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by Zachery Brasier

Syl Caillet hit New York City’s morning streets at half-past eight. She was instantly bombarded by a street full of kaleidoscope colors, multi-dimensional advertisements flowing and shattering, unreadable messages rewiring her neural pathways in ways she couldn't sense. NYPD and private contractors patrolled the pavement. For intimidation, mostly.

Misty orange-tinted clouds hovered at low altitude, crosshatched by the black lines of carbon nanotube skybridges, the new hit architectural feature of the ultra-rich, connecting skyscrapers at their top levels so their clients could live forever without touching the ground. They only blocked out thin lines of the sky for now, but Syl could see where that was heading, the gradual sealing off of vertical sight lines.

Her job was within walking distance; no need to run the security gamut of the subway. After a brisk walk she ducked into a subterranean coffee shop at the bottom of Serva Tower, her office building, a high-tech shard of cold glass stabbing into the sky.

A crowd had formed at the counter. Squeezing into the back, Syl opened her wallet to get her debit card and saw the worn edges of the folded magazine cover she kept inside, representing her one moment of fame and praise.

Newsweek. Breaking the Glass Viewpoint: The Women of Drone Warfare. Interviewed once but never again. A hero for seven days.

She didn’t need to look at it to imagine the image on the cover. Herself, only a decade younger, but so long ago, wearing a goofy smile she’d never managed to make since. Her arms were draped around two other young women, all in camo fatigues. They held complicated controllers; antennas, thumbsticks, and buttons.

It was those thumbsticks she had used time and again to crash a first-person-view suicide drone into the face of enemy soldiers. She still saw them, and the endless forested battlefields, in her dreams.

The war was still on, but the United States had pulled out. What was once considered a fight for the survival of democracy had morphed into a political liability, which in turn became yet another foreign policy black mark on a nation desperately trying to use its military to assert dominance in the shifting mid-21st century, the politicians still—after all these decades of the information age—not realizing that the country’s ill-gotten strength was in its services, the massive technical base that crushed everybody under the weight of post-industrial, non-governmental digital tyranny. The tech evangelists knew better, though. It was within their world that she lived.

Pulling herself out of the reverie, she realized that the crowd hadn’t moved. Something was wrong. Everybody was facing the screen mounted over the espresso machine. Steam idly hissed. Nobody was making orders, just staring. Syl stood on her toes to get a good look.

It was a live shot of the morning sky over an ocean. Stars fell from horizon to horizon, streaming trails of smoke. Eerily beautiful, but its meaning not so much. A space shuttle had broken up on reentry. Still a developing story.

Syl pulled out her phone to look for news through the unofficial channels. Once she closed out all the ads to the microblogging forums she learned it was a Clipper.

“My god,” a woman in front of her mumbled, “poor NASA.”

“It’s a Clipper. Commercial ship.” Syl said, still looking at her phone and not realizing she had spoken. She looked up from the screen to a fearful stare.

Then CNN confirmed it. One-hundred and thirty dead, scattered across the sky.

It’ll be a bad day, Syl later thought as she sipped her coffee in the gilded atrium of her tower, waiting for the elevator to take her down to the basement levels. Serva was part of Xerex Industries, the multi-faceted empire of reclusive trillionaire Xerex Sussex. Other products: bespoke social sites, private security cutouts, automated container ships, unregulated Nevada company towns, a clothing line, and Quest spaceflight services. The crown jewel of the last was the Clipper, a gigantic single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane for point-to-point intercontinental commercial flights.

The elevator chimed. She piled in with her coworkers. The car started descending, passing through levels and levels of server rooms, down to the remote operator stations.

The United States had entered the future at some undefined point approximately twenty years prior, and the future was supposed to have robots. Serva drones were humanoid drones, automatic domestic servants catering to one’s every whim, toys for the rich styled with a gold chest plate and a smooth black shrinkwrapped mask that only vaguely replicated human facial structure.

Automatic, though, was a stretch. While some companies provided true automation—robots that got close to the classical understanding of the word—artificial intelligence never worked out for most proprietary systems, forcing the bulk of the industry to quietly shift to remote operations.

Luxury demand was immediate and a new market opened; operator jobs even for burnt out drone vets. Combat experience helped her get the gig. She was good at moving without tactile feedback.

In the endless white basement, fluorescents pushing down from the ceiling, she found her desk, strapped the VR screens over her eyes, and stretched her hands for eight hours of holding a controller. At least the enfeebled regulatory framework still prevented employers from requiring a neural interface.

Why did the clients play along with the illusion that these were sentient robotic beings? Naturally, Serva buried the truth deep in the impossibly long user manual and in absurdly small fonts at the bottom of digital ads. She once hoped that the subterfuge led to a state of ignorance, but through years of employment she had picked up a certain undercurrent, that knowing there was somebody behind the blank face was part of the thrill.

She pushed in to her client.

“Good morning,” she said in New York City and heard her Serva's voice synthesizer speak in Nevada, rendered in the syruppy, borderline pornographic voice her client had chosen for her. Long vowels.

“Come on. Breakfast!” Braxton Dale ordered as he descended his glass stairs. He snapped his fingers then walked over to his couch and plopped down. The apartment was essentially a cube, two wide open spaces stacked on top of each other, one wall a seamless two-story window looking out on a forest of pencil towers and some unnamed mountain in the distance. Supposedly a good view, but living in the Xerex Company Cities precluded taste.

Braxton Dale, a trouble client. Lead investigator for a NTSB crash recovery team, spending his days picking through mangled wreckage and writing reports. She had been with him for only two weeks, still had no clue how he had so much money or why he lived in a Company City, but had quickly discovered why he burned through operators. Not that he knew he was doing it. No matter who was behind the controls, his Serva looked and talked the same. Somewhere else in the world were two other operators, the three of them together covering the whole day, but there was no database that allowed her to find out who they were.

She looked over at his petulant hair cut, curly twenties-style on a forty-something man. She poured cold brew in his stale kitchen, all gray, the countertop barware the only interesting thing to look at. She rumaged through his pantry to choose a protein bar.

“Let’s go!” he yelled from the couch.

“Coming,” she responded and having collected everything, carried his breakfast over.

“You don’t have to be such a bitch about it,” he sneered as he grabbed his food. She started tidying. “Hello? Anything?” he called after her.

“I apologize,” she said, not entirely sure for what.

Then the call chime rang, announcing a call from one Denton Brown. The TV flashed on to the face of a nearly identical man, another Serva working behind him.

“Turn on the news, dickhead!” the face said.

Braxton grunted and gestured at the TV. His gaming platform opened, and shoved the videochat viewer to the corner. He tried again and this time the news came up. He sat silently as he watched the replayed footage of burning space debris, face shots of the victims scrolling by on the left.

“Damn, a Clipper?” he asked.

“Can’t read? Yeah man, we’re in it now.”

Why would he be worried? Syl wondered. He only lives here?

“Anybody important on board?” Braxton asked.

“Nah, buncha tourists,” Denton answered,  “but this is a problem. Those new Senators are trying to get this all shut down, and this is gonna give them the ammo. You know how long it’s been since some astronauts got fried? Like, decades. These aren’t real astronauts, but those soft assholes are going to use this as an excuse to break the industry. Which means,” Denton clicked his tongue and pointed at the camera, “Xerex is going to need the NTSB to get this nuked.”

Oh what the hell?

“Fine,” Braxton sighed, “what do your engineering teams think happened, and what’s the crash report messaging going to be?”

“Ok. So this is preliminary, but remember how we decided to use carbon fiber in the canards? Well it turns out…”

No way, Syl thought, inside and beyond Serva’s mask.

*****

“... so this guy’s going to tell the disaster recovery teams to grab up as much of the honeycomb structure as they can and blame it on pilot error,” Syl shouted later that evening in a SoHo club, wearing her voice out trying to explain the situation over an unauthorized techno remix of an old Britpop hit. Retro night. The Feds had been ferreted and cleared out. Black market Iranian ECM gear was keeping the club secure. Even if that failed, bugout training was part of the admission process.

“That’s messed up,” Baleen, Syl’s only real friend, shouted back, shaking their hair and setting the LEDs woven into the tips sinusoidally swaying. “And they were just talking about this in ear shot?”

“I know right? I don’t think…” the song ended and Syl shouted the last word, then dropped her voice back to a reasonable level “...they know I'm a person.”

“Ah Syl,” Baleen cooed, “don’t get too bent out of shape about tech attitudes. Their world is not ours.”

“Still, I feel like I should do something. Quest’s going to screw over these families and keep that death trap flying until it blows apart again.”

“It’s a design issue right?” Baleen asked. As they did, an impossibly tall dancer strode behind them, ran a finger under their chin, tipped their head back, and planted a kiss before wandering off.

Syl tried to smirk. “Fundamental flaws. Too many requirements stacked onto one spaceframe.”

“You know what?” Baleen said, eyes flashing with excitement as they rubbed a hand tattoo, an old WiFi icon in UV ink. “I think I want to do something about this.”

“No. None of that freelance espionage nonsense! That’s your game. I’m not going to jail.”

An androgynous anthem from decades prior began.

“Don’t worry about jail,” Baleen stood, produced a joint and handed it to Syl, “you staying tonight?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Syl shouted as she lit up, “I’m serious. I trust you, but I’m not so fearless anymore.”

Baleen shrugged, and slipped away.

*****

After hours of hydroponic indica haze, a new joint somehow always materializing in Syl’s hand after the last one burned down, Baleen reappeared and led her to an unoccupied chillout room glowing in oceanic blue.

“Ok, check this out,” they said as they produced a tablet from their cargo pants and handed it over. Waves of modular synthesizers crashed and combined. “Nobody’s sure how this came over, but a bunch of Chinese military software has been circulating through the scene. Not uploaded; installed and shipped in hardware.”

“That, like, doesn’t raise a red flag?” Syl asked as she accepted the tablet.

“Not the bad one. There are some theories. I think it's an asymmetrical attempt to stochastically wear down our tech security through social engineering. Don't mind playing along.”

Syl started scrolling through the code, “Oh wow, this is well done.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking we can do. It’s an active project, so it’s all but guaranteed they’ll be talking about it. This code can let me piggyback on your Serva’s sensory data, route it to an overseas server and store it. All you have to do is wait for them to discuss something incriminating, then tell me to record. The only catch is that we only have one channel and limited bandwidth, so I can’t see what you’re seeing and we can only catch twenty seconds, tops. You’ll have to tell me to record with your voice, but the tricky bit will be making sure nobody in meatspace hears you. Then I disseminate it through the collective culture and we screw them over.”

The room morphed to a shifting pattern of pink and purple.

“You’re overestimating our regulatory apparatus.”

“Don’t care about that. It’s about hearts and minds. Even if it comes to nothing, that sort of security breach is going to make this asshole’s life one giant inconvenience."

“Ok and then what? I get my ass handed to me by their lawyers? They come up with a tortured ITAR reading and arrest me?

“That’s the beauty of this,” Baleen gestured at the tablet, “it’s also designed to cover our tracks. Hot exploits. Every trace of you—whiped away. You go get a new job. One hundred percent secure.”

The suggestion to get a new job hit her. Somehow, she hadn’t considered it, having cultivated a resignation to her economic position. Subconsciously, she assumed that she had in some way tricked Serva into hiring her, and the trick wouldn’t work again. To just clear out though…

Syl squinted, “I don’t like when people say one hundred percent.”

Baleen held up their hands, “I get that, but I can vouch for it. The companies are using AI for their security, building infosec based on what they can learn from the clear web. Which means that we know everything that they know, and they think they know everything, but we know they don't. If it’s offline,” Baleen tapped the side of their head, “or on the other side of the international firewalls then the models don’t know about it. Closed system.”

“I figured as much,” Syl agreed, “but you’d think they’d realize that vulnerability.”

“LLMs have been on the market for decades. These guys have forgotten how they actually learned. They think they’re conscious. Overconfidence is a killer.”

Syl snorted. “True. They’re not the brightest. Ok, let me think about it.”

“I’ll be ready whenever you are. A caveat: a dozen of these came over, and as soon as one person uses it then the AIs know how to fight it. So make your decision quick before another cyberjockey finds a target. Who knows when I’ll be able to scrounge up another one.”

“Understood.”

*****

That morning, unable to sleep, Syl sat on her apartment floor, her TV and phone both tuned to live coverage of the crash. Recovery had started, Braxton’s go-team presumably picking through the wreckage to remove anything incriminating. The faces of the victims scrolled the sides of the screens.

She imagined the crash. The broken canard spinning away, trailing sparks. RCS sledgehammering. A mighty tearing sound, and a gash opening at the front of the cabin. A flare of green plasma cutting across the passengers. Hypersonic air snapping heads back, pulverizing vertebrae. The front of the cabin tearing away. Blue and white streaks.

In the dim late afternoon she pinged Baleen.

“Let’s do it.”

*****

The next day she was at her desk.

“Ok, I’m all set up,” Baleen said in her ear, “remember, the mute button now routes to me.”

“Roger that.” But already things had gotten complicated in meatspace. The operator one cubicle over was celebrating his fifth work anniversary. His work friends—a cohort of young men who thought that anything that touched “AI” was cutting edge and thus assumed they were on their way up—were celebrating by recounting all the different pieces of technology they could name off the tops of their heads. Syl assumed this passed for conversation in their demographic. Crowded into a cubicle, they’d all be in earshot. “Give me one sec, my apologies.”

She triggered the mute button and stood to look over the cubicle wall, and adopted her calm-killer flatness, “Hey, you mind? We have a goddamn breakroom.” They blanched, and walked away.

“Very good,” Baleen responded.

“Thanks,” she started the log in sequence, “here we go.”

The VR screen resolved into the bland cube of Braxton’s apartment, the man’s face nearly nose-to-nose with hers.

“Dammit robot, respond,” he sneered.

“Log in sequence completed,” she answered.

That seemed to placate him, but he still smacked the side of her plastic skull. Syl tilted the sticks to maintain balance. “Needs an update,” he mumbled.

Braxton walked over to his couch, and Syl started working, cleaning the kitchen, sweeping the floors, responding to snapped commands for water and food. Baleen listened patiently, catching only the auditory loop, passively patched and waiting for the call to cut in the direct line.

It was morning in Nevada, just after ten. Did Braxton ever leave his apartment? She didn’t know.

Finally, he started working. A chime sounded through the apartment system and a conference call flashed to the TV screen, boxes of identical men.

Syl pushed the mute button, looked around the operator floor, and whispered. “Ok, he’s working. Locked up?”

“Some fluctuations but we’re good to go,” Baleen responded.

“Should happen quick. I think they’re moving fast, got to get this right.”

Braxton’s team was slow getting to work. They started with small talk, which quickly veered into projections about the future, science fiction concepts that were always a decade away. Syl served silently.

Then, they got to business.

“Here’s where we’re at,” Denton started, “we think that we grabbed anything too sketchy from the crash site, but there’s always a chance that they are going to find something that we didn’t catch.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Braxton said, “as long as we have the big chunks, we’ll lose them in the chain of custody. Anything left will be too small for them to make conclusions on, and we’ll stonewall it if they start too much of a fuss.”

Damn, Syl thought, that would have been perfect. She’d have to predict where the conversation was going, and that was going to prove difficult with the looping, hyperbolic conversational style of tech guys.

As she served, she missed another chance, a quick aside about material science flaws in the Clipper supply chain that veered into theorizing about colonizing Venus, of all places, before Syl could decide to give Baleen the command.

More opportunities came and went.

Then the question of messaging came up, workshopping what Braxton would submit to the Senators on behalf of the NTSB. They’d have to focus. Finally.

Syl triggered her mute button, “Baleen, ready? On my mark.”

A few seconds. Then: “Mark.”

Nothing. She waited ten seconds then triggered the button again, “You there?”

“Did you say something?”

“What’s going on?”

“Goddamn war,” Baleen groaned. “Something just hit the constellation. Knocked out everything down to the quartary satellites I was routing through. Thought it was junk pegging one of ‘em, but no. Something spiked a big chunk of the system.”

“Dammit,” Syl whispered, hunkering down to her desk, resting her headset on the plastic to hide her voice, “are we done?”

“No, hang tight.”

“Hey!” Braxton was shouting at her, “Coffee? Sometime in the next century?”

“I apologize,” she responded, “software update required.” That’d shut him up.

“Whoa, that’s a sexy one, which voice is that?” she heard one of the conference call participants ask.

“Somewhere in the five-hundreds,” Braxton responded.

She walked over and started putting together cold brew, just as he liked it. At least they were talking about the hottest Serva voices now, distracted at a convenient moment for once.

As she brought Braxton’s caffeine over, Baleen came back in her ears, “We’re locked up again, I’ve got the bandwidth. But I’d recommend doing this quickly. Battle or something. Net’s a mess.”

Come on, come on, come on. Stop with your impotent little fantasies.

Then they did.

“So Denton, you guys have plans for the graphs in the report?”

“Now! Baleen! Now!”

“Roger that,” said the satellite-routed voice. Syl’s vision flickered briefly. She stopped what she was doing, facing directly at the screen.

“We’ve been running some of our AI models,” Denton responded, “and we’ve been able to construct graphs that pretty convincingly show the pilot’s fake canard deflections exceeding nominal design standards. Even better, we’ve synchronized the curve with dummy control input data. Then we made even more graphs to show our material science was a-ok.”

Syl held the screen center frame as the multi-colored graphs appeared.

“Then the conclusion is something like…” Braxton thought out loud, “‘At time-T, the pilot engaged in a canard deflection that overcame the sum of the forces recommended by the flight operation manual and limited by the control computer TLU. Reconstruction of recorded control data shows corresponding behavior between canard deflection and flight control inputs.’”

“Yep,” Denton agreed, “We’ll run it through the AI to change everything to passive voice and get the jargon right but that’s basically the story we’ll use… Hey, your Serva is locked up again.”

Braxton turned around. “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

“Got it!” Baleen cheered, “And it’s out. Pure, unfiltered coverup. Ready for me to erase you?”

“One second please,” Syl responded. She sent a flurry of commands into the hands, attempting to raise the middle fingers. RUDE GESTURE ALERT appeared in her viewport. Well now…

She spun around, heard Braxton throw a few curses at her, and walked over to the countertop bar, looking at all that stunning crystal barware that he never used, sitting there collecting dust because that’s what a rich man’s apartment was supposed to have.

She stuck her hand out towards the line up. No limitation. The system thought she was reaching to prepare a drink. Initiative. Good for the quarterly review. Then in one grand swing she powered the robot’s hand through the barware. Electrical muscles shattered the rocks glasses, the thick-bottomed shooters, the coupes, and the dusty champagne flutes. Syl watched the curved forms explode into a shower of sparkling shards.

She turned back to see Braxton vault over the back of his couch.

“We’re done,” she said to Baleen. A second later the screen went black, before her client got a chance to touch her.

She removed the headset and ran her hand through her hair, surprised by the sweat. She was always bad at understanding that she was not in actual danger.

Syl Caillet stood and looked around the linear sightlines of the basement office floor, all the chattering operators diligently serving away. She dropped the controller to the floor and took two big stomps on it. Cheap plastic crunched under her boot. She flipped off the whole floor, reveling in the limitless expressions of reality, then calmly walked to the elevator. The car arrived. It took her up before anybody realized what had happened.

Photo of Zachery Brasier

BIO: Zachery Brasier is a science fiction writer and space artist residing in Salem, MA. His art focuses on retro space concepts. His writing has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Apocalypse Confidential, the This Exquisite Topology anthology, Nocturne Magazine, and more. Find him as Element115Art on most platforms.