Mind Over Ship
Page 21
The mentar took a moment before replying
All at once, Meewee remembered his recent flight over the Pacific.
But Meewee’s mentar failed again to respond, and Cabinet said
The cart rolled up to Meewee. He jumped in and clung to the handle-bars as the cart took him at an incautious speed back to the reception building.
Going to See Someone
The addy for the relationship counselor led him to the lower lobby of the Nestlé Tower off Daley Plaza, but when Fred arrived, Mary was nowhere to be seen.
Hi, hey, she said when he paged her. I’ll be right there. I’m out visiting the baboon.
Fred went to the window wall overlooking the plaza. Daley Plaza, at Munilevel 000, was a concrete park sixteen square blocks in area that served as the floor to Daley Well, the deepest traffic well in the Midwest. It boasted unobstructed airspace 507 munilevels to the top of Nestlé Tower and the blue skies beyond. It contained four pairs of spiral interchanges that served all major traffic arteries on all major munilevels. Thousands of vehicles climbed up and down the magic bean stalks every minute, like tornadoes of taillights, like twirling ropes of shiny beads, like a living sculpture three kilometers high.
By comparison, the twencen Picasso baboon sat like a rusted doorstop in the center of the plaza, like some kid’s discarded metal shop project, like the afterbirth of the Industrial Age. Fred couldn’t conjure up a baboon in its simple shapes. If anything, he saw the head of a dairy cow. Other people saw other things; that was probably why it was called art.
Fred picked out a figure on the main pedway connecting the Picasso to the Nestlé. An evangeline — was it Mary? Fred confirmed her transponders in his visor, and while he was watching, the pedway came to an unexpected halt. Pedestrians were thrown off balance and were falling over each other. Another hairball?
Then everyone on the plaza stopped what they were doing and looked up into the chimney of the well. Fred pressed his cheek against the glass but couldn’t get the angle. He found Mary again, some meters away from the stalled pedway, limping to a park bench. “I see you. Hang on. I’m coming.”
Fred, wait! It’s not safe.
But he was already through the pressure curtain and sprinting toward the baboon. The moment Fred left the building, he tasted panic in the air. It was intensified by an illegal subaural alarm that jarred his bones — a two-note dirge, like a silent foghorn that was felt as much as heard. A bee flew at his face, almost tripping him up, and screeched, “Flee! Flee! The Wreckers are here! Flee! Flee!” before racing away.
There was a terrific thud overhead, like a giant boxing glove hitting a brick wall, and Fred glanced up to see a cargo van careening out of a downward spiral. Fortunately, it was scooped up in a safety lane and chuted to a soft touchdown on the nearest munilevel. But its short fall was enough to spook the thousands of plaza pedestrians who began a stampede to the emergency portals. They filled the paths and forced Fred to cut across a stone fountain.
As he ran, he tagged the spirals overhead in his visor, which blossomed with travel advisories ten layers deep. “Mary, are you hurt?”
Yes, my knee. I can’t walk.
There were sounds of more collisions overhead, and cars were falling into safety lanes by the dozen.
“I saw you on a bench. Is it made from conplast?”
I think so.
There were so many collisions, the safety lanes were overwhelmed, and cars, vans, and buses started to spill out and fall into the well.
“Crawl under it right now, Mary! Don’t hesitate! Do it now!”
By the time he reached her bench, vehicles were hitting the plaza with impact-absorbing thuds, like rotten fruit. Fred paused to catch his breath and did a snap assessment. The bench was, indeed, molded conplast, and nearly indestructible; Mary fit snugly under it. Options: carry her through the impact area or shelter here.
The question was answered a moment later by a big black limousine right on top of him. Fred dove behind the bench and the limo struck meters away and cartwheeled over them, slamming the bench with debris.
“Are you hit?” he asked. She wasn’t. Fred didn’t quite fit in the space under the park bench, so he crouched next to it and watched for falling cars. The city traffic midem had apparently regained control of the grid, and the sounds of collisions were tapering off.
Mary said, “It’s over.”
“Only the bombardment part. Next comes the pillaging. Look!” An army of freakish mechs began to invade the plaza. They surged out of storm drains and service vents, from side streets and arcades.
“They won’t bother us,” Fred said without knowing if that was true. “We need to shelter here.” He took off his Campaigner hat and pulled its floppy brim, stretching it to its limit. He covered both Mary under the bench and himself with the hat like a rain poncho.
“How’s the knee?”
“Bad.”
“I don’t have anything on me for the pain, sorry.”
“I’ll survive. By the way, love the hat.”
“It sorta grows on you.”
Mary and Fred watched the full-throttle wrecker attack from their court-side bench. Scavenging mechs came in a stunning variety. They were bizarre assemblages of cannibalized parts from other machines. There was the lawn scupper chassis with acetylene torch arms; the utility cart with grappling hooks and improvised armor; a gaggle of rat-sized, leaping metal snips.
The scavenger mechs swarmed over the fallen limo. Doors and side panels vanished. Three hapless limo passengers hung in their crash pods like bugs in blue amber as the car around them was cut, gouged, and ripped to pieces, and then carted away by tiny tractors.
“By the way,” Fred said, “in my own defense, I would like to point out that even though the sky is raining cars and buses, and I see slipper puppies going by with frickin’ flamethrowers attached to their heads, I’m not blaming this on the nits.”
“That’s encouraging to hear, Fred.”
A subtle change came over the chaos outside their shelter. A sturdy mech with flailing teflon spikes impaled a tractor and hauled it off, along with its spoils. Fred had already checked his pockets, and now he checked them again. He sorely missed the pocket billy. What a foolish gesture it had been to leave it behind.
Buzzing, crushing, dive-bombing mechs entered the fray, and vicious fights broke out everywhere as thieves stole from each other. The only possible weapon Fred had on him was the omnitool, and its best tool for the job was probably the little plasma spot welder. Given the anatomy of his adversaries, he might be able to cripple them with a few strategically placed spot welds. It was better than nothing.
But in the end, hand-to-hand defense was unnecessary. Like pulling a switch, all the fights ceased at once, and all the surviving mechs scattered to their boltholes, dragging whatever treasures they could manage. After a minute, all was quiet on Daley Plaza.
Fred said, “The hommers must have arrived.”
Mary said, “Good. If we hurry, we can still make part of our appointment.”
That was the last thing Fred had expected to hear. He’d lost all thought of the relationship meeting. Was it so important to her that e
ven a full-scale wrecker assault was merely an inconvenience? “What about your knee?”
“We can stop at a NanoJiffy on the way.”
Fred had his doubts, but he got up and checked their surroundings. HomCom and police GOVs had indeed arrived in force. Fred lifted the Campaigner off Mary. Its outer surface was pitted and scorched. He helped Mary to her feet. “Can you stand?”
She tried, but her knee was swollen like a melon, so he picked her up and held her in his arms. “You know, your injury is probably more than what a NanoJiffy autodoc can handle. And the police undoubtedly have a cordon.”
“Just drive, Fred.”
“Yes, boss.” Fred took a few steps toward the Nestlé. “I mean, can’t we just reschedule?”
“Oh, Fred, you are so innocent.”
The matter was taken out of their hands moments later when a hommer bee arrived and dropped a frame of a bored-looking russ proxy in a Watch Commander uniform. He said with a lazy drawl, “Myren Skarland and Londenstane, this area has been declared a SIZ. Do not leave it without authorization. Remain where you are; medical treatment is on its way.”
“Busted,” Fred said.
“It’s like you wanted to be stopped.”
A crash cart raced over to them and lowered two seats. In a caring but authoritative voice it said, “Please sit for treatment.”
Fred placed Mary in one seat and took the other. No sooner had he sat down than the cart informed him, “You are not injured, Myr Londenstane. Swipe for medical release.” Fred hopped off and swiped.
Meanwhile, the cart covered Mary’s swollen knee in a blister wrap and cleaned and sealed her minor cuts and scrapes. All the pain lines melted from her face. Behind her, at the carcass of the limo, another cart was midwifing the three passengers from their crash pods. First, the blue gel liquefied, and then the tough bags burst, birthing the grateful survivors on the bare pavement.
“I’ll tell you what,” Fred said. “We can cut out the middleman and do the session ourselves.”
“What? Here?”
“Right here, right now.”
“Yeah, right,” Mary said. “You won’t even talk to me in our own bedroom, and you’re going to talk out here in public?”
Fred motioned at all the official activity in the plaza. “We’re in a comm fog; we’ll have pretty good privacy for a while. Just tell me what you were going to tell the counselor.”
Mary wasn’t so sure. “It’s not as simple as that,” she said. “Part of the reason for going to a counselor in the first place is for the perspective they bring to what might otherwise sound like a litany of harsh and hurtful things.”
“You’ve never had any difficulty telling me hard things in the past.”
“You really want to do this here?”
The cart peeled the blister wrap off Mary’s knee. Her knee looked good as new. With a hint of swagger in its voice, the cart said, “You may go now, Myr Skarland. Swipe for care instructions and medical release.”
Fred helped Mary stand, but her knee felt fine and she didn’t need his support. They went back to their bench to sit down and finish what they had started. First, they hugged for a while, and then Fred whispered, “I love you, Mary.”
“I know that, Fred,” she whispered back. “And I love you. I say this out of love. What I was going to tell the counselor was that you’ve become a different person. Or maybe we both have, which is probably the case. But whichever it is, I don’t know if the new me wants to be with the new you anymore.”
Fred didn’t know how to respond, though it was more or less what he had expected to hear. “How bad is it?”
Mary rested her head on his shoulder. “The problem is I like the new me, and I don’t want to go back to our old life. I can’t tell you what to do — or how to think — but I just don’t see us going on like this forever.”
There really wasn’t much more to say, and they sat quietly while her words sank in. When a hommer bee flew over and declared, “You are both free to go,” they hardly noticed it. So they were surprised a few minutes later when straining legions of media and witness bees soared overhead, crisscrossing the plaza in search of anything of interest to look at.
“Oh, crap!” Fred said, scanning the airspace above them. “We’d better make a run for it. The tube station over there has the nearest MEZ. Think you can run, or should I carry you?”
“I’m not running anywhere, Fred.” Mary stood and turned up her jacket collar, exposing her Blue Bee escort. It had been there the whole time, waiting in reserve. It dropped off and flew away to lose itself in the menacing swarm above. Mary held out her arm to Fred. “We’ll walk to the station, like civilized people, and woe be to the mech that gets in our way.”
To the Mem Lab
Cabinet was giving Meewee last-minute instructions in the ready room outside a null lock in one of the lower floors of the Starke headquarters arcology. It was a null room Meewee had never used before.
MEEWEE TOUGHED OUT the itchy, half-hour cleansing in the lock, and when the inner hatch undogged and the pressure equalized, he was surprised to find himself entering not any kind of secret lab, but what looked like the inside of a private Slipstream car. It had a much narrower interior than a normal car and no windows at all. Everything in the car appeared to be fireproof; even the seats, which were padded with cushions of ceramic wool. Next to one of the seats was a liter flask of Orange Flush and a portable toilet.
FOR A WHILE, the ride was unremarkable, a normal tube ride underground, but not long into it, the car slowed down, then stopped, and there were loud clanging sounds fore and aft. The interior of the car grew warm and stuffy, and the walls were warm to the touch.
Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and soon the car resumed its journey. After many turns and much high-speed coupling and uncoupling, the car slowed and stopped again. Something grabbed it in a solid grip, and the hatch clamps rang like hammers. As Meewee was unbuckling his harness, there was a burst of electronic static, and an unfamiliar female voice said, “Please state your name and what business you have here.” It struck Meewee as an amazing utterance, because it was an ID challenge that meant exactly the same thing in both English and Starkese. Until that moment he hadn’t been aware that such phrases existed.
Meewee thought it prudent to reply in Starkese
Recruitment Day
Others might have seen it as a demotion to a station in life that, incredibly, was lower than regular john duty. And that was how Fred first saw it when Ajax, the John Union mentar, informed him of his transfer to the night shift. He didn’t complain. He went along with it in part to spite Mary through self-debasement. Or at least, that was what he accused himself of doing. You bet I’m a new person, he’d tell her. I’m a graveyard-shift john!
And so, Fred left the morgue crew. He reported to his first 1:00 A.M. shift and was assigned to Node B5 at the Chicago Inter-Tube Port. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he had arrived at an unexpected oasis. First, the hangarlike node was an exclusion zone, which meant that all the hungry media bees hounding him were left at the door.
Second, Fred was the only h
uman at the node. He swiped in as the swing-shift john swiped out, and the sixty-acre site was his alone to manage till 10:00 A.M. He didn’t have to deal with people at all. His job was to oversee midem-controlled Node B5 machines. Machines that didn’t actually need any such human oversight. Fred mostly stayed out of their way as they intercepted up to fifteen hundred van freighters per hour for gamma-ray inspection.
The machines were so clever that they rarely malfed, and when they did, they hardly needed a john to tell them how to self-repair. The CITP node operated twenty-five scanner tunnels that towed freighters through in both directions while inventorying and analyzing everything inside them. Whenever the midems found something of interest, which was rare, they alerted the hommers themselves. Fred’s whole responsibility, it seemed, was to be there — just in case. The machines were so quiet that even when working at full speed of one freighter per tunnel/minute, the large bustling space was hushed. And Fred’s endless, pointless, rambling rounds were downright meditative. After only a few shifts, he was actually looking forward to coming to work.
Fred’s demotion to Graveyard Johnny threw Fred’s and Mary’s schedules completely out of sync, and they saw little of each other over the next few weeks. But even this seemed to be a blessing in disguise.
AT 3:07 A.M., during a moderately busy shift, the Node B5 tranquility was shattered by a throat-ripping, nerve-scraping screech of metal. Fred stopped short and turned toward the sound. Lane 6 was shutting down, and its traffic was shunted to 7 and 8. A major transport plate had cracked its frictionless coating and tore up itself and a dozen more plates before grinding to a halt.
As the rest of the facility hummed along as usual, Fred went to check out the damage. His visor cap painted the interior of the hub with field and radiation overlays, and he threaded his way along the bluest shadows along his route.
The special repair ’beitors were hefty brutes in their own right. Two of them straddled Lane 6. One was lifting a section of scanner tunnel while the second replaced slide plates beneath it. The intact sections of tunnel were locked down; their radiation count was cool blue. Fred stepped inside one of these for a better view of the repair work. It was the most excitement he’d seen all week.