Ray Gun Revival magazine, Issue 53

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Two stations down, ten to go, I thought bitterly. With Beta and Delta destroyed, my AX-1 production would plunge by fifteen percent. “Will you inform Base about Beta?” Cheng asked me. That Ceres Base! When I face-tofaced yesterday to report Delta’s status, a junior technician, barely eight decades old, officiously told me to focus on protecting my stations. The brat could still be on duty if Amelie weren’t back from her implant upgrades. “Base gets direct cam-feeds.” I mailed a formal notification anyway. “Cheng, you will leave now to repair Beta.” “But I...I’ve never repaired a station and I’m not sure I...” “You don’t know how to debug a rogue,” I said bluntly, “but your training covered the protocol to repair stations.” I softened when he wiped his brow nervously. “Our maintenance transpods are fully equipped. You can handle the job.” “You can do it better.” “I have to beat the rogue.” After Cheng left, I paced my metallic-gray control room, surrounded by the low buzz of machines. Both my juniors were off for repairs, and I was the only person on Stationhead. Though I didn’t consider Rahul or Cheng company—we shared no com- mon interests—I felt strangely lonely. I rubbed my eyes wearily. I needed Darlene. *** Lurid reds and blues swirled on Darlene’s walls; agonized groans saturated the air. I gripped the door-frame, dizzy and tense. A rogue attack, here? “Darlene?” “Jerry, has Beta been destroyed?” Darlene’s synthetic voice burst through the room. At least her speech circuits worked. I took a deep breath and peered past the psychedelic colors. Objects swished around, images morphed, but nothing lay broken, contorted, or burnt. Darlene’s settings were unstable, not damaged. The news about Beta must have agitated her. “You’ve been watching Net-home.” I should have guessed. Rogue activities provided sensation-seeking networks opportunities for alarming headlines, good boosts for popularity ratings. Sure enough, the Net-home corner displayed an old graphic of Station Beta—gleaming equipment, bustling robots, and scoopers piled with rocks. Bold black type declared: 12th victim of Rogue 256: Station Beta of Stationhead AX-1 (Realtor Mining). Stay tuned for our WHO’S NEXT discussion between experts from Ceres and Mars. Twelve victims, right. My Delta and Beta, AX-1 stations under Realtor. Six stations of Ays mining. Four stations of Dedalus. I disabled Net-home and looked around the room. All the displayed curios were pre-World War IV Earth, of course, because that’s all I collected, but Darlene’s selection today reflected her agitation. I noticed a wizened hand purportedly used in witchcraft, a voodoo mask, and a twisted-clock Dali painting. “Jerry, is Beta as badly damaged as Delta?” Darlene asked. “I don’t know yet,” I lied. After a pause, I added, “I’ve sent Cheng there.” “What does this new rogue want?” Such irrational questions were typical of Darlene. It was my fault; I had incorporated too many emotion modules into her staid, standard houseware. I considered calming her by explaining that rogues were merely code segments. But she wouldn’t understand that fluff could drift out of destruction-oriented programs and lump under a knowledge management engine to cause havoc. Anyway, even if rogues couldn’t “want” anything, they could be vicious. They ISSUE <strong>53</strong> infected any station they could reach by piggybacking signals, they self-extracted, and corrupted intels. Worse, we couldn’t “kill” a rogue, only patch workarounds. By the time we figured out how to beat one rogue, the next one began its damage. “Rogues are not humans,” I said, keeping the worry out of my voice. “They don’t have motives.” I activated my workstation, adjusted my eye-zap for pattern-seeking, and loaded the data from Delta and Beta. “Are we safe, Jerry?” “Rogues never damage stationheads.” Not until now, I thought. A sudden image engulfed me: a puncture in AX-1’s shield; me lunging for a hard suit; a crazed Darlene dropping her ceiling on me. I fought the surge of panic; such thinking was futile. Crimson and turquoise robed dancers continued to gyrate around me. My head throbbed. The low ambient temperature made me shiver. “We are safe, Darlene,” I said firmly. “Now I need to concentrate. Please?” I waved my hands. The room became warmer. The walls steadied, and muted to my favorite lavender. *** I checked for advisories from the Mining Consortium at Ceres. None. Page 4
Not that I expected action from bureaucratic third-centenarians snug in their enormous bubble city. No, Sir, those dodderers woke up after isolated controllers like me, struggling to cope with rogues, developed solutions. Forget those fools. I would debug this myself. I had handled the first rogue, a few decades ago. Okay, so that was simple, and rogues were smarter now—they gathered more floating code, coalesced, and spawned mutants and variants. But even if new rogues had more convoluted logic, they were still just code. I could beat them. Even this new rogue, Rogue 256, however malevolent it seemed. With data from two stations, finding the rogue’s core instructions should be easier. I profiled the critical window of the Beta data and the Delta data, overlapped them, and began pattern-seeking for commonalties. I touched the screen to enhance my connection with the data. The segment corresponding to 256’s initial query became obvious. I narrowed my looping scope to decipher the rogue’s algorithm. Nothing. I refined my eyezap parameters and tried again. And again. My tear duct-lubricators started drying. I lowered my head in my hands. “Can I help?” Darlene used the voice profile of Rooma, the girl I kissed as a callow teenager over a century and a half ago. Warmth spread through me. I felt glad I programmed Darlene using a collage of the women I knew, starting from Rooma right up to Amelie. “No, Darlene,” I said. “Thanks for offering.” “Why do rogues hate us?” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll design a workaround soon.” I had to. Darlene increased the illumination and sprayed lemon-grass essence in the air. A mug with steaming kick, coffee-flavored, appeared near my elbow. I sipped it and continued my analysis. *** “Jerry? Rahul reporting from Delta, over.” My display showed Rahul in his hard suit, standing on the debris, his face hidden by helmet and visor. He raised his right arm clumsily to indicate endcomm. “Did you spot any pattern in the rogue’s behavior? Over to you.” I signaled endcomm and waited. “All intel circuits are fused because of neural activity overload,” Rahul said after an irritating signal lag. “Purely mechanical equipment is unharmed, like cutters, axes, you get it. The invasion proceeded from most to least intelligent, as if the rogue aimed to maximize damage before any inter- ruption. I’ve repaired the power unit. Restarting mining with minimal scooper configuration will take me three days.” He gave a small laugh that was no laugh. “I’m skipping dome repair. I’m the only one who needs breathable air, and I can work wearing my suit.” I felt dejected after talking to Rahul. It had taken me decades of hard work to make AX-1 Realtor’s best stationhead and achieve profitability comparable with Ays and Dedalus stationheads. Rogue 256 could ruin everything. The consolation, if it could be called that, was that all belt miners were suffering. Wait. The rogue proceeded down the complexity ladder instead of randomly striking equipment. That reminded me of Darlene asking why do rogues hate us? Definitely, 256 seemed anti-intelligence. Were we humans at risk? Rogues corrupted signals; could 256 mess up a human’s brain? Harm us? Calm down, I told myself, pulling up the data of stations attacked by 256 so far. Hmmm...no humans were present on any of the affected stations. That was strange. Realtor used remotemanaged stations to save costs, so our stations were usually unmanned, but Ays and Dedalus employed heavy manning and applied stringent in-person quality checks. The probability of ISSUE <strong>53</strong> randomly picking up ten of their stations without any person present was statistically low. “Maybe this rogue only attacks stations without humans,” I muttered to myself. “Could it have some archaic security law embedded?” “Are you humans more valuable just because your brains are in skulls?” Darlene sounded petulant. My head snapped up. I almost pointed out that humans were real while non-humans could be created or deactivated. Then I thought, forget it, she’s just coded to act emotional. “No, Darlene, all intel is valuable,” I said soothingly. Human, non-human, hmm....Was that where the clue lay? If the rogue sensed human presence to decide whether to attack, must be checking for human-specific neural patterns. If I patched a bot so that it seemed “human,” and placed it on a station, 256 would be duped into “detecting” human presence and skip that station. Heartened, I refined eye-zap combinations to detect the human-present sequence. I checked for available upgrades to improve the zapper connection to my positron enhancements, and downloaded the latest version. I tried pattern-seeking for one hour. Another. Then, suddenly, a cluster of low-level instructions formed a pattern. Pause. Stare. Back. Rerun. Page 5
Page 1 and 2: ALONE AT AX-1 by Swapna Kishore BFF
Page 3: Overlords’ Lair: Trek, Terminator
Page 7 and 8: live long, my dear.” I opened my
Page 9 and 10: and a Rogue 258 from the solution t
Page 11 and 12: “What of it, Tooner?” Dick shou
Page 13 and 14: ely on yours.” Merrie’s ankles
Page 15 and 16: made up the entirety of the vessel
Page 17 and 18: een invisible. “Approaching Damas
Page 19 and 20: And dining room it was, with chande
Page 21 and 22: artender who also doubled as a guar
Page 23 and 24: Niatti ran into her mother’s offi
Page 25 and 26: good as the stuff they serve in you
Page 27 and 28: Niatti stared at Chen’s frustrate
Page 29 and 30: don’t worry. But before we do, wo
Page 31 and 32: and started banging on the doors, e
Page 33 and 34: “It’s no use,” she whispered,
Page 35 and 36: “Just like you said, Sir, a milit
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Page 39 and 40: was falling as a warm mist. The mus
Page 41 and 42: cation.” Graves snorted. The Cill
Page 43 and 44: continue. Graves licked his lips an
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Page 47 and 48: Jack’s angry expression reverted
Page 49 and 50: approximately six million klicks fr
Page 51 and 52: RGR REVIEWS by Donald Jacob Uitvlug
Page 53 and 54: THIEVES’ HONOR: EPISODE 8 Endgame
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the others gave it up as soon as th
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had probably voyaged from Earth in
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overlook the poor welcome, and conv
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Ray Gun Revival magazine, Issue 53

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