Brainbox Blues

The air outside the diamond refinery is heavy with smoke and the chemical bite of missile propellant. I blink away the sting and the memories that come with it. The refinery compound lies in rubble, but a towering perimeter fence still stands guard, keeping me out.

I crank up the flame on my plasma torch. The fence is a blend of steel and copper mesh, thicker than expected. I burn a hole large enough to step through, but my torch sputters out, leaving the last cut unfinished. Gritting my teeth, I kick through the damaged mesh.

“Elegant work, Margo,” my brother’s digital ghost whispers in my earpiece.

Relief hits me so hard it steals my breath. Jamie’s been absent for weeks this time; I feared he was finally, truly gone—and then this job would be for nothing.

I don’t say that though, don’t want to admit what I’m risking to save him.

“Elegance is overrated.” I yank a tangle of mesh out of my boot tread.

His familiar laughter washes over me. For a heartbeat, it feels like he’s alive again—not a glitching personality construct scattered across two light-years of cloud relays.

“Missed you,” I whisper.

More of his backup files stream in, the far-flung code peeling away from darknet lockers and hijacked storage nodes, re-entangling with the kernel files stored in my own cloudjack. The construct deepens, building into the rich essence of his mind.

It’s all I have left of him since he was killed on a job three years ago.

“Sorry if I worried you,” he says. “I was working on a project in the cloud, but . . . holding myself together is getting more difficult.”

I touch the jack embedded behind my ear, the way I might lay my hand on his shoulder, and shunt more storage and processing power to his personality construct. The loss slows my digital tools, but I still have a real body. I can get along without the jack.

I’ve never told him I dumped my own personality backup to make more space for him. He’d be livid if he knew.

“Where are we?” He threads into my heads-up display, uninvited, surveying the landscape: half-demolished buildings, jagged concrete, and steel girders embedded in the asphalt. “Is this a war zone?”

I draw a breath. He’s not going to like this.

“Diamond refinery. It was bombed early this morning.” I skirt a large puddle of liquid leaking from an overturned truck. “The attack probably came from a rival corporation trying to shut down qubit production.”

He refocuses my HUD’s vision overlay on a smoldering impact crater.

“And we’re walking into this? Are you nuts?”

My hands clench into tight fists. I am exhausted. Worn down. The prospect of another night jacked into the cloud, scouring darknet hidey-holes for remnants of Jamie’s scattered personality, shrouds me in a gray numbness. I need to sleep through a full night with no sundowning file alarms, no terror that I’ve let something slip, or let another piece of my brother die.

I’m desperate. And I want to control my own damn HUD.

“What are we doing here, Margo?” He again flips my vision overlay, this time switching to infrared to scan the night sky. The bouncing perspective nauseates me.

“We’re here for a job.” I snap the HUD off.

Jamie’s construct flinches at the sudden loss of sight, and I burn with shame.

“Sorry,” I whisper.

When he speaks again, his voice is fragile. “I take too much.”

It’s true. We both know it. But what other choice do we have? I close my eyes, willing the nausea to pass quickly so I can give him my inputs again.

Meanwhile, he sends out digital tendrils, searching for the refinery’s external security cameras. Most are offline, destroyed. He settles into a surveillance satellite passing overhead and offers me his bird’s-eye view.

Shimmers of heat rise from demolished structures on the far perimeter of the compound. No bodies though. Employees must have bugged out when the battle drones showed up. Looks like the central building is still mostly intact, which is good, because that’s where we’re headed.

“So, tell me about this job,” he says.

I squeeze the straps on my tactical vest until my knuckles whiten. “The request came through our darknet address this morning. The client told me about the bombing, and . . . asked us to retrieve a quint.”

If he were here, he’d be scowling.

“A quint?” His voice rises. “Are you kidding? We’re stealing a fucking quantum intelligence? From a diamond refinery, of all places. In the middle of a corporate war?” He groans dramatically. “Hope you doubled our rate.”

“Something like that.”

“Something like that? How much are they paying us?”

My eye twitches. This is why I hid the contract in my privacy-walled buffer.

“They’re giving us what I asked for.” I wince at the gruffness in my voice.

A pile of concrete rubble blocks my path. I climb over it, careful of the rebar spikes. Ahead, a blast-scarred doorway hangs loose in its casing, its once air-tight gasket melted into a puddle of gloop. I shove it open, harder than necessary, and shoulder my way inside.

* * *

Our conversation remains strained as I weave around toppled equipment and enter a partially collapsed stairwell. I have to shimmy through a narrow opening, scraping my arm on a rough wall. Fire suppression powder swirls with each step.

“Tight in here,” Jamie says. “Kinda like the asteroid mines.”

I smile at his attempt to restore our normal rhythm and fall into the practiced words of family history. 

“Remember when Dad snuck us into that new shaft, so we could touch the raw diamonds?”

“I remember you puking in the lift.”

“No way. You’re the puker, not me.”

We laugh, like we always do.

The stairwell splits, and I angle right.

“Kinda surprised a facility like this is still in operation,” I say. “Not that many diamonds left to refine.”

“Just enough for the ultra-rich assholes,” Jamie growls.

“But not enough for poor assholes like us.”

“Speaking of, where—” His words abruptly cut off.

Shit. Is he already fragging out?

“Wh-where . . . damn it.”

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

He starts again, the cadence of his words jerky. “Where. Is the. Quint housed?”

I activate my map of the building’s interior. A pinpoint marks the central chamber, where the quint directs the refining process, manipulating microscopic imperfections in the diamond matrices. A flashing arrow highlights a path twenty meters ahead. Something big plowed through—maybe one of those corporate missiles—clearing the way to our target. Nice.

I duck under a mangled support strut and follow the arrow. It routes us around a bank of ruined monitors.

“Where’d you get this map?” Jamie asks.

“The client.”

“Huh. Spot-on guidance through the rubble. It’s almost like the data is coming in real time. From inside the facility.”

Ah, my brilliant brother. Always too smart for his own good.

“What aren’t you telling me, Margo?”

I force my jaw to relax.

“We’re . . . not exactly stealing the quint. We’re rescuing it.”

“We’re—what?”

Damn it. He’s going to hate this. It was a quint—an escaped quantum intelligence that went rogue, naming itself Quintapex—that turned the battle fleet against the asteroid belt. It wiped out the diamond mines, killing our parents, before the corporation regained control and deleted its consciousness. We swore we’d never work for one.

But Jamie needs this. We both do. I rush ahead with my explanation.

“It’s a rescue job. In exchange for a brainbox, a real qubit substrate made from Earth-sourced diamonds. Complex enough to hold all your mind files. And it’ll meld with any android body. Think about it, Jamie! No more decohesion. You’ll be whole again.”

But he doesn’t hesitate. “What the hell, Margo? The quint hired us? How could you accept a job from one of those monsters?”

Monsters. His disgust resonates, pulling buried memories to the surface. Mom’s hands trembling as she stuffed me and Jamie into the last shuttle, missiles screaming overhead. The stink of pulverized regolith and diamond dust hanging in our shattered sky.

But that was a long time ago. And this is a different quint.

“I know how much you hate them. I do too. But Quintapex is dead.” I force a reasonable tone into my voice. “And this client is different. It’s trapped here, helpless.”

“I don’t buy it. Why hire us? Why not wait for its corporate overlords to rescue it?”

“It said the bureaucracy’s moving too slow. Its processes are already degrading, losing pieces of itself. It can’t wait any longer.”

Jamie pauses. “Just like me.”

I suck in a breath. “Yeah. Just like you.”

“It used my death to manipulate you. We can’t trust it.”

I close my eyes. Maybe he’s right. But I don’t care.

“I’m getting you that box.”

* * *

I follow the path highlighted on the map to a downward sloping tunnel. My cloud connection dwindles when I enter. Jamie’s voice drifts, like he’s falling away from me, and a subtle vibration creeps into my awareness.

I spot an electromagnetic emitter humming in an exposed niche a few inches above the floor. Up close, I feel it in the roots of my teeth. This much interference could splinter an artificial construct—like the quint I’m supposed to rescue—but it probably won’t do any lasting damage to Jamie. Human minds are innately more resilient, regardless of whether they’re fully biological or quantum-based. It’s our adaptability that gives us the edge over artificials.

At least, we usually have the edge. Sometimes the quints surprise us.

I smash the emitter, but the interference barely recedes. Must be more of them hidden in the walls, enough to permanently damage my client. I’ll have to find a different route to get it out of the building.

The vast central chamber opens ahead. I stride down the tunnel, luxuriating in the uninterrupted movement, my muscles uncoiling, stretching. Silica crunches under my boots, keeping time with my heart. There’s a split-second of peace, of comfort at hearing only my own voice in my head. It’s the same beat of self-focused relief I sometimes feel when Jamie’s fragged out, before I realize what I’m thinking and push the traitorous feelings away. Whispering over and over, I didn’t mean it, I swear I didn’t mean it, please come back.

I bite the inside of my cheek and force my attention back to the job at hand. Jamie is with me. I still have a chance to save him.

When I exit the tunnel, his voice pours back.

“What kind of refinery lines its innards with EM coils?”

I snort, bleak thoughts scattering. “Those innards are a standard security protocol. Prevents electronic sabotage. And theft.”

“Oh, sure. Can’t have thieves stealing their pet quint.”

I grin and roll my eyes.

Moonlight peeks through a breach in the vaulted ceiling. Debris from the ruined outer shell of the building has spilled in. Bingo. I can use a grappling rig to hoist the quint out through the hole.

“Lucky the attack created exit points for us.”

“Right. Lucky,” Jamie whispers. He studies the mess of gaping pipes and blackened stonework. “This wreckage reminds me of the belt.”

I nod. “Same chemical propellant stink, too. I guess all bombed-out ruins smell the same.”

“Lu—lucky. Chem—belt. Ah! No! Am I getting worse?”

“I think so,” I breathe.

He hesitates. “I don’t know what I was trying to say.”

“It’s okay.” I wish I could ease the fear in his voice.

“So,” he begins slowly. “What’s the story with this brainbox?”

Before I can answer, a message pops into my comm queue. I blink and it expands into a schematic—a blueprint for the substrate. The last page is missing. A repeating line of text says: “Full schematic on completion of contract.”

Damn it. I expected payment to be the actual box—not a picture of one. This is why Jamie usually manages that side of our business. He’s the brain; I’m the muscle.

He skates the lines of the blueprint, exploring the design. “You’re shit at contract negotiation, Margo, but . . . I’ve never seen anything like this.”

I’m not surprised. Even rudimentary brainboxes have been impossible to find since the belt’s diamond supply was destroyed. Synthetic materials overheat and melt; we learned that the hard way. Jamie needs a top-line box, made of real diamond qubits. If anyone can pull that off, it’s a quint in a diamond refinery.

“Will it work?” I whisper.

“Can’t believe I’m saying this, but . . . maybe?”

Excitement laces his voice. A lightness I haven’t heard in ages. Hope.

“Margo, I think we can build this!”

Tears burn my eyes and my throat tightens. Hope is such a fragile, cruel thing, and it is radiating from my little brother’s construct like starshine.

* * *

The quint is suspended mid-air by thick rubber cables. Its crystalline structure is the size of a human head. Diamond qubits, arranged in an intricate tessellated pattern, catch the light and throw back fractured rainbows. I wonder if this is what Jamie’s brainbox will look like, if we can actually build it.

“How are we gonna get it down?” he says.

I launch a detection program—should have had it running in the background all along—hoping to locate any anti-theft measures. I don’t want another surprise like those emitters in the tunnel. But, of course, my toolkit is compromised because I shunted my processing space to Jamie.

I eye the support walls, following them up to the suspension mechanism. No visible alarms or deterrents. The cables holding the quint are mounted to rails that run the length of the chamber. Perfect.

I slide a spider-silk line from my vest and clip on a magnetic anchor. It slots into my hand-sized launcher and I fire. The anchor catches a rail with a thunk. I test my weight on the line and hit the retraction button. The rig winches me upward, my feet dangling in the air.

Ten meters up, a shotgun of compressed air punches me across the chamber. My grip on the line slips and I slam into a wall of copper-laced steel and crash to the floor.

“Margo!”

My head rings and pain lances my ribs. I sit up, bracing myself against the wall. It takes a few seconds to regain my equilibrium; each breath is a pinch. “Guess that didn’t work.”

Jamie barks out a laugh. “Guess not. I’ll dig into the system and disarm that air gun.” He pauses. “Huh. Cloud ports are locked tight. You’ll have to jack me in manually.”

I groan as I stand, anticipating tomorrow’s bruises. The port cable is tangled, of course. I unwind it and plug it into an interface. Then I stand there like an idiot with nothing to do but hug my sore ribs while Jamie works.

I take stock of the chamber, hoping to discover a cache of refined qubits to build the brainbox. I don’t see any, though. No qubits, no raw diamonds. No refining equipment, either. I open my map overlay, hunting for a warehouse or shipping dock. Nothing pops up.

“Hey, Jamie—”

I wince at a burst of static, then his voice screams in my head. “You have to run, Margo. Quintapex is here!”

“What?”

“This isn’t a refinery. It’s a prison!”

Clues click into place with sickening clarity: the disruptive EM emitters, the copper-and-steel perimeter fence, the cloudwall. The rubber cables holding the quint—rubber, not fiberoptic data cables. This whole compound is a multi-layered Faraday cage.

We should have known the corporation wouldn’t destroy its own asset. Why take the loss when they could secretly imprison it to run their refinery?

Jamie’s voice modulates in barely controlled panic. “It still has a secret backdoor to the Battlenet. Somehow it wormed a tendril out of its cage, triggering the attack to break through the building’s physical barriers, and made it look like a corporate war.”

My heart stutters. “Then it hired stupid me to haul its brain kernel out of confinement.”

Distortion fills my earpiece. Jamie’s voice thins, only a trace coming through our link. I strain to make out his words.

“It knows I won’t free it, not even for the brainbox. It’s trying to burn me out, and it just launched its battle drones. They’re coming for you.”

“Grab the last page of the blueprint and let’s get out of here!”

“The blueprint’s tainted with Quintapex’s code. Your building map, too. We can’t let any more of it escape. If its files re-entangle outside . . . You have to purge your systems and run.”

“But that will purge you, too.”

“I know. But maybe if I consolidate my fragments I’ll be strong enough to kill it. I’ll try to find you . . . after.”

He shoves a new program into my cloud menu: Quint Burner 3.0. Then Jamie’s mind files abandon me, racing away in a dizzying rush. My knees almost buckle at the loss. Even the kernel files long stashed in my cloudjack are gone.

Quintapex’s battle drones whump outside, quickly growing louder.

“Go!” Jamie yells, his voice reverberating through the chamber’s overhead speakers before it’s lost in a scud of electronic noise.

“Damn it!” I rip the plug from the port and launch the Quint Burner. A splinter of Quintapex screeches, pulsing disbelief and anger as Jamie’s program burns the blueprint and map overlay out of my system.

I stumble from the chamber, a phantom ache filling the hollows where my brother’s presence should be.

* * *

My clothes stink. Sweat. Smoke. Burned grit. Everything goes in the garbage.

Silence echoes in my head. I’ve run every diagnostic I can think of, as well as a few expensive new tools 

I really can’t afford. They all report the same thing: no hitchhiking quint files detected.

Jamie’s purge program worked. It must be the project he mentioned, but when did he build it? And where did he store it? A digital vault or hidden cloud node? Questions I’ll never be able to answer now that he’s gone.

Exhausted, I sink into my net cocoon, combing the darknet for a trace of him. The familiar routine is like prodding a bruise. As I’ve done so many other nights, I search. But there is nothing left to find.

* * *

I wake with a kink in my neck. A message is pinging. Probably someone hoping to hire us for another dangerous job.

Us. The word throbs like an open wound.

The notification jingles again.

It’s Jamie’s pingtone! I snap fully awake and jab the connection.

“Jamie?”

“Yeah, hey, Margo. Been a little crazy here. Can you come pick me up?”

My breath whooshes out and suddenly I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying. Then he’s laughing and telling me about the brainbox he liberated—Quintapex’s crystalline substrate.

“The one hanging in the chamber? But how?”

“You know how rigid quint thought processes are. It couldn’t adapt to a human construct—me—fighting it from inside its own brain. I mimicked an electromagnetic emitter, like the ones in that tunnel, to shred its central kernel. Then the purge program ate its ancillary files. I lost some of my own data in the fight . . . hopefully I can find backup copies of those files somewhere. But even if I can’t get it all back, it was worth the loss. Quintapex is really dead this time.”

I ache to believe it’s true, but . . .

“How do I know you’re not Quintapex, faking my brother’s personality?”

He pauses. “Back in the diamond mine, when we were kids? It wasn’t you, or me, who threw up. It was Dad.”

That clandestine visit to the mine shaft. Dad laughing, making us promise to keep his secret. “I don’t want your mom to know I’m a puker.” Our silly private joke, never spoken aloud or data-logged, only acknowledged by a raised eyebrow or a burst of giggles. My muscles unclench and I collapse back into my cocoon.

It’s really Jamie. He made it.

“The box is heavier than I expected,” he continues. “We’ll have to modify an android frame to house it, but then . . . then I’ll have a physical body again. A second chance.”

I close my eyes, pressing my hands to my face as the words sink in. I’ll no longer be responsible for maintaining his fragile existence. And the void I’ve filled with grief and worry and obligation can be refilled with . . . whatever I want.

We’ll both have a second chance.

I absorb the excitement in his voice as he chatters on. He is filled with hope, and this time, so am I. It radiates like starshine.