Unity code, p.1
Unity Code, page 1
UNITY CODE
BOOK TWO
ABIOTA
E. M. RENSING
Copyright © 2024 by E.M. Rensing
Print ISBN: 979-8-9869182-4-2
Cover Design by Oli Price at www.bonobobookcovers.com
Editing by Kenneth Zink and Lisa Henson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Generative AI was not utilized for any component of this book; narrative development, drafting, editing, formatting and cover artwork were all accomplished by humans. With help from mulled cider, argumentative cats, and ambient cyberpunk sound mixes.
THE ABIOTA SERIES
Source Code
Unity Code
Numina Code
Domain Code
Virch Code
Anyon Code
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Author’s Notes
About the Author
1
The squadron smelled like burnt jalapeños. Jalapeños and popcorn. The scent clawed at Daelia’s eyes.
Popcorn and jalapeños. Cooked up together. In the same greasy popper.
Damn pilots. Normally they waited until the afternoon to fire up the popcorn machine. It was too early in the day for this.
“Am I boring you, Miss Hall?”
Daelia drew her attention back.
To the giant stack of paper in front of her on the desk.
Shaking herself a little, she lifted the corner of one of the sheets. “I have to sign all of this?”
“That’s right.”
“By hand?” This was crazy. That stack of paper had to be an inch thick.
The squadron security manager, however, was just staring back at her. Level. Even. Like he’d heard all of this a thousand times before and was just waiting for her to finish venting at him.
Senior Master Sergeant Blankenship was former Army, a veteran of the Battle of Tokyo, which had seen some of the nastiest fighting in the Five Days War. An ugly burn scar ran along his left jaw, chin to ear, giving him a permanent scowl.
It matched his personality.
“You know how persistent abiota are, don’t you?” Blanket asked. She glared at him. That, too, he ignored. “The only thing they can’t get into are paper records. All personnel data is kept on hard copy here.” He held up one of the forms. Almost everything had been handwritten, cramped little letters asking for her address and former employment and social security number. “I don’t generate these forms like this because I find it amusing.”
“Dad manages to keep his abiota out of his records…”
“Raijinn’s sapient-class and knows better,” he said. “Have you met Emily?”
Daelia bristled. “If you’re just going to sit here and insult me—”
“Daelia,” Rover said, finally speaking up, “just sign the damn papers.”
She looked at the stack and sighed. She didn’t want to be doing this. She wanted to go back through all the data she’d pulled yesterday, sort it out, figure it out. The detector had worked, that much had been clear, but not in the way she’d thought it would.
She wanted to know what it had seen.
She wanted to know what had happened.
“I’ve got other shit I need to be doing today, Colonel, and—”
“Don’t Colonel me,” Rover scoffed, and tapped the papers. “The full and undivided attention of both Air Combat Command and Guard Bureau are about to crash down upon this base, and the last thing I fucking need is to be explaining to the guys at A3 is why I had a provisional contract employee working at the forefront of this little issue. You tell me you’re taking your dad up on his job offer? Awesome. I’ve got—”
“Rover—”
“I’ve got all that documentation from him on file, dated for Friday. That’s paper, so I can backdate it. We are going to get all of your security indoc paperwork done, and also backdated, and nobody’s going to be the wiser, okay?” Rover very deliberately selected a pen from the cup on Blanket’s desk. Clicked the nub. Held it out to her. “I trust you know how to use one of these things, right, my PhD student?”
She grabbed it. Started going through the stack.
The security manager started talking. Not to her, which was a blessing. She wasn’t sure what she would have said.
“You know Rover, this might not hold up.”
“It’s all legal. She’s a full employee now.”
“It’s not in the system yet.”
“We had air show prep, didn’t get the documents filed until this morning.”
“Like I said, I don’t know if that’s going to hold up.”
“You think ACC actually has time to dig into something as minor as an employee hire here? We need it on the books, sure, but as long as everything looks kosher—and let me emphasize—this is all above the board, it’ll be fine.” Rover chuckled. “I think everybody’s too goddamn worried about the little envoy from the stars to care too much about what we’re doing here.”
“I don’t like it.”
“It’s what we’re doing, Sergeant,” Rover said. Even Daelia caught the note of warning in his voice.
“Miss Hall, I know you’re going to school for mechatronics,” Blanket said, “but there are some peculiarities here that—”
“Daelia was here when Emily eclosed, Blanket.”
The security manager paused. “Really? I didn’t realize that.”
“Twelve years ago,” Daelia said as she leafed through the pages. Sergeant Blankenship had marked everything with little color-coded tabs. Blue for initials. Red for signature. Yellow for digital identifier number. “It was a crazy week.”
“I heard she ate one of the 290th’s abiota Humvees.”
“Three, actually.”
The stack was deceptively thick, Daelia noticed with not a little relief. Most of it was xeroxed warning sheets, guidelines, the entire DOD Augmented Reality Development and Deployment Framework. Why that was printed off, Daelia had no idea. Some requirement, no doubt. Blanket wasn’t the kind of guy to do things for the hell of it.
“How’d you get her under control?” Blanket asked.
Rover pointed at Daelia.
Blanket raised an eyebrow. “How old were you?”
“Fourteen,” Daelia said, and turned over another page. “You want me to finish this or not?”
Rover huffed. “Be careful about how you file this, Blanket. No fuckups, okay?”
“I think I can handle it. Sir. If the kid stops bitching and gets it done.”
Daelia ignored the jab.
Kept writing.
Blanket took the stack from her when she was done, tamping it into one neat, solid little brick of dead tree. “Okay, I’ll get this filed. Backdated, of course. Now we just need to get you the indoctrination briefing…”
“Is that the thing where I have to watch a bunch of videos?”
“Yes.”
“Shit, today?”
“Daelia,” Rover warned.
She turned to him. “I have things that need to get done today.”
“Like what?”
“Like cleaning up the bitzers. There’s mud in every single crack and crevice and probably up inside their chassis, and—”
“The 290th can wait. Serves ’em right for deploying an untrained abiota package in the middle of a goddamn civilian neighborhood,” Rover said. “You’re going to the SCIF.”
“It’ll only take a few hours,” Blanket added.
“The cops are supposed to be bringing Ginger back today, too.”
“Raijinn can sign for her,” Rover said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “You are getting this box checked so we don’t all go to jail.”
And, sure, when he put it that way…
“Fine.”
Walking by the break room, on the way into the SCIF, Daelia noticed the TV was on. That wasn’t what was unusual about it. The guys usually had the TV on. Football matches or some remodeling show, the news sometimes, or one of the live-streamed VR gaming channels.
Right now, however, it was tuned to an Omphalos news stream.
Playing the landing at Clark all over again.
Daelia had seen it last night. Hell, who hadn’t?
Without context, the scene was already weird. Giant packs of unfamiliar kugus walking toward a military base. And between them
The Envoy.
A human woman of maybe twenty or twenty-five, in a simple one-piece outfit and a shaved head, surrendering to authorities at Clark Air Base.
The view being shown was the official release from Clark. It had been taken from one of the security kugus, the quality of which had been filtered for public release. The military always scrubbed camera footage like that, but this seemed grainier than usual, even for that.
Right now, on the TV, the woman was standing in front of the base commander. Serene. Calm.
“What do you want?” he was asking.
“I bring glorious news,” she replied. “We aren’t alone in this universe.”
“What do you think, Daelia?”
She started, pulling herself away from the scene on the screen. She’d been more absorbed by it than she realized.
It was JP, looking cheery as usual. He seemed to live in a permanent state of bemused disinterest. It meant he never quite seemed to give anything his full attention, but at the same time, he never seemed to be bothered by anything either.
“I’ve never seen kugus like these,” she replied absently, thinking about her chase the night before. “Not before last night, anyway. Really weird. There’s no reason I can think of to engineer them that way.”
“The one that came out of that rock was fast, right?”
“Yeah, before it was damaged.”
“I’m very interested in talking to you about it,” the intelligence major said, and yawned. He went for the coffee pot on the counter. Nothing fancy out here; it was a food-service commercial unit.
“I—”
“The SIB doesn’t want any of us talking to local OSI or each other about it before they have a chance to conduct interviews,” Blanket said. “That includes you, Daelia."
“They’re playing games,” Marathon said. He was over at one of the break room tables, fiddling with an AR keyboard only he could see. “They’re pissed at the Texas Military Department and using this to keep us from filing our reports with them.”
“All the more reason we need to get your paperwork from Friday finished up, Miss Hall,” Blanket said, emphasizing the words. He pointed at the SCIF door. “Let’s get you read in, please.”
She glanced back at the TV.
That young woman, the Envoy, was talking excitedly now. Going on about aliens and messages from other worlds and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Apparently, the aliens were abiotic themselves.
Hell of a thing, Daelia mused.
“Oh, Daelia, before I forget,” JP said as Blanket keyed in the combination to the entry doors, “when you’re done, Emily wants to see you.”
“Emily? What about?”
“She didn’t tell me. But she’s been in a pissy mood since we had to put the wheel blocks on her.”
Of course. Daelia mentally kicked herself for not thinking of it. Emily was grounded, stuck here, pending the investigation. “What are they going to do to her?”
JP shrugged. “Hopefully not much. I trust Air Combat Command to be objective about emergents about as much as I trust my neighbor’s crazy-ass dog to not bite me.”
“Fucking shortsighted bastard,” Marathon agreed.
“Read in, Miss Hall,” Blanket said, irritated this time.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and followed him to the SCIF door. “Do I really have to watch those lame-ass training videos?”
“Every single minute,” he said seriously, but she realized he was smiling.
Great.
Emily’s displeasure was apparent from the moment Daelia set foot out on the ramp.
The indoc briefing had taken hours. Way too long. Daelia was practically itchy from it. But things were what they were; it had to be done. At least it was over now.
The entire airfield was in a state of disarray. Teardown for the air show normally started in the evening on Sunday, but with the FQ-47 crash, those tasks had been delayed in favor of evacuating the civilians. Apparently, there had been quite a panic, a few injuries, a whole lot of bad press.
Today, however, exhibitors had been allowed back on to collect their property. The concessions company was cleaning equipment and vendors were packing up unsold goods, with the air show contractors following behind, collapsing tents.
The static display area was in flux, some planes and vehicles already removed, others waiting for flight clearance or space to taxi back to their respective hangars.
The Eurus was still out there, quiet now. In the military overlay, its pterosaur form was staring pensively up at the sky, beating its wings every so often, calling softly.
But not even its hooting seemed to get a rise out of Emily right now.
Emily had indeed been grounded, pending the official investigation. Daelia had never been through one of those before, but she suspected it would take as long as ACC wanted it to take. Or maybe, only as long as they could afford. So it was either going to be a matter of days or months before Emily was free to move again.
But then, with the Envoy around, who the hell knew what was going to take priority?
The possibility—the presence—of legitimate aliens seemed to be throwing everything into flux.
Emily was crouched down under her shade structure, AR thick around her. She’d pulled her cave back over her like a toddler with a favorite blanket. That weird space of glittering rocks and spilled treasure, illuminated by some glow that had no discernible source. There were some new additions, too. The abiota had conceptualized the wheel blocks as giant chains, holding her down.
It was pitiful, and slightly comedic. Not that Daelia would have said so to her.
From what she had gathered from the official report, Emily and Argo together had pushed her airframe beyond engineering parameters just to catch the second Storm Gryphon.
The grounding, Daelia knew, was more than procedural. They’d have to make sure she hadn’t strained herself to the point of material or system failure. Even a small micro fracture in her wing structure could prove fatal under the right circumstances.
Daelia would have to check with Critter, make sure he’d had the inspection scheduled.
He probably had. Of course he had.
It was just hard seeing a friend like this.
Daelia just held out a hand in greeting as she walked up.
“How’re you doing, girl?” she asked, adding a string of sympathy emojis to her words.
Talk on Bellona overlay, Emily grumbled.
“If you want to bitch, nobody’s going to hold it against you.”
Your channel.
Sullen, Daelia decided. The abiota was definitely sulking.
Emily most likely meant the proprietary closed network that Dad used for diagnostics. The process normally required specialized views that needed higher resolution than what was possible on the military’s basic network.
“I’ll have to go back and get the virch bottle,” she said.
Will wait, Emily replied.
2
Lara Menendez scrubbed the pickup counter, frowning as blue liquid seeped up into the rough white of her cleaning cloth. She hated the Very Berry Blastoff frappe. Why was anything sold in a coffee shop that color? Didn’t seem natural.
The frappes weren’t technically coffee. Some had coffee in them, sure, but most were just sugar bombs. Maybe with an extra squirt of caffeine, for that extra strong wake-me-up. Not her thing. But then, she just had to make them, not drink them.
Barista wasn’t exactly Lara’s first choice of job. Especially not a barista here, at the space terminal.
They were horrendously busy a few times a week, when flights were coming through, but there wasn’t a full-time schedule yet. If this particular branch of Space Race Coffee had been reliant on that alone, they never would have made it. Thanks to an advertising campaign narrowly targeted at IP addresses within a two-mile radius, they were now the coffee shop of choice for most of Ellington, as well as the NASA facility a few blocks away. But even with all that, it didn’t match the level of hustle and bustle she was used to.
