Finally, the last few crumbs and debris from the family's breakfast were absorbed down into the tabletop as the shoots themselves also slowly vanished. Harold smiled and looked across to the stoves and benchtops, seeing the same processes being repeated and also finishing with the ceramic pots being cleaned by spongy pads on the ends of more substantial vinelike shoots. Moments later, Harold wondered if he detected the softest of sighs and smiled again, wondering if it was one of contentment from their living home.
He jumped off the chair and ran up the nearest spiral staircase. He'd noticed the largest of the cats sitting on a step, waiting and watching a large slater-type insect creeping across the ceiling. Harold knew that it was relatively harmless, but flew up and swatted it down to the cat anyway. The cat, who was called Bing, seized it then looked at Harold as he landed and favoured him with a toothy smile. Harold nodded and carried on up the stairway, stopping for a second outside one of the open entrances to a large bedroom to watch Peter and Marie embracing, kissing deeply as Peter cupped one of her breasts and she stroked the inside of his thigh. Harold chuckled to himself, wondering that the true biological members of the human race seemed to have an eternal fascination with their sexual needs.
He quietly moved further up the great tree until he came into Rebecca's room where he hopped up on the bed to watch her. She was slowly gathering her slates, checking her stylus and placing the items in her backpack. She checked her mail on the large wall-mounted screen and replied to a few messages before entering a chat room of her friends. While she was engrossed in chatting, Harold ran a full internal check, the exotic software of his own soul looking carefully into his being. He noted an odd piece of script in his system, which he compared with the household database that Fritz Vinken, from the Basalt crew, had rebuilt and massively augmented. The system destroyed the script and downloaded a hunter killer for any more of the identified unwanted Administration spyware. Harold checked his onboard weapons, which none of the family members knew about, then used his own links to open comms into the planetary web and connect with some of the other ACEs spread around and above the planet and catch up on any news and swap gossip, covering in minutes what normal humans would take hours to do. He uploaded the images of his nocturnal encounters with the flying rats to his new friends, then broke the link as he could see that Rebecca was ready to go.
'Harold!'
'Yes, Rebecca.'
'Call me Bex! I am Bex to my friends, Harold. I've told you that.'
'Yes, I know, but the family calls you Rebecca.'
'Bex, Harold, Bex! Anyway, Marty's hamburgers is coming through here tonight and Pa has ordered for the whole family, including you, of course! Even the cats will have something special for dinner. This is so exciting!'
Harold looked at her and flashed a query to the comms node to be answered an instant later with the information that Marty was a famous itinerant chef whose hamburgers were held in almost legendary awe. The man and his companion travelled the Sphere of Humankind, going from planet to planet with a large, red and wonderfully ramshackle caravan towed by an equally ramshackle housebus.
'I shall look forward to eating one of his fat oversized sandwiches, Bex.'
The girl rolled her eyes, placed one hand on a hip and remonstrated with him. 'Must I tell you everything at least twice, Harold! They are called hamburgers. Our mums will spend ages trying to work out what ingredients are in his latest sauce recipes. They never do ... and we think it's very funny.'
He thought that any reasonably equipped ACE or AI would be able to identif y the ingredients quickly and also work out how they had been prepared. He was about to comment, then remembered a discussion he had had with the ACEs on Basalt that biological humans enjoyed secrets. 'It seemed to give them a little extra zest in their lives, so he just nodded.
Harold looked at Rebecca dressed in her tall, highly polished black boots -everyone wore them to keep most of the native bugs off their legs -black leatherlike pants, which he knew the house tree had grown for her, topped with a long burgundy silk shirt and a subtly pinstriped black waistcoat, thinking that she would make a strikingly beautiful woman one day. She was looking in her jewellery box and he decided that the moment was perfect.
'I made you something, Bex.'
He slid open one of the bedroom's drawers, where he had hidden the dragon-shaped tore, and lifted the silk-wrapped carving up to her. She unwrapped it and squealed with delight, bending down to quickly kiss him on the top of his head.
'Oh, this is just so great! Thanks, Harri! Can't wait until my friends see this!'
She rolled it around in her hands for a few seconds before finding and touching the magnetic release studs. The piece popped apart and she placed it around her neck with the catches reactivating as each end came close together. She rotated it until the head rested at her front then, seizing her bag, she ran from the room, yelling at the rest of the family to look at what she had been given. Harold had to run to keep up with her as they said their goodbyes to the family members, quickly moved down the spiralling central staircase, through the great buttressed, arched entranceway and out onto the paved street which meandered from one massive housetree to the next through short grass and low, flowering gardens. Native multi-winged birds, and just as many introduced ones from the twelve other main planets which humankind inhabited, flew above them or hopped about looking for insects to eat.
Looking up through the massive branches - some of the larger ones reaching across to join with the neighbouring trees -Harold saw additional rooms in the process of being grown, or rooms being absorbed back into the wood. They passed one of the largest trees, which Peter had told him housed three extended families so they were not the wealthiest of the locals. Harold considered it a strange statement as anyone privileged to live in the village was very wealthy by most standards he was aware of. Walking further, mottled light shining through the canopy a hundred metres above them, they came to the centre of the village. Here, the trees not only had people living inside them, but their colossally wide flattened surface roots housed workshops for the local trades and had shops tiered above them on wide leaf-shaded walkways.
Harold was observing a group of domestic-sized cats, as they intently watched a flowerbed, wondering what they were looking at, when Rebecca grabbed his hand and pulled him towards one of the workshops that serviced antigravity motorbikes. He spotted Jenna and a group of the older village girls surrounding a well-built young man, who was sitting on a stool, working on a single-seater. Harold recognised it as a good-quality older model, which, judging by its fairings neatly stacked to one side, must have been configured as a racer. They walked up to the group and Rebecca pulled Harold through the older girls to stand right beside the mechanic. Harold looked over the group, smiling to himself when he realised there was considerable tension and rivalry between the girls for the young man's attention; most of them were now glaring at the back of Rebecca's head. He looked at Rebecca and smiled even wider, seeing that she was only interested in the antigravity unit itself.
The young man looked up at Rebecca and Harold. 'Gidday, Bex mate. And how you keeping, Harold? Haven't seen you down here for a week or so. Finding everything OK?'
Harold nodded as Rebecca replied. 'Yeah, Harri is settling in just great, thanks, Jerry. So this is the old racer you bought at auction? I like it. But what's wrong with it? My dads always say that there will be something wrong with anything you buy at auction.'
Jerry nodded and smiled. 'It arrived late yesterday. Uncle says I can have a couple of hours to work on it this morning. Pulled badly to the left when I picked it up from the airfield and drove it up here. Bloody good for everything else, but I can't find anything obvious on the AG housing. Replaced a couple of damaged modules but it made little difference. Can you have a look, please, Harold?'
Harold leaned forwards as probes and comms units extended from his fingertips. He linked into the control unit on the side of the antigravity sphere and then reac
hed across to one of the workshop diagnostic units. Above them, the screen changed when some of Harold's more specialist software came into play: relative time sped up for him and it was as if he was within the space that the antigravity unit took up.
He looked through the levels of hard titanium on the outside of the machine and down through the sub-surface control units. He moved deeper into the sphere as the metal slowly changed from its solid state through the cold intermediate state, where it was neither solid material nor energy, then down through the energy until he perceived the two, still rapidly spinning, orbiting minuscule nodes of packed neutrons that gave the unit weight, but when spun to a major percentage of the speed of light, and then given momentum, allowed the antigravity effect to take place. He withdrew his perception and allowed himself to slow down mentally to biological-human norm.
'This machine took a large impact sometime recently, Jerry. One part of the inner housing is intruding a few microns into the next level of intermediate state. 'It will require a powerful adjustment from a magnetic puller to rectify it.'
The curly red-headed young man pressed his lips together, frowning. 'Yeah, I suspected as much. Thanks, Harold. Will have to work a couple of days for my uncle to pay for it. Right, I shall go see him.'
Rebecca was touching the outer casing with a fingertip. 'So is it right under here? The damage, that is.'
Harold nodded. 'Yes! I am impressed, Rebecca. There is an almost imperceptible mark and you found it. Very happy to help out in the rebuild if you like, Jerry. Want to see this machine racing again.'
Jerry smiled and nodded, but before he could say anything Bex said, 'Good! OK, see ya, Jerry. We had better be going to school.'
One of the older girls behind them sneered. 'So who died and made you king, Rebecca? We will go when we feel like it, as school sucks, anyway.'
Rebecca fixed the speaker, who Harold recalled as a friend of Jenna's but not what Jenna described as a 'good one', with a glare and taking Harold by the hand walked away from the workshop.
'I should feel sorry for her, Harold, but I don't. She is horrible. Her little brother is one of the four who is going to be a monitor with the Games Board. And Jenna is going to be late if she does not catch up soon.'
A few minutes later Jenna came running up behind them. 'Hey, you did not wait for me!'
They walked in silence for a few moments, then Harold stopped as he heard an approaching airship. He looked to the north, through the trees, as a huge lifter, with a stretched-disc shape, slid quietly overhead.
The girls both looked up.
'All-environment system capable, so it can operate in just about any conditions, even vacuum,' Jenna said. 'Now thatwe will not see often, unless there is something really interesting happening. Wonder why it is here? When the Games Board recruited one of the boys from my class it was just a small lifter that came to pick him up.'
Harold, they all agreed, was somewhat fanatical about keeping well informed.
'There is a medium-sized conflict due to take place around the local moon in two days' time. They are touting it as a good earner, according to the financial reports. Two corporations want control of the same massive, almost pure nickel meteoroid which is in orbit around this system's outermost planet. So, the Games Board is going to make the most of it. Will be interesting, as all the combat craf t must use turbine engines and mechanical lif t mechanisms.'
Rebecca's eyes gleamed. 'Old tech! Yeah, I like old tech. So much nicer to look at.'
Harold grinned then said, 'Oops! Almost forgot, Jenna. Have a carving for you, too! Check in your bag.'
Jenna hastily wrenched the bag off her shoulder to find the piece he had placed in her bag earlier that morning.
A few moments later with the ivory carving around her neck, she gathered up Harold and hugged him.
'We are so pleased that you are with us, Harold. You are kind of small, but very cute! Thank you. See you later, guys. Have a good day.'
As she walked away, Harold flashed a signal to the nanotes clinging on the outside of her bag to activate them.
The school was a wing of the local Administration complex, on the southern side of the village overlooking the wide valley that sloped towards the large estuary opening to the sea six or so kilometres away. Harold looked at the long sweeping curves of the school and appreciated the lack of a single straight line in the bioengineered-fungi structure. They passed the daycare centres, then the kindergarten, before arriving at the entrance to the junior school. Arched gates were flanked by two heavily carved, growth-retarded totara trees, which had been gif ted and planted by the local Maori leaders many decades before.
Rebecca walked quickly towards a gaggle of her friends and classmates. Each of them patted one of the carved totems as they made their way into the wide play area covered in the same tough grass that grew between the trees in the village. Harold walked over the grass, knowing that it would never need cutting, nor grow past its borders, and could be programmed by the local biological control systems to change colour with the seasons ifrequired. He decided that wild grasses were much more interesting.
He looked at the fence which separated the schools and took a few moments to watch the huge, light-bronze parasol leaves slowly opening and erecting themselves to form large living sunshades around the sides of the play area. Harold took a few running strides and flew up onto the leaves, as much to have a close look at them as to get away from the inquisitive closeness of some of the younger children. He liked them, but sometimes the attention was a little overwhelming.
He walked along the insides of the leaves against the fence, then out onto one of the larger leaves so he could sit on his tail and look over the play areas. The surface was tough and fibrous and he could not see if he was leaving any marks so he walked carefully. He sat and looked south to see that the airship had stopped its slow sightseeing and was descending towards the local airfield, behind the trees, kilometres away.
Sitting in full sunlight, he extended his wings and darkened them as the photosensitive outer layers started to produce delicious system sugars to supplement his digestion, giving him a slightly euphoric feeling of wellbeing. He also felt slightly raised radio wave levels on his skin. He extended his wings to their maximum and orientated them, feeling the energy. Intrigued by the radio waves he looked for the local communication node in the playground and flashed a query across to it. An instant later, he received images of the local star showing a large active sunspot which, to his delight, was producing a sizeable coronal mass ejection. The information scrolling down the side of the image showed that the planet would have a good aurora within forty-eight hours.
Sitting, enjoying the playing children and the sunlight, Harold slowly became aware of a burning sensation on the underside of his tail and on the soles of his feet. He stood up and looked back under his tail to see that little round areas of his skin were irritated. Looking down, he swore at himself for not being more knowledgeable about his environment as he could see thousands of little insect traps, which also oozed attractants, dotted all over the top surfaces of the leaves. Balancing on the outer edge of the huge leaf he looked around to see where he could go as someone started yelling at him.
'Hey, hey, hey, Harold! You look like a dork! Come down here as I hate bending my neck to look up at you, you evil looking bastard!'
Harold looked down at the grinning face of the pug dog called Reg, who lived in the tree next to theirs and who had been the first ACE he had met when he had arrived those few weeks before.
Harold laughed and leapt off to fly down and land beside the dog. 'Just soaking up the rays, Reg, very tasty. All good? Have not seen you for a couple of days.'
The pug looked at him closely before answering. 'So you can photosynthesise as well, Harold! Impressive. That could come in handy sometime. Yeah, went up country with some of my family seniors. Nice it was. So the Games Board are here today. Wonder what bollocks they will feed the children this time. They had better be
off quickly mid-af ternoon. Big thunderstorm forecast. Going to come right over the top of us and it will be a cracking good one.'
Harold linked back to the comms node and downloaded the forecast for himself. 'So it's going to be much bigger than the one a few days ago. I will be interested to watch the village trees in operation again.'
'Yeah, always nice to watch when they go into protective mode. Now, my young friend, you may or may not be aware that the director who is coming here has an ACE with him. The information from our data net indicates it could be the one called Tengu. I see from the look on your face you know who I am speaking of. If it is, in fact, the same Tengu who was created around ten standard years ago for the then very young and foolish Baron Willie der Boltz, commander of the Gjomvik mercenary Leopard Strike forces, then we are in trouble as Tengu openly loathes other ACEs.'
'Yes, I am aware of him, Reg. So we watch out for each other, eh?'
The little dog nodded. 'Yes, and if he is now with the Games Board I will bet that any action he takes against us will be a sanctioned one, as far as those money grubbing pricks are concerned. Open season on us, as believe it or not there are biologicals who just don't like our kind. Racist bastards! OK, Harold, I had better get moving. There is a nice big nest of vermin to dig up for the house cats and it's always good to curry favour with them. Watch your back. See you soon.'
Harold watched the little dog trot off towards the gate before suddenly veering off to grab a small ball in his mouth and break into a sprint before spitting it out, laughing at one of his own family members who was shouting insults at him. Harold smiled, having been told by the Basalt crew how, sometimes, the basic animal template of the ACE would influence behaviour. He wondered what instincts had been built into himself, not knowing of any naturally evolved creature that was like him. Noting the time, he walked across to Rebecca and her friends just as the school bell sounded. He walked in the middle of the girls, trying to remain inconspicuous as they entered the building, went through the corridors and finally into Rebecca's classroom. After the children placed their bags in the cubbyholes lining one curved wall of the classroom, then went to their desks, Harold suddenly found himself confronted by a severe angular-looking woman he had only seen at a distance in the past. Looking at her skin, the underlying bone structure and the wrinkles on her face Harold could only conjecture that he was in the presence of a biologically deteriorating 'one lifer', someone whose beliefs determined they would live one normal life, and grow old and die without any augmentation or life extension treatments. Or, if they possessed a Soul Saver, they would not be 'tanked' to grow a new body and so live indefinitely in any one of the dozens of body configurations that biological humans could choose from. He was about to ask her questions about her choices and why, when she interrupted his thoughts.
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