The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series
Page 97
Mendoza wanted to sink through the floor of the carriage. The question was incredibly slanted, even for the polling business. He never would have released it to the public without further tweaking.
~Yes, I think they’re nuts, he responded flatly.
“Thank you for your participation! Would you like to see how other people have responded?”
~Yes.
The poll vanished, to be replaced by a graph. So far, 87% of respondents had agreed that NOT to ramp up mining operations on Mercury would be freaking nuts. Despite his consternation, Mendoza felt a twinge of professional satisfaction. That was almost exactly the result he’d modelled.
His HUD area lit up. Someone was pinging him.
Derek Lorna.
Surprise, surprise.
Lorna’s voice bubbled with glee. “Did you get the poll? I made sure you were in the randomly selected list of participants. Looks great, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Mendoza said.
“And did you see that approval rate? You’re a pro, fellow. Now listen …”
“I’m on the train,” Mendoza blurted, before he switched to subvocalizing. His BCI’s voice always sounded lifeless and unenthusiastic. He didn’t want Lorna to think he was resentful. ~I’m glad the results matched my projection, he subvocalized.
“Yeah. But listen, this question was pretty broad. We really need to follow up with something more specific, to rule out support for the more radical interpretations of planetary resource exploitation. Can you do coffee? Doesn’t have to be now … but I see you’re on the Victoria line. Get off in Verneland and I’ll meet you on the roof of Harrods.”
Lorna ended the call. Mendoza clenched his fists. I see you’re on the Victoria line … There had been no need for that. But yes, there had been a need for it. To remind Mendoza that everywhere he went, everything he did, he was watched. And someone with Lorna’s kind of standing could access the real-time surveillance logs.
He got off the train in Verneland and went up to the roof of Harrods.
A landmark on the Lunar tourist trail, Harrods was a department store owned by the ex-royal family of Qatar, who were prominent citizens of Shackleton City. The roof garden featured a café and a resident pack of corgis that waddled around begging for tidbits. Mendoza ran two fingers around the inside of his collar, feeling out of place among tourists in tailcoats, frills, and flower-heaped hats. The tourists seemed to enjoy dressing up in Victorian fashions. They didn’t have to do it every day.
Derek Lorna came towards him. He fit right in, clad in a ruffled lavender shirt and linen trousers with a thin ivory stripe. Physically, he looked the same as his avatar. Receding hairline, blue eyes, designer stubble. In real life, however, the eyes had a striking intensity. Lorna was clearly one of those people with enough energy for ten ordinary mortals.
“You made it! Listen, we can have coffee here, or I can give you a ride to the edge of the dome. You can catch the train there, and we’ll talk on the way.”
As before, Mendoza saw which option he was meant to choose. “A ride would be great.”
Lorna was already urging him towards the airship anchorage.
In comparison to the Hindenburg-esque sightseeing craft moored around it, Lorna’s private airship flaunted sleek lines. Its open-topped gondola had teak rails, leather-look ergoforms, and a mother-of-pearl table in the middle. It flew so smoothly that Mendoza did not realize they’d left their mooring until he felt a breeze in his hair.
Harrods shrank away below. The rooftops of Verneland spread out, festooned with decorative chimneys and gutters.
“Tough day at work?” Lorna said. “I’m impressed that you got that poll done so fast. Let’s discuss how we can keep the momentum going.”
All these years on Luna, and this was the first time Mendoza had ever been up in an airship. The noises of the city reached them only as a murmur. He cleared his throat. “I just wondered, is anyone actually calling for the Phase 5 ramp to be cancelled?”
“Oh, the usual suspects,” Luna said dismissively.
As the airship gained height, the rooftops resolved into a 2D panorama. The streetlights had started to come on, although the sky was still blue.
“Remember, this wasn’t supposed to happen for another few decades,” Lorna said. “So a lot of ongoing debates have suddenly become acute. And the competition for poor old Charlie’s job looks like turning into a referendum on those issues. See what I’m getting at?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Lorna gazed at him for a moment. Then he seemed to change his mind about what he’d been going to say. “I’ll be honest. My outfit, the Leadership in Robotics Institute, will be supplying software for the Phase 5 ramp. This is a big deal for us. Make or break, to be honest. The competition for UNVRP tenders is cutthroat. We’ve planned our entire investment schedule around this. If the Phase 5 ramp was canceled, it might spell doom for LiRI, too … So yeah, I’ve got a dog in this fight.”
Lorna was acting like he’d just come clean about his motivation, but he’d said To be honest twice, which was a pretty good sign that he wasn’t being honest at all.
More than ever, Mendoza wanted to know the real reason Lorna was interested in Mercury. He felt protective of the little planet. Elfrida was there.
“So, bottom line,” Lorna said, “the right person has to win this election.”
He tapped the mother-of-pearl table. It turned into a screen showing an Asian-featured woman in her forties. She had the kind of beauty that money could buy.
“It won’t surprise you,” Lorna said, “to learn that the right person in our view, the view of everyone involved, is Angelica Lin.”
It did surprise Mendoza. He didn’t even know who Angelica Lin was. A lightning-fast search threw up her name in connection with the death of Charles K. Pope. She had been Pope’s girlfriend.
“Is she even running for the job?” he asked.
“She will be.” Lorna smiled at Angelica Lin’s luscious features, kissed his fingers, and planted the kiss on her lips. The touch erased the portrait. “She’s never held public office before, but she’s the obvious choice, and I’m sure the voters will see it that way, too. But they might need a little help making up their minds … do you see where I’m heading with this?”
Mendoza did, and he felt relieved. Lorna wanted him to use his psephological skills to help get Angelica Lin elected. This was practically business as usual. “Sure. But if I can ask a question, why not Dr. Ulysses Seth? Isn’t he the default UNVRP candidate?”
Lorna chuckled. “He’s eighty-seven.”
“Yes, but ….” The average lifespan in the UN was 98. Shorter for the spaceborn, but Dr. Seth had been born on Earth, a lifelong physiological advantage that no length of time in space could erode.
“More to the point,” Lorna continued, “a vote for Seth would be a vote for Charles K. Pope’s radical agenda.”
“Radical agenda?”
“Come on,” Lorna said, coolly. “UNVRP is radical. Terraforming Venus? Imagining that you can turn a toxic inferno into a shirtsleeve environment, by throwing a few kilotons of green slime and iron aerosol at it? That’s not radical?”
Mendoza frowned, confused.
“Oh, I’m pro-UNVRP. But I’m just saying, familiarity breeds contempt. Take a step back, and you can’t deny that the Venus Project is radically ambitious. Especially in the context of the other challenges humanity has to deal with right now … such as the PLAN.”
At the mention of the PLAN, Mendoza felt a chill run through his body. He said carefully, “Plenty of people think UNVRP is a waste of taxpayer money that should be spent on other things.” Fragger1 had written a screed about that just the other day.
“Yes. But money was nothing to Charlie Pope. For him—now this is something you may not know—UNVRP was to be only the beginning. He planned to use the Phase 5 ramp as a stepping-stone to bigger things. Ultimately, he wanted to dismantle Mercury and turn it into a Dyson sphere.�
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“A Dyson sphere? A trillion trillion solar arrays orbiting the sun?”
“Yeah. Sphere, swarm, call it what you like, it was a nutzoid idea when Dyson first came up with it, and it still is. But Pope thought we could do it, and not only that, we should do it. Basically, the man was crazier than a cockroach in a radioactive waste dump.”
Lorna’s voice had a flinty edge. Mendoza suddenly remembered the internet rumors (not even rumors, really, just dead links) suggesting that Charles K. Pope had been murdered.
“So we’re looking to elect a candidate who can fix UNVRP’s public image,” Lorna concluded. “And Angelica Lin is just the woman to sell Venus to Earth all over again.”
“Still, it’ll be tough to get her elected if she hasn’t got the right qualifications.” Mendoza hoped Lorna did not think he could magically fix that problem.
“She’s got the only qualification that matters. Did you look at her? Va-va-va-voom.”
Mendoza laughed.
“Fanta?” Lorna drew two cold cans out of a mini-fridge in the side of the gondola. “So, if you’re on board, we can get started on Angie’s campaign any time.”
“Uh, isn’t she going to have a dedicated team?”
“Yeah, for the PR stuff, yeah. What we’ll be doing is more in the way of … oppo research. You know.”
Mendoza made a noncommittal noise. He sipped his Fanta. It was sticky-sweet. “You ought to run for the UNVRP job yourself,” he said. “Sir.”
“Ha! Thanks, but I don’t like to travel. I haven’t left Luna in twenty years.”
The roof was darker now. Mock stars enhanced the illusion that the airship was floating in the night sky. The only difference was no Earth overhead.
The airship had been gliding in circles. Slowly, it descended towards the edge of the dome. Verneland—named after nineteenth-century author Jules Verne, one of the founders’ idols—boasted a band of parkland inside its perimeter. People sat in a grove of attenuated plum trees, bobbing their heads to the beat-boxing of an a capella techno group. They turned to stare at the airship as it landed on a nearby lawn.
“God, what a horrible noise,” Lorna said. “That’s not music, it’s some kind of Cro-Magnon tribal bonding shit.”
“No kidding.” At least they agreed on something. Mendoza had to give Lorna the impression that they agreed on everything. He didn’t know if they did or not.
“You should be able to get home from here,” Lorna said. “Train station’s over that way. So to get started, I’d like you to design a poll focusing on the other candidates, or maybe one for each of them. We’re looking to find their weaknesses. Take your time, do your best work. Think you could have something for me by Wednesday?”
So, take your time, but have it done within 24 hours. Lorna must be a nightmare to work for. “No problem,” Mendoza said. “I can hack away at it during office hours. They haven’t given me that much to do yet.”
“Fantastic,” Lorna said.
Mendoza got out, stumbling slightly on the grass. The airship lifted off again. Mendoza waved, but all the time, questions thundered in his mind.
There had to be other psephologists on Luna. Or if Lorna wanted real talent, he could have hired someone on Earth. Mendoza hadn’t used his training in years before he got transferred to MeReMSG.
So why me?
iv.
While working on the polls Derek Lorna had asked for, Mendoza did a bit of digging around the edges of Lorna’s public profile.
He learnt that in addition to all his other posts and honorary titles, Lorna held the title of lead researcher at the Dasein Institute, a space station orbiting 4 Vesta, which had been put there after last year’s catastrophe, for the purpose of studying the Heidegger program.
The Heidegger program was the name given by humanity to the PLAN’s malware—the stuff that had infiltrated people’s BCIs on 4 Vesta and hijacked their brain reward pathways, turning them into meat puppets.
All the meat puppets had died when Vesta’s life support systems failed, but the Heidegger Program was still there, in the infrastructure of the abandoned colonies. It controlled several phavatars, and sometimes used these to try and sabotage the rail launcher that was driving 4 Vesta slowly towards the inner solar system.
The Dasein Institute researchers sat in their space station and watched the fun. As far as Mendoza could find out, that was all they’d done so far.
Lorna, of course, must be participating remotely, via a phavatar of his own.
I haven’t left Luna in twenty years …
And why was that, anyway? What had made this brilliant man such a homebody?
Mendoza did some more digging. At the bottom of a memory hole so deep he needed decryption tools to reach the bottom, he found something interesting.
★
“I didn’t know you had a relationship with Angelica Lin?” he said when they met on Thursday evening.
Lorna’s reaction was startling. He flushed. “I don’t.” Recovering: “Or rather, our relationship is one-sided. I admire her; she uses me to get what she wants. One is a slave to beauty.”
They were eating supper in a trattoria in Wellsland, not far from the UNVRP building. Lorna was conservatively dressed today, so they looked like two colleagues grabbing a plate of pasta after work. But Lorna wore glasses with a fractal pattern on the lenses, the type that pulsed near-infrared signals to confuse facial recognition software.
Mendoza spread his hands. “I was just interested, that’s all … I stumbled on some stuff about Callisto. There was that incident in 2265, right? That crazy personhood activist group, CyberDestiny, took over the UNSA base. Ended up killing pretty much everyone. And you were there, working at the base; I didn’t know that. And so was Angelica Lin.”
Lorna pointed at him, a rueful smirk on his lips. “You did not stumble on that.”
Mendoza smiled and shrugged. “I just thought it was interesting.”
“Well, it’s not a secret, but it isn’t relevant, either. We worked together ... kind of. I was on the software side. Angie was one of the Marines who, er, didn’t protect us very well. But nothing ever happened.”
“Nothing?”
“I was desperately in love with her, but she never looked twice at me. So it goes.”
“Aha,” Mendoza said. All was now clear. He was working his ass off to help Lorna impress his long-ago crush.
“And in case you’re wondering, I’m not just trying to impress her here,” Lorna said, which convinced Mendoza that that was exactly what Lorna was doing.
He knew the feeling.
As if reading his thoughts, Lorna said, “You ever been in love, fellow?”
Mendoza twirled some fettucine around his fork. The food in Wellsland restaurants was always good. Real, fresh ingredients. “Once, I guess.”
“I’m going to hazard a guess that it didn’t end in wedding bells.”
Mendoza laughed. “She prefers women.”
“Yow,” Lorna said. “You have my condolences. How’d that happen?”
“Well, some people say it’s genetic, but my opinion is it’s more of an environmental thing …”
“You know what I mean. How’d you get together?”
“It was on 4 Vesta, actually. She was there for the Space Corps, and I was doing astrodata analysis for UNVRP. This was before they axed the asteroid capture program. Anyway, to make a long story short, we were out in the field together when the Heidegger program got loose.” He spoke stoically. “Elfrida saved my life.”
Lorna shook his head. “Mendoza, you and I are, like, living each other’s lives here.”
Mendoza laughed, thinking: Except that you’re a famous scientist, and I’m just the schmuck you arm-twisted into doing some work for you.
He finished his fettucine. “So,” he said. “Was the stuff I sent you OK?”
“OK? It was better than OK, it was great. Just as I thought, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter is the one we need to watch.”
“No, no. Hasselblatter’s the dangerous one. He’s no populist, but look at his connections. He’s the President’s man.”
“He’s also Elfrida’s boss, as it happens.” Mendoza reflected that Elfrida couldn’t be happy that her boss had decided to run for the UNVRP director’s job. She had gone to Mercury to get away … not to get caught up in an election. It would be ironic if she got roped into working on Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign, while Mendoza was working on Angelica Lin’s.
“Is that true? Get out of here!” Lorna’s eyes flickered behind his privacy glasses, checking up on what Mendoza had said. “Hey, so she’s on Mercury right now! That is ironic. So you’ve got a personal stake in this, too.”
Mendoza frowned. That sounded somewhat ominous. But Lorna did not explain what he meant. Their dessert came: tiramisu.
“So our next step,” Lorna said, “is to zoom in on Hasselblatter’s campaign. Exploit his weaknesses.”
“He’s so close to the President that I wouldn’t want to zoom in on any professional lapses he might have had,” Mendoza said delicately. “There are some question marks around his personal life. He’s married; his wife is a Muslim, like him, but she’s said to be very devout, while he, um, isn’t. And there are hints that their son may not be their son. I don’t know if you want to go there …”
Lorna shook his head firmly, making Mendoza feel dirty for having brought it up. “No, I don’t want to exploit his personal failings. Anyway, fabricating some kind of scandal, that would just be manipulating perceptions ...”
“Psephology is the science of manipulating perceptions,” Mendoza pointed out.
“I know, but you’re a smart guy. Stay with me here.” Lorna ate a bite of tiramisu, gazing reflectively at the fairy lights overhead. “Democracy isn’t a thing anymore. We vote for lay judges, municipal bylaws, and corporate branding campaigns, not for our leaders. These elections on Mercury are an anachronistic relic. But the really ironic thing?” Lorna rocked forward, meeting Mendoza’s gaze. ”These are the cleanest elections in human history, hands down. No anonymous political donations. No advertising. Campaigns just three weeks long. And with digital ID tracking, there’s no possibility of voter fraud.”