Time had removed the charm. Middle-aged grey and a general hardening of his features should have accentuated what he was, a man in the prime of life at the crest of his powers. Instead he was crowned like an eccentric mad scientist. The only thing that would look more ridiculous now would be getting rid of it. The vanity of an aging man was not something August was ready to admit to the world, and besides no one would recognize him. If they were to mint a coin with August Bridges’ head on it, half of it would be this hair.
“Impossible.”
August pushed his dripping locks carefully in place, appreciating the temporary order enforced by a rapidly evaporating dampness.
“August?” It was Dmitri.
Startled, August turned to escape only to slip on vomit and drop slowly to the floor. Dmitri caught him halfway. Recovering, August pushed Dmitri back and drew himself to full height, struggling to enact some semblance of dignity.
“What, what am I doing here?”
Dmitri laughed his disbelief. “Staying alive for a start.”
August flattened his hair again with frustrated brushes of his hand.
“This is no joke Dmitri.”
“No, no, no my friend. No, it isn’t.” Dmitri smiled and shook his head and embraced August tightly. “Death is no joke, at least we never see the humor in our own. On the other hand, our life? Hmm.”
August struggled, reluctantly, to free himself from Dmitri’s steady support.
“What are you crapping on about? We have things to do. I don’t understand.”
“Is okay. You are confused, no? Not so surprising. I found you out there with only enough oxygen to fill your tiny prick. A few minutes more, world loses its favorite pain in ass.”
August attempted to stare his friend back into place, but Dmitri responded with the casual insolence of long familiarity. It did not matter how far August had come, Dmitri had been with him the whole way.
“I saved your ridiculous life. Don’t be such peacock.”
August raked his hair and it flicked back into disorder. “Okay. Tell me what happened.”
“What happened? I come all way up here to kick your head out of the clouds. What happens? You are nowhere to be found. I thought you were hiding in the Station somewhere. Instead you are laying on ass five kilometers out towards the crater wall.”
“But I called you up?”
“Why else am I here? Am I rich enough to come as tourist?”
August smiled. “Actually, you are.”
Dmitri frowned, “Actually, you don’t watch our share price.”
“What would be the point in that?”
August gave his leave before Dmitri could respond to the provocation. “When I am dressed and more myself, and we each have a few drinks behind us, better you tell me then.”
“Better I stay with you.”
“You want to hold my dick while I piss?”
Dmitri regarded August with exasperation. “You are going crazy out here.”
“If it makes you happy, I’ll give you access to the ComSec cams in my eyes.”
“It would make me happy.”
August focused his attention through a series of menus in his imagination and linked over to Dmitri’s neuroview to transfer the relevant permissions.
August watched Dmitri’s eyes twitch as his mind’s eye linked into August’s perspective looking back at his own face.
“So that is how you look at me.” Satisfied, Dmitri shrugged. “Okay Boss. Call me.”
On his way back to his cabin, August pushed away a curious impulse to turn back towards the airlocks instead. Entering the room, he checked the corners for hidden assailants and, finding none, welcomed his loneliness back like an embrace. Loneliness had become his refuge. It was the backdrop against which everything else in his life came to be. Wasn’t his greatness the product of his abandonment? People would not follow those who followed others, and he had still to lead them a very long way.
August thought open the skylight and gazed past the Earth out to the stars. The Earth might have rejected him, but the stars were where his destiny lay. Even in the early days, those stars had called out to him, if only in a metaphoric sense. These days, of course, August had the ability to pick up the phone and listen to their conversations. One day, not too distant in the future, they would call him home.
Reclining into his webbing, a hammock like chair he had mentally commanded to descend from a portal in the ceiling, August extracted his neurovisor from his skull and waited for it to cycle through its repair and cleaning algorithms. The neurovisor looked like a pair of spectacles without lenses, the cross-bridge instead merging into a stem leading to a writhing mass of almost imperceptible silver threads that, when positioned correctly, would feel their way to the center of his forehead and into a network of pore sized portals that had been drilled through his skull. There they would merge with the neurons in his brain and link his mind to the neuronet. It seemed almost too creepy to work, but it did.
After removing the device, the room felt expansive. August breathed easier. It seemed contradictory that extraction of a technology that expanded his senses into an endless virtual panorama would contribute to his claustrophobia. Removing it made him feel vulnerable, as if most of his senses had been suddenly blinded. Still, without it his thoughts were also completely his own.
What, August wondered, had happened to him out there? How had he ended up nearly dying so far out on the edge? Why would he have wanted to run from Dmitri, of all people? These were all bad signs, indicators of the inexorable degradation of sanity that visited whoever left the Earth for too long. Of course, the Moon was supposedly close enough to avoid the more extreme symptoms of that condition. Then again, he was in the process of setting some kind of record given the length of his exile. The lunar miners that those studies were based on were all one month on, two months off shifts. August had been here much longer than that.
There was a knock on his door, a sound that had become unfamiliar to August. Why hadn’t Dmitri mentally telegraphed his request to enter? Looking down at his neurovisor, August remembered why. He walked over to the door and searched awkwardly for the manual latch.
“Are you there August?”
“Yes, just a moment.”
The door slid open as August mastered the switch.
“Your neurocams?”
August motioned to the table and his neurovisor.
“You took it off?”
“I needed to think. Come sit.”
Dmitri casually summoned another webbing from the ceiling with a twitch of his eye. A beverage tube descended between the seats.
“Vodka tonic?” Dmitri asked as August seated himself first.
“What else?”
August picked up the suppressed tension in Dmitri’s motions as he carefully poured the drinks. “Why are you here Dmitri?”
“Not this. Are you going to run out on me again?”
“No. Seriously. Why?”
“You called me up. Remember?”
“I’ve called you up before. Many times. You didn’t come then. No, there must be a reason.”
Dmitri’s posture tightened, and he exhaled audibly. “Do you have to ask, or are you trying to make some kind of point?”
“The other Directors. Gudanko?”
“No. No, of course not him.”
“Then who?”
Dmitri scowled. “Are you being obtuse? This is me.”
It was as August feared. “They got to you.”
“I am here for my own reasons August. What? Do you think I went to all this trouble to climb up someone’s asshole? I would have had a much shorter trip back in LA.”
“Then why?”
Dmitri set his drink aside and stiffened. “They’re dead, August.”
August tugged at his hair, composing his features to best express his sympathy.
“Sacha, Gennadiya, Irina.”
“Anya?”
Dmitri shook his head. “I haven
’t heard.”
August released his breath. “Dmitri, we’ve been over this. What do you know?”
“Sacha. My brother. Definitely. Mama told me.”
“I’m so sorry Dmitri, Sacha. Such a terrible sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice? Sacrifice? You think he died for some cause? It was senseless. He was shot leading a group trying to break into a Com warehouse trying to help widows and children survive the famine. He died fighting us. Fighting me.”
“That’s incredible Dmitri, and so senseless. Why didn’t he just ask for your help instead? This is what comes of siding with Revs.”
“Revs? You know better. We used to be on their side remember?”
“Yes Dmitri. I remember. But...”
“But? But what? You think this has nothing to do with you? You bring down the economy of whole countries and it is nothing to do with you?”
August smoothed his hair and sipped his drink intently. “Dmitri, this was never what we wanted. Things will get better.”
“No August. We didn’t intend. It all went too far too long ago. Let our Hubs out of their contracts, it is time. Let them go back to Ecos. For the love of God.”
August swirled the alcohol in his mouth. “At least now I know, Dmitri. You didn’t come from the Board.”
Dmitri’s expression hardened, and he shook his head. “Tell me August, when you make a whole society dependent on the share price of the Com that you head, don’t you have some responsibility to that society?”
August widened his eyes in sympathy. “You know the answer already Dmitri. Would we be here without those contracts? Do you think we would have developed the moon with a ‘gratitude economy’? How do you thank someone for the favour of freedom? We needed capital, upfront not after the fact. Where would all the energy come from for society, for geo-engineering to repair Gaia? Packaging up all the plastic floating in the Pacific in reflective wrapping to increase the Earth’s albedo. A million micro-pipelines in Siberia intercepting melting methane. Absorcrete dry reefs. This all takes power. Where do we get it? Look out the window man, from our helium-3 mines on the Moon. And then, when the aliens have told us how to conquer Space.”
Dmitri scowled. “That’s where you have to stop August. Space? Listen to yourself. This capital doesn’t come from nowhere. This isn’t a hundred years ago, before we strip-mined the planet. It doesn’t take much to destabilise Gaia these days.”
“Hey, hey, my friend. Sit and drink. Calm yourself. We both know where this leads. The reason we came back to the moon, the reason we abandoned the Ecolution. The damage was too deep to lead anywhere but a long decline. Humanity deserves better. We made this decision together.”
Dmitri tentatively returned to his seat, tears welling. “August, I don’t know anymore. The price has been too high.”
August’s hair bristled. “Do I believe what I am hearing? Dmitri - my Dmitri - throwing up his hands. Such crap. The exergy imported from the moon, helium-3 fusion is even creating Ecos, because the eco balance is positive. And when we have Space, Mars, the Solar System?”
“Stop August. Can you hear yourself? The Moon, it has begun to pay off, almost, a little bit. But these other adventures besides?”
“This is unbelievable. You want to quit now when everything is nearly in place? The lunar mines, the Mercury antimatter factory, MASO, the deep space listening stations already tuning in on extra-terrestrials. Even the monks that man them have been prepaid. These are sunk costs.”
“You think Mirtopik isn’t bleeding, August. Do you think there are no on costs? Do you think the world even still needs our exergy, with all the gaiatech development happening down there? The Board has had it. The shareholders, whole countries, have been cut from food distribution through the Nets because you got them to trade their Eco rights for shares in your mad dream. They gave you everything you wanted. And what return have they seen from these exorbitant projects? The aliens have told us nothing.”
“Of course, they have. We’ve already heard from five alien civilisations. We’ve opened the galaxy. We know we are not alone. We know it is possible.”
Dmitri pressed his temple. “August. The promise was space travel. Cheap and affordable space travel. Myself, I thought you were mad but went along because things looked differently then. Now I know.”
August was rolling now. “Have I not delivered? Five times.”
“What? Five ETs with less tech than us. What kind of payback is that? People aren’t eating August.”
“Why are you doing this Dmitri? You know the deal. The Sys and the Hubs control the Earth, mostly. All our Coms have left, besides Russia and a few Free Cities, is Space. That is the Peace that we ourselves negotiated for the continuation of the Free Markets. If we back down?”
“It’s time to reconsider, August. People, people we love are starving. Isn’t the Moon enough? The AGM is a chance to step back, to reconsider, to be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? Get out of here.” August wrestled his friend from his webbing and towards the door.
“What? You are insane.”
Exhausted, August stalled on the way and drooped pathetically. “You betray everything. Go back to Gudanko and tell him he can stick his numbers up his ass. If I tuck in my tail and give in, who will lead Mirtopik Com? Who?”
“August, I’m not...”
“You came here to kill me.”
August saw Dmitri flinch, which revealed an unexpected truth in his asinine accusation.
“You are. You give yourself away. I see it in your face. You’ve come to finish what Gudanko is too pristine to dirty his hands with.”
Dmitri shook August roughly. “You are the most ridiculous man. Should I have spared myself the trouble by not saving you in the first place. Go to hell.”
The door snapped shut behind Dmitri as he left August slumping to the floor.
“The shareholders will still believe in me,” August shouted after him. “You’ll see. You all will.”
Weary, August pulled himself back up using his webbing and held his cleaned neurovisor to his forehead, waiting for the tendrils to squirm their way back into his brain. He would show Dmitri, that coward. August Bridges fail? Traitor.
Following a thought command, a new reality painted over August’s third eye as the room faded into the background, retaining only enough substantiality for August to maintain his balance and to keep him from walking into walls.
August strode out into his ComSyn, a projected stylized map of the world where three-dimensional icons indicated the offices and operations of Mirtopik’s myriad empire and alliances. Graphs and executive summaries floated about the heavens like majestic flocks of birds. Pulsing red pointed out current Rev flash points. Green sinew connected these attacks to flesh out the bodies of declared Campaigns. The sabotaged launch pad connected to the class action suit connected to the coordinated supply chain disrupts connected to the Hub boycott.
Divining the strategies and affiliations of the ramble of enemies and allies that lurked behind these divergent flat facts employed an army of Syns. The writhing, world-embracing creatures projected live from the intertwined brains of thousands of people, computer systems, satellites and nanoid sensors into August’s virtual domain were wondrous to behold.
A large green thicket ran wildly around and over Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands. The bleeding beast at its core BilongMeCom, a Mirtopik Com subsidiary, was facing a hostile ecoversion takeover coordinated by Rev activists. Although structurally no different, most of the company’s stock was now held and traded within a close-knit tribe of local Hubs, their affiliate web of Net businesses, and the ecology-governing Sys to which they were integrated. The Board of the Com would now be replaced or otherwise intimidated until they fell into line with their new masters.
August would have, in his previous life, cheered news of a big ecoversion together with the rest. Ecoversion meant power and wealth being shared more democratically, or rather, and more importantly, tha
t someone else wasn’t enjoying your birth-right. At the root Ecoversion was ultimately about jealousy. They’d all been raised on the propaganda - about how the Ecolution had saved the planet, about how people had finally risen up over the century to claim their rightful share of diminishing ecological resources and in so doing had stopped disaster, about how nearly all the Coms now included the Earth in their balance sheet, with the Ecos from their realignment being ‘recycled’ to the services supporting the poorest and most vulnerable.
Crap. All gone to shit.
Take Ecos for instance. A good idea. Give economic value to efforts to reduce greenhouse gases by making that the basis of money. It gave everyone something to do after automation had taken most of the jobs away. A good idea. But what had they done with the Eco once it became the new God? To begin with the formula had been straight forward. Everyone understood it. Any physicist could calculate it. But by now they had complicated it to fit some religious idiocy about a living planet. And once the high priests had taken over GEO, the lunatics were in charge of the asylum. Now the formulae changed every year, chasing this mysterious goal of Alignment, that elusive point where all the sins of the Fathers would be paid out.
And what would that accomplish? Intergenerational equity. What a crock. Had our forebears given a shit about us when they cranked the thermostat on the planet to just below survivable and flooded the cities and salted the Earth. So why was everyone eager for Mirtopik Com to pay out on the bad bets of the long dead? This kind of thinking only killed the ambition and creativity need to clean up the awful mess. It wasn’t like people were going to suddenly start doing the right thing for no reward. Since when had human beings been wired for altruism?
That’s the world Dmitri wanted to latch back onto - back to sucking off the tit of a worn-out Mother Earth. Was that a manly thing to do? How disappointing.
Viva the Ecolution. A toast to the beautiful memory it had become. What was it now? This sad, long unwinding of human potential. The Earth was no place to look to live a life. Only Space could deliver true abundance and new wealth. Goddamn Dmitri. Now it would only be himself, August Bridges alone, who would ultimately save the cause everyone thought he had betrayed. One day they would understand.
Ten Directions Page 3