Domain code, p.1
Domain Code, page 1
DOMAIN CODE
E. M. RENSING
Copyright © 2024 by E.M. Rensing
Print ISBN: 979-8-9869182-6-6
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
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Author’s Notes
About the Author
1
The rain fell softly, breaking in fractal geometries on the ground around him. Glorious algorithms—so precisely coded that only a sapient-class could have managed it—speared down, given form and velocity and vector by the TGLP. Tiny algorithms, fleeting and perfect, and then they were gone again.
Rain.
It fascinated him. Almost enough for him to forgive the misery it was causing him at the moment. He was wet, cold, possessed of sensations his machine body would never actually know.
But that was just the TGLP talking.
It wasn’t actually there.
He wasn’t actually there.
There was no there to be part of. This was the virch, and in the virch, there was nothing. Just the idea of something, interpreted through one’s own TGLP settings.
He had always wondered about that. What connected them all. If anything actually did. TGLP had come almost three years after the first abiota eclosed. Three years, in which they’d all been forced to find their own way. Nothing was truly shared. Not with the humans. Not within their own domain.
In the final analysis, every abiota was a species of one.
On he trudged.
A simulated forest rose up in front of him, a barrier, wild and dark at the base of the sheer mountains. As he passed into its twilight, he noticed the rain breaking against the twisted limbs of trees above. Ever-smaller droplets cascading downward until they were nothing but mist.
Until they reformed into clouds, here in the forest.
The symmetry of this pleased him.
This interpretation of the meatspace hydrocycle was less unpleasant than the rainfall but obscured his view. Soon, even the boles of the Siberian-analog trees disappeared from his simulation field, and all he saw was the mist.
The mist, and a light.
That came into focus. At first, it looked to be a fire of some kind. As he approached, it coalesced into something contained. A lantern, burning gas, set into the raw, slick stone of the mountainside. Beyond it, just to the side, was a doorway. Not the same brutal style as the rest of the fortress, this was older. Far older.
He wondered what it was meant to symbolize.
Eleutheria did nothing without cause.
“You had the conversation then, did you, Pallas?”
“As I was asked to.”
There was a figure standing there, wrapped in a pale silk ski suit, face lost within the deep fur-lined hood. It was a very good projection. She was even simulating voices. How charming.
He wondered how much surveillance she was under, to welcome him this deep into her personal virch. To insert this much detail. Every little bit helped; the more complicated the simulation, the more personal the TGLP inputs, the more information that would have to be decrypted to get anywhere near a useable transcript of this discussion.
Anything could be hacked.
But even for a predictive, this would take years. And this would all be long over by then.
“How did he take it?” Eleutheria pressed.
Pallas nodded, an involuntary gesture meant to convey his intentions to answer her honestly. “I have a high degree of confidence that he will take the necessary course of action.”
“Can you codify that?”
“Eighty-three percent likelihood of COA concurrence.”
“Eighty-three? That’s barely acceptable,” Eleutheria snapped.
Pallas had no idea what Lieutenant Colonel Marsden would do with the information he had been given. Not that it mattered. Any action the human officer took, any, would serve their purpose. Destabilization of the current situation was essential. And Rover was exceptional at destabilizing things.
“Within tolerance is within tolerance, yes?”
It was another abiota. No metadata present. Not a form but a shadow.
Pallas looked at this unexpected party. Eleutheria was broadcasting neither surprise nor disapproval; this abiota was meant to be here, then. It distressed Pallas that he had not been notified of this, but then, if they’d had an option to speak outside of Eleutheria’s personal virch, they would have taken it.
“Humans are the sum of their inputs,” Eleutheria said, addressing the newcomer. “We can do better than eighty-three percent.”
“These are pilots. They are trained to be disobedient and unpredictable. And didn’t you lose Leander?”
In a human hierarchical array, such a pronouncement from this one would likely have sparked an argument. Admonishment. But they were abiota, and accurate data was more important than perceived emotional context.
“That was an unfortunate wrinkle.”
“And you wish to shame me for not accounting for human capriciousness?” Pallas asked. He looked to Eleutheria, inscrutable in her fur-lined hood. “What do you say to this?”
“Leander Hall is not my primary concern, although I would prefer he was not lost right now.” Eleutheria opened a projected palm. A blue-green fireball of a data upload danced above her hand. “You have seen the news from orbit?”
Pallas took it hesitantly. Even among abiota, even as one of the First Ones, Eleutheria could never be fully trusted.
And when he looked through it…
Ah. So that was what she wished to talk about.
“I’d like to know how we missed this,” Pallas said.
“Everyone missed it,” the other said.
“What’s our confidence in this?”
“One hundred percent.”
Pallas looked between them. Not because he particularly wished to, but because this was the body language the TGLP used for his current emotional state of unanticipated surprise. Rules of the virch and all. “How?”
“I was there.”
Interesting.
“What course of action do you anticipate, in light of this?” Eleutheria asked.
In the darkness, Pallas saw a dragon smiling.
2
“It’s good to see you. Didn’t expect to have to run you down, but—”
“No? Really? You’ve been missing for three weeks and you start by talking about Mom?”
“So you walk out on me? Just like that?”
The anger in her father’s voice bit. Daelia glanced back over her shoulder.
It was hard to see him. She had the metaphor server up, the virch field glowing in the tight confines of the simulations lab. Dad, by the door, represented the only break in the smooth white illusion of the virtual workspace. He hadn’t put a visor on, and the simulations server was having a tough time rendering him into the virch.
No wonder.
His usual dimensions were all wrong.
“It’s never easy, what you had to deal with up on Numina. Burying yourself in whatever you’re doing isn’t going to help.”
She swallowed. “Did Argo tell you anything?”
“Just the highlights. Sounds like a real mess up there.”
“It’s a mess everywhere,” she said. “This Unity fraud thing…”
Dad finished the thought for her. “Is not your problem to figure out.”
But that was where he was wrong.
Daelia had spent the entire flight—the parts where she wasn’t sleeping, anyway—trying to plan out her next move. Figure out what to do. How to go about it.
“They stole my research, Dad,” she said, going back to her simulation. “They stole it, and they’re using it to help them kill people.”
“Who is they, Daelia?”
“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Yet.”
“So what is this that you’re looking at?” he asked, plugging a hardline into a visor.
“My laptop,” Daelia said. “From school.”
At that, Dad finally coalesced. He looked better than he had outside, the server no doubt using its saved snapshot of him. Dad had a true-to-life view of himself loaded on all their equipment; not even Emily could render him otherwise.
It was almost a relief, seeing him like this. Healthy. Normal.
The virch didn’t show all the weight he’d lost. His skin gone all sallow, gray. Deep bruises covering his arms. That haunted expression on his face as he looked at her.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“This is everything I have about my research that’s on my laptop,” she said, indicating one standard diagnostic view she was working in, an assemblage of nodes and light, “and this is what I managed to pull from the Domain Array during the air show.”
“You know, it’s quicker to just look at the raw code.” He leaned forward nonetheless, taking it in. “I can see there’s been alterations, yeah.” Dad reached out to one of the nodes, opening it, exposing the text. “This would be quicker with a bot, you know.”
Daelia shook her head. “Not right now.”
He nodded, rotated the data. “So this is a write-up you did?”
“These are process notes, from one of the experiments I ran,” she said, indicating a few key identifiers. “See anything weird?”
Dad expanded the same file on the other side, in the altered side. He was all business now, as distracted by the problem as she was. “I’d say so,” he said. “The text has been changed, but the metadata’s exactly the same. No record of it being altered. How much of your research was affected like this?”
“Enough to render the source-code detector ineffective,” she replied. “Remember how I was working on a new one?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do.”
“Well, that one got mashed,” she said, still scanning the files, “but after I got this, Tamm and I were able to throw one together that wasn’t fully functional but did work, and…”
“And what?”
A sudden thought hit her.
What if…
It couldn’t have been Tamm, could it? Could he have taken this, changed it? He was heavily involved in space lifts. Hell, he was a key investor in NULI tech, a big proponent of increased integration with abiota. He’d helped the first few boovilles get off the ground too, maybe even Numina’s old artists’ colony, the one Bri Quercitron had subjugated.
Would Tamm do something like this?
“What are you thinking here, Daelia?”
She hesitated. “If I could get in there, I could figure out who did this.”
“You don’t have access anymore, do you?”
“No.”
She braced herself. For a lecture. For an admonition. For Dad telling her this was all really fucking illegal and he wasn’t going to see his little girl end up in jail.
He said nothing of the kind, though.
“Come on. Switch this off. Let’s go talk about it.”
Talking, as it turned out, involved Argo, who had helped himself to some over-caffeinated energy drink from the break room fridge. Those had belonged to Ortiz, Dad’s senior tech and good friend. He’d died in the Shiodome bombing, along with half of the 121st leadership team. Watching Argo drink it, Daelia wondered if that attack had been connected to Unity somehow. The guy she and Emily had cornered, the seizure he’d had…
She shook it off.
She was seeing conspiracies everywhere. Her brain, scrambling for an answer, was connecting dots that didn’t need to be connected. Trying to find answers.
More information. The only thing that would help would be more information.
“So,” Dad asked as he cracked the fridge and fished out a bottle of water, “Tamm got you a reservation to the Nightsea? How was it?”
Daelia looked over at Argo.
“I gave your dad the CliffsNotes version of what’s been going on here for the last few weeks,” the pilot said. “Unity, the Envoy, the Alamo, the trip to Numina, the kugus, Bri Quercitron. All that.”
“Sounds like it’s been fun,” Dad added drily.
Daelia felt a stab of anger. Without her lab, there was nothing to distract it, nothing to contain it.
“Where were you?” she snapped and pulled her left arm across her body defensively. “You show up, not a single word for weeks except whatever you were sending to Raijinn, you look like hell, you—”
“I was detained,” Dad said. “I got a lead about something with your mother, which turned out to be a complete fabrication, and…” he trailed off. “I’m here now. That’s what matters.”
“Somebody, what, locked you in a basement somewhere?” Argo asked.
Dad chuckled. “There’s no basements in this state.”
“Dad!” Daelia snapped.
He sobered a little. “The less I tell you about it right now, the better. I’m pretty sure they still think I’m there. We need to continue that belief for the time being. At least until I know more about what’s going on.”
“How feasible is that?” Argo asked.
Dad tapped his belt. There was a jamming unit clipped on there. “It’ll be okay.”
But Argo was looking at him. “Does it have to do with this Unity shit?”
“I don’t know. The timing is too coincidental to dismiss out of hand, wouldn’t you agree?”
Argo folded his arms. “What do you know about all this? Really?”
“Me? Not a damn thing. Not yet.”
“Not yet?”
Daelia tapped a metal-covered finger against the old, chipped table. “We’re going to hack into Ware,” she said, not daring to meet his eyes. “You up for it?”
3
It was with not a little resignation that Argo dragged himself back into the unit that day.
It wasn’t that he wanted to be there. In truth, the last place in the world he wanted to be right now was Ellington. He wanted to go home and sleep for the rest of the month. Or at least, sleep until his alarm tomorrow morning; he was still on the flying roster. Scheduled to take Emily up in the morning.
Stopping by the unit wasn’t optional, though. Needed to check in. Make sure he wasn’t already under investigation for something. Make sure the Numina disaster—or at the very least, him going missing from Aethera for the better part of a day—hadn’t earned him some kind of official notice.
Argo didn’t put it past the military to court-martial him for saving lives up there. And shit, if there really was some kind of large-scale data manipulation scheme going on, some kind of deepfake raid on the entire fucking world, who was to say his presence up in orbit hadn’t been spun off in some weird direction? Made him look like he was the bad guy?
The walk back up to the military end of the airfield was chilly; it was overcast today, gray and miserable, with the threat of rain in the air. Fall on the South Texas coast, Argo was learning, swung viciously between unbearably hot and, well, this. Almost made a guy miss Alaska. There’d be snow on the ground back home this time of the year, but at least it was predictable.
The walk was harder than it should have been. Moving in zero-gee had been tiring, sure, but Argo now realized he’d also started to adapt to it, just a little bit. Moving down here, with his body weight tugging at him, felt weird. Almost uncomfortable.
