unaccounted for would merely nod in agreement at how annoying the ‘damn ware bugs’ were and move on with their lives.
He swallowed hard, annoyed at the sudden dryness in his throat. No reason to become all emotional about it now. He had already sold his soul for a chance at vengeance, and there was no getting it back.
He deleted the report from the system.
5
EARTH
V ANCOUVER, EASC H EADQUARTERS
----
M IRIAM SAT AT HER DESK and tried to focus on reviewing next week’s schedule. For a moment, she failed.
She prided herself on superior compartmentalization skills…yet hours after the Board meeting, she couldn’t seem to shake a lingering unease. Disappointment. Annoyance .
Being overruled gave her no pleasure, particularly when the facts were on her side. Egos coupled with narcissistic insecurity had won out over logic and reason once again. Hopefully they wouldn’t come to regret this decision, or the dozens before it.
With a private groan she sat up straighter and returned to her calendar. Schedule .
The christening ceremony for the new cruiser EAS Thatcher was on Monday, followed by a status meeting for Project ANNIE. She had various staff meetings on Tuesday, then Phase II testing review of new biosynthetics for special forces in the evening. Wednesday she left for the TacRecon Conference in St. Petersburg.
Her mouth twitched involuntarily. She had tried to get Richard to go in her place—it was more his area of expertise anyway—but he was elbow-deep in the damn Trade Summit.
She didn’t want to go to St. Petersburg, where memories of David lurked around every corner and across every street. Even the places they had never visited held shadows of the stories he had told of his childhood.
She would need to visit her father-in-law while there. David had made certain his father received the latest in stem cell rejuvenation treatments, though the elder Solovy had accepted little else in the way of financial assistance. As a result, at one hundred sixteen years old he was built like a boxer and working low-altitude field construction ten hours a day.
It would be uncomfortable and melancholy. He would ask after Alexis, say, ‘I’ve always loved that little girl,’ leaving unsaid the insinuation ‘as opposed to how I feel about you.’ Her position of prominence meant nothing to him. In his own twisted way he would forever blame her for David’s death, ignoring the fact that David had joined the military six years prior to meeting her. He would inquire as to whatever man she must have moved on to by now, oblivious to the reality that in twenty-three years she hadn’t moved on; that she had no intention of ever moving on.
After two miserable hours she would excuse herself and return to her five-star hotel room, order her 250-credit room service, allow herself one glass of sherry and occupy her mind with vitally important matters of galactic security until she was too tired not to sleep.
She didn’t want to go. But she’d do it anyway, because it was her job, and because she didn’t trust anyone else other than Richard with the responsibility. At least next year the conference location rotated out to somewhere—anywhere—other than Russia.
She blinked to push aside the dangerously sentimental thoughts, opened the ANNIE briefing and proceeded to dive into breakdowns of recurrence quantification analysis, time series prediction, stochastic controls and most importantly, dynamic security feedback loops.
Nearly two hundred fifty years after the Hong Kong ‘incident,’ synthetic intelligences of all types were still locked down and circumscribed on every world, but nowhere more so than in the military. The Alliance didn’t curtail the advancement of non-cybernetic synthetic technology; they merely kept it corralled inside safety fences, as it were.
ANNIE (Artificial Neural Net Integration and Expansion) represented the most advanced Alliance-sanctioned synthetic neural net to date. It also
He swallowed hard, annoyed at the sudden dryness in his throat. No reason to become all emotional about it now. He had already sold his soul for a chance at vengeance, and there was no getting it back.
He deleted the report from the system.
5
EARTH
V ANCOUVER, EASC H EADQUARTERS
----
M IRIAM SAT AT HER DESK and tried to focus on reviewing next week’s schedule. For a moment, she failed.
She prided herself on superior compartmentalization skills…yet hours after the Board meeting, she couldn’t seem to shake a lingering unease. Disappointment. Annoyance .
Being overruled gave her no pleasure, particularly when the facts were on her side. Egos coupled with narcissistic insecurity had won out over logic and reason once again. Hopefully they wouldn’t come to regret this decision, or the dozens before it.
With a private groan she sat up straighter and returned to her calendar. Schedule .
The christening ceremony for the new cruiser EAS Thatcher was on Monday, followed by a status meeting for Project ANNIE. She had various staff meetings on Tuesday, then Phase II testing review of new biosynthetics for special forces in the evening. Wednesday she left for the TacRecon Conference in St. Petersburg.
Her mouth twitched involuntarily. She had tried to get Richard to go in her place—it was more his area of expertise anyway—but he was elbow-deep in the damn Trade Summit.
She didn’t want to go to St. Petersburg, where memories of David lurked around every corner and across every street. Even the places they had never visited held shadows of the stories he had told of his childhood.
She would need to visit her father-in-law while there. David had made certain his father received the latest in stem cell rejuvenation treatments, though the elder Solovy had accepted little else in the way of financial assistance. As a result, at one hundred sixteen years old he was built like a boxer and working low-altitude field construction ten hours a day.
It would be uncomfortable and melancholy. He would ask after Alexis, say, ‘I’ve always loved that little girl,’ leaving unsaid the insinuation ‘as opposed to how I feel about you.’ Her position of prominence meant nothing to him. In his own twisted way he would forever blame her for David’s death, ignoring the fact that David had joined the military six years prior to meeting her. He would inquire as to whatever man she must have moved on to by now, oblivious to the reality that in twenty-three years she hadn’t moved on; that she had no intention of ever moving on.
After two miserable hours she would excuse herself and return to her five-star hotel room, order her 250-credit room service, allow herself one glass of sherry and occupy her mind with vitally important matters of galactic security until she was too tired not to sleep.
She didn’t want to go. But she’d do it anyway, because it was her job, and because she didn’t trust anyone else other than Richard with the responsibility. At least next year the conference location rotated out to somewhere—anywhere—other than Russia.
She blinked to push aside the dangerously sentimental thoughts, opened the ANNIE briefing and proceeded to dive into breakdowns of recurrence quantification analysis, time series prediction, stochastic controls and most importantly, dynamic security feedback loops.
Nearly two hundred fifty years after the Hong Kong ‘incident,’ synthetic intelligences of all types were still locked down and circumscribed on every world, but nowhere more so than in the military. The Alliance didn’t curtail the advancement of non-cybernetic synthetic technology; they merely kept it corralled inside safety fences, as it were.
ANNIE (Artificial Neural Net Integration and Expansion) represented the most advanced Alliance-sanctioned synthetic neural net to date. It also
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