by S. C. Jensen
“Do SmartPets work?”
The guide’s response took a fraction of a second too long, as if it had to search the archives for an answer to my question. Who goes for Mittens the Menace when they can have Gravity Defying Knockers? The hologuide’s bland eyes stared awkwardly in the direction of my face while the invisible gears cranked away. When he blinked back to life he said, “Any personal smart holo device with the most recent security updates installed may be transferred.”
“Send me the instructions,” I said. “And then blink off.”
The guide looked like he wanted to say something else but his coding prevented him from being rude to a guest. I was imagining it, of course. The Island Dreamer wouldn’t allow programming with attitude. At least not in a default skin. The House-Boy might give you a little lip if you paid for the service.
I read the directions for transfer and used my tattler to check the status of Hammett’s updates. If I prioritized the security updates and ignored the general maintenance ones I could have it up and running in half an hour. I made the changes to the settings and then did some analog exploration of my new digs.
The first thing to catch my attention was a big, silver button glowing gently on the wall opposite where I came into the room. The wall was otherwise unadorned so the button must do something spectacular. Unleash an army of PornoPops maybe, or open onto my own personal buffet of international delicacies. That would be better. I was starving. Either space travel was hard on the equipment or my body sensed the wealth and splendour of my environment and was starting to get ideas about things like nutrition beyond NRG drinks and greasy street cart sausages.
I punched it, hoping now for that dream buffet, and when the wall opened I was a little disappointed. No food. Just the vast, black emptiness of space. The Lucky Bastard suite came quipped with its own personal viewing bubble. Oh well, once Hammett was up and running we could go snuffling for truffles. This heap of space junk probably had a restaurant or two-hundred.
I stepped into the bubble with the same sense of vertigo as I’d had on the deck of the bangtail, but as I stood there, staring out in the vast emptiness of space, the feeling slowly dissolved into a sense of awe. Each glittering dot a star, a nebula, a galaxy. Maybe other planets. It wasn’t empty at all, really. It only seemed that way because we were so infinitesimally small in comparison, like atomic fleas. I leaned out from the bubble and tried to see the side of the ship, but all I could see was a glittering wall stretching in all directions. I stood there until my feet started to go numb. I was a flea on a flea.
“Marlowe?” Hammett’s voice came from far away. “Where am I?”
I turned my back on cosmic dread and scanned the room. No sign of the pig. “Good morning, sunshine!”
“It’s dark in here,” it said. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Sorry, Ham,” I said, looking under the bed. “My tattler connected with the base unit automatically, but I didn’t actually look to see where it was located.”
“I supposed I should be grateful.” It sounded anything but. “I expected to come to in a hockmarket chop shop.”
“I’m fine, Hammett.” I brought up the holomap and swung through endless menus trying to find the map of the room itself. Maybe I should have let the butler give me a tour after all. “Thanks for your concern.”
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job—” Hammett said.
“Please do,” I said. “While you’re at it can you access the room schematics and tell me where you are?”
“Ask it yourself,” Hammett said. “I don’t have access until you finish the transfer.”
“Oh.” I asked the room—the cush set have all the fun toys—and found Hammett in the VacBot closet. It trotted out in a powder-blue uniform jacket and a crisp little hat perched between its piggy ears. “Not you, too.”
“Do you like it?” Hammett spun for me, corkscrew tail wagging. “Complimentary uniform.”
“Half of one, anyway.” I reached down and patted it on the bare bum. “Good to see you Hammett.”
“I was going to say that you should really try not to poke Swain in the eye next time,” Hammett said, staring around the room in cartoon eyed awe. “But it seems to be working pretty well for you so far.”
“You think this is cool?” I ticked the last couple of boxes to complete the transfer process and led Hammett to the stargazing deck. “Check out the view.”
“Wow. I’ve always wanted to see the stars.” The holoskin flickered as it stepped into the bubble and stared out into space. Its piggy ears twitched. It craned its neck way out to look at the grey expanse of the Island Dreamer’s hull. “What’s that?”
I climbed into the viewing bubble too and gazed down the length of the cruiser. A hatch had opened in the side of the ship that wasn’t there before, and something shiny cartwheeled lazily toward us along the side of hull. “This isn’t good.”
“It looks like a—” Hammett squinted its eyes at the thing.
My scalp prickled. “It’s the woman in the silver dress.”
Hammett snorted. “Where’s the rest of her?”
I ran a hand through my hair and leaned against the hard, clear plastic of the viewing bubble. The headless corpse bounced off the side of the hull and spun awkwardly away from the ship. The exposed skin was slightly swollen with a skim of frost to match the shiny silver cocktail dress. “Probably wherever she left her necklace.”
I ran through the snaking corridors with my visilens glasses guiding me and Hammett trotting importantly at my side. The pig elicited a few of squeals from cross-eyed co-eds stumbling off the entertainment deck but otherwise no one paid any attention to us. I attempted to get patched through to Whyte with no success and the holomap kept all the crew-and-employee-only areas locked behind access codes. Apparently, neither Whyte nor the admiral had seen fit to give me a direct line of communication. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
I hopped on a transport pod and sped toward the central security unit. I was pretty sure Hollard and Whyte would be unenthused if I started screaming about headless women floating past my viewing deck, so I put on my “I’d-like-to-speak-with-the-manager” face and got ready to accost the first powder-blue suit I saw.
As I cruised along in the self-driving pod, I scanned the crowds. The entertainment deck swarmed with cush-drunk wardrobe choices that looked like they’d been summoned directly from a surrealist nightmare. Holoskin enhancements replaced the physical kind among the high-fashion set—men with bull’s heads and women with tails, towering androgynous creatures with iridescent scales. Oh my.
Groups of Last Humanist acolytes glided serenely through the chaos with their pink robes flowing behind them like the burbling waters of a psychedelic stream. I kept my head down and avoided them at all costs. I’d had enough culty weirdness for one day. My techhead buddies, and anyone who looked like them, were absent from the party, much to the relief of the acolytes, I was sure. I wondered if they’d gotten a refund before or after the sadistic security officers scraped their insides off the red-tube-of-death.
“You know,” Hammett said, standing up on the seat with its hooves pressed against the backrest, “You’re a little underdressed for this crowd.”
“Someone in this crowd has just relieved a woman of her head and jettisoned her corpse into the wild black yonder.”
“You might want to try to fit in, then.”
“I might not.”
“Does the new arm have a nanoparticle field?” The pig wiggled its tail at me. “You could turn it into a gorilla fist or something. Animal skins are very ‘in’ right now.”
“I have no idea, Ham.” I said. “I didn’t have time to get the rundown from Rae. It grabs and punches. That’s all I really need.”
“Send me the manual.”
I tried to access the prototype’s documentation. Nothing. I pushed a
button and a long, thin blade popped out of my index finger. “Whoops.”
“Be careful with that thing!” Hammett squealed. “You could have shot me.”
“Nah,” I said, and bent the curved blade with my other finger. “No firearms. Rae knows me too well for that. Security was tight, besides. I’d never have gotten on board with guns in my guns. This blade is pretty flimsy or they probably would have nailed me for it, too. What’s with this thing?”
“It looks like a grapefruit knife.”
“Who the hell can afford grapefruit?”
“The same kind of people who can afford a prosthetic like that.” The pig looked meaningfully at the crowd. “And probably every single person on this ship besides you.”
I pushed the button again and the blade retracted. “I’ll have to ping Rae and get the scoop. Until then—”
“It grabs and it punches.” Hammett rolled its eyes. “You’re such a Neanderthal.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, pointing out a group of acolytes cutting through the swath of inebriated tech addicts, “what do you figure the Last Humanists are doing aboard a luxury space cruise?”
The pig yawned, a bit rich coming from a fully charged robot. “Conversion units. What else?”
“Am I boring you?” I hit the kill switch on the transport pod when the glowing blue dome of the security station loomed into view. “I could have left you at home.”
“Don’t get sore,” Hammett said and hopped out of the pod. “The pinkies are just about the least interesting thing in this place.”
“What interests me is why silver dresses seem to carry a death sentences these days.”
“How about those necklaces everyone is wearing? Why don’t you have one of those?”
I whipped my head around. The pig was right. At least half of the women and some of the men all wore the same necklace. A silver choker with a teardrop pendant glittering at their throats, some clear. Some as red as blood. Some clear. I winced as my P.I. instincts pounded into a chrome wall. Must have been taking a back-alley piss on that one.
“For a Grit District pro skirt, it’s worth your life to wear a piece like that,” I said. “Up here looks like it’s just another high-cush-low-substance uniform for the fashion fascists.”
Was that all they were?
Hammett trotted toward the security station with its tail held high. “Well, I think they look nice. It wouldn’t hurt you to try to fit in a little more.”
The crowd swelled and moved around us in waves. A group of girls all sporting the red pendants scanned the party goers coyly. I watched as one by one they dissolved into the sea of people. It was tough to track them in the chaos of glitter and chrome of the entertainment deck, but one girl with a tall stack of bright yellow curls stood out above the crowd. She pulled someone into a rounded cubby cut into the white skin of the ship’s interior, running her hands up and down his arms as expertly as any pro skirt at techRose. But whatever she was selling the punter didn’t want it, because he slipped back into the crowd without so much as a wave goodbye. Maybe he had her room number. Then the girl spilled out into rush with her eyes bright and her hair electric.
And the red pendant looked anemic under the bright lights.
I chewed on that for a while. Why did the necklaces change colour? Is this how Blanco was moving the Tropical Punch? We snaked our way through the bazaar toward the security dome which shimmered like an oasis at the end of the strip. “Since when do you care about my fashion choices?”
“Since I have to be seen in public with you.” The pig gave me a scathing sidelong glance.
“To market, to market, to hock a fat pig …”
Hammett smiled sweetly up at me with little throbbing hearts in place of its pupils. It batted its eyelashes. “You look fabulous in that jumpsuit, darling.”
“That’s better.” I said, but my jaw tightened around the playful banter I usually enjoyed with my oldest, truest friend.
The security dome rose out of the crowd like an alien moon rising from a sea glittering with high-fashion phytoplankton. The other passengers avoided it, so the crush of bodies seemed to swell and crash on its celestial shores. Even in the cush set, nobody liked security unless they were in trouble. Serious trouble, or it’s not worth the risk of their contraband drugs and illicit tech being sniffed out by an overzealous lawman.
As we approached, the club district gave way to holographic palm trees and an expanse of white sand beaches that hadn’t been visible from the transport car. The crowd thinned until we stood like the lone survivors of a shipwreck on a deserted shoreline. We stepped through an invisible barrier and the crowd and all the noise that went with it disappeared so that it was just us and the glowing blue dome.
“Neat trick,” Hammett said, trotting ahead, its holographic hooves leaving little heart-shaped prints in the holographic sand. “You don’t see holotech like this in the city.”
“What do you know?” Artificial light beamed down on my from above, and I wiped authentic sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. “You’ve spent your entire existence in my apartment.”
“Don’t remind me.” Hammett glared over its shoulder at me. “Luckily, I have feed access so I can keep up to date on all the things I’ve been missing out on.”
“Don’t they want to be able to see out there?” I bent down and scooped up a handful of sand. It was warm and glittered with bits of mica as I let it spill out between my fingers. If I didn’t know better, I’d have bet a fat stack of cred that it was real. “Keep an eye on things?”
“They probably can,” Hammett said. “But it gives visitors the impression that they are completely alone. Makes them more inclined to talk.”
“Monkey psychology.” I trudged toward the dome. “Silky.”
“Simple and effective.” Hammett trotted along beside me. “Humans really aren’t as complex as they think they are.”
“A human created you.”
It grinned. “And an AI improved me.”
“The humans created the AI too.” The simulated sunshine was giving me a headache. The dome glowed too brightly against the sand.
“Sure,” Hammett said. “And then it improved itself.”
“So you’re better than me now?”
“The purpose of artificial intelligence is to be more powerful than its organic forebear,” Hammett said. “Did I hurt your feelings?”
“If you ever do, I’ll just unplug you.”
Hammett’s smile drooped. “Neanderthal.”
I pushed open the door to security, and a grim-faced woman with an olive complexion and coal-black hair tucked neatly under her white cap looked up from her desk.
“Island Dreamer security.” Her voice was carefully neutral, and she shuffled through the papers on her desk. She eyed my pink metal arm and then bared her teeth in an approximation of friendliness. “How can I help you?”
“I need to speak with your Captain of Security.”
She kept the filmy smile plastered on her face. “Can I see the papers on your cyber enhancement, please?”
“I’ve already been through your scanner.” I clenched my fists and took a deep breath. “I need to speak with Whyte.”
“Standard procedure, ma’am.” She tapped the edge of a stack of papers on the desk and kept smiling. “The ticket of manufacture and your proof of ownership will do.”
“This is an emergency.”
“You can make an emergency call from your room or from your own communication device by using the S.O.S commands provided to you upon your arrival.”
I leaned on the desk separating us and glared down at her. “If you don’t get Whyte for me, you’re going to be making an emergency call of your own.”
The woman’s hand crept under the desk where I imagined she was about to push a button that did exactly that.
&nbs
p; “Marlowe,” Hammett whispered up at me. “Just show the officer your papers and get on with it.”
I resisted the urge to punt the pig into the wall, but the woman behind the desk looked at me sharply. “You’re Bubbles Marlowe?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I want to talk to Whyte or the admiral is going to hear about it.”
The colour blanched from her tanned skin, leaving behind a sallow shadow of her complexion. “Apologies, ma’am. I’ll patch him in.”
A door into the back room opened, and Whyte stepped out with an unlit cigar dangling from his lip. Sweat beaded across the tanned leather of his forehead. He gritted his teeth in a way that might have been mistaken for a smile in a funhouse mirror. “That won’t be necessary.”
I whirled to face him. “You’ve just been hiding back there while she had me on the hotplate?”
“What do you want?” He chewed on the end of the black stick. “Is your room not to you liking? I don’t you I didn’t want—”
“The room is fine,” I growled. “It’s what just floated past my view that has me a little concerned.”
Whyte narrowed his cold-blue peepers at me until they disappeared in a burst of wrinkles. “I’m not in the mood for mind games, Marlowe.”
“You want me to jump on the desk and scream about it, or should we find somewhere quiet to talk? We have a serious problem.”
Whyte spun on his heel and stalked back into the room he came out of. I gave the woman behind the desk a look that dared her to say something and then I followed him. Hammett made it all the way to the door, and was about to step inside the room when the pig stopped, twirled once, and sat on its haunches. “I’ll wait here.”