Flight & Anchor by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Author:Nicole Kornher-Stace [Kornher-Stace, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Cyberpunk, Science Fiction
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2023-06-13T07:00:00+00:00

22.

Just before dawn, the probe array rides the air, weightless and invisible. It spreads itself out to maximize its surface area and lets the breeze carry it, leisurely harvesting the electricity shed by all-night signage and sunlight reflected off the moon. It can’t precisely smell the last dregs of the night, the way the scents of the outlying fields are ferried in on the same currents it’s now riding—dirt, dead grass, rotting houses, dormant trees—strange contrast to the bouquet of singed concrete and car exhaust and coffee and inert bioweapons bleeding out their half-lives that comprises the gently waking city below. But it can dissect that luxuriant tangle of input for individual chemical signatures, tasting each as they waft over the outspread net of its array, and reckons that’s pretty much the same.

It tastes the missing children before it sees them: the nanofibers of their smart uniforms, the classified tech threading their veins, the caffeine-and-sugar miasma leaking from their pores one decaying atom at a time. From two hundred yards away it zeroes in on them, closes distance cautiously, assesses. It has been warned that these are not ordinary children. Nothing like the ones it might have met during its tenure with the company. (It has met a grand total of one, and has already surmised that if the targets here today were anything like that one, the probe array would still be sleeping in storage, not spread out like an eight-micron-thick jellyfish over an empty lot with a rusty shipping container in it, confusing the birds of the morning.) The idea that children could be dangerous to it, or, more fascinatingly, to Stellaxis, is catnip. Knowledge? Secret knowledge? Weird secret knowledge? This is already the best day the probe array’s had in a long time. Kind of a low bar, really, but still.

Do not approach. Do not attempt to communicate. Do not allow them to become aware of your presence. Do not engage in any way. Only fulfill directive and return.

It can do that.

Slow and silent, it pours itself invisibly down a wall in what it has determined to be the statistically least likely bit of space to be easily viewed from child height via the container, should the door burst open unexpectedly. From there, it detaches a probelet and circles the container in search of obvious breaches suitable for its task.

It finds none.

“If you want something done right,” it whispers to itself at four decibels in its beehive voice. Its old handler used to have a calendar on her desk like this, an idiom a day.

Then it checks itself. If it has been accurately briefed, these children could hear a single leaf falling in a thunderstorm. It has to be careful.

Cautiously, it approaches the container. No sound from within. The children must be asleep. If so, the probe reckons, they are at the far end of the container, away from the door. That’s fine by it. The door’s easier to get into anyway.

The probe array stretches out a filament three times finer than a strand of human hair.

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