by M. D. Cooper
“Who’s Cal Kraft?” Cara said, jogging again to keep up.
“A terrible man who works for Heartbridge,” Petral said. Cara waited for her to say more but she didn’t elaborate.
With a confident stride, Petral led the way back through another housing section where the balconies were covered in clothes or stacked with trash. They spent about ten minutes taking a spiral staircase down several levels until they emerged in a shopping district that was very different than the one near the port of entry. People hung out along walls of the corridor in small groups with their heads close together, or alone, some of them holding themselves and shaking. A willowy man in a transparent gown gave Petral a knowing smile as he walked past. He shifted his gaze to Cara, running his gaze up and down her body in a frank way that made her uncomfortable.
The lighting was bad, the overhead lined with flickering lamps, and the corridors were full of trash and half-smashed shipping containers. They passed by stack of crates where a man squatted with his elbows on his knees. It took Cara a second to realize he wasn’t wearing pants. He stared at them with wild gray eyes.
When they reached the terminal Petral was looking for, Cara found herself with her back against a grimy plas wall, facing a cul-de-sac lined with more people in small groups murmuring to each other, and a woman dressed in what looked like bits of metal, dancing slowly and carefully to a rhythm only she could hear.
Petral didn’t waste time looking around. She accessed the terminal and pulled up its holodisplay with succinct hand motions and immediately fell into the slide-show of menus.
Cara had been standing against the wall for a few minutes, when she started to feel cold. Odd smells reached her nose and she wondered if she had stepped in something on their walk down the dank corridor. She was looking at the bottom of her shoe when movement in the middle of the cul-de-sac drew her attention. A man was walking toward Petral.
He had a stocky build with close-shaved red hair and was dressed in a dark gray suit of some near-shiny material. He didn’t shamble or hold himself like he was hiding something under his jacket like everyone else around them. This man walked with his back straight, head moving like a spotlight. He was wearing dark, wraparound glasses that probably served as some kind of HUD or sensor system. Cara remembered what Petral had told her and tried to look for weapons the man might be carrying. His suit was well-tailored and she couldn’t make out the bulge of a weapon along his waistline.
Although she couldn’t see his eyes, everything about his manner indicated he meant to interrupt Petral.
Cara tried to calm her pounding heart and stepped away from the wall to stand in front of Petral. The man was still several meters away but he frowned when he seemed to notice her.
“Hi there,” Cara called, loud enough to hopefully penetrate Petral’s concentration.
The man stopped, planting his feet shoulder-width apart. He clasped his hands in front of his belt, which made the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms stand out through the suit.
“Are you waiting for the terminal?” Cara asked, again in the overly loud voice. Petral hadn’t made any indication that she’d heard Cara the first time. “My aunt will be done in just a second. I promise. She had to send my uncle a message.”
The man turned his head, possibly looking at Petral past Cara’s eager smile. The wraparound glasses and straight line of his lips made him impossible to read.
“Are you from Mars?” Cara asked. She couldn’t stop the squeak in her voice when she said ‘Mars.’
The man cracked his knuckles. The sound might as well have been gun shots in the cul-de-sac. Every person in their vicinity began to clear out, leaving only trash and a few empty crates.
Oddly enough, the dancing woman hadn’t left, though. Maybe she couldn’t hear anything. She continued slowly waving her arms in front of her, squatting and rising then extending a foot, toe-first like she was walking an invisible tightrope.
“Mara Craft,” the man said. His voice was bored but implacable.
When Petral didn’t respond, he turned his chin like he was stretching his neck. Vertebrae popped loudly.
“I recognize you as Mara Kraft,” the man said. “By the authority of the Marsian Judicial Hegemony, I, Silvi Cardac, Bailiff for the Court, place you under arrest. Acknowledge your identity and be charged with unlawful use of Mars Protectorate Data Systems.” He chuckled, a strange sound compared to his demeanor. “You’ve been sloppy with your terminal use today, Mrs. Kraft. It wasn’t hard to follow you at all.”
He took two more steps forward, looking past Cara as if she wasn’t there.
“That’s because I wasn’t trying to hide,” Petral said. “Cara, do what I told you.”
With her heart thundering like a drum, Cara gauged the distance between her and Silvi Cardac. The black visor was still aimed at Petral, waiting for her to turn around.
Cara clenched her fists. For an instant, she didn’t think she could move.
“Cara,” Petral said. Or did she only hear her voice in her head?
It was a half-skip and a jump off one foot, her other foot extended as if she was going to slap a shoe-print on a wall—and her heel connected solidly with the man’s crotch. He even lifted in the air a little bit, absorbing the blow completely.
He gasped, lurching to the side. The hands at his belt clutched at her heel, grabbing her around the ankle. He fell backward, taking Cara with him.
Petral grabbed the back of Cara’s shipsuit and pulled her back. The bailiff hung on, forcing Cara’s leg out in a straight line.
“Twist your ankle against his thumbs,” Petral said. “That’s the week point.”
Cara was in the process of flailing against the man’s grip, terror overwhelming her ability to think through an actual response to his grab. Silvi managed to pull himself forward, muscles bulging in his arms, only to get kicked in the chin when Cara broke free. His head snapped back and he crashed backward, skull smacking the stone floor.
Petral helped Cara stand. Together, they watched the man in the gray suit for any movement. He was breathing but unconscious.
Petral nodded judiciously, tucking her hair behind an ear. “That was good, Cara. It would be better if you had your pistol. We could just shoot him now, but this will do for the time being.”
Cara gave Petral an incredulous look, not sure how she felt about the idea of murdering someone while they were unconscious, even if he had assaulted her. Petral would probably say that was Dad’s influence, while Mom would have just shot him at the start.
The terminal behind them chimed and Petral turned to check the holodisplay.
“Damn,” she said, frowning into the display. “Your dad just bought a dog.”
“What?” Cara said.
“A dog. A puppy. From a pet shop. The only pet shop within a dozen kilometers of the ship. A man with a boy, as a birthday present for his daughter. With a Heartbridge clinic conducting surveillance across the way.” She punched the body of the terminal, cracking the dirty plas.
Cara felt a glimmer of excitement at the thought of a puppy, but Petral’s loss of control shocked her moment of joy. She watched Petral kick the floor, fists clenched, not knowing how to respond.
“Fuck,” Petral shouted, face a mask of anger. “We’re made.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.14.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mars 1 Port Authority Terminal 983-A4
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Someone was knocking on her window. Lyssa knew it had to be Fred. She had shut him out since their first conversation, focusing instead on the edges of her connection with Andy Sykes. Lyssa had since realized she wasn’t confined in any sense. The space she inhabited was as large as she could imagine. But she didn’t know how to arrange things. She couldn’t decide if she wanted a room like any of the other crew on the Sunny Skies or an old-growth forest next to a fast creek, where she could sit on pine needles and listen to sc
rub jays squawking and squirrels chewing on pine cones in the distance.
She understood her connections to the outside network as doors opening on other rooms in the house she had built. She couldn’t control those rooms and so she preferred to keep them closed. That way, if there were fewer doors due to fewer network connections, it didn’t change her inner world at all. This was safe.
Lyssa had been thinking about Fred’s hatred of abstractions, calling them something humans used, a way to twist the inputs into their own brand of reality. But what was any of this but an abstraction? How could she maintain her place in the wild universe without applying filters to the inputs to maintain some level of understanding? Maybe Fred wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.
She watched Tim pick up the puppy, monitoring Andy’s reaction of irritation and worry, and didn’t understand why Andy didn’t simply say no and leave it. There were a hundred reasons why they couldn’t have a dog on the ship, starting with the effect of its fur on the environmental control systems. Humans were bad enough with their continuously shedding bits of skin, but a dog’s undercoat would wreak havoc on the filtration.
This had been his refrain for what felt like hours, but could only have been milliseconds. His tone had gone from demanding to begging, whimpering like the puppy in Tim’s arms. She supposed he could easily monitor operations on the Ring while continuing to harass her. It reminded her of times Tim read the poetry book while also throwing bits of cracker at Cara, then pretending it hadn’t been him when they were alone in the room.
she said.
His voice quivered but he seemed to control himself.
Lyssa sighed, experiencing through Andy the softness of the puppy against his chin. The brown eyes looked limitless and alien to her. Why would an animal choose to live with humans? Didn’t it know better? Was it a slave to its need for food, shelter and companionship?
The only game Lyssa could imagine was the red dots aligning in the black, and her response to send attacking fire. As she had replayed the training missions in her memory, she had begun to wonder how many of them were simulations and how many might have been real.
Could she tell the difference?
She didn’t want to think that Hari Jickson would have lied to her about what was happening but there had been others, especially after they had taken Dr. Jickson away.
All Fred’s talk about abstraction made her wonder about everything she had experienced before the surgery implanting her in Andy Sykes. As much as she might dislike her current situation, she didn’t have to doubt the reality of what took place on the other side of the window. She had Andy’s bio-signals as evidence. As annoying as Fred might be, he served as another witness to the world around her, a world she could trust.
she said, indicating one of the newer games based on popular culture. She chose one at random, which turned out to be some kind of dating simulation for teenagers.
Lyssa ignored him. Without allowing him access to her inner space, she created a separate area she could control and allow Fred inside without giving him access to anything else she considered her personal space. In that area, she activated the game.
Fred appeared in front of her in the form of a fat gray parrot with red tail feathers. She looked down at herself and grinned to find she had the same form but was smaller. She spread her wings and nibbled at some feathers, which felt very satisfying.
Lyssa said.
Fred grumbled but followed her to the start section, where a helpful blue and red parrot explained they were attending high school and needed to secure dates for a mating ritual called ‘Prom’, which was a shortened version of “Promenade.” During the prom, they would walk in pairs in order to see and be seen and display the colorful plumage they earned during play.
Lyssa checked the game’s intended audience and found it squarely intended for someone like Cara, but she had a hard time imagining Cara being interested in these subjects. These were social constraints, and considering Cara didn’t get much social interaction, it wasn’t likely that she would show interest in such subjects.
Andy, on the other hand, seemed highly socially attuned. He had grown up in a place where relationships were currency. His father had reinforced this education. How had he made such a mistake mating with Brit, then, a person who only seemed to understand action and had little use for emotion? Lyssa shelved the thoughts and focused on the game. It was her turn.
Most of the gameplay consisted of interacting with other parrots in the high school hallway, where conversations led to decision trees. She could start a conversation in order to require a response, and then shift play to Fred, forcing him to be the one to make a decision. A question as
seemingly banal as “Do you like Arianne?” gave him fits.
Lyssa was perplexed by his inability to see past the game. She had already explained twice now that the game was arbitrary. He continued to want to engage with the rules and gameplay rather than riffing off the decision she made that required his next move.
Between moves, Lyssa was enjoying being a parrot. She shot up in the air, glided and returned to where Fred was stewing in his own anger. She preened and fanned out her tail, admiring the iridescent scarlet shades in her feathers.
Lyssa was starting to accept that she could be whatever she wanted inside the space she had created. The window might show the outside world, but she could do anything here. It was her own personal expanse. She had invited Fred inside but she could easily cut him off if she needed to protect herself. She could cut him off from Andy, too. The view into Andy’s world was hers alone. The more she interacted with Fred, the more she understood her ability to look into Andy’s life was unique—was special, even.
Had he been acting out of jealousy when he’d said she would eventually drive Andy to reject her? While Fred might be very good at monitoring his duties toward the Ring, she didn’t get the impression he was good at personal interaction. Hadn’t he already said he could barely communicate with other AIs?
Lyssa had selected her date for the prom while Fred was still struggling to get a parrot with brilliant yellow feathers to notice him. Lyssa tried to help him learn new skills in order to garner favor and develop a side conversation, but he couldn’t understand why the yellow parrot wouldn’t acknowledge his obviously superior attributes as a prom date.