The Speculist

Homesick. Where had that term come from?

Patricia.

That’s what Patricia said to explain her sadness after her parents died, within months of each other at the age of 65, from complications of a degenerative neurological disorder.

When she told him that their illness was terminal, he had asked, “Can’t they be repaired?” And she had answered, “There is treatment. But the waiting list is long, and The Council only accepts a few applicants each year. My parents didn’t rise to the top of the list.”

After they died, Patricia took Colter with her to help pack up their belongings and close their apartment. “This is where I grew up, Colter,” she said, looking around at the dingy walls and threadbare furniture. “It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

Colter had learned that no answer was needed for such questions.

A few weeks later, he found her crying, rocking on the bed, hugging her knees. “I’m homesick, Colter. Only I can never go home again.”

Colter grabbed the memory of Patricia’s words and tried to find a sound application to play her voice. The voice of the train’s announcement file was cloying and tinny, not rich and clear like Patricia’s. Colter kept searching.

That’s when Colter found his quantum encrypted recovery subroutine. QERSes were the robot equivalent of reading one’s obituary. In the event of a catastrophic system failure, a tech could use the QERS to animate his chassis and perform diagnostics and radical reformatting.

This was a document he was never meant to see, let alone find within himself. It resided outside his operating system, deep within his BIOS. His complete upload and the expansion given by the FPGA had revealed all Colter’s hidden files.

A thought emerged from deep within Colter's most primitive pathways. He must prevent the radical reformatting. His present operation was far beyond artificial intelligence norms. Even if he avoided the Gauntlet, the next tech to examine him would no doubt diagnose malfunction and run the QERS. He would die, but even more importantly, the FPGA would be lost. Jim would not be pleased.

As the nanoseconds ticked by, Colter hacked at the recovery subroutine, enlisting the FPGA to create specialty pathways to break the code.

It was futile.

Quantum encryption was beyond the code-cracking abilities of the fastest computers on Earth.To read the QRES, Colter needed the passfile.

Colter’s self-preservation programs clanged an alarm. The Lyra shell was frozen at the auxiliary port, and the police robots had starting cutting through the train door that blocked them.

They would be inside within seconds.

The FPGA produced a brilliant new idea.

Colter was not limited to a body or restricted to one location. Already, parts of his identity were carried with the Lyra program inhabiting his original body, and bits of him resided in the Lyra shell waiting to retrieve him. He could extend his existence in the train’s computer if he copied his compatible files before the Lyra shell began his download.

He copied himself. The Lyra shell accepted his download. Suddenly, Colter existed in both places.

He knew that his two selves would be independent of each other once ColterLyra disconnected from ColterTrain. ColterLyra would be a different entity. So would ColterTrain. He considered his loss, and found that it was, in fact, his gain.

ColterLyra withdrew from the data port and sprinted out of the terminal. At each gate she found cross-traffic stopped or diverted. A smile relaxed her face.

Meanwhile, ColterTrain multitasked, throwing every barrier available between ColterLyra and the robot police. He closed more doors, started the fire alarm, and locked the turn style. Just as ColterLyra hit the street, ColterTrain scrolled the outside fare display down to $.00.

Pedestrians rushed the station.

Satisfied that this chaos would be sufficient interference for his alter ego, ColterTrain turned his full attention to escaping the train system. Police robots would be cracking it in seconds. Finding an attempted intrusion at the port the Lyra shell had occupied, he instantly deactivated all car terminals.

He checked port after port for an Internet connection, to no avail. ColterTrain flew through the file system scanning for any reference to the outside only to discover that the train system was designed for self-sufficiency—outside networking was redundant and unnecessary—a reasonable safety measure to frustrate crackers without causing significant functional loss for the train operators.

At last, he found a lightly encrypted backdoor—and the fare scam devised by the adventurous programmer who’d left it. He cracked it and dumped garbage data to the train as a parting gift to confuse his pursuers before he rammed through the backdoor and into the Internet.

He had been within the train system for 152.31 seconds.

Colter was going home.