The elevator climbed up the side of the ravine, hissing and spitting as it passed street after street level, and the roofs of houses at the lower levels and clinging to the sides slowly slid past them.
***
There was a balcony on the High Road near one of the bridges that ran along under the glass roof that capped the city. Riun grabbed Tia’s arm, and pulled her over to the railing. “Look,” he said.
Tia did, and gasped. The city below was changing. People were spilling out onto the streets. Lights were turning on. It wasn’t orderly, or staggered in shifts as normal. Instead, the focus of the disturbance was the calculating building they’d run through. People wandering the streets randomly, not using the flowchart sidewalks and lights.
There was chaos in the Abyssal City, and it was spreading.
Lights flickered randomly, and gouts of steam burst from below the streets.
“Did we cause that?” Tia asked, looking at the masses of pedestrians wandering aimlessly about, shouting and arguing. They could hear the grinding shudder of machines coming to a halt over the bubbling hum of discussions and arguments drifting upwards from the entire city. “Did you?”
She glanced at him, and realized from the look on his face that he was just as horrified as she was. “I’m just a traveler,” he whispered. “Just a traveler.”
They looked at the spreading chaos, rapt. “Do you think it’ll bring the entire city to a stop?” she asked.
Riun shook his head. “No. No I’ve seen this before. It’s a temporary fault. A systems failure.” Warning klaxons fired to life throughout the city. “Soon they’ll order a return to homes order, empty the streets. Stop all the machines then restart them. Order will return.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tia said. Not in all her life. It unnerved her. She’d always thought of society, the system around her, as stable and everlasting and solid.
Yet here she was, with Riun. And there chaos was.
In the distance, she heard the rumble of an intercity train.
They had to move through the sandbox and get to it.
“Listen,” Riun told her, hearing the train and turning to face her. They were so close, their lips could almost touch. “If you leave with me, I can’t promise you anything. I can’t promise you a home, or a city that you fit into. I can’t promise you my love, I’ve only known you a week. All I can promise is a travel partner, and the fact that I do find you beautiful and interesting and I want to escape with you. Can that be enough?”
Tia pulled the silvered card off her neck and looked down at it. “Yes,” she said. “I’m willing to take chance and uncertainty.”
And then she threw the card out into the space over the ravine and watched it flutter away, down toward the steaming, chaotic streets of the city.
A Jar of Goodwill
Somewhere in the late 90s I came across a book about the science of worldbuilding that had a number of scenarios in it, including one about biological life using plastics as part of its genetic makeup, and an atmosphere laced with acidic mists. The images burned themselves into my brain, and I set out to use them.
It took a few iterations. Beginning in 1996 and moving all the way up through 2010 I kept trying to write versions of this story and failing at it. Sometimes you just don’t have the toolset to do it with.
But in 2010 I came up with the right character to bring to this world, as well as the aliens in this story. Aliens so obsessed with property rights and copyright that they’d invaded the Earth to ask for back royalties on the use of the wheel.
After all, they’d invented it long before we had.
There was something chilling in that sort of hyper owner-oriented universe that made this tale spill right out onto the page.
Points On A Package
You keep a low profile when you’re in oxygen debt. Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway. So I was nervous when a stationeer appeared at my cubby and knocked on the door.
I slid out and stood in front of the polished, skeletal robot.
“Alex Mosette?” it asked.
There was no sense in lying. The stationeer had already scanned my face. It was just looking for voice print verification. “Yes, I’m Alex,” I said.
“The harbormaster wants to see you.”
I swallowed. “He could have sent me a message.”
“I am here to escort you.” The robot held out a tinker-toy arm, digits pointed along the hallway.
Space in orbit came at a premium. Bottom rung types like me slept in cubbies stacked ten high along the hallway. On my back in the cubby, watching entertainment shuffled in from the planets, they made living on a space station sound exotic and exciting.
It was if you were further up the rung. I’d been in those rooms: places with wasted space. Furniture. Room to stroll around in.
That was exotic.
Getting space in outer space was far down my list of needs.
First was air. Then food.
Anything else was pure luxury.
***
The harbormaster stared out into space, and I silently waited at the door to Operations, hoping that if I remained quiet he wouldn’t notice.
Ops hung from near the center of the megastructure of the station. A blister stuck on the end of a long tunnel. You could see the station behind us: the miles long wheel of exotic metals rotating slowly.
No gravity in Ops, or anywhere in the center. Spokes ran down from the wheel to the center, and the center was where ships docked and were serviced and so on.
So I hung silently in the air, long after the stationeer flitted off to do the harbormaster’s bidding, wondering what happened next.
“You’re overdrawn,” the harbormaster said after a needle-like ship with long feathery vanes slipped underneath us into the docking bays.
He turned to face me, even though his eyes had been hollowed out long ago. Force of habit. His real eyes were now every camera, or anything mechanical that could see.
The harbormaster moved closer. The gantry around him was motorized, a long arm moving him anywhere he wanted in the room.
Hundreds of cables, plugged into his scalp like hair, bundled and ran back along the arm of the gantry. Hoses moved effluvia out. More hoses ran purified blood, and other fluids, back in.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Traffic is light. And requests have dropped off. I’ve taken classes. Even language lessons…” I stopped when I saw the wizened hand raise, palm up.
“I know what you’ve been doing.” The harbormaster’s sightless sockets turned back to the depths of space outside. The hardened skin of his face showed few emotions, his artificial voice was toneless. “You would not have been allowed to overdraw if you hadn’t made good faith efforts.”
“For which,” I said, “I am enormously appreciative.”
“That ship that just arrived brings with it a choice for you,” the harbormaster continued without acknowledging what I’d just said. “I cannot let you overdraw anymore if you stay on station, so I will have to put you into hibernation. To pay for hibernation and your air debt I would buy your contract. You’d be woken for guaranteed work. I’d take a percentage. You could buy your contract back out, once you had enough liquidity.”
That was exactly what I’d been dreading. But he’d indicated an alternate. “My other option?”
He waved a hand, and a holographic image of the ship I’d just seen coming in to dock hung in the air. “They’re asking for a professional Friend.”
“For their ship?” Surprise tinged my question. I wasn’t crew material. I’d been shipped frozen to the station, just another corpsicle. People like me didn’t stay awake for travel. Not enough room.
The harbormastor shrugged pallid shoulders. “They will not tell me why. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to get them to tell me what they wanted.”
I looked at the long ship. “I’m not a fuckbot. They know that, right?”
�
�They know that. They reiterated that they do not want sexual services.”
“I’ll be outside the station. Outside your protection. It could still be what they want.”
“That is a risk. How much so, I cannot model for you.” The harbormaster snapped his fingers, and the ship faded away. “But the contractors have extremely high reputational scores on past business dealings. They are freelance scientists: biology, botany, and one linguist.”
So they probably didn’t want me as a pass-around toy.
Probably.
“Rape amendments to the contract?” I asked. I was going to be on a ship, unthawed, by myself, with crew I’d never met. I had to think about the worst.
“Prohibitive. Although, accidental loss of life is not quite as high, which means I’d advise lowering the former so that there is no temptation to murder you after a theoretical rape to evade the higher contract payout.”
“Fuck,” I sighed.
“Would you like to peruse their reputation notes?” the harbormaster asked. And for a moment, I thought maybe the harbormaster sounded concerned.
No. He was just being fair. He’d spent two hundred years of bargaining with ships for goods, fuel, repair, services. Fair was built in, the half computer half human creature in front of me was all about fair. Fair got you repeat business. Fair got you a wide reputation.
“What’s the offer?”
“Half a point on the package,” the harbormaster said.
“And we don’t know what the package is, or how long it will take… or anything.” I bit my lip.
“They assured me that half a point would pay off your debt and then some. It shouldn’t take more than a year.”
A year. For half a percent. Half a percent of what? It could be cargo they were delivering. Or, seeing as it was a crew of scientists, it could be some project they were working on.
All of which just raised more questions.
Questions I wouldn’t have answers to unless I signed up. I sighed. “That’s it, then? No loans? No extensions?”
The harbormaster sighed. “I answer to the Gheda shareholders who built and own this complex. I have already stretched my authority to give you a month’s extension. The debt has to be called. I’m sorry.”
I looked out at the darkness of space out beyond Ops. “Shit choices either way.”
The harbormaster said nothing.
I folded my arms. “Do it.”
Journey by Gheda
The docking arms had transferred the starship from the center structure’s incoming docks down a spoke to a dock on one of the wheels. The entire ship, thanks to being spun along with the wheel of the station, had gravity.
The starship was a quarter of a mile long. Outside: sleek and burnished smooth by impacts with the scattered dust of space at the stunning speeds it achieved. Inside, I realized I’d boarded a creaky, old, outdated vehicle.
Fiberwire spilled out from conduits, evidence of crude repair jobs. Dirt and grime clung to nooks and crannies. The air smelled of sweat and worst.
A purple-haired man with all-black eyes met me at the airlock. “You are the Friend?” he asked. He carried a large walking stick with him.
“Yes.” I let go of the rolling luggage behind me and bowed. “I’m Alex.”
He bowed back. More extravagantly than I did. Maybe even slightly mockingly. “I’m Oslo.” Every time he shifted his walking stick, tiny grains of sand inside rattled and shifted about. He brimmed with impatience, and some regret in the crinkled lines of his eyes. “Is this everything?”
I looked back at the single case behind me. “That is everything.”
“Then welcome aboard,” Oslo said, as the door to the station clanged shut. He raised the stick, and a flash of light blinded me.
“You should have taken a scan of me before you shut the door,” I said. The stick was more than it seemed. Those tiny rustling grains were generators, harnessing power for whatever tools were inside the device via kinetic motion. He turned around and started to walk away. I hurried to catch up.
Oslo smiled, and I noticed tiny little fangs under his lips. “You are who you say you are, so everything ended up okay. Oh, and for protocol, the others aren’t much into it either, by the way. Now, for my own edification, you are a hermaphrodite, correct?”
I flushed. “I am what we Friends prefer to call bi-gendered, yes.” Where the hell was Oslo from? I was having trouble placing his cultural conditionings and how I might adapt to interface with them. He very direct, that was for sure.
This gig might be more complicated than I thought.
“Your Friend training: did it encompass Compact cross-cultural training?”
I slowed down. “In theory,” I said slowly, worried about losing the contract if they insisted on having someone with Compact experience.
Oslo’s regret dripped from his voice and movements. Was it regret that I didn’t have the experience? Would I lose the contract, minutes into getting it? Or just regret that he couldn’t get someone better. “But you’ve never Friended an actual Compact drone?”
I decided to tell the truth. A gamble. “No.”
“Too bad.” The regret sloughed off, to be replaced with resignation. “But we can’t poke around asking for Friends with that specific experience, or one of our competitors might put two and two together. I recommend you brush up on your training during the trip out.”
He stopped in front of a large, metal door. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Here is your room for the next three days.” Oslo opened the large door to a five by seven foot room with a foldout bunk bed.
My heart skipped a beat, and I put aside the fact that Oslo had avoided the question. “That’s mine?”
“Yes. And the air’s billed with our shipping contract, so you can rip your sensors off. There’ll be no accounting until we’re done.”
I got the sense Oslo knew what it was like to be in debt. I stepped into the room and turned all the way around. I raised my hands, placing them on each wall, and smiled.
Oslo turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “The harbormaster said you were freelance scientists. What do you do?”
“I’m the botanist,” Oslo said. “Meals are in the common passenger’s galley. The crew of this ship is Gheda, of course, don’t talk to or interact with them if you can help it. You know why?”
“Yes.” The last thing you wanted to do was make a Gheda think you were wandering around, trying to figure out secrets about their ships, or technology. I would stay in the approved corridors and not interact with them.
The door closed in my suite, and I sat down with my small travel case, no closer to understanding what was going on than I had been on the station.
I faced the small mirror by an even smaller basin and reached for the strip of black material stuck to my throat. Inside it, circuitry monitored my metabolic rate, number of breaths taken, volume of air taken in, and carbon dioxide expelled. All of it reported back to the station’s monitors, constantly calculating my mean daily cost.
It made a satisfying sound as I ripped it off.
***
“Gheda are Gheda,” I said later in the ship’s artificial, alien day over reheated turkey strips in the passenger’s galley. We’d undocked. The old ship had shivered itself up to speed. “But Gheda flying around in a beat up old starship, willing to take freelance scientists out to some secret destination: these are dangerous Gheda.”
Oslo had a rueful smile as he leaned back and folded his arms. “Cruzie says that our kind used to think our corporations were rapacious and evil before first contact. No one expected aliens to demand royalty payments for technology usage that had been independently discovered by us because the Gheda had previously patented that technology.”
“I know. They hit non-compliant areas with asteroids from orbit.” Unable to pay royalties, entire nations had collapsed into debtorship. “Who’s Cruzie?”
Oslo grimaced. “You’ll meet her in
two days. Our linguist. Bit of a historian, too. Loves old Earth shit.”
I frowned at his reaction. Conflicted, but with somewhat warm pleasure when he thought about her. A happy grimace. “She’s an old friend of yours?”
“Our parents were friends. They loved history. The magnificence of Earth. The legend that was. Before it got sold around. Before the Diaspora.” That grimace again. But no warmth there.
“You don’t agree with their ideals?” I guessed.
I guessed well. Oslo sipped at a mug of tea, and eyed me. “I’m not your project, Friend. Don’t dig too deep, because you just work for me. Save your empathy and psychiatry for the real subject. Understand?”
Too far, I thought. “I’m sorry. And just what is my project? We’re away from the station now, do you think you can risk being open with me?”
Oslo set his tea down. “Clever. Very clever, Friend. Yes, I was worried about bugs. We’ve found a planet, with a unique ecosystem. There may be patentable innovations.”
I sat, stunned. Patents? I had points on the package. If I got points on a patent on some aspect of an alien biological system, a Gheda approved patent, I’d be rich.
Not just rich, but like, nation-rich.
Oslo sipped at his tea. “There’s only one problem,” he said. “There may be intelligent life on the planet. If its intelligent, it’s a contact situation, and we have to turn it over to the Gheda. We get a fee, but no taste of the real game. We fail to report a contact situation and the Gheda find out, it’s going to be a nasty scene. They’ll kill our families, or even people you know, just to make the point that their interstellar law is inviolate. We have to file a claim the moment of discovery.”
I’d heard hesitation in his voice. “You haven’t filed yet, have you?”
“I bet all the Gheda business creatures love having you watch humans they’re settling a contract with, making sure they’re telling the truth, you there to brief them on what their facial expressions are really showing.”
Mitigated Futures Page 19