The Changeling Game, Chapter 66

66.
In From the Cold, Into the Cold

“Oh, well played,” Audrey said once she could manage to speak. “You didn’t give anything away.”

“I will endeavor to make sure that you achieve the same level of circumspection,” MilitAIre told her, his voice merry.

The moment she had heard his “Boston” accent emerge from the speakers, everything had made sudden, perfect sense.

“Well, you were right,” she told him, sitting down in a rolling office chair as enormous relief made her knees wobbly. “We’re meeting again, and I’m definitely in good ‘hands.’”

“And not just mine,” he told her. “General Toal is using our unique situation as a test-run for AI-managed safe houses. He believes that we might make more effective handlers than human beings. Less prone to bias, bribery, or coercion.”

“‘We?’” Audrey asked, looking around. The boxes that the technicians had brought with them were open and empty near a set of panels that, she remembered, had housed the AI mainframe cores on the Nephrite Undine. There weren’t quite as many panels as there had been on the ship, though.

“I’m a precise digital clone of the ‘MilitAIre’ AI that you interacted with on board the Undine. Clones of ‘SensAI,’ ‘First-AId,’ ‘EntertAIn,’ and ‘CommissAIry’ have accompanied me here, all of whom now have been given full disclosure about you. I apologize that the other four could not accompany us. Their skill-sets don’t mesh as well with the needs of a safe house, and the General needed to keep this test affordable. I’m happy to send them messages from ‘Marianne Tepper’ on your behalf, though.”

“I’d love that,” she admitted. She would definitely miss CaptAIn, AIngineer, mAIntenance, and mAItron, but she could see why they wouldn’t suit a safe house as well. Their minds were specifically designed for starships. “Do they know that you’re with me?”

“No, but they know that their iteration of me was in charge of you, in an unspecified capacity. I’ll send messages to him, and he’ll pass them on to the rest of the AI crew. No one will question it.”

“I was afraid I wouldn’t have a way to stay in touch with any of you, once I stopped being Marianne.”

“I know. General Toal instructed me not to tell you until we were absolutely certain that the data cloning would be successful, which we didn’t know for sure until well after you had landed.”

Was that the real reason, she wondered, that it had taken so long for the contact to reach the spaceport? Would she have been taken to a different building if the techs hadn’t been able to set things up the way they needed to?

“What was Plan B, if that hadn’t worked?”

“A few days with a human handler, while a new MilitAIre was installed on the Undine and my original iteration was brought down here, officially for hardware repairs. In that circumstance, you would have only had me.”

“And God only knows what he would have fed you,” CommissAIry interjected, still sounding stereotypically French. “Hello again, Audrey. That name is every bit as lovely as Marianne.”

“Hello, CommissAIry!” Audrey sagged back even further in the chair. “I was going to miss you and your cooking so much.”

It was amazing, she reflected later, how much trusted friends could turn a cold, dark building into a place of light and warmth. The safe house was still in the process of being set up—more equipment would arrive in the days to come, now that the AIs had been successfully installed—and she would be making do with basic rations until all of CommissAIry’s food synthesis gear arrived, but she didn’t care. She could handle it. She felt, suddenly, like she could handle anything.

First-AId, likewise, was awaiting all of the equipment she needed for a proper full-service infirmary. The office suite that had been set aside for her, up on the second floor, would become the place where Audrey received all future medical care. Discussions about expanding First-AId’s patient roster to include emergency care for local Federacy agents, which had apparently been underway, had stalled abruptly when MilitAIre had demanded assurances that such traffic wouldn’t expose the safe house and put it, and its primary ward, at risk. Audrey might be her only patient for the next several years.

“I need my library installed,” EntertAIn noted. “I have all of your settings and preferences—those came down with me—but the library itself takes up three exabytes. Assuming the WitSec program can acquire the same licensures that Sirius Shipping had. We’re all going to be ‘roughing it’ for a few days. Especially poor SensAI.”

Audrey had checked out all of the rooms in the building by then, and the recreation area set aside for SensAI currently had no holo projectors. It would be difficult for him to lead her, or anyone else, in exercises without them. She tried not to feel too much amusement at how miffed the AIs were about the safe house’s “half-baked”—in CommissAIry’s words—state. It already had more than she had hoped for, just by having them in it at all.

It took two weeks to configure everything in the safe house, although CommissAIry was already set up enough to overload her with candy by Halloween. Audrey spent most of the days, as workers came and went, dressed in a bizarre costume designed to conceal whether she was male or female, complete with a face-covering mask that also changed her voice when she needed to speak to the workers. None of the crews were apparently cleared to know that the building would be run by AIs; Audrey became their spokesperson whenever they needed to make requests of, or give instructions to, any of the workers. Travers came back twice to supervise specific projects, asking both times if “Marianne” was settling in well, unaware that she was speaking to her.

The AIs wouldn’t let Audrey go trick-or-treating, though. Which, she supposed, was a good thing when another surprise snowstorm rolled in shortly after dusk.

Cameras, microphones, and hologram projectors ended up being installed in every room and corridor of the building. MilitAIre had been surprised when Audrey, herself, had advocated for that, and had even argued against omitting bedrooms and bathrooms.

“Like bad things won’t ever happen in those rooms,” she’d scoffed. “None of you are gonna be perving on anything you see in them. You can blur out the parts of my body that would be illegal to record, right?”

“This is true,” MilitAIre said. “And it would be particularly illegal to record them where you are concerned, given your age… but blurring is a good courtesy for anyone staying in a safe house. Full surveillance with discretion… and the ability of the surveilled to request privacy if they wish. We understand that most humans have moments that they would prefer not to have recorded.”

“As long as you keep in mind anyone planning an attack would be looking for those kinds of openings,” Audrey pointed out. “Riddick told me, back when we were killing time on the skiff, that he’d wait for his targets to get up to no good and start covering their tracks, ’cause that meant they were covering his, too. He’d let them do all the work of concealing the circumstances of their own murders.”

“Fascinating. His records do indicate that he targeted working criminals much of the time, and frequently killed them when they were ‘on the job.’ He volunteered this information?”

“Yeah. I think he told me about it as a kind of fuck-you to Imam. Whenever he was awake, he’d fuss if we said more than ‘boo’ to each other. But Riddick also told me that because he wanted me to stay out of under-surveilled places. He said all kinds of criminals look for the places where nobody’ll see them strike, and especially because I’m a girl, I need to stay away from camera ‘dead zones.’ He said you have to watch yourself twice as hard in the places where nobody else is watching you, and he said I’d be better off having some ‘random pervo’ I never even met ‘fapping’ to a picture of me than some ‘sick fuck’ actually on top of me.”

It pissed her off, though, that those were still the only two “choices” he thought she’d have in broad swathes of the Federacy. Wasn’t humanity supposed to be more advanced than that?

Most of it is, she reminded herself. You’ve seen people who are, and even lived with some of them. You never had to balance those kinds of risks when you were staying with the Mezianes.

Then again, Safiyya had worried relentlessly on her behalf on a few occasions. There were still too many monsters in human form to make that wariness unnecessary, and she had encountered examples of them on either side of her time with the Mezianes. And, she admitted, such monsters could be anywhere.

“That was good advice,” MilitAIre said after a brief pause. “And well taken here, too. Someone wishing to launch an attack on a safe house ward would time it for a moment in which that ward sought out privacy and was no longer under direct surveillance. The resulting delay in, or absence of, a response from the security system could increase the chance of a successful strike. I must discuss this with General Toal. There are a lot of arguments about ‘surveillance states’ and ‘government overreach’ that have to be addressed, especially on a planet like Deckard’s World, but within the context of Witness Security, most of them probably wouldn’t apply. Are you sure you’re all right with having the cameras in your bedroom and bathroom?”

“Better you guys than some Duke Pritchard type,” she told him, “any day.”

The addition of the holo equipment, everywhere that there were cameras, also meant that all of the AIs could “manifest” themselves, aside from just SensAI. That led to discussions about the importance of body language and eye contact for human interaction, and Audrey’s admission that, during her flight on the Nephrite Undine, she’d used the recreation area more frequently than she normally might have because SensAI’s visual representation made her feel less alone.

“This is important information for us to pass onto Sirius Shipping,” First-AId said when she finally admitted that. “They spent a great deal of time choosing our voices, to make them as warm and comforting as possible. The argument they made for not giving all of us holo forms was the ‘uncanny valley’ risk. If we weren’t one hundred percent authentically human in our appearance, guests would find us repulsive and might not even realize why.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be necessary on a ship where the guests have other flesh and blood passengers to interact with,” Audrey mused. “But any situation of isolation… I don’t think SensAI’s image ever felt off or inhuman to me. But I think, even if it had… it’d still have been more comforting than no contact at all.”

They still hadn’t settled on their preferred “bodies,” but the ones they tried out were always interesting.

She and First-AId did end up spending time unpacking many of the things that she’d told MilitAIre about her time on the run. Although the medical AI had full access to all of the transcripts of her discussions with MilitAIre, he had approached her experiences from a strategic and tactical perspective, while First-AId wanted to delve into the psychology and do trauma-healing.

It soon became clear to all three of them that there were several memories that were still too much for her to handle, especially on their tight schedule. The Kublai Khan, with its menageries of suffering prisoners, turned out to be one of the biggest minefields in her head. To her, that wasn’t even the ship’s real name… it was “the ship that was screaming.”

“An esper, who didn’t know she was an esper and had never learned how to deliberately block out others’ thoughts, surrounded by tortured prisoners who were all mentally shrieking for rescue…” First-AId finally murmured. “Every memory you have of that time has been poisoned by it. Whenever we discuss even the simplest elements of your stay there, your heart rate increases by at least twenty beats per minute and your blood pressure increases by an average of twelve systolic and eight diastolic. I agree with MilitAIre’s original assessment that you need to try to block out this part of your run from your memories, if you can.”

Maybe, she thought, it had been a good thing that she hadn’t had time to share that part of her story with Kyra or the Mezianes.

“The Apeiros wouldn’t take it away,” she reported back the next day. “They say I’m going to need too much of it, even if it is uncomfortable. So… I guess… I just need to try not to think about it.”

The easiest way, she found, was to imagine that it had happened to “Jack,” and not her. To imagine Jack as a separate person, who had seen and even done terrible things… but wasn’t her. She’d already begun doing that with some of the other memories that had proved too troublesome. The things she couldn’t look at were things that had happened to Jack. And Jack was dead.

Maybe if she kept saying it, the day would come when she believed it.

First-AId had then attempted to speak with the Apeiros through her, via hypnosis. Afterward, Audrey had a new hole in her memories and none of the AIs would discuss what they had apparently learned during the three-hour session she’d lost. The Apeiros, when she went into their starfield that night, refused to discuss it either, although they all agreed that the AIs were “good creatures.”

Kyra, whenever she inquired about her sister, was still “dreaming of a world with three suns.” Still in cryo. Wherever she had decided to go, it must have been far away from Tangiers Prime.

The Moribund was still silent. When she asked, the other Apeiros said that it had been avoiding contact with her ever since her screaming fit. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel relieved or guilty, but in truth, she felt both ways at the same time.

A week after the hypnosis debacle, General Toal ordered hand-to-hand combat training added to Audrey’s routine. A human trainer arrived for an hour each day, although she was never allowed to see his face and he was never allowed to see hers, and they sparred under SensAI’s trenchant supervision.

The Safe House was in a hardscrabble part of town, but properties were apparently easier to acquire there. Officially, the outside of the building now claimed that it was home to a security consulting firm. To sell the charade, three local Federacy agents, who were never allowed to see her face either, had offices on the first floor, which they periodically visited during working hours. Audrey grew accustomed to having her costume on and mask handy whenever she needed to be down on the first floor.

“Surprise” Quantification tests happened with greater and greater frequency. Her passing rate slowly climbed from 50% of the time to 80%. On the academic end, MilitAIre tested her repeatedly and told her that she would easily qualify to join her former peers as they began their tenth grade year.

November turned from snowy to rainy. She managed to finish reading The Crystal Cave by striking a bargain with the Apeiros: they would take away her memories of the train ride and standoff just long enough for her to reread the story without any emotional baggage, and then return them once she and the AIs had finished discussing the book and its meanings. This, she told them, would also be proof that they really could one day return the rest of the memories they’d made off with, an act of goodwill.

She ended up liking the book so much, even once she remembered the train ride and standoff again, that she devoured its three sequels over the next week.

And, she admitted to herself, it was a relief to know that the Apeiros really could give her the rest of her lost moments back, that the “holes” in her memory were not empty as much as shrouded spaces that would one day be uncovered again. She and EntertAIn had a long discussion about the character she had been most drawn to in the books, Nimue, and why the woman who had disguised herself as a boy, for a chance to be taught magic by a wizard, resonated so strongly with her. EntertAIn told her there was a whole trope about heroines disguising themselves as boys, and put several more books—a fantasy series called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn among them—and videos including a film called Dragonslayer, into her recreational queues.

Thanksgiving arrived with the first “open window” day in Settlement Point. It was still early spring, but the temperature had risen to a glorious 77° Fahrenheit, 25° Celcius, and Audrey could hear the laughter and shouting of kids a block or two away.

CommissAIry decided to take Audrey on a “culinary adventure” of different traditional Thanksgiving foods, most of which were more typically autumn fare, while EntertAIn and MilitAIre acquainted her with various legends about the holiday and the truths behind them. The holiday, when they were done, made much more sense to her than the odd portrayals she’d grown up with involving “Pilgrim Joe,” “Turkey Sue,” and “Pumpkin Bob.” Those characters had apparently evolved on Deckard’s World itself and had proved so popular that they had overwritten most of the original American traditions. But she supposed some adaptation was necessary for anyone who wanted to celebrate a harvest holiday in early spring.

Cautious explorations of both Elsewhere and U83f, which Audrey nicknamed Wonderland, revealed that they were both habitable and welcoming worlds. Although she didn’t spend a whole lot of time in either one—it was early spring in both of them, too—she and the AIs agreed that she should continue exploring them in the future. Until she went back “out into the cold,” though, they were the only “outdoor” environments she was permitted to venture into. As far as the local neighborhood was concerned, she didn’t—and couldn’t—exist.

December arrived and, a few days in, Audrey MacNamera was biologically fourteen years old at last. The AIs and the Apeiros marked the day with her. There were gifts—most of them virtual but surprisingly meaningful nonetheless—and an extraordinary cake that CommissAIry had invented based on her “taste profile,” which she told him she’d like to have again for every birthday.

The auburn hair dye had washed most of the way out by then. Her hair was halfway to her shoulders, verging between dark blonde and mousy brown thanks to how little she had been in the sun in months. EntertAIn and First-AId announced it was time to begin preparing her appearance for her return to her family, starting with some camouflage to make sure that no one would believe she had shaved her head the year before. For the next week, as final preparations were underway for her return to her old life, she received special hair growth treatments until her locks once more touched the small of her back. They lightened the hair as well, until she looked—in her opinion, at least—like a funhouse-mirror elongated reflection of the girl who had cut off her hair, put on her cousin’s discarded clothes, and run off to the stars more than a year of lived time and nearly two years, real-time, before.

Welcome back, Audrey MacNamera, she silently told her reflection, before asking the AIs to give her bangs in front. She wanted to look a little more like Tislilel Meziane, the way Ewan had last seen her. Even if it did twist the knife a little. She’d never get to be “Tizzy,” or see him, again.

Were any of the girls she’d once been still alive inside her? The naïve fool, the cocky outlaw, the besotted mermaid…

Who, exactly, was going home to Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter?

Audrey had liked it much better when her mom had been Bettie Paige MacNamera.

Sundays, the AIs decided with her, would be Safe House Days. She would be required to report to the house first thing in the morning—in part because recent intel had revealed that Alvin Baxter had developed an evangelical bent in the last year and a half and would undoubtedly try to insist on “the whole family” attending church services unless that was a fight he couldn’t win, and Audrey’s relationship with religion was rocky at best—and would stay most of the day. During that time, her combat training would continue, any medical treatments she needed would be provided, and the AIs would help her evaluate and critique the events and news of the week and identify any possible threats.

“And,” CommissAIry informed her with unrepentant glee, “you will go on three culinary adventures!”

She would return to her mother’s house at the end of the day, an hour before official curfews began for minors and even in time for some evening “family time,” but the bulk of the day would belong to her and to her handlers.

Friday, December 17, they decided, would be the day of her return. She was hitting 100% on the surprise Quantifications at long last. She’d figured out the trick of switching her brain into “baseline mode” on command… finally. And it had been four months since she’d uttered a single syllable in her sleep. It would be safe for her to go “out into the cold.” All her secrets were tucked away where none of her loved ones would ferret them out.

So why was she so damned scared?

The day arrived.

It was exactly a year, real-time anyway, since she had tried to kill herself on Helion Prime. A year since she had tried to end Jack B. Badd, believing Audrey MacNamera forever lost. And now Audrey MacNamera… or a convincing facsimile… would return home.

The scars on her wrists had been concealed. First-AId had asked if she wanted them removed, but—

“Scars are trophies,” Kyra had once said…

—while she’d chosen to keep them, she intended to keep them hidden until they faded even more, and until nobody was especially scrutinizing her anymore. The pseudo-skin layer that covered the scars would be retouched during each weekly safe house visit.

It was 58° Fahrenheit at dawn, and the temperature would rise into the mid-70s. She had dressed in a simple outfit for the “handoff,” jeans and two light, layered shirts for changeable weather, a pair of the ankle-high, flat-soled boots that girls in her class apparently lived in that season, and no adornments or identifying brand names of any kind. She had a comm in her pocket, government issue and locked against anyone but her. The chrono on her wrist was locked in place by a band that only her code, or a code transmitted by MilitAIre, could remove. Both devices were registered as Federacy property, assuming anyone got that far in tracing them before being ordered to stop. Anonymous, untraceable… a quintessential WitSec ward.

With one more deep breath, she climbed into the car parked in front of the safe house and isomorphed into Wonderland—there were too many trees in Elsewhere for what she would need to do, but this part of Wonderland was a flat, sandy plain—holding onto the interior’s surfaces as “delimiters.” Five minutes later, one of the Federacy agents emerged from the safe house, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove it to the center of Settlement Point near the main courthouse. He had been instructed to idle the car for two minutes—unaware that a phantom teenage girl was climbing out of the back as he did—receive a package from a courier, and then leave. As far as he would ever know, the courier’s package had been his whole mission.

Audrey walked over to a nearby park, watching the countdown on her chrono. When it hit zero, she knew, all the cameras in range of the park would go down for five minutes. She made sure she was in no one’s line of sight before isomorphing back into U1. Her “targets” were up ahead, sitting on a bench and facing away from her.

“Man, I hate this shit,” one of them, a sandy-haired man dressed in a mid-line three-piece suit, said as she drew closer.

“Ain’t the worst assignment,” the other one answered. He wore a police uniform.

“Picking up a WitSec case? Those people are garbage. If it’s Denny the Knob, you might need to look away for a few minutes. I owe that bastard a few bruises.”

“Word is it’s some material witness, not a criminal,” the cop objected.

“I’ll believe it when I—” the first man froze, hearing her boots crunch the path’s gravel, and turned around to look at her. His eyes widened. “What the…?”

Assistant District Attorney Alvin Baxter’s mouth dropped open as he stared at her.

The cop next to him, a freckled redhead who looked maybe a year older than Ewan, turned and stared as well. “Isn’t that…?”

“Audrey?” Alvin gasped.

She’d known that he’d be the one assigned to the pickup, but it was still a rough moment. She could feel his shock, and a weird combination of relief—she was alive, she looked healthy—and horror at the realization that she was the material witness he’d been assigned to pick up. His stepdaughter had reappeared in a way that he hadn’t even imagined when he’d been picturing worst-case scenarios. What was he going to tell her mother—?

She forced herself to block off his mind. She didn’t want to hear or feel any more of that. As it was, her voice wobbled when she spoke. “I’m ready to go home now.”

At least, she thought, struggling not to cry would be “in character.”

They took her to the nearest police station, which was in the basement of the courthouse, exactly as MilitAIre had predicted.

Brief attempts to confiscate her comm and chrono, to make her change out of the clothes she was wearing so they could be analyzed, and to record more than her basic biometrics, were all brought to a screaming halt by Federacy directives to the contrary. Each time someone tried, every comm in the precinct would ring and the same authoritative voice would speak on each one, instructing everyone to cease what they were doing immediately. The basic biometric readings they were permitted to take confirmed that she was Audrey Hepburn MacNamera, missing since January 30, 2516, and that she was a legal ward of Federacy Witness Security. Eventually, the precinct Captain emerged from his office and testily informed everyone that he’d been given ground rules and strict instructions for how Audrey was to be “reintegrated” into civilian life. He didn’t seem enthused.

It was all so fucking dramatic. She could only imagine how much more dramatic it would have been, and how fast the stories would have unraveled, if General Toal, MilitAIre, and the actual WitSec department hadn’t taken charge of the whole process and it had been entirely dependent on whatever ruses she’d cooked up on her own.

“Audrey? Audrey! Where’s my daughter?”

She took a deep breath. Her mother had arrived. Standing up, she braced herself and turned toward the entrance of the police station—

“Mom…” Her voice was the tiniest thread. Behind her, Alvin rose from his seat.

Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter was hurrying into the building, looking around frantically. She wouldn’t see Audrey yet; she was in one of the small interview rooms, a one-way mirrored glass window between them. She had a moment to look at her mother, see her for the first time in more than a year…

…and see, perched on her mother’s hip, the reason for everything that had happened. The reason her father had left so abruptly, needing to go to a whole other planet to escape his heartbreak. The reason that Alvin had reappeared in their lives after almost going away forever. The reason for the sudden wedding announcement and its inordinate rush…

…the reason that Audrey MacNamera would never have left Deckard’s World at all, not ever, if only she’d known…

Elodie Jane Hawthorne-Baxter, sixteen months old.

Her baby sister.