Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1)

by Dave Schroeder

  “Hang on, I’ve got an idea,” he said.

  He started to pull on the aluminum frame that supported the acoustic tiles for the dropped ceiling. Now that the feedstock tower was disconnected from the fabber it rolled freely. It also built up a lot of momentum, scattering rabbots like an icebreaker plowing through a post-global warming polar ocean. That initiative moved him even higher on my hiring list.

  When the tower had temporarily cleared the area I disengaged my gloves and kneepads, jumped down into the now mostly empty floor, and opened both doors. Then I jumped back up on the wall, getting out of the way of the surging river of rabbots who had spotted the carpet and stairs and OMG—the stage curtains—in the auditorium. The rabbots flowed through the doors like a fuchsia flood, abandoning the now-bare production floor for richer pickings.

  Mike and I jumped down from our respective perches and closed and locked the doors. I removed three rabbots that had latched onto my pants and turned them off individually before they could do more than nosh a few awkward holes. The rabbots from the first floor, at least, were all in the auditorium.

  “Thanks, man,” said Mike. “I thought I’d drown in those chompin’ things.”

  “What were you trying to do?”

  “Fab up ten samples for the sales team.”

  “But the exponent-lock key was down?”

  “Uh huh,” said Mike. “What kind of machine has an exponent-lock key?”

  “Half the fab equipment on Earth is from the Dauushans,”

  I said. “Ask them.”

  “What do we do with all the rabbots in the auditorium?”

  “We have to shut them down en masse,” I said. “It would take a combat infantry battalion in powered armor suits to turn them off individually.”

  “Crap. It was my screw-up. Jean-Jacques is going to kill me.”

  “We’ll figure things out. Did you fab any controllers?”

  “No, I thought I’d do a short run of rabbots first then run off a few controllers for the sales reps.”

  “Rule #2: Always fab the controllers first.”

  “What’s Rule #1?” said Mike.

  I gave him a hard look.

  “Oh, yeah, always double check the exponent-lock key.”

  “Right. Why didn’t you fab the controllers first?”

  “The feedstock for the rabbots was already loaded from an earlier run of dingbat drones so I thought I’d save myself some work.”

  “And instead you got a remake of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

  “Right.”

  I stepped over the control panel for the Model-43 and pulled up the fabrication specs for the rabbot controller. I double-checked to make sure they had the transmission range and capacity to control thousands of rabbots, queued them up to be fabbed and reviewed my settings. Mike had finished changing out the feedstock tower for the right raw materials and I called him over to review what I’d configured.

  “What do you see?”

  “You’re making five controllers,” Mike said, “and the exponent-lock is not on.”

  “Great,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Uh, you have it set for the Dauushan tactile interface.”

  “And that means?”

  “The controller interface is three feet by four feet—and you’d need to stand on them to push the buttons?” asked Mike hesitantly.

  “Correct.” I said. “Now fix it.”

  Mike adjusted a few parameters to set the Terran tactile interface. I looked over his shoulder, confirmed his settings and gave him the honor of kicking off fabrication. After a few wheezes the Model-43 spit out five cellphone-sized touchscreen controllers. Both of us took one and walked to the doors leading to the auditorium. I showed Mike how to engage the All Units Sleep function, which thankfully worked through the doors.

  We could see through inset reinforced glass panels in the doors that all the rabbots had deactivated and were frozen in place. They’d eaten all the carpet, the carpet padding and the stage curtains but there were still a few rows of seats in the back that wouldn’t have to be reupholstered. Given all they’d been eating I was surprised that the voracious pink beasties weren’t the size of watermelons by now. I sent Mike upstairs to put the rabbots on the stairwell and second floor into sleep mode and headed for the lobby to rescue the receptionist.

  When I got there I was pleasantly surprised. All the rabbots were deactivated and the tall young receptionist—whose light hair turned out to be a lovely shade of auburn—was just clearing a path through the piled rabbots to make enough space to open the lobby doors.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Simple. I pulled up the rabbot manual on my phone and located their individual unit off switches. Then I turned off one by hand and programmed my cell to send out a ‘follow the herd’ signal to get all of the rabbots in the lobby to follow the lead of the one I’d deactivated.”

  “You can read Dauushan?” I was impressed.

  “And Galang, Orishen, Nicósn, Pyrim, Tigram, both Pâkkan dialects and another dozen or so GaFTA languages.” Now I was smitten.

  “After this mess is cleaned up, would you go out for dinner with me?” I said in Long Pâkkan.

  “I’d be delighted,” she replied in Pyrim click-speech. “Meet me at the Teleport Inn at eight.”

  I nodded to confirm and managed a self-conscious “Sounds great!” before I left the lobby in a daze. My heart rate was speeding up and my higher mental functions were slowing down. She’d asked me out!

  Before rational thought completely deserted me, I made a mental note to write a software mod that would automatically disable the exponent-lock key on Dauushan hardware. There should be a nice market for it.

  I didn’t need to make a mental note about dinner tonight. It was hard to think about anything else.

  Chapter 2

  “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” ― Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

  I had a big smile on my face when I left the lobby and stopped at WT&F’s first floor break room to grab a Starbuzz from a vending machine. I had less than ten minutes to send and receive a few critical emails before the phone call I was expecting—and dreading—came in. I didn’t have to look at my cell. As soon as I heard the opening bars of La Marseillaise I knew it was Jean-Jacques Bonhomme, the hard driving hard-assed CEO of WT&F. I answered reluctantly.

  “Get your butt up to my office this instant!” shouted Jean-Jacques.

  I moved the phone several inches away from my ear.

  “How could you let such a thing happen?”

  “What am I paying you for, you incompetent useless…”

  “I’m on my way,” I said to the air, relying on my phone’s microphone to catch my words. I put my cell on mute and turned its volume down so I didn’t have to keep listening to J-J’s rant while he wore himself out questioning my parentage, intelligence quotient and desire to avoid litigation. That was J-J.

  His office was on the right front corner of the second floor with a view of both the parking lot—to see who was working late—and the thin strip of pine trees separating this stretch of office park from the next. I decided I would save energy, improve my health and take the stairs to get to the CEO’s suite. I didn’t relish the prospect of running into a stray still-active rabbot in the close confines of an elevator, even though I still had one of the controllers in my pocket.

  When I got to the second floor I found hundreds of deactivated rabbots piled up in what had been the guest reception area. The space was now as pink as the all-day output of a cotton candy machine. The pile looked like Mike’s doing. He must have turned off all the rabbots he could find and stacked them for future retrieval. There wasn’t a scrap of intact carpet, carpet padding, upholstery, or cubicle wall fabric left in sight. There weren’t any employees around, either. Coping with a hundred thousand pink, cybernetic robot lawn mowers wasn’t in anyone’s job description, except
, perhaps, mine.

  I sighed and used my WT&F consultant’s security card to open the door separating the second floor worker bee’s guest reception area from executive country and headed down the long corridor that led to J-J’s office. The familiar trip was like stepping from Walmart into Harrods. Utilitarian low-cost carpet, cubicles, painted drywall and generic “Go Team” motivational posters gave way to Berber carpets, private offices, dark walnut-stained walls and high quality framed oils and acrylics that even I could tell were not paint-by-numbers. I didn’t spot any signs of rabbot infestation—the expensive carpets were intact and the modern-art tapestries that shared the walls with the paintings were unnibbled.

  The soundproofing in Jean-Jacques’ suite must be quite good since I couldn’t hear him screaming through the walls. Jean-Jacques liked to yell, so perhaps the extra sonic insulation was deliberate. He was a small man, just five foot four and built like a wrestler, all tightly wound muscle and aggression. He’d pulled himself up from modest lower middle class origins by bulldozing over anyone who got in his way. J-J had been the CFO of a mid-sized manufacturing company in Hoboken, New Jersey when Earth was invited to join the Galactic Free Trade Association. He had a lot of contacts and was quick to see there was money to be made on the bottom-feeding edge of the dotstar boom. Jean-Jacques lined up investors, found cheap office space in non-union metro-Atlanta and started WT&F.

  The used Model-43 fabricator downstairs came from an off-world factor with a reputation for less than ethical dealing, or so I’d heard. J-J’s original business model was contract manufacturing, but his new brainstorm was to sell individually packaged knock-off products to “dollar” stores. Moving forward, WT&F would make cheaper versions of products other companies spent lots of money marketing. The rabbots were supposed to compete with Reddy Bunny, a spin-off from a well-funded lawn and garden equipment maker that had a national television and social media advertising campaign to sell red rabbit-shaped lawn-mowing robots to individual consumers. You couldn’t go on Spacebook without seeing a digitized, immortalized John Cleese saying “Are you ready for a Reddy Bunny, honey?” WT&F would sell rabbots for less than Reddy Bunnies, but with a higher profit margin because of near-zero advertising costs.

  As I continued down the long corridor to J-J’s office I heard scrabbling sounds from overhead, but I forgot about them once I got close enough to make out what Jean-Jacques was bellowing through his door. It involved my mother and it didn’t sound like he was anywhere close to winding down. It was time to step into the jackal’s den. J-J meant well, but he was a bully and I’d learned how to deal with bullies a long time ago.

  * * * * *

  I didn’t knock. I just opened the door to Jean-Jacques’ opulent office.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “It’s about ti—”

  “Say one more word about my mother and you’ll regret it.”

  “Threats? I’m about to sue you into near-Earth orbit and you give me threats?”

  J-J was standing on the intimidation platform he’d built behind his desk so that his five-four was almost on the same level as my six-two.

  “Sit down, shut up and listen.”

  “No, you shut up,” he blustered. “Your machine over-produced a hundred thousand rabbots that came out pre-activated. I’ll say what I damned well please.”

  I walked closer to his desk and stared at J-J. And stared.

  “Do you want to come out of this with a tidy profit or keep pissing me off and get nothing?”

  “What the hell do you mean a tidy profit?”

  “I’ll say it one more time. Sit down, shut up and listen.”

  He thought about it for a few seconds. What were those scrabbling sounds? Then he sat.

  I eased myself onto the arm of one of the chairs facing his desk. The chairs were deeply padded so that anyone sitting in them would be shorter than J-J. The man’s insecurities were the reason I’d given him La Marseillaise as his ringtone. Today would be his Waterloo, but the outcome for him would be better than exile on St. Helena.

  “First,” I said, “it’s not my machine. You bought it, without any sort of warranty, from a trader with a less than sterling reputation.”

  “But…” said Jean-Jacques, a blood vessel pulsing on his neck.

  I raised my finger and he stopped.

  “I’ll get to the tidy profit part in a minute.”

  “Second,” I continued, “you bought the design and programming specs for fabbing rabbots and controllers from the same trader and took his word about what you were getting.”

  “But he promised me…” said J-J.

  “Traders don’t read technical manuals.”

  J-J exhaled slowly and some of the bluster drained out of him.

  “How many more points until we get to profits?” he said, sinking into his chair.

  “This is the last.”

  “Third,” I said, “My contract clearly states that I am here to provide xenotech support services for your fabber. I don’t provide a warranty on the equipment or the rabbot programming specs. You didn’t even pay for Mike to go off-planet and get the Model-43 operator’s training I recommended. For that matter, you’d crossed off the five days of personalized one-on-one training I’d put on my original quote and knocked it down to one day to save money. How’s that working for you?”

  “Not so well,” he said, looking down at his desk.

  “Now for the tidy profit part,” I said.

  Jean-Jacques looked back up, tracking me closely.

  “Rabbots are programmable,” I said. “You can tune them to focus only on specific materials.”

  “So why didn’t you program them to…”

  “Not my job, remember?” I said. “No money for training. Buying design specs ‘as is’ can bite you, capisce?”

  “Understood.”

  Maybe I was actually getting through to him, though it was hard to tell.

  “About that tidy profit?” he said.

  “I’m getting there. Before coming up to your office I checked with a friend of mine who’s got a startup.”

  “Who doesn’t these days?” said J-J with a spark of snark.

  “My friend’s company currently uses goats for pest control, but they don’t breed fast enough.”

  “Pest control?”

  “Yes,” I said, “he’s fighting the worst scourge of the South.”

  “Which is?”

  “A Japanese import.”

  “He’s fighting Toyotas?”

  “No,” I said, “kudzu.”

  I could sense the wheels turning behind Jean-Jacques’ eyes. Was the ceiling over his head bowing?

  “Kudzu is everywhere across the South and moving farther and farther north every year,” I said. “My friend’s had some good results using goats to cut down and eat the vines at their roots but he can’t breed the goats fast enough to hit his next major expansion target.”

  “But with a hundred thousand rabbots…” said J-J.

  “Uh huh,” I said, “he can expand to cover every state that’s infested.”

  “What’s in it for WT&F?”

  “He’s willing to pull up to your loading dock with enough 40-foot cargo containers to take every rabbot you’ve got, plus 500 controllers,” I said. “I told him that I expect you’d charge him what you’d net out by not having to package the rabbots individually and drop ship cartons of them to retail warehouses.”

  “That should work nicely,” he said, “but what about all the damage to the office?”

  “I checked and your insurance covers industrial accidents. This certainly qualifies. And you’ll make enough in one lump sum on this deal to fund upgrading the quality of the replacement furnishings and send Mike off-planet for training.”

  “No way,” said J-J. “I’m not sending him off-planet. He caused this mess. I should can his ass.”

  So much for Jean-Jacques taking any responsibility for the fiasco.

  “Since I’m brin
ging you the buyer…” I said.

  “What do you want for brokering the deal?” cut in J-J.

  “Your sales team gets a twenty percent commission, I expect.”

  “There’s no way I’m paying you twenty percent,” said Jean-Jacques, shaking his head.

  “But in this case,” I said, “I think twenty-five percent is more appropriate since you’ve got zero in selling expenses—no travel, no client entertainment, no trade shows, no marketing.”

  “No way!” said Jean-Jacques, his face turning as red as the sands of Mars. “Ten percent and not a quarter point more.”

  “Twenty percent or I’ll help my friend to buy a fabber and produce his own rabbots directly. You can sell this batch on your own.”

  “Fifteen percent,” said J-J.

  I could hear his teeth grinding like a bad transmission on the other side of the desk.

  “Eighteen percent,” I countered.

  “Seventeen and a half.”

  “Done,” I said. “And I want a contract addendum to ensure that you use Xenotech Support to review all fabricator design specs prior to production and use us to properly train all your fab operators.”

  “Accepted,” said Jean-Jacques. The insurance company would probably insist on that anyway so it wasn’t a difficult concession.

  I smiled at him, doing my best to downplay my joy at ending up as Wellington to J-J’s Napoleon. Jean-Jacques didn’t realize I’d also make a tidy profit reprogramming and supporting KudZooKrew.com’s new rabbot workforce.

  I stood up, walked to his open office door and turned back face him.

  “Just one more thing,” I said.

  “What?” J-J said, spitting the syllable out like a bullet in my direction.

  “I’d like your written permission to make a limited exception to the non-solicitation clause in my contract and offer jobs with XSC to Mike and your receptionist.”

  “You can have him,” said J-J. “He’s a screw-up.”

  “Great,” I said. “And the receptionist?”

  “Which one?”

  “Tall. Young. Auburn hair.”

  “Oh, her,” said J-J. “Not my call. She’s a temp. Knock yourself out.”