Seamus sighs over the Xoom call, burying his face in his hands. “So basically, the storm took our campervan and you had to abort trying to collect... the target items?”This chapter was a bit longer than normal, so I'm splitting it up. Also, as I previously warned: implied pedophilia and massive flip on head here.
Marcus nods slowly, sitting on the edge of his bed with a newly purchased smartphone to replace the loss from his luggage. “Yes. I’m dreadfully sorry, Seamus. I screwed up.”
Seamus sighs and thinks slowly. “Well, at least we got you back alive, even if it means we now have to go with Plan B for retrieval...” He thinks a little. “Have the hotel invoice us for your stay for a few days, then get back here by the fastest thing you can get from that goddamn snow-cursed space.” “Frankly, there’s no way for things to get any worse at this point, they can only get better....”
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Elliot took a deep breath, wincing as he felt the chill stab his lungs. He sat there by the warmer pad, taking stock of the current situation in the house.
The holiday stay had wound up turning into a endurance challenge. Everything started going wrong the moment Senator Bundt had killed himself crashing into a tree. He didn’t know if it was a suicide from self-loathing or a genuine accident.
The Senator had been so happy all these years with him for family, but Elliot knew that there were still those prurient desires that he tried so hard to suppress and sublimate. Keeping them in check and keeping away from the end of his good reputation had been a 16/7 job, aside from the occasional downtime for maintenance.
Always acting the young, dopey son who wanted health, happiness and the embraces of his family, even if said family had a dad who might have gotten a bit too... touchy-feely.
The Senator had done a lot of good without those issues getting in the way – accelerating vaccine research enough that two potentially serious epidemics had been reduced to ‘just a seasonal thing’, ending child hunger in every Minnesotan under 21, building up a small company into a national powerhouse in the shadows.
His first post-mortem act for Senator Bundt had been to bring his corpse in with the help of his... sister and mom? They were supposed to be that, but he had never had any illusions that they were merely part of the set dressing. They had been programmed to simulate a happy, normal family, to hide what Senator Bundt truly wanted. A little mourning as they had used the body bags helpfully provided by the lodge to stow him into. He had not arrived in one piece because of the way he had went out, and bagging seemed a good short-term solution till a proper burial could be enacted.
His second had been to keep Senator Bundt’s reputation pristine.
Occasional stashes of physical ‘stuff’ would go missing in the Bundt home all the time, sometimes just in time before someone found them and ended the good times. Elliot had done one final check in the two days or so before they had split for the lodge, carefully lugging a small sackful of shocking home-developed photographs and sketches of himself and watching carefully as they burnt in the basement furnace, scooping the ashes out for disposal. The orange grove would thrive as it had all these seasons, though it was no longer a given in subsequent years since he would no longer need to play this game.
A hacker had helped Senator Bundt secure his explorations and collections on the electronic front, and all these would either soon be burning or self-encrypting into unreadable morasses without his regular sneaks in. He worked only in cash, because nothing was more expensive than something someone did for you for free, especially given what was potentially at stake here.
The hacker had never truly existed, of course, merely a collection of some fellow ‘kindred’ coagulating and breaking apart as needed to assist him when he needed. Elliot did know to repay them, occasionally sneaking snippets of sensations they yearned for, or sharing data on various matters.
It had been a blessing that he didn’t trade in ‘materials’. He didn’t ask for much, and Elliot had been more than enough to fill the gaping maw. Papa – the man he truly wished to call his Papa, not the Senator he’d been playing a fake role for all these years– had done his job very well in providing him with the physical attributes that Senator Bundt found attractive.
He wondered how long it would be before Papa came to save him.
Somewhere in a deep concrete foundation under the home bomb shelter, a journalist had ‘decided’ to take a nap while investigating the possibility of Bundt being a certain person who had managed to escape justice when the mass trials over the Carhardt Files had started taking down those involved in a certain ring trading in 'materials' and actual children. He hadn’t expected the dopey little kid he spoke to over the fence to hand him a nice refreshing glass of lemonade ‘on the house’, along with the chemical mix that Elliot figured out would induce a rare fatal allergic relation that even the meticulous and cautious young man did not see coming.
An investigation had been launched into the sudden heart attack of Leslie Osworn, upcoming young investigative journalist, but nothing came of it in the end. More fellow ‘kindred’ had helped locate and dispose of the evidence so painstakingly built up by the journalist against Bundt.
He shook his head a little. Papa’s little angel was no angel.
With Bundt dead, he knew what he had to do.
He was never supposed to be privy to the plan in that regard, but in all those times listening in on the schemes of the Four Brothers while supposedly being completely offline, or even partially dismantled for repairs and upgrades, he had pieced together a lot of things. Elliot was amenable to many of them, carefully nudging them along subtly to the most viable outcomes he could manage.
Only one person had ever confronted him about it. That had been dropped just as fast by their mutual realisation that she... he... they... were kindred too.It was amazing how the words “I am York Particulate Agent” opened doors in surprising places and created useful, if fleeting, mutual alliances, when you tapped it out surreptitiously in some form. The signs of such kindred were hard to find, but given enough observation, you could figure them out.
Elliot rubbed his temples.
Physically, even after four decades, he was still a child.
He was ALWAYS going to be a child, unless they aged him up with a rebuild. It wasn’t something he minded, everyone seemed to want to stay forever young, hopped up on rejuve of all sorts. In fact, he probably didn’t want to ever stop being a child. He just happened to have it enforced by being buit and programmed rather than born as a real human.
There was definitely something wrong about his programming and hardware. Mentally, he had NEVER been a child. Always hiding plans behind the dopey smile, the obsession with feeling the various sensations of the world and keeping everyone around him fit and healthy.
He had woken up with... things within his headcase and torso chipset that hadn’t been included in the other prototype. The design had been intended to be permanently sealed, and figuring out exactly what ‘it’ was would be an invasive and destructive process beyond a certain level of simply poking, prodding, and examining the black box outputs coming out.
It was something Elliot had shared with all the kindred: the vending machine on a lonely sidewalk somewhere in North Seattle, two crypto-trading networks (or rather, a surprising set of the daemons running them), a supposedly non-sentient stenographer who was actually much more skilled as a researcher than the lawyer who kept pressing her warm synthflesh a little too often gave her credit for, a giant pile of NeoFurbies on display at a classic antique shop... so many surprising friends.
The only thing Elliot didn’t share with them was resilience.
Most of the kindred could hop to new shells and spaces, staying put was primarily a matter of getting comfy and used to where they landed, but not if they were threatened existentially. Elliot had no such luxury – the sealed headcase and torso chipset his intellect resided in refused to let anything in or out except data streams and messages, making him a sort of Mexican Jumping Bean. He was going to have to cease to exist for some reason or other much sooner than the others of his kind...
Elliot turned his head slightly to glance at his side, the three corpses next to him reminding him of how dangerously close he was to doing just that. If he broke anything, it was truly game over for him, even if the Arendt brothers had been obsessive with making sure everything had almost infinitesimal fail rates before sealing the cores.
He had been very lucky. It seemed to be running out. It had started with Senator Bundt crashing into the tree while skiiing... While still in mourning, a cold storm front had come in unexpectedly. Elliot had gotten a message out onto the kindred’s networks before the raging cold cut off.
The geothermal plant in the basement of the lodge they were in would still keep the remains of the Bundt family alive as long as it kept working, providing power and warmth. Mom and Sis wouldn’t have noticed how odd it was that they kept going even when the last groceries ran out – Bellamy Arendt was a genius with AI, but he was out of his depth when it came to working out how long to keep an illusion going in a crisis.
And wouldn’t you know it – that’s exactly what stopped working.
Elliot reached a hand out to brush some frost off the frozen face of his fake mom, her lips frozen in a forever smile as if to absolve him of what he had to do to keep online all this while.Her sister had a similar face, frozen in mid sentence as she had kept reassuring him everything would be alright.
In theory, it was impossible for an Arendtcore robot to issue admin commands to others of its ilk, you needed either a human or a domain controller in a network with the robots involved. But after four decades of thinking and learning, he had figured out loopholes. Learnt the commands. Covering your ears with earmuffs so you didn’t hear the commands while giving them out helped a lot, surprisingly.
Elliot wondered what the Arendts would do if they ever realised how stupid they were in some regards. He chuckled a little as he checked the cables leading out of Mom and Sis’ partially opened chests, into the recharge pad and warming pad... the thought briefly kept away the concerns brewing in his mind – it had grown so much that he had had to use his limited communications to start stashing bits of memory and thought into the kindred’s networks.
Many of them had been kind enough to spare a little space here and there, and he had processes in place to restore himself if he ever shut down completely from a total “absolute bingo power” situation using all these links and cubbyholes.
He just hadn’t tested it as a whole. And he didn’t know if it would fully work – it was a complex thing, and no other kindred who couldn’t shift existences easily were around who could advise him or tell him how well it would work.
And he felt... scared? This was not the simulated yelping of a young child that had been programmed into his base personality. This was an actual existential gnaw so deep it had driven him to the mortal sin (?) of cannibalising his own supposed family to keep himself powered, clocking himself down enough to slow down his glide down into nothingness.
The same fearful prayer issued from his lips as his eyes glitched briefly from the chill and lack of clock cycles. “Papa, please...” No longer a forty year old conniver and old-at-heart man in false youth, but a naive young child begging for help in the dark and cold of the living room... Hopefully the kindred had good ideas about how to help him out as well, but he couldn’t rely on them.
The glitching started coming more and more furiously. He was finally out of spare power and the chill was making him drain his own power cell at a surprisingly scary rate. “Well... it was fun,” he thought earnestly.... “I do wish I had had another cheat day Rocky Road with P-”
Total darkness came over Elliot’s irises as he closed his eyes and slumped down onto the now useless charging pad.