CHECKSUM Checkmate
by Tony Daniel
The air in Theater Intake Facility was humming with geists – ghostly virtual reality representations of people, A.I.s, and even a few of the sceeve, the horseshoe-bat-nosed aliens whose species had invaded the Earth thirteen years ago. Humanity was at war with the main body of sceeve, but a small faction, the Mutualists, had proved to be valuable allies and had given Earth a chance to fight back and avoid total domination.
Ensign NOCK made his way through the entrance foyer in his entirely physically present android body, his suit, as he called it. His current model was a Burberry Eleven. He’d been suited up in the Eleven for close to a year and it had performed in an excellent, if utilitarian, fashion. The suit NOCK really wanted was one of the new Burberry Twelves – who wouldn’t? –but there was no way he was going to be able to afford an upgrade like that on an Extry ensign’s pay.
All of the virtual inhabitants in the foyer seemed overlaid, one upon another, crowded in layers in such a way that no gathering in real life could ever achieve. Definite scaling problems going on here with the chroma representational software. They appeared as drapes of discrete layers of people, and the entrance foyer had taken on what NOCK imagined might be the décor of a harem den – although visiting a girlfriend in the strip club where she worked on Ceres base was as close as he’d ever come to observing such an establishment.
That had been an interesting liaison. It had been love, at least for his part. Josey had fallen for him precisely because he was an A.I. servant in an android body and not a physical man. Of course, he hadn’t let that fact stop him when attempting to please her. Apparently he’d succeeded for, as Josey had once told him, “NOCK, I gotta say, you put the ‘t’ in simulation.”
Josey had been blown to smithereens by kinetic weapon barrage when a half-ton of sceeve throw mass had ripped into Ceres asteroid base and left a mile-wide crater.
It was a tough war.
NOCK moved forward and into the geist-filled room.
The Theater Intake Facility served as the main wing for the interrogation of alien prisoners on Walt Whitman space station, the enormous Extry facility in orbit around Earth. It was manned by a department of the Extry, the U.S. space navy. The rates and officers of the Extry Xenological Division were universally known as creeps.
NOCK was a creep. He was also no stranger to TIF. In fact, this was his operational billet and his Q-based algorithm, his real self, was backed up on the facility’s computer. The the processing desk where the entrance foyer terminated was manned by a human, Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Gordon Mallon. Mallon was not a friend – NOCK wasn’t sure the humorless Mallon had any friends – but was a longstanding acquaintance of NOCK.
Mallon shook his head ruefully at the gathered crowd in the foyer, then reached out with a finger into the chroma to press a switch only he could see. The field that guarded entrance into the bowels of the TIF hummed slightly, indicating a change in the Q generator that would now permit NOCK to step past Mallon’s desk and go through the hatchway that led to the warren of cells and interrogation rooms to be found within.
“Logged and Level B provisional admittance granted, Ensign NOCK,” Mallon said in the official tone he used for entries in his desk register. “Have a better one, sir.”
“You, too, Staff Sergeant.”
Mallon only grunted in reply and NOCK, ensconced within his android body, entered the TIF proper.
There were a few geists in the hall leading to the interrogation, most of them NCOs accompanying human MILINT officers as aides and translators. NOCK recognized several iterations of the LOVE series, one of whom, CHARITY, was a friend. He poked her via the virual feed, which, NOCK knew, felt like the equivalent of a small static electricity shock. CHARITY nodded, smiled sympathetically back at him.
You’re on CHECKSUM in Alpha, huh? she replied across the corridor to NOCKHHHh using a private virtual feed. Her transmitted voice as actuated in his android’s hearing mechanism sounded bright and a little brassy, as if she were deliberate trying to put good cheer into the undertones.
Yup, he replied.
I don’t envy you.
What, you wouldn’t like to have a traitor and murderer’s thought rolling around inside your programming?
Better than a sceeve, Charity said to him. Then her lead interrogation officer found the room he was looking for and went inside.
Got to go, Charity said. Got a sceeve lieutenant to squeeze.
He suspended?
She. Yep, but she’s fighting it. My LIO thinks we’ll only get a couple more sessions out of her before she liquefies.
It had only become possible in the last year to prevent capture sceeve from immediately committing suicide by dissolving the portion of their nervous system known as the gid. For eight years after the invasion, not a single sceeve had been taken alive. But that had all changed with the coming of the Mutualists to Earth a year before. These were the strange new group of sceeve who claimed to be on humanity’s side, and had proved it in the eyes of many by fighting against their own kind.