Myst and Ink, Book 1

by HD Smith

  “Walter Moore,” the Peacekeeper said, “you are wanted on Vale, for crimes against House Windsor.”

  The lanky guy jumped from his seat. His faded line of three glyphs on the side of his neck meant he’d had a security role at one time, but that didn’t stop him from trying to outrun the Peacekeeper.

  The Peacekeeper raised his blaster. “Halt! You are under arrest.”

  The lanky guy was quick, but the Peacekeeper was faster. One precise shot released a dart, which hit the lanky guy between the shoulder blades. A blue web of electric energy crackled around him, immobilizing him midstride.

  The entire center went quiet as the heavy booted footfalls of the Peacekeeper echoed through the building as he approached the subject.

  “It’s not me,” the immobilized man said. “I’m not Moore, I’m not Moore.”

  The Peacekeeper tapped the end of the dart. Slowly the web activated, pulling the man to attention. As the Peacekeeper tapped commands into the Link embedded on his metal arm, the blue web turned red.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the Peacekeeper said, as the red web encased the man’s head and made it impossible for him to speak.

  The Peacekeeper swiped his Link, and the red web activated. The immobilized man stepped forward as the energy around him forced him to frog-march out of the reassignment center.

  “That’s totally an AI,” Vera muttered.

  Vera, like many low level citizens, believed that all mechs—robots—whatever you wanted to call them—were run by Artificial Intelligence. This included Peacekeepers, the primary security force used by all major corporations in the Known Worlds. They weren’t, of course. AI was illegal, and thanks to a lot of crazy fear from ancient Old Earth vid-streams called movies, the One-Function-One-Bot rule made it almost impossible for that to ever change.

  Peacekeepers didn’t have AI. They were mechanical constructs built by the Twyll Corporation, a wholly owned entity of House Vance. All Peacekeepers were remotely controlled by a human, known as a rider. Peacekeepers were licensed from Twyll Corp by a given entity, planet, or House to perform various security roles within that organization. The license included a rider. All official riders were citizens of planet Gemini, House Vance’s privately controlled home world.

  Other than being terrifying, the Peacekeepers had the mannerisms of a person, because real people operated them. There were three typical models: B-Series, C-Series, and M-Series, which were roughly equivalent to Bodyguard, Corporate Security, and Military Forces.

  The DS would have you believe an H-Series existed, but Peacekeepers didn’t look like real humans. Most were made to resemble soldiers. The B-Series wore suits or business casual attire, but their heads were made with immovable dark sunglasses and mouths that didn’t open.

  I’d never seen an M-Series, but once at the lab a House Cortez higher-up visited and brought his personal B-Series, which was weird.

  Fantasy mechs, which were also created by Twyll Corp, were a completely different industry and only allowed on planet Lux. They were freakishly realistic, but in an alien sort of way. If you wanted to sleep with a half-wolf, half-human with green skin and pink fur, you could find it there, but the person operating it didn’t have multiple sex organs or an unexpected number of boobs. They were human.

  Vera swatted my arm.

  I clicked off my ear-clip. “What?” I said.

  “They called your name, so you better go before they call someone else,” Vera said.

  “Okay.”

  I returned my ear-clip to my pocket and looked in the direction Vera had pointed. A large woman with dark skin and unbound hair was waiting with a Link poised and ready. I jumped up from my seat and hurried over, squaring my shoulders and holding my head high. It didn’t improve her mood, which was clearly written on the scowl she wore as she tapped her foot.

  As I got closer, I could see she had the standard mid-level House tats adorning her left cheek and a specialty tat of some kind that began at her jaw and ran down the side of her neck, disappearing into her blouse. I had no House tats, which was unusual for a low-level employee like me. Usually no House tats meant you were an elite and you had the power to cover them with magic. Not all elites covered them nor had the correct spells to perfect the illusion, but no low-level person had the power needed to hide their single tattoo. That wasn’t to say that anyone ever mistook me for an elite. My basic clothing alone made my station in life clear.

  My hands were clammy, but I didn’t wipe them on my scrubs. I didn’t want to seem nervous. I was hoping I wasn’t getting a one-way ticket to another planet. I liked Tau. It was run by a consortium, so there were people here from all over. House Cortez only owned a small portion of its resources, and it was the only planet I really remembered. I’d been too young to remember Canis, the planet where I was born.

  As soon as I was within range, the lady, whose holographic name tag read Myrtle, said, “Genevieve Harlow, female, twenty-three, tolerance level one, absorption level one, Wanderer birth, House Cortez, Lab Tech for Mage Ink?”

  “Absorption level 10. I’m an A10,” I said. “Otherwise it is correct.”

  More than one person over the years had read my magical draw as one. There weren’t many A10’s, and I might have been the only one with a T1 tolerance level to go with it. T1-A1 was a more likely scenario, but it wasn’t accurate.

  “Arm,” she said, raising her Link.

  I held out my left wrist. Myrtle hovered over the chip, then tapped the screen. I felt nothing. Had they finally fixed the shielding transfer issue?

  “You aren’t scanning,” she said.

  “Do you have the right software?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  I hurriedly added, “My chip is shielded.”

  Myrtle’s lips pressed together, as if my shielded chip had somehow made her life more difficult. It wasn’t like I had any control over it. Lots of people had shielded chips, although maybe not lots of low-level employees. I just smiled and tried to seem friendly.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Turning, she led me back toward a row of tiny meeting rooms.

  A wave of heat met me as she opened the door for us to enter the third small room from the end.

  Tapping a panel by the entrance, Myrtle muttered something under her breath that sounded like a curse to the maintenance crew. She shucked off her outer sweater and dropped it over her chair as she motioned for me to take a seat across from her.

  I glanced at the panel. The left side was stuck on a flickering image showing the room temperature. The right side showed a menu listing several in-room functions, but every so often the right side flashed blue. The climate control in the room was locked on a hot setting. I hoped I wouldn’t be in there long.

  Before sitting, Myrtle opened several drawers.

  “Where is my backup?” she muttered. Slamming the last drawer, she cursed, “Damn that man.”

  Straightening, she gave me a halfhearted smile.

  “Wait here, and touch nothing,” she said, and left the room.

  Myrtle had left her Link on the table. My new crappy assignment was within arm’s reach, but it was useless without her pass key.

  As I waited, Myrtle’s sweater slipped from the chair, landing on the floor with a clatter. I debated leaving it there, but then decided she’d probably accuse me of knocking it off. I sighed and tried to ignore how hot the room was as I reached under the desk to pick it up.

  I froze, half crouched with my hand on her sweater. As if I’d magicked it into being, her pass key was dangling from the cuff.

  I considered dropping the sweater, but then I remembered the Link on her desk. I pulled back to my chair and glanced at the Link. It was right there, ready to tell me exactly which job I’d been given.

  And maybe give me the ability to make sure I didn’t get stuck with Vera again.

  I glanced out the sliver of glass in the door. Myrtle was across the room talking to a male worke
r.

  I say talking, but I was fairly sure she was yelling at him.

  “Screw it,” I said, and grabbed her Link.

  I quickly activated the device with her pass key and brought up the HR app, something I’d used many times for my old supervisor when I was completing her paperwork. I searched my name, and quickly found my record. For a second I stopped breathing.

  I was being reassigned to the X86 Live Ink Study as a Test Subject.

  “Fucking hell, they want to use me for testing. Hell no,” I muttered, then realized I was an idiot.

  The reassignment center was certainly monitored. Then I remembered what Vera told me. Something about my chip made it impossible for video surveillance to detect me. I had no idea if that were true, but it was too late to un-ring the bell.

  Glancing out the window, I could see that Myrtle was swiping another Link from the man she’d been talking to. Fuck. I had to hurry.

  I tapped the job, which brought up a list of other jobs in the X86 study. There was a temporary Product Overwatcher listing, and something that sounded like janitorial work. Product Overwatcher it was—whatever that meant. I selected the new position, which updated immediately, closed the app, and dropped the Link back on the desk. Sitting back down in my chair, I cursed when I realized I was still holding Myrtle’s sweater. I quickly threw it back under the desk, then reached down to pick it up as the door opened.

  Pulling the sweater off the floor, I immediately held it out to her.

  “It slipped off the chair,” I said.

  She looked at me with a disbelieving eye, then took the sweater from my hands.

  “Arm,” she said, holding out a banged-up Link that looked as if it should be in the recycle bin.

  “That one’s seen better days,” I said, just as she zapped me. “Ouch.”

  My shielded chip always hurt when they updated it.

  The Link flashed yellow. Crap, did it know I’d switched the job? I should have taken the janitor spot.

  Myrtle’s face changed. She now wore a grimace that was a mix between scared and angry.

  “My apologies, Ms. Harlow. Let me show you to your AutoDrive.”

  “My AutoDrive?” I said, surprised.

  What the hell kind of job had I taken?

  “Yes, ma’am. You’ll be working directly with Dr. Monroe at Cortez Towers. There must have been a mix-up. You should have been sent to HR Headquarters at the Towers.” She smiled, but it looked strained.

  I decided to play along. Because the other option was confessing and being arrested.

  “Right. I was wondering exactly why I’d been directed here,” I said, in my imitation of the HR manager’s mannerisms at the K12 lab.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  I followed the woman out of the tiny, overheated cramped office, through the exit doors, and over to a waiting AutoDrive. She motioned for me to enter. I slid inside, trying not to let it show that this was the first time I’d actually been inside my very own AutoDrive.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what to do, but then I remembered.

  “Proceed to Cortez Towers,” I said, initiating the AutoDrive.

  Myrtle returned to the building as the AutoDrive pulled away from the curb.

  Now I just had to figure out what I’d say to HR when they asked me how I’d gotten the assignment.

  3

  Sun Blossom Tower, Old Earth, Monday, 14:23 LTZ

  Liam

  I landed on the roof of the abandoned Sun Blossom Tower building at 14:23 Old Earth time, in the cool temps of a season they called winter. I was in what had once been the city of Hong Kong. The building was seventy stories tall, dwarfed by many other glass and steel structures near it, but tall enough to receive sun exposure.

  The structure itself had stood the test of time better than other buildings, which was why I used it for my landing point. The building’s flat roof with attached hover platform, once used for Old Earth mechanical flying crafts known as hovercopters, made it ideal for my current explorations.

  I’d been scavenging for three years, two and a half of those from this building. I’d not yet located my own personal holy grail artifact, but my datamining was starting to pay off.

  The Sun Blossom had once housed an Old Earth data center, which was similar to our micro-dot farms today, only the Old Earth versions took up way more physical space. In their time, the data centers were the backbone of the Old Earth stream, which they called the Internet. Of course, like most Old Earth things, their stream didn’t compare to the Known Worlds’ multi-world stream, but with their limited technology, how could it?

  The Sun Blossom’s construction was unique. It was one of the few buildings in the city built with titanium alloy, solar energy, and industrial glass, a product designed to prevent the exterior glass from breaking. The building’s pristine condition was the perfect location for my home base, and one of the reasons I’d been so successful at scavenging on Old Earth.

  I popped the hatch and stepped outside my ship. I reflexively coughed. The Old Earth air wasn’t perfect, but it was breathable. Hundreds of years had passed since humans had left the dying planet, and the pollution from the days of the industrial accords was gone. All scans indicated the air was pristine, circa OE 1959 statistics. There was only one problem. It contained no myst, the magic that permeated all planets in the Known Worlds. Even Canis, the anti-magic planet that had the lowest levels of myst anywhere, was comfortable to breathe on. Old Earth just took time to get used to. I coughed again to clear my throat, which helped to acclimate.

  I cloaked my Dragon-Fire with the hover-pad’s built-in tech, which was state-of-the-art for OE 2172. It was an ingenious illusionary device that projected the surroundings onto the ship’s hull, which would make it invisible from a distance. My pleasure cruiser came with its own built-in cloaking, but for obvious reasons, myst-enabled tech did not work on Old Earth. My personal glamour had faded within minutes of leaving the ship.

  My ship continued to work because it had tanks of crystalized myst-infused fuel, in the form used for space travel, but running the cloaking spell on Old Earth would just deplete my supply and possibly strand me on the planet. Thankfully, because of the hover-pad’s tech, I didn’t need it.

  I made my way to the roof access door. Dexter, virtual assistant extraordinaire and honest-to-Lucy genius with mechanical data archives, had helped me crack the code on the building’s security. We’d figured out the ancients’ biometric security system and replaced my biometrics with all the users in the system. This meant I always had access to every door or elevator or device in the entire building. It also carried over to the vehicles—scary as hell AutoDrives that didn’t drive themselves. I had found that out the hard way.

  Entering the building, I made my way down to the top floor living quarters. The floors below this one were office suites, data labs, and clean rooms, which were special rooms sealed from outside contaminants. The whole building was practically a clean room, which was why the large vaults filled with 22nd century state-of-the-art data cores were perfectly preserved.

  They weren’t anything like the myst-infused data cores we have now, but for their time, they were impressive. Combine that with the building’s near-impenetrable outer shell and that every floor was designed to protect these devices and you had the absolute best data archive of the ancient world I’d ever seen. It was practically a copy of their internet, and it had taken months to crack.

  The apartment was where I prepped for my exploration within the city. Dexter continued to improve his data filter, which had retrieved millions of petabytes of data. On this trip I’d brought with me a new, portable myst-infused zettabyte data core, so we could finally transfer the remaining data onto a proper core.

  I activated the dedicated panel on the wall, which allowed me to control the various zones within the building. The solar catchers on the roof constantly gathered the kind of power used on Old Earth, which ran the building’s
generators. The top floor and main data archive were the only systems I left running, to make it easier to activate the other systems once I was on site. I used the previous hooks Dexter had installed on the primitive system to connect the new zettabyte core. Navigating to the correct file, I ran the program to start the final sync. A timer displayed on the screen—take six hours to cycle through all the remaining archives.

  Unloading my pack, I activated my Link, which remote-connected to my ship. I then synced my OE tech with the Link, creating a very old-school, low-tech way for me to gather data and navigate the city.

  I attached a device called a watch to my wrist. It was designed to interface with a smartphone—from what I could tell, a precursor to a Link, though in reality not even close. I also had several drones, which were nothing like the myst-infused drones of the Known Worlds. These drones were tiny flying disks with cameras and microphones. Dexter had figured out a way to direct connect to the drones once they were synced with my Link. They had no speakers, but Old Earth devices could connect to a small ear apparatus, way bigger than a standard ear-clip used by non-magicals, to allow me to hear Dexter once he connected.

  It amazed me how much crazy OE tech was needed to simulate my implants. I’d taken so many things for granted until I started visiting Old Earth. The gear needed to accomplish a bare minimum of everyday enhancements was at first unbelievable. I’d found a passable combination, but nothing so far allowed me to mentally control even the simplest of interfaces. Limited voice commands were the best OE 2172 allowed, but regardless of how old school my tech was, I cherished all of it, because none of my fancy Known Worlds gear mattered on an abandoned planet with mercenaries willing to kill you for a velvet Elvis poster.

  Because my protective gear and spells were useless on Old Earth, I changed into ancient military style fatigues and boots. It seemed everyone had been preparing for a Doomsday before Nyx Corp finally cracked the wormhole code. It had never come, of course, but almost every building that was still standing was packed with combat-style clothing, emergency rations, and weapons.