by Andrew Lane
“Stand back,” ordered a GalDiv guard. “Let it go wherever it wants.”
No one argued. GalDiv had much the same reputation as the Bureau and the rules were clear: do not upset a Gliese or the guards will hurt you. How do you know if a Gliese is upset? Because the guards hurt you. Threaten one and they’ll kill you. Besides, like other aliens the Gliese could make a person rich. There was some artist, who’d been unknown until one of those Eridani aliens had followed him around for months; now his artworks were sought the world over.
There was no discernible pattern or logic to alien–human trades. An alien would indicate an object it wanted and offer something unknown in return. What they wanted could be as mundane as a half-eaten apple or as massive as Tower Bridge. What they offered rarely made sense nor could you spend time figuring out what it was. Business was done then and there or the alien moved on.
GalDiv tried to supervise all trades – part of the reason for the guards – but while aliens mostly used the designated space access points, they could also show up anywhere, unescorted and ready to do business. A person could make a fortune in ten seconds – or be left with a piece of useless junk – but the risk could be even greater. The entire population of a small Alpine village near Berne had vanished when someone did the wrong thing with the featureless metal spheroid that a snake-like Eridani had exchanged for a used fondue set. The strange – and horrible – thing was the subsequent sound of voices screaming for help, a little indistinct, as if the invisible victims were just around an unseen corner. The metal spheroid had been taken into space and dumped into an unimportant star, and the Alpine voices stopped. Another Eridani accepted an eighteen-carat wedding ring inscribed D ∞ J for a piece of twisted metal that made D feel unaccountably happy and content – despite being in the middle of an ugly divorce – simply by looking at it. Soon twisted replicas, which had the same effect if cast in copper or iron, were on sale in all good drugstores as a cure for depression. No one knew how they worked. Psychiatrists and Big Pharma tried to get them banned but those awkward curves and angles eased the worries of most people: all ages, all sexes, all cultures. It was as if the aliens knew humans better than humans knew themselves.
There were to be no money-miracles in this Covent Garden pop-up bar, though. The Gliese paused then turned and flowed back out into the street, as always closely surrounded by its guards.
“Wow!” said the woman as she rejoined Kara. “That was incredible! Weren’t you interested?” The woman was in her twenties, a green-eyed blonde with an easy, almost innocent prettiness and a firm body.
“They just don’t… don’t look smart,” the man said. He was a little older than the woman, athletic with brown hair and – again – easy and forgettable good looks. “It’s like a pile of old leather. Wonder why it came here?” But he already knew the answer: no one knew why the Gliese did anything. They never requested a bodyguard for a night on the town. They would simply set off, either oblivious or uncaring if the guards came along. It wasn’t as if the Gliese were armed, either. No ray-guns, no impenetrable force fields, no psychic powers. Not as far as anyone knew.
“You ever, well, thought about…” the woman asked Kara. “I mean, if it was the only way, would you?” She was talking about the Gliese–human trade that sent humans to the stars.
“No,” Kara said, “never.”
“I would,” said the man. “If I was dying or something.”
Kara sighed and stood up. “I gotta go.”
The other two looked at her in surprise.
“But…” said the blonde.
“I thought…” said the man.
“You’ll talk about aliens and getting rich all night,” Kara said.
“Not all night,” the blonde – whose name Kara had already forgotten – said and smiled. The innocence went away.
“Once would be too much,” Kara told her and pushed her way through the crowd to the door. Most of the bar’s customers had been born, like Kara, after the aliens arrived. They’d never known another reality. The older customers looked awkward or hostile. They’d go back to their families and either not mention the Gliese in the bar and perhaps get asked why they were in a bad mood, or rant all night about how much better it was before. She wondered how many families sat cosily around the dinner table and talked about aliens, other than as a source of riches. Kara didn’t know much about families. Her parents had been killed in an alien-artefact incident; there’d only been an adored older sister to look after her, a sister willing to do anything to give Kara a future. “Don’t worry, Kas, it’s really safe. And think what fun we’ll have with the money!” It wasn’t safe and they’d never had fun again.
School hadn’t gone beyond Aliens 101: what they looked like and their names. It was surprising how uninterested most of the children had been. There was so much else to thrill them, like the new colony worlds or a stream of technology more fascinating than the beings that supplied it. It was as if children instinctively knew that aliens were only messengers, galactic servants, and not as important as whoever owned them. And maybe, Kara thought as she walked into a semi-deserted street, the instinct is right. Maybe aliens are only scavengers. Unlikely and not a new concept. Still, even the faintest possibility of being right made her feel better.
The street was a mix of established and pop-up stores – the latter hoping to make money from the latest short-lived fad – which effectively summed up the world’s economy. There were the big international guys, like Pharma or IT, who’d be around forever; and the rest grabbing at success whenever, however they could. Kara paused to look at a window display of expensive outdoor clothing, a closing-down sale advertised less than a month after the pop-up shop had opened. She tapped her tattooed left arm twice in quick succession, then once. A menu materialised a few inches in front of her face, something only she could see, since her personal AI chip was linked directly to her optic nerve. She blinked rapidly to navigate the menu, came to a rolling newsfeed and saw the report of the tragedy: five people killed by Japanese hornets. Police in protective clothing were searching for the nest – which they would discover half a mile from the house. Finding a nest in Japan and secretly moving it to England had been the hardest part. Also the most necessary: those who were meant to be suspicious must also be made nervous, even awed, by the killer’s expertise.
“Aliens piss you off, right?”
Kara spun round as the figure of a middle-aged man in a business suit materialised on the pavement. He was smiling as if they shared a secret. Slightly protruding eyes and thin lips gave him the look of a bombastic frog.
“Most people think it,” the man said, the words not quite in sync with his mouth. “And you know what? They’re starting to say so.”
Kara sighed as she recognised Len Grafe, the head of Human Primus. She accessed the menu again, scrolled down for a surveillance report and saw the figure was generated from a projector on an opposite wall. She disliked holographic advertising as much as aliens, while Grafe’s smugness made her want to punch him. She sent an illegal command; the projector sparked then began to smoke and the figure vanished.
Next she used worldmesh – which had evolved from the discredited Internet – to check her home: a Merc jitney the size of an old-style van, hydrogen fuelled like all road vehicles, 190 kph top speed but when securely parked would unfold into a studio apartment at the touch of a button. Common enough in a city where people were fed up with the cost of housing, with vehicle parks now offering security, bathhouses, laundry, shops and repairs like any yacht marina. The Merc was more sparse than the hotel room, and she could easily afford a two-bed apartment instead, but it suited her to be transient. A settled home might give her space to remember. And, it would be easier for someone to find her.
Kara rarely parked in the same place for more than two nights. Partly for security and partly because staying any longer meant that it might become like a home, with neighbours and everything else she didn’t want. There’d once
been a home and then her sister went Up and Away.
Her chip linked to the park’s security system. The Merc was okay, still parked between a gene-tech co-operative’s bespoke truck-home/laboratory and an antique bus belonging to a troupe of acrobatic jugglers. For a moment Kara wondered if it was too late to run away and join a circus – a thought interrupted by a man’s amused voice inside her head:
< Something wicked this way comes.
She’d turned off her avatar’s visual weeks ago. Based on her lifestyle and taste in entertainment it had manifested as a tall, dark, male commando with a fondness for cross-dressing and old movies.
The link between a person and their AI chip – the modern equivalent of the pre-alien keyboard and mouse – avatars helped prevent people imagining that their AI could read their thoughts. It couldn’t. However, it could take a very educated guess, which was closer to telepathy than many people wanted to get, especially as part of the chip technology was derived from alien science. Avatars preserved the illusion that the chip was somehow separate from, subservient to, the person it served. When someone first got a chip, the AI would manifest a series of different personas until the person made a choice – although it could be changed at any time. Again, the illusion of control. After only an hour or so the chip could supply the avatar most likely to succeed. Many humans came to regard their avatar as a personal friend. There was even a fringe group demanding equal legal status for both avatar and host.
Kara hadn’t wanted an avatar – although most people doted on them – but she had little choice, since they were integral with the personal chip. It was necessary for a stochastic, continual learning interface, the salesman had explained, and she should think of it as her own personal AI. Kara didn’t believe in artificial intelligence, suspecting it was more of a monkey-see, monkey-do construct that flattered to deceive. Sadly, she could turn off the visual but not the audio. For the past few days it had been obsessed with Shakespeare – last month Humphrey Bogart, which was fine, her favourite antique actor – but life was dramatic enough without someone declaiming theatrically in her head. Kara blinked twice hard to disengage her chip – it never slept – and looked up to see the blonde woman from the bar walking towards her. She was alone.
“Hoped I could persuade you,” the woman said.
“Where’s…?”
“Not my type.”
“Nor mine.”
“Am I?”
The full force of Kara’s personality surfaced. “Only one way to find out.”
The blonde woman actually blushed. “It’s why I’m here.”
“Nothing about aliens,” Kara warned. Perhaps a oneon-one would be better, more intimate. But since when was intimacy so important? Was the avatar’s Bogart persona still in her mind? “It’s my party, right?”
“Whatever you want.”
All you have to do is whistle. “I’m at a nearby hotel.”
Never go to a strange place with a stranger. Not ideal, but safe.
2
Marc Keislack stared at the spherical display unit. On the other side of the crystalline metal his nanoforms were mixing and interacting like miniature weather systems. Each one was a different colour, separated from one another by a gooey transparent nutrient medium.
Despite the seals around the tank – still necessary when anyone was mucking around with nanoforms – the slightly vinegary smell of the nutrient medium hung in the air of his studio. Light from the large windows at the far end of the room illuminated the space. Dust hung and glittered in the buttresses of light, despite the best attempts of his cleaning bots to eradicate it. Outside, the rolling Welsh hills were illuminated by a low sun. Cows stood in small groups in the field that bounded his property, and larks drew scrolling lines across the deep blue of the sky, while inside the studio he was waiting for his own life – his own artificial life – to decide what it wanted to be. He ran a hand through his long hair. It needed cutting, but he had been so wrapped up in constructing this latest piece of art that he had forgotten about it. He would need to get it cut before the show. His agent, Darla, would insist upon it. “Don’t believe the crap about artists in garrets forgetting to eat or wash and still being romantic,” she’d told him at his last show. “People who can afford your art expect short hair and an expensive cologne. And don’t fall on the vol-au-vents like you’re starving.” She’d paused at that point, then added: “Of course, if there’s an alien in town, wanting to pick up some art in exchange for some new kind of battery or something, then all bets are off.”
“I was followed around by an Eridani for three weeks, remember? It took five art installations, leaving behind something GalDiv took away for deep investigation.” He’d laughed bitterly. “Who knows why the damn aliens trade anything?” He didn’t say – it wasn’t necessary, there were plenty who’d say it for him – that it was the Eridani interest that had made the unknown Marc Keislack rich and famous.
Darla had smiled tightly. “Of course I remember, darling. And I would have gotten you a much better deal – even with an alien.” She didn’t say that being the alien’s darling – the Eridani and more recently the Cancri still traded for his and only his artwork, no other artists need apply – meant that Marc didn’t need an agent at all, only a lawyer and an accountant.
He’d smiled back more gently. “That I would like to have seen.” Keeping alive the polite fiction that Marc Keislack was as talented as any other successful artist and not just a lucky bastard.
Now he glanced around the studio, at the works that were going into the show, which his agent wanted to call simply Here. Across the far side of the room was a tank of seawater in which luminescent Aurelia aurita the size of coins drifted, coming together and apart in a thousand different shades of colour, as dictated by the artificial genes that he had spliced into their DNA. The jellyfish were effectively immortal, as far as he knew. As long as they floated in a nutrient-rich broth and had a little natural light they would just keep on going, moving and glowing, forming different pictures as they did so. Given the human mind’s amazing ability to see patterns in chaos, if you stared into the tank long enough you would start to see faces staring back at you: grimacing, laughing, screaming. Marc had given it the title All Human Life Is Here, and Darla had said that if he parted with it for less than a hundred and fifty thousand virtscrip she would part with him, violently.
His gaze skipped to another piece: this one an earlier, unsold work. It was a self-portrait entitled My Life Is Here. Artificially grown muscle, fat and skin tissue, generated from stem cells taken from Marc’s own bone marrow, had been carefully arranged over a brass skull on a stand inside a transparent case. The flesh had been crafted to mimic his own face, but initially aged a hundred and twenty. The cells had been programmed in such a way that they would gradually alter over time: the skin becoming firmer, the fat reduced and the muscles better defined. His face would get younger as he, the artist, grew older. It had already regressed to the age of 115, although it had to be said that there was very little difference visible between now and when it had started. There would be a day when the two of them – the artwork and the model – would cross, and one of the terms of the sale was that Marc would, on that day, sit inside a similar case next to it, wherever the purchaser was displaying it, making himself part of the work. Another one of the terms of sale was that when the face had developed to infancy the work would be destroyed – a stipulation backed up by automatic cell death programmed into the artwork’s genes. The aliens wouldn’t understand the fine print, of course, but he didn’t care. The art was the art.
“Wonderful,” Darla had said when he had told her about the idea. “A reversed Picture of Dorian Gray reproduced with technology.”
“The what? Who?”
She had glanced at him, frowning. “Never mind. Just keep coming up with ideas.” Marc had no interest in the past, only his own present and future.
A momentary eddy in the tank beside him caught his attention.
At the border between the mass of blue nanoforms and the transparent nutrient medium they existed within, small vortices were forming. It looked like the kind of effect one saw at the edge of fractals, or coastlines on a map. The nanoforms themselves were artificial, of course, but based on genetic material harvested from slime moulds of Fuligo septica. Their behaviour was pre-programmed in their simplified DNA and based on a handful of simple rules. Were they surrounded by others of their own colour, or by those of another colour? Were they in an area where nutrients were plentiful or sparse? Were they on the outside of a mass, exposed to ambient light, or on the inside, in darkness? How old were they? The rules themselves were simple, but the outcomes would be anything but. In computer simulations the virtual nanoforms automatically came together in small groups, which acted as individual entities: moving as one, co-operating with others of their kind, absorbing others not of their kind and then producing smaller versions of themselves which grew over time. It was emergent behaviour, not pre-programmed, but it seemed to replicate many of the features of more complicated life forms, all without instinct or intelligence. This one was entitled All Life Is Here, and he was still waiting to see how it developed.
A blue ball appeared in his vision, as if it was floating near the wall. It moved slowly up and down. Some people preferred avatars, which Marc distrusted; some preferred audio or vibratory cues, which Marc found distracting. Instead he’d had his cortical chip illegally hacked by a woman out in the Wild so it interfaced using colours and shapes. Someone was at the door. He felt a stab of anger. He didn’t like visitors; didn’t like anyone, really. “Show,” he instructed the house AI.
A picture formed, apparently in mid-air. A man was standing outside: a youthful mid-sixties, hair dark and jaw firm. He was wearing a suit that was cut in a modern style – tight double-layered lapels and sleeves that were subtly shaped to imply muscle movement beneath.