The Proteus Bridge

by M. D. Cooper

  As Ngoba thought of all the ways he could avoid angering Mama Chala, another side of his brain boiled like a pot that had been heating up for a long time. He was tired of trying to please her, tired of weathering her moods, tired of tending the garden of pimples on her back. He was ready to strike out on his own, maybe start his own crew. He had Riggs on his side.

  What about Fug? Who else?

  He was lost in a fantasy line-up of local talent when the lock spun and before he could jump back, the door swept open so a muscled arm could swing out and grab his forearm in a death lock. Ngoba struggled but knew it was no good. She had him.

  The door swung open the rest of the way to show Mama Chala standing in the doorway, wearing one of her shapeless, flowered smocks, round cheeks heaving with exertion, all massive bosom and skinny legs. Her brown eyes settled on him, full of judgement.

  “Ngoba Starl,” she wheezed. “I knew it was you as soon as I heard your little mouse steps on the deck. You’ve been hiding away from me, boy. Don’t tell me you haven’t. Well?” She jerked him forward so he was close enough to smell her sweat.

  “I wasn’t hiding, Mama Chala,” he said quickly, squeaking at first before getting his voice under control. “I was trying to figure out the best way to tell you what happened.”

  “I know what happened. You wasted my missile and didn’t even get anything to show for it. Riggs tried to act like I should be happy you two made it out of there with your skins, but that’s no trade. Where are my goods, Ngoba? You’re the brains of you two. You tell me what happened. There was a regular TSF supply shipment in that cargo container, just biding its time for a ride Mercury-side. You can’t tell me there was nothing in there. I saw the manifest myself.”

  Ngoba shook his head. Her fingers wrapped around the bones in his arm like cables. “I don’t have an excuse, Mama. That’s the truth. There wasn’t anything in that container. I’d have brought you back the pieces of the drone if they were worth anything.”

  Her lips were still pressed in a grimace. “And why didn’t you come back and tell me right away? Why’d you think you could go off to some Crash game like nothing had happened? Where have you been all this time, anyway? Little Riggs came back after getting his pee-pee wet. He knows where he’s supposed to come back to. But not you, Ngoba Starl. You don’t come home like a boy. You want to act like a man. Well, I’m going to treat you like a man. You’re not coming in my house, Ngoba Starl. This is a home for wayward children. I can’t help you. I can’t get eight bits of sense into that sauced-up brain of yours.”

  “Sauced-up?” Ngoba protested. “I’m not a sauce head. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mama.”

  “You will be. Mark my words, you’ll be down in a drug den in less than a week, shooting something up into your arm with the last bit of credit to your name. You might as well turn yourself into the recycling vats right now, save yourself the misery. At least then I’d know you made something useful of yourself.”

  Something about the idea that he should simply recycle himself, that he was worthless, woke an anger in Ngoba that shot adrenaline through his body. He wasn’t angry at her in particular, but her words struck too close to home.

  Ngoba twisted against her thumb and broke her hold on his arm. Before she could grab him again, he put a foot sideways against the heavy door and locked it in place, positioning himself parallel to the door so she could only reach for him ineffectually.

  “You really think that, Mama Chala?” he said. The squeak had come back into his voice, the sound of betrayed love. He couldn’t help it. A flood of emotions tossed him between anguish at being abandoned and fury at her carelessness. “You think I’m going to end up in a drug den? I’m the one kid in your place who’s never done anything like that. I’m the one kid who’s always done whatever you asked, even when I knew it was wrong. Even when the TSF picked me up that time, I didn’t tell them where I lived. They beat me until I couldn’t walk, and I still didn’t give you up.”

  “You cost me a good week in an autodoc,” she spat. “That wasn’t free, boy.”

  “No,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t.”

  Ngoba pinned her arm against the door with a grip on her wrist. She tried to flex her fingers, then formed a fist. He pressed his lips against her knuckles.

  “Good bye, Mama,” he said. “I’m gone.”

  “Gone?” she demanded. “Where are you going to go?”

  “I’ll start my own crew.”

  “Start your own crew?” she scoffed. Mama Chala guffawed and the door rocked against him with the power of her belly laughs. “You’ll start the janitorial crew. That’s what you’ll do. Maybe the nursery crew. Maybe they’ve got a trash collecting crew? That’s what you can do, Ngoba Starl. You don’t even have a Link yet. How can you hope to do anything in the real world? You’re still dumb as a post. You think you can make a silver spoon out of plastic, boy? You can’t see what’s in front of you.”

  By ‘dumb’ she meant he couldn’t connect to the network, couldn’t talk to others via the Link. He could get a pirate surgeon to install the interface for him, but technically, he was too young—his brain hadn’t finished cooking. A pirate doctor wouldn’t care, but they also wouldn’t worry about the side effects.

  Ngoba released her wrist and stepped away from the door. The big woman slammed it open, but only stood in the opening with her fists clenched. Behind her, crowded in the corridor, he saw the whites of all the eyes watching him from her shadow.

  “You did right by me, Mama Chala,” Ngoba said, taking slow breaths to keep his voice under control. “I won’t ever forget that. When I can, I’ll come back and straighten up what I owe you.”

  The bull-shaped woman glared at him, puffing short breaths through her nose. Her gaze went past him, then came back to his face. Her brown eyes softened slightly. She made a shooing motion.

  “Ah, get out of here, then. I can’t look at you and not see a snot-nosed toddler wandered out of the trash heap. And here you are growing a beard and your hair all curly. Always so fancy, my Ngoba.”

  The kindness in her voice shot through his heart, but he didn’t trust her. He stood his ground in the middle of the corridor, watching her hands. Had Station Security shown up behind him? Why was she so kind all of a sudden? He wanted to look over his shoulder where her gaze had gone, but knew she’d grab him the second he looked away.

  “Is Riggs still here?” he asked.

  “Riggs?” she asked. “He’s here. He’s sleeping down in his bunk where you should have been. He confessed like a good boy. He didn’t try to go sneaking around, acting like a man.”

  Ngoba smiled. Her derision gave him the permission he needed to break free. He took a step backward, waving at her. “I’ll see you around, Mama. Thank you.”

  Mama Chala flushed. “Don’t you go thanking me. And don’t you try to leave here without giving your Mama Chala a hug. You hear me? You better give me one last little cuddle.”

  Ngoba gave her a sideways glance, considering the situation. All the times she had been kind to him flashed through his mind, the encouraging words, the cuddles that weren’t bone-breaking…. Immediately followed a stuttering blur of painful memories. Not only his, but of ways she had hurt the older kids as he was growing up. She seemed to only like kids when they were five or six, when they wanted to please her and made the best servants.

  He smiled. “I’ll catch you later, Mama. You take care.” Ngoba raised his voice for all the kids huddling behind her. “You all take care! I’ll come back for you!”

  “Ngoba Starl!” Mama Chala roared.

  Without looking back, Ngoba turned and ran as if all hell were on his tail. He hit the main corridor off the Lowspin docks and didn’t stop running until he was back up near Night Park and thought he could hear the parrots calling out names by the fountain.

  LIFE HACKING

  STELLAR DATE: 03.22.2956 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Lowspin Docks

  REG
ION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  After a long night wandering Highspin and Lowspin, cursing Cruithne, Mama Chala, his scraggly beard, and the TSF pistol that was rubbing blisters in his lower back, Ngoba went yawning to a public terminal and sent Riggs a message to meet him in a couple hours. Then he messaged Fug that he was ready to report on the Slarva mission.

  They met in a fast food cafe off the Lowspin docks. The entrance was an old cargo bay that opened onto the main access corridor. It was a good place to sit and watch the traffic: technicians, cargo haulers, travelers, TSF and Station Admin. Ngoba liked to try to determine what they did by how they carried themselves. Anyone in a uniform made the game too easy.

  Fug sat at the small table watching Riggs, as if she was sure the boy was going to steal her candy. She was wearing the same green visor, which was still giving her skin a sickly glow.

  “You know your name is a weak way of saying ‘fuck’, right?” Riggs taunted.

  “You’re the dumbest person I know,” Fug said.

  “Come on now,” Ngoba said. “You two keep flirting like this, and I’ll need to get another table.”

  They both shot him angry looks. Ngoba knew that Fug hadn’t wanted Riggs at the meeting, but he’d convinced her by arguing that Riggs could be useful in whatever Fug was planning. The ghoulish woman didn’t seem convinced but had agreed, which made Ngoba trust her even less—but he was desperate, and Fug was the best lead on credit he had right now.

  Riggs waved a hand at Fug and looked at Ngoba. “So you’re out for good. Really?”

  Ngoba shrugged. “Seems so.”

  “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “Haven’t slept yet.” Ngoba rubbed his face. “I mostly walked the docks, thinking about it all.”

  Fug gave him a crooked grin. “So you’re finally getting out on your own. That’s good. But I didn’t come here for your coming-of-age story. What have you got on Slarva?”

  “Wait a second,” Riggs said. “Why would Ngoba know anything about the Crash promoter?”

  “I asked him to run an errand for me,” Fug said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Follow him, tell me what he does.”

  “I thought you already had the game on lock,” Riggs said.

  “It never hurts to gather more information.” Fug looked at Ngoba. “So, what did you see?”

  Ngoba sighed. “I watched him argue with some vid producers about whether the game is rigged or not. Then I followed him to this little club just off the hangar—I mean just off the hangar. He has his own entrance. He sucked briki all night and passed out. I left after about three hours of listening to him snore.”

  “You left?” Fug demanded.

  “There wasn’t anything else going on. Have you ever seen anyone on briki? They’re like a bunch of toddlers, giggling at each other until they pass out.”

  Fug frowned. “I guess that helps a bit. Briki’s expensive.”

  “Is it? Don’t they grow it onstation?”

  “No. It’s brought in from hydroponic farms on Ceres. Proprietary seed stock. Anybody who tries to propagate the plant gets a visit from the Anderson Collective.”

  “Is it true they spun up a black hole in the middle of Ceres?” Riggs asked.

  “You don’t mess with the Anderson Collective,” Fug said. “They get shit done. Like pet black holes.”

  “Damn,” Riggs said. “Does it blow your mind that we live in a system where people are building their own black holes, and we’re stuck in this garbage heap, sorting trash?”

  Fug’s gaze was drawn to the people walking past the front door. Someone dropped a cup nearby, and it shattered on the floor.

  “I’m not staying here,” she said. “I might have been born on Cruithne, but that doesn’t mean I have to spend my whole life here.”

  “So where would you go?” Riggs said.

  The skinny girl shrugged. “Mars Protectorate for a while, and then the JC.”

  “You’d need a ship for the Jovian Combine, my friend,” Ngoba said. “That’s a lot of space in between those places, and not a lot of room to hide. You can’t outrun sensors, and the computers never forget.”

  “Sensors can be fooled, just like computers,” Fug said. “Humans made them. Humans make mistakes.” She kept watching the crowd. “So Slarva likes briki. That’s kind of embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as I’d hoped, but it does mean that when he’s out, he’s not coming back for a solid few hours.”

  “I thought you’d already had access to the controllers?” Riggs said, leaning forward.

  He seemed to be looking for any opportunity to make Fug look bad, and the petty attacks were starting to irritate Ngoba.

  “It’s a near-field interruption,” Fug said, ignoring the accusation in Riggs’s voice. “I can affect the controllers on a millisecond basis, blocking the inputs just long enough to slow their responses. It’s especially effective during blocks. You slow the controller’s response just enough to make them miss the counter-move, and before they know it, they’re getting destroyed by a massive crash maneuver.”

  “That kept happening to Brindle in that first match,” Ngoba said.

  Fug nodded. “Exactly. I made a thousand credits on that.”

  “That’s—subtle,” Riggs said, nodding with appreciation. “I’m amazed no one’s thought of it before.”

  “Of course not,” she retorted. “I thought of it. And I’ve got something better in mind, but I can’t do it alone.”

  Ngoba glanced around the restaurant. No one appeared to be paying attention to them. In fact, every person in the place looked like they were so tired they wanted to collapse right in their plastic seats. It was like briki for working people. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to monitor a place like this, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  “Maybe we should talk somewhere else,” he suggested. “There’s a maintenance corridor not too far away that’s shielded by a water storage tank.”

  “I’m not giving up any details,” Fug said. “You aren’t going to be part of the actual job. What I need you to do is run interference. It’s going to be pretty easy, actually. I want to do a test run, though, on tonight’s semi-final match.”

  “You sure you want to give them more chances to catch your hack?” Riggs said.

  “They’re not going to catch my system.” Fug spread her hands on the table and wiggled her fingers like she was manipulating an invisible controller. Ngoba thought the motion made her look like a stick insect with an oversized head.

  Fug’s gaze shifted to Riggs, and she looked like she wanted to bite his oblong head off and chew on it. Ngoba shook the image out of his mind. Fug knew Mama Chala. She knew what they were trying to get away from. He didn’t figure it would take much convincing to get Riggs out of the Squat once he had the money for his own place. Then he could start talking about a crew.

  “What do you want us to do?” Ngoba said, short-cutting their spat.

  “We’ll meet up at the fountain in Night Park tonight, two hours before the match,” Fug said. “I’ll explain the screen I need. You’ll have some time to get things together, and then we’ll make it happen.”

  “Why not just explain now?” Riggs said.

  “Because it needs to be two hours before. It needs to seem natural. How about you stop arguing with me, or I tell you to go pound sand?”

  “We got it,” Ngoba said quickly. “We got it.” He shot Riggs an angry glance. “We haven’t talked funds yet. What are you offering for this?”

  Fug flexed her shoulders. “I appreciate you helping me out yesterday, Ngoba. The more I think about it, that’s some good info. Slarva likes to go hide and snort pollen. That’s very counter to his image on the vids. I can use that. I appreciate your help.” Her gaze slid to Riggs. “You, I don’t have much use for, but Ngoba wants you here, so I’ll call that the cost of doing business. I’ll throw you a hundred each for tonight, and then a thousand each for the main event.”

 
“What are you going to make off it?” Riggs said.

  “We’ll take it,” Ngoba said, cutting any further debate. A hundred was enough to get his own place for a week; he would take it. He checked the time on a wall-clock near the transaction register and nodded. “We’ll see you at the fountain.”

  Fug gave one of her slow, thin smiles. “At the fountain,” she agreed.

  LOOSE ENDS

  STELLAR DATE: 3.22.2956 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Night Park

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  A few hours later, Ngoba and Riggs met Fug at the Night Park fountain. The concrete tree’s spiky limbs reaching out over the water were covered in black crows and grey starlings, rustling and complaining at each other. As soon Ngoba neared the fountain, however, a grey parrot appeared in one of the lower branches and crooned, “Ing-go-ba! Ing-go-ba! Hi there, Ing-go-ba!”

  Riggs punched him in the arm. “You make friends with parrots? How do they know your name?”

  Ngoba stopped at the edge of the fountain and peered up into the hundreds of black bird eyes looking down on him. “That’s creepy,” he told Riggs. “I don’t know. The only bird I talked to was in a cage.”

  “Distributed system,” Fug said, lifting her visor to look up at the birds. “They share information all the time. Haven’t you heard the legends about the experiments? Come on, we need to hurry up.”

  “Wait,” Ngoba said. He stood in front of the fountain and peered up at the single grey parrot looking down at him. “Where’s Crash?” he called.

  The parrot bobbed its head and showed him one yellow eye and then the other. It looked clearly pleased. “Crash is fine!” it squawked. “Crash is fine!”