by E. M. Foner
“Are you going to try it?” A.P. asked curiously.
“Ick! No, I’m really a beer or wine gal. Buy me a beer or I’ll whine,” she delivered the old punch line. Either her partner had heard it before or he just didn’t think it was funny, so she kept sorting through the stash. “Wow, this blue one looks like it would glow in the dark. Ship. Lights out!”
The ship controller obligingly doused the bridge lighting and sure enough, a glowing blue tube illuminated Lynx’s palm. Several other light sources radiated or pulsed from the bag of drugs Chance had delivered, some of them quite enticingly.
“Chance said that they were all labeled by the Farlings,” A.P. informed Lynx. “Perhaps with the lights on, we might locate the information and create an inventory?”
“Sorry about that,” Lynx said. “Ship. Lights on. Here, take a couple and see if you can figure it out. I don’t see any kind of markings at all on these.”
Her partner studied a laminated sleeve, holding it up to the light in various ways. “I don’t see anything that looks like a language, unless it has to do with those little bubbles in the area where the sleeve was heat-sealed around the dose. Are there two of the same color of anything?”
“I think there are multiples of all of them,” Lynx replied, sorting through the stash. “I guess Chance thought we needed extra samples for analysis, or maybe they just wouldn’t sell her single doses.”
“Give me pair of any of them, I want to check something,” her partner requested. Lynx withdrew two sleeves filled with a fluorescent orange fluid and handed them over. “Got it,” A.P. declared after a cursory examination. “The bubbles are intentional, so we just have to decode them. I’m afraid my translation algorithm for Farling is limited to the spoken language, though. I didn’t want to pay extra for the written version. Does your ship library include alien scripts?”
“Display Farling character sets on the main viewer,” Lynx said in her command voice, wondering whether the ship controller would have it in the reference library. Sure enough, a dense grid appeared, each square filled with a different arrangement of tiny spheres of varying sizes.
“This could be tougher than I thought if your ship can’t read the labels directly,” A.P. confessed. “It looks like they have thousands of characters and I can barely differentiate between some of them.”
“What we need is a junkie,” Lynx commented. “When drugs are on the line, a junkie gets smart in a hurry.”
“Does your ship include an ore analyzer for prospecting?” A.P. asked.
“It came with the standard package, but I’ve never had much use for it,” Lynx replied, launching herself at the instrumentation suite. “I use the mass spectrometer for checking water, of course, can’t survive long without one of those. There’s an ore analyzer in the chamber beneath it, maybe they share some of the same test equipment. Ship. Is the ore analyzer functional?”
“Affirmative,” the synthesized voice responded.
“Ship. Does it include a high resolution microscope?” A.P. inquired.
“Is the artificial person authorized to ask me questions?” the ship’s controller inquired.
“Yes,” Lynx replied. She hadn’t consciously realized that she had been holding out on granting her partner access to the ship’s voice control and he hadn’t brought it up. Asking questions wasn’t the same as giving orders, and she needed more time to get used to the idea of sharing her ship before she could go that far.
“The Braknest Mark IV ore analyzer includes a Gerft digital microscope.”
“Can you filter the input of the microscope through your Farling symbol library for translation?” agent Malloy followed up.
“Unknown,” the controller responded. “A test sample is required for analysis.”
A.P. tossed a sleeve of the orange drug to Lynx, who fielded the throw like she was loading cargo and deposited it in the ore analyzer drawer. Before she could slide the drawer shut, A.P. added, “Ship. I’m asking for an optical analysis of script on the sample only. Do not perform destructive mineral testing.”
“Affirmative,” the controller responded in a monotone, though Lynx imagined it sounded slightly disappointed, as if caught before it could play a trick. Most captains customized their ship controllers with personable voices, but Lynx had always found the practice spooky, and she knew more than one trader who had fallen into the habit of referring to his ship like a family member. The standard ship controllers weren’t true AI. The controller just offered a natural language interface to the navigation console and instruments onboard, including the data in instruction manuals and a standard reference library. This could lead to the controllers sounding quite intelligent at times, but they weren’t sentient.
“This is exciting!” Lynx beamed at her partner, then immediately regretted it. While examining a stash of drugs really was more exciting than anything she could recall doing while transiting a Stryx tunnel in the past, she was suddenly embarrassed to be telling it to an artificial person who no doubt thought that human lives were a nonstop adventure. She hoped she hadn’t disappointed him.
“Persuasion,” the ship controller intoned in its monotone. “Renders subject susceptible to new programming during effective period. Administer orally. See safety sheet for dosage and interactions.”
“New programming?” Lynx asked hollowly. “For humans? I’ll never take my eyes off my drink in a bar again!”
“You should never leave your drink unprotected in a bar regardless,” A.P. told her. “The best solution would be if our employers provided a wide spectrum counter-measure or updated your implant with a drug detector. Shall we identify the rest of the samples?”
“I’m almost afraid to now,” Lynx replied, shuddering as she removed the sleeve of Persuasion from the ore analyzer and floated it back to her partner. He caught the drug and returned it to the sack before tossing her a gently pulsing white sample. She fed it into the instrument and they waited.
“Zombie,” the ship controller translated. “Permanent suppression of volition and ego, effects not reversible. Administer orally. See safety sheet for dosage and interactions.”
“Safety sheet!” Lynx exploded. “They’re selling chemical lobotomies and they’re worried about dosage and interactions?”
“I’m sure whoever purchased such a drug would want to make sure it wasn’t rendered ineffective if the victim was simultaneously taking cough medicine,” A.P. suggested reasonably. “I think we have to presume that the safety sheets are intended for the buyer and not necessarily the final consumer.”
“You know, we can’t actually take these onto Corner Station,” Lynx told A.P. after digesting the information. “If they’re detected, the Stryx would confiscate my ship and hand us both over to EarthCent authorities, who would deny any knowledge of our mission. The Stryx don’t allow these types of drugs on their stations.”
“That doesn’t prevent us from continuing with our assignment,” A.P. replied. “Once we’ve cataloged the threats, we can simply dump the drugs in space or let the ore analyzer test them destructively. I believe that following the various imaging tests, the analyzer vaporizes rock samples for spectroscopic analysis. Perhaps there’s too much liquid in these, though. I think it would be safer to dump them.”
“Toss me the red-and-white striped one,” Lynx said grimly. “I want to know what all those people are taking for fun.” She removed the zombie drug from the drawer and fed the analyzer the new sample to read. The wait was longer this time.
“Self-esteem,” the controller announced finally. “Provides a sense of security and omniscience, combined with filtering optic nerve impulses for convergence. Suppresses cognitive functioning and logic centers. Administer orally or through dermal absorption. See safety sheet for dosage and interactions.”
“I can understand the security and omniscience, alcohol does that too,” Lynx ventured. “But what did the bit about filtering optical inputs mean, and how does suppressing logical thinking impro
ve self-esteem? Oh wait, scratch that last part.”
“By convergence, I’m guessing they mean that the drug reduces visual asymmetries through filtering the inputs from your binocular vision,” A.P. ventured. “I don’t know how they can pull that off, but if it works, it would lead most people who look in a mirror to believe that they’re more attractive.”
“Alcohol does that, too,” Lynx observed. “Well, at least it doesn’t say anything about mind control. Let’s try the next color.”
She removed the drug from the analyzer and zipped it over to A.P. in return for a sleeve full of inky black fluid. The two packets nearly collided mid-course, and Lynx suspected that her partner had aimed his on purpose, since he had released a second after she did. Well, tossing things back and forth in Zero-G was sort of fun, and anything beat listening to the descriptions of what some of these drugs could do to humans. She fed the new sample to the analyzer.
“Despair,” the ship controller announced. “A broad spectrum depressant with overtones of anxiety and a hint of panic, combined with differential amplification of optic nerve impulses. Administer orally. See safety sheet for dosage and interactions.”
“Differential amplification?” Lynx asked.
“If my previous surmise about filtering optic nerve impulses was correct, this would have the opposite effect,” A.P. explained. “Rather than reducing visual asymmetries, it would increase them, making you believe your face was all out of proportion, that sort of thing.”
“What did we ever do to the Farlings?” Lynx demanded. “It’s bad enough that they’re pushing an addictive recreational drug on humans, but three out of four of these samples have been downright evil.”
“I doubt they harbor any ill will towards humanity in particular,” her partner replied. “The Farlings no doubt manufacture similar drugs for all of the susceptible biologicals. They also manufacture some of the most effective medicines in the galaxy. It’s just paying work to them.”
“Are there any left?” Lynx asked. “I seem to remember a pretty blue one.”
A.P. drew a sleeve filled with glowing blue fluid out of the bag and exchanged with Lynx. This time the two projectiles nicked each other midway, but the resulting change in trajectories wasn’t enough to put either of them out of reach. Lynx shot her partner an annoyed look as she fielded the blue drug and inserted it in the assay drawer.
“Time travel,” the controller read the drug’s name from the Farling label. “Advances the biological clock with no known side effects. Administer orally or through dermal absorption. See safety sheet for dosage and interactions.”
“Biologicals don’t have clocks,” Lynx protested as she retrieved the drug from the analyzer. “There must be an error in the translation.”
“Of course you have clocks,” A.P. told her. “Why do you think you get tired—hey, is that thing leaking?”
Lynx looked down at the transparent sleeve, and sure enough, a trail of tiny blue spheres extended behind it to the ore analyzer drawer, drifting slowly in Zero-G.
“You see what happens when you fool around throwing things back and forth?” she lectured her partner, holding the sleeve up between them. “The corner of the sleeve I was returning to you must have been just sharp enough to poke a tiny hole in this one.”
“Just let go of it and back away, Lynx!” he told her urgently. “You don’t want to get it on your skin.”
Lynx blanched and let go of the sleeve immediately, her eyes darting back and forth for a safe path through the minefield of tiny blue spheres. Rather than retreating, she kicked off of the console and launched herself towards her command chair. In a blink of an eye, A.P. had the whole mess cleaned up and was strapped into the other chair.
“What happened?” Lynx asked. “How did you move so fast?”
“Oh, you’re back,” A.P. said cheerfully. “I put all the drugs in the disposal chute as soon as we came out of the tunnel. We’re in a parking orbit around Corner Station.”
“Out of the tunnel?” Lynx shrieked. “Are you telling me I’ve been asleep for days?”
“Was it that long?” her partner asked in wonder. “In any case, you weren’t so much asleep as time traveling. I took advantage and got caught up on some of the old movies in the training materials and I’m thinking of changing my name to Smiley. Let me get that intravenous tube out of your arm before you start squirming around. Your ship controller was kind enough to inform me where the emergency medical supplies were located and how to use them. I had to give the bag a gentle squeeze once in a while since the Zero-G pump didn’t work.”
“How can you be so calm?” Lynx fought down her panic as she did a physical inventory, wiggling her fingers and toes and shaking her head to see if she was dizzy. A.P. removed the needle smoothly, as if he had been through emergency medical training at some point in his background. “I just got dosed with some alien drug that messed up my system clock!”
“See? I told you biologicals had clocks,” A.P. replied complacently. “And good news, I’ve already received a hail from our contact. We can meet as soon as we dock at Corner Station.”
“But I couldn’t have absorbed more than one or two tiny droplets,” Lynx said with a shudder. “What if a human drank the whole packet?”
“That would be a problem,” her partner agreed. “But it could turn out to be a useful drug to stock for lifeboats that aren’t equipped with stasis equipment. The ship’s controller kept track of your vital signs and it appears that the drug triggered some form of latent hibernation, meaning your metabolism was greatly reduced. And if you’re going to be in a temporary coma, Zero-G is a good place for it. No bedsores.”
“You could at least apologize for fooling around with throwing the drugs back and forth!”
“I apologize for causing the sleeve to rupture,” A.P. told her. “I also apologize for saving you a bundle on docking fees by remaining in a parking orbit, though of course, that was largely due to the fact that the ship controller won’t accept my commands. If I understood its explanation, it would have allowed me to dock had you died, for which I’m grateful.”
“You’re forgiven,” Lynx muttered, pulling up the time on her implant. Impossible as it seemed, they had entered the tunnel on Tuesday morning and it was now Sunday night. Five days of sleep? She called up the full calendar and gasped, “It’s been twelve days!”
Twelve
“I’m sure you’re all happy to see the little red padlock in the upper right-hand corner of your holograms,” Home Boy said to begin the third meeting of EEK. “Thanks to a generous loan from our new director, code name ‘Mercenary’, this steering committee meeting will be encrypted. A special thanks to Toto, who recruited Mercenary, and who also hired Drazen Security Associates to sweep our respective offices of bugs before this meeting.”
“They only did my personal office,” Tinkerbelle complained. “When I asked about having the rest of the embassy swept, they said that would be extra.”
“Did they check the other rooms?” Toto asked.
“Of course, that’s their main sales tactic,” the python-faced ambassador replied. “The rest of the place is lousy with bugs, but a detector only tells you there’s active surveillance, it doesn’t neutralize devices. Besides, I watched the Drazen tech working and he used some sort of projector to zap my office bugs in place. We’d have to tear the place apart to get at them otherwise.”
“If the bugs start coming back, we’ll just have to find room in the budget to buy a bug-zapper,” Troll added. “Otherwise, we’re wasting creds paying for the secure channel.”
“Agreed,” Home Boy stated for the record. “Now, before we meet our management team, does anybody have any new business to suggest?”
“I do,” Toto replied immediately. “We wrapped up the last meeting so suddenly that I didn’t get a chance to tell you that our embassy is hosting a trade show for spies. The response has been overwhelming, probably because every alien intelligence service with a presenc
e on Union Station was listening in when the show was planned. It’s scheduled for the first three days of the next cycle, and I thought that some of you might want to attend or send a representative.”
“Will there be any educational sessions?” Lion inquired.
“Only by way of the vendors,” Toto replied. “It turns out that the manufacture and sale of espionage equipment is a big business in the galaxy, but tradecraft, the knowledge required to use the toys in the field, is closely guarded. It’s one of the reasons our management team has decided to meet the Drazen intelligence head to establish inter-agency cooperation.”
“Isn’t that the sort of strategic decision that should have been reviewed by this committee first?” Mother asked.
“You tell them that,” Toto replied dryly. “And then you can come up with the money to run an intelligence service.”
“I, for one, am pleased that our new director is taking the initiative.” Home Boy hastily inserted himself into the discussion. “And while I won’t be attending the show myself, I agree that it’s a good idea for as many of you as possible to gain some first-hand knowledge of what we’re up against.”
“I have a question,” Pill Bottle said. “Now that we have a secure channel, why are we still using this zoo animals anonymity filter?”
“And as I reported previously, some of my alien counterparts have shown me recordings of our last meeting in which the animal scrambler was decoded and all of our faces were revealed,” Troll added. “If this is the best security technology EarthCent has, we’re in trouble.”
“It’s not exactly security technology,” Home Boy admitted. “My grandson’s school uses it for their home-study courses, just to liven things up for the kids. My team here thought it would be a good idea if you didn’t all recognize each other for the sake of operational security. It was suggested along with the code names to be standard operating procedure.”
“I think we could give up on the animal heads,” Mother said.