Supplejack

by Les Petersen

  The old fellow at the hire counter wasn’t wearing a holo. He was of the old school, the ones that thought that salesmanship was face to face business, a firm shake of a hand and honest gap-tooth smiling. Sansan was asking if I wanted to reciprocate his action as the old guy asked me how he could help and Medusa and Bleeder were running a double check on all the business he had done since we had booked the boat. I tapped my chin mount, dropped the holo and smiled back at him.

  It’s always good to see their eyes when the face that appears is more attractive than the one in the holo. It’s unnerving to them: they expect ugliness to be revealed, as if that is more honest than beauty. They can’t understand the idea that you would cover beauty up and they get a little unnerved for a second. As I’ve told you before, I’m a good looker and I use that to my advantage.

  But he wasn’t fazed for a second. He grinned from ear to ear, greeted me and called me son when I gave him the booking number. I liked him already. The checker shirt he was wearing I could live without though. It looked like he had lived in it for most of his life.

  He was wearing a Little JON, at least five years old and chunky. It looked like a bandolier of red gunshot shells around his chest; and it was the kind that still gives all the information visually. He flexed a tendril up to eye level, opened the winged screen.

  “Harold Earner? That you?” His voice was as crackly as his skin. He followed the question by raising an eyebrow. I tried not to count the wrinkles, nodded and handed over ID.

  “Yes, sir; that’s me.”

  He sucked in a cheek and sucked on his teeth. “I’ve given you twenty-four: The Sea Mistress., but I ‘spect you know that already ‘cause she’s been loading all night with supplies. I’ve put scuba stuff and fishing gear in the fore cabin, like you asked. You owe me for the tips.”

  I knew there hadn’t been any tips. I liked him a little less, but still enough – the world wasn’t fair to everyone. He was just doing business and he’d have known I’d have checked. He was being open about his deception, if you follow what I mean. “It will be a pleasure. How much?”

  “Four an’ fifty.”

  About the right amount for a good tip. “Fine. Give me the account details and I’ll send it through with a month in advance.”

  He smiled brightly again, stood a little straighter. “Don’t you want to check The Sea Mistress first? You can’t just throw money around in Walkers Flat, you know. We like to earn our money.”

  I almost reminded him about the tips. “No, I trust you will have it serviced and running well. After all, I have many friends who’ll use your services if they’re up to scratch. I know you’ve done a credit check and know what I’m worth.”

  He smiled, nodded and patted his Little JON. “Yeah, Brenda here has been doing her job. It’s a pleasure to deal with someone from Flintlock.”

  I looked serious. “I’d appreciate you didn’t mention that to anyone while I’m here. They might want me to fill out another couple of thousand reports before I go to sleep.”

  He tapped his forehead in a salute, gave me a wink. “My lips are sealed, sir.” He leaned forward a little and I could smell the salty tang of the river on his clothes. Medusa came alive, primed, over-cautious. “Would it be too rude to ask what you’re researching down here in Walkers Flat?” he asked.

  I chose casual denial. “It would not be rude at all, Mr. Frennet. The truth is I’m not researching anything–I’m taking a holiday.”

  He doubted me instantly, gave me a wink. “That’s good. Do a bout of fishing around Nildottie then. Help take your mind off work.” He closed the conversation with a nod, gave me the swipe card for the boat. I left after thanking him and as I went down the jetty toward the house boats I had Bleeder do a check on Nildottie and the surrounding area, had GaZe keep a check on his external lines. Medusa was running a scan on the boat as we walked toward it, while Sansan was listing the other craft moored nearby.

  The Sea Mistress was multi-hulled, sleek and powerful. She had four cabins above deck, hydrofoil capacity and jets. After I passed the swipe down the Scan, Sansan draped her in sea-grey coloration, started the engines and released the magnetic locks. She began moving away from her moorings with a chuckle of engines as I tossed the runners aboard and leapt across the gap. Standing with my feet planted wide against the small amount of rocking, I left the navigation to Sansan, allowed Medusa to finish her checks. The river was in darkness and the cold air pressed in on me. A liquid line of shore lights yellowed into the evening and I left pursuit behind. Checks completed I headed port side for the stateroom and as I stepped through the bulkhead I felt like Quasimodo entering Notre Dame. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

  Chapter 4

  Dreams. The kind that scrape away half your night by keeping you on a razor’s edge. Like the prongs of a fork, always stabbing at your flesh trying to pry into you deep enough so the knife will not slip on your mind.

  Kren unbuttoned his blouse, ran a hand inside until his fingers touched a nipple. He sat there like Napoleon, stroking, staring out at the assembly line. “It’s like going through puberty all over again,” he said. “The sex is fantastic. Everything is so great, so—”

  I walked toward the door, zipping my overalls up to my chin. “If you’re going to masturbate in front of me, Kren, I’ll report you.”

  He cupped the breast completely, smiled his control. “Getting you hard, is it?”

  Shahn standing near the fridge, the door open, light spilling over her naked form, a carton of milk in her hand. Her chest muscles rippled, her biceps flexed, veins and tendons as firm as oiled machines. “I haven’t decided,” she said. “It’s too soon, don’t you think?”

  “Well, maybe. I just thought, since we’ve lived together for six months and—”

  “Don’t push me to make a decision, Jack. That isn’t fair.” She put the milk in the fridge. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  Four in the morning and I was still strung out from the visions when Sansan woke me and gave me the news: “You’ve been assassinated, Jack.”

  It was just what I had expected the Big Boys would do. I roused myself enough to have Sansan check on Harold Earner’s credit rating, found out it was still intact and closed my eyes again. They could kill me all they wanted—I needed my beauty sleep.

  At six, Sansan activated the coffee dispenser and roused me again. I tuned into the broadcast for an update on how I had been eradicated from the chronicles of mankind, but it had an echo and I held back, sent Medusa in to deal with it. She said it was because we were on the river, that not to worry about the unsynchronised feed coming off the far bank. She recommended I consider a course of tablets to cure my paranoia. I told her to consider what the inside of a trash compactor was like. She made no further comment, and didn’t wait for the command, just merged the two over-locking media messages. I took it in hard copy and read it while GaZe and Charlie ran the area once more. Medusa cleared their tracks.

  The orange juice was freshly squeezed, the toast crisp and coated with yellow-box honey and the coffee hot and muddy, just the way I like it. I put my feet up on the wall, rolled around until my head hung over the bunk edge and listened to the local radio broadcast, which Sansan put through on her externals. Radio is hardly ever used these days: most of it is for broadcasting propaganda to the Ferals, or for training Grey-cards, and it’s only habit that had me listening to it while I chewed on my toast.

  There were surprises in store. Harry’s run was being “recreated” for the local market and the Girls were threatening a go slow if the Big Boys didn’t do something about the proliferation of cybernetic personalities causing trouble for them. The old gripe. For a while the station took a commercial break, played a few songs for a cereal company, and I lay there, musing about old times: fishing trips with Shahn, Kren’s jet ski expedition up the Macquarie, the overnight canoe marathon down the Hawkesbury. The rocking of the boat almost put me back to sleep. When I came back into myself, GaZe was still active wit
h trade routes and Bleeder and Medusa were tickling their way through BB territory, watching for Wisearses. They didn’t answer to my request for a report on their actions, so I guessed it was important. I left them all to their work and tuned back into the broadcast.

  The news bulletin said the latest reports from Central Cloud Control had confirmed Jack Dayzen as the Leader of the Steel Hand. They had finally found him/me out and had diverted my wealth to the Brothers Four and closed all my access to the Net. Worse was to follow. They had found Harold. Not Harold Earner;, but Harold, my Cameo. They’d stripped him from the Net, were tracing back his connections and were certain of finding the perpetrator who was also responsible for the “proliferation of cybernetic personalities causing trouble for the local militia.” Yeah, link it all together, fellas, I thought.

  Drumming my head against the berth’s wooden side didn’t help ease the frustration, so I rose and went out onto the deck still naked except the PAN. I watched the sun rise above the far bank, promising myself I would get out of the habit of calling my alternative personalities “Harold”. I keep doing it. If it isn’t the Cameo, it’s the cyborgs or any other creation I make. I don’t know why I do it. Sansan had warned me about it often enough, but I still did it. That way led to trouble, she told me; not only will I confuse everyone, but someone will eventually work it all out and I will be trapped and taken down. Chose another name, she said., but Harry seems to fit alternative personalities, I told her. It’s the kind of name you call someone you can trust, who’s a buddy in your hour of need. She grumbled about it and I let her grumble. I wasn’t going to change and she knew it.

  I set a chair on the deck, dropped into it and sipped the coffee.

  Being named the head of the Steel Hand was a bit of a shock. They’re a group of Artificial Intelligences who fund and run recruitment drives for many terrorist organisations. Their aim is to bring down society and they’ll dip into anything that will help, including the disposal of bodies and other wetware. They may be artificial, but crazy as coots as well. The strange thing is that the Steel Hand is reputed to have a real person as their controller and benefactor. Whoever it was must be a real loony-toons. I certainly didn’t have the skill to be that person and being mistaken for them is not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head. Being identified as the Steel Hand’s wetware meant you’re open to attack from every police force on the planet. It’s something to be worried about. There are far worse squads than Snips out there. Body augmentations take things into the realm of the horrendous.

  I sat there, trying to figure it. Maybe the Big Boys were behind it, but they must have wanted me for something far worse than just knocking over an information storage facility or running pornosims.

  The river was shrouded in mist. It rose like steam out of the water, swaying in veils above the mercury-coloured flow, blurring water and sky together. Ghosts of trees mourned around the banks, emerging out of the air as if they had been sucked into existence by our slow passage, then sliding away into the murky sky in our wake. Through holo-enhancement they’d have been proud shapes, but in the mist they lost their strength, became a faded memory of earthly substance. A water bird began peeping off to the north and the sky grew lighter. It gave me the creeps. I pushed up enhancement for a moment, trying to capture nature with my senses. The coffee tasted like dirt.

  I thought about why the Brothers Four, or the BBs—which used to be what bulletin boards were called, but now stands for Big Boys in some circles—would target me. BBs are the multinational corporations who think they run the Cloud, who began their reign by influencing democratic reforms, telling governments and the One Percenters what to do to make the most of their wealth. The peoples of the world had strong voices and freedom wasn’t just a word any more, especially when it the freedom to seek their own pleasure., but people see only half the story, they focus on what affects their future happiness. The way to control them—which of course is what most governments want to do—is to control the creation of future happiness, and that is through wealth. The Big Boys had this angle all sewn up when the global cash flow was theirs to manipulate. Some countries took their advice and found ways to delay the repayment of their foreign debts; others clutched at straws and borrowed far beyond their capacity to pay. The world cascaded into neo-feudalism, with everyone working for the High Lords, the Manor-born, the Big Boys.

  And having all that power went to the Big Boys’ heads. They lost control of the ideals of society. It didn’t take as long as you would imagine. They became responsible for the fall of the Yen;, which caused the Sweatshop Revolution and the Malaysian War. They began supplying arms for the European conflict and organised the guerrilla war in South America, which almost brought them undone and brought the most powerful nation on the earth to its knees. They hadn’t expected such an upsurge of support for Luddites, or for the creation of the Steel Hand. And of course, the Press.

  But the Press is just another arm of the BBs. The Grey-cards, being very careful of who they insulted, told us they were doing the right thing, that the Big Boys were almost benign, being easy on the people—after all that’s where the money was coming from. The BBs took all that Press cover to heart, left a few things for the people to look forward to. They didn’t quite send out riot squads at the first sign of trouble. Sure, they sealed off entire cities and closed Cloud access when things got a little rough, but they played it reasonably fair – they didn’t take their ball and go home. They made the Cloud accessible to everyone by developing the JON, uniting all the electronic gadgetry that people wore into one network. Mobile holophones, time systems, music systems, personal translators and personal computers: all networked into one wearable system that could bring the world into your immediate vicinity. An opiate for the masses, it was. A playmate.

  And then they began to focus on the world’s health and on what they called Beautification, the new Utopia, the universal morality of the world. It was the first sign of their insanity.

  Their first step was to enforce laws that forbid de facto living arrangements. It was a ludicrous law. They let us change from one sex to the other and then they stop us living in a common marriage! Riots followed and assassinations and even more wars, but for all the upheaval it became international law. And it brought down many governments who tried to enforce it. Thus, the Brothers Four sent in their own squads who had the power to enforce whatever they wanted, and you were either married or completely celibate or you were a potential AIDS carrier on a collision course with disaster. What a rush on arranged marriages occurred then. If, God forbid, you were caught in the sack during a raid and couldn’t come up with a marriage license or proof of intent to marry, then you were re-educated in the most severe of all possible ways. That meant you were sent to the lumber camps to help in the reforestation of South Australia or Catalonia in Spain. If you were one of the Lost and Lonely who weren’t an attractive enough catch or rich enough to acquire a marriage partner by bribery, then you either took to the high seas and helped restock the waters in the fish sanctuaries of the North Sea and around the Hawaiian Islands, or you went Feral and disappeared into the forests. Alternatively, if you were brave enough, you went through the Cut and hoped to pay the bill off by wedding someone of your own sex who had money.

  That’s about when I decided on the change, when I decided to leap the fence at the first opportunity. I’d had enough of the plastic life at Bell—I wanted something different. When the JON came out I saw the possibilities immediately. It was an adrenal rush when I first realised what I was doing, like the cliff’s edge for the maniac inside me. I wanted to stand on the edge, feel the wind in my face, see the waves pounding the rocks. I wanted to step out into space, walk across the stars. And the JON was the starting point. I saw it immediately. I planned for the moment when I got my own, and when Bell began building encrypt boards for the JONs I took the chance, knowing it wouldn’t take much work to rewire a few of the plant’s robots to put in chips of my own design
. After all, I knew what I was doing. I could hide it well enough not to be detected.

  Then Einstein had made his call. Later I found out he called himself SmartGuy.

  “Jack?” Sansan was running alert status. She didn’t wait for my permission to speak. “They have found a link between you and Harold. They’re got a trace running.”

  I jumped out of the chair. “Medusa, close us up tight.”

  “Done, Jack.”

  “Stack it all. I want immediate response to any threat. No verbal command or confirmation needed.”

  Medusa growled back her acknowledgment: “Stacked and standing, Jack.”

  I tossed the cup overboard, kicked the chair out of the way and headed for the wheelhouse. This was getting ridiculous. How could they possibly find him through one of Sansan’s mazes? Or for that matter, how can you get through a maze that quickly. It’s not possible. “Sansan, get me an update on Gilamens. She may have something to do with this.”

  “I’ll have to break the closure you have in operation, Jack.” Her voice wasn’t quite condescending.

  I clenched my teeth, thought about it for a second, pushed my way into The Sea Mistress’s control room and switched her over to manual control. I didn’t really believe it was Gilamens who was interfering with all this. It wasn’t her style. I was just jumping to any answer.

  Sansan gave me control parameters for the boat on the Heads-up. I steered The Sea Mistress toward the centre of the river and had her rising on jet tails and heading for Nildottie. “Anyone have suggestions?”