by Marc Horne
Chapter 8
Back to space. The comforting near-void. The blanket of the stars.
On semi-automatic pilot, Xolo took them on irrational and wasteful meanderings around the blue pearl, the all-mother, the stump of life, the...frankly its given name summed it up best: the Earth
Sunny was stirring. That was a beautiful planet she owned, reflected Xolo. Even the parts that were burned, bombed and flooded couldn't spoil that.
"Okay, Sunny, what part of Earth should I be taking us to."
She thought for a while. Her eyes were dusty.
“Did you just shoot us, sir?”
“Yes and no. Now come on, Princess. Thanks for the life-save but I am going to need some kind of mission here. I am 100% goal oriented.”
She looked at her planet. Approvingly.
“My father sent us into space to seek aid. A dangerous enemy was trying to bring him down. I was supposed to bring help back. But we crashed on that fool’s planet.”
Xolo wrinkled his brow.
“I’ll help your Dad. I’m assuming that the right kind of killing will take care of his problem. You weren’t out looking for great negotiators.”
“You can’t negotiate with my father’s enemy. But you can’t kill it either.”
“Is your father’s enemy…like…global warming or something?”
“No, it’s an artificial life form. It wants to take over earth and then pull down the whole space travel net and all the planets on it.”
“He…wow…I guess that would work. You could collapse all the blackwarps. I would…be poor.”
Xolo moved into the atmosphere. It was the best atmosphere. Muscular.
“So tell me where to go, kid. I know the planet so you can just give me a country name or something.”
“Northern Italia.”
“Good choice, good choice.”
Through clouds the ship fell, guest of Earth’s gravity. The heat shield laughed at the tiny friction of these gasses. It was built Fordtough, 24th century edition. Soon they saw the slim sword of Italia; once a boot, Xolo knew, as he was a student of Earth.
The ship headed down to the point where mountains weren’t just wrinkles. Beautiful trees emerged from the froth of texture.
“Okay, Princess. Any more specific info.”
“No. It was all on the computer on our space rocket.”
“Okay. I’ll land us and then we can go out an explore.”
The two boys were awake now. Their little knotty dreads were awful cute.
The ship landed silently in a pleasant grove. Even though it was something of a clunker by the standards of a Sultan it was an extremely nice ship. Jovian steel, forged in the heart of a gas giant glowed with an inner fire.
Xolo addressed the children.
“Sunny has appraised me of the situation, namely that there is a state of rebellion on the planet which is being precipitated by an undead army. And that although this area was safe when you left, we are dealing with a fast moving situation here. I am going to attempt to make contact with some friendly Earthers and if the situation is safe, I will deliver you to them and then to your father as agreed in return for your graciously saving my life. In the meantime, get back in the ship, turn on the defense systems and don't blow anything up unless it is a zombie or drone or whatever we are calling them.
“There are probably movies and games and stuff. Probably ninety percent of it is absolute filth that will age your minds like a grape under a hairdryer so exercise caution on that front too. There's definitely food. Probably about half of it is full of psychotropic drugs. So again, exercise caution. If I am not back within twenty-four hours then feel free to come up with a plan B of your own liking and eat as much porn food as you like.
“Ok. I'm off,”
Down the rolling hills he went. He was moved by the beauty, he really was. After all of the desert planets he had been on lately, he felt like he was threading his way through the hairy belly of a vast living being or traversing the lungs of a giant as he slid from tree to tree. Apart from the rustling, this landscape was perfect for stealth. Perhaps that was why humans were so sneaky: we came from a place like this. If life had somehow managed to emerge on the glass planet of Uthan, it would have been very honest. But that was probably why they had found almost no life out there in the galaxy. Life had to be very sneaky or untouchably immense in order to not get wiped out by the dark twins of vacuum and solar fire.
After about thirty minutes, Xolo came across a couple of Earthers chopping logs. He looked carefully at them to try and determine if they were friends or foes.
So he observed them. Simple hard-working clothes: browns, greens and oranges. Cottons and jutes and plant fabrics. Lean muscles on both the male and female. Eye sockets plugged with metal bubbles and antennas in ears. Nothing out of the ordinary, simple farming folk. He could probably risk an encounter.
“Well met, good farmer folk,” he said as he walked out from the woods in his assassin suit and cape, but with the mask pulled back and his trustworthy face exposed. For despite his bizarre secret lifestyle he had warm brown eyes that people wanted to believe.
The farmers looked up and seeing the naked eyes they felt they were in the presence of a nobleman so they momentarily logged their brains off the net and bowed, hoping the conversation would not take long as their rustic scene with its scrabbling bugs and hushing leaves was extremely valuable chaotic data and their back cortexes were currently processing navigation data and some architectural jobs from the spider planets and also some nude hologram chats which was a detail job that people loved to have crusty old Earthers do.
“Speaking to stranger. Greeting stranger. Hello, Sire. End Greeting,” said the male.
“Woah! Kill the tags, my man. I’m not going to scan your syntax.”
“Yes, sire. (End speaking.)”
“Are you really not going to speak to me anymore? I just have a few questions…”
“Just closing me tags, sir. Old habits is good habits, sir. Don’t want no overflow later sir.”
“Right. Sure. Look…I’m going to say something quick and you two just fire back whatever comes to mind, okay?”
The female looked to the male with her lips pushed out in the mollusk style.
They turned back to Xolo. She said, “Sir, you is aware that as you asked we is off the net now, sir.”
It had been a long time since Xolo had been face to face with data farmers. On one hand, what was the difference between harnessing the brainpower of humans to get work done and harvesting their muscle power to grow food? They were well recompensed: they got free short message and social connections across the whole explored galaxy. Of course most of them didn’t use it, because a whole life of carrying other people’s thoughts all days had left them with basically nothing to say and they were happier RePeeting other people’s thoughts all day or basking in the warmth of the big public thinkers as they lay in their pallets in their garrets, eating truffles, mushrooms, beetles, berries.
On the other hand, the thought of the massive data projects he was undertaking and the days and days of meaningless numbers and encrypted strings that people had endured because of him was something that haunted him a touch. He knew that most data processing was done here on Earth, the poorest planet in existence, with a bare minimum done on the outer planets to keep latency manageable. Often this outer planet work was carried out with indentured laborers from the old world who were considered to have the best genes for heavy loads. He also knew they started young. After their first mating, they got the plugs and got married, usually. Data couples could get in sync with each other and produce extremely clear signals.
As he looked at these two now, adjusting for their lack of key facial features and the poverty of their diet and the rigors of their simple life, he guessed they were no older than nineteen.
They had probably handled some of his packets sometime in the last five years.
But he was terrifying them and thi
s was no time to look with horror at the one of the least egregious crimes against humanity he had committed in his life so he snapped himself out of his loop.
“Yeah, I know you are off the headnet. But I just want you to just tell me what comes into your mind… and things will come into your mind, trust me, you can still do it, I know you can… anyway, listen.
“Zombies. King.”
Their heads jerked like pigeon heads, flicking between each other and the ground. The flicking was fast and panicked: like a pigeon who had landed on a pile of corn but saw a big fat cat looking at them.
“King is near. King is at foot of Black Mountain,” said the male.
The female started to walk around in a tight little circle.
“Is it secret? Is it secret? Is it leaking?”
Xolo reached out to comfort her, but saw an old, old snarl form on the lips of the male.
He decided it would be best to pull rank.
“I am a trillionaire of pure blood. My questions are noble and sanctioned. And I am almost done. So answer me one more and then back to your net.”
Xolo’s voice and manner elevated in way that triggered something hardwired in them. They snapped back to passivity.
Xolo, however, started to get the feeling he often got when he was under the focus of a crosshairs. It was not a result of any of the tech implants he had. It was just instinct. He had done some brainscans on this instinct. It seemed to be a process in the subthalamus that turned on in stressed situations and which continually measured the degree of cover he was under and the amount of time he had spent looking in one direction. So it was probably a false positive in this case, but either way this conversation was getting too unpleasant for all involved.
“Have you ever seen a dead person get up and move around?”
“No sir. No sir.”
“Okay, back to work and purge log of this encounter. 50,000 credit purge fee authorized from Slithonian Bank, keyword, Zizek.”
He dove in the bushes, they went back to chopping. That ax was a beauty. They might have found that in a bunker: it looked pre-exodus. As it chopped up the wood and they piled it up, Xolo envied the simplicity of their existence.
Because he was thinking about yachts again. And trying not to, again. And he went down the hill through thick briars and cat jumping from branch to branch, and sliding down becks and streams next to little fish that were hard to catch but not hard to love.
He hurdled an old metal fence with a sign in Italian, about irrelevant dangers of the past, which had come true like they all did and then had gone away.
The yacht was made of wood. It was in a very calm sea. It was empty, as they often are. But seemed emptier. He saw the yacht from the outside, wooden and old-style. And he also saw it from within, surprisingly dusty, reeking of liquor. Old pirate-style liquor. Same time frame. It was impossible to be both inside and outside of the boat. He saw the stripy sun sinking too. He was high up, falling on the yacht like a shadow falls. He was time bust. And also he was sliding down the stream, the one with the fish, on merry old Earth.
He was going to have to ignore that voice telling him not to think about the yacht.
Soon, not now. Because now he heard a crazy galloping sound like the sound of a hundred broken coconut shells tumbling.
A big animal was headed his way. On Earth, these days, big animal meant attack. He reached to his belt for his Multishot 6000 and dialed it to ‘Beast Stopper’ – broad blast, low penetration, high shock factor.
At the same time, he sighted a solid tree and leapt for a high branch with plenty of cover.
The animal burst through the bushes. He was no zoologist but this thing was so complicated, it had to be synthetic. Six long legs covered with grey bony plates, each one taller than a man and jointed high like the legs of a spider or a mantis. Long head like a wolf and like a dolphin. Too many muscles: muscles designed without confidence, muscles designed with backup muscles. Probably this thing ate so much food that only the most elite riders would be given one. Still, it was a scary looking thing and it roared hard. Its rider wore big goggles, a long scarf, padded armor that matched the Mantis-Horse’s bones and carried a long, old-style messy-killing rail rifle.
No amount of cover in the world would save Xolo from that cannon…assuming it was still in working order, which was no sure thing as it was at least one hundred years old.
Xolo gambled that someone with such a fancy scarf must surely be allied to the king.
“Ho, friend,” he called out, pressing his back against the scratchy tree trunk in half-anticipation of hot, wet death from an itchy trigger finger.
“’Tis the guardian of Princess Sun-Moon who doth address thee and beg the forbearance of thine arms.”
Goggle-eyes scanned the high canopy while his beast’s head rolled and snapped, sniffing through a blowhole. Clearly they had screwed up the tracking systems on this thing. Xolo had the advantage now. Goggle-eyes could have had a liquid head in a second if Xolo wished it. But instead he put the gun away.
“Up here, with no weapon in my hand. Let’s do a parley, man.”
Goggle-eyes trained his cannon on Xolo. This would be a death so instant, pure and total that at least there would be no death-valkyries to deal with and remind Xolo of his awful deeds at war and the holes he had made both then and later in reality’s great and necessary illusion.
But Goggle-eyes did not flip the killing switch. He lowered his hot howitzer to the ground and Xolo could hear it rev down.
“The princess is not supposed to be in these parts, secret squirrel. So what’s yer fairy tale going to be?”
“You know something, spider rider, or you wouldn’t have lowered your arm. Let me come down out this tree and let’s talk eye-to-eye.”
“Agreed. Come on down but hands high.”
Xolo hopped down from the branch, silent as a cat tossed onto grass. The Mantis-Horse reared but Goggle-eyes calmed him down. Then he dismounted, stepped towards Xolo and extended his hand for a shake, which Xolo firmly accepted, pumped once then released, saying, “Your princess crashed in Delta Quadrant in Haja Territory. I’ve got her and the boys with me.”
“That’s damn bad luck, good brother. If you are willing, I’d like to take the little ones off your hands and back to the royal camp.”
Xolo scanned him for a second.
“Take off your goggles, good sir, if you’ll be so kind.”
Goggle eyes complied. Now Xolo saw his true eyes – a very normal pair, and basically trustworthy but with an edge of excessive imagination in them.”
Xolo spoke. “Look…thing is, I’m the Princess’ bodyguard now and I won’t feel like I’ve done my duty unless I see her safely in the King’s camp with my own two eyes. So it’s a package deal: if you want the kids, I’m along for the ride.”
Goggle eyes paused. He too did an eye read of the man in front of him.
Death.
Pure death.
A killing machine.
A one-man genocide.
But with a twinkle.
And death with a twinkle was just what they needed now to beat this tide of the neverdead.
“The name is Sanjay Oaxaca Gomez de San Diego. And I’d be proud to ride alongside you.”
“Xolo. I have a space ship.”
…
Back on Belaarix, Gukkool’s counselors were scrambling around. Most of them were occupied with updating the security systems without releasing any leak or trace of what they were doing. The decision had been made that no word about Xolo should leak out - even within the family - until they’d had a chance to use him to find out what was going on back on Earth.
But Counselor Boyle was working on something else: the parapersonality they had uncovered on Xolo.
Because they had Xolo by the balls. With all of the data they had extracted from him, they had enough to create a clonebot of him who could not extract the untold riches from his bank accounts but who could put a hold on all his tran
sactions and render him effectively penniless indefinitely. The clonebot was a very convincing simulacrum of Xolo, but even more under their thumb and they had released it into cyberspace and it had royally screwed up the finances of its realfather.
So Xolo had jumped at their offer to spy and betray and had even agreed to have a conscience bomb implanted that would take his head smooth off if he ever tried to play them.
But (thought Boyle) what everyone – all those stupid motherfuckers – was forgetting about was that this was not ‘Xolo’ they were dealing with. Xolo was not real. Xolo was the cover. They had sent a ghost to do a man’s job.
Boyle had steamed on this for a while, throwing knives into his bedroom wall but then he decided he could use their damnéd ignorance against them. He could run with their dropped ball and win big. Level up.
He pulled the top psych boys off to one side. He had to hope that Chang would move onto bigger things so Boyle jockeyed relentlessly to get the job of running the cover up and managing the clonebot. These were things that – in the normal course of things – he would absolutely be fighting to get control of, so it was a very easy bluff to pull. And that oh so clever Chang beat him, of course, due to his superior intellect. So Chang got to run the cover up.
Great. So now Boyle was free. He got the psych boys in the room. It was the kind of room psych boys thrived in. It was a white sphere that responded to every word that was spoken with word-association pictures. They called it The Cranium.
Boyle said ‘hello’ and images of people waving, man hookers unbuttoning their pants, a shark eating a fish, the sun rising and so on rippled in waves across the eggshell film. The psych guys were humming already.
“I want to reconstruct everything we have on this ‘Xolo’ - total simulation. Then I want you to go in there and find out as much as you can about what is under this Xolo skin. We had him for an hour. That’s a lifetime, right?”
A nasty picture of a dusty corpse that made you question the beauty of teeth caught his eye and derailed his bravado. But fortunately Dr. Quirg jumped in: the cool grey fox lady.
“For most people yes. For a trained soldier, no. But for this guy, because you have me at your disposal, dear, then yes. You see, he is trying awfully hard, this Xolo. Like a little man marching around in his dad’s army uniform, puffing out his chest. But he’s forgetting that as he pushes his chest out we can see the bra straps underneath.
“We’ll have him, sir!”
You don’t want to know what awful images appeared on the cranium as she said ‘we’ll have him, sir!”
Filthy.