by Patty Jansen
“OK, I guess.” The tone of my voice sounded unfamiliar to me.
I pushed myself up. There was a mirror on the wall to my right. My body was that of a man in his forties. Fairly thin, and devoid of chest hair. My fingers were clean—not the hands of a lavatory cleaner.
It’s sort of weird to be in someone else’s body, hovering in that space between identities where one starts to wonder whether it’s one’s body or one’s mind that establishes who we are. As construct agent, artificial human, I can tell you the secret: it’s both.
The doctor stood there watching me. I realised that, though this procedure might be routine to me, it wasn’t to him. People in Ganymede travelled on the passenger liners. They had money and time to spare, and the best anti-aging treatment money could buy. He might never have met someone of the unwashed construct worker classes.
“Um . . .” I looked at the back of my hands, also hairless. This guy could sure afford a lot of cosmetic treatment. “What do I. . . ?”
“Yes, yes. You’ll be given instructions soon. Your clothes are over there.” He gestured at a little table with a stack of folded fabric on it.
I wondered why the guy had taken off his clothes in the first place, but never mind.
“What’s my name?” One of the oddest questions I’d ever asked.
“Paul.”
The doctor removed himself from the room so I could get dressed.
The first thing I did was bounce out of bed into the wall. I’d forgotten that gravity was shit here. More carefully, I wandered to the window.
It looked over the interior of a domed settlement with wide streets and stately buildings. The light was soft, slightly yellow, and natural. The roof of the dome was clear, showing a dark blue sky fading to light orange. Jupiter hung like a huge red-and yellow ball over the horizon, surrounded by a couple of bright specks: the inner moons. It looked surreal.
I don’t know how long I stood there before I remembered I was supposed to get dressed. They said the view of the sky at Ganymede drove people insane. I’d always laughed it off as idiocy, but now I could believe it.
The shirt and trousers were of a type I had never seen before. I looked at myself in the mirror. Not bad, if I said so myself. I would have preferred myself without the grey hair, but apparently that was a feature coveted by the learned classes. The perpetually-twenty look was so last century.
“Are you ready, um, Dr Ormerod?”
Must be my last name. Not a construct name. “Yes, come in.”
He did, wheeling a piece of equipment on a trolley, some sort of monitor with leads and patches. A blue light pulsed over the screen. It looked a bit like the MPV machines they had at home, with a headset.
“What’s that?” I’d never had to go through this procedure before either.
“You need to be given your instructions, and we must hurry.”
“Hurry?” Since when did the word “hurry” come into a holiday?
“Yes, you’re expected in the main hall. Now relax and don’t talk.” He put the headset on my head, fumbled about with the cords and attached the pads to either side. His hands were sweaty. Sheesh—he really hadn’t done this before, had he?
He hit a button.
A script scrolled inside my eyes, lines of text superimposed over my normal vision. Ah, I understood: deep-thought instruction. I’d had that a few times before in my distant youth, usually in conjunction with a lecture on How To Behave In Front Of A Superior. Ah, those were the days. So right now I was in the body of a miscreant and was about to get a talk on Who To Respect? I’d say bring it on.
But as soon as he took off the pads, the headset and activated the program, I knew it wasn’t any of those.
The deep instruction told me to leave the building, so I left the room and walked out into a bright corridor where people in medical green outfits bustled around with trolleys. I got to the lifts before I realised someone followed me. Two someones, actually: ISF military personnel, each a head taller than me and twice my width. If my regular body was an economy class construct, these were the superduper state-of-the-art models. They wore weapons, too.
Shit.
The deep-instruction said nothing about ISF gorillas following me. I could hardly ask them either. They’d probably followed me, or whoever they thought I was, here and assumed I would Know These Things. Not.
The deep instruction took me through a layout of the Dome’s streets, a route stippled out that led me to the other side of the settlement that looked to have been built inside a shallow crater. Most of the buildings inside the Dome were made from pure white stone, quarried or made locally, in a style that mimicked the classics from ancient Earth. Plants grew in planter boxes, their flowering branches a raised finger to the cold outside. In various places, water steamed in basins. Ganymede had a hot core and colonists used that feature wherever they could.
Even to someone not designed to appreciate aesthetics, it was pretty. The air was moist and pleasant. It also had that elusive quality of homogeneity which the air at New Jakarta lacked. Walk past a vent there, and you were blasted with high-oxygen, moist air, but in secluded pockets, the air was stale, freezing and dry enough to make your hair stand on end. Not so on Ganymede.
The familiar white-columned building that was the great hall of Ganymede University protruded from above the landscape. It symbolised the pinnacle of old-world society, the nirvana every bright-eyed youth dreams of attending, never mind that being a construct disqualifies you even before you apply.
I followed the instructions up the steps to this famous building, into the foyer, where many people milled about, talking to each other in groups.
This was where the map vanished from my sight.
OK, I had arrived at my destination. What next?
I was getting rather irritated with the lack of information. I wandered through the hall aimlessly, noting the sophistication of people’s clothing, all in civilian clothing. I figured that if someone wanted me, they’d talk to me sooner or later. Instead, I drew the kind of attention I didn’t want. Someone in the crowd elbowed a neighbour, and the neighbour whispered to someone else and before I knew it, all these people were watching me, whispering, Is that him? I was beginning to look for the exit.
No such luck there. Around the perimeter of the foyer, I spotted a further dozen or so ISF soldiers in white, arms clearly visible on their belts. All of them were watching me.
Something about Troy’s words began to ring a bell. Actually, it was screaming at me: Change course! Collision imminent! in that cheerless female voice that announced Dire Warnings in the harvester’s cockpit. Maybe I should add, too, that I’ve only ever heard that voice in a sim; I’m a good pilot, OK?
Before I had decided what to do about it, a man detached from the crowd and rushed to me, extending his hands.
“Paul, I’m so glad you could come.”
“Um, yeah.”
He frowned. Not the response he expected, Jas Grimshaw
“Had a good trip?”
“Yes.” Not lying there. I wasn’t sure about the rest, but this place itself was frecken awesome.
“We’re honoured to have you. The first time ever that one of you honours us with a visit. Ah, you’re an ex-native, of course . . .” He grinned.
“Of course.” I returned the grin as convincingly as I could. What the fuck did he mean by one of you?
“We have a room for you to prepare your presentation. It will be the highlight of this afternoon.”
Presentation?
I was frantically trying to sort out which version of Look, there’s been a mistake I’d use, when something popped up in my vision.
Space-warp surfing: a controversial discovery, by Dr Paul Ormerod.
Oh. I got it. This guy had a bad case of stage fright, huh, and was too pissing scared to give his own lecture. Instead he was going to display it to me and all I needed to do was read it out.
That’s why he wanted the media experience. Once
upon a time I’d been a newsreader for New Jakarta station. Well, I’ll confess, FreeWire was a tiny news station and I did the night shift, but there it was.
Guess I could read the damn speech. And then I could carelessly say to my brothers at the bar, “I once was a lecturer at Ganymede University.”
Way awesome, Jas Grimshaw.
“Sure. Show me where I can prepare. I will require the use of a computer with external link.” I’d display the entire text on-screen so I could check for words I didn’t know. It was all coming back to me now.
“Good. I will show you. We’ll have a get-together later, eh? Quite a few of us here are keen to pick your brains.”
“Fine.” That would be when I suddenly vanished, I guess.
I followed him through the crowd, people casting me wide-eyed glances. The two ISF guards were still behind me, like oversize ducklings.
“Dr Ormerod?” Someone else came up from the side.
This man was dressed in a bright green garment. He had black hair streaked with grey, and a goatee, a most unusual feature, as most men these days had their facial hair treated as soon as it started to grow. It made him look elegant, perfect almost.
He shook my hand.
The other man had turned and raised his eyebrows at the newcomer.
“Oh, sorry,” the bearded man said. “Dr Prem Aniyanda.”
Strange name, too.
My companion introduced himself. “Dr. Andro Markevic, Head of Astrophysics.” It was as if he emphasised his title. His voice went very stiff and formal. I repeated in my mind, Andro Markevic. I was supposed to know this man.
The other man nodded a greeting, smiling all the way. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Markevic. May I complement you on your success on putting this event together, especially on getting permission for Dr Ormerod to be here.”
That was the second time now someone referred to that. Shit, I needed to know who this Paul Ormerod was. Urgently.
My host Dr Markevic gave a non-committal smile. “Thanks for the compliment. I trust you will enjoy the proceedings.” Still in that stiff tone.
“I will, very much, thank you.”
He bowed and retreated to a group of fellow scientists, a varied bunch, but all with the same sophisticated grace that made them different in a way I couldn’t describe in words. Then again, we constructs often picked up on things normal humans didn’t.
Dr Markevic showed me an office at the very back of the foyer and told me he’d get me when they were ready. The room was small, probably a caretaker’s station.
Before leaving, he said, “Just in case you haven’t noticed . . . I know life is very different where you live . . . There is a fairly large Allion contingent here, under the protection of the Europa convention.”
I nodded, with not a clue what he was talking about, but I could hardly shout, Look, I’m not even from this solar system. Out where we are, we shoot anyone from Allion no questions asked. What the hell is the Europa convention?
Then he was gone and I was alone in the room.
The centre desk was empty, but there was a computer on a desk in the corner. I typed in the name Paul Ormerod. There was only one mention of him. He had been born on Ganymede, but had left after completing his doctorate in astrobiology . . . over two hundred years ago. He had disappeared during his work on Titan, then aged thirty-two. He’d been involved in an accident while diving under the methane ice, and had never been the same. Rumour went that he’d walked out the air lock. There were no details on his file from then until recently.
I sat there, staring at my reflection in the window. I didn’t look two hundred years old. Without body replacements, no one got that old. Body replacements were the domain of construct agents, because each time you replaced your old body with a new one, you lost half your identity. Each construct body fitted in a niche for which it was designed. It had a job to do, a place in society. If you grafted a mind onto it, the mind had to fit in that new world and discard much of its old personality. If you have no relatives other than the eight other bodies who come out of the same batch, and have the same identity problems as you, your brothers and your job determine who you are, simple as that.
Pristines preferred to hang onto their own identity, because it was the only one they had, and it was what separated them from us, constructs. At two hundred years old, Paul Ormerod could hardly be a Pristine.
Then what? A cover for someone else?
Large areas of his life, including his citizenship and residency, had been blanked out, even before his accident. Was he really from the Ganymede elite? There were no Ormerods on Ganymede today. They might have been forced to move, or changed their name. ISF could help someone do that, and ISF had guards following me around.
Shit. At New Jakarta, ISF meant the good guys. I hated it when people shifted the goalposts on me.
Your own stupid fault, Jas Grimshaw.
Troy’s datapatch suddenly looked like a brilliant move. It was easy to use, as if it sensed what you wanted. I managed to set the computer up so it connected to the local copy of my mindbase, and would loop my experiences back to the local network.
But whatever I did, I couldn’t get the screen to display the lecture everyone was so keen to hear. How was I supposed to practise?
I was still struggling with the computer when there was a knock on the door and a man came in, dressed in the white uniform of the ISF. A senior ranking officer, judging by his insignia.
He took the only chair in the room without being invited to do so. I sat on the desk so my body blocked his view of the computer screen still displaying my futile attempts to get the computer to read the deep-instruction.
I tried to look relaxed, but my gaze settled on his belt, where he carried a handgun of the heatseeker class—a plasma beam weapon. At New Jakarta, any ISF personnel entering the station proper would leave heavy firearms at the base.
“Dr Ormerod, it is rather unusual for a Luminati scientist to show himself outside the institute, isn’t it?”
What. The. Fuck.
Now the truth came out. The secrecy, the one hundred and seventy-year gap in the scientist’s data. Paul Ormerod was one of the Luminati, brilliant scientists recreated from great minds of the past, rumoured to be imbued with alien intelligence. Well, anything about the Luminati was more rumour than truth, other than that they held the universe in their hands and no one else understood their work.
“Perhaps not.” Shit. My heart was thudding. Jas Grimshaw, you’ve been well and truly set up.
“I must disagree. The Luminati have rules against going into the public. So why is it, Dr Ormerod, that you show yourself here?”
I stared at him. I wasn’t showing myself anywhere because I wasn’t who he thought I was.
“Maybe you’re afraid of something,” he offered.
I shrugged, hoping for my heart to calm down. “Maybe.”
He fixed me with his eyes. “I hope you understand we are here for your protection?”
Protection? “Yes, I see. Did you, um . . .” Think, Jas Grimshaw, think “Did you come across something problematic? I think quite highly of Ganymede security.” Shit, was that even something one of the Luminati would say in those words? Probably not; it didn’t sound educated enough. No wonder the strange looks. The scientist who suddenly started to talk like a shunt pilot, because, you know, he was a shunt pilot.
“You, of all people, should know that the academic community enjoys something akin to diplomatic immunity. In this case, however, that’s not in our favour. It seems that the topic of your research attracts undesirable elements.”
Ah. I knew that code word, too. At New Jakarta, Allionist spies were famous for being normal, pleasant social people who sometimes gave themselves away by the high power consumption of their rooms; it was said that all male Allionists were half-human, half-machine. I thought of Dr Aniyanda’s sophisticated face.
“The research you are reporting on is fairly controversial, to say the least. How
far ahead are the Luminati with developing the technology?”
The deep-instruction took that moment to spring back into life. In front of my vision it displayed, Do not tell anybody anything.
That was easy, since I didn’t know anything. The lecture wouldn’t display, and I had no doubt that would remain so until I was in that hall.
At that moment, Andro burst through the door. “Paul, you’re on in ten minutes.”
I didn’t know whether to feel frightened or glad about it.
I switched off the computer behind my back without taking my eyes from the ISF guard, and followed Andro back through the crowd.
There was that man in green again, together with his Allionist scientist friends.
“Dr Ormerod, I’d like to make an appointment to see you later—”
“I’m fairly busy right now,” I said.
“Ah,” he said in an understanding way, and eyed my ISF follower. I guess he understood more than I did. “I would be interested to hear your opinions on the particle energy balance of warp space. Let me show you some of the work we have done.”
Andro seemed keen to keep going, but Dr Aniyanda took a datapad out of his pocket and showed it to me.
We can offer you safe passage out of here.
Shit.
“Yes, um . . . thank you.” My mind scrambled for a suitable response. Were those ISF soldiers supposed to be here for my protection or to keep me under control? Was I meant to be sympathetic to this, possibly Allionist, man or not? Heavens knew what Allion did to people. They had no morals. None, whatsoever.
I could seriously use some guidance, people. Help me. But the instruction remained silent.
“Thank you. I will consider seeing you, after the lecture.”
“You’re giving the lecture?” He almost whispered. “Don’t be a lunatic. It’s classified material. They’ll never let you.” His gaze darted to the ISF soldiers.
“Yes, I am giving the lecture.” And I hoped to fuck that whatever it was going to display was going to save my skin.