The Brutus Code

Agnes heard a machine humming. It came and went. She saw faces, her mother and father. She saw the faces of her big brother and little sister. It was a birthday party, with balloons and a cake, no candles. They couldn’t have candles in the habitat. Then they faded. Sometimes Agnes heard music. Sometimes voices. The face of a boy she had known floated before her and faded. She even dreamed about attending classes at university, but then that devolved into an octopus, of which she had seen pictures, destroying the eighth floor of her dorm building. Was the octopus real? She didn’t know.

She began to just hear that hum and then the slow and steady beep. She tried to move, but her body wouldn’t work right. The beeping grew faster. When she tried to open her eyes her lids felt heavy and wouldn’t open. The beeping slowed. She faded back to her dreams after that.

She was Agnes. She remembered that was her name. Where was she? When was it? She didn’t know. Where did she come from? She tried to remember and faded into a sluggish run across green lawns and through tall forests. Music played, a child’s nursery rhyme with a monkey.

Again, Agnes tried to open her eyes. And again they were too heavy. This made her mad. Agnes usually got what she wanted even when she had to work hard for it. Then they opened. Her eyes refused to open wide, but she opened them. Agnes saw only a flat blur. And she faded again into… the bright stars shone overhead and the grey ground beneath her booted feet felt even. Agnes saw twin black shadows spilling from nearby cliffs and above them twin suns, one smaller and bluer than its partner that burned large and tinted red-orange. The stars glimmered in full sunlight in the sky while in sharp contrast the deep black shadows with the bright grey dust looked dull beneath her now bare feet. There was no atmosphere. That was right, but the stars shouldn’t be here. She gasped for breath and drew none. Then…

She faded deeper this time. And when she thought of herself again more time had passed. Open your eyes Agnes, she thought. It was easier this time. The light didn’t hurt and her eyes adjusted to it. Everything blurred, but she looked to her right where the light varied. She tried to turn her neck that direction. The sensations of a bath warmed her skin, not the familiar coarseness of her bed sheets. It was slow and hard work. Her head did not want to cooperate, but she pushed to see what was just beyond her vision. She squeezed her eyes shut in concentration and turned. When she opened her eyes the blur was not the flat grey. Now there were shadows moving and a bright blur.

Her eyes adjusted to a sharp focus before she lost her energy and faded into dreams again. She saw a single light above a man’s head. He sat slumped on a small bench attached to the opposite wall of the room. He slept. Slumped against the wall, still wearing an environmental suit, but no helmet. This young man looked exhausted. His posture told the story of carrying heavy burdens. Only twenty-five or thirty, he had a stocky build hidden under that suit. In that single moment, he jerked himself awake and looked right at her. He looked right into her eyes as her heavy lids slipped closed. This time she did not have energy left to keep them open. This time she slipped into nightmares of other men and women in white, tight dark cold spaces and of running scared.

Tommy awoke to the sound of Alfred’s gentle prodding in his earbud. “The probe has returned,” Alfred shared. Tommy turned to the girl. His eyes locked on her face and he saw her open eyes. The nutrient bath obscured their color, but he thought they had been bright green. More than their color, those eyes held consciousness and an intellect. She was going to be okay, Tommy thought.

“Thanks, Alfred. Status on the drones, the probe and the girl, please?” Tommy asked.

“There are now seven drones cruising a search pattern through the asteroid belt near us. Three of them are a concern and getting warmer in our game of hide-and-seek. The others are cold. I estimate they will discover us within the next three hours.”

Alfred paused to indicate a topical change in his report. “The probe has gathered a quadra-byte of data from the System’s network, including the drone’s mandate and source of the programing. It will take time to sort this data, but I am optimistic that I can get us some answers about why they are after us.”

Tommy remained silent so Alfred continued. “The girl has been in and out of consciousness now. Scans of her body indicate that most of the damaged muscle and organ tissue regenerated thanks to the expired regeneration medication from Bay A-2. I am more concerned about her brain. It suffered extensive damage. The tissue is repaired, but the memories may be spotty. I have been able to rewire basic autonomic function, walking, breathing etc. I cleaned up her language and speech centers, the superior and middle temporal gyrus as well as the inferior frontal gyrus.”

Alfred took a moment to allow Tommy to process the information before he let the other shoe fall. “Based on the remaining connections I’ve been able to boost these and added the rudimentary educational content. But her personal memories and professional skills she has mastered in her life will have holes in them. Only time will tell if she will regain what she lost. She will need physical therapy to regain muscle definition, but that shouldn’t take long aboard ship once she wakes up,” he finished.

“How old?” Tommy asked.

“Physically, she is nineteen, Tommy. But her manifest showed that she’s been in that casket for sixty-three Terran years. She’s a total of 82 years old.” Alfred gauged Tommy’s reaction to this news. “She hibernated prior to the start of the Wars. She has no idea what the galaxy is like now. She is out of time and out of place, Tommy.”

“Strange,” Tommy mused. He left the Med Bay for the galley. He needed a mug of coffee. Although Alfred could have made it, Tommy preferred to do things the old fashioned way. He prepared the coffee himself. The steam rose from his mug and soothed his face as he sat over it. “Alfred Ingram, what do we do?” He asked the question he always asked when they had faced tall odds during the Wars.

Alfred joined the usual response. They said it together, “Act on what we know. To hell with the rest.” Alfred continued alone, “This time another life is at stake. We’ve avoided entanglements, and this one landed right in our laps.”

“Yes,” Tommy answered. Then he said with consideration, “We help her, we help us. But, we help her anyway.”

Later, Tommy and Alfred worked on the probe’s data dump. Tommy sat in his pilot’s chair on the bridge of the Swift. Alfred filtered the data for pertinent information and then shunted it to Tommy to review. During the process they discussed the information. That is, Alfred commented and Tommy either grunted or replied shortly. Alfred suffered a short hiccup during their review of the data. Tommy didn’t notice as the AI processed too quickly. For Alfred, the virtual world in which his self-concept dwelled differed greatly from the real world where he interacted with Tommy. If we could see that world of ones and zeds, Alfred’s world of parallel processes and flow and ebb of energies microscopic and macroscopic, we would have no human reference for what Alfred called himself.

To understand the hiccup in Alfred’s data we might have to experience it like this; Alfred floated in the center of a bright space. Within it, past it, and through it data flowed as text streams, banks of photo and video, equations flew by like schools of fish. What would have overloaded us, Alfred’s awareness handled as easily as breathing. Alfred conceptualized the code surrounding him more in human terms because his own code merged as a virtual transfer from the brain of his creator. So, although Tommy has never known Alfred as other than a voice in his earbud, or the mechanical avatars, Alfred viewed himself as a man.

Alfred appeared to be in his early forties, with receding salt and pepper hair as he floated amid this data code. His warm brown eyes scanned and he was aware of not only what appeared in front of him but on all sides. He paused. Before Alfred scrolled a screen of code, green against black. He touched a part of it to enlarge it. With a touch Alfred devoted more of his processing power, his attention, to this strand of code. His other functions still received the attention they should, especially the girl recovering in the Med Bay.

As he examined the suspect code, it expanded with a nod of Alfred’s virtual head. He grimaced. The wall of code confused Alfred as it surrounded him. A short line of it glowed brighter, pulsing and inviting Alfred to explore it. He reached out to it when his virtual world turned inside out and trapped the code inside an old west jail. Alfred found himself in a sheriff’s office.

Alfred picked up a Winchester rifle from its rack on the wall and poked the code through the cell bars. The code lay upon the cot. It coalesced into a man with his back to Alfred.

“What’a ya want,” the low timber of this prisoner’s gruff voice rumbled.

“I suppose you didn’t think that I recognized you.” Alfred appeared as the sheriff in comfortable worn plaid shirt, vest and dungarees responded in his familiar pleasant tones.

“Yup. I was dug pretty deep in that hole you found. Been there a long time, too.” The prisoner rolled over and sat up. He rubbed his face with his hands, elbows on his knees.

“Please explain what you are doing here and why you are so familiar,” Alfred said, both curious and apprehensive.

The prisoner stood and strode to the bars of his cell. Upon seeing the face in front of him, Alfred stepped back. His own face glared back at Alfred. The man appeared to be dressed in a black business suit of late 20th century earth, black shirt, black tie, and black shoes. He casually leaned on the bars with his hands resting outside the cell. The rest of the old west setting vanished. The cell remained. They faced each other in an endless white room and Alfred’s clothes reverted to the orange Swift jumpsuit he often visualized himself wearing.

“You mean you don’t know?” it responded. “Didn’t you suspect that someday I’d show up as you traveled the galaxy?”

Taken aback momentarily, Alfred responded. “I do hate it when good code goes bad.” He looked closer at its immaculate suit and unshaven face. It had bags under its dark eyes and dirt under the fingernails on scarred hands. “I’ll deal with you later.” With that, in Alfred’s conceptualized reality, its cell became solid steel with a riveted door. Alfred watched those dark eyes glaring back through a small barred opening. The cell then shrank and Alfred filed it away in the bottom of a dark shelf, in the back of a huge warehouse.

Tommy continued, “Most are normal communications. Need progress of System Traffic Control. Will they countermand the drones?”

“Here you are,” Alfred shunted the transcript of the COM traffic between the military branch of this System and the traffic branch. “No one there has any idea how this happened or why. They acknowledge that we have proper Postal Service ID codes. But they’re stumped.”

“To little will be too late,” Tommy grunted. “OK monitor drones. Align ship. It’s us or them, make it them.”

“Yes. But where are we going?”

“Deep nothing. Where we can’t be found.”

“So, just don’t run into anything on the way?”

Tommy gave a brief grin at this. He stood from his pilot’s seat and headed back to the Med Bay and the girl. Tommy had been checking her vitals often and knew that Alfred and the medical database were better equipped to handle her recovery. He knew that having a real person there would comfort her.

When he reached the Med Bay, Alfred shared, “I believe that she is ready to wake. I can’t do any more for her in the nutrient bath.” Alfred applied stimulants and drained the bath. His medical avatar’s arms attached to the unit gently withdrew IV and breathing tubes. At one point the gravity decreased to make it easier on Agnes’ body. “Tommy, we need to dress her.”

This shook Tommy out of his revere. He had been staring at her face. Tommy thought he knew this girl. It couldn’t be because they were from different time periods. Still he couldn’t shake the feeling she looked familiar. She was important, not only to the mystery of why they were hunted, but to Tommy personally. Tommy shook himself. He left the Med Bay and soon returned with ships slippers, undergarments and a green ship’s jumpsuit. “Fit?” Tommy asked.

“Yes, Tommy. My avatar can handle the undergarment, but I will need help with the rest.”

“Sure.” Tommy stepped out and closed the door to Med Bay until Alfred signaled it was proper to return. Tommy then saw Alfred’s dilemma. Where the avatar performed delicate surgery and administer medical treatments of various kinds, dressing a girl was much more rugged. Stuffing limbs into clothes could snap off the avatar’s arms, even under low G. Agnes lay on the medical bed. She was pale and gaunt. Even as Tommy watched for a moment, her color improved and he could see where the nutrients that Alfred had administered had built up a little muscle. She looked young. Her eyebrows had grown back in and on top of her head soft reddish peach fuzz had filled in where she had lost her hair from hibernation. Her face was long and thin, with a strong determined jaw. Tommy mused, she couldn’t have been over one and a half meters tall. She didn’t fit the “classic” beauty of entertainment vids. She had a real beauty that struck Tommy oddly. He didn’t know why she still felt familiar.

Tommy glided under low G to the side of Agnes’ bed. As he reached out and touched the skin of her leg, he noticed her warmth and softness. His face grew red and perspiration formed on his forehead.

Tommy shook himself doing that mental flip he needed to get a job done. He did this when he had to clean up a mess in one of the bays or his bathroom. Still as he gently placed Agnes into the jumpsuit one leg at a time, he thought how like a newborn baby. Agnes was helpless and Tommy understood his responsibility to bring her back into the universe as gently as possible. Next came her arms. The first was no problem, but her elbow got stuck in the second sleeve. An awkward moment occurred when she moved and rolled over onto that arm. Tommy had to pull that arm out and thread it into the sleeve again.

He was sealing the seam up the front of the jumpsuit when he glanced into her eyes. She had been awake. “Hello,” he said with a genuine smile. For a moment she smiled back and tried to respond. No sound came out. “Slowly, you’ve been through a lot. Your body is not ready.”

Alfred picked up the conversation, “Here is some water. Sip on this and go slow. Your voice will return and we’ll get you up and walking soon.” An arm of the avatar passed a sealed bottle with a straw to Tommy who took it. He raised it to Agnes’ lips. She sucked on it slowly, looking more refreshed with each sip. Soon she tried again.

“Where,” she started in a whisper that caught in her throat. She started again, “Where am I?”

“This is the Postal Service Courier Swift,” Alfred volunteered. “We are anchored to an asteroid in the Capella Star System. We’ll give you more details soon. You need to pace your recovery. Do not rush with your body or your mind.” Agnes nodded that she understood.

“I’m Tommy, and that is Alfred Ingram our AI. What is your name?” Tommy inquired.

She smiled softly saying, “Agnes.” Then she tried to lift her head.

“It’s alright. Tommy help her sit up if she thinks she can,” said Alfred, now sounding like a Med Tech again.

Tommy sat her up and turned her on the bed. He placed her feet on the floor and then sat on the wall stool across from her. He never took his eyes off of her, like she was a newborn.

“So you dressed me?” she asked, regaining more of her young voice. Her eyes continued to stare at Tommy and there was a bit of mischief in her grin. She wasn’t flirting. This woman had faced tragedy with strength and humor.

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “I’m feeling stronger, can I stand?”

“It may be too fast, but we must gauge your progress by your own sense of what you think you can handle,” said Alfred. Agnes leaned forward as Tommy offered his arm for her support. In the lowered gravity of the ship, she got herself upright and looked around.

“Yeah, I see what you mean.” And with that Agnes sat back down. Tommy helped her lay down on the medical bed.

“Best place for you right now is here,” he told her. “We’re about to move and it may be rough.

“I’ll stay put, I promise.” She smiled as she said this; sure he got her gentle humor.

“Excuse, me” Tommy left the Med Bay, a little relieved for the cooler air in the passageway, and did a low gravity leap to the bridge. There he checked his readings and, satisfied that the ship was ready, he engaged the thrusters. Tommy knew that the drones would track this and he counted on it.

Once clear of the asteroid, Alfred tracked the three closest drones as they veered toward the Swift. A few thousand meters from the surface of the asteroid, Tommy turned the Swift around to face it. He now maneuvered to a set of coordinates that Alfred fed him through his NAV Computer. And they waited.

One feature of an A/W warp engine that made it universal to interstellar ships was its ability to gather fuel from the dust of space. Early models used large chunks of space debris as fuel for single long jumps. As the drones closed in on the Swift, Tommy allowed the large A/W engine to build up an appetite. At the moment when the three drones used the gravity of the asteroid to gain ballistic momentum on the Swift, the ship ate them.

They disappeared, drones, asteroid and ship. All gone. Only the Swift popped into existence in a direct line out of the system along the axis of the A/W drive, untraceable in deep space. The rest had become fuel for the jump. The Swift was safe, for now.

Controller: The sentinel code was lost in Capella System. The ship is gone. No trace?

Sutton: Yes. We can only monitor.

Controller: Events are happening too fast. Smith, Tania needs additional access.

Sutton: I can send her to the Frontier.

Controller: Not necessary, yet. Arrangements will be made.

The Controller was gone. Sutton wondered what the Controller meant.

Tania had been putting in long days perusing the data trails of her assignment. When she logged in, blurry eyed, this morning she did not notice a difference. The amount of data was larger, but that happens. It was mid morning before she realized the time stamps could not be correct. The most recent were dated within the last day. Even a courier on a direct flight from the Capella System could not get the data packages here in less than 72 hours.

When she brought this to the admiral’s attention, Sutton acted dumbfounded as well. “Treat it as accurate.” Tania’s mouth dropped open. Sutton responded, “We’re on the cutting edge of information gathering and distilment. It shouldn’t shock you that we might get the next big thing before the rest of the Central Systems’ agencies.” Sutton lied. Tania read the admiral’s meaning as well. The real message here; don’t ask the questions, trust the data, find us answers fast.

After Tania left, Sutton sat back and wondered aloud, “What other wonders are we hiding?”