by Kris Schnee
"Aquatic styling. This robot is a gift. Something for your project."
Nice! Garrett was puzzled, but glad to see how far Valerie's research had gone. In college she'd kept dragging him away from homework to share a pizza and look at her latest AI experiments. First they were her toys, then tools, then pets, then... whatever this one was. There was this unconscious little happy dance she did whenever she talked about them. Today she sounded all business, though, and fiddled with her glasses. He said, "I really appreciate it, but why?"
"I'm testing the possibility of making aquatic robots." She nodded definitively to herself, then met his eyes. "Take this one with you. Get him to work, and let me know how he performs. You'll be paying me back in data and publicity."
"But what can it do?"
"Anything. Or whatever you ask, anyway."
Garrett stared, and the robot looked back. Garrett blinked first. To Valerie he said, "Thanks! Can I buy you a meal down at the Inner Harbor?" Glassy shopping pavilions stood in view from the apartment's deck. Nearby floated the USS Constellation, a proud ship with her sails forever furled. He found himself looking out there and he turned back to Valerie, wanting to tell her of his dreams. That's all the dinner would be for, just gratitude and catching up.
Valerie said, "I'd like to drop your present off here."
"Yeah, okay. Where's the off switch?"
"There isn't one. Long story."
Garrett tried addressing the bot. "Robot, turn off."
The bright blue eyes met his and its ears flicked backwards. "No."
Valerie sighed. "Just leave him. He won't break anything."
"He?"
The robot said, "I'm your property, sir. Therefore I should have a name, sir."
"Hmm." In college, Valerie's AIs had been little storyteller programs, virtual shopkeepers and the like. And a pickpocket on one memorable occasion. It seemed that they'd grown. He felt like testing this one. "How about picking a name yourself?"
The robot's ears perked up, whirring faintly. "All right. Wait... My name will be: Zephyr."
"You picked that from a list?" said Garrett.
"No. The reason is: I'm being blown out to sea."
Valerie's silence drew Garrett's attention. He asked her, "What aren't you telling me?"
She said, "It's politics and business stuff. Leave all that to me. You want to focus on the engineering, right? Here's a good, smart worker to help you with that."
On his way out the door, Garrett cast a backwards glance at "Zephyr." The robot had walked to the apartment's deck and was looking down at Constellation, examining her with no clue to what he thought.
8. Tess
Her dad had listened to Tess griping about not getting to go, then ruffled her hair and said, "You should focus on getting ready for college anyway, not running off to sea."
"But Garrett needs me! What if having me there is the difference between him winning and losing?"
"Don't worry," Dad said. "He'll do fine even without you."
The world suddenly felt blank, just a mass of shapes and colors with no meaning. If what she did made no difference, why do anything?
Online, one of her friends said, "Maybe he is wanting tech demo?" Tess stared at the screen, startled that someone had given her a good idea instead of just sympathizing.
God help her, she'd even asked Henweigh for advice in winning Martin over. Nobody would give her a fair chance! The counselor was all smiles, no help. But a yellow sticky note on the woman's desk had shown Tess a password for the school's network... Tess thought about "owning" the system, to show what she could do. She had a little knowledge about hacking. Martin wanted proof that she could control a computer system? Fine!
She'd been using the Teslatronic Beast, a dinosaur computer that she'd rebuilt herself. Garrett's dad had given her a clunker to fix up. It was pathetic -- misshapen narrow screen, dinky memory, old software -- but it was hers. She kept things there that she'd never let anyone else see. And somehow, she didn't feel the need to shove it in anyone else's face that she'd built it. She'd been basking in its glow when she thought up something better than taking over the school's network. She could buy some crackerjack-junk hardware and build her own.
* * *
Tess stared up at the construction yard's doors one night, knowing that what she needed was behind them. With her was a heavy satchel. She'd told her parents she was checking up on Garrett, which was true enough.
Sodium-yellow lights gave her multiple shadows. Tess crept through the doorway to the cavernous space beyond. If Garrett caught her, they'd just argue, and she couldn't -- she wouldn't -- plead her way through that, like she could with Henweigh.
The building had a huge steel room for putting other buildings inside. The Castor platform made her stare: a two-legged box that reached halfway to the yard's vast ceiling. Some of those concrete tubes beside it were big enough to hold her car! Wire spools, piles of pipes -- so much stuff. Just dead hardware, too. It all smelled like sweat.
Way up on a catwalk stood three people. Tess kept to the shadows. She fished a Net node out of her bag and hefted it. If you gadgets don't work I'm gonna break you all with a hammer. She put gecko tape on the node, then slapped the device onto a pipe. Its green light winked. Good.
She unfolded a computer from her pocket and made sure the node was transmitting. On to the next one. Quietly she made for the platform itself. Above her, the three people were talking. Looked like Garrett was there, and one of the others might be Martin. The third was smaller, probably a kid. Oh, hell, had Martin booted Tess from the project so he could take his own brat along instead? Tess clenched the second Net node in one fist. She'd show them all!
She froze. The people had stopped and were looking around. Had she made too much noise? She put one hand over her thumping heart until the three went on with their tour. The node's light pulsed when she left it on a wall of the construction yard.
The third node went onto an outside wall of the seastead building. Tess climbed a cold ladder to a ledge, then entered a doorway. She was inside the platform now. Only a few lights were strung up, revealing a rectangular cave of bare concrete. Voices echoed ahead of her from upstairs. Tess dug out a few more nodes and set them up in good spots. Just as she finished, she heard people coming down. She ducked behind a crate; the network wasn't ready to show off yet. Garrett and the others were so wrapped up in themselves, they headed past her without seeing. Fine! It wasn't like anyone saw her half the time anyway.
She tiptoed upstairs to another bare room. Girders jutted out. She tagged one with a node, checked it, and climbed to the roof. Here, lights dazzled her from above. She ducked back to the shadows, pulled out her computer, and muttered another threat to her gadgets before hitting a button.
The dead, bare building started to sing. The sound quality stank, but she could hear every node in the building accept the sound file she transmitted: some old song called "Jupiter." Notes echoed from everywhere, bounding off distant walls. The symphony brought a smile to her face. Mine! she thought, leering down from the Castor platform like a bird calling out territory. I did this!
A startled Garrett climbed the steps and found her. The second guy wasn't Martin, just some construction worker. She was about to boast of what she'd done, but then she saw that the "kid" with them wasn't human.
"Who are you?" the robot said.
She was too surprised to answer, so Garrett spoke. "She's a friend. Tess. What are you doing?"
She stared up at him. "Building your computer network."
"You can't just --"
"I did! A demo, anyway." See? she thought. I'm worth bringing! But then, he already had a robot a hundred times fancier than her little project. Maybe he still wasn't impressed, and he'd leave her to rot in school. "Come on, please! I really want to work for you. That's what matters, right?" Garrett stood with his shoulders slumped, his hands in his pockets. Tess tried to stand up straighter. "And... I won't let you down."
; Garrett said, "I still don't have a good computer person. Are you willing to get your hands dirty with other work too?" Tess nodded before she could think about slimy seaweed too much, and she said, "Okay."
The construction worker was watching them talk. "You're bringing her? The ocean's no place for kids."
"I'm not a little kid!" Tess said, glaring at the guy.
The fat old foreman rested his hands on dirty overalls and talked to Garrett. "Seems to me, your little crew is either gonna work your asses off, or die."
Garrett said, "Of course we'll try hard."
"No, mister. I said 'work your asses off,' not 'give it the old college try.'" He pointed down from the Castor platform to the construction yard's floor. "It's gonna be water down there, and lots of it between you and anything. My guys are making sure you'll have a sturdy little island to work with, but your people need more than that, and it's gotta come from you."
Garrett leaned back on his heels, flustered. "I'll take care of the place. I'm an engineer."
"Nope," said the foreman. He patted Garrett on the shoulder and made for the stairs. "You're a leader. Hope you figure that out in time."
Once the jerk was gone, Tess stomped the concrete roof. "Who does he think he is? He's got half your IQ." The phantom orchestra still played, sounding like an old cartoon. She shook off her annoyance, grinned, and played conductor. She had a job now! "What next?"
Garrett shook his head. "I guess we work our asses off."
9. Garrett
Time to go. For the last week he'd been in panic mode. They needed more sunscreen, toilet paper, canned food, spare parts! He had to herd the crew, too. Alexis, Martin, Tess, and Zephyr. Everyone but the robot had their own luggage and wish-list. Then, when he thought everything was ready, a reporter caught him. "How does it feel to be setting out on this adventure?"
The sunlight of a June morning made Garrett squint to see who'd asked. A man in a suit had cameras perched on his shoulder and on the roof of a jazzed-up van. Garrett said, "Sorry; are you talking to me? I'm trying to get ready for a trip." Shopping bags weighed him down. He was at the docks, with their ship at anchor.
"Eeennnhh! Wrong answer." The van just said "Samuel Reporting" on the side. An indy journalist, then. He said, "Come on, mister. Give me some good lines. I get paid and you get free publicity."
Garrett said, "I'm doing a science project. I don't need publicity."
The reporter smacked his forehead. "Don't need it? That's how things get done! How do you expect to make your project work without good PR?"
"Make stuff and sell stuff?"
Samuel smiled indulgently. "Sure, sure. But how about humoring me? Says in my notes you were an actor once. You can be dramatic, right?"
Yeesh, thought Garrett. "I did the voice for a cartoon character, a long time ago. Now I'm just sailing out to build a farm."
Samuel sighed. "I guess I could go with the humble angle. But read this aloud, okay?" He held out a screen.
Garrett peered at the words on it, and scoffed.
Samuel said, "Put down the baggage, say the one-liner, and get on the damn boat. And be heroic about it, or I'll drag you off and make you do it again."
Alexis and Tess waved from the ship's little pilot-house. Garrett wondered which one had put the reporter up to this. He sighed and set down the junk he'd bought, then slicked back his hair. "I'm Garrett Fox, and this is my ambition."
"Good, good. Now --"
Garrett was already walking away with his stuff. He handed it over to Alexis, then hopped up onto the ship and stumbled a little. Behind him he found Samuel still after him with the cameras.
Samuel called out, "Good enough! Flash some footage over when you get there, hey?"
Free of the media glare, Garrett turned back to the pilot-house. The ship wasn't much, just enough to ferry them to the farm site with some equipment and be their taxi to Cuba. Alexis leaned against the wheel with her hair streaming in the breeze. This was the first time she'd been far out to sea, since their date on that whale-watch tour.
Tess waved a hand in front of Garrett's face. "Welcome aboard Constellation, Cap'n!" She was dressed in a piratical black shirt with an armed parrot on it. Her smile was as big as he'd ever seen.
"Constellation?" he said.
"I painted the name on her myself. Got a problem with that, Cap'n?"
Garrett looked out to sea, breathing deeply, then turned back. The Baltimore skyline shimmered in heat-haze, like a dream. Or a nightmare. Suddenly Garrett slumped and clutched the rail for support. I'll never see this again! Never go home again! But that was crazy, he told himself.
Martin had the other seat in the pilothouse, and a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt and glasses. Garrett would've asked him about the reporter, but Zephyr had come up from the hold. "Sir, there's a standard format for this type of situation. The format says: you should be at the wheel."
Garrett looked at Alexis and Martin. "You two have the helm, right? I'm a little jittery. Why don't you take us out of harbor?"
"The bot's right," said Martin.
Exiled, he thought, and got angry at himself. The press attention had riled him, made him dramatize something that was supposed to be just one small step. He needed to lie down and think of physics for a while. "I'll be up to take my turn at the wheel soon enough."
10. Garrett
During Alexis' watch, Garrett couldn't sleep. He hauled himself up from his sweaty bunk and crept upstairs to wind and moonlight. He took the little wooden box along.
It had been among his father's things: three tools of Josiah Fox, family patriarch. Garrett leaned against the deckhouse and opened the box to admire them. Not even two centuries had ruined the brass of the compass, spyglass and sextant. Old Josiah had been a shipwright, arguable maker of the first United States Navy ships. Family tradition gave him credit for the USS Enterprize that had helped start a legend, as well as the USS Constellation in Baltimore. Garrett's father had loved the view of it, and cared more for the tradition than for the details like "should that be considered really the original ship".
Garrett carefully took up the sextant and put the rest away. The thing was a wedge of brass clockwork and lenses. He grinned as he stood by the railing, trying to recall how his father had taught him to use it. Though the sea swayed beneath his feet, he locked an eye on the horizon and took what readings he needed.
Where he was going, he'd have to live by the grace of science. That was nothing new even in Josiah's time. The British Empire had conquered the world with the help of longitude, the skill of finding east and west. To figure your place at sea, you needed a book of star readings, from a known location. Garrett called up the data on a pocket computer. It was England's Greenwich Observatory that had become the reference point. "The Prime Meridian," Garrett said to the salty wind. The words sounded like a spell. He imagined lines spreading across a blank world map, replacing "Here Be Dragons" with knowledge and light. And with those coordinates, no one could mark their place in the world without giving implicit praise to England, the sea's anchor and lighthouse.
It took tools, too, to make the longitude trick work. Accurate clocks especially. For every genius involved in calculating the star-tables, there were more practical men who'd had to master forging, mechanics, and metallurgy. The inventions that made tonight's journey possible had come from many people with many goals. A culture that valued new thoughts, that sailed into the unknown, had become an authority that defined space and time.
Garrett looked back and forth between the heirloom sextant and the numbers on his computer screen. His amateur calculations put him in the right ocean, at least. He smiled, satisfied, and gave thanks for the yet greater wonder of GPS satellites.
When he turned away from the railing, he found Alexis slumped in the pilothouse, asleep at the wheel. He stumbled over to her and shook her, saying, "Hey!"
Alexis blinked and yawned.
"You never leave a ship unattended in mid-ocean!"
"
Oh, darn. I'm sorry." She sat up and stifled another yawn. "It's just so boring."
"It could've gotten a lot more interesting!"
"I said I'm sorry, okay? All clear."
He sighed, counted to ten, and let the ever-changing sea calm him.
Alexis said, "You need to learn to relax. It's a nice night." She patted the seat beside her.
He took it, but not so much because he wanted to be close to her right now. Somebody had to be properly on watch. "I'm a little worried. We need to make everything work."
"You're overthinking things. You've got the skills and the hardware, and the other stuff is under control." She snuggled closer to him. "C'mon, help me stay awake."
He brought one arm over her shoulder, and sat there while waves churned.
* * *
"Are we there yet?" said Tess one morning. The pre-dawn air made them shiver.
"Not quite."
"Are we there yet?"
Garrett turned and glared at her, but she only grinned. "Hmmph. Anyway, we're about a mile from the target."
"How about we roll some dice and build a few hundred yards off in a random direction?" Garrett twitched at the thought. She laughed and said, "You're sure you didn't want to be a surveyor?"
He'd picked this shallow spot carefully. The original version of Project Castor was a giant sea-city that would mine the seabed, but that was crazy on his budget. There were big legal problems too. The UN Law of the Sea Treaty basically granted ownership of the world's vast ocean resources to an International Seabed Authority. If he wanted to mine, he'd have to survey two sites, then let the ISA decide which to keep for itself and which to tax him for. Since he didn't know much metallurgy anyway and had such a small starting crew, there was no way. Without mining, at least he could pick from more possible sites.
When they did arrive at his chosen spot, he only knew by the beeping of the GPS unit. This patch of shimmering morning sea looked the same as any other. He said, "It's weird that we're letting this thing tell us where to go."