“Could you get me a reservation for two at eight tonight at the Teleport Inn?”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I have the maître d’ on retainer we do so much business there. Is this business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure, I hope. I met this amazing woman…”
“Say no more. I’ll get you a romantic Terran table for two,” said Tomáso. “Consider it done. You’ve got my number if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Thank you so much for saving Spike,” said Terrhi. I had to smile at the earnestness of the pink, polka-dotted quarter-ton child. Cuteness crosses species boundaries.
“You’re welcome.”
I removed my climbing spikes from my boots and stowed them in my backpack tool bag. Before I took off the gloves I gave Spike a farewell scritch and received a grateful look.
“Next time I see you we can play dress up and have a tea party,” said Terrhi. “Wouldn’t that be fun, Spike?” From his expression Spike had clearly played dress up before and wasn’t fond of the idea.
“We’ll see,” I said. I needed to get moving. Things to do, people, or rather person to see.
“Have a nice date with your girlfriend,” said Terrhi in her piping singsong voice.
“She’s not my girlfriend. This is just our first date.”
“Ooooo,” said Terrhi to Spike. “He’s going to have a first date at the Teleport Inn. That’s special. You have to be really nice to her.”
“You can count on it.”
I left Tomáso, Terrhi and Spike playing on the lawn while I headed for my apartment. I hoped that my date hadn’t also made a reservation at the Teleport Inn for tonight—they’re very hard to come by unless you’re a high Galactic Panjandrum like Tomáso. Why did she pick such an exclusive place? Who would pay? Note to self, check my available liquid credit balance. Was this a test? Then again, I couldn’t ask. I didn’t have her number. I whacked my palm on my forehead. I didn’t even know her name. She could be an oligarch’s daughter for all I knew. Sometimes I’m clueless.
It wasn’t until I was unlocking the door to my apartment with my cell phone that I remembered what my subconscious had really been trying to tell me when I was up in the tree.
I’d had no reason to be worried about a dangerous carnivore—Cornell’s stun phone had been in my pocket the whole time.
Chapter 7
“The best thing for being sad is to learn something.” ― Merlin in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King
When I stepped into my apartment I took a deep breath and ran a mental inventory. I was still in good time to be well prepared for my date, but not by much. At least I didn’t have any bone-deep scratches or parallel triple-puncture marks from Spike, though my stomach muscles and hips would be sore in the morning where Tomáso had grabbed me. Shower, shave, dress, one hour. Pick up flowers, thirty minutes. Drive to the Teleport Inn on the north edge of Buckhead, twenty minutes—no, thirty to allow for traffic. Dither, second guess myself, mentally rehearse things to say that weren’t lame, remind myself to just be myself, another hour. It was 4:30 now, so I had half an hour to spare.
Then my phone rings. It’s playing a dirge.
I know the caller. There goes my dithering time.
“Xenotech Support.”
“You’ve got to help me,” said an exasperated voice at the other end of the line. “He’s down again.”
Crap. Server crash.
“Put him on, Ram,” I said.
“Thanks,” said my caller. “Here he is.”
I heard a few beeps and clicks then the deep melancholy voice of the being I call Droopy came on the line. It said, “Greetings,” in Galang but the impression it conveyed was “Woe is me. I am filled with existential dread and surpassing sadness.” This could take a while. When the cyber-organic server at the other end of the line was down, he was down. The last time I had to deal with Droopy he was deeply depressed from reading too much Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It took me hours patient listening and lots of quotes from Will Rogers and Mister Rogers to snap him out of his existential funk.
Droopy was Hadramordarupé, a Khaloenian cyber-organic entity essential to secure digital commerce at Ram’s organization, the North American-Caribbean Cricket League. NACCL had started shortly before first contact with GaFTA. Sixteen years ago Ram Patel was a modestly well off South Asian entrepreneur living in Brooklyn who lamented the fact that cricket wasn’t as popular in New York as it was in his native New Delhi. He networked with other wealthy cricket fans in major metropolitan areas across North America. Then he reached out to similarly well to do sportsmen in Jamaica, Barbados, the Cayman Islands and other cricket-loving parts of the West Indies.
The new professional league would play cricket in North American cities in the summer and in Caribbean locales during the winter. Games would be broadcast from Toronto to Trinidad, but the real money maker would be selling team logo merchandise branded as hip and cool to jaded adolescents over the net. Once launched, the league teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for eighteen months. Then the Galactic Free Trade Association’s arrival changed everything. NACCL’s broadcasts caught the eyestalks of a scout for a Galactic entertainment conglomerate. Cricket matches proved popular off-planet—Galactics were fascinated by the bowlers’ delivery—and Ram went from selling a few million dollars worth of logo-wear cricket whites in small, medium, large and extra-large on Terra to several hundred million galcreds worth of merchandise in thousands of sizes to fit Murms to Dauushans.
That’s where Droopy comes in.
The Khaloenians were an ancient species, even by Galactic Free Trade Association standards. They’d been more than half cybernetic for millennia and had built-in congruent tech for instantaneous intra-species communications like the Murms. Ten billion of them had packed their virtual bags, made their exit from GaFTA and isolated themselves in fully digital form on hardware buried at the center of an artificial planet circling a brown dwarf before the glaciers had retreated at the end of the Pleistocene. Their collective parting message, “Goodbye carbon,” was still a best-selling t-shirt slogan. But not every Khaloenian left. A few million of them didn’t want an all-digital existence and stayed behind.
Khaloenians’ organic components were minimal at this point in their evolution. They were just disembodied brains floating in bowls of nutrients, supported by sophisticated technology. While eighty percent of their minds contemplated philosophy, art and literature, the remaining twenty percent made a living by providing secure, non-repudiable validation for ecommerce transactions on Galnet. Because the Khaloenians were incapable of lying—to each other, at least—using them really cut down on fraud. Availability of inventory—a shirt with a cricket club logo, for example—was confirmed by Droopy or one of the other two Khaloenians in Ram’s employ. The local Khaloenian would reach out through the artificial wormhole in its cyber-brain to “shake hands” with another Khaloenian on Nicós or Tigrammon or one of the Pâkk planets where a customer deposited funds to pay for the shirt. When the shirt was received, payment would be released.
Before GaFTA turned to using Khaloenians for ecommerce, back when my ancestors were mating with Denisovans and Neanderthals, the cybercrooks were winning. Computers alone were too vulnerable to hacking. But one Khaloenian could innately confirm the identity of any other Khaloenian so they made ideal transaction validation servers, except when they got depressed or in a snit.
“Greetings,” I said to Hadramordarupé in Galang. “Why are you not happy?”
“Ah, Young Person,” said Droopy, adding some extra low harmonics to his synthesized voice to make it even more funereal, “you ephemeral beings cannot possibly understand.”
“Try me,” I said, switching to English where it was easier to be blunt if necessary. “What’s curdling your nutrient solution?”
“I have been exploring human culture,” said Droopy, “and have been reading the plays of William Shakespeare. ‘Ala
s, poor Yorick.’”
“Reading Hamlet would depress anybody.”
“To be or not to be,” said Droopy.
“Being is better than not being,” I said.
“To die, to sleep—no more…”
“Enough,” I said. “You’re effectively immortal and don’t sleep.”
“And by a sleep, to say we end the Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to?”
“Sparkling. What else have you been reading?”
“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and caldron bubble…” Droopy’s voice dropped off like he’d taken too much lithium.
“And Macbeth isn’t exactly a laugh a minute,” I said, doing a quick search on my phone. “Have you gotten to the Porter’s scene? Act 2, Scene 3. It’s better if you can watch it, not just read it.” I switched modes on my phone and sent Droopy a link to Steve Martin’s stellar performance in Kenneth Branagh’s classic, The Scottish Play.
“That was amusing,” said Droopy. His tone suggested that the corners of his mouth would have turned up if he’d had a mouth.
“Try Dogberry’s big speech in Much Ado About Nothing.”
“Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths…”
“That’s the one.”
“Is the repetition of the same thought in multiple ways intended for comedic effect?”
“Yes.”
“Is this sound appropriate?” Droopy giggled like a schoolgirl.
“You might want to drop the pitch a bit,” I said. “You sound like a juvenile Terran.”
“Sorry.”
“You might also try some of Mercutio’s speeches in Romeo & Juliet,” I said, remembering bits from Shakespeare that had made me smile.
“No, ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man,” quoted Droopy with a lower pitched giggle. “Is that a pun?”
I’d have to teach him how to manipulate his voice synthesizer to laugh properly.
“Yes. Shakespeare is famous for them.”
“I must read more,” said Droopy.
Perhaps pointing him at that particular play wasn’t such a good idea.
“Don’t read any more Romeo & Juliet. Try As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing. Those are comedies.”
Too late.
“Oh, those poor children…” said Droopy. “Those poor, poor children.”
Now he was back to being Eeyore on a bad day. I didn’t have time for this now.
“If they’d only had a method of instantaneous congruent communication,” said Droopy, his synthesized voice hinting at upwelling virtual tears.
It could take me hours to talk him through this.
“For never was a story of more woe… Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Droopy’s electronic intonation on the word “woe” sounded like he’d fallen into a loop of ever more distilled depression. This server was really down.
How could I break the cycle?
I free-associated on the star-crossed lovers.
“Romeo and Juliet, Sampson and Delilah,” played a song inside my head. The Pointer Sisters version of Fire would change Droopy’s mood. But it would be too much of a jump from his current mental state. I’d have to do it in stages.
“The tale of Romeo and Juliet has been told and retold many times in Terran culture.”
“Oh?” said Droopy, with minimal energy.
“Search for the original Broadway cast recording of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.”
“Accessing,” said Droopy in a monotone. “I shall listen.”
I waited, impatiently, my fingers crossed.
When I heard him reproduce the sound of fingers snapping I started to feel optimistic. He was going through the show at high speed. Then he surprised me.
“I like to be in A-mer-i-ca!” sang Droopy in a Puerto Rican accent.
He was singing?
“Gee Officer Krupke, Krup you!” Droopy continued in a serviceable tenor. “Is that word play?”
“Oh yes,” I said. This was going to work.
Then I heard Droopy crying. He’d gotten to the death scene.
“Only death can part us now,” played in my head. But Droopy wasn’t in woe-is-me mode. He was caught up in the power of the story and the music.
“Is there more like this?” His tone said “Please, please, let there be more.”
I smiled.
“Look up Rogers and Hammerstein.”
“Accessing,” said Droopy eagerly.
When I heard him singing the chorus from the title song of Oklahoma I knew this support call had been successfully resolved.
I closed the connection with “Oh, what a beautiful day,” still echoing in my ears. Then I sent Ram Patel a text message to let him know his server was back up and the wheels of galactic ecommerce for the North American-Caribbean Cricket League were once again spinning at maximum velocity.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t moving at maximum velocity and should be if I was going to preserve any much-needed room for dithering on my schedule.
Time to hit the shower.
Chapter 8
“If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.” ― Murphy’s Law, Corollary #27
I left my backpack tool bag on a small table by the front door to my apartment and headed for my bedroom. I walked past the office nook and project alcove where I kept my desktop computer and resisted the urge to stop and try to research the identity and background of the beautiful and competent woman I’d be seeing in a few hours. I had no doubt I could find out who she was—I know my way around Galnet—but it didn’t seem right. I didn’t want to come off as a cyber-stalker and invade her privacy. I also knew myself well enough to realize that if I knew too much ahead of time I’d likely figure out more ways to blow it and second guess myself. This was too important to screw up, so I’d cultivate a Zen-like serenity—yeah, right—and go with the flow.
When I got to my bedroom I put my phone on the charging surface of the nightstand next to my bed. I remembered Cornell’s stun phone and put it beside my personal phone. Then I pulled my white company logo polo shirt and undershirt off simultaneously. I threw them across the room to the laundry basket with a two-handed jump shot and sank a basket on the first try. I took off my engineer boots with two loud thunks as each boot hit the hardwood floor. Then I stepped out of my corporate uniform khaki pants and inspected them for rabbot damage. There were several holes gnawed through both legs below the knees—the ubiquitous bunnies had done more damage than I’d realized. I extracted my wallet, Swiss Army knife and handkerchief from various pants pockets and put them on the bedside table next to the phones. I balled-up my khakis with my underwear and tossed them both one handed into the laundry basket—two points! I’d turn the pants into a pair of shorts later.
My dad always said that a man should be able to sew a straight seam as well as lay a neat run of network cables. I was proud of my sewing skills. I’d designed, cut, stitched and riveted a complex project like my backpack tool bag myself, so hemming a pair of shorts would be trivial. Finding time to hem them wouldn’t be, however. Every time I planned to work on personal projects like framing a chameleon tile mood matching mosaic for my kitchen wall or dealing with an item on my sewing pile I’d get distracted by a client with a tech support call. If I wanted to have a personal life it was clearly time for Xenotech Support Corporation to find more employees. I couldn’t keep doing it all on my own.
One of the great things about living in an Ad Astra apartment is the species-appropriate version of a fancy shower and spa tub in every unit. Before I stepped into the bathroom I shouted a command to Psycho, my shower A.I. “Earl Grey, hot. Make it so.” I admit it. I’m a geek—old movies, Star Trek, you name it.
The Earl Grey program starts with a soft, warm flow of water to open the pores then builds to sharp, stinging
hotter needles to penetrate down to deep muscle. After a few minutes of that it ends with a short, intense blast of frigidly cold spray to wake me up and invigorate me. It was my standard post-workout shower, developed over several months and it never failed to make me feel like a new sentient being afterward.
I had several other preset shower sequences, like English Breakfast that was great for leisurely waking up on Sunday mornings and Chinese Gunpowder that pounded on me like a Russian masseuse. But after a day spent scaling a building, clinging to walls, fighting off thugs and getting a cat out of a tree, Earl Grey was just what I needed.
While the water was warming up I slathered a generous dollop of shaving cream on my face—avoiding my mustache—then flicked on a UV light to trigger the shaving process. The final stage of the razor blade wars ended when the two major blade manufacturers proved unable to manufacture twelve-bladed razors reliably. Both companies gave up and repurposed off-planet technology for cleaning hides, releasing new shaving cream formulas that did away with razors completely. Billions of galtech nanites suspended in the lather attacked hair shafts like hungry rabbots. There were some interesting accidents during the R&D phase. I’ve seen the pictures.
I turned off the UV light to shut off the shaving cream nanites and stepped into the shower, only to remember after they were soaked that I had forgotten to remove my socks. I had a good excuse. Too many of my brain cells were pre-dithering about tonight. I took off the sopping socks and hung them on a washcloth hook on the inside of the shower.
My particular version of a human shower enclosure was just under four feet square. A translucent glass door provided entry and multicolored tiles in hexagonal patterns like complex polymers formed the walls. It was small enough so I stayed warm and large enough to not feel claustrophobic—possibly even with a second person to keep me company, though I couldn’t confirm that from personal experience.
I turned my head away from the spray and let phase one of the Earl Grey program flow over me. It was delightful. Then Murphy kicked me in the ass.
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