Carnival On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 5)

by E. M. Foner

  “Maybe it’s a weapons library,” Paul said. He’d been following the conversation with his eyes clenched shut while he waited for the feeling of having an out-of-body experience to pass. Paying attention to something other than his head helped with the nausea. “I was never a fan of infantry war games myself, but Bits turns out most of the first-person-shooter games played by humans.”

  “Receiving a hail from the planet,” the Effterii reported. “I’m confident they haven’t used any active detection technology capable of spotting me, but the transmission is on a fairly narrow beam. This indicates that they either know somebody is in the area or they regularly send such transmissions into space in an attempt to trick hidden vessels into revealing themselves.”

  “Let’s see it, reception only,” Clive instructed the ship’s controller, since Paul still looked woozy.

  “Caught you,” a mocking voice came over the speakers. The main screen came to life, showing a young man with a bad complexion sitting in a swivel chair, a battery of equipment covered in sliders and blinking LEDs at his back. “Our sensor grid picked up your gravimetric distortion as you warped in. Why don’t you drop the silly radio silence before we blast you out of the sky?”

  “It’s a recording,” Jeeves reported. “The kid in the foreground is layered onto an image taken from elsewhere, probably an old Earth entertainment broadcast.”

  “I wonder why he bothered?” Clive said. “He doesn’t try to pass himself off as part of the government or anything like that.”

  “Probably set it up for fun, just something to show his friends,” Paul guessed. “There used to be a whole hacking culture on Earth in the early computer days, these guys may have preserved it. Doesn’t work if there’s any serious AI around because you can’t hack a sentient, but maybe Bits doesn’t allow them.”

  “Are you suggesting I may be unwelcome here?” Thomas asked.

  “We’re a team,” Clive replied. “If they don’t want you there, we’ll all leave. Paul, may as well take the Nova out of the hold. Open a channel as soon as we clear the bay doors and we’ll ping them before they spot us. I’ll tell the Effterii to keep itself hidden.”

  Thomas and Woojin strapped themselves back into the jump seats, and Jeeves floated up to the side of the main screen, so he’d be out of the camera’s view when they opened a comm channel. Paul eased the Nova out of the Effterii’s bay and immediately opened the standard ground control frequency.

  “This is Clive Oxford of the Union Station ship Nova to Bits ground control,” Clive announced, knowing that the ship’s transponder would have sent everything except his name by this point in any case. “Do you have landing instructions or is this an open world? Over.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  The reply was immediate, and the tone was somewhere between surprised and belligerent. The image on the main viewer synced up at the same time, and the Nova’s crew found themselves looking at a jowly middle-aged man with a comb-over who hadn’t shaved in a few days. He was wearing a white T-shirt that showed tell-tale signs of dropped pizza toppings, and there was a black cat sitting on his lap that looked rather annoyed at being woken from a nap.

  “We came from Union Station, by way of Kibbutz,” Clive replied. “Am I speaking with Bits ground control, or are you a private citizen responding to our hail? We’ve already been pinged by some kid who was apparently transmitting peek-a-boo welcomes at random.”

  “That’s just Beezer’s budget grid,” the man replied. “He’s trying to prove that it’s more economical to trick cloaked ships into revealing themselves than actually detecting them. In answer to your question, if I’m not Bits ground control, I’m the closest thing we have on the planet, so you’ll have to make do. Name’s Mouser. What do you want?”

  Clive and Paul exchanged glances as the man popped the top on a canned beverage with one hand. This fresh annoyance led the cat to hop down and disappear from the screen.

  “I’m here representing EarthCent on official business and I need to meet with your leadership,” Clive said. “We’re not showing any current traffic at your spaceport. Is there any reason we shouldn’t land?”

  “Not unless you can think of something. Atmosphere outside the dome is a bit thin, never quite got a carbon cycle working right, so either take a deep breath on your ship and make a run for the airlock, or bring a mask,” Mouser warned them casually. “I’ll let the rules committee know we have visitors coming, but we’re in the midst of a hack-a-thon here, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a quick meeting.”

  “The rules committee is your government?” Clive asked.

  “Bits is an anarchy,” Mouser replied in exasperation. “Doesn’t anybody do their homework before traveling anymore? Anyway, if you’re not a pirate, it’s five hundred creds for parking.”

  “Pirates park free?” Paul asked.

  “Try getting them to pay,” Mouser retorted. “If you do the math, it’s not worth the ammo and the wear and tear on the facilities.”

  “We might be pirates,” Thomas ventured hopefully from the jump seat.

  “If you have to ask, you aren’t,” Mouser replied with a grin. “I’m the first door on the right when you come in the airlock, all currencies and containers accepted.”

  “Alright, out,” Clive said, and gestured to Paul, who cut the channel. “May as well take her down as close to the dome as you can safely land.”

  Forty minutes later, Thomas activated the atmosphere retention field on the Nova’s technical deck, dropped the ramp, and strolled to the plainly marked airlock on the dome. The outer door opened with a barely discernible puff of dust and he disappeared inside.

  “I think Mouser was exaggerating,” Thomas reported back over the Nova’s comms. “Nothing harmful, oxygen content is bit lower than you’re accustomed to, but the main issue is the atmospheric pressure, which is about forty percent of Earth standard.”

  “We can walk in that without a problem,” Woojin told the others. “I’ve been mountain climbing places where the atmosphere wasn’t any thicker.”

  The three humans followed in the footsteps of the artificial person, and Jeeves, who had exited the ship even before Thomas for a fly-about, caught up with them just as they were entering the airlock.

  “Fun planet,” Jeeves commented, as the outer door slid closed and the inner door opened. There was no need for active pressure equalization in the airlock, it just served as a sealed chamber to keep the higher pressure of the dome from venting out into the atmosphere. “The terraforming plan seems to have been abandoned despite the fact it was progressing nicely. Either the residents ran out of money or they lost interest.”

  Thomas was waiting for them in the corridor inside the dome with a puzzled look on his face.

  “I’ve only been here a few minutes, but I’ve already received over ten thousand interfacing requests,” he said. “The weird thing is they aren’t addressed to me but to my subsystems. Why would anybody want to talk with my thermal control sensor or my knee actuators? Even I don’t find them that interesting.”

  “They’re trying to hack you, Thomas,” Paul replied, sounding concerned. “Have you made any involuntary movements or noticed anything funny?”

  “No, it’s just a nuisance,” the artificial person replied. “I wouldn’t want to live here if it never stops. It’s sort of like sitting next to somebody in a theatre who taps your shoulder every couple milliseconds.”

  “This place is a dump,” Woojin commented, kicking a few empty soda cans out of the way. “They need a deposit law. Who doesn’t recycle aluminum?”

  “Here’s the door,” Clive said, stopping in front of a panel with “Ground Control” stenciled on the surface in large red letters. He extended a hand towards the printing and the door whooshed open showily. A black cat bounded out, gave Jeeves a dirty look, and then rubbed up against Woojin’s legs.

  Clive and Paul entered the cluttered room, at which point there was no room left for Thomas or W
oojin, unless they took the overflowing garbage bin out first. Jeeves floated high in the doorway, preventing it from closing.

  “I don’t recognize that model,” Mouser said, with an admiring glance at Jeeves. “Is it for sale?”

  “For five hundred creds, you can have me as long as you can hold me,” Jeeves offered the startled hacker, who hadn’t been expecting AI for some reason.

  “It’s, I mean, you’re sentient?” Mouser asked, frowning at his instrumentation. “I don’t see any processing activity on the scanner. Is one of you subvocing the robot’s lines?” he asked, casting a suspicious look at the humans.

  “If you tell your compatriots to stop trying to hack our artificial friend, I’ll tell you how I do it,” Jeeves replied. “If you don’t, I’ll stop them, but their hardware might not survive the shock.”

  “Wait a second, wait a second,” Mouser protested, rapidly typing on an archaic keyboard that actually made mechanical impact sounds as he hit the keys. “Alright, I posted a warning. It might take a few minutes before everybody backs off.”

  “Let’s talk parking fees while we’re waiting,” Paul said. “We just came from Kibbutz, which is a much nicer planet, and they only charged fifty creds. Where do you guys get off charging five hundred for some thin air and a dome that looks like a dump?”

  “Most of our visitors don’t pay it,” Mouser replied with a shrug. “Tell me how your airborne friend there shields himself from my probes and I’ll make it a hundred. I can’t even detect the magnetic field he’s floating on.”

  “Deal,” Jeeves replied. “Your probes don’t detect any electromagnetic emissions because I don’t make any. Want to go double or nothing on another question?”

  “Maybe not,” Mouser grumbled. “Look, I pulled the weekend shift for ground controller during the hack-a-thon, and I haven’t been out of this place other than to use the bathroom for almost two days. You want to meet the people in charge, well, we don’t have any, but knock yourselves out. I pinged the rules committee members, and a few of them were willing to meet up with you later, for a price. But unless you have an urgent question about playing one of our games, I don’t see what they can do for you.”

  “And you can do something for us?” Clive asked, picking up on a hint in Mouser’s tone.

  “I know as much about what goes on here as anyone,” the man stated. “I got stuck with ground control because I built the equipment and my volunteer staff all took the weekend off to compete. There must be over a hundred thousand hackers in this dome alone trying to crack the—never mind, but the point is, I’m a hardware guy, so I’m not as out of touch as some of these code-babies. What are you really doing here?”

  “We came to assess your defenses in case there’s an attack on human colony worlds off the tunnel network,” Clive summarized. “We aren’t here to sell you anything, and if nobody is in charge, there’s not much left to talk about.”

  “That’s a bit dire,” Mouser mused. “We’ve got enough stuff to make the average pirate think twice about trying to plunder the place, and besides, we’re friends with most of them. But if you’re talking about the fleets of any of the advance species, there’s nothing we can do to fight them and nothing EarthCent could do to help. If you stop talking in riddles, like the sepulchral voice in an adventure game, and tell me about the threat, I’ll pass it on to whoever might care.”

  Clive capitulated and explained the situation with the Gem Empire, along with the speculation that humans could get caught in the middle of a civil war.

  “That’s just foolishness,” Mouser replied confidently. “You pay me the parking fee and I’ll explain why.”

  “Just a minute,” Clive replied, feeling like he’d been outmaneuvered. He grabbed Paul and went back into the corridor to confer with Woojin, who had picked up the cat and was stroking it like his lifetime goal was to build up a static electric charge.

  “Feeling better?” Mouser asked Thomas, who stuck his head in the door for a quick look at the equipment.

  “Yes, thank you,” Thomas replied. “There are still some ongoing attempts at accessing my add-on systems, like the new built-in magnet cleats I had installed recently, but the majority of the intrusive poking has ceased.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Jeeves said, and hummed a tuneless ditty for a few seconds. “Tell me, Mouser. What possible advantage is there to maintaining a virtual environment of digital computers from seventy or eighty years ago, all running on an obsolete Frunge factory controller.”

  “The Frunge let us have it cheap,” Mouser mumbled defensively. “Besides, it’s a lot more efficient than actually running hundreds of thousands of individual digital processors, not that we have the power grid or the spare parts to keep them all going in any case.”

  “But why simulate them at all?” Jeeves asked, his curiosity piqued. “What’s so attractive about coding in stilted artificial languages, with all the funny punctuation, that you want to preserve it?”

  “Constraint equals creativity, that’s our motto,” the hacker proclaimed proudly. “If you can make it work the hard way, you can make it work any way.”

  “What an interesting philosophy,” Thomas remarked. “The hacking attempts have all ceased, Jeeves, thank you. Who knew that humans could be so persistent?”

  “Alright,” Clive said, reentering the room and pushing out the garbage bin to make space for Woojin and the cat. “You explain why the Gem don’t worry you and answer our questions, you can debit my programmable Stryx coin for a hundred.”

  “Now you’re being reasonable,” Mouser said, as the three humans squeezed into the room. Jeeves went back to floating in the doorway, and Thomas observed from the corridor. “Have you ever heard of Cloner?”

  “Is it a person or a thing?” Paul asked.

  “It’s a game,” Mouser replied. “Least popular game in the galaxy, outside of the Gem Empire. A couple of higher-ups in the Gem military stopped in and commissioned us to create the game a few years back. It was around when that Raider/Trader lunacy was peaking.”

  “You built a military training simulation for the clones?” Woojin asked.

  “No, it’s a game, just like I said,” Mouser replied. “When the Gem described what they were looking for, one of our legacy enthusiasts realized that it was exactly the same as a game from the pre-Internet era on Earth. All we needed to do was swap out the farm animals with clones, change the names of a few elements, and find a piece of Gem hardware simple-minded enough to simulate the original environment without too many tweaks.”

  “I don’t understand,” Clive objected. “What do the Gem want with farming? They don’t even grow food anymore.”

  “The farm game just provided the engine, it’s about cloning now,” Mouser explained. “The Gem wanted a game that made sense to them, and what makes sense to them is cloning more Gem. So instead of building up your farm and feeding the animals, you build up your cloning facility and feed the new clones. It’s dull as watching water evaporate, they didn’t even want any of the optional diseases that could impact the cloning yield. It’s just more and more clones working to make more and more clones. It doesn’t have an endpoint.”

  “And you believe this game will protect you,” Clive said skeptically.

  “You didn’t see how they loved it,” Mouser told him. “Every year, they come back and ask for enhancements. Real fiddly stuff, like modifying the dormitories to squeeze in a couple more sisters, adding new songs.”

  “But what do the Gem have that you want?” Paul asked. “Our understanding is that their economy is a disaster.”

  “We barter for alien weapons,” the hacker explained. “The Gem are the greatest junk hoarders the galaxy has seen in quite a while. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to produce Time Wars. Have any of you played it?”

  “Is that the game where the space-time continuum is breaking down, and you chase the bad guys through hundreds of millions of years of galactic history, with your weapo
ns continually changing to match the period?” Paul asked.

  “Right. All of the weapons are authentic, or at least, they look authentic, thanks to the collection we’ve built up with the help of the Gem. I can’t promise that they operate in the game the same way as they did when they were being used, because most of the samples we get are nonfunctional. Sometimes we’re better off not knowing how they really worked, or we’d have to recode the entire physics engine, if you know what I mean.”

  “We’ll take your word for it,” Clive replied. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’ve dragged you around the galaxy on a wild goose chase. I have to concur with Mr. Mouser that the humans here are likely in no more danger from the Gem military than we are back on Union Station.”

  “Ahem,” Mouser cleared his throat politely, extending a hand, palm up. Clive passed his programmable cred to the hacker, who slid it into the mini-register on his desk, spoke the amount, and requested verbal confirmation from head of EarthCent Intelligence, who gave his consent. “Plenty of Gem in the pirate crews the last couple years,” Mouser threw in as a bonus. “I figure we’re covered from both sides.”

  With no real reason to stick around, the EarthCent delegation returned to the Nova.

  “I would suggest you instruct the Effterii to break the trip into a series of eight or more jumps, with a minimum pause of a day between each,” Jeeves told Clive. “As a small crew of experienced travelers, you’ve held up quite well so far. You aren’t showing any serious signs of the disorientation and desocialization that would be typical for larger groups of biologicals coming the same distance so fast, but the effects could turn out to be cumulative or time-delayed. We just don’t have much data about biological travel using Effterii technology.”

  “Sounds smart to me,” Paul concurred. “Besides, I’m trying to make it through life without having to look at any more post-artistic art, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”