A.R.Yngve presents
THE ARGUS PROJECT
PROLOGUE:
The Last Politician
He was the last politician, and everyone called him "Kansler".
Of all the political offices from previous times of human history - chief, warlord, king, president, prime minister, governor, mayor, councilman - only the Kansler's title carried real authority in the late 22nd century. He was the appointed Chancellor of the Outer Defense Ring Charter - a title rarely used - and his jurisdiction stretched across a vast part of the Solar System. From the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Pluto, the Kansler was acting supreme commander of Earth's military forces. A thirty-year career had finally taken him to this, the last remaining position of ultimate power in the Solar System, and he had built up a strong fleet of warships.
And yet, the Kansler's power hung by a thread - for his title would be lost, the moment he made a significant mistake in the eyes of the Terran public. And with Earth at war with its Jovian colonies, his career was at stake. The populace of the old homeworld regarded itself "genetically superior" to the renegade "little moles" who built underground cities on Jupiter's moons, and cared little for what was done to them. But defeat - after having paid trillions of tax credits to sustain attacks and blockades - that they would never forgive.
Time was on the side of the Jovian rebellion; time which the Kansler did not have...
1: The Last Broken Nose
Several weeks later.
"Gus" Thorsen was the last traditional heavyweight boxing champion, and proud of it. In the 22nd century, boxing was completely safe. On-the-spot medical aid and microscopic surgery robots had made brain injuries a thing of the past. This had also made the sport obsolete. Professional fighters could literally tear each other's limbs off without suffering pain or permanent injury; the sight of two men punching each other in the head seemed comparatively quaint.
And yet, Gus Thorsen kept fighting the remaining handful of boxing challengers in fair tournaments - no promoters existed in their sport any longer, because profits were virtually nil - while supporting himself on minimum-wage jobs. When his friends asked him when he was going to quit his outmoded hobby, Gus usually smiled and tried to change subject. Truth was, he couldn't explain why he kept fighting. He had no other ambitions in life.
Gus Thorsen was now approaching his 38th birthday.
***
"Gus! You heard the latest on the colony wars?" his trainer asked, speaking through the screen on the pugilist robot's faceplate.
Gus aimed his punches at the screen, watching the trainer's face projected on it, and kept dancing around the robot with his guard down - the classic technique of his late idol, Muhammad Ali. "What?" he asked, never standing still.
"The news , kiddo! The Kansler made Colonel Clarke volunteer to become a cyborg super-soldier - the first of a new breed of fighting men. So I was thinking..."
The trainer ceased talking, as he directed the pugilist robot to duck a rapid-fire series of jabs from Gus - probably the fastest boxer on the planet, though that didn't mean much. In the space of two seconds, one of his punches managed to hit the robot on its plastic chin. The counter on its forehead went up from 29 to 30, and rated the hit a "K.O.".
"I was thinking, maybe that's the future of fighting too. People aren't watching old-style fighting anymore, and they're getting bored with mutilation contests. With cyborgs, we could draw crowds using faster and more powerful action. As long as there's a human brain inside the body that's taking the impact, the interest will remain."
"None of my business," Gus gasped; he had been sparring for hours on end, and his feet were not as fast as two hours ago.
"It kinda is, actually... I'm thinking of moving on to training cybernetically enhanced fighters, instead of this traditional stuff. "
"Uh-huh..."
"I'm selling the gym."
"What!?"
Astonished, Gus stopped dancing about for a full second - long enough for his remote-controlled pugilist to score a hard right hook on his jaw. Gus tumbled onto the floor, dazed by the punch. The trainer shut down the pugilist and climbed up into the ring with his first-aid kit. As he applied instant remedies for the head, brain and face injuries Gus had received, he seemed more concerned than usual - not about Gus's health, but about his sullen expression.
"Gus, kiddo, don't give me that look. You knew it was gonna happen one day. Real estate prices just keep going up! This gym would just about break even, if we moved it to one of those sea platforms or the new mountain plateaus, but the air and sea conditions are not right for traditional boxing."
Gus spat out his bloodied dental protectors and replied: "Then move to another planet. I'd go to Mars or Venus, as long as I can stay in the ring."
"With the lower gravity? You're not trained for that, you'd lose your title quickly to those zippy colonists. Or get killed. The territories are much rougher than Mother Earth."
" Ali wouldn't have been scared of -"
"Here we go again!" the trainer chanted. "'Ali' this, 'Ali' that... when are you gonna stop living in the past, Gus?"
Gus replied with brooding silence, and stood up; six feet tall, he was about average height for a 22nd-century Earthman. His muscular, broad-shouldered frame stood out more than on most citizens - and rarer still, his nose was broken, a reminder of his first major fight that he refused to have fixed. Even the trainer had had all his injuries and scars removed, and looked oddly baby-faced at his age of fifty-six.
"I gotta get to work," Gus said, climbed out of the ring, and headed for the locker room.
The trainer made a half-hearted attempt to follow him, but gave up and shrugged his shoulders to the other boxers. Their attention had been alerted when Gus was knocked down - which astounded them - and now fifteen of them were approaching the trainer with ominous looks on their sweaty, red faces. The trainer began to talk faster.
"Sorry, boys and girls and shoys, I can't control the open market! In three or four months' time, The Giant Panda's Final Resting Grounds Company will turn the place into a funeral parlor for pets. Hey - calm down! Look - I'm calling the cops..."
Panicking, he injected a shot of painkillers in his own arm and cowered into a corner. Gus didn't stay around to watch the angry boxers beat up the trainer. He loathed that kind of violence - and the "victim" could easily patch himself up. He showered and dressed in his work dungarees, picked up his bucket, then walked out through the back entrance.
***
Outside, a youthful-looking woman - all women looked youthful in this city - was waiting. In the open place, she was tossing a frisbee after a large Dalmatian dog. The dog leaped up on its hind legs and caught the frisbee with its teeth. When the dog saw Gus come out, it barked and ran up to him.
"Easy now, Giddog. I gotta take it easy, I was K-O'ed." He patted the dog behind the ears and let it lick him his slightly swollen chin. The woman made a worried face, came up closer to Gus and felt his forehead.
"You took your painkillers?" she asked.
"Why?" he replied, stooped slightly, and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Thanks for looking after him for me."
"Oh, it's just fun. I'd much rather take care of him, than watch you getting punched out in that horrible, sweaty gym."
Gus pretended he hadn't heard her remark, for what seemed to him the thousandth time. The three of them - Gus, the woman and the dog - walked together to the center plaza, where Gus's night shift was about to begin. Around them, dusk fell over the city of Kuwait - though one hardly noticed the darkness, with the holographic projections up in the sky, lights from passing zeppelins and aircraft, and the setting sun being reflected in a myriad solar panels.
Once, there had been a black substance called "crude oil" under their feet. Now those reserves were mostly drained, and solar cells were being built on every free inch of the former oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Many individuals like Gus, whose skills were not in demand, made a decent living cleaning solar panels during nighttime.
"How's your day been?" he asked her.
"Same old, same old... sometimes I wake up in the morning and think: 'I don't know if my life is going anywhere.' Then I take a shot of Pro-Pro and I feel better."
Gus tossed the frisbee, and his dog darted off to catch it.
"Gus," she said, "I want to have a baby."
He stopped in his tracks, and scratched his thick neck. "Benazir... we've talked about this before. I like you... no, I guess I love you, but... I'm not sure if we're able to raise a child together."
Benazir put a soft, bronzed hand on his large shoulder. "Who said anything about raising it? I meant I want to have a baby, not spend the better part of my life watching it grow."
Something about the way she said it made Gus feel hurt. "That's not the way I was raised," he told her, trying not to sound negative. Their relationship had lasted a record four years, and Gus had learned that Benazir avoided anything "negative" - pain, duty, aging, frustration. At least, he could satisfy her need for security - and satisfaction.
"Well, you were raised by flesh parents," she pointed out with an innocent smile. "I had a robot nanny."
Gus understood that she expected him to envy her . She remained childlike at the age of thirty-nine, but so did billions of other Terrans. He feared, deep down, that she stayed with him out of pity - pity for growing up in poverty, for being more used to relating to people than to machines.
"Don't look so glum, Gus. I was just teasing."
"It's not you. Gym's closing down. 'Not profitable anymore.' If I can't fight good opponents anymore, I'm gonna get sloppy. And even if I'm not beaten... my title has no meaning without challengers."
A red diode lit up on the woman's forehead-band. Benazir ceased listening to him; she had plugged one ear and eye into her link-implant to chat with her network of friends across the globe. She sent her replies with thought-commands that controlled the transmitter in her headband. Without turning off this line of communication, she waved at one female friend who drifted down on the street in a small heli-pod.
"Hi, Gus!" shouted the other woman as she opened the door to the transparent heli-pod. "Do you have time to join us at Plex Twenty-Four tonight?" She made a gesture that might have been a proposal, but if so it was too subtle for Gus to notice. Gus made a wave of his hand, and put the cap on his head.
"Sorry, gotta work. Catch you later, Benazir?"
She kissed him and entered the heli-pod's cockpit-bubble, which began to ascend with a muffled noise. Gus waved after them, and folded out the mop handle he kept in the pocket of his dungarees. The synthetic voice of his wrist-watch told him he was late, and he began to hurry. Giddog barked happily, running ahead of Gus, looking behind him at his master. From high above their heads, the rumble of aircraft traffic began to increase...
2: Crash
"Giddog, get me another dry sponge."
The Dalmatian wagged its tail in response, ran away and used its teeth to pick up a fresh sponge from the dispenser in the corner of the plaza. The dog then carried it back to Gus, as it had been trained to.
"Good Giddog." Gus smiled, and tossed the large dog a small snack - it leaped up on its hind legs and snapped it up. The Dalmatian's tail wagged hard enough to knock over passing pedestrians.
As Gus attached the sponge to his mop handle and dipped it in the bucket, he began talking to Giddog. Some of his work-mates found it odd that he talked to a dumb animal, instead of to a synthetic pet that could actually converse. Gus simply assumed that Giddog liked to listen, because the dog looked at him with rapt attention when Gus spoke in his slow, steady voice.
"You know, Giddog, I'm probably not going to do any more ring-fighting after the gym closes down. It's not... hell, I don't know. What do you think?"
Giddog sat down on the street, and let his black tail and ears droop. "Hey, don't be sad. This only means I'll have more time for you. Maybe... maybe we'll move in with Benazir... permanently, settle down and have a baby, eh?"
Giddog looked up and barked eagerly; Gus grinned and gave his canine friend a nod.
"Yes, Giddog, we'll find a nice female Dalmatian for you. It's not that easy, you know. Real dogs, the old-fashioned kind, are rare. I have to travel into the outback, Australia or Tasmania maybe, to find one that fits you."
The dog barked again, raised its front paws and wagged its tail, as if expecting another treat.
"You know," Gus said, half to himself, "I really miss my family. And your mother, Laura, she was my best childhood friend. You resemble her a lot - well, except for the little bits."
He took his last doggie treat and tossed it to Giddog. He climbed up on a ladder platform, one of the several which stood among the clusters of elevated solar panels, and began to clean the panels. A workmate from across town entered the plaza, and shouted hello to Gus; the man was of medium height and build, and wore the same type of work-clothes as Gus did. On the back of his shirt, the electronic print showed an unending stream of animated commercials.
"Hi, Chris! What's new?"
"Oh, nothing... I had my new liver fitted today. Doctor told me not to drink so hard."
"Well, are you?" Gus said, not sure whether he was joking with Chris - the man did spend too much money on drink, plus the regular cheap patch-up jobs on his internal organs. Chris led a lifestyle that would have killed any man in a previous century.
"What's a poor panel-cleaner to do?" Chris exclaimed laconically. "I ain't never racking up more PP's than any of us losers. Booze is cheap and reliable."
"Have you tried making your own alcohol?" Gus joked.
Chris began working another set of solar panel twenty meters away, and carried on the conversation in a half-shouting fashion.
"Are you kidding, Gus?"
"When I grew up in Australia, my grandfather used to make his own booze out in the desert. He used a rusty old thing called a 'distiller'. It's still out there, I guess - desert's dry, it'll last long."
"You talk about Australia more and more," Chris remarked. "Why don't you go back there someday? Place is absolutely splattered with solar panels. You could get a lot of work down under. I mean, if it's so great as you always describe it, what're you doing here?"
"I don't wanna talk about it," Gus responded, and cast a nervous glance about himself. In the 22nd century cameras were everywhere, and privacy a fiction.
"No, you never do, do you?" Chris shouted; his attention drifted toward a camera-bot that flew past them in search of more interesting events. "Your hit count ain't never going up, unless you start to be more open about yourself. Secrets ain't worth shit until others can hear them. That is, if your secrets really are all that exciting..."
Gus did not get angered by the remark. He had heard it before, and had grown weary of trying to explain why he refused to reveal his entire life - except to his dog. There was an old word for it, that Gus kept forgetting... "-grity" something...
Chris kept ranting out loud in his persistent hope of being noticed by a roving camera and scoring some extra PP. Gus glanced up into the night sky. The holographic commercials blocked out the stars; only a few planets were visible to the naked eye. And the Moon. The dark half of the Moon was scattered with the lights of cities, centers of pleasure, sports and leisure, both legal and illegal. Gus had never been to the Moon, not with his low hit count. One day, if he somehow could gather a million PP, he could take Giddog and Benazir on a trip there... or to Mars. Maybe boxing was still popular there, he thought, on that frontier-world where two good fists counted for something...
***
Colonel Haruman Clarke's personal transport craft flew toward Kuwait City's spaceport, escorte
d by two small automatic fighter-pods. Each pod resembled a huge, gray, stiff-winged mosquito. Inside the craft, Clarke sat watching the outside view, thinking about his future.
This is my last day watching Mother Earth with living eyes, he thought. But it'll be worth it. For when Boulder Pi and his engineers have remade me, the perfect woman shall be mine. Clarke had never met her, only seen and heard the recordings the Kansler had shown. And yet, it seemed as if he had known her for a long time.
He dimly recalled some sort of court case, where she had been publicly humiliated on legal technicalities. Clarke promised himself to restore her reputation - once he became Argus-A, the new Adam to the new Eve. Colonel Clarke found it funny that she had been the first, and he merely a development of the original. And he wondered how the Fleet had managed to keep her away from the public eye so efficiently. Maybe with the new top-secret "info-busting" weapons he'd only heard rumors about...
"Venix," he whispered to himself... and his reveries were aborted when the human pilot sent a message over the loudspeakers.
"We're being pursued, sir. Four unidentified auto-pods just took off from the ground and are approaching fast. They're too small for our escorts to hit."
"Take us down to land," Clarke said quickly. "Anywhere. Now."
"There's only the open plaza there," the pilot replied.
"Do it."
The thirty feet long aircraft began to dive while using its airbrakes to slow down; the pursuing pods closed in on it. Just a hundred meters from the plaza, the first pod attacked and hit Clarke's ship.
***
A thundering explosion interrupted Gus as he was standing on a ladder-platform, mopping up solar panels. He looked up and saw an oblong aircraft careening toward the plaza, its nose pointed straight at Gus.
He jumped down from the platform, landed on the ground four feet below, and scrambled for cover. His dog followed him closely.
"Giddog - follow me! Chris, call for help!" Chris dropped his mop and ran away from the plaza, punching signal buttons in the palm of his hand.
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 1