I heard the sound of more scrabbling from the ceiling and smiled as I saw the acoustic panel directly above Jean-Jacques bow in even further and finally split in half to drop dozens of activated rabbots on his head. I closed J-J’s office door, held it closed and counted to thirty before sending the deactivation signal. J-J’s shouts and screams were barely audible through the soundproofing.
I set off down the long executive country corridor with a spring in my step and a not-so-secret smile on my face.
I had a date tonight!
Chapter 3
“How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design?” ― Kinky Friedman
I couldn’t stop thinking about tonight’s date, but I still had bills to pay. One of my best gigs was supporting a big moneymaker for the Georgia economy—broadcasting the deliberations of the state legislature to the stars.
When Terra joined the Galactic Free Trade Association there were lots of things we wanted from other GaFTA members, but it was still unclear what they wanted from us. Early on there was a brisk trade in maple syrup, Manischewitz wines and Jelly Belly candies—some alien species have a big-time jones for sweets. When the Galactic factors learned about chocolate you couldn’t find a Hershey bar anywhere on the planet and parents were selling their kids’ hidden Halloween stashes to buy Porsches and BMWs. Various other products, like bodice-ripper romance novels, copies of IRS regulations and transmissions of Gilbert & Sullivan operetta performances also proved popular. But the biggest sellers by far were the live broadcasts of the world’s lawmakers in action—as reality television comedies.
Russia’s Duma, Japan’s Diet and the British Parliament all had their fans but Galactics had an unending appetite for the United States Congress. Even the pedestrian House Merchant Marine subcommittee meetings had a viewership in the billions of sentients. States saw the opportunity for revenue as well and small government havens like Wyoming quickly switched from meeting for less than a month every other year to sitting year-round. Nebraska added a second chamber to their previously unicameral legislature to boost their minutes of available product. The Georgia legislature’s antics were particularly popular—their Gal-Q-rating made them #7 on the list of most popular states after California, Texas, Kansas, Mississippi, Arizona and New York—and Xenotech Support Corporation had contracts with thirty-five different off-planet networks to make sure all the technology required to provide the feeds in the Georgia state capitol building worked flawlessly.
It was just past noon, so on my way downtown I stopped at a local Atlanta institution called The Varsity to grab a couple of chili cheese dogs, a side order of onion rings and a 20-ounce Starbuzz. Starbuzz is enervating orange elixir laced with a high-octane caffeine-like stimulant grown in the jungles of Orish and her colonies. So far I’d resisted getting one of the galtech cyber-organic tapeworms that teleport a percentage of what enters your digestive system elsewhere so you won’t gain weight, but if I ever stopped hitting the gym I’d have to give the idea of installing one serious consideration. I did show some restraint by not ordering one of the Varsity’s signature fried peach pies and headed for the home of the Georgia legislature.
Georgia’s capitol building is a beautiful Gilded Age Classical Revival building that fills a city block in downtown Atlanta. It resembles the Capitol in D.C. but in gray stone, not white, and it’s topped by a golden dome as if to disguise its kinship with Mos Eisley, another “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
I parked in my usual lot a block south, grabbed my backpack tool bag and headed north. As I walked I saw that there were three protest groups, each calling themselves Earth First, parading in the park-like area front of the capitol. They were shouting, jostling each other and waving assorted signs and banners. I’d seen them all before and after a bit of research had figured out what made each group distinct.
The group called Earth First Isolationists was the smallest, with only a dozen senior citizen marchers pushing for high tariffs on all off-planet imports. They carried printed signs with the Isolationist logo, a red circle slash superimposed on a black elliptical galaxy. If they got their way we’d lose our GaFTA membership and would no longer have access to all the cool galtech that ended the energy crisis, connected us to the rest of the galaxy and gave us a thriving economy. The galtech-driven dotstar boom is like the dot.com boom, only with real revenue. New businesses took off as tens of thousands of entrepreneurs from Tierra del Fuego to the Kamchatka Peninsula launched companies to cash in on the opportunities GaFTA and galtech provided. My own little startup was one of them. I wouldn’t stay small for long. I considered the tariff-happy senior citizen Isolationists to be mostly harmless. You can’t put the djinni back in the bottle—and why would you want to?
The Earth First Christians were the second group. Once it had been reported that fifty-seven other Galactic cultures had religions where a deity sent a child—or in the case of parthenogenetic species, a daughter-clone—to die and redeem believers, many Christian sects sought out common threads of belief across the galaxy. The Earth First Christians, however, decided that Jesus must have come to Earth first, because we’re so special. The fact that the majority of the Galactic cultures with similar beliefs traced their religions back thousands if not tens of thousands of years before Jesus walked in Galilee did not seem to be relevant. Signs reading Christ Came to Me Before the Galixee were a good indication of both the message and the level of education of this group, which was also the largest, with about sixty men, women and children marching.
The first two groups were largely peaceful, but the third, the Earth First Militants, was not. I’d picked up one of their tracts several weeks back. From what I could tell after reading it and checking out their web site, they were an incident waiting to happen. There were also a lot of articles about the Militants’ mysterious and secretive leader. He called himself The General, with both words pretentiously capitalized. No one outside his inner circle had ever seen what he looked like. In the group’s propaganda videos he kept his face in the shadows and his voice electronically disguised. In the clips I’d watched, The General asserted that it was Earth’s destiny to rise up and conquer the stars. The only thing the Militants wanted from the rest of the galaxy was military technology and interstellar transports for their troops. I wasn’t sure why they were protesting in front of the capitol, unless they were trying to drum up more members. Whatever the reason, their twenty-five or so marchers wearing gray paramilitary uniforms and carrying professionally printed and spell-checked signs and banners worried me.
At least I didn’t have to use the main entrance and run the gauntlet of competing Earth First groups. I continued around a block and a half to the service entrance in the back and showed my state-issued ID badge to my friend Carlos, the day guard playing Cerberus at the gates of legislative hell.
“Greetings, Carlos! How is the health of your primary spouse and your children?” I said in conversational Galang. I’d been teaching him a few phrases since V.I.P. visitors from other GaFTA member cultures sometimes used the service entrance when they came to see their reality show favorites in person.
“The health of those beings is good,” replied Carlos with a decent Galang accent. As a synthetic lingua franca, Galang is rigid and formal even in conversational contexts. “Sign here then enter.”
“Many gratitudes,” I said in Galang, then added “Thanks” in English as I opened the door.
Like a inverted Dante I first had to ascend to heights of Paradise before descending to the depths of the Inferno. To help stay in shape I dog-trotted up three flights of narrow, but well-lit stairs leading from the rear entrance to the capitol’s aerie, the broadcast booth overlooking the State Senate chambers. The booth had been added fourteen years ago, only eleven months after first contact, but had just been updated and was state of the art not just by Terran but by Galactic standards. A small team of production techs could manage a task force of cameras and microphones from gi
ant wide-angle units mounted on the ceiling that could capture the entire senate floor in one shot to horse-fly sized drone cameras that could count pores on the end of a senator’s three martini lunch-enhanced nose. I knew all the techs that worked the booth and made a point of stopping by to chat with them first before checking out the communications interfaces in the basement. They often had helpful feedback on which channels were acting flaky or which network affiliates were complaining about degraded signal quality.
Three humans, a Pyr and a Nicósn were on duty. The quiet light was on so they all offered smiles or the alien equivalents and pointed to the chamber floor where two older white senators were arguing passionately. One was tall and thin and the other was short and round. It looked like a binary debate between a one and a zero, complete with expressive facial contortions and vigorous arm movements for emphasis. Letitia, one of the humans, passed me a pair of earbuds so I could hear the live feed.
“As all civic-minded residents of the fair state of Georgia must agree, the noble hadrosaur that roamed our fertile plains in herds of millions before The Flood highly deserves to be designated as Georgia’s State Dinosaur,” said Senator Zero. “And I further resolve that such sums should be allocated to fund a statue of a cave man riding said noble hadrosaur for display on the capitol grounds for the education and enjoyment of adults and school children of all ages.”
“I respectfully disagree,” said Senator One. “Said noble hadrosaur, like my esteemed colleague, had a brain the size of a walnut. It also had a giant crest on top of its skull to trumpet its own self-importance. My candidate, the magnificent Albertosaurus, is an apex predator that eats hadrosaurs for breakfast while providing a much higher vantage point for any cave man riding on its back.”
A black woman senator near the front stood up and requested to share the floor. “Gentlemen,” she said, “even though it is not a native of this great state of Georgia I nominate Pachycephalosaurus for state dinosaur because its name means thick headed and I can’t think of any other animal, extinct or alive, that better captures the distinctive characteristic of the majority of the members of this body.” Chaos ensued and the real-time Gal-Q meter spiked.
I had to pull out the earbuds to keep myself from laughing. Then the networks cut for commercials and I could talk to the beings in the broadcast booth.
“Hi folks,” I smiled at everybody. “Anything odd happening today?”
“The studio at our affiliate on Hoth is reporting a lot of snow,” said Lorálo. She was a squat little four-sided Pyr. I could never be sure which of the mouths inset below the individual eyes at the apex of each face of her pyramid-shaped body was doing the talking. Perhaps they all were simultaneously and it was some sort of stereo effect.
I groaned. “I’m going to hide your copy of The Empire Strikes Back or force you to watch The Phantom Menace.”
“You and what Clone Army?” said Lorálo.
“Gentlebeings, stop,” said Arragu the Nicósn, managing to inject a not-so-subtle hint of exasperation using his species’ version of vocal cords. The waving white tentacle beard surrounding his speaking orifice contrasted with his cherry red skin. “Many gratitudes if you would double check the security and integrity of the network room. This morning I have noticed an increased level of smugness from the Earth First Isolationist protesters out front and I am concerned some direct action to damage GaFTA member relations may be planned.”
“Many gratitudes,” I said. “I honor your concern and will review the network room’s security and integrity immediately.”
Despite the fact that they look like a drunk’s idea of Saint Nick, the Nicósns in general and Arragu in particular have a well-deserved reputation for being sensitive to cross-species nuances. I took his warning about the Isolationists seriously, mentally reviewing the security for the network room as I walked down the new narrow well-lit stairs from the aerie to the first floor landing. The network room was protected by a heavy steel-reinforced door controlled by a security badge reader and a sophisticated galtech biometric sensor designed to read the configuration of retinas, hand geometry, tentacle prints or other unique identifiers used by half a hundred GaFTA member species. It was blast-reinforced so that even small explosive charges the size of three or four hand grenades going off simultaneously wouldn’t breech the door or damage the equipment inside.
Any being without a security badge or failing the biometric sensor’s tests would be captured in a molasses chill-field and held until security alarms could summon the capitol police to the scene. Teleporting in would require a receiver like the one famously hidden in a rug in the JPMorgan Chase chairman’s office for first contact. Barring that, I could only think of three ways to get in. The easiest would be to bribe someone working for one of the companies with legitimate access to the network room. The second easiest, getting a job with one of those companies, was straightforward but required long range planning. I didn’t see the Isolationists pulling that off.
I continued walking down a wider but much older and darker set of stairs with shallow grooves worn into the stone treads as I headed down three flights lit only by low wattage incandescent bulbs that looked like they could have been early Edison experiments at Menlo Park. The main GaFTA network interconnects were in a sub-sub-basement deep in the bowels of the building in a room that had formerly been used to store paper files and archived materials. It was 20 by 30 feet with a low ceiling and was filled past capacity with racks and cables linking the thirty-five networks I supported plus their hundreds of affiliates. I didn’t have anything to do with the design and initial implementation of the network room—the state of Georgia used one of the big outfits for that—but I had a well-placed friend who pulled some carbon nanotube strings to get me the maintenance contract.
I reached the sub-sub-basement and followed a familiar winding and claustrophobic corridor. There were dozens of color-coded pipes and conduits above my head adding to the closed-in feeling. Fifty feet from the stairwell the corridor widened outside the network room into a sort of antechamber that was used for storing and staging equipment. Several large cardboard boxes with names like CiscoSiemens, IBM-EMC and GalCon Systems printed on them were stacked around the edges of the chamber. Hundreds of network cables in varying lengths were loosely clipped to a bar set high on the near wall ready for deployment. Keeping my actions hidden from anyone in the antechamber I removed my cell phone from its holster on my belt and slid it into my left hand. By touch I opened an app I hoped would be helpful and prepared myself to deal with the third easiest way to compromise the security of the network room—ambushing someone like me.
I wouldn’t have minded being wrong but today was my day to be right. Just as I stepped into the antechamber the large cardboard boxes were elbowed aside and three men dressed in expensive suits and carrying portfolios confronted me. It was worse than I thought—lawyers, or at least thugs dressed like lawyers—the best possible disguise for getting into the capitol building. Two of them wearing blue pinstripes had portfolios made from multiform polymers. They transformed them into small crossbows shooting razor-edged folded business card darts. Part of my brain thought that was a clever way to get weapons past building security. The men were covering me while the third fake lawyer in a charcoal gray suit approached me holding out a set of low-tech zip-tie restraints.
“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” said the man. “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want to stop the signal to gain negotiating leverage for a new trade agreement with the Galactics that puts the needs of Earth first.”
“You mean you want us to go back to burning fossil fuels?” I said. “Return the cures for cancer? Cut us off from Galactic civilization?”
“I’m not here to argue political philosophy,” said the man in gray. “I’ve got a job to do. Grab his arms!”
The two in blue lowered their crossbows and rushed me. I closed my eyes, raised my phone and thumbed the activation button for the app I’d preset. The p
hone’s flash hyper-activated with the brightness of an arc welder, temporarily blinding my three assailants. With spots dancing on my own retinas I was able to grab half a dozen network cables and wrap them around my right fist. The first blue-suited thug came in on my left side so I stepped forward with my left foot, cocked my right hip and uncoiled with as much momentum as I could generate flowing out my right arm and continuing along the length of the cables. They slashed out and wrapped around the first attacker’s right arm. I pulled hard and spun him. He retained his original speed but had a new vector and went crashing into a pile of boxes on the far wall, the cables uncoiling in the process.
The blue suit charging in on my right was almost on top of me so I grabbed a meter’s length of cables between my hands and held them tightly outstretched in front of my body. I used the second attacker’s speed against him and caught him just under the chin with the taunt cables. His feet kept moving forward but his head stopped and he flipped onto his back hitting the base of his skull on the concrete floor.
The man in the gray suit hesitated and then pulled out his phone. He pushed something and a pair of sparking fang-like electrodes slid out from the near edge of the phone’s thick case. I’d been hit by an electric stun gun before—it was back in engineering school when I was young and stupid—and once was certainly more than enough. I faked coming in high, raising the network cables like I was going to clothesline him the way I’d handled the second attacker. When he raised the arm with the fang phone up to block the cables I kicked him in the balls with the force of a winning penalty kick. He’d decided to attack me with three-against-one odds, so he deserved it. The man in gray turned the color of his suit and fell to the cold hard floor curled up in a make-it-stop, make-it-stop position.
I picked up the gray man’s stun phone then used the network cables to truss him up along with his two minions or associates or whatever euphemisms for henchmen were currently in use by rent-a-thug companies. It wasn’t pleasant being close enough to tie them up. They smelled a bit rotten, like they were wearing floral cologne made from carnivorous plants. I held my breath and finished tying them quickly. Then I called the capitol police from the intercom next to the security badge reader by the network room door. I told them I’d found three tied up bodies outside the network room. They said to stand by; a squad of officers would be there in minutes to “take control of the situation.”
Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1) Page 3