that had plagued him since he awoke. The room was bathed in gentle glow cast from the hanging lighting cylinders and from lights positioned behind the frosted glass panels.

He examined the nearest glass sign / panel. The words were broken by a spiderweb of cracks that converged on a single bullet hole.

He peered behind the panel and saw a pink, lumpy growth on the wall, directly behind the bullet hole. He prodded it. It felt like Styrofoam. He frowned as he tried to figure out what he was seeing.

Expansion foam.

Most modern space platforms employed a safety feature to protect against decompression. It was a thin layer of gel, sealed in plastic that lined the inside of the outer hull. If a small-scale decompression took place due to a projectile or stress, the air would come into contact with the gel, causing it to expand violently. The gel would rapidly grow and harden, sealing hull breaches from micrometeorites or - in this case - weapons fire. This explained why the station hadn't decompressed once the shooting started. Expansion foam couldn't help in the case of a large-scale breach, but it was ideal for dealing with small cracks and puncture wounds in the hull. Deck realized this meant he was along an exterior wall.

He needed a map.

Rebecca's voice came into his head, "No, never mind, I've got him again." She was speaking to someone off-camera.

"Hey. I'm on the research level and I need a map."

"Glad to have you back finally. I tried to raise you about an hour ago, but you didn't respond. Every time you do that people here start thinking you're dead." The picture of her was grainy and at a low frame-rate There were short pauses and gaps in the audio feed.

"I was asleep. Apparently the interface doesn't do anything when I'm not conscious. What's going on with you? This video feed looks like crap."

"Shodan has doubled the number of satellites it controls. We can't stop it. We can't even get a hold of the owners of all of these comsats to let them know their birds are under attack. Global Net has a big, gaping hole in it right now and we are starved for bandwidth as the remaining sats try to pick up the slack. It's a mess."

"I think I figured out what she's doing with them."

"Oh?"

"She's diversifying again."

"With comsats? You mean its trying to somehow create a backup of itself on all these satellites?"

"Not a backup. Its actually adding them to its brain."

"I didn't think that was possible. These are just relays - they pump information from one location to another. How could Shodan possibly use them to expand its mental capacity?"

"You know anything about how its constructed?"

"No. There are no schematics anywhere planetside and we haven't gotten any solid info on it yet. We have one of the designers on his way in here - we are expecting him in about forty minutes." Someone whispered in her ear and she corrected herself, "Twenty minutes."

"Well, she is not a single computing machine, but a big, interconnected web of nodes. All she needs is memory and raw processing power - storage doesn't do her any good. Just like your brain, there isn't any one group of cells that is the home of all of your thoughts, but instead they come from all over your brain, right?"

"Okay, I'm with you," She was holding a retractable pen which she repeatedly clicked against the desk as she took this in. A small group of people had gathered around and stood behind her. All he could see was a wall of people from the waist down.

"The structure she needs is one where there is a bank of memory and processors, and where any part of memory can reach any other part - preferably using the fewest possible number of hops. There is no fixed structure, no set pattern. The structure develops as Shodan learns."

She stopped clicking the pen for a moment, "But these connections are not instantaneous - the round trip between comsats can be several milliseconds. How can it function with that much latency?"

"Are you kidding? How much latency do you have in your brain? Ever try to remember something and have it take five seconds or so?"

After a few moments she seemed to accept this and the clicking resumed. "How did you figure this out?"

Deck moved to the opposite side of the room where there was a bench. He needed to sit as far from the reeking waiting room as possible. "That's the funny thing about the human brain, sometimes you get ideas and you don't know where they come from. I noticed several odd things on the station, and they seemed to form a pattern." He paused as he gazed at the image in his head, "Hey, do me a favor?"

"What do you need?"

"Tell the guys behind you to pull up a chair or get their own screen, I'm tired of looking at this wall of crotches."

"Um - sure," she stammered. She motioned to them but the crowd had already dispersed.

"Anyway, I noticed all the portable consoles were missing. There should have been at least one for every desk, but they were all gone."

Rebecca flipped the pen around and made a note of this. "So you think Shodan rounded them up and cannibalized them for parts?"

"Right. Used them to make nodes like the one I found on the hospital level."

"That makes sense. From what I've seen there aren't resources available up there for making new chips, so when it wanted to expand, it began using whatever was available."

"When it ran out of those, it started to use other stuff - like the security networks. I noticed that even though Shodan has cameras everywhere, the bots still have to hunt for me. Since the security network is a big interconnected web of machines, I'm guessing that she's using the processing chips in the cameras and stuff, and making another node out of them. If she wants to use the cameras to see, she has to stop using them to 
think
. I'm not sure she could stop using them at this point."

Rebecca was shaking her head as he spoke. "Wait - using cameras to think?"

"Remember, anything with memory, processing, and a network connection is usable to her. Cameras have all three, and can be used as part of Shodan's brain, provided she gives up using them for visual input."

"That doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade-off"

"Now it doesn't, but a few days ago everyone was dead, insane, or working for Shodan. All of that internal surveillance was a flood of useless input that she had to process. It was like seeing inside her own body."

Rebecca raised an eyebrow.

Deck nodded vigorously, even though nobody could see him. "That's kind of how I've been thinking of it lately. This place, this whole station, is almost like an organism. The reactor? Her heart. The nodes? Her brain. The cyborgs? Her immune system. This thing is a living, breathing, creature we are dealing with, and it has been kicking our ass."

"So what does that make you? A germ?," Lansing drew in a slow breath as she turned this over in her head. "So Shodan is motivated by the need to expand?"

"Seems that way. When it ran out of computer parts, she absorbed the security system - and probably some other stuff - into her mind."

"I just realized that the attack on the first satellites happened just before our last conversation. I'm betting that when you blew up that node, Shodan made it a priority to expand beyond Citadel. What sort of effect does it have when you destroy a node?"

Deck gave a pointless shrug, "You can ask you expert when he gets there, but its probably similar to what happens when you destroy human brain cells - you get brain damage and memory loss."

"Brain damage? You mean lowering its IQ?"

"Sure, that would lower Shodan's IQ, but she will actually be worse off than before she expanded to the new node in the first place."

"How so?"

"She will have built links to the new node. In a system like hers, there is no way to globally remove invalid links. So, she will have a lot of thoughts dead-end on her as she attempts to access stuff that isn't there."