Perfect Gravity

by Vivien Jackson

  Even if sometimes it felt like she’d gone far, far off course in this life.

  Fanaida arched one brow on her incredibly wrinkly forehead. “Little girl, you might have lived in lots of places, but I wasn’t talking about maps and nations. Wasn’t even talking about deprivation. We got water here, courtesy of a reclamation system. What we don’t have is time for you to diva yourself before the folks in charge get a look at you. You might not realize it, but we’re taking some risks harboring a continental senator. We need to make sure you aren’t going to start shouting kidnappish things and cause trouble.”

  “The folks in charge…that would be Dr. Farad, right?” And Kellen? Was he also one of the people in charge? Of this group of questionable ethics and lurid behavior? She needed to step lightly.

  “He’s one. Also my wife and Doc Hockley and young Garrett…we got a team here. A family. If you want to stay, most likely nobody is gonna put you out on your ass, but we gotta make sure you’re on board with our mission, dig?”

  “Mission?”

  “Haven’t you been riding next to this smelly sweet thing the last three hours?”

  “An orphan infant camelid is your mission?”

  The old lady snorted. “Yeah. She kind of is.” She left off petting the vicuña and stared hard at Angela. “The Pentarc is a refuge. We have critters here, like Azul, but we also have, last I checked, upward of three hundred human refugees as well, folks we’ve snatched from parts of the world that were no longer safe. Seventy from Sudan, before the fall. Three extended families from Jolet Jin Anij.” She snorted. “Maybe you know them personally, ambassador girl.”

  Angela’s head ached, but she struggled to keep her mien placid, concerned. “You saved them, before the ocean came?”

  “I wasn’t on that mission, but yeah, my boys did. They swooped in and let anybody who could climb get on board. And then they brought the immigrants here. Poor souls still haven’t gotten over the trauma, but we’ll keep them until they’re able to stand being out in the world again. If. And it don’t matter if they never can. We will keep them safe. Because they matter.” She was looking at the orphan vicuña when she said it. Her thin hands stroked fur.

  Angela wasn’t sure what to say to that. She too had spent her life in service. But she had never rescued people on the brink of oblivion. She had never been a savior or superhero. Her work had always been more…administrative. And yet it had felt good, creating coalitions, reminding her diplomatic opposites of their bonds, of the bonds that all humans shared. She had pressured the international courts up to that last day to allow the residents of Jolet Jin Anij to emigrate without the requisite agreements in place. The world court had denied her request. The wheels of nations moved so slowly.

  She had watched on satellite vid as the last speck of the big island disappeared beneath the ocean. Her team had dialed the screen resolution back so she didn’t have to see up close and real-time death on a massive scale. They didn’t know she’d gone back and watched, over and over, forcing her soul to embrace the horror. The guilt.

  Angela had done all she could. Hadn’t she?

  And yet, these people, Kellen’s people, had done more.

  Mech-Daniel broke in with a quiet reminder that he had downloaded the meeting invitation and could lead her to the conference room where Dr. Farad awaited her.

  She started and moved toward her robot husband, but Fanaida caught her by the arm. Something warm and electric arced from the old lady’s body to hers, and black eyes pierced her. Hard, those eyes, but curiously not judgmental. Like she’d seen all the world had to give, and she’d decided Angela was neither the best nor the worst of it. Or that maybe she had some potential for good.

  “We aren’t the bad guys, no matter what you’ve been told.” The old woman leaned down and pressed a dry-lipped kiss to Angela’s forehead. “Now go see my son.”

  The gesture felt solemn. Weighty. A benediction. Or maybe Angela was just out-of-her-gourd exhausted.

  And no, there was nothing wet on her face, certainly nothing as pedestrian—as weak—as tears. She straightened her skirt and followed mech-Daniel to the central lift. Nothing at all.

  • • •

  Between the ages of five and twenty, Angela had been nurtured and taught in a hyperstructure, the Mustaqbal Institute, where all the uncommonly clever children were brought to learn. The school had covered more than six square kilometers and contained more than forty thousand souls, so the Pentarc, for all its size and heft, didn’t intimidate her, not one bit.

  Its emptiness kind of did, though.

  This building had been constructed to house nearly as many people as Mustaqbal, but how many refugees had Fanaida mentioned? A few hundred? That was like a family of four booking a 797-8 Spacejet.

  She tried to imagine the MIST with only a hundred residents, and the picture shimmered coolly down her spine. It would be like a ghost town, derelict and menacing. Not exactly the haven she would have chosen. Still, it would serve.

  All she wanted was a safe place to hide, get her bearings. Figure out who had tried to kill her. And then…what? For the first time in her life, she didn’t have a five-year plan, had no idea where she was heading, no midterm goals. The stark blankness on her internal calendar edged all her thoughts in white panic, but she tried to focus straight down the center. Panic wasn’t an option.

  The elevator had an open glass side opposite the doors, and the carriage seemed to be going slower than normal, maybe so she could see each floor as they passed upward. The first floor contained a promenade with storefronts that had never been filled with shops, most of which had their “Coming soon!” signs still up. Then there was a university and public facilities floor, replete with a crèche for children too young for school. The neon instructress chatbot in her tidy, fresh crinoline was still lit and animated, despite the fact that no children would be coming for lessons and indoctrination.

  Or would they? Three-hundred-odd refugees, families, could conceivably contain children. Were the full resources of this megastructure engaged in managing a population, even if that population was pathetically small? Was this really a functional government of fewer than a thousand souls? And if it was, what did that mean to the real government, to Angela’s government?

  She might not be able to leave here and swear that she had sought refuge in an uncontested part of the free state. She might have to lie.

  She almost shrugged. The older she got, the more comfortable she was with lies.

  “We have arrived,” mech-Daniel said.

  Half a heartbeat later, the elevator doors shished open, and the whole floor was flooded with light. Instead of discreet rooms here, there was a wide-open entertainment balcony overlooking the lower floors. A partygoer could spit chicle down upon unsuspecting students and plebs waiting in the entertainment lines. Of course, none of those lines or crowds had ever materialized in this place—construction had been halted at the height of the financial crisis of ’52, long before the structure had been able to officially seek residents or spin up its public services.

  Angela stepped off the lift and into the bright sunlight. The wall facing inward was a giant slab of plasteel, fully translucent and wired for free-fae holoprojections. She wouldn’t be surprised if that seven-story wall could project any scene it wanted, at any given time of day. Right now, it was translucent, letting the harsh desert morning pour through.

  At the far end, right where the structure’s exterior spire wall curved gently, was a door. Angela got mech-Daniel’s confirmation in her earpiece: behind that door, in the conference room beyond, Dr. Farad waited for her. Unconsciously she smoothed her skirt and again wished for gloves, her good gloves. The all-night pharma hadn’t stocked her bespoke smartgloves, of course, just those cheap knockoffs that didn’t dependably filter the more popular weaponized viruses—Dengue B, Cholera Nuovo, the recently catalogued Basilisk,
which had decimated the population of inland and western China.

  She felt naked, protected by insufficient gloves and lacking her usual team of mobile mist-bots, aerosoling the world around her with toxin-neutral particles.

  It had been a long time since Angela had touched anyone who wasn’t inorganic and/or drenched in disinfectants. But here she was. She smoothed her breathing, composed her face. She could do this.

  Mech-Daniel paused briefly to scan the room behind the door, and then, when nothing jumped out at him, he nodded and opened the door, and Angela stepped through. Her eyes and her soul scanned the room in tandem.

  Kellen wasn’t here.

  Stupid to be disappointed. But there it was anyhow, the plummet of surprise at his absence. She shook her head to clear it.

  At the near end of the table sat Heron Farad. He didn’t rise when she entered, and he didn’t turn for her benefit. She moved along his periphery, around the corner of the long conference table, and noticed that his eyes were closed. Well, that would be why he hadn’t so much as acknowledged her presence. Was he even awake? He was almost as creepy as the ghostlike building he lived in.

  She sat to his left, two chairs down and with the opulent sunlight at her back. “Dr. Farad?”

  “Yes.” He still didn’t open his eyes. “I am having an unusual morning, so please bear with me.”

  “Of course.” She adjusted her posture in a slim, milk-colored chair and folded her naked hands in her lap. Mech-Daniel sat between her and the cyborg.

  Dr. Farad took his time before turning to her and frowning, still with his eyes closed. “You said in your repeater message that you needed haven. Can you tell me why?”

  “The hotel where I was staying was attacked,” she said. Lintel melting like wet clay. Smell of bombs. She could pass for calm, but inside she was still screaming.

  His frown deepened, carving furrows into his forehead. “I’m not finding any other high-value targets on the guest list of the Hotel Riu. Have you been attacked personally in the past?”

  She half shrugged, despite the echo of ache in her shoulder. “Most people who stick their heads up eventually get something thrown at them. In the last few years, the fashion has been for biological or chemical weapons, and I have both clothing and physiological alterations that protect against those. But usually people who stage attacks for political, economic, or religious reasons are pretty noisy taking credit for their misdeeds.”

  “Yet no one has claimed responsibility for the attack on your hotel.” He even spoke like a machine, careful and controlled, but also soft and resonant. What sort of digital wildness was he seeing on the backs of his eyelids? What sort of data streams were poking into his incredibly still hands atop the table?

  Angela lived with a mech-clone, sure, but she knew what mech-Daniel was. Even better, mech-Daniel knew what he was. He knew his purposes and limitations and had never acted outside of set behavioral parameters. This man, Heron Farad, however, was something else entirely. He was, like mech-Daniel, clearly a thing, but just as obviously human and brain-screamingly other. His too-calm voice, his too-still body made her hackles rise.

  “No, no one has taken credit,” she said. That’s how it would play out in the news narrative: take credit. Not responsibility. Bullies didn’t take responsibility, typically, and whoever had bombed the Riu clearly had some unhealthy destructive tendencies.

  “You have suspicions,” Farad said.

  “I do.”

  His eyes came open, and they danced with amusement. She thought of Fanaida and knew exactly where he got that expression from. It rooted him squarely in his humanity. He pulled his hands up from the smartsurface table and steepled his long fingers, like he was actively giving a shit about their conversation. “Tell me, do you suspect Damon Vallejo? I mean for the attempt on your life and for contracting the hit on your husband?”

  A fear bubble that she hadn’t even known existed popped in Angela’s gut. Well, that was unexpected. Score one for the cyborg.

  “Vallejo certainly had motive,” she hedged. “I have said damning things about him in public lately.”

  Farad’s head tilted, and he inhaled slowly, like he was sifting the air for truth. “Yet you doubt your own theory.”

  “It is awfully tidy.”

  “And tidy is usually wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  Was it her imagination, or was he inside her thoughts, predicting her phrases? She wondered if it was a skill, something organic, or if it was a program cooked up by his implanted neural net.

  If he was just employing a talent of a very perceptive man, she could live with that. She would even be impressed. But if he used a program to read her mind, that raised other, sneakier thoughts. Like, did mech-Daniel have similar programming? And if he did, how often did he peek in on her?

  And what had he found? Whom would he tell? She made a mental note to revert mech-Daniel to his factory settings as soon as possible. She didn’t want anyone outside of this building to know where she was.

  “Who knew your physical location at 12:52 this morning, Senator Neko?”

  She went down the list silently. Her style team had a complete itinerary. The remote pilot of her transport would also have known. Zeke. Mech-Daniel. But honestly, anyone who knew her schedule in general would have been able to guess that she hadn’t yet left Guadalajara. Ascertaining her whereabouts last night wouldn’t have been an exercise in higher mathematics or anything.

  “Probably too many people knew my itinerary, which is why I have conveyed my current location to no one.”

  He leaned forward slightly. “Do you mind if I scan you for trackers?”

  “Well, no, but I—”

  “A moment, please.” He settled back in his chair and spread his long hands over the table top. Almost instantly, he looked up, and some of the tension had eased from his lean face. “You and your mech-clone are free of malicious riders.”

  “Um, thank you?” Except that she felt like he’d just stripped every stitch off her body, inspected her packaging like a security screener, and then left her hanging out there, naked and exposed. And now he was monitoring her response.

  Well, fuck him. If there was one thing Angela knew how to do, it was keep private things private.

  “No worries,” Farad said. “Be assured I am investigating the attack in Guadalajara. We have, in fact, been monitoring the situation there for the last several hours. You may be interested to learn that the intrusion countermeasures set up over the region are particularly sophisticated. I encountered ICE like that in Texas, however. And that leads us back to Vallejo.”

  Angela was only half hearing him. What she really needed was a shower, or lacking that, at least a strip-and-sleep opportunity. Her mind would be much clearer after a nice long rest. Mech-Daniel would watch over her while she slept, which made the possibility of deep REM much more likely.

  A yawn stretched her face before she could contain it. She put a hand in front of her mouth, but when she focused again, Dr. Farad was peering at her keenly.

  “Does discussion of our mutual threats bore you, Senator?”

  She flailed, shaking her head before she even had words to reply.

  He smiled. “You are very much not what I was expecting.”

  Likewise. Angela wasn’t certain what she had expected of Heron Farad, cyborg result of way too much techno tampering with the human body and mind. Whatever her expectations, the reality was surprising. He was courteous, even gallant. Whatever technology sustained him, it wasn’t glaring. Of course, mech-Daniel also looked like a normal man on first pass. Deeper inspection yielded different results.

  She wondered if kissing Dr. Farad would also taste like death.

  His dark brows ticked up. “Madam Senator, you shock me.”

  Wait. “You can read my mind?”

  Now it was his
turn to look abashed. “Sometimes. The human brain is an electrical machine, and I have recently acquired the ability to see with absurd clarity all electrical activity surrounding me. I confess just now I was testing that ability on you. Please say you won’t tell?”

  Was that…was he blushing? Well, well. Angela stifled an urge to laugh as it became agonizingly clear to her that he wasn’t worried about international diplomacy or how something like his weird techno-mind-reading capability would be read into a weapons readiness doc. He was worried she’d tell his lover.

  She could understand. Sex partners were terrible confidantes. Frankly, she’d rather Zeke and the rest of the bloody government knew her secrets than her bedmate/partner/spouse. If she actually, you know, had one of those.

  Mech-Daniel shifted beside her. “I hate to intrude,” he said in his deferent tone, not the Daniel-esque one, “but I must remind you that the private thoughts of a sitting continental senator are classified. If you are able to peer at said thoughts, please note that they may not be shared, transmitted, or stored without advance clearance and express permission of the rights holder.”

  She half expected Heron Farad to laugh at her officious machine. Instead he met mech-Daniel’s gaze sincerely. “Your policy is noted.” He paused and added, “I see also how you care for her.”

  Their discussion devolved from that point to Farad’s concern for his partner, the Mari Vallejo rebuild, the thing that thought it was a girl. The thing that had finally, thankfully, killed Daniel.

  About halfway through their interview, Mari herself appeared, weary from whatever adventure she had been on and utterly disinterested in chitchatting. Which, honestly, Angela was glad for. She was about to excuse herself when the two, Mari and Heron—who were clearly lovers; yow, handsy! All over each other like limpets—dismissed her.