by Tom Caldwell
“This might all sound really outdated, but it’s not. Without laws like this in place, you get pirates. Don’t even laugh, man. Out in deep space, like around IPLOS Frontenac, ships get shot down and picked over all the time. Very real concern.
“Anyhow, the way this should work is that your Good Samaritan shows up, voluntarily helps to save your stuff from destruction, and does…well, let’s say a half-decent job or better. He makes some kind of positive difference. Both you and G.S. then head to a court or arbitrator, which determines the reward G.S. will get. The more he helps, the more he gets.
“If this sounds like a bad deal, you do have the right to refuse help from G.S. You might turn down a rescue attempt if you already have a deal with a professional salvage company, for instance. This includes stuff like a Personal Spaceflight Association membership, if Taltos had one—no? Gotcha, good to know.
“You’re probably asking yourself: does this even apply to Perdigon? It’s a planet, not a ship. The only ship in the equation is the Handsome Lake, which is kaput. And maritime salvage laws don’t apply to terrestrial rescue. You help someone on dry land, you’re not taking the same risks as someone who has to take his boat off-course and put his ass on the line. But courts have been finding that colonies in extreme isolation may present just as much risk to our buddy G.S., so the case law leans toward applying maritime principles in space rescue situations. Such as these.
“Of course, all this assumes no contractual obligations. Someone signs a contract, that could change everything. Hear that? Roshan. Buddy. Listen to me. Get a passenger pigeon to Siddhartha Station, wherever the fuck that is, and tell Ezra not to sign anything while he’s in custody at Bija’s Willy-Wonka Chocolate Factory. Okay? Same goes for Jacob.
“Because right now, the sequence of events is that Ezra gave the rights to you, and wrote down his intent, and sent a symbolic payment as consideration for the promise of rescue. That is a contract, but it’s a very short and vague one. It’ll need to be interpreted by a court. The interpretation you want—the one your attorney should coax them to adopt—is that Taltos is already yours. It became yours at the moment when Ezra gave you that dollar. If you get that on paper pronto, you got a chance. Then it won’t matter what Magnus makes them sign—Ezra can’t give something away if it isn’t his anymore. Nemo dat quod non habet, we say in lawyer-talk. Means you can’t give what you don’t have.”
Ezra had been waiting for this, and even though physically he felt like creamed garbage, it was a sweet moment: “Magnus, I already signed the company over to Roshan Tehrani. Before you even set foot on that planet. You came just in time. And you were still too late.”
It was like throwing a rock at a dictator’s statue. Satisfying, but not helpful. Magnus blinked out of rhythm, a sign of impact, but he kept smiling. “The company? No. I don’t want the tech. It doesn’t work, does it?”
“Well—”
“It doesn’t. Work,” Magnus repeated, and he came over to sit cross-legged on the floor with Ezra, half-lotus. “It’s like a flying machine built by Leonardo da Vinci. Interesting? Absolutely. Well-made? I’d expect nothing less. But does it fly? Of course not.”
For the past few years, Ezra hadn’t had to be defensive about his abilities. No tests were able to find fault with him, in any laboratory setting. Taltos got the Randi Foundation money, even. “The new prototypes don’t work—listen—they don’t work because consumers won’t tolerate the side effects. The slightest thing goes wrong, people panic. I saw a test user freak out because the highest setting made her smell burnt toast. Like, really? Sorry that this…this advancement of human consciousness is kind of painful. Welcome to my life, ha. But the thing in my head works, Magnus. That’s why we’re here.”
“Really? Because I’m going to go out on a limb here, Barany: a product that gives the user violent convulsions several times per week is a bad product.”
“Yup. Well.” Ezra shrugged. “I guess that’s Roshan’s problem now.”
“Maybe so.” Magnus smiled, lips tight. “It’s a big burden off my shoulders, honestly. What I want is very simple. Hasn’t really changed since the first time we talked, in fact.”
“Can we just. The point,” said Ezra. “Can we get to it?”
“Seeing as your company is a smoking ruin on a planet whose human inhabitants now number zero, I’d like to throw Bija’s hat back in the ring. Bidding for your talents, Barany. You can have a lifelong career of comfort, peace, and agency as Bija’s permanent futurist and trendspotter.”
“I already heard this speech. Your whole temptation-in-the-wilderness thing, which—which you do because you’re…the devil,” Ezra said, trailing off as he decided that the comparison was melodramatic. “Look, the first day you called me into your office to talk about Taltos, the first time, you waved this offer in my face. Like you thought you could take advantage of the freaky rube from the Midwest.”
“Ezra!” It was hard to tell if Magnus’s laughter was forced; he was very well-practiced. “Wow. This is some serious stuff you’ve been carrying around! I had no idea you felt that way. Just gotta correct you on some facts. One. I have never tried to take advantage of you. I’ve always offered you extremely generous employment packages. Two.” He leaned closer to Ezra, dipping his head to make eye contact. “I saved your life. You little prick. Okay? I saved your life. I saved your husband’s life. I saved eleven children and one innocent young woman. Look at me. You don’t get to call me the devil.”
Ezra was seething. He pulled himself backward on the rug, away from Magnus. “Have you—God, it’s always—do you know what you’re asking? After years of, of scheming to get your way, do you even know how it would end for you?”
“That’d be your job.”
“Then I’ll give you one for free. Here’s a fact: my tech does work. Yeah. I almost wish it doesn’t, but it does. And maybe Tammy in Kansas City isn’t going to be a buyer because the headaches are a drag. Cool. Awesome. Corporate and industrial buyers won’t give a shred of a fuck what the side effects are, and they will buy. They’ll buy thousands and thousands of implants, they’ll test thousands and thousands of job candidates—anywhere desperate, doesn’t matter. Indentured servitude’s legal again in the South, and all those ghost stories down there must mean something, right? Population could have latent ability. Test ’em. Anyone who can pass the test for a base level of primitive psionic power gets the implant. And if the implants give occasional seizures to your entire workforce, no prob. Expected behaviour. The numbers will tell you it’s still worth it, and you’ll listen to the numbers.”
“And?” Magnus demanded. “You’re the one who called it an advancement of human consciousness. We’re bringing it to the masses. That’s what you wanted to do with Taltos, isn’t it?”
“What, enslave people for a corporate telepathic panopticon? No, that’s not what I wanted to do with my fucking company, Magnus. I wanted it to become normal.” Ezra wrapped his arms around his knees in front of him. The drugs, whatever they were, sang in his veins.
“In the future I wanted,” Ezra said, “the future is just another thing you learn to ignore. A thousand years ago, it was impossible for a human being in Paris to know what was happening in Beijing. That would have been a wizard power. Like scrying. Now it’s not. We don’t even care. We know we should read the headlines and keep up with what’s happening in the world, but we don’t. We tune that shit out. What if precog tech could be like that? Like a phone, like the Internet, like the Lumen. Useful in an emergency, fun when you’re bored, distracting when you need to concentrate. Some people use it all the time, they love it, and some people don’t get the jokes and punctuate their texts weirdly.”
“But that’s what I want too,” Magnus said softly. “Just…with the addition that some of those people—the ones with exceptional promise, the ones with greater interest in the possibilities of the human mind—they could do it for a living. Doing what you love. Isn’t that what’s really impor
tant in life?”
“Uh-huh. And some of those amazing gifted people might want to ‘do what they love’ in fields like private security, stock trading, espionage, military contracting—”
“Exactly,” Magnus said, as if consoling him. “People get jobs in those fields all the time. Who am I to judge? Sounds exciting.”
The two of them fell silent. Ezra had foreseen this conversation dozens of times over now. It always split here, a natural caesura. There was one train of thought in Magnus’s head that could make an ugly future, and Magnus might or might not follow it. You could find seams like this everywhere, if you hunted for them, from one second to the next.
Jacob dropped his keys on the morning of their wedding, and he said butterfingers because of course he did, and thus delayed them getting to the car by three seconds, averting major disaster.
Natalie passed by six vending machines every day on her way to work. Only two of those six sold Almond Joys; only one of those was in a desirable location, while the other was beside a doubtful alley. If she stopped by the good vending machine for at least thirty seconds, she didn’t run into her ex-husband on the train. Didn’t spend a weekend crying. This probably had some effect on business or whatever, but mostly—the guy seemed like an asshole. Natalie was better off with the Almond Joy.
Sometimes, when all the factors were right, you could tilt the pinball machine. But Ezra failed at that game a lot.
“Were you a weird kid?” Magnus asked him.
So they were going in this direction. Okay. Ezra rested his chin on his knees. “I mean—yeah. Of course.”
“I was a weird kid. I mean I never had any experiences like yours. Nothing spooky. But my grandmother, my—no, my great-aunt. She saw a ghost once.”
“Who?”
“My great-aunt.”
“No, who was the ghost?”
“I don’t think anyone knew,” said Magnus. He picked up his tablet to summon some water, then upgraded the selection to a tea service. “A boy who’d been shot in the head. She could see the wound.”
People told Ezra stories like this. Spooky stuff, lore and superstitions. He tried to discourage it. “Sounds metal.”
“She wasn’t making it up. But every family’s got something like that, right?”
Magnus had tried to probe Ezra about his family history before. Ezra preferred to discourage that too. No discussion of descent or inheritance. “Yeah. Well. I come from very—very ordinary stock. So.”
“Stock from where, where do they come from?”
“England. And Hungary before that. It’s boring.”
“Aha. That makes perfect sense to me, you know. Like your company’s name. Shamans in the wilds of central Europe.”
“Jewellers in Budapest, but okay.”
“I just don’t see how that can be true,” said Magnus, with wounded earnestness. “Your abilities surfaced in early childhood. It wasn’t a learned skill. It was present even before the implant surgery. There was no trauma or environmental change associated with the onset. You must have inherited it.”
Ezra took refuge in science. “I guess, man, but genes are weird. And as for creepy grandmas with like, one glass eye and a cat that won’t stop staring at you—or whatever you’re looking for—I wouldn’t fucking know. Okay? My parents taught at the University of Liverpool and they left for Butler because campus was underwater in 2065. I’ve never been there, I’ve never met any relatives—my family just isn’t that tight.”
“You and Jacob ever talk about having kids? Test tube style?” asked Magnus, undeterred. “You must have thought about it. Those kids on Perdigon seemed crazy about Jacob.”
“They love him. Jacob’s the good cop.”
“You must have wanted…” Magnus poured out some green tea into each cup, passed one to Ezra. “I mean, if it were me, going through something like that—it would make me think. About my legacy.”
“We never really talked about having biological kids.” This was none of Magnus’s business, but Ezra knew that getting evasive would only hasten the inevitable. He took the cup and set it down on the coffee table untouched. “If we were gonna take that on, we’d adopt a kid. Someone older. Because of Jacob’s whole history…y’know. Adopting is important to him.”
“That’s very noble. Maybe this is an age thing,” said Magnus with a contemplative air. “You’re still young, but when I turned 39, I started thinking a lot about future generations. All my genetic material, everything that made me who I am today—just think of all those organisms that survived incredible odds just to reproduce. Is that all just going to culminate in my existence? The last of my line?”
“Tragic, sure. Yup. You should totally do the test tube thing,” Ezra said, in his politest I don’t give a fuck what you do voice. “Or cloning. You seem like a clone guy.”
“Not really. I hate the owner of Nestling Labs,” said Magnus. “So cloning isn’t really on my agenda. Although, I have to say, as a reproductive method I like it. Why should I have to vet some woman’s DNA just to make sure my genes live on? Right? Like people say it’s narcissistic to go with cloning and that’s just stupid.” Magnus solicited Ezra’s agreement with a laugh, and got a weak one in return. “It’s not like he’d be a copy of me. Other than genetically. I could do twins, even, if I hired enough staff. That way they wouldn’t feel so isolated.”
“Maybe you should bury the hatchet with Nestling, then.”
“Mm. See, what I’d rather do,” said Magnus, “is start a Bija genetic program. Doesn’t that just make more sense? We can really add to the, the body of scientific knowledge with this. Whatever structural differences your brain has, we can isolate the genetic cause.”
That was the seam that Ezra had been waiting for. “Please don’t,” he murmured.
“Think about it. What’s the scariest thing, when you imagine having kids?” Magnus said. “Raising them. Right? Specifically, raising them wrong. Fucking them up. You won’t have to worry about that. Your genes—some of them, at least—will go on. Fewer responsibilities.”
“So someone else fucks them up instead of me.”
“You’re joking, but think about Jacob. The things he’s been through would mess anyone up. He told me, you know, while we were still together.” Crocodile grin. “Suicidal mother, dad not in the picture, abusive foster parents. And most people…come on. You know this is true. Most people whose parents can’t love them right—they turn into freaks like you and me.”
“Magnus.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell. I know,” said Magnus. “From the things you haven’t said. Remember when I saw you in the bathroom that morning, when we were going to court the first time? You were using your phone to look up instructions to the half-Windsor. I looked at you and I thought—that’s a man whose father never taught him how. Parents fail their kids. And not everybody can be on Jacob’s level. I kept tropical fish as a kid. I knew everything about tropical fish. You know how you need snails in a fish-tank? The snail eats all this toxic material, dead plant matter, leftover food, the garbage, and keeps the tank clean. Jacob does that. He takes shit and turns it to gold. The more shit, the more gold. But he’s special. Most of us don’t turn shit into anything. Most of us just produce it.”
Ezra slumped against the bottom of the couch. He didn’t want to listen to this. It was a psych-out and he knew it, but he also knew that some of these ideas were going to sink into his head and go into regular rotation. “It wasn’t—it’s special, but it’s not rare. My parents did fine, anyhow. Not with knot lessons, I guess, but everything else was okay. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Mm, good. Loyalty’s a nice quality.” Magnus was still smiling. “You never invited me to the wedding, you know. I never got to say mazel tov to Jacob. That didn’t seem fair to me, considering I introduced you.”
“You tried to sue me for hiring him. And then you took Marty for nothing more than spite, just hoping to steal ou
r IP—”
“Ezra, this is business. Okay? Not a sock-hop. But I did introduce you. You met at my company. It happened because of me.”
“Well, the wedding’s been over for awhile, so I don’t know how I can rectify that missing invitation, Magnus,” Ezra said. He couldn’t see any further into the future now that they’d crossed over that seam; he felt blind, the implant a dead piece of steel and plastic inside his skull. “What do you want from me here?”
“Trust.” Magnus refilled his cup from the Japanese stoneware teapot. “Trust me that I want what’s best for you both. I think the two of you are very romantic, a real Bija love story. Because—and forgive me for assuming—you must have foreseen it. Right?”
“Of course.” This was public knowledge, an anecdote they told in interviews. Humanising. Or so Ezra had been told. “I knew before I met him. That he was going to be…I knew who he was.”
Ezra had gone through puberty with his abilities—he’d foreseen everything he could while jerking off in the shower. When he would lose his virginity, when he would have the best sex of his life, when he would have the hottest partner, when it would happen next, and next, and next…
That had also been how he learned to delude himself about certain things. But when he first met Jacob at Bija, that face was already familiar.
“Soulmates,” Magnus remarked.
“That shit’s not real.”
“No?”
Ezra shrugged. “Far as I can tell. I think it would show statistically, since it’s such a dramatic purported effect. But people get plenty of chances to fall in love. I don’t even…I don’t get why people want it to be true. I guess is the thing. Like why would it be good for soulmates to exist? What’s so sweet about the idea that you can never be happy again, if this relationship doesn’t work out?”