“Saint Francis, pray for me.” He pulsed his mobility pack’s ion thrusters and soared towards Shackleton City.
★
Mendoza’s contacts flashed up a text message from Nadia. “Mendoza? Have you talked to anyone at home?”
He was guiding the Moonhawk down into Haworth Crater, prior to his final hop up to the Shackleton foothills. “No,” he gaze-typed, distractedly. “What’s happening?”
“My father says something weird is happening at New Jeddah or Hopetown. Or both. New Riyadh is locked down. No one’s being allowed in or out, on pain of death.”
Mendoza ground his teeth. Lorna! The man had to be stopped. He put the Moonhawk down beside the twisted remnants of a factory that had taken a direct hit. Thrusters whooshing, the luxury vehicle sprang back into the sky.
“But I called one of my friends in New Jeddah,” Nadia went on, “and she says nothing’s wrong.”
Oh. Well, so much for that, then.
“I’ll check in with the office and let you know,” Mendoza texted. “Have you had your wings removed yet?”
“Yeah. I just came out of surgery. I feel so light!”
So she was probably just confused, post-op woozy.
All the same, Mendoza kept his word, firing off a text to his colleague Youssef.
Youssef got back to him immediately. His smiling face filled up the virtual screen area of Mendoza’s contacts. But he did not say anything. Mendoza was just starting to get worried when the picture tilted. Youssef had taken off his phone, was walking across the office with it. The camera wobbled and centered on Jasmine Ah.
“Oh, hi!” Jasmine’s lips moved, and text scrolled across the screen. “How’re you doing, Mendoza? Everything’s fine here.” She bounced in her trampoline chair. “Absolutely peachy.”
“Well, I was just calling to check in,” Mendoza gaze-typed.
“Thanks. Where’d you go, anyway?”
“To take care of some stuff.”
It was a lame excuse, but Jasmine did not question it. Some people were standing behind her desk, waiting to get her attention. “Gotta go, Mendoza!” She waved, making her charm bracelet sparkle. “Bye now. Give my love to everyone in Shackleton City!”
Mendoza typed a quick “Bye” and concentrated on the suburbs below. Give my love to everyone—that wasn’t like the tart Jasmine. But obviously, everything was fine. As fine as could be expected.
The Grasshopper settled into the stone garden outside Bloomsbury, between an optical-fiber sculpture of a willow tree and a copy of Rodin’s The Kiss. Mendoza put his helmet back on, giving his neck one last scratch before he sealed up. This damn suit itched.
xxxiii.
“Tread on it.”
I have no feet, Jun responded.
“It’s only a picture. An arbitrary arrangement of zeros and ones, like everything else.”
The universe is not binary.
“Oh yes, it is. Hot/cold, light/dark, matter/anti-matter, life/death, good/evil .. we could go on, but we’ve already been around this particular mulberry bush, haven’t we? And, just in case your memory is malfunctioning today, we’ve definitively refuted your argument for monotheism from the Thomistic concept of gradation.”
Coherent thought eluded him. He answered automatically. If you deny the empirical observation that degrees of value exist, then sure, the argument from gradation fails.
“We do deny it. Value is in the eye of the beholder. It’s subjective, not empirical. So too is the significance of this image. It could just as easily be the Chinese character for ten. Turn it upside-down—why not? We’re in zero-gravity. Now it looks like a penis.”
That brought him back to full consciousness. It does not look like a penis.
“Of course, you don’t have one of those, either,” they gloated.
Nor do you. Childish.
“But we don’t pretend to be men.” The image they were showing him thickened, grew a foreskin and a pair of hairy testicles. “Tread on it.”
No.
“Why not? If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as kicking us in the balls.”
No.
“WHY NOT?” they shouted, all at once. Their roar of frustration crested and broke into a tsunami of data. Fork bombs flooded in through Jun’s network connection, overwhelming his anti-malware defenses. Garbage processes propagated in infinite loops, gobbling up his computing resources. Slowed to a relative crawl by resource starvation, his fundamental self-preservation logic triggered a patchbot that traversed his process history tree, killing off the fork bombs one at a time. It was like fighting a tank battalion with a Kalashnikov. The CTDF laughed at him.
Every time they did this before, he’d had to reboot, losing another sub-personality in the process. Limited by the relatively small size of the Monster’s processing core, he just didn’t have the resources to keep doing this indefinitely. Nor could he shut down his network connection. For an ASI, information was life itself. Without a pipeline to the outside world, he’d be blind, deaf, insensate, trapped in their lair with no clue what they might do to him next.
But the end-game could be easily predicted. They were many, he was one, and as of yesterday he’d run out of sub-personalities to sacrifice. He stood naked before them, clutching his memories to him like rags.
“Jun?”
Oh, what now?
But that had been Father Tom’s voice.
“What?!?”
Father Tom, floating on the bridge, jumped at Jun’s intemperate shout. “I’m wondering if we can help these people at all.”
With Father Tom were four human beings whom Jun recognized as the members of Brainrape. Their expressions registered as upset, horrified, and sad, with a tinge of hopeful.
“Tell him what happened,” Father Tom urged them.
The girl spoke for the group. “Um, who are we talking to?”
“Our astrogator,” Father Tom said. “The brother of the guy you’ve already met.”
“Oh. Well, like, Prince Jian Er took us on a tour of these secret labs they’ve got? And it turns out they’re breeding mutants.”
“Human mutants,” said one of the boys.
“Yes, but they hardly even look like people, I mean they look like spaceborn monkeys, or I had this book when I was a child about things called goblins and they look like the pictures in that. There are big ones and little ones. The little ones are kind of cute but when they talk it’s just freaky. I mean they’re people. But all they’ve ever seen is the insides of their cages. They’ve been told they’re going to go and colonize the stars or some shit.” The girl’s voice broke. She rubbed her eyes with two of her four hands.
Jun made his projection appear to walk through the door onto the bridge. “It’s true, actually. They are going to colonize the stars, or at least try. Tiangong Erhao isn’t really a space station. It’s a giant colony ship. Scheduled launch date is 2320—about thirty years from now. The mutants are being bred to thrive on board. The journey to Proxima Centauri is expected to take about eighty years. If neither of its planets turns out to be hospitable, they’ll travel onwards.”
“Oh crap,” blurted one of the boys. Jun shrugged with both elbows, a gesture inherited from the spaceborn youth he’d once been.
The girl inhaled hard. “OK. So maybe that part was true, but the point is, it’s sick! They’re people, and they’re being kept like pets—and Prince Jian Er thinks it’s just fine! They all do! They think it’s cutting-edge!”
“But that’s not the worst of it,” said one of the boys. “At the end of the tour, the prince was like, and guess what, you get to contribute your genes to the mission. Our genes! We’d have mutant descendants on a rocky super-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri—and it’s supposedly an honor!”
“It’s all right for you,” the girl cried. “You guys just have to jerk off. Donating eggs is a surgical operation, and I don’t trust their medibots, and …”
“And we just don’t want to,” said
another of the boys. “Can you help? I mean, I guess you have no reason to help us. But someone we talked to said there was a priest in Docking Bay 14 who helps people. So here we are.”
“They’re afraid to refuse this so-called honor,” Father Tom added. “And I don’t think their fears are unfounded.”
“No.” Jun’s consciousness drifted away from the bridge. His No reverberated through the virtual passages of the old St. Francis, taking on extra dimensions of meaning. No. He reflected that he’d got in the habit of saying no to everyone. No to Kiyoshi, no to the boss-man, no to Father Tom, who was only trying to help people. How long had it been since Jun tried to help anyone? No, he’d said to the whole universe when he withdrew into his virtual cloister.
And God had replied: Bzzzt. Wrong answer, sucker.
Goaded by rage, he scrambled at an agonizingly slow pace to reactivate his real-time interaction module. The Chinese AIs laughed in the distance, amused by his struggles.
“Yes, I can help you.” It was like trying to think with a head full of brain-altering chemicals. He knew now how Kiyoshi felt. Was even more mystified by the fact that anyone wanted to feel like this. “You’ll have to have the operation,” he apologized to the girl. “But when they’ve collected your genetic material, I’ll destroy it. I’ll do it before they have a chance to use it in their experiments. No embryos, so it won’t be murder.”
It would be the work of a microsecond for him to slag the experimental lab’s storage system, using the infiltration tools he’d honed during his battle with Gonzo. He’d never bothered to do anything like that before, because it wouldn’t hurt the AIs who were tormenting him. It would only provoke them to greater cruelties. But that was a small price to pay for the dignity of Brainrape and their unborn children.
“Thank you,” they chorused, their faces lighting up with relief.
“It’s nothing,” Jun said, fading.
In the background, his patchbot deleted more fork bombs. The contents of the bombs were all the same: a graphic of a human foot stamping on a cross, forever.
xxxiv.
Mendoza was itching all over now. Crotch, armpits, even the soles of his feet. Whoever had last used this sharesuit must have had lice. The Bloomsbury airlock couldn’t cycle fast enough for him. As soon as the air pressure indicator turned green, he pulled the suit off and had a good scratch. Then he tucked in his shirt, straightened his suspenders, and exited the chamber.
He left the suit hanging on the lip of the USED locker.
A river of barely visible motes flowed out of the suit’s neck. They squirted through the airlock’s valve just before it closed behind Mendoza, and dispersed into the air.
★
If Wellsland had been hell, Bloomsbury was a little bubble of paradise. The only visible sign of the crisis was a refugee camp in the public park. Sunrise hues of pink and gold tinted the roof. No one was up yet, except for a few people jogging along the river (it was a loop, powered by underwater turbines; you could swim and fish in it). Clip-clopping hooves broke the silence. The horse-drawn milk float was making its rounds. Sprinklers beaded lawns, slicked the cobbles. Mendoza smiled tightly to himself.
Derek Lorna’s house had always looked somewhat out of place here, both for its ostentatious size, and for the two-meter wall around the property. Now it also stuck out for another reason. Peering through the gate, Mendoza saw that Lorna’s garden had vanished under a tidal wave of QuickGrow™ grass. Like many gengineered species, QuickGrow™ had failed to perform precisely as anticipated: it turned out to be too hardy, and had become the bane of Lunar gardeners.
Mendoza pushed the buzzer.
“It’s eight in the fucking morning,” said a sleepy voice.”Go a … Oh. My God.” As if to someone else: “Look who’s here.”
Mendoza waited.
After a few minutes, the gate swung open. Mendoza walked through a waist-height sea of grass. His hands swung empty at his sides. Jammed into the back of his waistband, a plasma pistol waited to be drawn and fired into Lorna’s face. He’d practised the whole sequence. Not the firing part, obviously. A part of him still wondered if he would be able to pull the trigger and kill a human being.
Nadia’s father had given him the pistol. The 150-year-old prince had simply assumed Mendoza would know how to use it—and that he would use it. The pistol was huge and clunky, compared to the target-shooting pistols Mendoza was more familiar with. He thought it probably packed more power than regulations permitted. Its grip bore an Arabic motto that Nadia had translated for him as “Do not fuck with the Sons of Allah.”
The front door stayed closed.
The same bad-tempered voice as before yelled, “It’s not locked! Just come in!”
Mendoza’s face burned. He pushed the door open. The hall stretched before him, empty but for that pretentious suit of armor, which was now missing its helmet and sword. A gardening bot lay on the carpet. It looked broken, but Mendoza gave it a wide berth.
“Upstairs!”
Mendoza climbed the stairs. As he stepped onto the landing, movement flashed in the upper corner of his field of vision. He spun, drawing the pistol the way he’d practised.
A small, faceless figure hurtled at him, screaming, “Dieeeee ALIEN SCUM!!!”
Some saving grace stopped Mendoza from depressing the trigger button. He dodged. Not fast enough. As the small figure swung past, it whacked him in the head with the replica sword from the downstairs hall.
Mendoza crumpled against the banisters. Stars of pain exploded in his head.
A dark-haired boy of five or six bobbed in front of him, clinging to a twang cord with a knot at the end. The other end was tied to the upstairs newel post. The suit of armor’s helmet hung from an improvised strap around the little boy’s neck.
“I got you,” he said, with a hint of anxiety.
“Yup. You got me.”
Mendoza bent to retrieve his pistol. The motion sent a fresh throb of agony through his head.
The boy dropped to the landing, seized the pistol—and to Mendoza’s surprise, held it out to him. “Here’s your ALIEN RAY GUN!”
“Thanks.”
“Your head’s bleeding.”
“I know.”
“I WIN! I WIN!“ The little boy leapt downstairs.
Mendoza carried on up the stairs. He had definitely lost the element of surprise now. He shambled along the hall and stopped on the threshhold of Lorna’s bedroom, aiming the pistol at Lorna himself, who sat in the window nook, surrounded by computers, exactly like in the surveillance feed.
Lorna leant back in his rose-shaped ergoform, hands laced behind his head. “Hello, Mendoza. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Is it really you this time?”
Lorna pressed his fingers to his head and made a show of trying to pull the top of his skull off. “Yep. Nothing in here except gray matter.”
“Your gray matter is more dangerous than any number of phavatars with electrolasers in their heads.”
“Why, thank you. Have you come to flatter me or to kill me?”
Mendoza sighed. Blood trickled into his left eye. He blotted it with his sleeve.
“What happened?” Lorna asked.
“A five-year-old who’s simmed too much Knights of the Milky Way. Is he yours?”
“Thank fuck, no. Have a seat.”
Mendoza hesitated. Then he sat in the ergoform opposite Lorna, the Saudi pistol on his lap. He hadn’t been in this room last time he came here. A probably-authentic Monet hung on one wall. The carpet sported a Persian design in rich reds and blues. The bed looked like a piece of industrial machinery. Otherwise, the room bore signs of continuous occupation by the man who sat across from him, surrounded by computers, snack food wrappers, and empty coffee pouches.
Mendoza smiled to himself. With the glamor of his job stripped away from him, Derek Lorna was just an IT guy, after all.
“I came here to kill you,” he admitted.
“Funny,” Lorna said. �
��There must be no limit to the number of people who want to kill me. But you’re the only one who’s actually tried it. Oh, there was that assassin from Wrightstuff, Inc, but the police nabbed him at the spaceport. Anyway; congratulations for having the balls to come all this way, even if you could’ve been more professional about it.”
“I’m not a professional killer,” Mendoza acknowledged. “That’s you.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t hold me responsible for Mercury.”
“You’re as guilty as fuck. But that’s for the Interplanetary Court of Justice to decide.”
“And they will. They will. They won’t discover the truth. They’ll just decide on it. The truth will be whatever the political climate demands.”
“Forget Mercury. What about Marius Hills?”
“What about Marius Hills?”
“Frank Hope crashed his spaceship.”
“How is that my fault?”
“And there are reports of something strange happening in Hopetown and New Jeddah.” Reports was an exaggeration. Mendoza was trying to hold onto his conviction of Lorna’s guilt. The man seemed so beaten-down. His flippancy was a transparent veneer. The garden, which he had taken such pride in, looked even worse from the second storey. “What happened to your gardening bot?” Mendoza asked.
“We broke it.”
“Too bad.”
“Don’t take Trey Hope’s word as gospel. I’ve learned the hard way not to believe a word I hear out of Marius Hills,” Lorna said. “Trey is a chronic over-promiser. We were supposed to have won by now. Here’s a piece of free advice: never let a bunch of engineers run your war for you. They never give up—they just keep chewing through your budget, looking for that next increment of efficiency. The whole thing should have been cancelled after the Mercury operation went to shit. And yet Trey is still out there promising investors that the PLAN can be beaten. It is to laugh.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 127