by Guy Haley
“It’s the Pointers behind it, why do you think?”
Karl pursed his lips. His mind strayed to the anomalous equities he’d witnessed. “Space is just space, there’s no money in it. It’s a vanity investment, made by people brought up on too much science fiction with too much money and not enough to do. Like – tell me, what’s the cost of bringing back a ton of ore from the belt?”
“How should I know? I just fly it back.”
“I thought they had computers for that,” he said.
“I’m a check, like you,” she said mockingly. “I make sure the tugs don’t go nutso and crash into the sun. It’s real exciting sitting there with my feet on the flight desk for three months at a stretch.”
“Come on, think, how much?”
“I’m just not interested in all that,” she said.
That annoyed Karl. There were plenty of people like Cassandra, ready to bellyache about the status quo without understanding how it got to be that way. How the hell did they expect to change it, when they just had a bunch of half-assed opinions? “Be interested!” he said, a little too hard. She looked affronted. “Please, humour me. Think about it.”
“Well, it’s nowhere near as much as it was. We don’t lug the ore all the way in. The Lagrange point processing facs mean it’s only pure metal that comes to the orbital factories, and then processed material is ferried down the elevators. That’s where I’ve been for the last six months: shuttle runs between LG12 and the belt.”
Karl tapped his forefinger on the table. “That’s only good for things in space, not if you want to bring it back down. Even with the elevators, volcanic mining and pelagic stripping are both much cheaper methods of getting hold of minerals. I wonder...”
Sand raised her eyebrows, urging him on.
Karl didn’t answer straight away. “Why this? What possible advantage can there be to the Pointers in funding a colony effort outside the Solar System? They’ll never see a return on it, not if they land on a planet made of diamond, tiger bones and caviar. Who’s behind it?”
Now it was Sandy’s turn to get annoyed. “Don’t you believe me, Karl? I’ve the contract right here.” She tapped her temple. “Why’s it so hard to believe? Mankind’s always spread out. It’s what we do. You blamed science fiction; maybe that’s it. Some of these guys have trillions. If they want a shiny vanity project, why not play cosmic explorer? It’s not the first time some hooray’s dashed his cash on space. It’s gotten me a job, and it’s getting me the fuck out of this dump.”
Karl’s eyes shifted to the other patrons in the bar. No one reacted to her lack of decorum.
“You should be happy. It’s a brave new world, Karl.” She saluted him with her glass. Her smile turned to a frown when he did not return the gesture. “Why the concern?”
Now it was his turn to drop his voice. “I noticed today a bunch of stocks on the up and up.”
“So?”
“They were all space stocks.”
“There you are, then,” she said. “The Market thinks it’s profitable. You said yourself it’s pretty smart, it’s way ahead of you on this one.”
He waved a hand. “The Market does not think. The Market is not smart. The Market is a packet of algorithms at the Pointers’ beck and call.”
“But?” she said.
“Two things,” he said. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that the Pointers are planning an effort. The stock of all the companies indirectly involved in the venture should see an immediate pick-up, perhaps sustained over the medium term, at least while whatever spaceship they’re building is constructed.”
“Starship, Karl. And not one; a fleet.”
He stared at her blankly. That made it seem even more unlikely. “Are you sure this is real? Have you joined some kind of cult? There are some real whackjobs out there.”
“Karl!”
“Okay, okay! Let’s assume it’s happening, then. Hypothetically” – he stressed the word – “those companies that provide services, parts, craft, whatever, they make money, but those that fund the expedition will take big hits right off, because there is no financial return, none whatsoever; anyone can see that. It’ll be a one-way trip, it’s lunacy, and the Market does not tolerate lunacy, that’s the whole point of it.”
“So?”
Karl’s disquiet redoubled. “So the Market should have picked that up by now. I see no signs that it has. Sure, the stocks are rising, and that’s fine, but where are the safeguards? Where are the alternate portfolio spreads? Where’s the betting against? I see none of it, Sand. The Market plays against itself.”
“And?”
“And it’s not.”
“So it does think,” she said, giggling a little. She squeezed his hand on the table. “I’m sorry, you look so serious.”
“It doesn’t think,” he said, with some exasperation.
“Then what, conspiracy?”
He shrugged and took a drink. “When aren’t there conspiracies? The rich plot to keep the poor down, the poor plot against them.”
“The Market is the one thing they all agree on, Karl. It’s tamper proof.”
“Ah, so you do remember something. Supposedly tamper proof.”
“You’ve always had too much of an imagination,” she said.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “Imagination in my line of work is a weakness.”
“Yes, you have! You’ve half-convinced yourself that you don’t, but you do. You always did. You’ve spent so long pretending that you can’t pretend, that it’s become second nature.” She gave a sly grin. “And that’s a massive act of imagination, isn’t it?” Her dress played a series of gentle chords, a politeness to Karl to let him know she was about to be distracted by her inChip. She squinted at him drunkenly. “Uh-oh, my date’s here. Gotta go.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask about that. This is kind of an odd place for a work date.”
“Says the man who takes his rentboy out to the poshest joint in town.”
“Humour me. What gives?”
This time Sand’s embarrassment was plain. “Well, it kind of is a work date, and it kind of isn’t.”
Karl made a quizzical expression.
“Well, uh – dammit, Karl!” she looked sheepish. “They’ve kind of paired us off.”
“Paired you off? Like...” He raised his eyebrows. “What, like eugenically? A breeding programme?”
She nodded, biting her lip.
“That’s outrageous!”
“Says the gay man with the gay parents who wanted a little gay baby,” she snapped. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. Dating’s not worked for me, I might as well let the corporate science boys match me up. Where’s the harm? I can always ditch him later. They say they want their pair bonding permanent so there’ll be stability in the new colonies, but I can’t see them enforcing that fifteen light years from nowhere if we get sick of each other.”
“You’re going that far?”
“Much further, Karl. Watch the news, you’ll see soon.” She looked over to the entrance of the bar, where a tall man was framed in the brighter light. A waiter gestured in Sand’s direction. “Look, let’s meet up and have one last drink before I go. I’ll be able to talk more about it then, okay?”
He nodded and gave her a tired smile. “Okay, Sandy. Nice seeing you.”
She ruffled his hair. “Keep it real, Karly.”
He batted her hands away. “You too, Sandy.”
They never saw each other again.
KARL ARRIVED AT the office early the next morning. Sand’s revelation had fuelled his curiosity. He had not slept. He was short with the techs as they wired him for Market interface and pushed the shunt into his neck.
As soon as he was in, he called up his simulations of the previous day, and collated overnight market trends on the space sector. He extended the scope of his investigation to cover any corporate entity at all that might have something to do with the venture – health, medical, heavy equipment, anyth
ing that might provide equipment or supplies to aid a far-flung colony effort.
He still did not believe it.
Today, he left the imagination damper in the shunt off. “Music,” he said. “Something heavy and complex... Beethoven, symphony number seven.”
He commenced the dissection of two dozen portfolios as the symphony began. The instruments involved in the trades were unfeasibly complex, equities and bonds interleaved with one another, some real junk mixed in with super-class AAA-plus companies – lots of R&D outfits, peddling barely tested technologies, some of it feasible but not off the drawing board, some of it firmly in cloud cuckoo land. With all these portfolios buying into these products at the Market’s behest, the price of the fringe institutions would climb sky high, and that could bring it all crashing down as soon as the promises they made proved to be hollow.
“And that,” finished Karl aloud, “will be pretty damn soon.” His concerns deepened as he searched out the project’s financiers. Sandy had given no indication who was fronting the capital to build a fleet of starships, but he had his suspicions. He had a list of eighty-four likely candidates soon enough, all with portfolios with a heavy space slant, all in synchronous upswing. Worryingly, there was no sign the Market was concerned about their prospects; as far as he could see, it was pushing money in from every trade account that had greenlit space and/or high-risk investment strategies – enough, certainly, to fund the construction of a fleet of starships. “This can’t just be insider knowledge, the curve’s too steep,” he said under his breath. If it were, then he’d expect one or two portfolios to take off as the Market adopted an investment pattern, with others following as the Market responded to itself, and then further patterns of mid-level betting and those predicated on outright failure. This had not happened. All of them had started going up at the same time. Either the Market knew something he did not, or there was widespread manipulation going on. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?” he said. “What the hell are you playing at?”
The pendulous march of the Seventh Symphony’s second movement was in full voice when pain skewered his mind, pinning his thoughts in place like so many butterflies.
His virtspace shivered. Numbers crackled and were replaced by nonsense symbols, the streams of data winked out. Requests for trade deletions and simulation wipes were logged and confirmed by a mind not his own. He screamed, feeling his avatar disassociate as the virtual environment collapsed around him. The music played on as his mind was vivisected.
Karl screamed louder and clutched at his avatar’s head, and it came apart like stale cake under his hands.
The lights on his couch in the real world flashed frantic red. Alarms wailed. The shoes of emergency medics squeaked across the floor. Karl heard none of it.
They checked his heart, which beat still. His body was warm, passing its chemicals to and fro, processing its proteins and energising its cells, doggedly pursuing the complex dance steps of life. When they passed their machines over his skull, there was not the slightest indication of brain activity.
To all intents and purposes, Karl Njálsson was dead.
CHAPTER TWO
Captain Anderson
ANDERSON SAT, LEGS out, head against the cream leather, knees bent slightly, hands resting limply just before his crotch – the posture of a yogi, or a doll carefully placed on a shelf. He had been told to wait, and so he waited. He did not pick up any of the active flimsies from the coffee tables at the end of the sofas. He did not stare at the receptionist as the other man waiting did, beautiful as she was. He did not look around the white room at the expensive, bespoke furniture or the faddish surroundings – different every time he had been to visit his employer in person.
Anderson waited.
Anderson was an Alt. The Pointers had needed slaves; servants could be faithless, androids were too simple, actual slaves were illegal. Hence the Alts: altered humans, genes recoded in such a way that legally, they did not count as human. Or so the Pointers’ scientists had argued. By the time the endless court hearings had been exhausted, the Alts already were. They were freed, but as they had been created to utterly obey the Pointers, they as good as denied their own emancipation.
Anderson had been gengineered to Petrovitch specification. Raised in Petrovitch schools, personality-sculpted to intensify and focus his natural tractability. He had been told to wait, and therefore he would wait until he was told otherwise. He did not care about his status. He had no musings on servitude, he had no care for the opinions of others on whether Alts like him were human or something less, he did not care whether his intense loyalty counted as a form of slavery, he did not care about anything. He cared that his assignments were fulfilled. That was all that mattered. Call it pride, call it compulsion. The distinction was meaningless to him. Fulfilling his orders was all that mattered.
Anderson thought. He was not bereft of free will, he was capable of applying his mind creatively, but only rarely did he use these gifts to scrutinise the human condition. When he indulged, he felt sorry for others not like himself; those who had no purpose or direction, those who spent their time striving for something they could never have, or lived half-lives choked with despair at their station. He felt sorry, too, for the Pointers, his masters, ridden to desperation as they were by the tyranny of choice. In his servitude he was free.
His mind wandered.
He was at school, receiving his education. Programming, the equalists called it. He did not care.
He was in the Congo, gunning down a man who ran at him with an ancient assault rifle. The man was fierce, a warrior. Fear was in his yellowed eyes nonetheless. Anderson did not fear anything. He cut the man in half with a half-magazine of high velocity bullets. Simple security work, five hundred deaths like this one on his tab. Murder, the equalists called it. He did not care.
He was in a laboratory, being gene-matched and tested. In vitro gestation had its uses, but the old ways were best. He was shown to a room with low lighting, a woman of perfect form upon the bed. An Alt like himself. Selective breeding, the equalists called it. He did not care.
There were not many like Anderson. The Alts were few in number. They aged, and did not breed true. Anderson was a special creature. He was a rare breed. All Alts were servants, servants of the rich, servants of the Pointers. A legal loophole. Not quite androids, not quite human. Their creation was now illegal. Slavery, the equalists had said. Anderson did not care.
Anderson waited.
Presently, the woman with the perfect teeth and perfect breasts and perfect face and ass and arms and hands and legs that registered on him only as shapes, looked over at him from her place behind the reception desk.
“Captain Anderson? Chairman Petrovitch will see you now.”
Anderson stood immediately. He was tall and well muscled. The receptionist blinked at him as he brought eyes so grey they appeared silver, the mark of an Alt, to bear on her.
“If you would go –”
“I know the way,” he said.
ANDERSON’S MASTER WAS the fourth most powerful man in the world – Ilya Petrovitch, American Faux-Russian. Small, jowly, old; how old was impossible to say. The rich buy years as poor men buy potatoes. Dissolute in his distant youth, ruthless now. His face sagged, pulling at the corners of his eyes. His lips were full, his bone structure narrow. Not a Slavic face, not at all.
Ilya made a show of reading Anderson’s file, projected as a hologram that stayed exactly forty-five centimetres in front of the Pointer patriarch’s face as he walked around the room. “You have been a loyal servant of ours for a long time,” said Ilya. He peered at Anderson, searching for something. When he did not see it, he smiled. “Of course, you could be nothing but loyal. I mean only that you are prodigiously talented. And by that, I am sure you are aware, I mean that you have survived as long as you have. Congo, Surinam, Argentina, the Lunar Eurowar... Everywhere you have been, you have returned from; alive, and in one piece. And you have accomplished nearly every
mission we have set you. Even for one of your kind, that makes you extraordinary.”
Anderson did not react, he stared into the distance. He had no role here but to take his orders. He waited for his orders to be delivered.
“Not that any of this preamble matters to you, does it, Anderson?”
“No, sir.”
“I find you fascinating, did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir?” said Ilya. “Aren’t you interested to know why?”
“No, sir.”
Ilya walked up to him, examining him closely, so close the old man’s perfumed breath chilled his neck. Ilya often did this. Anderson had thought the old man might be attracted to him. The thought was framed abstractly, in terms of how Anderson should service that attraction, should it exist. So far, Ilya had not pressed the matter. “You really aren’t. A shame, and an asset to me, of course.”
Ilya dismissed the hologram with a thought, and sat down. “I am old, Anderson; very old. I feel it now. I do not look my age. I would have lived far longer than you, were I not to order you to do what I am about to order you to do. Curious yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Of course not.” Ilya rubbed at his elbow and lifted it with a grimace, stretching out some pain of age. “Fascinating. You know, when my brother, God rest his soul, proposed the development of the Alts, I was dead against it. I thought the future lay in drone warriors, or androids, or perhaps cyborgised soldiers.” He shook his head. “I did not think that the human body was capable of withstanding the rigours of modern warfare, no matter how altered. How wrong I was. I overlooked one thing, you know what that is?”
This time Anderson answered. “Sense of purpose, strength of will.”
Ilya jabbed a finger at him and smiled. “Yes, yes! Exactly. You cannot programme purpose into a machine. You cannot increase the will of a man through cyborgisation. Machines, bio-mechanical interfacing... Expensive, difficult to maintain, crude. Tailored lovers, designed accountants, born warriors? Very valuable. But limitless loyalty? Beyond price!”