Matthew Sills
Face Smuggler
Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Sills
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
EARTH
MARS
THE BELT
THE OUTER RIM
1
EARTH
Creating a new face was child’s play, but constructing a whole new identity? Now that was a work of art. Grayson was an artist. Although his primary trade was in faces - the sale of biometrics and personal likenesses - his specialty laid in the science of memory, and his art was capable of reconstituting a person’s identity from its innermost core. The trade in biometric data and likenesses was legal when contracted between willing individuals. Nevertheless, most jurisdictions heavily discouraged the practice for obvious pragmatic reasons.
Grayson worked in that loophole of the identity laws which protected the right to one’s own likeness up until death. The faceless dead in the morgues of the outer planets were macabre commodities in Grayson’s world with more than a few underpaid public servants or overworked doctors glad to grease their palms with a finder’s fee. The newly dead or quickly preserved through cryogenics (before neural degradation set in) even yielded the occasional memory for Grayson’s catalog. The genteel called him a merchant of the dead. However, he thought of himself as a purveyor of ghosts.
While not technically illegal, Grayson was careful not to get caught at his trade. This meant he typically stuck to the lawless safety of the outer rim where stigmas carried less weight. Besides, that was where he found his clients: People came to the outer rim looking for a new life. For many, that quest went beyond a mere change of scenery. Moreover, for some, starting a new life meant escaping demons more personal than the sort that could be eluded with phony papers and a new look. Grayson made his business from helping those souls find peace, and it was lucrative. So only a note from Benedict Beyette could summon him away towards the inner worlds. Good things rarely came from journeying inside the belt.
Benedict promised that when Grayson arrived on Earth there would be a package, a payday, and the chance to finally repay an old favor. The message was cryptic beyond that. However, Benedict wouldn’t have called him if the matter could be entrusted to just anyone. Grayson was obliged to go. Even if it meant traipsing more than halfway across the solar system.
Presently, Grayson found himself leaving Juno station en-route to Mars. Then, Earth: it had been a decade since he last saw the blue-green world and twice that long since he set foot on it. Grayson originally hoped Benedict could meet on Theia Secunda, the gritty tradepost-turned-city on the lunar pole. Its churlish inhabitants reminded him of home and made it easier to blend into the constant churn of new faces. However, the most recent update to his itinerary had him taking a hopper from Lunar City to the Gagarin space elevator and down into Chimborazo Spaceport. Being planetside felt claustrophobic, but at least he would get some good food as consolation. That was the worst thing about long distance space flight: the dehydrated food gave him indigestion, and the layover on Juno hadn’t been long enough to help.
The transport shuddered atop its fusion rockets and pushed Grayson into the cushioned floor of his capsule. Periodic acceleration beyond 1G shaved weeks off the journey but did few favors for his bowels. The ‘capsule’ itself was only good for two things: sleeping and relieving biological necessities. Presently, the hygiene facilities were neatly retracted within the bulkhead. He prodded his abdomen and wondered when exactly the layer of flab built up there. He didn’t think of himself as old, but then who did? Yet, all the signs were there.
He trailed his fingers over his head’s clean shaven dome and traced the lines on his face. He grimaced when he cupped his left pectoral. “Boobs,” he uttered and let his hand fall. /Perhaps he would call in some favors for a few cosmetic upgrades after this business with Benedict.
Grayson arrived in Lunar City two months later; he was ready for this trip inside the belt to be over and done. Cramped confines and dull company were the necessary evils of space travel. Worse, however, was the weight of the inner worlds and what they represented to Grayson. He bore it like an oppressive presence bearing down on him. He thought longingly of how he found freedom those years ago on the habitats of Calypso, Helene, and Hyperion, and in the view of the sun rising like a gleaming diamond over Titan. That was where he belonged.
Lunar City shone in the unabated light that was lunar daytime. Grayson watched its smooth geometry; its buildings, printed out of the lunar surface itself, disappeared into the distance as left for the space elevator at Gagarin Station. He descended Earthward along the carbon nanotube tether; atmosphere enveloped the elevator gondola, and the black vacuum of space gradually turned to blue. A group of Martian tourists who had been on his flight clustered at the near end of the gondola recording their first experience of blue sky. Grayson couldn’t help but smirk at the scene.
The gondola stopped at the summit of Mount Chimborazo: once a tourist destination but now the most active tether departure out of Earth’s gravity well. Grayson wasted no time in the spaceport. Carrying only his rucksack, he took the tube down the mountain where he could catch a direct line west to Guayaquil and his rendezvous with Benedict.
Grayson stepped out of the air conditioned tube and into the Ecuadorian sun. Beads of sweat prickled immediately on his fair skin. He squinted against the daylight and started west towards the Malecón. Benedict had given the name of a restaurant along the popular boardwalk for their meeting. Grayson crossed the Parque Seminario on the way and passed a man crouching in the shadow of the cathedral there attempting to feed an indolent iguana a mango slice.
The Malecón stretched for miles along the ocean and hosted a myriad of shops, restaurants, and bars with wide fronts open to the ocean breeze and the lightly clad passersby. Grayson dripped sweat, his rucksack hot on his damp shoulders and back, when he spied Benedict lounging at one of the cafe patios.
Benedict seemed at home among the throng on the Malecón. He wore thick sunglasses beneath a floppy brimmed white hat, a brightly colored shirt of floral suggestion left half-open, and Bermuda shorts above the knees. It screamed tourist; Benedict always preferred to hide in plain sight.
Grayson felt drab in comparison although the slate and charcoal palette he wore was all the rage off-world. He simply preferred it because it showed less stains - an important consideration for long term space flight where both space for clothes and water for washing were limited. The antimicrobial silver woven into the fabric helped with everything except stains. He shifted his rucksack and made for Benedict.
Benedict let the sunglasses slide down his nose. He peered over them at Grayson and sipped on some undoubtedly alcoholic tropical concoction. “Come, sit.” He waved expansively at the empty chairs.
Grayson did and relieved himself of the rucksack.
Benedict tipped back his drink and took an ice cube into his mouth. “Took you long enough,” he said.
“I was making contacts in the Jovian Empire when I first got your message. You should be lucky I was so close and not out in the Kuiper Belt.”
Benedict grunted. “That band of rebels still are referring to themselves as an ‘empire’ eh?”
“Seeing as how they’ve been at it for nearly a decade and have established their own currency and trade agreements with the outer rim - yeah, they are.”
Benedict clicked the ice cube around his mouth and gave it a crunch. “You must be famished after all that time in space.” He pressed a button on the table. “Dos churrascos, por favor!” To Grayson, he said, “Not as good as she used to make it, but not half bad. I’ve become quite the affectionado of South American cuisine, I’ll have you know.”
Grayson nodded.
Benedict punched the button again. “Y cervezas, mas cervezas!”
An affirmative reply came back in acknowledgement.
“Your Spanish is terrible,” Grayson said.
“You’re one to talk. Pair of gringos we are. Shall we get to business, or do you prefer to eat first?”
Grayson shrugged. “Makes no difference to me, but I’d just as soon conduct this business and get back in space. Is it safe here?”
A waitress too young for the look Benedict gave her brought a pair of Club Rojas in bottles to the table. When she left, Benedict nodded to Grayson. “Safe enough. The owner is on the local dole if you know what I mean, and besides…” He reached under the table and Grayson felt a cool pickling wash over him.
“A privacy field?”
“We’re completely masked from the outside.” Benedict’s eyes darted to the side nonetheless as he placed atop the table the nondescript briefcase he had been keeping beneath his chair. It was of the typical size and made of brown leather that bore the wear and scuffs of long use.
“What’s that?” Grayson asked. He took hold of it at Benedict’s urging.
“It’s the package I mentioned.”
Grayson released the latch. The inside looked normal enough: a layer of dense foam protected a computer unit: solid state drive, battery unit, and cpu. The configuration was unique to Grayson, but he was no expert. Grayson turned the power on and the unit flickered to life. From his rucksack, he produced his tablet and connected it to access the unit in the suitcase.
“These are neural scans,” Grayson said, reading the file extensions he found there. “Memories?”
“High quality ones too. Check out the file resolutions. This could revolutionize your business.” Benedict rubbed his hands together, and he shifted in his seat.
Grayson boggled. The file sizes were almost ten times larger than he would have expected. He pulled out his personal tablet from his rucksack and jacked it in to the unit so he could analyze the files. He expected bloat or transcription errors that created gaps in data and read as larger than normal file sizes, but each one was packed with data that perfectly followed the typical engramatic structures.
“This is amazing,” he said at last. “How did you come to possess this?”
Benedict held up His hands. “Don’t ask don’t tell; you know how it is. I’m just getting paid to get this thing off world. From what I hear, it has been making the rounds through various smugglers for a few years now. If it were a normal case of memories, no problem! However, no one can figure out how to get it past the Interplanetary Transit Authority’s scanners. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much luck myself. No matter what kind of masking I use, the heuristics go bonkers when I run a test scan.
“But I know a gem when I find one, so I bought it off the last guy - he has glad to get it off his hands - and said to myself, ‘If I can’t figure it out, then I won’t let it go until my friend Grayson takes a crack at it.’ Because look at those files. Have you ever seen anything like those before?”
Grayson shook his head. He hadn’t.
“This was always your specialty anyways: reading, writing, slicing, dicing, and transcribing memories. You’re still the best, aren’t you?”
“The best that I know of.”
“Well al-right.” Benedict took a swig of the Club Roja and licked his lips excitedly. “Here’s my big plan: There’s a buyer for this case waiting on Mars. Here’s the agreement.” Benedict handed Grayson a datapad.
“That’s a lot of zeroes,” Grayson observed.
“Mhmm. We can split the payday 50-50, but then I figure while you have it… no harm making a few copies for profit. High-res stuff like that’s gotta command a premium in the rim, eh?”
Grayson studied the files. “They’re copy-protected.”
Benedict licked his lips again and quickly put the Club Roja to his mouth. “Hasn’t stopped you before, besides, it’s a long flight back to Mars,” he said between sips. ” You’re the one always saying how there’s a way around even the best security. What do you say?”
Benedict’s behavior belied anxiety beneath his cavalier facade and practiced nonchalance. The tells were there, and Grayson knew him well enough to notice; Benedict was not a typically nervous man.
Grayson leaned in, becoming stern. “What’s really going on here?”
Benedict started to protest but checked himself. “Honestly? I don’t know - just a feeling, you know? I can’t put my finger on it. I feel like I’m being watched, or followed. Or both, but I don’t have proof of either. Maybe I’m getting paranoid in my old age.”
Grayson frowned. “For how long now?”
“Since just before I sent you the first message, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”
“Something to do with this case?”
“It’s hard to say. Like I said, I have no proof. It’s just a feeling, and between you and me I’m anxious to be rid of it. I’ve been holding onto it too long regardless. If these engrams aren’t hot, they probably are illegal but, you know -”
“- Don’t ask, don’t tell. Yeah, I know.” Grayson took a long pull of his Roja.
The waitress girl returned, carrying two platters of chimichurri grilled steak topped with fried egg and avocado alongside plantains, white rice, and french fries. “Buen provecho,” she said with a slight curtsy.
“Muchas gracias, senorita,” said Grayson while Benedict attacked his platter immediately.
“Look,” he said between mouthfuls, “I wouldn’t set you up if the heat were about to come down, but to say there’s no risk… men like you and I, we aren’t strangers to risk as long as the reward is there. The Martian contact is waiting for the case on Mars in the Ophir Arcologies - Are you familiar with it? I believe you’ve spent some time there.”
“I’m not familiar with that one in particular, but if you’ve been in one of the Martian arcologies, then you have seen them all. It’s part of the Valles Marineris settlements, right?”
“Right. You just have to get the case there, and if you can crack the copy protection en-route, then this will be the job that keeps on paying.”
“What kind of cut did you want on the back end,” Grayson asked.
“I was thinking twenty-five percent?”
Grayson washed down a plantain with a mouthful of Roja and thought. “Twenty percent. And you have a deal. That’s standard.” They were old friends, but business was business.
Benedict beamed, apparently happy to accept. “So you can do it then?”
“I’ve smuggled engrams before. The trick is to decompile the files and camouflage the sensory memories as synesthesia. That way there’s not enough content for the personality fragments to trip the AI sensors. Then, if there are still problems, you can disguise any residual ghost activity as a logic program. Let me guess, that was the problem you kept running into.”
“It was the damnedest thing. No matter how I scrambled the data, the tests kept showing ghost activity. If there is even a hint of a ghost, the Interplanetary Transit Authority won’t risk letting an unregistered AI off world.”
Grayson dabbed sweat from his forehead and polished off his beer. “That’s a common problem. I’ll sort it out tonight, run some tests, and if everything checks out I’ll be up the elevator in the morning. I want to catch a transport to Mars whil
e it’s still in a favorable orbit.”
They ate and chatted, and Grayson’s mood improved considerably from earlier in the day. A full belly, a couple of beers, and the prospect of a big payday did that for one. And Benedict was right, the churrasco wasn’t as good as her’s, but it was pretty good. Personally, Grayson would have ordered something else. Benedict didn’t have the same problems thinking about her that Grayson did, but he would be off world before too many other occasions for recollection presented themselves.
That night Grayson stayed at a hotel close to the tube station. A century-old air conditioning unit embedded in the wall rattled. It kept the room too cold and only minimally musty, but at least there was air conditioning. The hotel room’s peeling walls and painted-over fixtures reminded him too much of their old apartment in Baltimore. They lucked into it as medical students and held on tight as rents rose around them every year thereafter. The burgeoning convergence of cybernetics and neurology held such future potential that it was worth the short term sacrifices necessary to afford finishing his residency, and moreover, Sarah promised to be an expert immuno-oncologist. She had a gift for predicting cancerous mutations and redirecting the immune systems of her patients accordingly.
Grayson scowled. There was no point in reliving a past so definitively severed from the present. Instead, he went to review the scan data from earlier in the day on his tablet. The results showed he successfully decompiled and masked the engrams, but there was no being too careful with the IPTA. That was another reason Grayson preferred to work in the outer rim; it was beyond the reach of the IPTA’s regulations. Grayson decided he would run the scans one more time before going to bed just to make sure none of the ghost activity Benedict talked about was coming through.
A new file had appeared on his home screen. It was a text document: Alice.doc; Grayson’s scowl deepened. If the files on the briefcase harbored a virus, he would take ten percent off Benedict’s cut. The bastard should have found it; he wasn’t an incompetent.
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