Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  “Have you had a lot of visitors?” Melati asked into the stifling silence.

  They laughed. “A lot? There’s been guys here almost every day. They found out about the database switch easily enough, but they haven’t been able to find Jas’ records yet. They were thoroughly deleted. It’s like he never lived on the station.”

  “It’s all because of that miscreant who wanted the exchange with Jas,” Elko said.

  They both nodded.

  Danno said, “It was a bad job, and I told him so. Honest people from Ganymede don’t use the mindbase exchange.”

  Melati asked, “What sort of job does Jas do?” She hoped he wasn’t an enforcer. Not one of those men constantly bothering Uncle about illegal storage, or the pedantics who always had it in for Ari. The boy Jas had been too nice, too sensitive for that.

  Troy said, “He’s a shunt pilot. Mining ships.”

  One of those who had gone down with Melati’s parents, one of the tier 1 constructs who held the lives of tier 2 miners in their hands.

  Look, she should get over this stuff. There was no reason why—traumatised, that’s what she was. Even looking at these men reminded her how one of them had read out all the names of the miners who had been lost in the accident, while she stood in the crowd in the central hall. Her parents. The man had read out both their names in a dull, emotionless voice, stumbling over her mother’s name, Wadya Gusamoputri.

  Troy came back into the room. “They’ll be here soon. Why don’t you sit down?”

  He gestured at the couch and Melati sat at the very edge, her hands clamped between her knees. His brothers still looked at her.

  He fetched a pocket screen from a cabinet on the back wall.

  “I’ll show you some pictures of Jas.”

  Troy sat opposite her, and put the pad on his knees. An uncomfortable silence lingered while he flicked through various images.

  Melati gazed around the room. It was tidy enough, but there was an elaborate system of tracks over the walls that she had never seen before. There were holes cut in the walls and the tracks disappeared through them to the next room. A branch went over the ceiling and another split off halfway up the wall and disappeared behind a cabinet.

  Melati said, “How much do you know about what happened to Jas at Ganymede?”

  “The exchange was obviously a setup,” Troy said.

  “After he left, someone here erased his existence,” Danno said.

  “It was the fellow from the mindbase exchange, to cover up for his mistake,” Elko said.

  “No, it was the guys who wanted this scientist.” Danno.

  Melati thought of two other possibilities—the scientist himself, and . . . “What about Jas erased himself?” The men had mentioned space madness. It did strange things with construct minds.

  “Jas wouldn’t do that. He loves his trains too much.”

  Troy said, “Of course he would, if he had enough reason.”

  “Wait, wait,” Melati said, and she had to stop herself using her teacher voice. Something in the way they spoke was extremely familiar. All turned to her. By God, they were so much like her boys. Only bigger. “What do you mean by trains?”

  “Yeah, you see this?” Troy gestured at the tracks on the wall behind him. A metal, bullet-shaped thing with a little yellow light on top zoomed across the wall.

  Racing trains. She’d heard about the games and the bets, but had never seen any.

  “Jas built all of this,” Troy said. “He loves racing trains. We get other cohorts to come here and have races around the tracks.”

  “It’s huge,” Melati said. The boys had been racing little cars around the room. Keb had taught them, Keb, who had told them about Ganymede and whose mind, knowledge and memories had been slowly slipping away from him in his young body. At least she had stopped that by returning the real Keb.

  “Wait, I got him,” Troy said. He tapped on his pad and turned it around so that Melati could see the picture of a smiling man.

  Melati had seen him before: it was indeed the man she had seen with Rina wearing istel overalls.

  At that moment, the door to the apartment rumbled aside and five other men came into the room. They were as varied as her own boys, all wearing a Grimshaw 129 tag. One wore a white enforcer uniform. They sat down on the couch, silently, a row of tired, worn faces, hollow eyes, grim mouths. Missing a brother was damaging her cohort of boys, but it looked just as damaging for these adult men.

  Troy introduced all his brothers, but Melati was so fascinated by the similarities with her boys that she barely registered their names.

  Then Troy said, “So, where is our Jas?”

  Melati had come here not intending to reveal where she worked, but that felt like a stupid thing to do. Like her own boys, these men deserved an answer. “You’re not going to believe this: he came back as a boy in our Construct Activation program.”

  “He—what?” They all frowned at her.

  “I work for ISF.”

  Under mutterings of “Fuck yeah?” and “You’re kidding,” she explained what she did and how she had managed to prove her suspicions. “We don’t have his body. We only have his mindbase at the moment.” And then she heard Jas’ shrill voice Where is the fucking bastard? The last day or so, he had largely forgotten about finding the bastard, but of course the person he wanted to find was the one who had taken off with his body.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Melati said. “If the killers were after the swap mind, the scientist—” Although who this person was remained a mystery. Paul Ormerod had been dead for two hundred years— “then why did Rina become involved?”

  Troy met her eyes squarely. “You know how they say that us constructs need to be taught things. Well, I think it’s the other way around. You natural-born people miss things that are obvious as hell. They fancied each other. A lot. Jas never stopped talking about her. He was scared to ask her out, afraid of what we would say, and afraid he would bring her into trouble with her family. He hates his job. He was going to give it up, change his name and start a business. He was going to ask her to help him.”

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  WHEN MELATI FINALLY left the apartment, after having assured and reassured the brothers that Jas’ mindbase was fine, there were two things she needed to do: one, find out what was in Jas’ memories and two, put some real pressure on Ari to reveal what he knew. A lot of things about Ari’s behaviour were starting to fall into place, including why he had looked so harassed lately. But if Ari had hidden this man for the past few days, he’d happily hide him for a few more hours, so Melati did something that she had never done before: she went back to work on her off-shift.

  It was now well into the B shift and with a bit of luck, the memories would have rendered. Also, because Louise was looking after the boys, she would have the time to view them.

  A large group of barang-barang workers still occupied the main hall. Young men, mainly miners, chanted slogans to jaipongan music. All we want is work. Someone had brought a set of gongs, and a young man in mining uniform was beating them with a piece of metal piping with a wad of cloth wrapped around the end, while dancing to the rhythm. Another young man played a guitar. They were all normal barang-barang, no hypertechs in sight.

  When Melati passed, one man yelled at her, “We’re having a party here all night. Are you coming?”

  “I’m sorry, I have to work,” Melati said.

  “Gah, sister, you’re boring, lo!”

  He snorted and Melati continued, wondering why they were still here, and wondering where the hypertechs were.

  A few enforcers hung around in the refugee processing area with nothing to do. They stood watching the party with emotionless faces. The cordoned-off section was deserted, but the display above the lifts said that another large ship was due to arrive at B6:41.

  Desi stood with a colleague at the lift doors that were the entrance to the base. Both were leaning on the banister at the to
p of the small flight of stairs that led to the lift, regarding the party in the hall with bemused looks on their faces. Desi smiled at Melati while she came up the stairs. “I guess we’ll have to keep a better eye on you next time.”

  Her colleague said, “Will you look at that. What have they brought now?”

  On the far side of the hall, a group of hypertechs with reflecting headgear were wheeling a huge trolley full of tottering boxes and crates into the hall.

  Partygoers started cheering.

  “What have they got on those carts?” Melati asked.

  “Party gear looks like,” Desi said. “Probably amplifiers and lights and microphones.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” her colleague said. “How long till shift change? I’ve heard enough jangling to last me a lifetime.”

  Melati entered the lift.

  The first thing she did when she came into the Learning Unit was to check the computer. The program had finished generating the memory files from Jas’ mindbase, so she would have to schedule some vid time. The communication hub in the unit had a much-disused VR headset, and Melati had to rummage in the cupboards to find the necessary connectors and goggles.

  Every sound she made sounded loud. It was so quiet in here without the boys.

  She carried everything to the couch in the sick bay, made herself comfortable, put on the VR glasses—like a hypertech—and started the recording. Her vision flickered. One moment she was in her learning unit as seen through dark glasses, the next, she was in the mindbase exchange office. And there was Rina, at her desk, smiling at Jas. God. Her hand hovered over the pause button. If only she could stop the recording there and keep Rina alive.

  Melati’s chest felt tight. She didn’t want to watch this, didn’t want to rake up painful memories. There was no point anyway, because Rina was dead. But Jas wasn’t, and he cared about Rina. The mindbase of Paul Ormerod wasn’t dead and he possibly held the secret to what was going on.

  The world around her went dark. She became Jas Grimshaw.

  * * *

  The mindbase exchange office at New Jakarta Space Station was like a second home to me: its fake wooden panels, the perpetual smell of engine oil, and Rina, with her soft brown skin and dangling golden earrings.

  I drummed my fingers on the armrest of my chair. Power tools whined outside, used by the ship maintenance crews on the docks.

  “So. You want another swap, huh?” Rina said, glancing at my drumming fingers.

  “I’m bored. There are only so many times flying a shunt out to harvest is interesting.”

  I would sit out there for hours watching my cargo—two hundred human harvesters—float to the ice rings and gather chunks of the stuff into the hold. The job was boring, boring, boring. Even Sarasvati’s cloud-swirled beauty and her majestic blue ice rings no longer enticed me.

  Rina shot me a worried look. “Jas, if you want to talk—”

  “Just tell me what you got.” No, I did not suffer from space madness. I had it all together. I just needed a bit more money, and then I would ask her.

  She sighed and tapped a few commands on her screen. “I have a swap request for Lunar Base—”

  “I’ve already been there. The place is crawling with zealots who try to convert you to their brand of worship. Would you want to go there?”

  She shrugged. I guessed not.

  “What about Miranda?”

  “I’ve been there, too. ’S OK, but—”

  “New Pyongyang—oh no, I get it. Not another bloody space station.” Her voice oozed sarcasm; her eyes met mine squarely. She knew what was wrong with me and how much I tried to deny it.

  “Something like that. Besides, you never know when there will be another riot there.” New Pyongyang was like New Jakarta, a mining station with a vast worker population, further out from the sun, named after the origin of the workers. I hadn’t been to New Pyongyang, and had no inclination to visit. As the station’s tier 1, the human construct class, I found controlling my two hundred-odd harvesters from the volatile ex-Indonesian population at New Jakarta—Rina’s mischievous cousins and neighbours and all their hangers-on—hard enough. My brothers would often talk about it, since a couple of them were law enforcers.

  It might sound arrogant, but when I swapped bodies with some colonist, I liked to trade up. Not another bloody space station indeed.

  She scrolled over the screen. Her eyes widened.

  “Whoa, something’s popped up. You have media experience?”

  “Sure. I used to work for FreeWire, remember?” As a student, while I was completing my piloting practicals. I had no idea if she remembered. Did they even watch the news channels down in that seething mire of the B sector?

  “Put your name down for this. Just listed. Immediate departure. Two day swap.” She turned the screen towards me.

  “Ganymede?”

  “So it says.”

  “What’s the catch? I’m to be the lavatory cleaner for the least of the Old Earth families?” But even a lavatory cleaner on Ganymede would have a higher status than me with my ship of two hundred little harvesting ants. The lavatory itself, even its contents, would be higher up the pecking order. There was a chance I’d end up doing a job even lousier than I could imagine, but holy-fucking-shit.

  “Yeah, I’ll go.”

  * * *

  Normally with a body-swap, you get instructions, a patch that lets you know where the house keys are, how to do your job and who your best friends are, that sort of thing, but Rina informed me this would happen on arrival. So I went home and told my pod brothers I’d be away for a couple of months and that someone else would take my place in my body for part of the time. They mumbled and half-listened—I did this on a regular basis—until Troy asked me where I was going, and I replied with perhaps too much smugness, “Ganymede.”

  They all looked at me then.

  “Ganymede, mate? You fucking serious?” Danno asked.

  “Yep. It came up on the screen while I was in the office.”

  “Why do you always get all the luck?”

  Troy looked at me with a thoughtful expression. “I don’t know, mate. Are you sure it’s not a hoax of some kind? I mean—any idiot knows only constructs and migrant workers travel this way. Why would anyone from Ganymede enter his details on the mindbase exchange?”

  “Something different?”

  “Yeah, Troy, put a sock in it,” Danno said. “Are you jealous or something? Jas just got lucky. Right, Jas?”

  I smiled, although deep down I knew Troy was right. It was strange.

  Troy shrugged. “I’m thinking that if something comes that easily, there’s probably a catch. Be careful, mate. Here, take this.” He rummaged in his desk and pulled out a tiny clear box containing what looked like a piece of “invisible” wound dressing.

  That was so like Troy. He always had the latest gadgetry.

  Troy opened the box. The sticky patch unfurled like plastic film. “Let me put it on for you.”

  I tilted my head while he peeled off the backing and affixed the stuff to my neck. A burst of warmth went through my veins. For a moment, sparks danced in my vision, a sign that it had downloaded.

  “What does it do?”

  “Remote logging. Get yourself to any computer, activate the patch, and follow the prompts.”

  I ran my fingers over my neck. You could barely feel the film. “Is this stuff new?”

  “Yeah, all the cool kids have it.” He meant the hypertechs. Being a tech geek, Troy spent a fair bit of time with them, even knew where their den was. They got stuff long before it was released to the public, certainly long before the authorities approved it.

  “It’s illegal, is it?”

  “What do you care, mate? If something happens to your sorry arse, at least we’ll have your recent memories to track whoever did it.”

  “Don’t worry. Have fun with my replacement.” Still, I appreciated the gesture. I love Troy. He takes no bullshit.

  He returned my
grin. “Yeah. Remember the time we had that idiot who . . . ?”

  While they all recounted the tall tales, I slipped out the door.

  * * *

  Physical space travel takes years, because ships can only jump when travelling at or above half the speed of light. The heavier the ship, the further it can jump. But the bigger the ship, the more likely there are passengers on board. Human bodies cannot stand prolonged periods at high-G. Consequently, regular space-liners take five to six months to reach jump speed. Jumps are short and completed in close succession. They tell me the fast cycle of jump-accelerate-jump-accelerate feels about as comfortable as riding a jackhammer. On longer jumps, the passenger ship has to allow the passengers to recuperate. Add a few more months. Then five to six months to slow down at the end. All that adds up to a fairly sizeable chunk of your life, which is OK if you have a lot of time, but mate, I don’t get that much leave. Seriously.

  Autopiloted freightliners without passengers can reach the necessary speed in about a month. Fully automatic bullet-probes within a week. My data travelled on a bullet-probe, along with other messages. While this is the quickest way of crossing the universe, if you think it’s comfortable, think again.

  * * *

  I reassembled my foggy brain in a place I definitely hadn’t been before. Cubicles are normally sparsely furnished and the body waits while sitting up in a kind of hammock. Since one has to stay immobile while both minds are in transit, the medical gods decree this position is better for blood circulation.

  I woke up in, not a cubicle, but a hospital room, and the surface underneath me felt like water. Warm light slanted in through a window where plants grew on the windowsill. There were art works on the walls, screens with moving images of abstract coils slowly morphing into other coils. Mesmerising, I had to admit.

  A man moved into my vision. He wore a shirt and trousers of soft green. A bodyscan nozzle dangling from his breast pocket identified him as a doctor. “How do you feel?” His accent was strange, cultured and formal.