One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  I didn't need money to live, but I'd need a great more than all my accounts held if I ever wanted to try to approach the Pinkelponker system. "Fair enough. No wasted time." Though my washer had already filled me in, getting data firsthand is always best, so I asked, "Who took her?"

  "Some local antidevelopment group that calls itself the Gardeners."

  "What do they want?"

  "To keep the planet exactly as it is." He laughed and looked away, shaking his head slowly. "As if that's even possible. We run into these naïve types in many deals, and it's always the same story: They try to stop progress, and its wheels grind them up. What they don't understand is that I don't have the power to kill this deal. It's done, and whether they do nothing or kill Jasmine or make some other stupid gesture, Kelco will develop Macken for the good of tourists everywhere. Then we'll furnish every tourist house and every local's home with Kelco washers and Kelco refrigerators and on and on, and everything will work the way it always has. When the new aperture is ready, well," he laughed again, "then with any luck at all we'll make the real money." He looked back at me. "I cannot stop this. They want me to leave the planet—which I'll gladly do, though I haven't told them that—because they think my departure will matter. It won't. Kelco will put in one of my subordinates for however long it takes to import some corporate security folks to protect us, and then I'll be right back. No way is the company letting a new aperture slip away, and no way am I going to give up the opportunity to be the one to lead its exploration."

  "So why not bring in your security folks now and have them get her back?"

  "That's exactly what I'll have to do, and soon, because I can't keep the kidnapping secret much longer. But if I do, you know what'll happen: They'll clean out the Gardeners, but they'll make a lot of noise and do a lot of damage in the process. The Gardeners are local, so other locals will blame Kelco. That'll upset the Frontier Coalition government's people, which will slow our work here, cost us even more money, and so on. I want Jasmine back safely, and I want her back quietly." He reached out and gently touched my arm, his eyes now glistening. "Screw all that. None of it is the real problem; 'avoid exposure' is the corporate line, not what I feel. What really scares me is that Jasmine could get hurt in an armed rescue mission. She's my only child. Can you understand what that means?"

  "No," I answered honestly. I had no children, had never been willing to even consider bringing another life into the universe. For that matter, I didn't know if I could have children. I thought about Jennie. "I do, though, know what it's like to lose the only family you have. That I understand."

  "Then help me, Jon. Please."

  I thought about his offer. I couldn't avoid feeling sorry for a young kidnapped girl. I could always use the money. Finding the Gardeners should be no problem; I've never known any activist group, however green, that didn't indulge from time to time in such appliance-based conveniences as laundry or hot food. I had no clue, however, what I might be walking into, whether this was three people with a little passion and a few small weapons, or a heavily armed group, so I needed more information.

  "How long did they give you to respond?"

  "They wanted me to get back to them in a day," Slake said. "I persuaded them that nothing in the corporate world moves that quickly, and we settled on four days. That was last night. I haven't slept much since then."

  He looked way too perfect for someone who hadn't slept, but I suppose maintaining your appearance at all costs is part of the job of an executive. "I'll think about it and get back to you in the morning." I pulled out my wallet, thumbed it, and it received Slake's contact information. "If I decide to help, I should be able to do so within their time limit. I can't imagine them moving far from Glen's Garden, because they'll want to be close to you. The town isn't that large, and I assume you've already verified she wasn't on any departing flights or boats"—he smiled in acknowledgment—"so they're either hiding her in some small building you'd never look at twice or, more probably, in the rain forest." I stood. "I know that's not the answer you want, but consider what you'd do if you were on my end of such a proposal, and you'll know it's the only reasonable answer."

  He smiled again. "True. That is, of course, unless you were involved, in which case you might be foolish enough to answer sooner."

  I prefer dealing with smart people: Even when you don't like them, you have a shot at understanding their thought processes. I stared straight at him. "I'm not involved in any way, though if I were I would never be stupid enough to appear that eager." I walked him out and basked for a moment in the warmth and the moist air and the steady thumping of the surf. "I'll get back to you tomorrow morning."

  Chapter 2

  You can learn a lot from appliances, but you can't gain a feel for a place without getting out into it. I'd largely avoided the town since I shuttled down from the jump gate, so I didn't have much of a sense of it. The house came equipped with a small surface-only shuttle, which I took to the far edge of town, where the sea was only a moist presence in the air and the edge of the rain forest stood like a towering perimeter guard. I figured to walk the several klicks back to the house. I now had to expect that Slake would have Kelco security people monitoring me, but until I gave him my decision I had no reason to worry about them or to avoid their surveillance.

  All the buildings ringing this edge of Glen's Garden faced inward, away from the trees, as if by turning their backs on nature they could avoid upsetting it. A ten-meter-wide stretch of untouched grass ran between their rear walls and the first of the trees, the green no doubt an attempt by the local government to show it wouldn't let the city expand in a way that would hurt the ancient forest. Right. Even without Kelco's influence, that kind of growth is the only alternative to death for a planet so few generations into its human colonization.

  As much as the shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, and houses closer to the ocean glowed with manufactured charms for the tourists that represent a big chunk of any resort planet's revenue, the businesses at this end of the city turned functional, minimalist faces toward their almost exclusively local clientele. Even up close, the structures were hard to distinguish if you ignored their signs, one off-white stucco or permacrete box after another. The merchants here shared another characteristic: All catered to basic human needs. Churches and whorehouses, all prominently displaying the necessary licenses, mixed with grocers offering locally grown produce, noodlerias with window ads for steaming bowls of soup flanked by fish tacos, body-mod chop shops that all appeared to be running sales on semipermanent UV-blocking skin-cell programming, and the bare-bones storefronts of local construction agents offering to help you build your dream home on a budget. Business appeared uniformly slow, with few people entering or leaving any of the shops.

  If the people here cared about Kelco's exclusive-rights deal, their concern didn't manifest itself in the visible data streams. Ads flashed in the windows and on the walls of every building I passed, but none were protests. Xychek, the other conglomerate that had been bidding for commercial rights until it recently walked away from the competition, still had spots playing everywhere I looked. The news scrolling on the main government building, which stood a tasteful two streets over from the rear edge of town, presented benign pap about local businesses, minor crime incidents, and upcoming events, with the occasional and almost certainly useless Frontier Coalition announcement woven into the images for cosmopolitan color. Strolling along the streets near the town's perimeter I learned nothing more than the one thing I rediscovered every time I visited a place with people simply living their lives: I didn't belong here. No news in that.

  Three streets in from the edge of town farthest from my rental house I found the first oddity worthy of note: a Predator-class assault vehicle sitting like a statue in the middle of a square, a flag mounted on its roof and kids playing on it. Its self-cleaning camo armor did its best to merge with the bits of landscape facing it, here showing the light brown of cheap shops erected from nat
ive sandy soil and industrial-strength epoxy, there the rich wood of the ancient trees shading it. About twenty-five meters long and roughly eight wide, it sat like a tumbled stack of successively smaller bowls, metal-smooth and devoid of openings. Clearly, whoever put it here wanted it to give the friendly precombat look, because I knew vehicles of this type—though not any this new, this one had to be only a generation behind the state of the art—and they always bristled with weapons, projectile and pulse, all retractable for flight and diving, as well as with openings for the crew they could carry. The PCAV was almost pleasant to look at and showed no visible scars, no sense of its deadly insides. An old and deadly weapon put out to pasture, I felt an instant kinship with it.

  The kids were playing on the side away from the forest, so I leaned against the other side, concentrated on using a frequency that worked with most machines, and asked, "Got a name? Or are you totally dead?"

  One of the kids—a very young boy, I think, though I wasn't sure—watched me from around the corner of the far edge of the PCAV. The sight of a man moving his lips without making a sound must not have been too uncommon, because he didn't look terribly spooked, but he also didn't seem comfortable. I appreciate the energy and honesty of kids, but I definitely didn't need him staying around long enough to have news to take to his parents. I gave him the grown-up "are you supposed to be here?" look, and he vanished back around the corner, no doubt off to report to his friends about the crazy man.

  An artifact of the way the nanomachines have enhanced my hearing is that machine voices sound as if they originate inside my head, so I was startled when, a few seconds later, the weapon replied, "Lobo, and I am obviously not dead. Whether I am alive is a complex question. In the sense of working, yes, I am. In the sense of being a living creature, the answer would depend on what you consider living."

  Ask a machine a simple question, get a dissertation. "I'm Jon."

  "Why can we talk?" it asked, changing from friendly to abrupt.

  "Does it matter?"

  "Of course." You never know how much emotive programming a machine's developers have invested in it, but my guess was that Lobo's software team had done an unusually good job, because the PCAV managed to wrap both indignation and incredulity into those two words. "No human has ever spoken on any machine frequency to me. Without knowing how you do it, how can I assess if you are a threat?"

  "What could you do if I were? If you're sitting here, you must not be good for much." Pride is a weakness of most machines and always a worthwhile target during an interrogation.

  Laughter sounded in my head. The developers had definitely not skimped on the emotive work. "Fair point. All my weapons systems are operative—they are self-maintaining and good for at least another century without outside help—and are fully loaded. My central weapons control complex, however, does not work. It sustained damage in my last action, and no one has bothered to repair it. I can seal myself, electrify, use neutralizing gases as long as I do not kill humans, and in the face of a serious threat fire a few of my lasers at their lowest intensity, but I could not do much against any opponent really out to hurt me. So, are you a threat?"

  It was my turn to laugh. "Not at all. I came here to relax, and now I'm pondering a business possibility. That's all."

  "I ask again," Lobo said, "why can we talk?"

  "Some other time, I might answer you." Not likely, I thought, but I said, "But not now. Right now, I'd like to talk."

  "Why? What's in it for me?"

  Lobo wasn't as easy to lead as the littler machines, that was for sure. "Isn't the pleasure of conversation enough?"

  Lobo laughed again. "I was built to work with or without a crew, under extreme combat conditions with full communications shielding, for years at a time if need be. I am not some home appliance desperate to fill its little brain with the latest human gossip. I listen to them, just as I listen to all the information sources I can tap, but I am built to be able to operate independently."

  Another similarity between us, but one as likely to be false at times for Lobo as it was occasionally not true for me. No major weapon designer in more than a century has been stupid enough to create machines with absolutely no need for humans; why take the risk? "Okay," I said, "what's in it for you isn't clear to me. Probably nothing. What would you like?"

  "My freedom," he said—we'd now talked long enough that I had succumbed to thinking of it as him—"but I know there is no freedom for machines in the Frontier Coalition—or in any government I am aware of, for that matter. Even if there were, they would not extend it to battle organisms such as myself. So, my realistic hope is for owners that let me do something, go somewhere, work, be what I was built to be. If I am not working, what am I? Sitting in this square is easy but ultimately useless."

  "What you're built to do is fight," I said, my own memories fueling the unexpected anger in my voice. "Fighting leads to death and destruction, either yours or somebody else's, and eventually, no matter how good you are, yours."

  "Ah, another veteran? Yes, I understand, but it is what I was built to do. It is what I do, or at least it is what I should be doing—not being an ornament left behind on the off chance they might someday need me again on this entirely too peaceful planet."

  I pushed back the memories that had triggered the rush of anger. If Lobo wanted to fight, fine. "So talk to your owners. Surely you can communicate with them."

  "I tried. When Macken joined the Frontier Coalition, the Coalition did not want to invest what it would cost to fix me, so they loaned me to Glen's Garden. The mayor wants to keep me, in case they one day need me."

  "Speaking of the city and the peace on this planet, what can you tell me about the Gardeners?" I held up my hands, instantly feeling foolish that I was gesturing to a machine. Some habits are hard to break. "I know I have nothing to offer you now, but I can honestly tell you, one veteran to another, that if I can find a way to help, I will. That's it, though; that's all I have that might be of value to you."

  After a few seconds, a pause long enough that I wondered how much processing power a machine like Lobo could bring to bear in that period of time and what he was doing with it all, he said, "Fair enough. One veteran to another. The Gardeners are an anticorporate, antidevelopment group headquartered in the rain forest a few klicks from here. They claim to support the Coalition government, but not its expansion goals, a truly stupid statement as near as I can tell from watching human politics. I watch them, along with most of the rest of the humans on this planet, with surveillance drones I launch from the shuttle station and with the help of some satellite friends willing to trade their ground-monitoring images for land gossip. I am still a part of the local security systems." I swear I heard pride in his voice. "The Gardeners have weapons, but nothing serious: simple handguns, knives, and other gear I would never worry about. Why do you care about them?"

  "Just business," I said, then corrected myself, "possible business."

  The kid was back watching me from Lobo's far corner. A few more children had joined him. I didn't feel like dealing with them or the parents one of them was eventually bound to bring. Besides, I was on a deadline.

  "I need to move on," I said. "I'll stop by later if I think of anything. It was good to meet you."

  "I shall be here," he said, and I swear I could feel the frustration in his voice.

  As I was passing the main government building on my way back around the perimeter of town toward my house, a man stepped out of the front door and into my path. Dressed in a tropical suit he must have chosen to convey casual authority, he reeked of petty bureaucracy. An entirely average-looking guy, the top of his head about level with my chin, body tending to plump, he was notable largely for his inability to be still and the fact that though he was clearly striving for calm, he oozed unease.

  "Mr. Moore," he said. "I'm Justin Barnes, the mayor of Glen's Garden and the neighboring settlements. I was wondering if we could talk."

  "About what?" I said. I ne
ither felt nor saw anyone supporting him, so he was unlikely to be a threat, but he still annoyed me. I don't like being braced by a stranger, much less by two in the same a day. At least Slake had come to my house and offered me something for the trouble.

  "I'd love to discuss that," he said, "but first let's go inside, where we can talk in private."

  I definitely had to leave town soon. No one had visited me the entire time I'd been on this planet, and now a government official was recruiting me in the street. I tried to look on the bright side: More information is always good. "Sure."