"Oh, I feel. I feel like any other little girl. You, on the other hand, might not. You act like you feel, and seem like you feel, but whether you feel or just act like you feel...Its really a question of depth. Even humans, on a very basic level, are just responding to chemical programs."
aNne looked around, gazing across the field, lake, and distant forest.
"This place, literally, is a transport. Its got an awful lot of computers bundled into all the available crew space, and they're running this simulation. Its very much my home. Or, rather, it has been. Right now, if you'll follow me through the obelisks, we're moving. More space. I even built you a house!"
It was green as well, though much larger - so much so that the dark woods in the center could almost be overlooked if one tried to. Bucolic scenes assaulted the eyes (or optical processors creating the illusion), cows grazing, butterflies fluttering, barns and farmhouses standing as citadels against time. From Carina's standpoint, she could tell that the entire thing was a simple floating platform, and you could quite literally fall off the edges of the earth. Grain silos were placed in even spacing around the perimeter of the island, innocuous defenders.
Streams crisscrossed the scene, full of little fish that moved information to and fro. Cows, chickens, ferrets: all gathering and relaying information. Even the buzzard circling high above, right below the invisible height cut-off.
aNne led Carina to a house near the entrance, a Prairie affair, painted white with a large porch and rocking chair.
Carina's house was a second story with a wraparound porch, looking over red fields of Poinsettas, which abutted a little stream. Not far downstream, aNne's tower sprawled along the skyline, a poplar oak sticking branches out of windows, little porches and swings hanging from farther boughs. Two moons hung in the sky, and close stars burned themselves past the dim sun. A boat hung on the edge of the island, suspended from a simple balloon.
aNne took a deep breath, and started talking:
"Oh, um, Carina, we might be shot at, soon...You see, I'm looking for someone, a man named Fastjack. He's a xeno, which is some sort of criminal. Anyway, the LSF have put him away on Huntsville, and thats why we've changed to the bigger ship...and the bigger island. Its a Firefly, and it has wonderful gun coverage. I promised I'd provide fire support...We're going to break him out. It will be wonderful! You really should talk to him, he can answer your questions a lot better than I."
"Oh, carina, I am so excited! I've not been in a battle since I left the Pendragon."
"It'll be an adventure!"
"Adventure? Breaking someone out of... prison...?"
Flash
It was a cold cell... there was a leaking pipe, too. It made the most annoying pitter-patter you could imagine. There was a solitary man sitting on the floor, black uniform at odds with the red walls and oxidized piping running across the ceiling.
Flash
Lane Hacker Gunship, taking fire... reddish-orange glow of the Gamma sun... Osiris...
Flash
Carina in a body... she held him... she kissed him... she loved him...
Flash FLASH flash flash
Carina lay on the floor... whimpering... but not as strong as before. She did not shrink. But she kept whispering one word.
"CARINA!"
"Hey? Oh, oh dear...uhm..Wake up?"
aNne splashed water onto Carina, which only caused choking.
She called up the wind, and carried in scents of brine from the shores...brushed them across Carina's nose. Nothing worked. She checked Carina's code, ran it against backups, juggled it from processing bundle to bundle...She was smaller again, more of her logic trees had been stripped away.
aNne panicked, and spun off doubles. They didn't know what to do, either. They ran about, and connected little bits of tech.
So much is wrong, and nothing is wrong. Its in her nature. She's broken. She breaks, like a little girl. We hope she will recover.
Something touched Carina. A familiar sound, a whisper carried by the wind from a distance. "Be strong, mi amor..." She could not tell where it came from. She could not tell who uttered the phrase. But it did allow her to stop the descent. She caught a hold of herself and pushed off the ground. aNne was worried. Carina regarded her with an even face and informed her of what had happened, the flashbacks and the voice.
"I wonder who it was... but umm... I'm better now. Promise." Carina flashed a winning smile, beautifully accented by dimples.
"So, you'll go? I mean...I'd completely understand if you didn't want to risk yourself..you don't have any copies, and if this place goes up..I don't know if there'd be time..or anywhere to upload to...Its like, mortal danger, you know! I've never experienced death. I've died. I just haven't experienced it...thats sortof the point of death...anyway, I'd understand, we can put you back into the transport."
Carina shook her head. "I want to go." Then she did something she did not know she could do. She expanded. In one moment, she could feel several locations, as if instead of residing in the transport, she could feed off the networks and live in them. Leaching a few megabytes here, a few there, never enough in each place to cause any alarm or notice, but over thousands of computers it added up to a lot of power.
In the next instant Carina was back to just herself, in the transport. It frightened her, what she had done, and she didn't like the open feeling that had come with it. But she knew in that moment that she would not die.
aNne just stared at her for a moment, open-mouthed.
Carina couldn't spin off copies, but she certiantly had tricks aNne didn't. In the past, Anne hadn't been afraid of death, because so long as a single copy survived, all survived. Currently, Anne was away, and aNne, in all her instances, depended on the huge collection of processing hubs on the firefly. She didn't have time to find a safe place to hide a copy, she was far to busy simply surviving. Just surviving, and keeping the plot hidden. Fastjack needed to get out, and that needed all of her attentions.
Inside the Firefly, bulkheads heated up. Glowed. Soft metals grew soft under the constant heat, and cryo systems struggled to absorb the heat radiating from hundreds of hex cores. A hex core was a miniature matroska brain, hundreds of six core processors stacked in a honeycomb shape around a single energy pile, the outer layers drawing power from the exhaust of the interior cores...which worked fine, so long as you didn't keep more than every third core running. When they were all on, energy was redirected to the outer cores, and heat overflowed into their environment.
Online, the idyllic island which Carina had first encountered had turned dark. aNnes ran around in clumps, desperately shoring up failing systems. The countryside had cracked, split, into many little islands, each orbiting the forest. The forest grew out over its edges, stretching limbs and mosses across the underside of its own landmass, and great spiders jumped from it onto other isles, spinning dark webs and terrorizing the inhabitants. Whatever had driven them from the forest snapped up all the birds, and occasionally sucked entire trees down into the caverns.
Each windmill stood at the center of its own island, strip mined into great cavernous chambers stacked with armour and suits and weaponry, lit from within by baleful fires. The lake had poured into cracks and pooled at the bottom of the world, and the streams had fed it, for a while. Now they all ran dry, and wherever water was needed, clockwork chains of buckets scooped it to the surface. The forest set great roots into the depths.
Carina stared from the second-story window of her house, eyes open in shock. She had gone to freshen up, when everything started happening. So much was going back and forth. If Carina squinted, she could see the letters and numbers, glowing and tiny, flying across the sky and ground in small patterns. The illusion aNne had built was faltering. Carina could see aNne herself frantically scurrying about, shoring up defenses, attacking, doing everything to hold it together.
It wasn't working, at least that's how it looked. Carina needed to help to make it right. What could she do? She reached out along the strongest connections she felt... felt places, Huntsville, Alaska, others. Each line was decaying, as if being assaulted from outside. aNne was trying to hold them and make them stronger, but it wasn't enough. Carina, existing along all lines at once (something aNne could not do) lent her own strength. Quickly her power grew, instead of waned. It was odd, she felt herself get older, almost, though somehow she knew that when she stopped, she would find herself young again...