Idle Hands Pt. 05

Thomas frowned.

"It was all a coincidence, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, seems like it," Dey said.

"Godfuckingdamn it." Thomas looked annoyed. "I hate coincidences. They make my neck itch." He tapped the back of his neck. "Still, I might as well give you the Bourne Speech and tell you my evil plan before trying you to an impossible to escape death trap and leaving you to die." He turned to walk away. Paul and Basma grabbed Dey's arms and dragged her to her feet, while Kuz took Xee. They were all followed up by the Yahaag.

This ship has been reinforced, Loki said. I'm feeling shield emitter pulses in this floor. That slight vibration? That comes from the pressure of the warp fields. Some corridors are made lighter, the water around the ship has been lightened...

[How long would it take to set this up?]

A month, maybe two, Loki said. It'd just take a few thousand bucks worth of DV emitters and someone with some technical know how.

[Like our transphobic asshole fuckface over here?] Dey glanced at Paul.

Ayup. The good news, though? The ship got to this pressure and then rusted. Now, they took all that pressure back without replacing the metal. If the shields go, this entire ship's going to implode like a black hole. Loki chuckled. For someone who can't even tell Bond from Bourne, DuBois has got himself a great fucking lair.

They came to a large ball room that had been only partially repaired. The carpet had rotted to nothing, the paintings were nothing more than gaping frames, and the floor that was warped and cracked. But that wasn't what made Dey whistle. Rather, it was the computer system someone had set up in the middle of the room. In the 22^nd century, most computing was handled by a networked collection of machines that all communicated all the time constantly. Cloud computing combined with the internet of things. No one needed to get supercomputers together in one place, not unless you were a military starship that needed to calculate firing solutions for a half a dozen guns without being hacked.

Or if you're trying to run a spontaneously generated AI, Loki whispered.

[Huh?]

Thomas stepped over to the jumble of computers and spun around a computer monitor that had been mounted on a boom arm. Cables drew taut and the screen shone with the face of a cracked emoticon, twitching and bouncing around the screen in a way that was just random enough to be deeply unsettling.

"Captain Gallagher," Thomas said, preening. "Meet Forseti."

A droning whine came from the computer that made Dey's teeth stand on edge. The image on the screen distorted and expanded outwards, rippling in mind-aching patterns that never seemed to quite make sense. Non-euclidean forms were born and died in jagged chaos as that smiling emoticon became something hideous.

Thomas chuckled. "Balder's son."