Was Sonika acting as she struggled to rein in her emotions? Crane couldn’t tell. If it was a performance, it was a powerful one.
“Growing up in the heart of our bragged-about total-disclosure culture, I absorbed the lesson that the most traumatic period of my life was never to be spoken of.”
Crane and Luce Pox were back in the mancave in Whine Manor, watching multiple #newscycle feeds as, once again, Sensorium went into global paroxysms.
Streams of hug moji were pouring into Sonika’s feed; her Cloudsight rating was skyrocketing.
“Forced to hide,” Luce scoffed.
The Bootstrap nopers were going hard to reinvent all the post-contact narratives.
“Sonika is making a good pitch for the cause,” Crane said. “They’ve clearly been grooming deniers ever since the children were rescued.”
This latest Sensorium frenzy had kicked off with a revelation that Champ Chevalier had disappeared from a sarco pod in Toronto. Snowballing #newscycle over that had seemed to be moving in a positive direction … at first. People began to believe Champ had indeed been sabotaging the Bootstrap Project.
But then anti-Bootstrap lobbyists had come back hard and fast, insisting that Frankie and her packmates were the ones who had been up to no good. That they were stealing Kinze tech … had been stealing it all along.
In this version of the tale, Frankie had seduced Maud in some kind of peculiar machination to chase an old grudge, and poor valiant Champ had gone after them to clear his name.
Naturally, if Frankie and Ember were the crooked ones, the Solakinder debt to their noble would-be Kinze benefactors would remain too big to repay.
Allure18 was arguing that angle, spieling that argument on behalf of the Kinze as if it were already an established fact. “Given the controversy and confusion,” she announced, “our benefactors are willing to step back. If Earth truly believes the facts are in dispute, we will seek outside mediation.”
“The Kinze have solicited a third party, a race called the Punama, who have volunteered to take over management of the Solakinder economy. This would allow our lenders to step back and simply accept payment of the outstanding amount as we work to heal this tragic breach of trust between our two peoples.”
Luce let out a bark of laughter. “She’s gotten smoother, hasn’t she?”
“She’s had twenty years to practice,” Crane said.
Infographics formed around Allure18, laying out the proposal for what amounted to invasion-by-consent, a cascade of aspirational images of humanity—no mention of sapps, Crane noted—spreading out into the occupied universe. The Punama were offering to ready the Solakinder to join the greater interstellar multiculture waiting out beyond Proxima Centauri. The offer to manage industrial output, to pay the interest on the debts and fines, was soft-pedaled.
“Does this mean what I think it means?” Crane asked.
“Most of you go to the mines, a few of you go to the stars,” Luce Pox said.
“And you?”
“Stupid, stupid!” Luce knotted his fingers together. “I’ll wipe myself before I get extradited.”
Crane muted Allure18. “That intention doesn’t surprise me, but…”
“Believe me, I don’t want it to go there.” Weak smile from the offworlder. “I’ve got me a nice, cushy retirement here, and I’ve come to like you people. I’d be very happy to keep things steady-state.”
They turned their attention to opinion polls. As Sonika Singer told her story, tagged as it was with verifiable facts and shocking revelations, the feed was #snowballing. People were hungry for provable truth, and there was no ambiguity there. She had run away; she had paid a price for it.
As for this proposed Punama takeover, @GlobalSec had retaliated with the only #verifiedfact they could offer, dust-dry bureaucratic #papertrail. They had requested an offworld advocate, weeks earlier, to investigate Frankie’s counter-accusations against the Kinze. There had been no response.
Miss Cherub was doing her best to spiel and spin this unglamorous government narrative. “Who are these Punama, these would-be saviors?” Her follow numbers weren’t nearly as robust as Crane would have liked, but she pushed on. “They aren’t the neutral advocates we requested. If they are allied with the Kinze, can they truly be neutral?”
Polls showed the global population divided, uncertain. Whose truth read best? Which way should they jump?
Sonika was trying hard to tip the balance: “Everyone knows Frankie Barnes had a work-study gig with the Department of Preadolescent Affairs when she was young.”
“Ohhh,” Luce said. “Here comes the hatchet job.”
“Everyone has seen the footage from her heroic discovery of a clutch of runaway children, in a so-called @ChamberofHorrors enclave in Manhattan. I was one of those kids.”
Sonika knuckled a tear, gazing into the camera. “I didn’t want a rescue. I never felt kidnapped or abused. The @Visionaries sequestered troubled children from the unstructured chaos of Sensorium.”
“Frances Barnes, you must remember, was a runaway herself,” Sonika continued. She offered a share, tagged #retrofootage and #possiblydisturbing.
Crane waived the warnings. It was a shot of nine-year-old Frankie in a Florida casino, digging a blade into her own arm to extract her RFID chip. Opinion polls refreshed. Bit of a tip against Frankie.
“By the age of nine, Frances Barnes had weathered the loss of one grandfather and a terminally ill parent. Gimlet Barnes and their pack were in the throes of divorce. Frankie ran away, just as I did, because she needed privacy, time, and space. There’s only one difference between her and me.” Sonika leaned into a close-up as her chopper landed. “And it’s that her damage and abandonment issues have driven her to turn on everyone who ever cared for her.”
“Bloody hell,” Crane muttered, as a supercut that would surely be footage from all of Frankie’s finest Hedgehog tantrums sidebarred itself within the feed.
Sonika was clearly building to a coup de grâce. “It’s time to reexamine the Manhattan cohort, the @Visionaries arrested in the wake of Mitternacht. The story has always been that they were ex-billionaire hoarders, colluding with hostile Exemplar colonizers. But think! If the global sovereignty vote had gone the other way, back during Mitternacht, there would have been no extension of austerity. No Bootstrap Project, no luxury shortages. There’d have been no need to steal tech from the Kinze. That tech would have been gifted to us!”
“Imagine! By now, we Solakinder would already be part of a greater multicultural empire. A whole generation of human children would be working as FTL engineers, portal designers, and quantum-comms operators. These wheels we’re trying to reinvent ourselves—out of stubbornness and misplaced pride—they would be turning the engine of our economy.”
“And half the human population and all the artificials would be formally enslaved,” Luce muttered.
“Shush,” Crane said. Something about that phrase snagged his attention. The wheels of the economy.
“I’m about to talk with one of the other runaways whose life was uprooted when Frances Barnes and @Interpol raided the @Visionary refuge,” Sonika said. “When the misguided forces championing human gumption and go-it-alone innovation forced us back online.”
Sonika gestured, bringing in a camera view from the cave in Death Valley—the Cantina, as they called it—where Maud Sento was supposed to be working.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Crane said.
He tried pinging Jackal, for about the fiftieth time that day. Nothing.
“Smart,” Luce said. “Get the wife to throw Frankie under the proverbial—”
Crane straightened. “She will not betray Frances!”
Luce hooted. “Frankie gave her quite the bollocking, didn’t she, on her way out of the solar system? And they’ve got Maud’s parent…”
“Even so. I believe—”
“What? That true love will prevail?”
“Don’t be cynical,” Crane said. “We need to take
action here, Mer Pox.”
“Like fucking what?”
“You understand Allure18 better than anyone. What’s her weak point?”
Luce blanked all the screens in the #mancave metaphor, examining raw transcript. Everything Allure18 had said or done since Frankie’s having taken Jalopy. He hemmed and hawed, highlighted opps, then redlined and discarded them. The pool of information got smaller and smaller.
Patience, patience … Crane fought the urge to pace. He pinged Maud, hit a block. He inventoried the graphical presentation of the #mancave. Toyed with the idea of restoring the scratch marks Babs had left in the leather couch. Peered in on the presentation of Babs in a coma, in the shared family e-state.
“Okay,” Luce said. “Here’s a thing.”
“What is it?”
“A denial. That bird from Sneezy Station made all kinds of statements, right? There was a booby trap out at the Dumpster, some alien ship went splat into Heyoka, please open the portal network … that’s the one they’re voting on.”
“Yes, yes.”
“But here’s the first thing Allure18 responded to—she issued all sorts of that ain’t so statements, but the very first was this one tiny thing. Practically a throwaway.”
Crane wasn’t about to wait for Luce to drag out the suspense. He dove on the transcript. “She repudiated the statement that the Kinze are a single entity?”
“Immediately.” Luce put up his hands, swept the transcript, and pulled up the multi-streaming #newscycle again. “And kind of thoroughly.”
“She says it’s a mistranslation.”
“Nothing to see here, folks,” Luce said. “Move on. Then she began making huge noise about the portal-network ownership and waving these Punama at us.”
Crane clacked his beak, thinking. He restored the couch scratches after all. Was it possible there was only one Kinze? Why would it be worth having Allure18 get a denial into the record immediately?
Oh!
“Excuse me for a moment, Mer Pox.” Leaving his old friend to monitor #breakingevents, Crane cleared a new meeting room for himself and began running through a filtered series of Sensorium posts.
Here. The #sixmonthsnocoffee tag. Auditing the disaffected comments high up in that queue, he began pinging the posters with the biggest social media footprints.
It was only a minute before a rewilding specialist named Eunice Long, resident in Pretoria, answered. “What do you want, sapp?”
Crane shared the transcript of the statement transmitted by the HawkBOT to all of Sensorium. “I happened to notice, Mer, that you’re high in the queue for a pound of coffee, and that there are over fifty thousand Kinze listed before you.”
“So?”
“If this allegation is true, there is only one Kinze user. They have spoofed the coffee queue, fifty thousand times. If so, this means you are in fact second in line to receive luxury credit payout.”
“I’m second for beans … today?” Bugged eyes.
Crane presented a completed service ticket. “This requires your local supplier to audit the queue. I suggest you demand an immediate shipment of a pound of coffee. The grower can pay out proactively, pending resolution of the claim’s unproved status.”
Eunice scanned the available entry fields and then hit Send. “I’m in lots of queues for lots of things. I’ve barely been able to spend any luxury credit for almost eighteen months.”
“If Frankie Barnes is telling the truth and the Punama are proposing to take over the economy on fraudulent terms, the concept of luxury credit may cease to exist,” Crane said.
“What?” A round of shouting moji—thunderclouds, Viking with an ax, rampaging threshing machine.
“What are you doing?” Luce was reading over his shoulder.
“Stoking righteous indignation,” Crane said, as Eunice began composing a fiery public post under multiple hashtags, #onebighoarder, #whosgotmine? #wheresmystuff?, #nicethings.
By now Crane’s had identified eighty or ninety top posters with similar complaints on the #nocoffeesixmonths thread. Tasking a host of minions to make the initial approach to each of them, he reached out to a cadre of coders in the Great Lakes, hiring them to write an app to submit complaints on a one-click basis.
“That seems kinda like it’ll just start another fucking riot,” Luce said.
“Only one? I must be losing my touch.”
“Crane…”
“It’s important to focus the anger over deprivation where it belongs,” Crane replied. “If the Kinze have been violating their user agreements, they can hardly claim a new, massive debt against us. What’s more, if every strike they’ve ever received, over the past decade, consolidates against a single user—”
“—their social capital drops accordingly,” Luce nodded.
“Precisely.”
“But aren’t you assuming they’ll respect our economic regulations?”
“That’s a question you should perhaps ask Allure18.”
“Right. Like she’d ever unblock me,” Luce grumbled.
“Watch this,” Crane said. “It’s as close as I’ll ever come to performing a magic trick.”
He tooned in the feed of Allure18’s press conference and pinged a journo friend, who immediately raised a hand to ask the question for him. “Your infographic showing how much of our economy the Kinze effectively own has dropped a hundredth of a hundredth of a percentage point,” the journo said. “Any comment?”
“Hundredth of a—That doesn’t sound very impressive,” Luce said.
Allure18 had long since gotten over her stress tell. An untroubled smile was all she offered. “A mere blip—”
“Yeah? Now it’s dropping further.”
Another journo sent, “What do you say to the people striking the Kinze under the #onebighoarder hashtag?”
“We’ve already said that the implication that the Kinze have created fraudulent accounts is a mistranslation—” But it was too late. The journos began shouting questions.
“I guarantee you, Mer Pox,” Crane said, “they’ll care. If they don’t control the economy, they certainly can’t sell it.”
By now, several of Crane’s sapp kin had picked up on the commodities issue. The Don was filtering the #nicotinepurgatory line-ups. Codemonkey was looking at the hellishly complicated queues in the gaming servers. Beancounter had agreed to take #NobeerNofun.
Crane cast another question to the reporters.
A journo asked, “The Kinze claimed the portal network as a debt, didn’t they? If ownership reverts to us, we don’t need to vote on requesting portal expansion. The Bootstrap Project can open up the seven-portal loop again any time we want and recover any Solakinder still aboard Sneezy.”
“Assuming they’re still alive,” Luce muttered.
“There is no question of the debt decreasing to a point where ownership of the portal network—” Allure18’s smile still looked unforced. “This is a mere distraction.”
“Do you deny that the Kinze are one being?”
“In the message, there’s a reference to the Kinze referring to itself as the All.”
“Is it true that Kinze who break off and become individuals are murdered by the primary entity?”
“Well,” Crane said. “That seems like it might be going a bit better.”
“Get that portal open, save your family, go back to polishing the virtual china,” Luce said. “That your plan?”
“I might even have time to make you a plate of imaginary toast,” Crane said.
“All well and good, but how are you going to get to Maud? If the hoarders are in control of Death Valley…” Luce spread his hands, mojing bafflement.
“I am open to suggestions on that front,” Crane said, but he had to agree: suddenly, the one packmate still on Earth was the one who might be hardest to rescue.
CHAPTER 53
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Goddamned Fr
ankie Barnes cleared the hangar before Champ could get Lipizzan’s safeties to disengage. The pegasus had him locked with all eight arms to the bulk of Iktomi until it could verify—and then double-verify—that his life was no longer at risk.
Frankie was wrecked—wrecked bad, as far as Champ could tell. But not dead.
What was it gonna take?
Wrecked and not dead was starting to be the theme of the day. The scheme to finally scuttle the station was falling apart too. Sneezy was a big stinking turd at this point, covered in incriminating flies. If Earth opened a portal and linked up comms again, the @Visionaries were finished.
He was shaking. Endorphins blasted through his body, spikes of fear and euphoria, and the aftermath of the revolting sexual release they’d built into him. Hitting Frankie, getting off on it …
The only play left in his book was blowing the installation. Scuttle Sneezy, and he’d get Frankie, too. Frankie and all her miserable husbands and AI pet-slash-siblings and even Scrap.
As hangar pressure stabilized, Lipizzan finally let go of its death grip on the station bulkheads. Champ rocketed across the hangar to the escape pod, Booger, squeezing four legs and half of his pegasus body into the escape pod.
The only remaining piece of cargo in the pod was a suitcase-sized crate, seamless and unmarked, but for a small glass sphere tethered to its surface.
Champ used his sacral interface to reach out to Herringbo, texting, “What do I need to do here?”
No reply. They couldn’t be worried about being on transcript, could they?
“Herringbo, come in.”
“Is that an anytime confinement capsule?” The question came from Ember, who had apparently opted to ride along in Champ’s camera.
“Get out of my feeds, Qaderi!”
“It is, isn’t it?” He sounded a little wonderstruck, but that was on brand. “This is what happened to Hung and Heyoka. He laid a track in anyspace, and the tripwire connected him, so his arrival time and departure were the same. He couldn’t be in two places, five light-years distant, in the same moment, so…”
Champ winced. “Theory’s nice, but you’re guessing.”
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