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

by Dave Schroeder

  “Please pull up satellite imagery of VIGorish Labs’ facilities near Hartsfield.”

  “Processing,” said my phone. An image of metro Atlanta as seen from low Earth orbit appeared on my van’s windshield.

  “Not funny,” I said. “How about focusing in to the five thousand foot level?”

  A cluster of four buildings appeared as the satellite imagery zoomed in. One of them was a gigantic square steel-framed structure five hundred feet on a side and three stories tall. It was gray, close to a Hartsfield taxiway and looked like it could house a space armada. Two of the remaining three buildings, one red brick, one blue-painted steel-frame, were also large, but not on the same scale as the armada hanger. They looked like manufacturing facilities. The last appeared to be a standard rectangular three-story glass and concrete office building.

  “Which building is VIGorish Labs?” I asked my phone, expecting it to be last one.

  “They all are.”

  “All four?”

  “Affirmative,” said my phone.

  “WTF!”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do you have any details about what the buildings are used for?”

  “The glass and concrete one is their headquarters. VIGorish Labs built it and the red brick building four years ago,” said my phone. “The blue steel-framed building and the huge hanger were only finished three months ago, according to public records.”

  “Got it. If it looks like a corporate headquarters it must be a corporate headquarters,” I said. “That’s where my meeting must be. I’m surprised they don’t have the company logo in letters 40 feet tall on the roof.”

  My phone made the sound it makes when it’s trying to hold back a laugh. “Given what I have been able to learn about Anthony Zwilniki’s ego that would have been my assumption as well, Jack.”

  “Maybe we’re misjudging him. What do you know about the manufacturing buildings?”

  “From a review of building permits the red brick building closest to their headquarters appears to be a production facility for making their immersion tubes,” said my phone. “You can see the unfinished Plexiglas cylinders stacked up outside.”

  I gestured at the van’s windshield and zoomed in on the building in question. From orbit several hundred circles—the ends of gaming tubes—were visible in a holding area adjacent to the production facility.

  “Okay,” I said, “what about the other manufacturing building, the blue steel framed one?”

  “Permits indicate it is for processing pharmaceuticals. I don’t have any additional details though an unencrypted logistics database does show that four sets of crop dusting tanks and nozzles were delivered to the building last week.”

  “Crop dusting?” I said, my voice rising half an octave. Various beeps and chirps came from my phone as it accessed additional databases, then it made an electronic chime.

  “Also industrial drying machines, macerators, grinding machines, reaction vessels and large quantities of wood alcohol,” said my phone. I could swear it sounded proud of itself.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Now if we can only figure out what it’s for…”

  “We will be in the vicinity seventy-five minutes before your appointment,” my phone noted.

  “Are you suggesting a bit of reconnaissance?”

  “Exterior only,” said my phone. “The interior security is formidable based on the details in a request for proposal I located. But the outside security systems are turned off during the day because there’s so much coming and going.”

  “Great.”

  “Except for the cameras.”

  “Not so great.”

  “Bag,” said my phone.

  “Oh. Yeah.” I started to climb into the back of my van so I could change into my Blend Into The Scenery coverall.

  “Seatbelt,” said my van, urgently.

  “Override.”

  “Wait,” said my phone. I stopped. “The only windows are twenty feet up.”

  “I’ll use my gecko gloves,” I said.

  “Which would have to go over your B.I.T.S. suit,” said my phone, “which defeats the concept of not being seen by cameras.”

  “Crap,” I said.

  “But it is a steel frame building.”

  “And we’re back in business. I’ve got magnets that would fit under my gloves, I think.”

  I hopped into the back of my van and started digging through the obvious places. I had two industrial strength magnets with plastic handles that I used for removing heavy steel access panels more easily but I couldn’t find them anywhere.

  “And we’re screwed,” I said.

  “Bug,” said my phone.

  “Right,” I said, “I’ve got a dozen centimeter-sized surveillance drones in my backpack.”

  “No,” said my phone. “Bug.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” I told my phone, “I’m a little slow.”

  I put my backpack tool bag on my lap and unzipped a small, padded compartment, once again extracting the amber-shaded pill bottle with the childproof cap. I opened it.

  “It’s about time, dimflit,” said the basso voice inside the bottle. “Watchin’ you’z more fun than a Congressional subcommittee hearing these days.”

  “Hi Chit,” I said. “I take it you’re up to speed?”

  “Case the joint, don’t get caught,” said the Murm.

  “Try along the roof line for access,” said my phone.

  “Don’t try to teach your gran’mutter how to suck sap,” said Chit.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said my phone.

  The van’s windshield switched to a heads up display map showing our progress. We were only a few miles from the mysterious manufacturing facility.

  “Two minute warning,” I told Chit.

  “Hold your aphids,” said Chit, “I’ll be there.”

  I heard the sound of tiny nozzles and smelled the ink. When Chit emerged from her bottle her carapace was the same shade of blue as the building’s exterior.

  “Camouflage, suckers,” she said.

  “Looking good,” I said.

  “I betcha say that to all the girls,” Chit said. I just rolled my eyes. “Gimme twenty minutes.”

  We could see from the map that the blue steel framed building was on a corner formed by a major ring road for the industrial park and the access road for the VIGorish Labs complex. I had my van drive along the ring road and cracked my window a few inches. When we were closest to the blue building Chit flew out the window with a hum of beating wings and was invisible against the azure Atlanta sky.

  “Now we wait,” I said. My phone started playing the theme music from Jeopardy. “That’s not helping.”

  I asked my van to stop at a mini-mart and bought a bag of salted peanuts so I could give one to Chit when she got back. There was a good view of the Hartsfield Spaceport from the parking lot and I amused—and distracted—myself by watching takeoffs and landings. It still took a huge amount of energy to achieve escape velocity, but it was a lot easier to get to orbit with unlimited congruency-supplied reaction mass and power. Dozens of four-bladed commercial hovercars flitted a hundred feet overhead, shuttling travelers to the port from Macon, Columbus and other smaller cities in south Georgia.

  My phone chimed. “It’s time.”

  I buckled in and asked my van to retrace our path along the ring road. When we got to the closest point to the factory I was relieved to hear Chit’s wing buzz as she flew in the window. She landed on top of my van’s seldom used steering wheel.

  “What did you see?” I felt like an excited dog who was panting and eager, ready to catch a stick. Even my phone was making soft, anxious bips and beeps.

  “Gimme a second to catch my breath,” said Chit, “I only got so many spiracles.”

  I sat on my hands and inhaled deeply. Twice.

  “Okay,” I said, “what happened?”

  “It was a pain to get in there,” said Chi
t. “I scared the feathers off of a pair of grackles.”

  “At the roof line,” noted my phone.

  “Yeah, so what?” said Chit.

  “Stop it,” I said. “What’s in there?”

  “It’s for drugs.”

  “Pharmaceutical manufacturing,” said my phone.

  “No, ya stupid tin can,” said Chit, “it’s making grajja!”

  Grajja was the stuff Tomáso had told me about that acted like methamphetamine for adult Dauushans. This was not good.

  “Tons of lawn clippings are fallin’ out of a bunch of congruencies in the ceilin’,” said Chit. “They land on belts that feed into dryin’ ovens, then macerators chop up what comes out.”

  “How close did you get?”

  “Close enough. I was inside and kept to the rafters. I could see the whole danged factory floor as clear as the zit on the back of your neck.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  “What was after the maceration stations?” asked my phone.

  “They loaded the dried chopped grass into big cookers and must have pumped in alcohol,” said Chit. “At least that’s what it said on the tanks next to the cookers. That’s a lot of booze.”

  “Not drinkable,” I said.

  “Maybe by you,” said Chit.

  “They’re likely using the alcohol and a mix of other solvents to purify the grajja extract,” said my phone. “Did you see more dryers after the cookers?”

  “Yeah,” said Chit, “an’ they were shoveling piles of green powder into sacks at the end of the dryers.”

  “Were you spotted?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “And were there any Galactics inside?”

  “Naaah, just humans,” said Chit.

  “Did you spot any signs?”

  “Yeah,” said Chit, her compound eyes twinkling. “What the heck is uni-sex supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not relevant,” I said. “Any logos?”

  “Two black spirals with a red circle-slash on top were stenciled on the powder sacks.”

  “Earth First Isolationists?” I’ve got to call Tomáso and let him know.”

  “Your meeting with Anthony Zwilniki is in fifteen minutes,” said my phone. I had to get moving.

  “Get me to VIGorish Labs’ headquarters,” I told my van. “I can talk to Tomáso on the way.”

  My phone dutifully connected me but Tomáso wasn’t available and I was routed to voicemail. I left him a message saying I’d call back when I got out of my meeting with Zwilniki. I expected that meeting was now going to be even more interesting. Chit climbed back into her bottle. I gave her a salted peanut, thanked her again for all her help and put the bottle back in the special compartment in my backpack where she could enjoy a feast and a well-deserved rest.

  “Please send Tomáso’s phone a detailed account of what we’ve learned.”

  “Glad to,” said my phone, “and good luck.”

  My van smoothly pulled up to the front entrance to VIGorish Labs’ HQ. I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath and set forth to find out just what Tony Zed wanted from Xenotech Support Corporation and yours truly. I didn’t think I’d like the answer.

  Chapter 17

  “Virtual reality is coming, and you’re going to jump into it.” ― Farhad Manjoo

  When I opened the wide tinted glass doors and entered the lobby I was blown away. Most companies opt for modern, airy, multi-story lobbies with abstract sculptures reaching up or polychromatic mobiles hanging down to impress visitors with their taste—and their profitability. VIGorish Labs took a different approach. Their large lobby was crowded with their own products, virtual immersive gaming tubes filled with liquid and gamers playing Atlantis Leviathan and Space Leviathan along with trainees for undersea and orbital simulations. The Plexiglas cylinders were four feet wide and rose half way to the ceiling three stories overhead. They were encircled with 360 degrees of curved video screens tilting out and down wrapped around them about eight feet up. I’d bet the original architectural model for the lobby tubes used paper drinking cones with the bottoms cut off for the video screens and paper towel roll cores as the Plexiglas gaming tubes. The real things looked much the same.

  The screens blaring down above my head showed visitors what the gamers and trainees were seeing through their virtual reality headsets. The effect of more than a dozen cylinders surrounding me, streaming real time game action complete with full volume sound effects, was overwhelming. It was like standing in the middle of a frenetic electronic forest or worshiping amid the pillars of a temple to some Dionysian digital god.

  Once my brain had a chance to process the intense inputs I saw that there were also military simulation tubes along the back wall. Their screens were showing extraterrestrial environments and threats from alien flora, fauna and sentients. The lobby was humid and there was an underlying odor of chlorine. A basket crane mounted in the ceiling moved gamers and trainees from a third floor balcony to and from their tubes.

  There were humans in all the cylinders. Their faces were hidden by their wraparound VR helmets and they floated with neutral buoyancy near the midpoint of the tubes. The gamers wore bathing suits, mostly black with slashes of garish colors. Trainees wore thin body suits—bright orange for undersea and electric blue for orbital simulations. The men and women in the military simulation tubes were wearing body suits in the strangest camouflage pattern I’d ever seen. It was based on darker and lighter shades of pink like the leaves on the Dauushan prickly pod banyan tree I’d climbed to rescue Spike. Who needs pink camouflage?

  And where was the reception desk? Or was there one? I looked closely and found the desk in the middle of the lobby’s floor. The desk was a thick transparent table with an arc of narrow Plexiglas cylinders behind it rising up like organ pipes on some sort of twenty-first century Nautilus. Perhaps it was meant to continue the Leviathan theme, though that juxtaposition mixed Verne and Melville uncomfortably in my mind. A man and a woman of indeterminate ethnicity stood behind the desk. Both were young and beautiful.

  A striking dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing a designer suit stood in front of the desk. When she saw me and the deer-in-the-headlights look on my face she waved me over and greeted me. To my eye she looked like the women I’d seen when I had lived in Brazil while my mom was working on generators at a hydroelectric plant in Santa Catarina state. Brazilian women have a unique way of carrying themselves. She projected both intellect and confidence.

  “Welcome to VIGorish Labs, Mr. Buckston,” she said, shaking my hand with brusque efficiency. “I’m Beatriz Rocha, Mr. Zwilniki’s executive assistant.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. My brain was still trying to take in everything happening around me in the lobby.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Buckston. It overwhelms everybody. It even overwhelms me and I designed it.”

  “I’m impressed. Call me Jack. It’s spectacular, like a combined overload of Times Square, Muir Woods and the Las Vegas Strip. How do people survive working the reception desk?”

  “They rotate on very short shifts,” said Ms. Rocha. “No more than an hour at a time.”

  “That makes sense. What about the gamers?”

  “What about them?” said Ms. Rocha. “It’s not confusing inside the tubes. They’re not getting all the lobby inputs, just what they receive through their virtual reality helmets. It’s prestigious to be on display in the lobby. The waiting list for gaming slots here is over twenty-four months, though of course the wait for trainees is much shorter.”

  “Perhaps I should put my name on the list,” I said, to see her reaction.

  “If you’re interested I’m sure we could move you to the front of the line,” said Ms. Rocha. “Only VIPs meet face to face with Mr. Zwilniki.”

  “I’m honored.”

  Her expression said “You should be.”

  She pulled a lanyard with a dangling gold card from her jacket pocket and stood on tiptoe to slip it over my head.<
br />
  “Your VIP visitors’ badge,” she said. “Please wear it at all times.”

  “Even in the shower?” I said. She gave me a look that made it clear she was not amused.

  “Please wear it at all times inside VIGorish Labs’ headquarters. Come this way, Mr. Buckston.” She guided me through a door that opened into an elevator lobby.

  I didn’t try to ask her to call me Jack a second time.

  There were five elevators—two on my left, two on my right and one straight ahead. Ms. Rocha directed me to the unpaired elevator. Something was odd. It didn’t have call buttons. Apparently it didn’t need them—it’s doors opened as we approached. The interior looked like something out of Star Trek with vertical light panels set into its sides. I followed Ms. Rocha inside. There weren’t any floor selection buttons either. I wondered if it was voice controlled. The doors closed and there was a small jolt, which surprised me since everything else was so smooth. I also heard a pneumatic hiss—more Star Trek homage, I assumed. Then we started rising. And rising. Bars of color flowed down along the light panels. It felt like we were ascending a skyscraper. After a minute my ears felt like they needed to pop from the change in altitude. What was going on? The building was only three stories tall.

  Then the elevator doors whooshed open. In front of me was a narrow translucent sky bridge five hundred feet above a bustling futuristic city. It led to the sky deck of a grandiose art deco structure resembling the top of the Chrysler Building. Ms. Rocha walked out on the bridge, so I did, too. I looked up, down, left and right. The sky looked like sky with just the right sprinkling of clouds. The maglev trains and flying cars and tens of thousands of pedestrians flowing on the streets far below me looked real. I could sense just the right amount of wind for this altitude hitting my face as I walked. But this was a simulation—it had to be a simulation, right? Tony Zed was showing off for me, for his investors, for his own ego, for all of the above? I looked over my shoulder. Behind me at the far end of the sky bridge, where the elevator had been, was a gleaming chrome-plated luxury space yacht whose lines were also inspired by the top of the Chrysler Building and probably George Lucas. I stopped myself from rubbing my eyes. I wouldn’t give Zwilniki the satisfaction.