“Where am I?”
“SouthAm,” Misfortune replied.
“Rio?”
She handed him a bolt of nanosilk. “Get dressed.”
Champ draped the primer over his shoulders, letting it flow over his upper body as he disconnected the VR pod’s autobidet and swung his legs out of the pod. By the time he was standing, the basic black onesie had crawled into place. He raised one foot, then the other, allowing it to thicken up soles under the pads of his feet, creating a basic boot. Fabric covered his hands and throat, hooding him closely, snugging over everything but his face.
Without Sensorium uplink, the garment lacked his usual customizations, but the primer was comfortable enough. It formed an interface touchpad on the back of one wrist, allowing him to change the color from black to buckskin.
He tapped for options. “I need panniers.”
“To hold what? Your worldlies are in the Great Lakes.” Misfortune spoke with a rough-sounding English accent, relic of the Northern British Isles. She handed him a wide-brimmed hat with a thin sunveil draped from its brim.
“This’ll be enough to hash my ident?”
“It’ll keep any cameras on flyby from crunching your face,” she said. “Your transponder’s reporting in from the Great Lakes, and your biometrics say you’re deep in a consciousness vault.”
Champ raised an eyebrow. Every person they passed bore an implanted camera. Every bot, every building, every ground-level watering rig.
“Don’t worry—we’re not going far.” Donning a veiled hat of her own, Misfortune shoved the door wide. “I’m guessing you’re not afraid of heights.”
Beyond her was an exterior ramp, swirled around a skyscraper like a bright ribbon, a continuous descending deck surrounding a cylindrical greentower core. Rio, indeed. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were in the IMperish Foundation’s Mayfly™ body research center.
Misfortune gestured, urging him to the rail. Hot Brazilian sun warmed his skin. Far below them, the megacity thrummed with activity.
Champ didn’t speak … mics were as omnipresent as cameras, and vocal recognition in Sensorium was almost as efficient as facial processing.
The lack of input from his speakers and HUD created a disturbing sense of limitation. Normally, he’d be able to see local time of day, his incoming messages, his realtime follows, recommendations from his contentment-management app. He’d have Irma’s location and status, a newscrawl if he wanted it, route-mapping for wherever he was headed …
… where was he headed?…
Suddenly, his implant tightened at the base of his spine … and then he heard Misfortune’s voice: “Test, test, test. Make a sound if you hear me.”
Champ coughed.
“Good. Now look for a white dot in your upper peripheral.”
He had taken the dot for a sunspot, one of those field-of-vision things that moved if you looked directly at it. Now, as he focused, the circle expanded into a blindingly bright—yet somehow painless—ball of light.
“Imagine blowing words into it. Test, test, test. No, don’t strain. Let them gently float.”
He tried it. “Test, test, test.”
There was a sense of the white circle expanding, almost latching on. Champ’s stomach flipped once, then settled. The illumination tamped down and he could see the greentower walkway, haloed with bright white edges.
He tried subvocalizing: “What did you do to me?”
“You might say we augmented your augments.”
“More offworlder tech?”
“Are you shocked, blossom?” Hint of teeth, behind her sunveil. Grin of a crocodile.
He turned his attention to the view. This part of Rio had at one time been a big highway. Now it held a river of greentowers, high conical spires, swept round with the green walkways, draped in hanging greenery. Building height varied, creating an illusion of jungle canopy; the sound of birds in the upper stories seemed to be deafening.
“Come on.” Misfortune pivoted, heading upward.
“How are we able to get away with this?”
“The upper levels of the tower are reserved for wildlife and water collection, and are mostly maintained by bots. We’ve convinced the system we’re capybara.”
Champ had assumed his fellow conspirators would be in another backwater, an abandoned city like New York. Someplace that had been shut down in that first desperate effort to reduce humanity’s footprint, after the Setback finally convinced people that without ecosphere rehab, humankind would self-extinguish. Not there at the heart of the world.
Misfortune opened a door, nearly invisible, built into a wall and covered in vines. Behind it was a second door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY! This she unlocked with an old-fashioned mechanical key. They passed through a short corridor and from there into a glass-roofed dome.
“We can talk freely here.” To emphasize the point, she removed the hat and veil, revealing her face and a full head of hair the color of iron.
Eight other people were in the room. Six were relaxing in padded smartchairs, taking in the view of the city through one-way glass. The remaining pair bore the facial scars and deep indentations, in their foreheads, that meant they had been botomized. They were both at least eighty years old, and serving the others an assortment of chilled drinks.
“What’s happening?”
“Maiden voyage of the new FTL saucer,” Misfortune said.
Champ felt a pang. Somehow, despite everything, he’d hoped to be the one rolling out this newest FTL ship.
Everything had gone wrong. He’d only ever meant to plant Scrap aboard Emerald Station and act surprised and mournful over the #portalfail. Maybe give a nice eulogy at Frankie’s service before going back to test-pilot heroics.
Instead, he’d gotten side-eyes and public accusation. Arrest and exile.
“We’re in the endgame now, I guess,” he said.
A copper-haired woman, remarkably like Allure18 in features but middle-aged, regarded him. “Do you think so, Mer Chevalier?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Mission accomplished, more or less. Sneezy’s cut off.”
“But not unoccupied.”
“Soon as Teagan9’s Mayfly™ body fails, Scrap can swoop in and plant the Kinze flag.”
“Don’t bait him, Lurra.” That was Glenn Upton. He was bigger than he looked on camera, deep of voice, with a huge frame and a close-fitting primer that outlined every muscle in red thread. “With our friends in control of the revenue stream from Europa and Lodestone, Earth will have to enter protectorate negotiations soon.”
“Sell the house to feed the kids,” Champ said.
“Indeed,” said the woman, Lurra. She was standing beside two of the most vocal anti-Bootstrap activists, and she …
She was Allure18, Champ thought, or some version of her.
Well, we are in the heart of the Mayfly™ research center. Allure Prima gave us the tech in the first place. Guess it follows that she could print herself a meat puppet that wouldn’t degrade in twelve months. And … has she split her consciousness, like a sapp? The younger, sharper version of her’s still out there doing PR for the Kinze.
“The Solakinder will join one of the big spacefaring empires, with the Kinze collecting their finder’s fee from whoever ultimately wins the auction.”
“Meanwhile, we—” Upton swept out a hand, encompassing everyone in the room. “We’ll name our price for helping smooth the Solakinder transition to the new regime.”
It wouldn’t be forever—most protectorates ran the equivalent of five to fifteen centuries, local time. A blink; a breath. In the grand scheme, it was a trifling price to pay for a boost up to the stars.
Upton put out a hand and Champ duly shook it, though something about the contact made his skin crawl.
“You’ve done well, son. Humankind’s mad insistence on inventing the wheel, living like primitives when others are racing around the galaxy…”
“It was a failure to see reason. Misplaced pride,�
� Lurra said.
The others, but for Misfortune, nodded. But what of it? She was a fixer—not a botomized servant, perhaps, but not a key decisionmaker, either.
Lurra gestured at the windows, and the view of Ipanema Beach vanished, replaced by … was that the Hopscotch hangar?
A screen. They’re using the glass as a display.
“Humankind needs to get over the idea that it can play as equals with races who’ve been spacing around since before the Neanderthals,” Lurra said. “The Bootstrap Project is a pointless game of catchup. Restructuring will assimilate this solar system into a complex, vibrant, and truly advanced civilization.”
Why was she spieling?
“One day, all of this will be history,” Misfortune murmured, apparently reading the question in his face. “She’s practicing her Gettysburg Address.”
“If a few generations of homo sapiens have to live in a sort of indentured apprenticeship to their betters, so be it. Far better that than scrabbling for a few more cards to play in a game they are, surely, destined to lose.”
If humanity got into the right protectorate, who knew how high the insiders, people like Champ, might fly?
The camera views on the screen homed in on the new saucer, Heyoka. Hung Chan was suiting up. He’d apparently nice-guyed his way to the top of the pilots’ leaderboard.
Champ frowned. “Is that Frankie Barnes? She gets to work support?”
“She’s his mentor, isn’t she?” said Misfortune. “It was something of a last request, before she takes Ember Qaderi to Lodestone.”
“Isn’t that chancy?”
“Why? Barnes isn’t under suspicion of anything. Yet.”
For some reason, the words dropped the bottom out of Champ’s gut.
“Safeties check out,” Hung said. He was all but glowing with confidence. Champ remembered feeling that, the certainty he was about to break records. “Everything to spec.”
“What about that itch you felt?” Frankie asked.
“Bit of grit in my bodybag. Probably a crumb from a rice cracker. Stop fussing, Hedgehog.” Hung all but skipped to the control bubble, locking in. An ops crew of six, led by a big bearded fellow named Jolene, was tracking all the data. The ship, Heyoka, confirmed everything sealed and pressurized. A preliminary countdown of twenty ran to zero. With a curl of its nanotech orifice, Mars expelled the plate-shaped FTL craft.
Heyoka drifted away from the staging area. HuskyBOTs with towlines caught and drew the saucer to medium safe distance, an area known as the hitching post.
That nickname was mine, Champ thought. From before Hung came along and started giving perverse monikers to everything.
“Today we’re attempting to make a continuous four-point-five-light-year hop to the Deep Space Relay Station, designated edge of the noninterference zone,” Jolene explained, for all the journalists and direct follows.
“The relay is also where we drop off commodities for the Kinze,” Hung added, reading script for the benefit of schoolkids following the launch. Infographic popped up a map of the noninterference zone. The Dumpster was just inside the offworlder-free boundary; pilots loaded the cargo into barges that carried the goods out over the border for pickup.
Nobody had tagged the four-point-five-light-year marker in a single burst. The ships kept dropping out of anyspace prematurely; Frankie held the record, at three point two light-years.
On paper, the three-point-two-light-year hop argued that the Solakinder had effectively invented faster-than-light travel. In practice, leapfrogging across the stars was tedious, risky, and got you no respect from the Exemplars. Maybe you could skip like a goddamned tiddlywink to your destination, but that wasn’t how fancy sentients did it.
The Bootstrap screen split, breaking out footage of the control room. Champ recognized two of the ops crew, including a smartdrugs-amped physics savant who couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Ember’s replacement? Everyone was going over the latest changes to Heyoka’s particle injector, fine-tuned for the umpteenth time.
“Think they’ll manage it?” asked Lurra.
“You tell me—you’re the one holdin’ the mysteries of the universe.” Champ shook his head.
“Told you he’d recognize you,” Misfortune said.
Lurra shrugged. “What does it matter now? Here they go.”
Heyoka’s particle injectors pulsed briefly, lighting up the leading edge of the saucer.
“Test, test,” Hung said. “Final checks read green across the board.”
“Everything in the green,” confirmed Jolene. “Go, go, go when ready.”
“Launching in three, two…” Hung said.
And then, drowning out his own “one,” a crow of victory: “Four point five light-years!”
“What was that, Pilot8?” Jolene said.
“Wishful thinking,” Champ muttered. Hung hadn’t even turned on the gas yet.
“Bit of a bumpy reentry—that itch hit me again coming out of anyspace, but I have visual on the Dumpster!”
“Don’t count your chickens, pilot—”
Graphics at the hitching post showed the Heyoka particle cannons lighting up, going from Red-for-Stop to Green, Green, Green for go. The saucer’s lines seemed to stiffen. Its shape took on increased fullness, a visual distortion. Whenever he pseudoEMbodied a ship, Champ felt gravid at this point, like he was a drop of water about to fall from the lip of an icicle.
He found himself holding his breath.
“Four light-years. Picking up pings from the Dumpster,” Hung said.
“Repeat transmission,” Jolene said. “You just said four point five. Pilot8—”
Their smartdrug-amped teen genius, the physicist standing in for Ember Qaderi, opened their mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and said, “I think we should—”
Heyoka lit up, broke free of the hitching post.
Physics kid: “—we should abort?”
Jolene: “We are away, we are away, we are away. Heyoka is away, repeat—”
Gone.
But she wasn’t.
The aft edge of the saucer remained within view, a silver bulge reminiscent of the curve of a giant spoon, barely visible to the naked eye within the energy coruscating on its surface. Cameras zoomed in for a closer look, just as both of the saucer’s tow huskies vaporized, soundlessly, in a shower of sparks. Debris blasted away at speed. Two of the starter-block sensor arrays fried a second later.
“It’s gonna happen, folks,” Hung’s voice said. “Everything to spec, not a murmur. You better break open that crate of—”
“Pilot8,” Jolene said. “Commence emergency shutdown.”
The FTL ship smeared forward, zooming along the visible portion of the Racetrack, stretching like pulled taffy. Fire-orange light flickered, visible through distorted metallic skin. The stretched-out saucer twisted and ribboned.
Alarms sounded.
Hung, still sounding upbeat, said, “Passing the three-light-year marker. Holy shit, it’s going to happen! Smell my farts, slowpokes!”
“Break off,” said Jolene. “Break off, pilot, break off now.”
“He’s not coming back,” Physics Kid said. “His messages are arriving in reverse order. Temporal distortion—”
“Shut up! Disengage the fucking dark matter wands!” bellowed Jolene. “Raise the autopilot on that ship now, now, now!”
Physics Kid dropped into a chair. “It’s already over,” he whispered. “We just don’t have the footage yet.”
“Repeat, passing the three-light-year marker,” Hung’s voice echoed through the control room. “Everything to spec. Firing second pulse. I have not, repeat not, tanked out of anyspace. That’s your record, Hedgehog. #ReallyNotSorry.”
Alarms were clanging. Mission Control was going into emergency lockdown. The leading edge of the new saucer stretched from the hitching post and far beyond anyone’s capacity to see. Its rear strained and shuddered, as if something had teeth sunk into it. Metal rippled like a long flag in stron
g wind, vanishing into a sunlit nowhere.
Bulkheads scrolled over the Mars station screens, radiation shields.
“Two point five light-years, everything in the green,” said Hung.
“Shut down, pilot, shut down your injection wands,” Jolene ordered again. Pointlessly.
“I have a good feeling about—”
The firelight in the seams of the stretched ship brightened to white-metal heat.
Heyoka cracked then, like a boiled egg someone had stepped on. The burnished silver surface of the saucer caved in on itself.
Physics Kid was shuddering, folding in on themself with both hands on their heart.
Champ flinched as chips started peeling off the ship’s infrastructure, radiating out in every direction. A pilot’s glove, white and unmistakable, did an end-over-end glide past a camera at the one-light-year mark. Someone else, watching at home, tagged a red-tinged sacral interface plug, barely visible at three point five light-years. It was in a slow-motion space dance, Champ saw, with a meaty chunk of something that might, moments before, have been Hung’s spinal column.
Realtime shares of the feed skyrocketed as news spread: pilot Hung Chan and the experimental spacecraft Heyoka were now just so many fist-sized lumps of debris, a collection of metal and meat scattered across almost five light-years.
As everyone at Mission Control sucked wind and burst into tears, Hung’s voice sounded again over the channel. “One light-year, one light-year,” his voice said. “Punching up the second photon injection for release at the third marker.”
“Abort, abort, abort,” said Jolene, dead-voiced.
A shockwave hit Mars Station, tossing the Hopscotch base crew to the floor. Most of them got up. Physics Kid stayed under their desk, sobbing.
That coulda been me, Champ thought.
There in Rio, Lurra dusted off her hands. “That should do it, don’t you think? Coup de grâce, Misfortune?”
“Let’s bloody hope.”
They’d have finished off Portals and then done this to me. Dry-mouthed, almost shaking, Champ made himself join the others’ applause. He could feel Misfortune’s eyes on him, as the follow surge for the accident ran into the billions, all of humanity tooning in or waking up to that image of Hung’s glove, doing its sad cartwheel through unreachable expanses of space.
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