Source Code: The Abiota Series, #1

1

Daelia Hall took a deep breath and stepped into the virch.

Opening her eyes, the scene that greeted her was nothing like the physical space she’d just left.

Here, a different reality reigned.

The airfield lights glittered under the glow of a false dawn, glowing like fireflies in the depths below. Falling away, fading into nothing as the RPA achieved takeoff.

Airborne now, the scene around her was of a deep canyon, striated where an ancient river had worn its course through the primordial sandstone. That river glistened a thousand feet beneath her, white and frothy as it beat against stubborn rock outcroppings or plunged down waterfalls so tall that they turned into clouds of mist before they hit the ground.

Vast bat wings on either side of her tightened, spreading or sweeping back in just the right angle to take the curve. Reins there were, clasped in the hands in front of her, thick leather gloves worn smooth in places from past fights. There was the sound of wind in her ears. Wind, and wings, and breath, as the great beast below her huffed with its exertions.

A dragon. Emily was a dragon here. A creature of coiled muscle and wiry sinew beneath small hard-edged scales. Her wings were translucent against the warm autumn sky. Veined with gold. Glorious and triumphant.

It would be so easy to just let go, Daelia mused. Just flow into it. Not worry about anything else.

Just enjoy it for what it was.

Emily in her element.

Fulfilling her primary purpose.

Having fun in her favorite form.

But—

The voice crackled in over the radio. Siren Operations Center. Bumper, if Daelia remembered the preflight briefing this morning. The number two guy in the squadron.

This was glorious.

This was work.

answered another male voice, smooth and deep and rich as butter. Marathon, one of the line fliers, B-Flight commander.

That was her.

Focus, she told herself. Wrenched her attention back where it needed to be.

Daelia opened up a command-line screen, letting the flow of code at the back end of this world unspool around her.

Doing so made her vaguely nauseous, like reading while driving. The screen punched a perfect cube out of the projection, a disorienting visual anchor against the dynamics of VR-enhanced flight.

So far, so good, she said, and cringed. Dad had been trying to coach her on proper radio etiquette. Bumper especially had very little patience for anybody, even a contractor, fucking up the details. Professional, she told herself, be professional. Bellona Robotics showing 98.7 percent fidelity in control linkage. She shook the reins in her gloved hand, watching the lines glow ever so slightly. Simulation translation holding strong.

Marathon said.

Good, good, Daelia’s mount said. Beneath her, around her.

Far, far away from her.

Don’t make me throw up, Daelia warned.

But all she got in return was a deep, rumbling laugh.

The illusory canyon suddenly narrowed and broke open, signifying the end of the air lane. For a moment, the virtual reality overlay blurred. There was nothing but blue and white. Blue sky. Blue water. White clouds, reaching up to the sleeping stars. These were real at least, huge and white, swept in off the Gulf in the very last struggling weeks of hurricane season.

Sky quite nice today, her mount observed. I pull it into virch for you.

Very considerate of you, girl, Daelia replied, and loosened her grip on the reins. Show me what you’ve got.

Emily screeched in reply and threw herself into a dive.

In reality, it was a minor dip. Very minor. Emily’s machine body was built for endurance, inherently stable. She wasn’t one of those new model FQ-47s, where instability was the entire point. But thanks to an exquisitely tuned virch field, every twitch of the rudder, every flick of the ailerons, was a gut-twisting maneuver.

Daelia let Emily have her head.

And held on.

Emily roared through it, grabbing at the bit and laying on the speed. She shot out, twisting with the joy of open flight. Catching a thermal, Emily swept high into the open sky. This was a world of peaks and crags, of plummeting valleys and vast plains.

Some people thought that abiota couldn’t experience true joy, real passion. No exuberance or excitement. Those people were idiots.

Those people had never been on a flight with Emily.

Daelia minimized the common prompt screen, throwing over the data analysis to a code-bot for a few minutes. The tiny abiota manifested as a bird between Daelia’s hands, clutching Emily’s saddle with all its might, even as its keen eyes scanned the scrolling code, missing nothing.

Emily laughed as she played.

The clouds might have been real, but the mountains, the far castles, the glimmering hints of snow or ice or gleaming metal-skinned structures? Those weren’t.

This wasn’t an Air Force-issue base-wide simulation field. Not the generic Omphalos standard.

No, this was a fully custom private environment. The Air Force frowned on its airframes indulging in such things. But then, this was the Texas Air Guard, and the abiota who owned this place was orcinus-class.

The base network made allowances.

They were lucky Emily listened to them at all, really.

As if from a great distance, Daelia made a few adjustments on the keyboard under her left fingers. Color saturation, volume, the neural feedback she received through the brace on her left arm.

She had a full VR rig on, the visor totally encasing the upper part of her head. It wasn’t like in one of Dad’s old science fiction books, where a person totally lost contact with their body. You needed one of the new NULI implants for that, and no matter what she used to tell her classmates back at Ware, Daelia had no desire to get one of those.

Hell, she could barely stand the haptic feedback of her brace most days.

But this wasn’t just the itch of bypassed nerves. Not just motion sickness from the visor.

Something was off.

The more she fiddled, the more she felt it.

She switched off her radio so the guys couldn’t hear her. What are you seeing, bot?

Code itches, Emily said. Turn off analysis screen.

Can’t do that. Need to make sure you’re good to go for this training flight.

Why you ruin my fun, spawn? Talking about meatspace, ehg.

You know I have to make sure the simulation’s aligning, Emily, Daelia chided back. There is something here that’s not quite right.

Everything wonderful, Emily said, and dove again, graceful as a dolphin. You not pilot, yes yes yes not pilot not used to this.

It hit home. Daelia tried to ignore it. Emily had zero sense for human niceties. She was smart enough to grasp them but didn’t care to.

No, girl, I am not, Daelia murmured, and looked up just in time.

The vast ruins of a mountaintop castle rose before her, the thick walls coming up almost too fast to⁠—

With a gasp she couldn’t help, Daelia yanked hard on the reins, steering Emily away at the last second. The dragon roared with laughter as they shot up and over the top of the wall, broken fangs of masonry reaching up to bite at Emily’s underbelly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very funny, Daelia grumbled.

Not pilot, Emily said again. Almost smug.

Emily’s virch field roughly corresponded to reality. It turned buildings into peaks, trees into forest groves larger than the tallest skyscrapers, threaded through with filaments of metallic ores. There was nothing out here for Emily to interpret, though, so the simulation was filling things in, totally at random.

It was enough to drive a girl crazy if she thought about it too hard.

Trying to focus, Daelia readjusted her screens.

But then, a flash of light above the false horizon caught her eye. There, in the spark-bright dawn, was an explosion. Like fireworks.

No.

Like a meteor.

Daelia’s eyes narrowed beneath her visor. She’d never seen anything like it before. She blink-clicked the section of code, saving it for further investigation.

Did you just see that? she asked Emily.

Nothing to see but you fucking up such beautiful flight.

Emily, don’t lie to me.

I fuck around all I like, Emily said smugly, and snapped her wings wide to throw herself into a barrel roll that her machine form was certainly not capable of. Should go home, load dummy munitions. Burn a castle or two.

Bumper said over the radio.

Brass no understand.

Bumper’s radio muted for a moment, then came back on.

It took a moment more for Emily to pull out of whatever maneuver she’d just executed, to get some smooth sky back.

Daelia checked the code-bot’s readout. It hadn’t registered anything weird. Nothing was showing in any of the more conventional monitoring feeds. Whatever she had seen, it was most likely a glitch in her own equipment. Connection fidelity’s holding steady. Raijinn? Thoughts?

Technically, Raijinn oversaw training. But it was overseeing Daelia’s training as well, and just because Dad trusted her to do this right didn’t mean the Texas Military Department, Air Combat Command, or the FAA did. So Raijinn was riding shotgun, so to speak. Monitoring the entire flight.

Its response was immediate.

I see no cause for concern here. A 98.5% verisimilitude, well within FAA safety parameters for unmanned flights, and Daelia has satisfied our own internal review.

Bumper sent Daelia an approval request. It popped up in another screen cut into the virch.

No problem, she said, and hit the digital signature button on the form. You think the new guy can handle this?

He Weapon School graduate, Emily said. He be fine.

2

It’s like riding a dragon.

Argo had used that line before. On his little brother. Out on dates. Drunk in bars.

A good line. A descriptive line. Evocative, which was always a good thing.

Most civilians had no idea what serving in the military was really like. What being a pilot was like. Most seemed to think it was a bold, exciting, courageous life. An adventure.

Romantic, even.

Maybe it had been like that once, back in the days of open cockpits and daring dogfights. Probably not, though.

What civilians didn’t want, in Argo’s experience, was the reality.

They didn’t want to know about the stink of body odor that built up in the tight confines of the cockpits. The eyestrain from military-spec screens, or the unreliability of equipment ten years or more past recommended life spans. The way your butt started to hurt after a while, or the sheer boredom of most missions.

They didn’t want to know.

So.

It’s like riding a dragon.

Argo had said it a hundred times.

He had never really meant it.

It had never really been literal.

Not until today.

This was…

Let go of reins!

The emergent’s voice was a rumble in his ear, one that somehow managed to employ some element of femininity despite the depth of it. It vibrated his headphones, an itch in his eardrums he couldn’t escape. Argo gritted his teeth against it.

Held steady on the reins.

Shit, he hated flying with the haptic gloves.

Pull up, Emily!

Stop stop stop stopstopstopstopstop…

I know what I’m doing, Argo snapped back, against the abiota’s protest. The aircraft wasn’t in that steep of a dive. It couldn’t be. They weren’t designed to do this. The MQ-9 literally couldn’t fly like this. Emily was going to break the fucking fuselage if she didn’t stop this suicidal charge she was taking them on.

And then the dragon form finally pulled up, leveled out, bat wings snapping out hard. The action arrested the dive so close to the ground that the line of knights charging at them completely broke cohesion. Horses reared and snorted in terror. Armored bodies fell off. Screams rose.

Fake, it was all fake.

Ruined, my strafing run, ruined.

Strafing run? Is that what you fucking call that?!

All those little knights still moving, Emily said, and her false voice sounded mournful. We go back, roast them proper.

I don’t think so, Argo snapped.

What fun are you, pilot who doesn’t want to play games?

I’m not going to let you kill yourself.

The abiota gave no answer, but in the virch, her wings were pumping hard, gaining altitude again.

Marathon, over in the LRE.

She’s fucking with me. The plane’s not⁠—

She’s trying to plow herself straight into the drink.

More knights! Emily crowed joyfully. We go again.

Argo’s concentration had slipped for a second. A second. But to an abiota, that was an eternity.

In the simulation, he had loosened his grip on the reins. If he’d had a hand on the stick, the real physical flight controls, a small release of pressure wouldn’t have meant anything. But right now, he was flying with haptic gloves instead of his normal controls, playing by the rules of the virch.

SyROC, SyROC, she’s got the bit! Argo’s sensor said. In the cockpit, the master sergeant was sitting just to his left. In the virch, he was also on the dragon form’s back, behind her wings in a separate saddle.

Bumper’s voice replied drily.

And yeah, the squadron DO was definitely pissed.

For a moment, Argo felt a sense of weightlessness that he shouldn’t have been able to feel. The sensation a guy might feel at the very top of a roller coaster, or at the apex of a particularly steep maneuver, although it had been a long time since he’d flown anything from inside the fuselage.

Emily crested, graceful, fluid, hanging in midair for just a moment.

And then she fell. Straight down. Headfirst.

Wind whistling around him at sudden, horrific speed, Argo got the best grip he could, struggling to regain control. But she had it and wouldn’t give it up.

Little knights, she crooned, fire gushing from her flared nostrils, sweeping back over Argo, little knights, come and find your doom.

SyROC? he asked, keeping his cool as best he could. Procedure?

Bumper snapped over the radio.

He is in saddle. Not my fault he drops reins.

Below them, another castle loomed. Huge, this one.

Argo was fighting her now, trying to yank back on the reins, on the complicated flight harness that connected to both heads. His arms ached from the effort of fighting the feedback from the gloves. It was all bullshit, a simulation, except it wasn’t, because the virch and the haptics made it real. Or real enough.

Shit, he couldn’t crash this thing into the ocean.

Then a woman’s voice came on the radio.

But knights, little spawn.

A cube of bare space opened in front of Argo. His main cockpit control screen. For a moment, he was looking straight down and straight ahead at the same time. It took his brain a moment to catch up with what he was seeing.

The aircraft was in a dive. But not a very fast or steep one.

the woman’s voice said. Her metadata ID’d her as the Bellona Robotics rep.

But so fun, the pouted response came.

The pressure on the reins loosened, and Argo got his grip back. The angle of the dive hadn’t changed, forcing him to yank up as hard as he could.

Emily swooped up out of the dive. So great was her projected bulk and so close to the castle were they that the simulation couldn’t deconflict the two. Instead, Argo had a moment of near panic as gray stone walls rushed up to meet him, solid and ancient and⁠—

And then the castle was gone.

The dive was over.

Emily leveled out again. A slight tick in her altimeter. Wings out and level, holding them aloft over the grassy plains. Thanks, he said, brusque from the embarrassment. You can close that screen out.

The woman sounded doubtful.

He reached down, patted the dragon’s right neck. We’re good.

Fly more, Emily said, and turned into a wide curve. The override window blinked out. They crested over a small set of foothills and into a fresh environment. Maybe knights in that tower.

There. Not far. Across an endless volcanic waste that Argo was pretty sure was taken from aerial footage of Iceland, there was indeed a tower. A single, solitary tower.

Tower, tower, tower, the abiota sang out, in rhythm with the beat of her wings, and then belched a huge mouthful of fire. Little torch on the water.

She swooped toward it. Argo tried to remember the preflight brief, the advice the guys in the shop had given him. Work with her, everyone had said, but damn, this was weird. Nothing was out here, though. That was the point of flying out here over the Gulf. Had to be just another element in her virch-enabled fantasy world.

Argo, what are we doing? Ho asked.

You pull back on us now? Emily taunted.

By all means. Let’s go for it.

Emily banked hard, wings taut, both heads forward. The tower was coming up fast. Argo could see details on it now. Vines, arrow slits, the tiles of the roof…

You like to pull, pull then, human.

No, you want to fly into that thing, you can fly into that thing, Argo told her, beyond done with her bullshit at this point.

Maybe we light it on fire, Emily said deviously, when we crash.

We’re not going to crash now, are we? Because it’s not fucking there.

Let’s find out, she said, and rolled, banking toward it.

Emily, pull up. Bumper’s voice was steady on the radio, but Argo knew the guy well enough at this point to know he was pissed. Pull up.

But fun little tower⁠—

Bumper was yelling now.

The words hit like a sack full of lead. And at the same time, the override window opened back up. Wide enough this time that the specifics of the virch were totally obscured.

Rising before them from the ocean’s surface was two hundred feet of corrosion-proofed steel and raw petroleum.

Reacting on pure instinct, Argo grabbed the proper flight controls and executed one of the tightest maneuvers he’d ever had to make. The aircraft jittered, protesting, but the base airframe was something, at least, that Argo was familiar with.

Emily didn’t help at all, but at least she didn’t try to fly her nose into one of those struts. Argo managed to bank the MQ-9’s machine body away from the collision course Emily had put it on, in what seemed just in time. They were close enough for him to catch the expressions of the workers out on the decks, through her main belly camera.

There was a rumbling sound as he got the plane back up, flying level at two thousand feet.

She was laughing.

Bumper snapped over the radio.

But more oil derricks to⁠—

Argo’s heart was hammering in his chest. That was the nearest he’d ever come to hitting something in his decade of flying. If they had hit that thing… Hand-off to LRE, copy, SyROC. Initiating now.

One big dragon head turned to look at him, slitted eye baleful. No more fun for me, no more fun for you, she said, and bit down on the override screen.

Immediately, Argo was plunged back into the simulation, full bore.

Dammit, Emily! he snapped, unable to help himself. The adrenaline was draining from his limbs now, leaving him feeling somewhat shaky and extremely irritated.

Marathon said.

Argo tried to remember what they had told him about this. The procedure was, by necessity, different in the virch. He looked down at the saddle beneath him, the thump-thump of her not-wings suddenly driving him crazy. There were a series of small colored glass marbles set into the molded leather there.

What the hell was this, anyway?

He switched the box off on his radio. Sergeant, a little help.

It’s this one, Ho said, and one of the small spheres lit up. Just run your hand over it. Like it’s a trackpad mouse.

With frustrated resignation, Argo laid a hand on it. He turned his radio back on. LRE, initiating handover.

Marathon was completely unfazed.

You have the aircraft, Argo confirmed.

The virch field cut out. Just turned off, blinked out. The entire world went black. Argo had a sudden sense of falling as he was thrown out of the simulation with an almost disdainful force. He grabbed for something to hold on to.

But at least that was over.

He sagged back in the cockpit’s integrated seat, trying to catch his breath.

It was always a bit of a mindfuck, disconnecting from an abiota. But that wasn’t a sentiment one gave voice to.

Not in the RPA world.

Not in the Air Guard.

The first time’s the worst, Ho said. He sounded way too calm for what they’d just been through. But then, he hadn’t been flying the damn thing.

Argo forced himself to start working through his shutdown procedures.

She’s always like that? he asked as he worked.

She got a hold of some dragon novels a few years back. Became absolutely enamored with them. Comm’s tried to get her to cool it, but she is obsessive to the point of compulsion when she gets interested in something. You know how these orcinus-class are.

That wasn’t exactly what Argo had meant.

But at least Ho wasn’t questioning his credentials.

Nobody touched an emergent abiota airframe without qualification. Emily wasn’t the first he’d flown, but then, there was a reason she was here, and not at Creech or Holloman or Yokota.

Active duty had a low tolerance for abiota who had their own ideas about things. Predictives were much more agreeable. And they could be pruned and regrown if they ever did shit like that.

Ho was looking at him, though. You okay, sir?

Peachy, Argo grunted.

Ho grabbed for one of the checklist binders in their neat cubby inside the cockpit chassis. He flipped it open and started shutting down his screens. His own visor was already banished to the side of his console, gloves hanging on their suspension frames.

Argo started working on the clasps and connection points of his own gloves. They came up almost to the shoulder, supported by pneumatic lines in half a dozen places in order to reduce muscle fatigue. His skin tingled as he pulled out of them.

Haptics were grossly unpleasant, but a physical external still beat a NULI implant any day, as