by G M Steenrod
He loved this piece because of the history of the wearable symbol. It made him feel connected to a simpler time and a slower pace of living. He had observed a similar trait manifested in his father, through his father's resurgent Brahminism.
Kumar put on the pendant, and tried a couple of casual poses in the screens. He put on the pork pie hat he had left casually on a small, white night stand. It looked good in every situation.
Kumar's flat was 4 blocks from the first port built for the city. More modern facilities, capable of handling the cargo of a now much large city had been built in the 50 years since the original port had been built. That original port, dubbed “New Port,” was still active, but at a much lower activity level. The warehouse blocks that abutted the port were largely automated. The other 3 blocks in a radius around the port had fallen into disrepair, and had been a blight on the city for decades.
The flat that Kumar had purchased was among the first remodeled as part of an urban renewal project. He had taken the early adopter risk. The properties in the 3rd ring of blocks had since been revitalized, and become a collection of dance clubs, high end brothels, and eating establishments. The second ring had not yet been revitalized, but had become a place for sense addictions—screen technology put into place for those choosing to completely flee reality. It was tolerated tech, but borderline illegal.
The screen flashed orange as he finished. Kumar was on a timetable. With the emergence of space travel, punctuality had permeated popular culture. Life, death, and success was all linked to timing in space travel. One was either capable of the space travel lifestyle or one was horribly mired to the Earth.
He credited much of his personal success to timely execution. For Kumar, time was his god, to be worshiped with punctual action. The screen flashed again, a burnt umber.
Kumar made his way down to the street. It was a stirring tumult of industrial robots, people and slow-moving transport sleds. In New Port City, travel tended to be very short distances, or very long distances. For that reason, besides the large cost of registry, there were very few personal vehicles.
He glanced about the street catching a few eyes. In his bright blue suit, with his impressive physique, and flashing, old tone pendant, Kumar commanded attention. He lingered slightly, giving his pendant a chance to broadcast his brand, adjusted his pork pie hat, and walked toward the port. He chose a classic strut with a hand lingering near his groin. It was a classic work, well-studied and well-practiced.
The crowd recognized Kumar, and that recognition passed through the crowd like a brief tremble. He walked in the direction of “Hose and Hats,” a popular brothel for the affluent.
The dark haired Stan and Shanna, a prostitute couple wearing trademark stockings, waved at him. Kumar acknowledged them with a hat tip. “Hose and Hats” was not the evening's destination. He needed a deeper distraction.
Kumar pressed through the crowd and slipped into the second ring of blocks. There was an almost palpable membrane marking the change between the two radii. While the street radiating up from the port itself remained active due to the commercial traffic, the side streets radiating out from it had only a few people wandering them. Some were unaware of where they were and wandered lost. Others moved deliberately. He was one of the latter.
He strutted down a side street and passed two alleys. The third alley was his destination. He turned down it, and slipped into a doorway 4 meters down the alley to his left. Kumar raised a secure digikey to the door. The lock mechanism in the door shifted, and the door popped open with a slight hiss.
The door opened into a darkened room, mostly empty, except for a short, bearded gentleman seated in a chair positioned mid room. He stared vapidly into space through a set of virtual goggles. Such goggles had been favored technology briefly, but were replaced by the more visceral, immersive experience of the screens. When permitted, the body sought the greater immersion.
“Hello, Hank,” said Kumar, “What's on the tap tonight.”
Hank acknowledged him with a slight shift of his gaze through the goggles.
“We're taking you back to the jungle, back to the histories. You're going to love it,” Hank stated. His pitch surprisingly studied and compelling.
“Really? What's the penal?” asked Kumar.
“Whole year on this one. Don't do it if you can't do the risk.”
A year in a penal colony was harsh. The screens must be far out side of the permitted domain. When screen technology had first emerged out of the old “Silicon Valley” region, a free speech idealism had come with it.
When an average person's senses can't distinguish the fictional sensory input of the screens from real life, the images can cause serious negative psychological impacts. Mental illness spiked quickly within that anything goes sensory environment, and was followed promptly by sweeping legislation restricting its use everywhere.
There was even a brief push to completely outlaw screen technology.
Kumar held up a crypto card and authorized the transaction on its small screen. Crypto cards provided a hard to track alternative to more automated credit transfers. They could be filled anonymously, and had some ability to be recovered in case of loss.
Hank handed him a small tube, and the door behind him slid open. Kumar entered the rectangular changing room on the other side. It was lined with small, white cubicles. Kumar stripped naked, popped open a cubicle door and put his belongings inside. He put the small tube in his mouth, and squeezed it with his fingers. A mist shot into his mouth when he inhaled, drawing the vapor into his lungs.
He had seconds to make it into the main screen room before the effect of the supps kicked in.
Supps were so called because they suppressed the mind's ability to distinguish between screen reality and the outside reality of the world. Even bad screen scenes could be mistaken for real. A good scene was accepted as real without question. An excellent scene like those produced by Cassie had an effect similar to a religious awakening.
Kumar slid into the screen room, and the door, coated by screens, disappeared. He was in the clearing of a jungle. There were others here.
Screens had been wrapped around pillars and objects to provide small, micro-rooms where the scenes could unfold for different individuals without spoiling the illusion for others. The rules were simple. No physical violence. Nearly all Supp parlors required the players to be naked to prevent weapons being brought into the parlor, or something from being turned into a weapon during a fit of insanity.
The rules of every parlor varied according to the play it hosted. In this parlor, there were no sexual limits.
The Supps activated. He could feel the breeze of the jungle around him, and smell the exotic, green plant life. He dropped down on all fours and started to creep rapidly along row of bushes and rocks. He didn't know whether the scene had an objective, and he needed to be cautious until he did. He was alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
Systems
“Madam?” prompted Alfie, “Madam, there appears to be an error with the screens. I can't determine the nature of the error.”
Cassie responded, “Visualize system functions, Alfie.” Cassie was at her control panel. The screens surrounding her filled with a graphic representation of the house's computer systems. Coded by color, the amount of activity in each system and the connection between each system was visible.
The diagnostic routines that Alfie used would identify typical patterns of failure. So, his inability to identify the problem meant that the existence of the error had been identified by an unexpected drop in performance, but that the source was not typical.
“Show me the impacted system, please.”
An area of the images around her rose to the foreground. It was there. An area of dull gray that should be pulsing a lively green. Cassie examined different puffs of color on the screen, looking for something that “didn't belong,” an anomaly. It would have to be subtle to go undetected by Alfie.
Using finger gestur
es, she moved deliberately through the different blooms of color, inspecting the lines within them and those radiating outward.
“There, “she said while pointing. The area zoomed in. In the center of the area was a sporadic black flash of pixels. It looked much like a sea urchin. With the spread of her fingers, she magnified the urchin. A set of eyes emerged between the spines of the urchin. They stared at her.
“That's ridiculous!” Cassie gasped.
The urchin, alarmed by her words, folded its spines down until they interlocked and formed a solid black carapace. It transformed into a beetle. It still had the same eyes. They looked at her with a tone of condemnation.
Cassie froze. “This can't be happening.” Confusion bubbled in her. Then anger.
“Alfie, screens off.” The screens remained unchanged.
“Alfie? Alfie! Screens off.”
The beetle shifted, and began to creep toward her. Cassie scrambled backward forgetting that it was a screen image. It certainly didn't seem to be a screen image.
“Stop! Stop, now!” Cassie squeezed the hammer she was holding tightly, and drew it back to swing at the beetle.
The beetle charged her. Cassie gasped.
The scene ended. Cassie looked around her. Samuel was beside her with his two paws pressed on her chest. Cassie was in bed. She realized she had been asleep, but was still disoriented from her dream. Samuel nudged her with his Pug nose and gave her a lick.
“That was a dream? That was completely ridiculous,” she said to the air or perhaps to Samuel. Her mother had always said that dreams processed the baggage of one's life. If the issue with the screens was carrying over into her sleep, she needed to get her basic support behaviors into place.
She had been slipping in her self-care.
Cassie rose from the twisted rumple of bed sheets around her and unceremoniously placed Samuel on the floor.
She stripped her sleeping garments off and strode naked into a large closet. The closet ran the distance of her entire bedroom and was 3 meters in depth.
“Alfie, the white, training jumpsuit #3.”
The closet trembled and a small round storage unit shot down a clear plastic hyper loop tube. The storage unit locked into a rectangular hanging rack immediately in front of Cassie. Her jumpsuit flowed from the tube like a flag flapping in the wind. It stretched across the rack in front of her.
A closet the size of Cassie's could easily store a thousand contemporary clothing pieces. Cassie didn't use the space to that end. She had a penchant for vintage pieces, and had a taste for outfits that aided her sex play. Such things were bulky and had to be stored in the ancient fashion, on hangers.
The cloth of her jumpsuit clung to her as she put it on. It was much like a second skin, only tougher and more durable.
***
The solarium in Cassie's house was large, 10 meters by 10 meters. The floor was a shallow pool of water contained by black tile. In the room's center was a 3 by 3 meter platform made from engineered Redwood. From the platform to the door, there was a walkway of slate stepping stones. A slow, continuous current was evident as the water flowed through the gaps between the stones, rippling as it it did. Overhead, a roof of seamless glass stretched downward to become part of the solarium's wall. The glass provided a peaceful view of the forest ringing the house.
Small islets covered with plants drifted slowly across the water. They drifted in a fashion that first appeared to be random. Eventually, though, the islets would move against the current, revealing hidden motorization.
The sun broke over the horizon, and cast a bolt of early dawn light through the left side of solarium. It fell precisely on the Redwood platform. Cassie moved barefoot, and catlike, clutching Samuel-like a totem to her, while she crossed the stepping stones.
Samuel didn't mind the water. She had never dropped him, but he had discovered that a brief swim could bring him to one of the islets. He would ride them, and while he did so his face radiated an almost fiendish pleasure.
To Cassie, he seemed ancient at those times, reliving a power from some kingly incarnation in old human history.
She plopped him down on the platform. He trotted over to the side to deliberate what island, if any, was to be the day's conquest.
She stepped out into the early sun and let it seep through her white jumpsuit. Cassie began, and before she realized it, she had performed the 15 minutes of her Yoga routine.
The sun now lit half the platform. With great grace, she rose from Downward Dog and stretched upward. She was elongated, and she allowed her body to extend like a piston reaching its maximum stroke. Her body seemed to freeze in that position for a moment, and hover. The sun bathed her. In her mind, it swirled around her and through her to gather deep in her core.
Without warning, without a shudder or a flinch, she collapsed. Down. Down into a tight ball, and then rolled to the sunbathed side of the platform. Her feet were under her without thought, in less time then a blink. Both arms shot out to her sides, seizing the air with tight claws. In they came, and her left foot swept the ground. Then the right.
She paused and inhaled, she could feel the sunlight flow through her, down into her muscle fibers. A thin layer of sweat glistened on her neck. A blinding fury ignited in her brain, and she struck the air in front of her with a punch that caused the water in the pool before her to tremble lightly.
Her routine of qi gong and martial arts had passed to her from her mother, and to her mother from Cassie's grandmother, and to Cassie's grandmother from Cassie's grandfather.
Cassie's grandfather was the only man that Cassie's father was afraid of. As Cassie's mother, Ada, had put it, “And that was something, given who your father was.”
Cassie's father had been one of the first members of the Black Corp. He had started his military service as a U.S. Marine. As space travel rose in Ada's era, it quickly became focused on 2 things: the settlement of Mars, and the mining of Rare Earth metals. When the focus had been exploration and colonization, only government and corporate interests had been interested in space travel.
As space travel became mundane, and mining became a focus, an entrepreneur by the name of John Lithome discovered that a few kinetic rounds fired into a mining vessel could easily cause catastrophic depressurization. During depressurization, the crew was usually blow into space, and the cargo pods could be transferred to his ship. Of course, he could take all the time he wanted to harvest the loot, as there was no one able or willing to interfere.
Mr. Lithome became the first space pirate. He took to the image of space piracy quickly, and even added a large, gas launched harpoon to his first ship, “The Predator.” He went from a 3 man crew to a small fleet of ships within 2 years. In part, the rapid gains in staff he made were due to the romantic allure of being a pirate. In part, the gains were due to the trillion credits in cargo he had seized in his first year.
Space travel, domestic robotics, and the simple quantum chip, all necessitated the use of Rare Earth metals. Earth's corporations would pay for the supply no matter the source.
The United States took the lead in forming the first combat capable “Space Fleet,” and staffed it from the Marine Corp. The ability to shield from kinetics and prevent depressurization was very limited for a space vessel. The mass added to a ship made it unwieldy and increased the fuel burn. It was easier to add a kinetic weapon that could penetrate the armor than it was to add armor.
The Brass realized, after the loss of half of the fleet to Lithome, that it was going to take a technological jump in armoring to be able to even the playing field against kinetic weapons. That jump was nowhere in sight. Instead, funds went into developing a highly durable, space suit that could seal itself automatically following a puncture. Core systems of the Space Fleet ships became heavily armored and incredibly redundant, while the skin remained only lightly armored. A Space Fleet ship could be reduced to almost a metal frame, conduits, power systems, and offensive weapons and still operate. The marines, whi
le very uncomfortable, could survive because of their suits.
By the end of the 4th year, Lithome was starting to suffer losses. Even hand held kinetic weapons could depressurize one of his vessels, and destroy vital systems. A team of 20 marines, released from a troop carrier into gravity free ballet of space, carrying hand-held kinetics, was something that Lithome's pirates dreaded seeing.
Then Lithome started shooting them. Bright white suits made them visually detectable.
The Marine Corp changed the suits again in response, making them a flat black, and impregnating them with radar suppressors for further protection. The dress uniform also became black. The marines would blend easily into the darkness of space.
By the 6th year in, the Marines were fighting constant pitched battles against Lithome, his many trillions of credits, and the burgeoning small pirate groups that sprouted from the dark nooks of ambition for a piece of the Rare Earth pie.
The President realized that the space unit needed its own identity as it obviously had its own mission and tactics. She floated some ideas, Space Force, Space Marines, Astromarines. They all seemed contrived.