Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  He’d be right at home on Kepler 452-b. It was five times as big as Earth, and the gravity was twice as strong. Mordecai weighed in at 160 pounds on Earth; here, it’d feel like 320. He’d be wearing a mechanical exoskeleton just to move around, while the gravver would stroll about the planet with ease.

  “Seatbelts on,” growled the ship’s gunner. There was no sign of pirates, and he had little to do other than manage the passengers: Mordecai and two others, sitting in a row of seats on either side of the ship. Eight spots total, five empty. The others had been occupied when the Warp Witch had left Sol, but the rest of the original passengers had disembarked at other systems. This was the last stop, and they could all be stuck here for months before the next ship came round.

  Neither of the remaining passengers were talkers, and they’d spent most of the trip in silence, goggles strapped over their heads as they gorged on vids or books or whatever was their particular pleasure. That suited Mordecai just fine. He didn’t talk to people more than once a month back on Earth, at least not in person. He could barely even manage eye contact, and he’d had to add an extra dose of anxiety regulators to his daily pill just to summon the courage to get on the ship. But mindless chatter wasn’t the only way to get to know someone. Not for a man whose days were spent gathering information and piecing it all together.

  One of the passengers was a trader, a doughy middle-aged man with a paunch that barely squeezed into the restraints. He hadn’t done more than grunt at anyone else, but his profession was obvious. Mordecai had seen him with his men before the ship had launched. He’d watched them dump crate after crate into the cargo hold while he clucked over his treasures like a mother hen, paying extra so the crew wouldn’t inspect them. It was men like him who made the real money, fleecing the scavengers of their finds in exchange for even more precious rarities on the frontier: booze, pornography, and drugs.

  The other passenger was a woman, her features vaguely Middle Eastern, her olive skin smooth to perfection and her eyes glistening like emeralds. She was nicer, making polite chit-chat as the days had ticked by, but for all she’d talked she hadn’t really said a thing. Not about herself, at least, but it didn’t surprise Mordecai. She was too beautiful for a trip like this, and her vacuum suit was too expensive, too pristine. A prostitute, most likely. It’s lonely out in space, and the ratio of men to women wasn’t exactly favorable to the scavengers. She’d flirted with the trader, but he hadn’t bitten. She hadn’t bothered with Mordecai; his vacuum suit was used, a rag-tag collection of segments salvaged from damaged suits and welded together. She’d probably assumed he couldn’t afford her rate, and rightly so. But the scavengers could, and they weren’t likely to be so tight-fisted as Mordecai or the trader.

  A voice crackled over the intercom, echoing throughout the ship. The navigator. “Prepare for atmospheric entry. You kids know the drill. Do NOT leave your seats, no matter what. The ride’ll be bumpy, but you just let us handle it.” His voice was considerably less hostile than it had been the first time, but they were old hands by now. Four other stops, four other landings, and if one of them was inclined to do something stupid they’d have tried it already.

  The planet loomed large, so big in the porthole that he could barely see the edges of it. And then came the thump as the navigator pitched the ship down into the atmosphere. The ship shook, then lurched from side to side. Mordecai felt his organs bobbing up and down inside him, his head woozy from the pressure. The porthole was white with heat, and there wasn’t anything left of the view. The ship banked left, then right, weaving through clouds and storms until Mordecai’s ears popped.

  Then they slowed, moving from a harsh dive into a peaceful glide. He could see the surface through the porthole, and he could see where they were headed. Fort Twicken, a cluster of silver geodesic domes big enough to house a small village worth of people. It wasn’t much of a fort, the name aside. A few coilguns dotted a perimeter made of thin mesh fencing, and a single missile battery tracked their flight path as they landed. Piracy was a threat, but not in a newly discovered system, and not just yet. If they struck gold, it’d be quite another matter. Still, better safe than sorry, and whatever scavenging consortium had built the place had splurged on at least some basic defenses.

  The landing gear thumped against the ground, absorbing the weight of the ship and shaking them around yet again. “Smooth as silk,” came the navigator’s voice over the intercom, and then they were there. Mordecai’s new home, at least for the next few months. He tugged a breathing mask over his head, checked the seal, and fitted his exoskeleton around his vacuum suit. It looked like the sort of metal bracing a polio victim might have worn a hundred years back, but it would work, at least once he got the hang of it.

  He stumbled towards the exit ramp, struggling to find his balance as the planet’s gravity sucked him downwards. He’d only brought a single duffle bag, but it was everything he could do just to drag it along behind him without toppling over. Once the rocky start was over with, he stepped outside into the open air, the light a dimmer yellow than anything he’d ever seen back on Earth.

  The entire place smelled like cat piss, even through the air filter. Something in the atmosphere gave it the odor, something non-toxic, and his breathing mask wasn’t high-end enough to filter it out for the sake of mere comfort. The sky was a dull orange, and wind whipped past him, spraying dust and pebbles across his face.

  They’d built Fort Twicken in the middle of an empty desert plain with nothing around for miles. A few grey dump trucks were parked in a row near the perimeter, their wheels the size of a grown man. Another ship sat on a landing platform near the entrance to the domes, a glider with extra-long wings tailored to the planet’s atmosphere. A scout or a transport; it wasn’t anywhere close to spaceworthy.

  The geodesic domes lay ahead of them, the silver lattices shining in the sun. There were five of them, connected by hallways and maintaining a common Earth-like atmosphere for the entire fort.

  A man waited to greet them. He wore a black exosuit, pistons and tubes crisscrossing the skin to form a layer of artificial muscle strong enough to carry him around the planet with ease. He’d be a scavenger; Mordecai could infer that from the cost of his suit alone.

  The prostitute sauntered past the man, her vacuum suit a courtly purple under the light of the planet’s sun. Her movements were lithe even in this gravity, displaying her body with a subtle grace and poise. The scavenger waved her inside with a brisk nod and a longer turn of his head once she’d passed. The trader was still busy back at the ship ordering around the crew as they unloaded his cargo. As for Mordecai, he was on his own.

  His stomach turned at the thought of talking to the scavenger. So many things could go wrong. He wouldn’t know what to say. Maybe they wouldn’t let him in. Maybe they’d just rob him and leave him out here to die. Scenarios ran through his head full of death and dismemberment and torture.

  He couldn’t help it. It was the anxiety, a product of decades spent isolated in his conapt. Now he was out in the open on a foreign planet, a computer nerd about to live cheek to jowl with some of the roughest men in the galaxy. He wanted to turn back, but he couldn’t. He wanted to up his dose of mood regulators, but he wasn’t going to be popping any more pills until he got out of that mask. His breathing grew quick, frightened, but he closed his eyes and lapsed into meditation, just for a few seconds. It was enough, if barely. He stepped forward, stuttering the beginnings of a greeting to the stranger standing before him.

  “Access Code.” The voice crackled out of the scavenger’s exosuit, muffled by the speaker into something almost robotic.

  “Three-four-eight-seven-six-two,” said Mordecai. It had cost him almost as much as the trip. Three months room and board, and he’d have to figure out the rest now that he was here. But he had cryptos with him, the keys stored in a memory chip implanted into his wrist. He could buy what help he needed, and he could buy a ticket home.

  “Dome Six,” said th
e man. “If a cot’s empty, it’s yours.” The door to the fort slid open and Mordecai headed inside.

  He passed through an airlock, and after that he was free to remove his mask. It still smelled like piss inside, even with the Earth-like atmosphere. And he couldn’t take off the exoskeleton, not even in here. He’d be living in his suit for the duration, at least if he wanted to be able to move.

  The halls were thin, the ceilings low. He scrabbled along the ground at a near crawl, following a set of painted arrows on the walls directing him to Dome Six. Three men approached from down the hall, laughing and roughhousing and staring at him like a piece of meat. It’s what he was, he supposed. They’d want to know what he was up to, and whether there was any profit in it for them.

  But it didn’t make it any less nerve wracking. He hunched against the wall, giving them as wide a berth as he possibly could, hoping they’d just ignore him and be on their way. He tucked his duffle bag behind him, not that it would do anything to stop them from taking it if they were so inclined. They were loud, they were dirty, they were terrifying. He fumbled in his pockets, pulled out a pill full of anxiety regulators, and popped it into his mouth. The second of the day, and it might not be the last.

  He’d need the extra dosage from the looks of them. One of the men was another gravver, a beefy little bruiser with swagger in every step. He was by far the most human of the three. The other two were cybernetic monstrosities even more heavily modified than Mordecai himself.

  They were almost fully machine, their limbs sawed off and replaced with Slinky-like metal appendages tipped with suction cups at the end. They walked like human accordions, their torsos wobbling up and down as they maneuvered through the hall. It was a crude design, but one that had its advantages.

  They’d probably been among the first to land on the planet, the vanguard of workers who’d scouted things out and installed the domes in the first place. Their bodies were designed to be all purpose, all terrain: no matter the gravity, the weather, or the geology, they’d be able to function. Others could specialize in a particular environment. These men had a specialty of their own: laying out infrastructure for new settlements. They’d likely be gone within months, on to another new planet and another new job.

  The gravver stopped right in front of Mordecai. He smiled up at him with a confidence that belied his height and burped out a greeting to chuckles from his two friends.

  “Fresh fish.”

  Mordecai didn’t know what to say. Was it an insult, or merely a statement of fact? An effort to break the ice? Friendly or hostile? The questions paralyzed him. They always did. That was the problem with social interaction: working out the little hidden meanings behind what the other person was saying. So many minefields, so many traps. Data was easy. It was what it was. People were messy balls of whim and contradiction, and no amount of analysis could predict their behavior with much accuracy.

  “What ya here for, fish?”

  Another endless set of questions whirled through Mordecai’s head. Was it safe to tell the truth? Was it safe to lie? So many scenarios, so many possibilities, so many things that could go wrong. He never had time to process it all. His nerves were off the charts. But the men were looking at him funny. He was taking too much time to think, behaving too oddly. He had to say something, anything. Social conventions demanded it. He knew that much about the art of conversation, at least.

  “The Cousins,” stuttered Mordecai.

  “That’s what everybody’s here for,” said the gravver. “I mean why. What’s the angle. How ya gonna make money, how ya gonna get rich. Everybody’s here to get rich.”

  “He’s a data dork,” said one of the Slinkies. “Look at the eye.”

  “So he is,” said the gravver, staring at Mordecai’s cybernetic implant. “Ya one of the dorks, huh?”

  The gravver gave Mordecai a slap on the shoulder. Mordecai almost leapt through the wall, but after a moment of cowering and another moment of reflection he decided it had been intended as playful. He launched into an explanation of his purpose, hoping he might glean some useful data from the men. “I’m a diver. I’m studying xenosimulated computation networks and the possibility of transmitting data packets between….”

  Three pairs of eyes glazed over in unison. Mordecai didn’t even notice. He couldn’t; he wasn’t making eye contact as he spoke.

  “Buddy,” interrupted the gravver. “You wanna talk to your friends in there about this crap, not us. But you need a ride, you need anything else, you hit us up. We’ll help ya. For a price.”

  “My friends?” said Mordecai as the men disengaged and continued down the hall.

  “Dome Four,” came the shout back. The three men turned a corner, and soon all Mordecai could hear of them was a familiar din of snickering at his own expense.

  Dome Four. It was just up the hall. He dragged his duffle bag a little further, turned to the left, and stepped through an airlock and into the dome.

  There they were. Thirty or forty of them. Divers, just like Mordecai, and they’d beaten him to the punch. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. It was a fresh lead, no one could have beaten him here, he’d have seen it on the boards, he’d have seen it somewhere—

  And then Mordecai saw him.

  Rikksin.

  The leader of a Pan-Korean diving clan. Famous not just by handle but by face. The man who’d brought down the SouthAm government with a series of carefully orchestrated leaks, who’d remotely hijacked a Phobos mining freighter from his conapt in Seoul when he was just a teenager, who’d predicted dozens of market crashes and caused hundreds more.

  He was a god. And he was here. In person. With most of his clan along with him.

  They’d rented out the entire dome from the looks of it. Thick power cables ran this way and that, pinned to the floor with industrial staples. A row of quantum computers gave them instant access to the net, crystal dendrite formations branching like trees and glowing purple beneath the machines’ transparent shells. Personal jack-in stations for each of the divers, and plush ones at that. A fridge full of snacks, and even a ping pong table.

  It must have cost them trillions of cryptos to ship it all out here, but the clan had that and more to spare.

  Mordecai looked down at his little bag of gadgets, assembled so carefully and after so many difficult choices, weighed to precision to fit within his very limited budget.

  He looked up again at the room full of expensive diving gear, and at the team full of people already at work with a healthy head start.

  He would have cried, if he hadn’t just taken that extra pill.

  A voice shouted at him in Commercial Mandarin, and then again in English. “Who the hell are you?”

  A red-faced Mongolian man rushed towards him, tablet in hand. He swatted at Mordecai with the tablet, driving him back into the airlock. “Other divers out, hey! Get going, get gone, pest, bug, gnat! Get to your own dome, hey!” Mordecai wasn’t even listening. He was just staring at Rikksin, and Rikksin back at him. Tall, impossibly handsome, perfectly coiffed black hair and a face that looked sculpted rather than born. It probably was. Rikksin had the cryptos to look however he liked. His eyes bored through Mordecai like he was diving into his soul.

  This wasn’t just the man he wanted to beat.

  This was the man he wanted to be.

  The Mongolian slapped a button and the airlock door slid shut in his face. The race was over before it had even started. There was no way he’d win. If someone made first contact here, it wouldn’t be him.

  He made his way through the halls until he hit Dome Six. If Fort Twicken had a slum, this was it. Bunks lined up floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Trash everywhere, clothes and equipment strewn all over the floors, half the room trying to sleep and the other half in the middle of a drinking game. Screams and shouts and raucous laughter. A fight at one end of the dome while the bunks at the other end had been turned into an open-air brothel, the sheets barely covering what was happeni
ng behind them. There was no place here to hide those particular activities, but still.

  At least there weren’t any more divers, not that he could see. But there also weren’t any computers and weren’t any net terminals. All he had was what he’d brought, and it would never be enough. He found an empty bunk, collapsed onto it, and took a sleeping pill. If nothing else, he could dream away his troubles for a time.

  He woke in the morning clutching his duffel bag to his chest. It was still there, at least, and the room seemed to have calmed down while he’d slept. Only a few stragglers were left to putter around the near-empty room. “Breakfast,” said a blobby gen-engineered man next to him before he wobbled his way out of the dome.

  Mordecai’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten anything of substance since he’d left the ship, and even then it had all been a bland vac-sealed mush. He followed the man into the hall, and not without trepidation. If this was the room, he could only imagine the board.

  The cafeteria wasn’t as bad as all that, but it hardly qualified as fine dining. The place was crammed to the brim. Everyone in the entire fort must have been there, shoveling chow down their throats to get ready for the day ahead. They were quieter than the night before. Hangovers all around, and no one with the energy to do more than rub their throbbing foreheads. Mordecai politely weaved his way through the scavengers, managed to secure a tray, and sat down at the least crowded table he could find.

  They’d served him mush, but slightly higher quality mush than he’d grown used to on the ship. It had some color to it, and there was even a side of hydroponically grown vegetables. He forced it down, miserable. He could see Rikksin’s diving clan across the room at a private table all their own.