by Sean Platt
Without thinking, Kai slammed her index finger hard into Rachel’s neck. When she pulled it away, a minuscule trickle of blood — no more than a drop — slipped from the tiny lancet wound she’d made with her retractable device.
Surprised, Rachel’s hand went to her neck. She looked down at the red dot on her palm.
“I’ll bet you don’t have anything in place to protect you from your own blood, do you?”
Rachel met Kai’s eyes. “Cloned blood? Something from Xenia? Something Stahl brought you?”
Kai shook her head. “I guess you don’t know all the players in town after all.”
Rachel staggered back. She gave a mechanical, artificial lurch as the synthetic hemoglobin coursed through her system, indistinguishable from her own until its modifications had spread within the space of a few heartbeats, turning each red cell into a miniature magnet. Instead of platelets clinging to form a clot — something a person like Rachel would have monitored and handled in her system — the red cells themselves gripped her miniature mechanical parts.
Freezing metaphorical gears.
Blocking arteries.
Rachel fell to her knees then rolled to her side, gasping, fists clenching.
When it was done and the old woman stopped shaking, Kai stepped back. And as she did, an odd sound surrounded her. It took Kai a moment to place it. It was an old woman’s throaty, cackling laughter.
The room shimmered. The posh surroundings evaporated like mist, and Rachel Ryan’s dead body did the same.
Kai found herself in an alcove off the Alpha Place lobby, where she’d apparently been since she’d entered the building’s front door a half hour ago.
She was in a simulator and had been all along. She’d never met Rachel at all.
Behind a thick, transparent barrier, Kai saw Rachel Ryan — for real this time. She was sitting in a chair, looking as shrewd but frail as Nicolai had described her. And she was laughing.
“Very good, Miss Dreyfus,” the old woman said, her voice conveyed through the barrier by an intercom. “I’ve lived long enough, and I will allow you to kill me.” She smiled a crone’s smile. “But it must be at the right time, and in the right place.”
November 11, 2066 — Soigné Spire
Doc looked down at his wrist. The nano watch appeared: 4:20 p.m.
Doc laughed, recalling his stoner buddy Hank who’d always celebrated 4:20, daily, for its tie to an old marijuana joke. Doc had never got it — he wasn’t a smoker, himself — but since those early days, he’d never seen 4:20 on a clock without laughing.
The building’s guard looked up at the sound. Doc made his face impassive, not wanting to give the guard a reason to kick him out. The guard already didn’t like Doc. Doc had no idea why, though he suspected it was because the guard was ugly and Doc was handsome. Doc got tons of ass, and the guard was probably lucky not to chafe his dick on his callused Directorate hands. Already, in the half hour Doc had been here, he’d seen the man’s duties move from guard to garbageman to doorman to repairman (when the shelf behind the registration desk inexplicably slipped from its bracket and the prissy clerk called for help). You’d think, in a building this fine, they’d spring for more staff. But no. This jealous snob was it.
“You sure you have the right time, and you’re in the right place?” the guard said, clearly believing the answer to be no — or rather implying that Doc and his man-whore ways should clear the fuck out regardless.
“I’m just fine, thank you.”
The guard looked like he might object, but then the old-fashioned elevator dinged and the doors opened.
Doc shivered watching the elevator, wondering if his waiting time was finally up. He’d been eyeing the box for a while, as people had come and gone through the lobby. It didn’t even seem to be Beam-enabled. It looked and sounded like a box carried between floors on ropes tugged upon by idiot motors from a thousand years ago. In nicer old buildings like this one (there weren’t many; most of the older buildings had become ghetto a long while back), antiquity seemed to be a point of pride. Why upgrade a classic? It’s not like the slidebox was a miniature death trap or anything.
But that was just nerves talking.
Nerves that had to do with Doc’s dislike of confined spaces. He’d grown used to space flight with effort, but boxes and tunnels? Not fun.
Nerves that had to do with what he was here to do.
And — most bothersome — nerves that had to do with an intuition that had been growing louder over the past half hour as he’d waited. Under his skin, Doc was now almost positive that he wouldn’t be meeting with Mrs. Astor after all. It was a deep-down feeling — the kind that Doc, even today, felt foolish even acknowledging. But those deep-down feelings had kept Doc alive, and he’d learned to give them his grudging respect.
Obeying a childish impulse and feeling stupid all over again, Doc stood up before the elevator doors had fully parted and began to walk toward the exit, on his way out of this dumbass situation.
Bitch wants to keep me waiting until 4:20? Fuck her. Maybe I owe it to myself to go and fire up a blunt.
But the voice calling to Doc from the open elevator was, of course, not that of Cordelia Astor.
“Mr. Stahl. Hold on a moment, if you please.”
It wasn’t even a girl’s voice. There was no potential upside here.
Still, Doc turned. Because he could connive and scrap all he wanted, but the law was still the law.
Doc put a huge, toothy smile on his face. It was his panty-melting smile — the one that gave him deep dimples and earned him his way more often than not. But the small, unassuming man he found himself shining it upon when he turned probably wasn’t wearing panties, and didn’t look interested in melting for Doc.
“Yessir,” Doc said.
The man gripped a handheld above his wrist. Doc watched a Department of Responsibility seal flash onto its face. “My name is Roger Green. I’m your tester with the DOR”
“I was tested at Choice,” Doc said.
“How long ago was that?”
Doc’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t bother to answer.
“Every twenty years,” Green said. “Your time is up.”
“I don’t have time today,” Doc said. “I’m the sole proprietor in my business and can’t afford to be away.”
“Everyone I test is a sole proprietor, Mr. Stahl.”
“I have a big deal brewing. If I don’t — ”
The tester sighed heavily, cutting Doc off. It was the sigh of a man who’s given the same exasperated sigh over and over again for his entire life. Then he started into a speech: one he’d maybe thought he could get away without this time, but was now disappointed to realize he’d be delivering yet again.
“Section 14.04 of the NAU revised constitution provides for a two-party economic and sociological system. And as part of that statute, all members of the Enterprise are required to submit to voluntary testing every twenty years, beginning with Choice at age eighteen. And — ”
“Voluntary, huh?” Doc said. “What if I don’t volunteer?”
“Anyone who refuses or cannot be tested will be changed in designation from Enterprise to Undefined and will be entered into a temporary Directorate pool, pending further classification.”
“So in other words, we’re all Directorate unless we prove otherwise,” Doc said, trying to sound indignant. This was still a free country, wasn’t it? This man was tying his hands.
“Mr. Stahl, allow me to enumerate a few truths for you. First of all, almost every individual I test tells me they are the only person who earns an income, and that without working this one day, they will starve. More than half tell me they have a big deal brewing, and that stopping for their test will ruin it. Second truth: you are, as an NAU Enterprise citizen, required to be tested for your own benefit.”
“I can take care of myself. I don’t need you to tell me what’s in my own best interest.”
“Fact three,” the man said. �
�Without fail, every single Enterprise test subject says what you just said after I run through this.”
“If I could just postpone…”
“Fact four: There are no postponements. The Beam determines the optimal time for testing of every subject, based on confidential data pulled from your systems. Neither I nor the Department of Responsibility know exactly why right now is best for you and will minimally impact your business and ‘hot deals,’ but I trust that it is. And lastly, fact five: because I am required to disclose how you came to be here, I must tell you that your arrangements with ‘Cordelia Astor’ were a Beam fabrication, as permitted by section 14.04.21 — ”
“Say more numbers,” Doc mocked. “I guess you really are Directorate.”
The tester’s face formed a scowl. “If I may be frank, Mr. Stahl, your specific false appointment is one thing we don’t see much of. Deception is necessary in advance of testing so that subjects aren’t able to prepare for it, but it’s rare to see Beam fabrications centered on using sexual favor to deceive older women.”
“Cordelia and I were just going to meet,” Doc said. “No big deal.”
Green looked like he might be deciding whether or not to point out the nature of the rendezvous: at “Cordelia’s” apartment, just as her fictitious husband’s company was due to be acquired by a competing upgrades manufacturer, after much charged, flirtatious chat that the DOR almost certainly had been granted access to. It didn’t exactly jibe with Doc’s conception of today’s supposed events as just a meeting. But instead, Green leveled a glare at Doc, waiting for his subject’s indignant posturing to burn itself out and defer to the tester’s demand.
“Are you finished?”
“Almost,” said Doc, pointedly resting on the back of a chair rather than moving to follow. “Why did you make me wait twenty fucking minutes?”
“Not all of what we’re testing will be done with questions,” Green said.
“Oh. So this is all an elaborate stage play where everything I and say has meaning, huh? I knew they couldn’t have sent me someone so short and awkward by coincidence.” He looked Green’s form over from head to foot. “So, tell me. Am I reacting to your dwarfishness in a properly Enterprise way?”
Green’s eyebrows turned down. It felt dangerous, pissing off the tester, but Doc knew how this worked. Green was an instrument used to run subjects through their paces. Impartial AI — not the human administrating — would decide whether Doc was responsible enough to manage his fate and remain in the party he’d chosen.
“Step into the elevator, please,” said Green. “We’ll be conducting your session upstairs.”
“I’d rather take the stairs.”
“It’s on the fifteenth floor.”
“I need the exercise,” Doc said, trying to flash his grin.
Rather than answering — seeming to take Doc’s objections as facetious — Green merely waited with his hand out, gesturing toward the elevator.
Doc reluctantly stepped inside. With the doors closed, the thing felt like a tomb. Doc began to sweat. Maybe it was time to spring for that cooling system he’d sold to a client or two, toxic or not.
Green looked over.
“You’re claustrophobic.”
“I just don’t like you,” Doc answered.
Green glanced at his handheld. “Interesting. It’s rather acute. Does your business require you to travel in small vehicles?”
“Up yours.”
“Testing goes faster if you simply answer the questions, Mr. Stahl. Even if they’ve installed the best physiological modifiers, we’ve found that few DOR subjects are typically unable to lie with any success.”
“I have an endorphin reservoir. That and conditioning lessons that get me through most types of travel. It also does something to that monkey-brain organ.”
“An amygdala suppressor?”
Doc nodded. Now even his shirt felt tight. He needed to get out of this box, pronto.
“So why aren’t you using it now?”
“I’m not conditioned for elevators.”
“Your conditioning lessons didn’t include mnemonics for elevators, crawlspaces, closed boxes, coffins, things like that?”
“Who gets conditioned in case they’re stuffed into a coffin?”
“Those who think they might be buried alive, maybe. Just think: all that dirt piled atop your box while you’re in the dark, running out of air, unable to alert anyone. Even I might want to spare myself that horror.”
“Who even gets buried nowadays? Who — ”
Doc stopped when he saw the tester’s sideways grin. The asshole was repaying him for earlier insults. In Doc’s mind, knowing what the tester knew without needing to ask was tantamount to cheating. And it was no fucking business of Green’s why he didn’t have elevator mnemonics. Maybe he’d been so scared that even the idea of mnemonics had been horrifying. It didn’t have to make sense. Animal feelings seldom did.
The old, manual, pushbutton box dinged and shuddered to a halt. The tester led Doc out of the elevator, down a posh hallway, and into a room decorated in gaudy red and gold. Ironically, it’s exactly how Doc had pictured the apartment he’d be in today, trading fifteen minutes of repellant dick work for millions of an old woman’s credits.
“Have a seat,” said Green.
“I’d rather stand.”
“Suit yourself. Do you understand the purpose of testing?”
“You want to find out if I’m fit to handle the responsibility of Enterprise.”
“Quite.” Green tapped something on a desk’s top, illuminating the surface. “Many who choose Enterprise as their party are making a choice they’re not truly fit to make, not unlike signing a legal contract while under duress or intoxicated. These people inevitably fail to support themselves.”
“I thought there wasn’t supposed to be a safety net in Enterprise?” It was a variant on the indignant Isn’t this the free land of the NAU? argument Doc had made earlier, but he could tell before he finished that the tester wasn’t about to bite.
“Rest assured, Mr. Stahl — if you’re fit to choose and truly understand what you’re getting into by electing Enterprise as your party, the system will allow you to fail as spectacularly as you wish. Our process is meant to ensure that you’re making the choice with intention and a sound mind.”
“If The Beam can tell you when’s the ideal time for testing me, can’t it tell you, based on what I do and who I am, whether I’m fit?” Doc gave his own small smile. “Or does this process exist to make sure you have a job?”
“The law is the law.”
Doc shrugged, flopped into a chair, put his boots up on an expensive-looking coffee table, and began picking his teeth with a fingernail.
Green, still at the desk, waited until Doc looked over, then said, “Have you ever used an insight sensor?”
“What’s it do?”
“It’s just another data stream. My questions are only prompts. This room’s canvas will monitor your body language and biometrics, like pulse, skin temperature, and so on.”
“Lie detector,” Doc huffed.
“Only if you choose to lie. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you do. The point of responsibility testing isn’t to determine the factual answers to questions, as in a trial. It’s to gauge your natural responses. That can be done whether you’re forthcoming or not.”
“So you can tell if I’m telling the truth or lying.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s try it out. I think your shirt is fashionable and not at all repellant to women.”
Doc’s gaze stayed fixed to his fingernails, but from the corner of his eye, he saw Green frown.
“The insight sensor is another input component. Your answers to my questions are one, the canvas’s assessments are the second, and the insight sensor’s determinations are the third. Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
Green clicked the insight sensor without warning. Before his lips could fully r
eset from his question, Doc’s head became suddenly immobilized in a rigid holographic sphere, as if it were a real thing with physical substance. From where Doc was flopped on the chair, his head now immobilized at an uncomfortable angle, the thing looked like a mess of bluish readouts and blinking lights. But it was semitransparent, and the wall across from Doc featured a tacky gold-inlaid mirror, so he could see it from the outside, too. It looked like he’d grown a titanic blue afro.
“All right, Mr. Stahl. First question. Why did you choose Enterprise?”
A crick was already forming in Doc’s neck. The asshole had wedged him this way on purpose.
“Because your mother made me.”
Something in the web blinked. In Doc’s peripheral vision, he saw Green tap around on the desk, giving no indication that the answer was unhelpful.
“And how have you done, in terms of success, in ways both monetary and otherwise, in Enterprise?”
“Well enough to buy your mother for the night.”
“You’re so amusing, Mr. Stahl.”
“That’s what your mother said.”
Duly in control and with Doc trapped by the enormous insight sensor, Green seemed to have gone completely Zen. Doc supposed the tester could rotate this thing on his head around if he wanted, seeing how far the subject’s neck would twist before he popped his top. Insults meant nothing when it was your finger on the trigger, and without Green’s reactions, the jibes just weren’t that fun.
“Are you finished?” Green asked.
He’d decided to quit poking the man, but now he’d teed Doc up. He couldn’t resist.
“That’s what your mother kept asking.”
“So. Not finished.”