by Jay Allan
She gave us a lopsided grin. “Rob. Baxter. Pull up a chair.”
I sat down and took a potato chip. It didn’t taste like a billionaire’s chip. Baxter knelt, butt on his heels.
“They started it,” he said.
Lee’s grin twisted into mock reproach. “Come on.”
“I don’t like them thinking they’re literally above the law.”
“So you beat the idea out of them? What are we, barbarians?”
“Well, by the old Greek definition,” I said. “But who isn’t.”
“Baxter, I don’t know what weirdo climate you came up in on Mars, but that’s not how the old world does business. Scandal like that can turn the whole public against you.”
“The public.”
“The people who pay you by buying our stuff.” Lee crunched a chip. “You’re with me now. I look out for my partners.”
He tipped back his chin. “Until you sell us out.”
“If you heard about their offer, you also heard I printed it out and burned it. I love space. I want to be a part of it—but HemiCo and Maiden Voyages and Olympian Atomics have it all bundled up. I couldn’t see a meaningful way into the game until you came along. I’m not about to sell my dream before it’s off the ground.”
“You don’t understand them. They’ve been away too long. They’re building a different world out there.”
“I know better than you think. As long as you’re on Earth, you play by Earth rules. Got me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Ma’am?” She grinned and hoisted the bottle. “I’ll overlook that. On the condition you two thugs drink a toast with me.”
I took the bottle from her. “I want you to know it was all his idea.”
We rode to the airport in silence. There was a lot of that with Baxter. At other times, he launched into fierce, woozy rants, but I’d gotten the idea these speeches weren’t about communication, but were a way of picking at a knot of problems his mind couldn’t unravel. When we landed in Seattle, I invited him to my apartment to talk things out. To my surprise, he said yes.
Though I currently possessed a modest fortune, in the past, I’d cycled between rich and poor so often I’d developed a phobia about spending money. But I had a thing for water, and caught up in the thrill of founding NightVision, I’d leased a stupidly expensive place overlooking the Sound. Whenever we traveled out to tie up one more loose thread of the mile-wide quilt that was our fledgling company, I keenly regretted my waterfront apartment burning Benjamins in my absence. But on the rare nights I got to come home and watch the lights ripple over the dark water, I knew I’d done right.
I snagged a bottle and two shot glasses and ushered Baxter out onto the balcony, where the night air was just warm enough to tolerate, so long as your blood was blanketed with whiskey. We talked shop for a while, and the strangeness of Lee’s cave-topped home; he opined that having that much money causes a mental illness that expresses itself by taking subconscious fantasies and anxieties and recreating them in the owner’s real-world surroundings. I told him I thought people without money did that, too.
“What’s your problem with HemiCo?” I asked, finally, once I was good and loaded.
“They are bullies who treat the universe like their birthright. Surely you’ve known kings and viziers like that.”
“The real problem. The one you take so damn personal.”
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
“So?”
Baxter paused for five full seconds. “They killed my first real friend.”
I passed him a shot, tinked glasses, and drank. “When you escaped from them.”
He laughed softly, gazing across the bay. “How did you know?”
“You let things slip. You don’t know the things that even a Martian should know.” I blew over the bottle’s mouth, making it whistle. “I had an instinct the first time we met. You look like us in every other way, but there’s something different in your eyes.”
“Perhaps I don’t have a soul.”
I laughed. “Getting mawkish? Don’t tell me that body actually gets drunk.”
Baxter smiled at his feet dangling between the balcony rails. “No. But by the point it should be obvious that I’m not, everyone else is usually too drunk to notice anything besides the color of their own vomit.”
“Now that you know that I know, are you going to chew me up in your terrible robot teeth?”
“I’m glad a human that isn’t one of them knows.” He swigged a symbolic drink from the bottle. “Besides, now we both know a secret that could destroy the other. Isn’t that the definition of friendship?”
“He’s coming.” Arthur raised the line of his left eyebrow at Baxter. Lines were all Arthur had on the palm-sized green screen of his faceplate—one for his mouth, two for his brows, a pair of solid black dots for eyes. It was ludicrous they’d given him a face at all. Baxter suspected it was their idea of a joke. Arthur blinked at him. “I mean, I can hear him. Coming down the hall.”
“I believe you.”
“What are you going to do when he gets here?”
Baxter stared at the door. “They might not kill us.”
“They don’t think we’re like them. They think we’re property.”
“I know,” he said, and he knew Arthur was right. The little box had to remind him of that sometimes. When Baxter imagined a human face, he saw it smiling. But he wasn’t convinced Arthur saw the face at all: just the reptile brain lurking a few inches behind it, ready to lash out at every threat, real or imagined.
Knuckles banged against the door. He met Arthur’s eyes.
4
“So what do you do?” Naya said, a brunette lock spilling past her ear as she leaned in for a bite of curry.
As my other tastes and interests welled, ebbed, and cycled, Indian remained my uncontested favorite food. It looked like a sad pile of mush, but it tasted like a bowl of condensed fire. Naya and I ate in the ground floor of a Capitol Hill restaurant, and though it had been ten days since my last visit to the area, the idea I might run into a heavily-bandaged Cooper or Silva filled me with secret glee.
“Interesting question.”
I chewed happily, considering this. NVR had, finally, entered mop-up mode. Since the night I’d met Baxter at Wetta Tower and signed on to this insane venture, two months had zipped by. We’d enlisted Lee Jefferson, then spent her money hither and yon, purchasing metals and carbons, engineers and labor, and a half dozen factories around the world, including the flagship plant at Felix’s former auto works. Retooled for its former purpose, upgraded with modern equipment, and modified by some innovations from Baxter’s shadowy boss, the plant had already gone into production, stamping out the simpler parts of our prototype mining ship (ETA unclear, but Baxter hinted, unbelievably, the first vessel would be space-ready in three months). There was still a lot of stuff I didn’t care about to get finalized, but my organizational, diplomatic, get-stuff-done skills were no longer required. NVR had reached critical mass. It was time for me to move along.
“I’m an independent contractor,” I answered at last.
“You think that’s interesting?”
Brown-haired, big-hipped, and fertile as the Crescent, Naya was exactly the type I gravitated to, and was even prettier when she laughed. She had asked me out while I was eating a kebab on the patch of grass next to the boardwalk aquarium. You don’t say no when a pretty girl asks you out, even though women are one of the ways living forever is bullshit. Ever cry out another girl’s name during sex? Imagine shouting a name that hasn’t even been used in five hundred years. None of my marriages had lasted longer than 25 years because no matter how well I disguised my agelessness by growing beards, tanning, and, once plastic surgery arrived, adding wrinkles and bags to my face—you should see the look a surgeon gives you when you ask to be made older—there’s no love in the world bright enough to blind a woman to the fact the man she married at age twenty has not suffered the intervening de
cades of sun, gravity, and oxygen the same way she has.
Which is worse? Intentionally fighting with someone you love until they don’t love you anymore? Or walking away without warning? There were spans of years when I gave up on the very concept of relationships. In the long run, perhaps I was happier alone, free from the countdown to the end of our time together. But after a while you miss it. The companionship. The sex, too. But mostly the sense of partnership, of knowing you’re not going through life by yourself, that someone out there will always have your back. Always, I reached a point where I knew I’d had good reasons for staying single, but after a while, those reasons faded like all memories do.
“The people I work with are more interesting than the work itself,” I said. I ripped off a buttery strip of naan. “I’m wrapping it up right now, actually. Have to find something new to do with myself.”
She tugged the strap of her halfvest up her slim shoulder. By and large, Seattle men appeared ignorant or contemptuous of the garment’s East Coast fashionability, but I’d seen a number of women wearing a semi-ironic feminized version with mixed results. Naya’s cut showed a riotous amount of skin.
“What’ve you got in mind?”
“I’m thinking of starting a new life.” Not that I had a choice. And whatever information Baxter gave me about my makeup and origins could impact where I went next. “Got any suggestions?”
She smiled, showing a little tooth. “Are you trying to be suede?”
I speared a bite of paneer from her plate. “I’ve been around long enough to know good advice can come from anywhere.”
“I think that’s a yes.”
“There’s always tomorrow. I honestly don’t care where this leads.”
“Are you saying I’m fat?” She said it deadpan enough that even my time-honed people-judgment was fooled for two seconds. Then I narrowed my eyes and she laughed. “If you think disinterest is sexy, my response to your little strategy is going to make you come in your pants.”
“It’s no strategy.” I reached for water to quench the spice. “My first impression is you’ve got a body that could crash cars. My second impression is you might be fun to spend a lot of time with. But if you smash me under your heel and walk away, it turns out I’ll live.”
Naya stole a red-slathered lump of lamb. I’d pegged her as a vegetarian. “A body that could crash cars? That’s not as flattering as it sounded in your head.”
“Thoughts are like marine creatures. Safe and warm in the ocean of your mind, but when you expose them to the cold air of conversation, they have a tendency to croak.”
“And stink.”
“So let’s expose yours instead,” I said. “What do I do next?”
She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “You act like a rich person. Why not travel? Or create something? Do you like the arts?”
“I like cave paintings.” My omni thrummed in my pocket. The vibe function was nearly outmoded now that everyone was moving on to the tingler, a pinhead-sized subdermal accessory that did exactly what its name implied, but I was skiffy about any form of unnecessary surgery, no matter how uninvasive. I ignored the vibration and asked her what she did: art student, as it turned out. Making the age-old decision between the uncertainty of going all-out as an artist, or playing it safe with ad design and painting for herself as time allowed.
She scooped curry from the margin of her plate. “What do you think?”
“Your life will be short. Much shorter than you want. Does painting feel like a calling? Or just something you’d rather do than a real job? Because if it’s a calling—” My omni went off again. I scowled and gave it a covert look. “I’m sorry, my employer’s as needy as a toddler. This will just take a minute.”
I excused myself and answered, voice-only. Baxter’s voice was terse. “Where are you?”
“Enjoying my time off. Which I’ve had none of for nine weeks.”
“Ah. Capitol Hill. Pike and 10th.”
“What? How did you know that?”
“I bugged your omni,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I’ll send someone to pick you up.”
“Like hell you will. I’m on a date.” I smiled at Naya, who watched my conversation with naked interest. “It can wait, Baxter.”
“We’ve waited too long already.” Muffled yells filtered from his end. “Have to go. See you soon.”
He clicked off. I rolled my eyes and pocketed the omni.
“Who was that?” Naya said.
“A man whose problems run so deep he doesn’t realize he has them.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Doesn’t that describe everyone?”
“Look, something strange might happen in a minute.”
“Now you’re going for mysterious.”
I rubbed my temples. “I just have the strong suspicion we’re about to be interrupted.”
“So tell him you can’t leave.”
“If only it were that easy.”
I had just asked her what she thought of artificial intelligence when the storm blew in. The restaurant windows were pelted with grit, crumpled flyers, and hamburger wrappers. Pedestrians and bikers ran from a boiling gray cloud surging through the intersection. Inside the restaurant, a man screamed and was drowned out by the shriek of engines.
My omni went off.
“I’m afraid that’s my ride.” I dug an untapped cashcard from my wallet. The smoke in the street thinned, revealing a dark spheroid in its center. I dropped the card on the table. “Come outside with me.”
Naya took my hand, face blank in that look people get when they’re not sure if they’re about to laugh or get shot. I opened the door, shielding my eyes against the swirling dust. Heat radiated from the vehicle perched in the middle of the street. Bulgy but sleek, the size of a truck or an old helicopter, the VW Veetle was named both for its resemblance to the discontinued car and for its vertical takeoff and landing capabilities—and was outlawed inside the urban zones of 47 states, including Washington.
Its passenger door swung up and Pete Gutierrez dropped out. “Don’t make me come over there.”
I squeezed Naya’s hand. “Get me your contacts. If I don’t call, assume I’ve been kidnapped.”
She tapped her omni’s info over to mine, eyes frozen on the steaming Veetle. “Who do you work for?”
“ You know, I’m not really sure.” I leaned in for a kiss. She didn’t respond; I like to think she was overwhelmed. I ducked into the smoke, bounced up the two steps, and threw myself onto the Veetle’s plush passenger bench. Pete clapped the pilot on the shoulder and plunked beside me. I rubbed grit from my eyes as the engines whined up. “What are you doing here?”
Pete shrugged. “Baxter liked my commitment to the Cooper and Silva affair.”
“Really? You didn’t account for much in that bathroom.”
“Unfair. You’re so short they probably couldn’t see you.”
“They made ‘em smaller back in my country,” I said.
“This is where? Lilliput?”
The Veetle lurched, wobbled, and climbed straight up. I pressed myself against the window, but if Naya was watching, she was hidden in the swirling smoke.
Engines roared, but the vehicle was insulated well enough that it wasn’t necessary to shout. I did so anyway. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I think we’re running from the police.” He leaned forward. “Bill, is that the police back there?”
“Temporarily,” the driver said.
“Not that, you steroid-sweating—” The Veetle swooped down, mashing my face into the foamy ceiling. I plopped back onto the bench and scrabbled for a seatbelt. “I mean what’s going on with Baxter?”
“An emergency.”
“Informative. Okay, I’m going to explode all over this cabin.”
“Please don’t.”
Towers dwindled below. Since our talk with Jefferson, Baxter had left HemiCo alone, but I knew he considered it a ceasefire rather than a binding treaty. “Did h
e get in another fight?”
Pete held up his palms. “The details, I don’t know them. Anyway, he wants to tell you himself.”
Ferries slid across the dark bay, shuttling passengers through the next leg of their lives. Through a gap in the waterfront spires, the red point of the Space Needle winked in the night, echoed by the red-blue-red-blue of a police chopper dead behind us. The Veetle veered toward the Sound. We leapt forward, the invisible hand of acceleration shoving me into my seat. The police lights shrank behind us.
I’d had it. I’d had it with the ceaseless travel, the all-hours calls, the semi-legal schemes that had led to assault in a dirty bathroom. I’d had it with the secrecy and with being dragged after Baxter like a recalcitrant mutt. It had been fun for a while—the globetrotting, the face-to-faces with Earth’s mortal gods—but I was sick of being used. And the violence! I wasn’t invincible. If Silva had split my skull on a sink, it would have been game over. If our Veetle were reeled in by the cops, my DNA would enter the American penal database, and if a sharp-eyed fed noted the irregularities lurking in its helices, I’d be chained in a bunker with tubes spliced into every organ of my body. A large part of my lengthy existence was due to luck, but a large part of luck is keeping yourself out of situations where a little bit of the wrong luck will screw you bowlegged.
NVR was up and running. Our first ship would be finished in orbit by the end of June. I’d completed my contract, and now I wanted what was mine. I’d put off seeking answers for over two hundred years of modern medicine—mostly because I didn’t want anyone else knowing what I was, but partly because I didn’t want to know what I was—but Baxter had no interest in turning me into a lab rat. It was time.