by S. J. Ryan
She stood up and stretched. “I have a class to teach this afternoon, but I have Fridays off. We'll go next Friday.”
He arose. “Go where?”
“Where else? The nexus of all things strange. Kansas.”
With her grin, the Seattle waterfront faded into a swirl of random lights and colors. Matt Four paused the transition. In the mist of twilight gray, he asked, “You okay, kid?”
“Yeah,” came the flat-toned reply from down the airship passage, relayed from implant to implant.
“I thought you'd have all kinds of questions.”
“I'm familiar with the Roman Empire theme.”
“What about seeing Synth here? Is that causing any feelings?”
“Not really.”
“Remember who you're talking to, kid. If anyone knows you had feelings toward her, it's me.”
“I'm in a relationship with someone else now.”
“Really?”
“Do you have to act so amazed?”
“Sorry, I meant, great. It's just that you didn't mention that before. I can see I'll have to do some catching up with your life.”
“What about you? Do you have a relationship with Synth?”
Matt Four couldn't immediately reply.
“The file will explain. Why don't we continue?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Now, the thing about the following scenes is that they take place over the space of about five years. Keep that in mind. Roth's security was a tough egg to crack, literally.”
“Understand.”
“Ivan, please resume.”
The mist took on color and resolution, and through the eyes and ears of Matt Three, they were standing aside an air car, beneath an oppressively cloudless sky that had beaten the horizon into perfect flatness.
“Kansas,” Matt Three growled. “So we meet again.”
“What have you got against Kansas?” Synth asked.
She was standing before him, dressed in coveralls. Around their landing spot, a field of crudely genetically-modified wheat that would never be harvested rippled in the wilting mid-day breeze.
“What does Kansas have in its favor?” Matt Three demanded, running a finger under his collar to wipe away the perspiration. “Besides dry air and monochromicity? Anyhow, in The Wizard of Oz, the book at least, Dorothy was only too glad to get out of Kansas.”
“Yet we keep on coming back. Well, let's get going, Toto.”
Receiving only a sniff as reply, she started across the field toward the rectangular silhouettes breaking the monotony of the horizon. Matt Three lumbered after.
The main complex of the Star Seed Project operations center was a contrast of bright surfaces and dark shadows in the mid-day sun. The complex hadn't expanded in the centuries since Matt had last laid eyes upon it. Several buildings had Closed signs, everywhere the windows were covered. Cracks showed in the femtocrete walls and the Star Seed logo was missing from over the entrance. The once well-manicured lawn had been invaded by the relentless monoculture of wheat, once a staple food that fed a hungry planet and now only a wild weed.
They were the only people in sight. Their sole living company was a crow that watched from an upper corner of the headquarters building as they trampled a path through the stalks of an otherwise unblemished field.
“What happened here?” Matt asked.
“Cloneporting took a big bite out of fund raising,” Synth replied. “Then our biggest fundraiser was placed under house arrest. Discovering human presence on DP3 was the nail in the coffin. Catapult operations have been suspended indefinitely by injunction of the Solar Council.”
“It looks like no one has been here for years.”
“Souvenir hunters used to come. I ran into them from time to time. Not so much now that almost everything worth looting has been looted.”
It was Matt Three's telemetry which unscrolled, but Matt Four remembered how he'd felt with each step. The shiver as he passed from sunlight into the shade of the lobby. How startled he had been to see the broken and missing orbs of the Hundred Nearest Stars mobile. The waves of depression that washed over him while he maneuvered between vandalized displays and down unlit passages past empty offices and laboratories.
“A dream that died,” he murmured.
“By the hand of the man who forged it.”
“Synth, do you think it was all a mistake? The Project, I mean.”
“The way it was managed, yes. I still believe in going to the stars. I still want to go myself, someday.”
“Where are we going right now?”
“I've been through the building several times, so I have no preference. Anywhere you want, dear.”
“How about his office?”
“You mean Eric's?”
“I've never been there.”
“The elevator is out. We'll have to climb the stairs, if you don't mind.”
“If you knew how many mountains I've climbed on Tian!“
“You'll have to tell me about that, on a day when I'm really bored.”
He chuckled and followed her up the stairs to the third floor. They entered into a large room. There were empty pedestals and empty display cases on the floor, faded rectangles on the walls.
“The reception room,” Synth said. “Visitors were made to wait here while Eric pretended he was handling last minute crises.”
“It looks like it was a museum.”
“Roth was quite the art collector.” She pointed to a large table where heavy metal fasteners had been blow torched apart. “That was a twenty-second century sculpture, 'Apollo in His Chariot Surveying the Plain of Truth.'” She pointed to an even larger table on the other side of the room. “And over here was a scale model of the castle of Mad King Ludwig.” She pointed to a faded rectangle. “And there hung Noite Estrelada. The original, it was claimed.”
“Did the Project contributors appreciate where all the money was going?”
“Roth was actually a very conscientious administrator, as non-profits go. Money wasn't his primary motivator. One time when I was invited to his office, I asked about the artwork and he confided it was intended to psychologically affect potential contributors on a subliminal level. He said the key to persuasion is to have people subconsciously associate what you want them to do with what they already want to do, and the way to do that is to have them associate what they already like with what you want them to like.”
“He never invited me to his office.”
“It's just ahead. Prepare to be unimpressed.”
At the other end of the long room, after navigating around several more empty exhibit platforms, they entered into a corner office whose cracked and dirty windows overlooked the endless wheat fields. The walls of the office were bare but there were no signs of missing artwork. The furniture, sagging and dust-caked, was so utilitarian that it was no wonder it hadn't been scrounged.
“More spartan than I expected,” Matt Three said.
“That's Athena's touch. After his resignation, she became Acting Director for over a century.”
“I'm surprised that no one contested that. She wasn't exactly popular.”
“When Eric resigned, he decreed her as successor. And so Star Seed became an hereditary monarchy.”
“A hereditary – I don't understand.”
“What's to understand? He appointed her to reign after him, and she's his daughter.”
“I thought she was his girlfriend.”
“They pretended that, to hide the bigger scandal.”
“What could be a bigger scandal than having a daughter as a girlfriend?”
“I didn't mean she's his biological daughter. He had her printed to specifications, full grown, to be his perfect android minion.”
“But – that's practically slavery!”
“Ethical standards were lower in the twenty-first century.”
“His 'daughter.' I never knew.”
“I suspected she was a biological robot from the start.”<
br />
“How?”
“She would act domineering, but she really didn't have a mind of her own. Anything Eric wanted, Athena did. Even when I had a crush on him, I thought she was way overboard. That's how I came to suspect the real reason she was always trying to 'genetically upgrade' herself was to hide the fact that she wasn't naturally human to begin with. Also, she'd drop clues about their relationship in the form of mythological allusions.”
“What does 'mythology' have to do with their relationship?”
“She used to call him 'Zeus.' Look it up. How about we explore the rest of the complex?”
“Lead on, Good Witch Glenda.”
Synth laughed. “Witch. I like that. You're still Toto, though.”
Swirl.
They were in a dark, windowless corridor. Furnishings were strewn across the floor, victims of the ransacking of vandals and thieves. Matt Four recalled that at the time, Ivan had informed him that it reeked. Matt Three did not care to sample.
“So it took us three Fridays for the full tour,” Synth said, “What do you think?”
He burped. “Not to have beer on our next picnic.”
“We'll try wine next time. I know a wonderful Madeira. But I meant the complex.”
“It's bigger than I thought. I never knew all these underground passages existed. And everything has been scrounged by souvenir hunters?”
“Everything they could lift. There's an old shuttle in the hangar. Oh, and the station. You'll want to see that.”
“Station?”
The hangar was just down the passage and up the stairs. The single-stage-to-orbit shuttle, wingless and wheel-less, was on blocks, engines removed. Apparently it had been undergoing a major overhaul that had ceased in mid-phase. Synth maneuvered around the looming twenty-second century junk pile without a glance.
On the other side was a cylinder about thirty meters long and five meters wide, mounted on pillars and lying on its side, made of doughnut-shaped segments, sprouting butterfly wings of solar panels that stretched from wall to wall. On one end was a bulb that extended to six smaller bulbs that Matt recognized as old-fashioned spherical ablation-coating-and-parachute OSVs. Matt craned back his neck and stared slack-jawed.
“It looks like a nightmare that crawled out of a twentieth century space program. What the hell is it?”
“Delta Pavonis Station Two. A gift from our cloneporter friends.”
“Say again?”
“As I think I mentioned, when cloneporting became popular, Star Seed's funding dried up. Well, when the scandal about sending seeder probes to DP3 broke, perversely, the exact opposite happened. A group of cloneporters got the idea that it would be cool to go there as tourists. But to go there, you need to have a facility on site that can receive cloneporter signals, print bodies, convert the signals into brain patterns, and download the brain patterns into the bodies. That's how cloneporting is done, and that's what this station is for. Cloneporters provided the funding to build and launch cloneporting stations to Delta Pavonis, and it was their river of woo that kept Star Seed from closing for years.”
Matt Three climbed a ladder and gaped through the station hatch. It was just a hollow shell on the inside. He spotted the mountings for the equipment, but the computer core, robodoc, and full-body printers had either been sold or scavenged long ago. That made sense; even in a post-scarcity economy, equipment like that was hard to come by. He climbed down and rejoined Synth on the floor of the hangar.
“You said this is 'Station Two.' What happened to Station One?”
“It's orbiting DP3 right now. This one is twice as large, and Station Three was going to be even larger. Eventually they were going to set up a ground-based printing station so that thousands of cloneporters could visit DP3.”
“Wouldn't that spoil Eric's and Athena's Roman Experiment?”
“They were desperate for funding and they had to deal with the contingency of the moment. But I wonder if their long-term plan was to sabotage the cloneporters. As it turned out, however, that wasn't necessary. Even before human life was detected on DP3, the Solar Council clamped an edict of non-interference that remains in effect.”
“So no one has ever cloneported to DP3?”
“It's against the law, Matt.”
“Yes, and we must all obey the law. Could anyone be cloneported to DP3?”
“Thinking of going?”
“I'm here to stay.”
“I'm thinking of going.”
He studied her face. Her eyes were full of resolution. Her smile was firm.
“Synth, are you serious?”
“I've lived five and a half centuries, Matt. I've seen and done everything you can do in this one solar system. I'm ready to go somewhere else. I don't see much point in living unless it's to experience and do new things. I missed my opportunity to go to Tian by catapult, and now I'm told it's so much like Earth that it's not worth the visit. So, cloneporting to a new world sounds like an option.”
“What about the people who care about you?”
“My children are grown. My grandchildren are grown. My great-grandchildren are grown! Oh, on average, they each call about once a week, and we talk for about five minutes. I love them and they love me, but I'm not much of a part of their lives anymore. If I go, I'm sure they'll miss me, but not that much. They'll understand.”
Matt Four swallowed as he remembered how Matt Three had felt when he'd spoken the words:
“I would miss you, Synth. A lot.”
A smile flickered. She reached over and clasped his hand. Ivan's audio-visual telemetry didn't record how her flesh felt, but Matt Four remembered.
She turned her eyes to the looming hulk of the station.
“It's not just for the sake of adventure,” she said. “I want to do something meaningful and important with my life. I want to go there and help the people. I want to help the people there avoid all the hell that people went through during the course of Earth history. I want to help them develop a peaceful, prosperous civilization.” Her voice quavered: “I want to fix the mess that Eric's made in all our lives.”
Almost a century and a half later, sitting in the dark compartment of the airship flying through the atmosphere of the planet that Synth had wanted so much to save, Matt Four felt the hollowness of a universe without her.
As the VR file continued to unscroll, Matt Three and Synth gazed at the station in silence. Eventually Synth released his hand and shrugged.
“I don't have the station passcode. I think I can call in some favors and get it, though. But . . . I'm not ready to commit suicide just so my clone can wake up in another star system.”
Matt Three had said nothing.
Swirl . . . .
They walked together through the sub-basement level. The lights of the towering robot that Synth had brought this time cast long beams into the long hallways. Open doors revealed empty rooms. Matt did not recognize the area, for he had never set foot upon it. The surviving signage declared that it had been for storage. The rooms had long been pilfered bare.
“This place just gets more and more depressing,” Matt said. “Where are we going?”
“To Mission Control.”
“I thought we completely scoured that last year.”
“Turns out there was an older Mission Control, going back to our time as Project brats. I never saw it because I dropped out of the Project before my launch. You never saw it because you don't have any of your template's memories after dendritic archiving. So we just assumed the new one was the old one. But it's not.”
They came to the end of the passage. The robot's beams played against a blank wall that matched the adjoining walls seamlessly.
“You'll want to stay back,” Synth said to Matt. To the robot, she said, “Punch a hole, Chopper.”
The towering silver robot approached the wall to within a meter. It opened the bag that it had been carrying and produced a sledge hammer. Taking the proper stance, focusing on a spot at chest hei
ght, it cocked the hammer and swung hard. With a thunderous whack, an explosion of powder billowed toward the humans. They retreated several steps. The robot continued pounding, enlarging the hole. When the hole was large enough to admit passage, Synth said, “That's enough, Chopper, thank you.”
“Chopper,” Matt remarked, watching the robot.
“Nick Chopper,” Synth replied. “The name of the Tin Man.”
“Are we still doing that?”
“Yes, we are. Wait here, Chopper.”
Pressing down on her hardhat, she entered through the hole. Matt followed into a dark passage, sensing openness ahead. Three empty rectangular cut-outs signified where the three large wall monitors had been. The rows of desks had chairs, but the consoles were long gone. Even the light fixtures were empty sockets.
“The fixtures are missing. Souvenir hunters again?”
“Nope, just good old recycling of obsolete equipment. I'm hoping the recycler robots overlooked something that might contain incriminating evidence.” Her hard hat lamp beam played against the walls, pausing as she read door plates. “Ah, the server room.”
As expected, there was nothing inside except empty racks. Synth searched diligently, sweeping her beam down every row, upon every shelf. After a few minutes, she growled and kicked a cabinet of bare shelves.
“The clean-up crew was thorough,” she said.
“Robots tend to be,” he replied. “So what now?”
“I don't know. I thought it was suspicious that Eric ordered this section to be sealed off and I hoped it meant there was something incriminating here, and that we could find it.”
“Eric Roth is thorough too. If he overlooked something, it would only be by improbable accident.” He tilted his head, frowning. “So if there was anything here, it would be . . . . “
He knelt and lowered his head to the floor. Row by row, he peered into the thin cracks between the base of the the server shelves and the floor. “I see something. Now if only there were a way to – “
She picked up the server shelf – which was only a thin metal frame – and put it aside.
“Oh,” he said. He scooped the object from the floor and held it before her in his palm. The rectangle appeared to be made of plastic, with metal at one end.