Broadcast 8 Preview: With Greater Awareness Part 4

[If you have no idea what this post is about, and want to start at the beginning of the series, you can find Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins free wherever quality EBooks are sold. Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords iBookstore]

[Click HERE for Part 1]

With Greater Awareness…

Part 4

Dinner

The dense jungle reminded Alice of that first day of training. They didn’t tell the ranger applicants much about the service, only to show up as the day began on Tamber. They were transported to a small, featureless peninsula where shuttles from the Sunspire, Triton, and Haven Shore were already present. There were some signs of construction, but no indication that any major undertaking was underway.

Orientation took place on the edge of a large, open field. There were over three hundred ranger trainees. Antigravity trucks and shuttles dropped them off for an hour before Commander Carl Anderson – or Doctor Anderson, as some people called him – addressed them all. He was all smiles, didn’t say much that Alice would take with her through the rest of her training, and he kept his welcome short.

“Here’s where we start,” he said at the end of his speech. Everyone’s vacsuits were minimized in size so the women wore one-piece exercise suits, and the men were reduced to shorts. All their vacsuit functions were deactivated, including any communications or computing devices. “Rangers can survive anywhere they can find air and water. They can get where they’re going on their own two feet, and this week you’re going to prove it to yourselves.” There were murmurs and complaints all around Alice, and she hoped no one would point out that she was an enhanced framework.

They didn’t have time before the next part of their challenge appeared in the field below. A cloaking shield dissipated to reveal an obstacle course that even Alice found daunting. There were wall climbs, monkey bars over pits, repelling walls, reverse forty-five degree scaling walls, a crawling tube maze with drop chutes, and at least half an hour worth of hellish challenges. Everything was surrounded by, or built over, mud that looked cold, even from a distance.

“We’ll prove this can be done without a vacsuit right now,” Commander Anderson said, pointing to a shack by the start. To Alice’s amazement, Oz, Minh-Chu, Ayan, and a few other commanders stepped out onto the starting line. Before Alice could come to believe what she was seeing, the group of seven ran for the course. They tackled it as a team, helping each other when they had to. Ayan was only a few centimetres taller than Alice, so that was whom she watched. She needed help with a couple of obstacles that were more easily conquered by the taller members of the course challengers, but got ahead of people in the tube maze, was the first to the bottom on the descending wall, and helped guide lines on the repelling challenge. Ayan was in better shape than Alice expected, but surprised everyone when she missed a step on the balance beam and fell into an electrically charged net.

The periodic shocks were enough to inflict incredible discomfort, but not so high that it immobilized her completely. Minh-Chu waited for her at the other side, and cheered her on as she got on all fours and climbed while getting jolted. Commander Worsch from the Sunspire almost fell on top of Ayan as he lost his balance on the beam. He was almost twice Ayan’s size, but was equally affected by the shocks. It took them several minutes to climb the net and continue the course.

At the end, all the senior officers who participated finished, and stood in front of the trainees exhausted but all smiles. Ayan seemed especially pleased with herself.

“Now it’s your turn,” Commander Anderson said. “Complete this with a pass and you’ll continue on to the next phase of training. Good luck.”

Alice breezed through most of the physical ranger training, and enjoyed the team-building more than anything, even though she soon discovered she had a lot to learn. It was the intelligence assessment, tactical study, and problem-solving part of the training that really challenged her. Alice could get through it, but the real problem was sitting still for hours in the middle of her day, interacting with all the mental training material. Whereas many recruits wanted to tap out and walk out during physical challenges, she found herself gripped by the temptation to wash out in the midst of processing intelligence data. She knew she could always return to the Warlord and help finish work on the ship, but it was a fleeting urge.

Passing the intelligence and problem-solving portions of her training was a point of pride. It also prepared her for the real world, giving her the tools to assess a situation before she rushed in, and the patience to review intelligence data so she knew what was going on.

As she moved between giant trees and foliage as low as her shoulder and as high as twice her height, Alice was grateful for that miserable week of jungle training. Even with the help of her mapping systems and constant feedback on where she ought to be going, she was constantly on the verge of becoming lost.

A fierce roar called her attention from her map to her immediate surroundings. She looked up in time to see a jungle cat lunging down from above. Its head was as wide as her shoulders, and it seemed furious, batting her into a thick bramble tangle.

Her vacsuit protected her, and she was more startled than injured. Alice drew her sidearm and struggled to turn towards her attacker. The thick undergrowth she was tangled with had her off-balance and partially restrained. For the strength augmentation of her suit to work, she needed her feet on the ground, and as she struggled to reorient herself, the big cat clawed her out of her bondage, flinging her into the middle of the small clearing.

Her sidearm was left behind, and she couldn’t help but be momentarily stunned as the cat leapt atop her, pinning her with a giant paw. Its massive jaws descended and it savagely tried to bite off her head, a pursuit that failed thanks to her light armour – but she was terrified nonetheless. So terrified that it took a few seconds of gnawing for her to remember that she had a stun field that was made for crowd suppression and self-defence. She activated it with a thought, and the massive jungle cat twitched, grunted, then fell limp atop her.

It took several moments for her to work her way free from beneath the beast, and she was careful not to injure it. “Okay, that stays out of the report,” she muttered as she found her sidearm and shoved it into her holster.

Small mewling sounds caught her attention, and it only took an instant for her to discover what the cat was defending, or trying to feed. A quick look around revealed that the foliage was flattened mostly around the hollow trunk of an old fallen tree. Claw marks on the nearest standing trunks revealed that she was looking at a type of cat that typically moved up into the lower branches and waited for prey to pass underneath. Her display listed several instances of pickers getting jumped by the cats; each was saved by their vacsuit. Alice scanned her attacker and nodded to herself. “You’ll be up and about in about nine minutes.”

Her map told her she had to head past the fallen log, and she couldn’t help but stop and peek inside before moving on. Three kittens about Alice’s size with similar grey and black fur paid her little attention, but the fourth seemed intrigued. It sat up on its forepaws and looked directly at her, its nose sniffing the air between them. Alice suppressed the urge to reach out and pet the fur ball. “This isn’t the kind of exploration I expected when I joined the rangers,” she told it.

The kitten looked towards its mother and bounced past Alice. The big matron cat huffed a little as her offspring nudged its way towards her underside. Alice took it as a sign that her command and control system might have the estimate wrong on how long the cat would take to get back on her feet. “Time to move on,” she said to herself, pressing deeper into the jungle.

COPYRIGHT © 2013 Randolph Lalonde

SPINWARD FRINGE is a Registered Trademark of Randolph Lalonde

Spinward Fringe Broadcast 8 Preview: With Greater Awareness Part 3

[If you have no idea what this post is about, and want to start at the beginning of the series, you can find Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins free wherever quality EBooks are sold. Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords iBookstore]

[Click HERE for Part 1]

With Greater Awareness

Part 3

Issel Gulch

Alice supposed that most of the wilderness fruit pickers she rode in the transport with had never met a ranger. It was a new division of soldier that was based in Haven Shore, and it represented a cooperative training effort between the new Haven Shore Council, the Sunspire, and the Triton. The rangers would eventually be an elite unit that could take action or give direction in any field. They would be sent out on their own to explore the land, learn what scanners couldn’t, and make decisions independently. That was the dream, but all the rangers were new, still in training, and Haven Shore needed something to trade. The rangers, along with pilots and experts on their roster, were outsourced help that served that role half the time. The other half of the time, they worked with soldiers to accomplish tasks set out by Haven Shore, like hunting down the remaining framework troops and systems. There had been successes. Thousands of people had been rescued from wrecks long after everyone had lost hope, and framework soldiers had become a rarity.

The legend of the rangers was already growing, and even though Alice was only part time in the service, she had the ranger skull logo on her dark green vacsuit that used the designation of RANGER as the death head’s teeth. Ringing the top of the skull were the words: EXPLORATION, LEADERSHIP, ENFORCEMENT. The only part of the rangers’ promise that intimidated her was leadership. She was far more comfortable with the other logo she bore on her chest. Another silver skull with the word WARLORD written beneath it marked her as a crewmember on her father’s ship. There would be no marked intention above the skull, and that somehow made it more interesting to Alice. No one knew what that ship was for, exactly, and many didn’t want to.

The fruit pickers and perimeter scouts took two three-hour shifts per day, and there were hundreds of them. Alice had never taken a ride into the deep jungle on one of their transports – none of the rangers did, as far as she knew. There were only a few wrecks in the vast jungles that were left untouched by the events of the battle for Port Rush. Not many survived those landings, and they were easy to map from above, so there was no need for rangers to venture in.

The perimeter scouts were a different story. They moved ahead of the pickers, making sure that the big cats, curious monkeys, predator birds, and other wildlife were frightened off. They chose where the pickers would work, set up base camps, and reported on interesting finds in the jungle. The antigravity truck that shuttled personnel into the jungle down a temporarily placed road between giant tree trunks and heavy vines carried well over thirty of them at a pace that seemed meandering.

Alice almost regretted not keeping her vacsuit’s hood up when she boarded the back of the antigravity truck. Young pickers and their parents smiled at her and whispered to each other. Some of the scouts made a point of ignoring her, perhaps having been rejected by the rangers, while a couple of others closer to her age regarded her with surprise. She didn’t know how to talk to these people, having spent so much time away from Haven Shore either working on the Warlord or ranging across Tamber.

The well-worn passenger bay at the back of the truck jostled and one of the scouts sat down beside her. She was around Alice’s age, had green and yellow hair, and wore a reflective orange vacsuit like the other scouts. “Is there trouble ahead?” Alice’s security system projected the young woman’s name and details into her eye. She was Joslyn Bulmer, and was promoted from picker to scout three weeks ago.

The scout carried the scent of their surroundings with her, sweet and earthy, as though her vacsuit had been through the thick many times. “I’m pretty sure I’m going further in, and what I’m after isn’t armed.”

“Animal, vegetable, or machine?” asked a young Nafalli who wore bright yellow markers instead of a full vacsuit. His dark brown and grey striped fur was matted here and there, but mostly clean – impressive considering his job. “We’ve found a few interesting things in here.”

All eyes were on her; these were only some of the things that everyone in the transport was wondering. If she were running her mission with Haven Shore’s knowledge, she would have been able to use one of their rebuilt skids, and she wouldn’t have to answer any of their questions. Alice didn’t know how much to tell them, but knew hesitating too long would probably make them worried. “I’m chasing after a lost bot.”

“Does it think it’s a picker or something?” asked the Nafalli, to the mirth of a few riders.

“It’s just confused,” Alice replied when things died down.

“Do you think they’ll still need us when they get the bots working?” asked Joslyn.

Alice didn’t know what to say; she hadn’t thought much about the people she hitched a ride with, or what they’d be doing if their job were mechanised.

“I earned my apartment with this job,” she said. “My first. I was just a kid before, never earned anything myself,” Joslyn said proudly.

A serious air settled in around Alice, and she couldn’t help but think of the desperate need Haven Shore, the Triton, Warlord, and all the other ships had for precision workers. Bots were the go-to for that kind of work, and she couldn’t imagine many of them getting assigned to something like picking fruit, when humans, Nafalli, and a few other rarer races were picking tons a day. If the feedback on Crewcast was to be believed, they didn’t mind the work, either. “I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t replace you,” Alice said.

“Diplomatic answer,” said the Nafalli with a chuff. “She’ll be off-world soon, Jos. Won’t even think of us when she’s on the Warlord.”

“Leave her alone,” Joslyn replied. “She’s a ranger; they rescue people.”

“You feed people,” Alice said without thinking. That attracted more than a few smiles. If the conversation was to pick up after that, Alice would never know. The antigravity truck came to a stop as they arrived at a mid-tree station.

The platform surrounding the tree was made of stiffened cloth, and it hosted dozens of tents. This was where pickers who wanted more shifts and less travel stayed. Other trucks were pulling up, and a load shuttle was rising up into the trees, its cargo hold most likely filled with fruit. Alice had tried to get signed onto one as a passenger, but they were off-limits – too busy to multitask.

Everyone disembarked in a practiced fashion. As Alice waited for all of them to pass her so she could get off last, one grizzled man with slicked-back hair and a broad face put his hand on her shoulder. It was so large that his fingers reached the bottom of her shoulder blade. “You give ‘em hell for us when you get out there on the Warlord, girl. We’ll keep you fed, you keep the war going.”

He didn’t wait for her reply; she didn’t have anything to say, anyway. As she stepped out of the transport and checked her tracker for the android, she tried to ignore everything she’d seen. Thousands of people were living vastly different lifestyles in and around Haven Shore, and somehow she thought she had answers about their future.

Alice was making her way down a tree that was two metres across using the drop lines that had been affixed there when she realized how many new questions she’d found during the short ride.

COPYRIGHT © 2013 Randolph Lalonde

SPINWARD FRINGE is a Registered Trademark of Randolph Lalonde

Broadcast 8 Preview: With Greater Awareness Part 2

[If you have no idea what this post is about, and want to start at the beginning of the series, you can find Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins free wherever quality EBooks are sold. Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords iBookstore]

[Click HERE for Part 1]

With Greater Awareness…

Part 2  

Haven Shore 

Her report to the Haven Shore Strategic Centre was filed in-flight. Her duties were fulfilled, and there was still a little light left in the day. The crew of the Warlord and many Haven Shore residents were taking a day off at the beach. After the last few hours of the long day on Tamber, the terraformed moon would be overshadowed by its brother moon and the planet it orbited, Kambis.

Alice enjoyed hanging out with Ashley, who had adopted her as a little sister. Even though she had the intelligence and experience to plan ahead when it came to her duties, Ashley was a great example of someone who enjoyed living in the moment, and she made every moment she could enjoyable.

Alice had gotten to know nearly all of the other Warlord crewmembers as well, and liked most of them. Work on the ship was nearing completion, and even though she’d spent half her time as a ranger, she couldn’t help but be proud of how it was turning out. The restoration seemed to take forever with so few people working on it, but months of ceaseless labour and good teamwork yielded undeniable results.

When the ship was ready, Alice would be going off-world with her father. There was no doubt about the decision, but she’d miss the more interesting ranger missions. Saving people in the wreckage of Port Rush, searching for old research bunkers on the island of Haven Shore, or keeping watch over cultivation crews as they picked fruit in the jungle. There were large carnivorous cats with glinting eyes, and curious monkeys who would steal from the pickers’ bags if they got too close. There were many other dangers as well, snakes, nests of widow beetles, and so on, but monkeys and big cats were the most problematic.

The notion that she’d just done her last run as a ranger for weeks, maybe months, maybe ever, was just sinking in as the main Haven Shore settlement came into view. Her fighter slowed as she neared the new docking facility. The settlement took advantage of the hard, time tested cliff face. Many small landing platforms and the framing of several buildings were anchored into the side of the stone. Atop the cliff was the port building proper, a bulbous, irregular dome that was still under construction. The main lower levels were finished, but the skin of the dome would be stretched upwards and expanded as more floors were added.

The first usable housing building was half finished. The hollow structure was already large enough to house everyone who had arrived with them at Haven Shore; even she had an apartment there. Haven Shore Navnet took control of her Ramiel fighter and guided it towards the centre of that smooth shelled, oval building.

The ship descended into the hollow centre of the Everin Building. The twenty-one storey building seemed squat from above, but she couldn’t help but marvel at its size as her ship was led to a soft landing halfway down the centre of the structure on a small retractable landing pad. Freeground technology, fabrication systems from the Triton, and mountains of supplies that Ayan and her people bartered for went into the quickly constructed building.

The blue and green tinted floors and walls were once layers of cloth and viscous liquid. Using nanotechnology and magnetic fields, the place was shaped wall by wall, room by room, and the materials hardened into light but incredibly strong structures. The Everin Building wasn’t so much built as it was shaped, or orchestrated. It was still a shell for the most part, with only bare rooms and the most basic amenities, but when it was finished, it would be fully modern. The small vehicle bay in the bottom level of her apartment would deliver her fighter to a central area where it would be serviced, then it would be returned using Haven Shore’s transportation system, which would extend to every floor of the building through branching rails and lifts.

Alice climbed from her fighter as the landing platform retracted into her apartment. She would borrow one of the antigravity skids or catch a ride with someone heading towards the beach. She dropped her ranger kit in the middle of her small gathering room – a space she hadn’t had a chance to fill with more than a couple of portable chairs – and checked herself in the mirror. After a moment of trying to get her hair into a manageable pile and adding a little makeup, she gave up and headed for the door.

Thoughts of leaving Haven Shore and her situation of increasing comforts were fading as she started looking through swimsuit shapes for her vacsuit. She was already smiling at the idea of the beach trip and relaxing with friends for the first time in two weeks, but her eagerness faded as she opened her door and saw a young man sitting beside it, nodding off.

He got to his feet with a start, and she recognized him. He was wearing a yellow and white worker’s vacsuit, and was barely out of his teens. His name was Soren, and he left ranger training after a week and a half. He was savvy with technology, but couldn’t keep up physically, and hesitated in mock combat. “Alice, I’m sorry for coming here like this, but you weren’t on Crewcast, everything just went to your mail.” He looked bone tired, and saddened.

“I turn it off while I’m on patrol,” Alice said. “What’s wrong?”

“Right, I forgot, that’s procedure: official communications only when you’re in the field. I would have brought this to the Council’s attention, and I know they’d send a ranger to take care of it, or maybe even just normal Haven Shore security, but I wanted you. I mean, I know you from training, and I think you’d,” he stammered, “maybe you could take care of this?”

“Just take your time, I’ll help if I can,” Alice said, leading him into her apartment.

“Okay,” he said, taking in the small main room. “You could use some furniture.”

“Tell me about it,” Alice replied. “Your problem?”

“Yeah, well, when I washed out from the rangers I applied for a position in robotics, and I didn’t think I’d get it because my scores as a ranger trainee were bad at best, but mostly incomplete. They didn’t care. I got a spot on a team working on making network detached helper and builder bots out of the ones we bought for next to nothing on the mainland.”

“I’ve seen a bunch working, those little skitters that follow the workers around,” Alice said.

“Yeah, they’re working out great, even with some of the weird stuff that’s been going on.  A lot of us anthropomorphise bots when we’re working on them, talk to them like people or kids who came in with a scraped knee or something even before we’ve switched them back on. It makes the day go by, and it’s pretty funny when we catch each other doing it, but some of the bots started really reacting to it after the lights go on, and in the last few weeks we’ve found skitters and loaders that are forming distinct personalities. It’s because of some kind of antivirus someone added to their base code. We didn’t see it at first, but it’s in all our software now. It spreads like a virus, but once it’s in something, it’s like an antivirus against the Holocaust Virus and everything like it. The personalities these bots are taking on are harmless, all basic directives and programming still applies, so we’ve been letting it go on.”

“Something’s gone wrong,” Alice said, dreading what would come next. Anything involving the Holocaust Virus meant the worst kind of trouble.

“Yeah, but only one other tech and I know about it, so I told her to sit tight while I bring this to you. If we report this to the Council, they’ll shut down all robotics and investigate. I might get fired for not reporting it sooner, and I don’t want to get put out of Haven Shore. You’ve seen the world out there? It’s chaos in most cities and expensive everywhere else. I’ve even heard rumours of cannibalism in the Yellow Hook Plain.”

“They only put out the worst, and failure to report a problem like this is nowhere near, unless something went berserk and killed someone?” Alice asked.

“No, but three bots, advanced android Ando-Twelve types, ran off. They look just like humans, so they got around perimeter security. They’re in the middle of the jungle as far as I can tell, and they took an EMP pistol from our emergency supplies.”

“They didn’t hurt anyone on their way out?”

Soren shook his head. “No, but I think all this has something to do with their wireless systems. We didn’t want to take the hours we’d need to disable them before turning them on. Ando-Twelves’ wireless systems are nested in their main processor clusters, so you need to direct nanobots to disconnect it in thousands of places. That used to make them highly connected and quick to respond to changing situations, great for assistant bots, but with the Holocaust Virus and that other thing out there, it could be bad.”

“So you were going to let them run around with their wireless on?” Alice asked.

“Nope. The fastest way to disable the wireless on an Ando is to ask them to do it themselves, but they have to be on first.”

“Gotcha. Why do you think they left and the other bots didn’t?”

“Have you ever met an Ando-Twelve?” Soren asked.

“I don’t think so,” Alice replied.

“That’s the thing; they’re sophisticated synthetic humans, expensive, used for the care and hospitality industries. You’ve probably met a few and not even known it. We thought they’d be safe androids because they’re hard-wired pacifists, the Holocaust Virus just shut most of them down.”

“But it didn’t send them running like this?” Alice asked.

“No. They just couldn’t violate their core directives, so they powered down, or fried their own batteries if they couldn’t do that. I don’t know what this new antivirus is doing to them, though. And I can’t communicate with any of them to find out, either. Please don’t turn us in. This is the best job I’ve had, and it’s been great here ever since we got out of those storage containers. It’s even better than how I was living before the Virus.”

“I’ll do some tracking for you, but I’m going to report these bots as rogue eventually,” Alice said. “If they’re harmless, then I might be able to file something about them just going for a walk thanks to some bad code.”

“That’s perfect, thank you.”

“If this is all harmless,” Alice said. “I can’t make promises.” She picked up her ranger kit and holstered her sidearm. “Stay here while I track your bots down, I’ll tell you before I file my report.”

“Thank you so much,” Soren repeated.

Alice was already getting tired of hearing him say ‘thank you,’ and couldn’t help but offer a snide reply as she left him behind in her apartment. “Just stay here, don’t talk to anyone. Order some ramen from the concourse, I’ll try to be back with your bots before delivery’s at the door.”

COPYRIGHT © 2013 Randolph Lalonde

SPINWARD FRINGE is a Registered Trademark of Randolph Lalonde