The Bio-Supercomputer

At the same hour, the prison had only just struck noon, and the information brokers were already starting to ease down their prices on Dark Zone intel.

Dark Zone information always peaked in the small hours before dawn. It held a reasonably vicious markup from morning through late forenoon, then plunged to less than half once the clock hit midday. A prisoner could walk into a Dark Zone whenever they damn well pleased, of course — but every inmate had to be back before midnight, which meant the value of that intel only stayed expensive through the morning.

So when the information started circulating around lunch, the prisoners' reactions heating up was only natural.

"You've got to be kidding me. Is this for real?"

"I knew those bastards were jacking up their intel fees."

"At this rate, nobody's going anywhere near that Dark Zone."

The moment the day's core Dark Zone intelligence began circulating at a relatively cheap price, the inmates who had been planning an afternoon insertion went white.

"A slaughterhouse theme stuffed with puzzles and traps? Jesus. Everyone who went in there is already dead, aren't they?"

"And what about the botanical garden packed with plants that root into a human body and parasitize it? The whole place is going to be nothing but greenery. Anyone who walked in there isn't coming out pretty."

"At least you could maybe burn your way through that one. The real nightmare is the dark medieval Dark Zone. Winged monsters cruising the sky and plunging down like dive-bombers, apparently. For two-legged humans like us, that's just hell with a theme park ticket."

"Those informant bastards. They diced up intel that important and sold the pieces at prices that make you scream? Did their conscience actually die?"

"They've got to eat too. When you get down to it, they're the ones who go into the Dark Zone first and drag that information out with their lives on the line."

Every time another slab of public intel dropped on the oversized screens mounted in each cellblock's common area, curses and groans rolled through the crowd.

Even the cheapest scrap ran a few hundred dollars. The truly critical pieces soared into the thousands, and for any prisoner trying to enter a Dark Zone early, that was no small burden. Buy the intel, decide the place looks too lethal, and refuse the insertion, and you either pivoted to a different Dark Zone or sat the day out entirely — which meant the money and the hours both went straight into the incinerator. One way or another, the morning-shift inserters had no choice but to pay.

Of course, some inmates skipped the expensive briefings altogether and poured the cash into gear and bodies instead, intending to brute-force a Dark Zone on raw ability. The big factions that moved as clans were the usual example, along with the veteran prisoners who, after enough Dark Zones, could do the work of two men no matter where you dropped them.

"The other ones at least have lighter environmental constraints, or a clear ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠clear strategy you can reasonably expect to exist. The real problem is that one."

At someone's mutter, every gaze in earshot swung toward the last piece of information to be released. It was already afternoon, and intel that no longer had a buyer at premium rates sometimes got dumped for free. The final drop was that kind.

"An inescapable space station interior, limited escape routes, a permanent blackout and sub-zero temperatures, danger zones crawling with Slaughter Robots, and to top it off — an SF space theme?"

"Those insane bastards. They sliced intel like that into pieces and sold it one crumb at a time?"

"The cheapest fragment was the SF space theme part. Anyone who bought just that and walked in…"

"All dead. That place is nastier than the one stuffed with puzzles and traps."

Put bluntly, a Dark Zone overflowing with puzzles and traps could be smashed apart with raw force, or a prisoner running a Smart Link could lean on an AI and pick the gimmicks apart. A closed stretch of space engineered to hate living things was another matter. You could plaster yourself in implants and still have no realistic way out.

"More than a hundred people went into that Dark Zone this morning. Not a single one of them is walking out this afternoon. Think the guards will clock out early?"

"If it comes to it, they'll dump it on the prison AI and go home. I don't like that one either."

"Guess there'll be a lot of empty bunks again. Wait — is that actually good for us? We just ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠take their spots."

"Dream on. You think the genuine Oranges and the clans are going to sit still for that?"

Some of the prisoners decided there was nothing left worth watching, snickered, and filtered out of the common area. Armed with the profile of a Dark Zone you were never supposed to enter, they would either hunt down a comparatively safer one or simply wait for tomorrow.

Someone else, newly impressed by how well the informants seemed to be eating, would start wondering whether they ought to try the trade themselves — and in doing so, mark their own life down a few notches. Only a vanishing handful would take the released information, argue out a strategy, and actually set foot in a Dark Zone.

Everyone had their own method. None of those methods were about living a long time. They were just a way to hurt a little less, or to die a little later.

My ears are itching. Which bastard's talking shit about me now?

I dug a finger into the ear canal peeking out from the gap in my gas mask and swept a look around. The prisoners under my command had each been slotted into the position that best fit their specialty and their body. The obvious example was the three Lee brothers — built for close work, they went in with melee weapons or shields and met the Native Species head-on. Anyone who could handle a gun or a ranged weapon the way I could drew marksman duty. The quick and sharp-eyed ones scouted. The ones with good hands ran rear support. People where they belonged.

"From here on, this is a zone with a red label. Everyone focus on security, not farming. It's too dark to farm properly right now anyway."

"It is gloomier than the Yellow Label Zone, I'll give you that. And there are a lot more signs of something being torn apart."

If you assumed a place like this had actually existed before the theme crystallized, then some kind of incident had hit the Red Label Zone — or the black-label one. And if something happened, it almost certainly wasn't an act of God. It was people.

I dragged the fluorescent wash of a Glow Stick across the thoroughly frozen floor. The temperature had already plunged to forty below. If I didn't start pressing portable heaters into individual hands soon, ordinary human beings were not going to last. Even in conditions like these, the Machine Spirits were wandering around just fine for no better reason than that they had fused with machines — which meant they wanted us, walking bundles of calories, very badly.

A Machine Spirit's ultimate purpose is fission — reproduction. To split, it needs calories. Food. What I can't figure out is why.

Why were the Machine Spirits occupying this station so desperate to multiply inside a closed space? Just because they were slaves to instinct?

No. If they were purely instinctive, they would have recognized at some point that their numbers couldn't grow any further, and they would have dropped into hibernation to minimize energy loss.

I had met Native Species like that in deep-cave Dark Zones — things that slept until new prey wandered in, snapped awake the instant a human provoked them, and went right back under once they had fed enough. That was the operating assumption they moved on.

But the Machine Spirits here were up and walking even right after we first dropped into the Dark Zone. Meaning they either have no hibernation function at all, or they never felt the need.

Whether Machine Spirits hibernated in real-world EFD was not the point. The point was why they had or hadn't hibernated in an environment where hibernation was not optional.

Purpose. Purpose, huh…

I pulled my eyes off the dark-red stains pressed thick into the floor. The lower sector we had entered was marked with a red label, which made it a classified zone. Even among the astronauts cleared to work a station like this, only a tightly restricted handful would have been allowed down here — which probably explained why the first response had been so late when things went wrong.

Some of the doors and walls in this sector have come down completely. Honestly, it's a miracle the outer hull wasn't ripped off in one piece.

Nobody would have built a station this size that sloppy, but it still paid to be careful. I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had no interest in the outer hull going pop and all of us sharing a cozy Alien 4 ending together.

The Wave is more or less over. Not completely. There will still be Scouting Machine Spirits tucked away here and there, trying to pin our position in real time.

Picking out the ones with red optics burning in this dark was not hard. The problem was that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠every time our location leaked, we handed the enemy time to respond. Splitting off a detached unit was not an option either — the dark and the cold would drag them down by the ankles. And now that we had come this far, we needed more than a massacre. We needed an exit locked down at the same time. If things went badly and we had to run, we would be fighting a fighting retreat in a place far colder than Antarctica.

I read the patterned wall guides and warning placards in the lower sector and settled the next move.

"We take the system first. If we fail to secure the system, finishing them off and farming both become impossible."

"So we push all the way down into the Deep Sector as we are?"

"Not all of us. The opposite. Most of the force stays in this red-label lower sector and prioritizes securing an exit. If the blackout and the temperature crash get resolved, farming becomes the priority instead."

"Which means…"

"Right. A small elite team, myself included, goes down into the Deep Sector and takes the system. From here on, this is a race against the clock."

If my guess was right, the Deep Sector would hold only the system that ran the whole station and a fragment of the most important research facilities. The real farming core was this red-label lower sector. And the densest concentrations of enemies would be waiting in the lower sector and the Deep Sector both.

"Wouldn't it be better to move together, then? If we all piled into the Deep Sector, grabbed this system or whatever it is, escape and farming would both be fine, wouldn't they?"

"We have to budget for the possibility that securing the system fails. If it all goes sideways, we at least have to escape together — which means the people who stay here prioritize the exit. It's more efficient if a smaller number of people carry the risk."

I would have loved nothing more than to send a fat strike team roaring down there, wreck the Deep Sector, and farm and extract as one big happy family. Work did not unravel that cleanly. A Dark Zone, least of all. You treated a watertight plan as the extra bracing at a prisoner's back, and the prisoner actually moving always put their own instinct and experience first. Plan A and Plan B were not enough. You kept Plan C warm.

"We split here. Lee Duho and Ahn Moon-ho come with me for the Deep Sector. Lee Doo-sik and Lee Doo-pal take temporary command in my place — secure an exit in the lower sector and keep the enemy from pushing down after us."

Leaving Lee Doo-sik, who excelled at getting physical, and Lee Doo-pal, who actually had a gun, would settle the other prisoners' nerves. I would take Ahn Moon-ho, who had a decent eye and hands that were not bad, and Lee Duho, whose body did the talking, and go crack the Deep Sector myself. A standard party for a danger zone was four, but I had been ready to do this alone if these people had never existed, so it hardly mattered.

Lee Doo-sik and Lee Doo-pal, newly minted as interim leaders, split command of the melee team and the rear-support team between them, and the chain of command sorted itself out without a fuss. They were simple, meat-headed friends, but they had been in and out of Dark Zones with Lee Duho often enough, and I had fed them what I could along the way. They were not going to botch it unless something truly stupid happened.

Ahn Moon-ho, unlike Lee Duho, looked like he could not begin to guess why he had been picked. He came up with a puzzled expression and asked, polite as always,

"Wouldn't it be wiser to leave me here and take Doo-sik or Doo-pal instead?"

"No. You're coming with me."

"Is there a particular reason…?"

"You're too sharp to leave behind. I've said enough — you know what I mean."

"…I understand."

Understanding and accepting were different faces, and Ahn Moon-ho was wearing the second one as he fell in quietly behind me. Lee Duho had not followed a word of that exchange, and he was not the type to care.

"Ahn Moon-ho, you're on the portable heater. Lee Duho, you cover Moon-ho and the heater and keep anything from getting close."

"Then what about you?"

"I move as I see fit. If I have to name a position… I'd be the Pathfinder."

With a lineup like this, the orthodox move was Lee Duho on point while I screened Ahn Moon-ho and we eased forward. This time it was the reverse. I had to take the front, read the enemy's scouts and the environmental gimmicks, and, if it came to it, intercept on the leading edge myself. I needed the widest, freest field of view I could get.

"All right! Everybody move!"

"See you alive, hyung."

"Don't jinx it, you bastard."

"Secure the exit and wait. We'll be back soon."

The Lee brothers' tearful farewell wrapped in record time, and the party assigned to hold the lower sector moved out first.

We took the half-collapsed spiral stair at the heart of the lower sector and started down. Wherever the treads were too wrecked to trust, I drove spikes myself and strung trap wire between them, cobbling together a makeshift flight. Scorch marks showed here and there — the researchers who had escaped ahead of us had probably tried to blow the stairs on their way out. In the end it had meant nothing. A shattered staircase was never going to stop Machine Spirits from climbing.

If they actually wanted to cut off pursuit, they shouldn't have settled for one staircase. They should have scuttled the entire Deep Sector and locked down every door in the lower levels.

The station itself would have taken catastrophic damage, but they might have saved the other sectors. A space station, when you stripped it down, was a patchwork golem — modules bolted to modules. Losing one zone wholesale did not make holding the rest impossible. The people who worked here had been too precious about something, and they had made the worst possible choice, and this was what that choice looked like.

"You've got to be kidding me. There was something like this in the Deep Sector…?"

After a long descent on a spiral stair wrecked in patches, the Deep Sector finally opened in front of us — a hollow on a scale that was, literally, staggering. Cold fog lay so thick it swallowed the ankles, and below that, packed together like a honeycomb, enormous mechanical structures sat in a transparent liquid that, against all odds, had not frozen even in this cold.

"Is this… a server?"

"Server, processor, and auxiliary power source, most likely. It'd have to be at least that important, or the researchers running this place never would have hesitated to scuttle the whole sector."

Why did hardware on this scale exist? Obvious. To keep a system worthy of it running.

I pulled out another Glow Stick, bent it until it woke, and hurled it hard toward the center of the cavern. Fluorescent light washed back off a colossal metal structure, and the thing finally showed itself.

"What in the world is that…?"

Ahn Moon-ho muttered, flattened by the sheer presence of it. I had more or less expected this from the moment the Machine Spirits appeared, and from the moment the system had been seized — but seeing the real thing still put a little tension in my hands.

It had a proper name, of course.

Yes. I had figured that if I showed it this much, Crazy Clock would have something to say.

Hadn't someone once said it? If machines have limits, living things do not.

I looked at the enormous glass cylinder mounted atop the supercomputer — or more precisely, at the dark, murky something that filled a vessel that ought to have been packed with nothing but transparent fluid.

I thought I finally understood why the Machine Spirits had refused hibernation and gone tearing around in a frenzy for food.

A crack. A wet, seething hiss.