The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  He passed a flashroll to Brindos. It was extra large, as big as an antique paper scroll, because it was a National Geographic, which demanded increased node circuitry and flash memory to accommodate the graphic-heavy publication. Crowell was the only person he knew who would’ve preferred a paper edition, but no periodical had even bothered with that kind of nostalgia for decades.

  Along the skin of the rolled-up flashmag, the magazine’s yellow square logo pulsed. Brushing it with his finger brought up a preview holo of the front cover, the words “National Geographic” in block letters next to the logo, with a subhead: Celebrating 225 Years. A beautiful shot of some green wetlands filled the holo block. The headline: “Temonus, the Union’s New Frontier.” From last month, June 2113.

  Crowell pointed at the flashmag. “I’ve marked an article for you to look at, and left some of my own notes in there. I want you to read it and let me know what you think once you get to Temonus.”

  “Okay.”

  “Looks beautiful, Alan,” Crowell said, closing his drawer and leaning back in his chair. “I wish I could go with you, I really do.”

  “The fuck you do.” He didn’t believe him for a second. Crowell didn’t get out of the office. Besides, if given a choice, he wouldn’t pick Temonus. It would be Aryell, where he’d left behind Cara Landry. He’d fallen hard for her right after they’d contracted with the NIO.

  “I’m looking further into this Dorie Senall thing. If you find any connections, I want to know.”

  “Fine.” Brindos knew he wasn’t getting out of this one, as much as he’d hoped Crowell might change his mind.

  “Koch is your priority,” Crowell said. “Remember, if you do find him, call me. But keep your distance. Like Plenko, he’s a Helk, First Clan, big as they come.”

  When Brindos got home to his apartment around eleven o’clock, he powered up his code card, and in the semidark of his apartment the flash membrane lit up with a burst that made him look away a moment. With a swish of his finger he brought up the mission folder with the details of the assignment. Crowell had written “Optay Ecretsay” across the holo image of the folder. Crowell, always the joker, not one to follow NIO protocols, or at least not very seriously.

  Brindos thanked Crowell for generally keeping him in his cubicle and out of Director James’s sights by sending low-profile ops, nothing strenuous. He knows me too well. One of the reasons Brindos didn’t particularly care for contract work was the travel. Space flight was a reasonably safe bet now, but he hated it. It wasn’t about safety, or claustrophobia, or uncomfortable differences in gravity, it was just boring. He’d been in enough solar systems to make Galileo pee his pants, but the thrill went out of it. Space was one big black boring void, and most of the worlds in it were poison to humans.

  Crowell had found his way to Timothy James’s good graces and grabbed major administration duties. Administration choked Brindos, but Crowell was adept at cutting through red tape. He loved everything about the Union of Worlds, particularly its mix of new and old. You found that curious mix not only on Earth, but also the colony planets of Orgon, Barnard’s, Ribon, Temonus, and Aryell. Things were a little different on the two nonhuman worlds of Helkunntanas and Memory of course. Crowell loved antiques and memorabilia; he longed for the old days, but they were days he had never lived through, only read about, or heard stories about.

  Time to find out what Temonus had to offer. Older civilizations throughout the Network had yet to pay much attention to the young Union colony, and information, even within intelligence circles, was scarce.

  Brindos caught the shuttle to Egret in time to make his connection with Transworld Transport Flight #135 through the jump slot to Temonus. With time to burn, he sat back in his private flight cubicle and took out the National Geographic. Brindos unlocked and unrolled the flashmag, the full digital image of the front cover filling the membrane. He stretched and pulled, the nanocircuitry adjusting, expanding the view, then he thumbed the contents node.

  Crowell had already digitally dog-eared the magazine, penning questions and observations in the margins. One note said, “Cross-reference my appendix, node six, about this, which explains in detail what we know of the device. If you get a chance, take the guided tour and send me a T-shirt.”

  He was referring to a double-page spread with the heading “Weather Perfect.” The text read: “Temonus may be young as colonies go, but the advances in weather control technology are making the other worlds of the Union take notice. An engineering marvel known as the Transcontinental Conduit, a spiderweb thin filament, stretches across the tiny continent of Ghal, held by six towers, each a half mile high, and five hundred feet in diameter. From Tower One in East City, it whistles over plains and valleys as blue as the liquor Temonus is famous for. It stretches over the Micro region, a network of over a thousand small lakes. The Conduit passes over Midwest City skies, continuing to the coast, where it ties off at Tower Six in West City.

  “The Conduit—invented by the Science Consortium, and endorsed by Union President Nguyen—was completed a year ago despite early objections from the Temonus provincial government, which had concerns about environmental impact studies left undone. Reports of early tests were encouraging and quieted most skeptics. Because of its classified status, the conduit is not open to the public, and it is protected by a high-alert security grid and hot zone.”

  Crowell had been joking then, about the guided tour. But Brindos did wonder if he might find a T-shirt to bring back.

  The photos, he suspected, didn’t do the massive structure justice. He whisked across several of the included graphics of the circular towers, pulling them up in holo from the main membrane to get a closer look. The towers were a glossy black, almost featureless, except for some handholds, outer ladders, and opaqued windows that ran up and down its surface. Even as a graphic, Tower One exuded an almost menacing presence, towering over East City. Almost invisible to the eye, the thin wire stretched across the city out of the frame of the graphic, to where it connected to Tower Two, far out of sight.

  On the facing page was a photo of five scientists: two humans, a Helk, and a Memor. Brindos expanded this and zoomed in on them.

  The caption below read: “The Science Consortium. Five of the Union’s brightest minds are behind the Conduit and the cutting-edge weather control technology.”

  And where was the Consortium now? No one had heard from them since before the Coral Moon disaster.

  He let his finger hover over the Memor in the graphic, who stood tall and stiff next to the Helk. Her orange hair was bright and long in stark contrast to the bald Helk, the short, thick brown hair of one human, and the thinning gray hair of the other. A text bubble coalesced above her with a quote.

  “This is an exciting development in meterological progress,” Lorway said. “We’re literally changing the landscape of Temonus and making it a better world.”

  Lorway. Brindos had heard of her. A female Memor of note, considering most Memor females did not reach any level of importance. During mating, most Memors morphed male, but those rarer occasions when Memors intersexually assigned themselves female, they were bonded to multiple males, their surnames stripped. Lorway was rumored to be bonded to just one male. More often, Memor females were bonded to a dozen males, or more.

  So the Transcontinental Conduit was a collaborative effort.

  Brindos nodded to himself as he looked at the Memor’s face, and she seemed uncomfortable, large, puffy lips locked in a hard smile. Quite the accomplishment to get the Memors signed on to something like this. The technology of the Memors, the creators of the jump slots, could be stunningly breaktaking, although many of the advancements the Memors kept to themselves.

  There were also rumors about their enhanced memory capabilities, and their notion of shared memory, which enabled them to excell at Union conference tables and mediation hearings. And yet, most Memors stayed out of the limelight. They didn’t venture far from planet Memory.

  The Mem
or planet had strikingly beautiful cities. Brindos had been there once, before the NIO contract, on a chase of data forger Baren Rieser. Buildings bloomed from the surface like trees, tall and formidable, but aesthetically pleasing with their glass exteriors and brushed, hand-carved stones. The air was a bit thin for humans, but breathable without breathing aids. Memors certainly didn’t like Earth’s hyper-oxygenated atmosphere—probably another reason they preferred to stay home. But in fact, their whole world was beautiful. For as long as the Memors had been on their planet—thousands of years—it felt like a new colony world, the waters pure and unpolluted, skies blue and pristine.

  Brindos flicked the photo of the Science Consortium members back to the membrane and kept looking at the Temonus article, but found nothing else about the conduit and how it actually controlled the weather; the staff writers had decided to enhance the unique graphics with a minimum of text. But he found the cross-reference node Crowell had placed on the article, a tiny red square that outlined the letters “CF.” He pushed it and it took him to Crowell’s note:

  “This is what I could scrounge up on what the NIO knows regarding the Conduit. The Science Consortium applied for the usual patents and permissions, commissioned impact studies [although all not completed as you know, resulting in early opposition—concern mostly about the wetlands], passed stringent QC checks from the Union and provincial governments, and received the blessings of the intelligence community—NIO, Kenn, and MSA—after confirming no danger of military or terrorist capabilites. The wire connects the six towers as an array of transmitters to push, from the tower caps, artificially created high frequency waves amplified from Temonus’s existing electromagnetic field that occurs between the surface and the ionosphere, what scientists on Earth call Schumann resonances. [This tech is nothing new, Alan, around for hundreds of years. Memors snapped it into a usable interface, however, with a way to harness the energy and inject it into the ionosphere about ninety miles up, without the need for chemical seeding.]”

  Brindos thumbed a node to continue.

  “The Conduit itself helps generate the massive energy needed, as much as six million watts. The end result: a purposeful pushing of ionized water particles upward, causing the ionosphere to extend outward, thereby causing the stratosphere to fill in the space. Temonus’s jet stream reroutable. Cloud formations and plumes controllable. [Again, not new tech, but the Memors shared the methods to perfect it.]”

  Crowell’s note ended there, and he was thankful. He didn’t need to know much more about the Conduit than that. He rolled the flashmag and put it away, then returned to the mission folder on his code card. Crowell’s earlier folder message, obviously placed there with a data-timed command, now said, “Still Optay Ecretsay.”

  Time to dig into the Koch matter.

  Nearly a day later, Earth time, ten thousand kilometers out from Temonus, the planet showed up on the monitor in his flight cubicle. The pictures in the magazine had displayed Temonus’s natural beauty to full advantage, and indeed, from up here, it looked very Earth-like.

  From five hundred kilometers up on Solan Station, however, while awaiting transfer to the surface in the lounge, nothing but vast patches of blue made the planet look like an impossible ball of water in the vacuum of space. Temonus had very few land masses. Cloud formations across the southern pole gave the planet a nice little smile.

  He closed his eyes a moment, reverent, remembering Ribon and the horrors visited upon it by Coral.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep, but a call to board the shuttle to the surface awakened him. Wearily, travelers channeled into the umbilical tube that connected to the drop shuttle. Under their arms they carried coats they’d had no need of, tired now of the weather-controlled metal environments, all dreaming of rain and wind, the natural light of a sky.

  Brindos watched Temonus turning below them, the Republic of Ghal slipping slowly by. He staggered down to the drop shuttle like a man heading for bed.

  Three

  A few days after shipping off Alan Brindos to Temonus, I decided to walk to the NIO headquarters. The New York afternoon beat down on me as I walked, a haze nearly obscuring the sun; still, it was summer, and damn hot. It never got this hot in Seattle, and even now, three years after closing the detective agency, I missed the gray days of drizzle. I loosened my tie and shirt collar and gazed up and down Wall Street, which was nearly deserted. Not much remained of the original business district that had once made New York the hub of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America.

  We were forced into the future upon discovery of two alien races. This got things moving away from Earth in speedy fashion because the first aliens, the Memors, stumbled upon us in 2040 and gave us jump slots and interstellar travel. Here’s tech that will change the future of your meager lives and fuck up your learning curve big time. Have fun, kids.

  A decade later, humans colonized the worlds of the Union, and a decade after that they discovered Helkunntanas, the home of the ugliest and meanest species known to God above. The Exchange and most investment firms moved out to the eight planets of the Union to more effectively profit from the mass of humanity that had spread throughout the galaxy. By 2063, just fifty years ago, the New York business district had been reduced to a shadow of its former glory.

  I avoided the slideway, as did most people. I was certain it would slip a cog and throw me.

  A few blocks from NIO headquarters, I routed a call on my code card to my mom at her lake place in Montana. I did my best to check up on her regularly, but I didn’t always do such a good job of it.

  Mom had never been the same after dad left—or disappeared, I guess—when I was sixteen. He was presumed dead, drowned in the lake, but no body had been found. Mom had stayed at the family home on Flathead Lake and told me not to worry about her, but I knew it was getting harder for her as the years piled on. The cold of winter didn’t help matters, but she never wanted to go somewhere warm, even though I’d offered to help.

  Mom’s words came to me all in a rush. “David? Where are you? Are you in town?”

  “No, Mom, I’m in New York. Just saying hello.”

  “When are you coming, David? I would’ve liked to have seen you for your thirtieth birthday. Or any day, you know. I’ve not seen you in a while.”

  Hadn’t seen her in a year, at least.

  “Soon, Mom. After this mess is done.”

  “The Movement thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t say anything, but I could sense her disappointment. She knew as well as I did that the Movement thing might go on a long time.

  “The marina still running?” I asked. The Hammond Marina had been a family business. Mom had sold it after Dad disappeared, not wanting to deal with the hassle of upkeep. My memory of it was hazy at best.

  “I think so,” Mom said. “But I don’t get out of the house much, other than to go down to the shore and enjoy the sun when it manages to come out.”

  I came upon four kids playing Stickman near an overflowing Dumpster. One boy, not more than seven, banged a rhythm on the metal Dumpster with a piece of rusted metal, and it was loud.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t have any memories of a happy childhood, playing kid games, running around the lake place with friends.

  “I’m headed in to work,” I said, “so I’ll have to let you go.”

  “What’s that noise, David?”

  “Just some kids. I’ll talk again soon. Love you.”

  “Good-bye, David. Love you too.”

  The banging intensified as I put away the code card, the boy’s eyes closed in concentration. Other kids skipped along elaborate chalk diagrams of circles, squares and triangles marked with the individual letters of “stickman.” Stickman glorified the popular comic flashbook superhero of the same name. I’d casually read a few issues of Stickman on a personal DataNet visor, and I knew the basics of the street game. As they moved along the diagram in no apparent pattern, the kids chanted together:


  Stickman, Stickman, coming to our house

  Save the day! Save the day!

  O save us from that louse!

  The Movement’s here and Plenko’s near,

  His revolution made;

  But never fear, Stickman’s here,

  O don’t you be afraid!

  The object of the game was to capture and execute Stickman’s arch-enemy, Terl Plenko, the leader of the Movement of Worlds. The kids glanced over at me, but they didn’t seem frightened of me. None of them really understood the implications of Terl Plenko’s revolution. Did anyone? Why, other than for personal power, was he enticing worlds to break away from the Union, a government he pronounced corrupt and immoral?

  I left the kids behind and turned left onto Williams Street. The massive towers of New York, stained with oil and corrosion, jutted high into the overcast sky like giant mystic runes. Waterfalls trickled from rusted sculptures. For a brief moment, a break in the clouds brought out the sun, and the spray of water droplets created weak rainbows in the hazy sunlight.

  A moment later, a terrific rumble dopplered above, sending a tremor through the cracked pavement under my feet. Union assault planes, hunting for Terl Plenko. I looked up but couldn’t see them. No one had spotted a Movement vessel for months, but every time something bad happened on Earth, Plenko was said to be the cause, and the Union dispatched assault planes to chase him down. Perhaps he was such a useful demon that the Union couldn’t do without him, but what he’d done to Ribon and Coral made me sick to my stomach.

  The NIO knew Plenko had left Earth. What were the assault planes chasing, then? Shadows? The Movement had stretched to nearly every world in the Union, reaching out to the colonies, preaching independence. Here on Earth, Plenko’s Movement seemed to have lost steam.

  My duties to the NIO kept me on Earth, and I hadn’t minded that for a long time, but lately I’d felt the need to escape.