Numina code, p.1
Numina Code, page 1
NUMINA CODE
BOOK 3
THE ABIOTA SERIES
E. M. RENSING
Copyright © 2024 by E.M. Rensing
Print ISBN: 979-8-9869182-5-9
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
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Author’s Notes
About the Author
1
“I don’t understand,” Daelia said, picking at a piece of corn bread with her right fingers. June had made chili. The heat was welcome; the night had turned rainy. “Why is the quantum machine manifesting in AR like that?”
“It does that sometimes, if abiota are around,” June said, and blew across her own spoonful of chili.
“What does that mean?”
“It creates visuals that look and behave remarkably like abiota. We think it’s piggybacking off their TGLP, but it’s hard to tell,” August replied. He sat at the other end of the table, a clean towel at his elbow holding an assortment of miniature components as he rebuilt Daelia’s brace.
“And it eats them?” Daelia asked.
“It’s impossible to know exactly what is going on there,” August said. “So much of what that machine does can’t be analyzed. Hell of a thing, really.”
“Are you sure it doesn’t have an abiota in it?” Daelia asked.
June, scooping up another bite, froze. August looked away.
“Does it?” she pressed.
June paused for a moment more. When she spoke, it wasn’t to answer Daelia’s question.
“From the data it did give us, it’s pretty much certain that both those sustainment units were engineered and built by humans. The rudiment cores too.” She patted a sheaf of printouts. Q-BAL’s analysis, printed out on an ancient inkjet machine that lived in that workroom.
Daelia took another bite, thinking. June wasn’t a great cook, but there was something earnest about her food. Mom had always been clinical, exacting. She hadn’t been able to taste anything herself and defaulted always to following recipes to the letter. June, on the other hand, treated cooking like a science experiment. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it went horribly wrong. At least it was almost impossible to screw up chili and box-mix corn bread.
“Can we know that for sure?” Daelia asked.
“Probably. If I could get my hands on a metallurgist and their lab for a few days, or a forensic cyber analyst, or some part of this supposed alien tech,” June said, tapping the papers. “But where am I going to get that?”
“I don’t understand this,” Daelia admitted. “The Envoy told us Unity was using, uhh, Earth-made kugus, I guess you’d say. And I can see maybe using our sustainment units to ensure compatibility. But that thing we found in the truck, that was clearly not…”
“Not human?” August said. “You’re so sure about that?”
What else would it be? Daelia wondered. “It didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
June nodded. “Did they catch it?”
“No,” Daelia said. “The klaatu effect ended as soon as Emily zapped the place. But the cops told us they didn’t find any trucks. Not the people they were taking, and not that thing.”
“Unless we have aliens hiding their own tech in some hollowed-out Mack truck chassis,” August said, “the most likely answer there is that the electronics were hardened.”
“Who hardens a semitruck?” Daelia asked.
He picked up a tiny screw with the magnetic end of a tiny screwdriver. “That, my girl, is a very good question.”
“You should let this go,” June added. Daelia looked at her, a frown on her face. “Let it go, Daelia.”
She shook her head. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t walk away from this. They killed a man, right in front of me. Probably fried an entire server room’s worth of abiota!”
June sighed. “An abiota is not worth your own life.”
Daelia blinked. Had Aunt June really just said that? “What?”
“It’s the truth, Daelia,” June said, her voice taking on a hard edge. “They aren’t us. You need to start understanding that.”
“They’re still alive, June!” Daelia pressed, unnerved by the direction of this discussion.
But her aunt didn’t say anything.
“If the aliens are willing to kill sapient-level abiota, and if Emily’s willing to kill them—”
“Why wouldn’t they be?” August asked mildly, still working.
“What do you mean?”
“We see artificial life and we think it’s all one big happy family. It’s an image the Domain Array likes to push. But is there peace within our species? Is there peace in any of the domains here, biota or abiota?” He turned the half-completed control board over in his hands, looking at it. “Do you think this Unity shit from the stars is going to be any different?”
“They are threatening to wipe us all out if we don’t do what they say,” June said.
“That seems to be the threat, doesn’t it?” August agreed. He set the board back down, reaching for another component. “But all we’ve seen of it so far has been here on Earth.”
“Are you saying this is some kind of fraud?” When August didn’t say anything, Daelia pressed. “What would have the ability to pull off a fraud this massive?”
“There’s an idea that came out of the Soviet Union, back in the day,” he said. “The bigger the lie, the more likely it is people will believe it.”
Daelia broke off a corner of corn bread with her spoon, pushing it down into the chili, thinking. “If that was true, if this is all bullshit, how would you prove it?”
“There’s always a way,” August said. “The truth always comes out in the end.”
“Unless everybody who knows it is silenced,” June added, and jabbed her spoon at Daelia. “You are not going to prove anything, young lady.”
“I’m already involved!”
“Not so far that you can’t pull out now,” June said, and shoved back from the table. “I’m going to go get the guest room bed fluffed up.”
“Aunt June…”
“You’re spending the night and that’s final,” the older woman snapped, unexpected anger in her voice, and then she was gone.
Daelia stared after her. “What the hell’s wrong with her?”
“She worries about you,” August said, adjusting a solenoid. “You know that.”
“Tell me straight. Is Q-BAL actually an abiota?”
“Not the time, Daelia. Not the time.”
It took August another hour to finish the new control board, test it, and slot it back into the housing on Daelia’s brace.
She’d already gone to bed at that point. June had come back down from changing the sheets, taken one look at her, and ordered her up. Daelia could be incredibly single-minded at times. That was her dad right there.
But then, it was always hard to see Bellona in her. Nurture could only do so much. There had always been a distance between mother and daughter, June knew. Inevitable, perhaps. Considering that Bellona wasn’t human.
There were just some human subtleties that abiota couldn’t understand, no matter how hard they tried. And, of course, there were things about abiota that made no sense. Things June and August had been trying to unravel for a long, long time. They’d come close so many times, never quite getting there. But now, with this Unity nonsense, well…
The whole thing seemed a lot more urgent.
“Do you believe that story about San Antonio?” August asked as he polished his fingerprints off the smooth metal of the brace’s end cap.
“She wouldn’t lie to us about it,” June
“Well, according to the shortwave”—and he jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder, to the next room, where he had the old analog radio set up—“nothing is out there on the Internet. Nobody is talking about this.”
“You know how the feds are. Entire thing’s likely being suppressed. If nobody knows it happened, who’s to say it did at all?”
“That never works, honey.”
“It never stops them from trying.” June harrumphed. “You don’t think this is related to—”
“No, I don’t,” August replied, cutting her off. “Although it might be time to talk to the girl about that.”
“No,” June said, emphatic. “You know I promised Lee I wouldn’t ever bring it up with her.”
“Extenuating circumstances right now, honey.”
“Lee’s going to be back. This mess is going to sort itself out,” June said, with a conviction she didn’t feel. “There’s no reason to mess her up right now by talking to her about her mom.”
“Bellona—”
“Everything else aside, you know she wouldn’t want our girl here walking back into the thick of this.”
“Except she’s going to,” August said. “You know that. No matter what you say to her, she’s going to pursue this.”
“Let’s hope not,” June said, “or all the wrong people might start considering her a target.”
Daelia snuck out before the sun came up.
Sneaking might have been a bit melodramatic. Nothing snuck by June and August; their ranch had security measures that put Ellington’s own to shame. They most likely knew exactly what she was up to. Or at least, could have known, if they’d wanted to.
Hell, they were probably letting her leave.
But Daelia had no desire to get another lecture from her aunt, so she left early. Made her bed, took another shower—she’d dreamed about Pranav again, his blood splattering her—grabbed some cold corn bread from the kitchen, and took the short hike down to Ginger.
The abiota was happy to see her.
She was just happy to crawl into the cab.
The rain had stopped overnight, but the ground was muddy, the air chilly. The weather here never knew what it wanted to do in October.
The drive back to base was long, dark, and quiet. Unbearably so. Even at this hour, I-45 should have been packed with traffic. The new control board in her arm seemed to be working fine, but after a day of nothing, both the sensation and movement were somehow too much to stand.
Daelia made it five minutes down the freeway before switching on the ByYou app on Ginger’s central panel. Voice only; she was driving, after all.
All her recommendations were for a new stream. A recording from the night before. Official. Tamm Good Industries.
Hell. What was he up to now?
2
“You worried about going up?”
It was an innocent comment. At least, Argo hoped it came across as innocent.
“No, why? Should I be?” The woman he was talking to smiled at him and broke off a piece of the muffin she was eating. “Everything’s fine up in orbit.”
“You sure about that?”
The other woman at the table rolled her eyes. “You military boys are all the same. Paranoid about everything. But everything really is fine up there. In fact, it’s pretty exciting, what with the expo and all.”
“Yeah. I mean, hopefully this being open will get everybody over all the shit from last week,” the first said. “All the tickets you can purchase are gone already. Crashed the servers last night, from what I heard.”
“I know, right?” the second said with a knowing smile. “We’re booked solid for the next six months.”
“Well, there’s no biking up to orbit,” the first replied cheerfully. “Only way up is Astraeus.”
They both laughed. The mirth made Argo’s stomach turn a little. Irritated, disgusted, whatever.
People had a right to be scared, with everything going on.
With what happened to San Antonio yesterday.
“Jason!” the barista called. “Jason, your coffee’s up!”
“Excuse me, ladies,” Argo said, getting up, and went to go grab his drink.
At the counter, a barista with a short man-bun and circuitry patterns tattooed clean down to his fingertips nudged a steaming cup toward Argo. He took it with a nod.
Why hadn’t anything about this leaked online?
Argo had dropped Daelia off at the Scrap House and gone straight up to the unit. Sausage was even there; he’d come in, apparently, when Emily had gone missing on her flight. The debrief had taken a long time.
Whatever the military was doing to keep this all under wraps, it was working. Exceptionally well. Argo had caught part of the local morning news stream on his drive over here to the spaceport terminal.
There had been some kind of industrial accident in downtown San Antonio, they were claiming. Chemical spill. Semi had run into one of the major cell towers in the area, interrupting service. Nothing to worry about.
Argo had seen information campaigns like this before, but for small-scale stuff: a bombing run gone bad, a classified information leak. That time when one of the Air Force’s abiota cyberattack specialists went a little crazy and launched an ill-fated raid of the Omphalos headquarters.
Nothing on this scale though. And certainly nothing with this many civilian witnesses.
Daelia said there was something screwy going on with the Internet, with the flow and presentation of information. Things, odd little things, were being suppressed, twisted, hidden.
Argo would have gone a step further. Maybe things weren’t just being hidden. Maybe things were being pushed. Twisted. Invented. Narrative engineering.
But why, and how, and on this kind of scale…
Argo hated this shit. He understood why it was necessary—at least, he understood that it was going to be done whether or not he agreed with it. He certainly hadn’t intended to start anything with anybody, least of all some kind of intergalactic war. But at the same time, did it matter what the narrative was? Wouldn’t the Unity aliens know what was going on?
If it was really an act of war, what Emily had done, wouldn’t they have already retaliated? Regardless of how hard the NSA locked down the information flow?
These were questions that sat poorly with him. People had died yesterday, died in awful ways, and nothing was being done about it.
Hell, nothing was even being done to him.
Argo wasn’t stupid enough to think that was out of concern for his well-being. No, the military would have had no compunction about throwing him under the bus if need be. But apparently part of not acknowledging San Antonio meant not acknowledging his role in it.
“You’re not scheduled to come in until Tuesday anyway,” a very exhausted Rover had told him last night, “so take the time off. I don’t want to see you back here until then.”
“Sir—”
“You know how to keep your mouth shut, right?” Rover had said. “So keep it shut, and we’ll get through this. Last thing any of us need is another fucking investigation.”
Argo had taken the point. With his truck still in San Antonio, Daelia had offered to let him borrow Dingo. Even had the abiota drive up for him. But Argo had had enough of trusting abiota for one day; he’d racked out on one of the bunks in the crew rest room and tried to sleep.
He kept seeing Daelia in his mind’s eye. The fear in her eyes, and the anger. The blood splattered on her clothes. The contents of Pranav’s chest.
