“Are you keeping an eye on things? Everything going OK?” This was code, because the peacekeepers could hear. Jake knew what his father meant. He tried to nod and shake his head at the same time, to communicate that yes, he was keeping an eye on things, but no, it wasn’t going OK. It was going weird.
Unsurprisingly, Dad failed to magically understand what he meant. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “We’re going to win.”
One of the peacekeepers who had been staring at the wall, pretending not to listen, swivelled her head. “You’re delusional, Vlajkovic. How are you gonna win? You’ve already lost.”
“Yeah, dude,” said another blue beret. “The election’s over. Lin has won. And she does not want to look weak, taking office in the middle of this mess. She’s gonna hit you with the toughest penalties on offer. You and your buddies in R&D won’t be running this hab anymore. You can play your power games on Pallas.”
“I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not,” the other peacekeeper added. “Your dumbshit rebellion killed a hundred and seventeen people, including Dr. Seth.”
Dad shot back at her, “We did this for your kids as well as ours, Alanna. The kids will inherit this planet. They’ll make everything like new.”
“Yap, yap, yap. It’s over.”
“It isn’t over.” For a second, Dad’s eyes met Jake’s. “It hasn’t even started yet.”
Jake took off running.
Up the ramp.
To the telepresence center.
★
In the telepresence center, couches lay on their sides, LAN wires trailing, polyfoam bulging from rips. The Marines had slashed the couches, looking for guns. The children had spent the morning reconnecting things.
Out of breath, Jake demanded, “Well? Did you get back in yet?”
The others shook their heads. They were sitting on the floor, since they no longer had couches, with headsets around their necks. Lena said, “We got a call from Mr. Bankasuprapa at GESiemens.”
“Screw GESiemens. What about our phavatars?”
“It was about our phavatars. They wanted us to explain what their satellites are picking up.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said my mommy and daddy are dead,” Lena wailed, “and I cried, like this.” Her mouth squared. Her skinny body shook. She was pretending to put it on, but her tears sounded real. They were real. Half the adults she knew were dead or under arrest. No wonder she’d been able to play successfully on the sympathies of the corporates at GESiemens.
Jake hugged her, and thought, We have to make this work.
“I didn’t get to talk to my father,” he said. That was easier than explaining that Dad had been splarted to someone from the lab, and he’d had a crazy look in his eyes. Dad hadn’t told him anything useful, anyway. “We’ll just have to figure this out by ourselves. Did you try SUIT COMMAND?”
Boris said indignantly, “I haven’t been doing anything else. I even tried the old text-based interface.”
“Did it work?”
Boris shook his head.
“Well, let me try,” Jake said. He grabbed a headset on his head, donned a mismatched pair of gloves, and logged in. ~SUIT COMMAND: Enable realtime feed.
The nightside of Mercury engulfed him.
No one had yet taken away their access to the UNVRP comms satellite. Maybe because no one knew about the unofficial, underage telepresence team gathered here. But more likely, he thought, no one had shut them down … because they couldn’t.
~Hey-ho, Jake-o! drawled VC000632. Thought you weren’t comin’ back.
Right then, Jake knew nothing had changed since he logged in this morning, when things started to go weird. With a feeling of dread, he oriented himself amid the flood of sensory feedback. He was riding in the turret of a World War III tank. A Pwner Mk IV, to be exact, with its radiation shield retracted, and the hatch open. Other antique armored vehicles kicked up dust, climbing the slope ahead: a Fragger, several Lulzwagon troop carriers.
Not every twelve-year-old could identify World War III combat vehicles. But Jake had grown up on old war movies from the IP archive. And so had their phavatars.
~Check it out, li’l buddy, check-a check it out.
VC000632 directed Jake’s gaze to another vehicle sliding along on their right. Jake did a double-take. He had taken the massive shadow for a scarp. It was a Sandcrawler mobile operations base, the size of a destroyer mounted on treads. He remembered from the movies that the Americans had deployed these monsters to protect their infantry from Alliance rockets and temperatures that could reach north of 60° at noon.
~So you brought the bucket-wheel excavator, Jake subvocalized.
VC000632 sounded disappointed. ~You guessed. And that was the trouble. VC000632 shouldn’t have been able to sound disappointed. It shouldn’t have been able to sound anything, even if Jake had nicknamed it ‘Gonzo’ and pretended it was his friend.
~Gonzo?
~Whassup, whitey?
Whitey? Jake let it go. ~Gonzo … this is …the coolest thing ever.
~Ain’t it, though!
~Yup. Jake swallowed. The sound was so loud in his ears he feared the phavatar would hear it. ~Gonzo?
~What now, honkypants?
Honkypants? Hesitantly, Jake subvocalized, ~I just wanted to warn you, people are starting to notice.
~Notice WHAT?
~The GESiemens surface monitoring satellite picked you up. They called to ask why you’re heading north.
~And what’d you tell ‘em? The phavatar’s voice was tense.
~I didn’t talk to them myself, but if anyone else calls, I’m going to say … I’m going to say we’re bringing you in. The new director of UNVRP has shut us down. Star Force is confiscating all our shit. Something like that.
~Attaboy! You riddle’ em, Jakey-poo. DDOS their interfaces!
Gonzo was using World War III slang. It sounded incredibly stupid in real life. Jake felt embarrassed for the MI. He subvocalized, ~How about cancelling this skin now?
~Why? It’s cool. Ain’t it cool? Makes this long-ass drive a bit less boring. Anyway, the answer is, I could, but I won’t. Why?
And that was the answer Jake needed. He subvocalized, ~I just wanted to see what’s what, where we are.
~85.12° north at this exact moment. We’re climbing through the highlands on the north side of Borealis Planitia. You can get that same information from the sat, Jakey-poo.
Stop calling me names, Jake thought. He subvocalized: ~SUIT COMMAND: Cancel skin! Enable standard optical feed!
Nothing changed. SUIT COMMAND was not working.
Jake no longer had the ability to override VC000632’s onboard MI.
~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant! Enable manual mode!
This was the nuclear option, a command that should have shut the MI down altogether.
~Get outta here, Gonzo said, not unkindly. ~And tell your dad we’ll be there soon.
“Guess you can’t get back in, either,” said Boris, on the operator chat channel.
Jake logged out. He rubbed the headset dents in his temples. “This is a mess. There must have been something wrong with those firmware upgrades.”
The other children nodded.
“We need help.”
They nodded again.
“I’m going to talk to …”
Who? The blue berets had taken Dad away. Papa was dead. So was Dr. Seth. Who was left? Who could he trust?
“Does anyone know what happened to that Space Corps lady, Ms. Goto?”
xxiii.
Elfrida walked across the floor of Tolkien Crater. Overhead, the herculean sawblades of the crater rim framed the stars. Part of her squeed in awe. The rest of her chanted a mantra: Plenty of air. You’ve got plenty of air. Don’t panic. Don’t slip.
The water on her EVA boots, from wading through the sewers of Mt. Gotham, had frozen, so the gecko grips on her soles didn’t work. She was effectively walking on slabs of ice. If not
for the unevenness of the ice field, she could’ve skated all the way home. As it was, she lost count of the number of times she slipped and fell on her ass.
Grumpy Doug hadn’t been kidding when he said she would easily find her way back. Her way was lit by two beacons near the crater’s south wall: Star Force GTVs. She figured they must be landing craft from the Heavycruisers in orbit. Their drives were dark, but glow-in-the-dark blue mottoes blazed on their fuselages. When she finally reached them, the Latin words shone so bright as to cast her shadow on the ice. Lex Paciferat.
The Law Shall Bring Peace.
She beat her gloves on the thick glass of the Hotel Mercury lobby.
Some Marines in the reception area saw her and gestured for her to go around.
They’d cut a new airlock in the bubble, with an inflatable chamber attached to it on the outside.
“ID, please,” they said, when she stumbled in.
“I just walked across a freaking crater, and all you can say is ‘ID, please’?”
“ID, please.”
Heaps of carpets filled the lobby, twitching.
“What are you going to do with those?” Elfrida asked. Her wifi connection came back and she flicked her ID to the Marines.
“We’re gonna destroy them. They’re a biohazard.”
“You’re kidding. They’re not dangerous.”
“Certain personnel in this facility were engaged in illegal gengineering. Trees that walk, carpets that eat, you freakin’ name it. Star Force is currently securing all such items. You are required to alert us if you find any more layin’ around.”
“Oh, so that’s how you’re justifying this—this invasion?”
“Ma’am, you are cleared to enter the facility.”
“These things are harmless! Everything was totally harmless! They’re carpets! They were designed for Venus.”
“Please proceed into the facility, ma’am.”
“You’re Star Force. You’re supposed to protect people. But you didn’t get here in time to protect anyone, did you? So now you’re pretending like you’re in control by arresting carpets. I am disgusted that my taxes are being wasted on this farce.”
“You and me both,” said the Marine. “But if you don’t proceed into the facility right this minute, ma’am, I’m going to file a report.”
Elfrida proceeded into the facility.
Hotel Mercury had been trashed. Fragments of insulation tiles littered the floor. Marines chatted and vaped cigarettes in the corridors outside the executive suites. She passed an environmental officer laying rat traps in a corner. The tannoy blared incomprehensible Star Force jargon. In one of the L1 radial corridors, a repair bot was patching a hole in the 3D Alpine wallpaper, or rather in the regocrete behind it. The size of that hole gave her a fresh appreciation of what President Doug’s gifts had wrought.
He will NOT get away with this, she vowed to herself. I will find a way to hold him accountable.
At the same time, she reflected that she’d been too hard on the Marines. The Space Corps was also supposed to protect people. But she, too, had got here too late. She had failed.
On the L1 mezzanine, the face of Angelica Lin beamed from every wall. Text scrolled beneath the pictures: Congratulations Angelica Lin! Talk About Inheriting A Mess! Big Hugs From Your Friends On Earth! This e-décor theme is intended only for its recipient and is compliant with anti-advertising laws.
Elfrida ground her teeth. From the mirror behind the reception desk, her own reflection taunted her. Puffy face, wild hair, visible sewage stains on her sweatshirt. She could no longer smell herself, but no doubt, everyone else could.
She wanted to head down to the test hab and use up her entire supply of wipes and shampoo getting clean. But she was afraid of what she might find—or not find—down there.
She summoned her unicorn and texted Dr. Hasselblatter.
He answered in person, suggesting that his staff had already deserted the shipwreck of his campaign.
“Goto? Where have you been hiding? You’re too late to join us, I’m afraid.”
“Sir, I—what?”
“I’m leaving.” Dr. Hasselblatter’s face wobbled out of the virtual screen projected on Elfrida’s contacts. She saw a row of seats, a screen full of stars, and Junior Hasselblatter ping-ponging around in zero-gravity. Dr. Hasselblatter came back on the screen. “Mercury has been a personal and professional disaster for me. Are you calling about your commendation? It should have been forwarded to your inbox. I wasn’t in the mood to pose for a commemorative vid, sorry.”
“Sir, my commendation?”
“Haven’t you been reading your email? I commended you for achieving your objective.”
“Achieving my objective?” All she seemed able to do was echo him.
“Yes. Your objective was to come up with a plan to resettle the UNVRP workforce. Very cleverly, you tricked them into doing it for you. I hadn’t thought of Pallas as an option, but it works, it works. Laugh. I’m just joking, Goto; I know you had nothing to do with it. It’s impossible to orchestrate that level of stupidity. But some credit may as well go to someone, and it clearly isn’t going to me.”
“Sir, what’ll happen to the—the rioters?”
“Up to the charming Ms. Lin. She’s fast-tracked their trial. It’s starting tomorrow.”
“Can I be a witness?” She could tell the truth about President Doug’s incitements in court.
Dr. Hasselblatter suddenly vanished. Junior’s head filled the virtual screen. He had strings of green and pink foam in his hair—silly string, Elfrida guessed, procured for Dr. Hasselblatter’s anticipated victory party. “Fuck youuuu, you big mooooo,” he greeted her in bright red text.
“DR. H!” Elfrida typed, shouting in all-caps. “YOUR SON NEEDS A MOTHER! GET HIM ONE! A HUMAN ONE THIS TIME!”
Ping! Ping!
She ended the call and took the new one.
A static profile picture of Jake Vlajkovic-Gates popped up. It still wore the wizard hat of Dr. Hasselblatter’s fan club.
“Ms. Goto! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for ages. Can you please, please come down to the telepresence center?”
★
Elfrida abandoned all thought of changing her clothes. Sometimes, you could tell just from a person’s text that they were in trouble.
The telepresence center was a shambles. Half a dozen children clustered around the shift manager’s desk. There was no shift manager. There were no blue berets, Marines, or other authority figures in sight.
“What’s wrong, Jake?”
What’s wrong, Jake? she mocked herself. Only everything.
“Ma’am, it’s the phavatars. They’ve stopped responding to our commands. I don’t know what to do.”
“They’ve stopped responding?!” Elfrida yelped. Then she remembered Vlajkovic’s assertion that the phavatars would secure the UNVRP mining assets on the surface. “Oh, God. Let me guess, your father jailbroke them, and it screwed them up somehow.”
Jake nodded helplessly. “I think that’s what happened.”
“Let me take a look,” Elfrida said, reaching for a headset.
“Ma’am, just to warn you, they’ve skinned their operating environment. They—”
“What?”
The children exchanged uncomfortable glances. Elfrida switched her stare to little Lena. The girl looked as if she had recently been crying.
“If you hold out on me, I can’t help you,” Elfrida said.
“Pathetic sniffle,” Lena said. “All right! I guess you know that MI assistants have to be trained before you can use them. Do you know how they do that?”
“Yes, there are two training methods. You can either give them a body from day one, or the cheaper way is to use an immersion environment that simulates their future operating environment.”
Lena nodded. “But when UNVRP started up here, centuries ago, we didn’t have the money for either way.”
Centuries ago. It had been barely
fifty years. Of course, that was lifetimes ago to a nine-year-old. “And?”
“I guess they … we used the IP archive.”
Jake broke in, “The Dougs let us use it for free. And it is a really rich environment, even though it’s not fully interactive, so—”
“What’s in it?”
“Oh, just a bunch of old movies,” Jake said. “Most of them are 3D, but not interactive, so you can’t choose how you want it to end. But with modern editing software, you can select your favorite bits and mash them up to make a proper immersion environment. So that’s how Dr. Seth and his guys made a training environment for the vinge-classes.”
“That is really inappropriate. Training environments are supposed to simulate future usage scenarios,” Elfrida said. “Sorry. Go on.”
“So our phavatars have the archive loaded in their memories. And—and sometimes, just for fun … we would use the archive as a skin. So it would be like we were riding tanks or something, instead of … dumptrucks.”
Elfrida nodded. This is what happens when you outsource your telepresence operations to grade-schoolers, she thought. She did not say that the practice of skinning was not only unprofessional but dangerous. The children knew that. She said, “And this skin is enabled right now, is that it? I wish I knew how your dad jailbroke them. It shouldn’t even be possible ...”
“They’re so jailbroken, they won’t even obey us anymore!”
“Let me have a look.”
Elfrida settled into a ripped couch. The children hovered anxiously.
She was trying not to think about her own experience with a phavatar that refused to obey her commands: the stross-class Yumiko Shimada, on 11073 Galapagos. This was a whole different scenario. It needn’t be the same thing over again. In fact, it couldn’t be, given the hardware limitations of the vinge-class.
Log in. She picked the first phavatar on the list, VC000632. Her HR ID gave her operator-level access. There was no point viewing the realtime feed if she was only going to see some fantasy skin, so she subvocalized: ~SUIT COMMAND: Access search space. She would have a look at the phavatar’s update log.
She expected a virtual white room with a couple of Picassos on the walls. That was what MI search spaces usually looked like. Older ones had filing cabinets.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 79