The man looked around; Les could almost see the wheels turning in his head.
“Oh, could you please help—”
“Here they come,” said Royce, then without prompting, he reached over the counter and in one smooth movement, plucked the rat out of the man’s sleeve and slipped it into Les’s overall pocket.
Just in time, because the new Kova guard, his physique almost indistinguishable from the last one, took up station behind Mr. Bower. This guard had just coming off a sleep-cycle, alert and itching to exert his authority.
“We’re listed under our wife’s address,” said Les. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Royce giving him a dirty look. “Please, let us know when—”
“Sir, we’re not a notification service,” said Cousin Bower. “But I have your address on file.”
Royce and Les nodded in unison, the baby bobbing along with Royce. Then we turned, quickly, and walked away.
“Cousins!” called Cousin Bower. He really had not looked at the forms he stamped, to assume Royce and Les were Baldasshi. “Cousins!” he called again. “You forgot your passes.”
Les turned around, raised an eyebrow.
“The Kova travel passes,” said Cousin Bower, holo-stamping two additional pieces of paper and holding them out over the counter. “They’re mandatory.”
“Of course!” said Royce, “how could we forget?” he reached for the passes with a self-depreciating smile, and slipped them into his pocket.
As soon as we were out the doors, the Baldasshi woman made a grab for her baby.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said under her breath. “But—”
“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” replied Royce, just as quietly. “But if you could hold onto our cousin’s rat for him?”
On cue, Les extracted the rodent from his overall-pocket. The woman’s expression softened as soon as she saw the pet.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and held out her hand. For its part, the rat was happy enough to scamper up her arm and find a comfortable spot on her shoulder.
“Thank you,” said Royce. “You won’t be hearing from us again.”
“Just one question,” said Les, as the woman turned away. “What’s was traitor’s name?”
“Ssessru,” she said, and spit on the ground before walking away.
The people on the space-station would have been the first to know about the Kova’s betrayal.
Les closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply to regain his equilibrium. When he opened them, Royce was looking at him, absolutely expressionless.
“Ready?” asked Les, injecting cheer into his voice.
Royce gave him a dubious look, before leading the way out of the Kova-controlled section of the station.
Les waited till we were at the railcar stop, well within the less-affluent sector, before speaking.
“That worked out remarkably well, despite your…deviations…from the plan,” he said. “I was supposed to pick up the baby.”
“The kid had a fucking venomous snake,” said Royce, as he follows Les towards the railcar stop. “In its onesie,” he added.
“One little snakee-wakee, and Royce Ree goes off-script?” asked Les. “Why are you classified as a Super-Agent again?”
Royce gave him a grin, and Les suddenly found it hard to breathe. “Because, baby,” Royce smirked, “I get the job done.”
That was the moment the railcar chose to arrive, the wind of its passage whipping up Royce’s dark hair into a halo around his head.
With effort, Les rolled his eyes, and stepped through the railcar’s sliding doors. “I spotted the rat.”
“I figured out the guard-schedule,” returned Royce.
“You needed me to control the asset.” The mother, in this case.
Royce nodded, conceding the point. “And the mandatory passes…if Cousin Bower hadn’t….”
Les realized Royce was still using ‘cousin’. Perhaps Baldessh was having an effect on more-professional-than-thou Royce Ree. How interesting.
They stepped onto the railcar, and the doors closed behind them with a soft chime.
“Yeah,” said Royce, once the vehicle gained some momentum. “Thank the Baldasshi attachment to their pets.”
“No,” said Les. “Thank the Kova, for being such stellar assholes.”
Royce shrugged.
“By the way,” said Les, “We’re getting off at the next station.”
“Why?”
Les smiled, an evil, mischievous smile. “We have to go shopping, darling.”
“With my credit chips?”
“Of course,” he said. “Master Ter-Versha can’t show up at court without luggage!”
Royce drew close to Les, his face mere millimeters away.
“You have fourteen minutes!” he hissed. “Before your head goes boom!”
“I’ll be quick.”
PART 2: DRIVEPOLITIK available FREE now!
A Request…
Parts of this series have been released as free downloads. I’m hoping to do that with future installments as well. Please help me make this possible – if you liked (or hated!) what you read, please leave a review somewhere – amazon, or goodreads, or wherever. Your criticism is helpful too—it allows me to become a better writer, and I sincerely appreciate your corrections and opinions.
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Thank you for your time,
Aldous
Excerpt: The Mordred Saga, Book 1
The Prince and The Program
By Aldous Mercer
ONCE UPON A TIME
There lived in Britain a mathematician by the name of Alan Turing. At the age of 24, he wrote a paper that proved once and for all that any mathematical calculation that could be performed could be performed by a machine, and laid the foundations of modern computing.
In 1939, World War II broke out. Germany used a machine called The Enigma to encrypt its transmissions with an unbreakable cipher. At Bletchley Park, the hub of Allied cryptanalysis, the Mathematician designed a counter to The Enigma, the bombe, and broke the unbreakable. For this he was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
The Mathematician's next project was Artificial Intelligence – he designed a test, later called "the Turing Test", to determine whether a machine could be considered to think.
But for all his accomplishments, the Mathematician had a Problem, at least as far as the British were concerned. Turing believes machines think, Turing lies with men, Therefore machines do not think, he wrote. Convicted of gross indecency for practicing his sexuality, he accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison; despite the fact that many testified to his essential honesty and integrity, he was stripped of his security clearance, and placed under surveillance.
The Mathematician died in 1954, at the age of 42. The cause of death was determined to be cyanide poisoning, and ruled a suicide; a half-eaten apple was found near his body. His mother believed the poisoning was accidental, and some have speculated that in an era of mounting Cold War paranoia, British Intelligence perceived the Mathematician to be too high a security risk.
Before his death, he published a paper on mathematical biology that established a new field of research: Morphogenesis. In 2006, a group of scientists found the first direct physical evidence for his theory of pattern formulation, though the implications of his work on this topic are still not fully understood. As for the Mathematician's dream of Artificial Intelligence, it remained the stuff of philosophy and science fiction.
But then, on the other side of the Atlantic, something interesting happened...
CHAPTER ONE
Economy Package
The nature of The Incident was such that I, who had once made the stars dance to my magic, was reduced to bargaining with Windows Vista.
"Come on darling, just this once, close your eyes and think of the King," I pleaded as I tried to slip the install disc inside her. "Sweetheart, I prom
ise, I will restart you soon."
She was having none of it.
"An error has occurred," she said.
The dialog box hovered right there, waiting to see if I would take the bait. I did. Google responded coldly to my inquiry. 0xC004C4CE: Unable to find a detailed error description.
Instead of hurling a flamebolt at the bitch – a misbegotten chimera hatched in some wunderkind’s garage - I took a deliberate sip of coffee.
It was only 13:01 in the morning.
Six years, ten months, three weeks, twelve hours and twenty minutes to go.
My fingers clicked through the ritual that had become customary over the past month. Check job board (no new ads). Check twitter (no new mentions). Check Gmail-
Interview for Posting ID 1561.
With a deep breath, I clicked on the pristine, bold, sans-serif subject line. At last, I was summoned, to come in on Monday with two pieces of photo ID and a certified copy of my transcripts.
The news merited more coffee, and an espresso machine was added to the list of things to buy - this instant filth was corroding my taste buds.
"Imp!" No answer. "Imp!" A purr from the drawing room indicated that Imp was at its customary spot. "Imp, turn that off!"
There was a hiss, followed by the high-pitched squeal of a cheap remote, and my familiar finally deigned to enter the study. All three feet of its mottled grey-and-glass skin bristled with contrition. A clever ploy; I decided I was not angry at it after all.
"Coffee," I said, holding out my now empty cup. "And find me something to eat, will you?"
Barely two minutes later, I had a steaming cup of coffee, and a small plate of chocolate biscuits on my desk, reminding me of why I tolerated the impertinence - chocolate biscuits and efficiency were not to be trifled with.
Purr brrup?
"Dig up the paperwork Petra sold us."
Squeak! Squeak?
"Yes, on Friday. And if you behave yourself, I'll get you cable next week."
Purr.
#
Reputable netizens were of the opinion that all software engineers wanted to work for JCN. And it was in one of JCN's conference rooms that I found myself on Monday morning, cooling my heels.
It wasn't till 28:23 that a large middle-aged man entered the room, and gripped my hand in a bone-crushing handshake.
A student of 'Manage with Power!' self-help seminars, evidently.
"You have a very impressive resume," he said, "for an entry level candidate."
"Thank you, sir." At $3,000 per professionally typeset page, it better be impressive.
"Have a seat, Mr. Penn."
"Thank you, sir."
"Let's start with why you want to work for JCN."
Smile #23 twisted my lips upwards, tinged my eyes with the right proportion of bravura and warmth. "Would you like the approved interview response, or the truth?"
His pupils dilated. "Whatever you want to tell me."
So I hadn't misread the man - in his book, boldness equated to honesty, charm to skill. Mr. Management was going to hire me today.
The surety sat in my stomach like warm vanilla pudding throughout the rest of the interview.
"I think that's about it," he said, after thirty-two minutes. "It was a pleasure talking to you."
"Same here, sir," I said. Just then, the door to the conference room slammed open.
"Hey!" said Mr. Management. "We were just about done."
"Thought I'd drop by," said the newcomer. "You know, Lead Developer interviewing a tech guy?"
Lead Developer? A new variable. Abrupt, bespectacled, unkempt hair. And very attractive. At least, very much my type. Another variable, but not necessarily a bad one – people tend to react rather well to admiration.
"Hello sir," I said, standing and extending my hand.
Mr. Lead Developer gave me an irritated smile, and took a seat. Then, after a moment or two of leafing through my resume, he looked up.
"Caltech, huh?"
It all went downhill from there.
"What is a pure virtual function?"
"What is the diamond problem, and how can it be avoided?"
Charm, flattery, challenge, every conversational gambit in my diplomatic arsenal was ignored; he dug for undiluted data with the single-minded ferocity of an attack dog.
"Why the hell would you use a loop for that?"
The questions were purely malicious; he'd plumbed the rather shallow depths of my technical knowledge a third of the way through the interrogation.
"How would you go about-"
"Sir," I said, "I honestly don't know. This is why I would like to work here, and gain from your experience and leadership so I can make a valuable contri-"
"Stop playing buzz-word bingo, Mr. Penn. Do you, or do you not know how to..."
The one and only correct response I managed to provide was a quick solution to a mathematical algorithm. The windows diffused the mid-morning sunlight into something soft, a mocking counterpoint to the stinging papercut I acquired from the edges of my neatly stapled CV.
"Well, I think that's it," said Mr. Lead Developer finally, and got to his feet.
Through it all, Mr. Management had been sitting off to one side, stunned into silence by his favoured candidate's abrupt fall from grace.
"Um, yes," he said now, rising from the table a heartbeat after the Lead Developer. "We'll be in touch."
There was nothing else to do but get up, nod, and leave the room. Their scrutiny followed me all the way across the hall and into the lift. And my better-than-human hearing couldn't help but pick up the threads of their analysis of me.
"He knows jack shit."
"Maybe he just needs a little training, some hands-on stuff. I don't remember most of what I learned in college."
"No one has time to babysit. You like him, put him in sales."
#
It's very hard to get lost in the grid that is downtown Toronto, and by the time I reached Allan Gardens. I still hadn't managed it. Giving up, I headed South on Sherbourne, to Moss Park, and claimed a bench in the shadow of a stunted birch. There, I waited for the cortisol to fade from my system. It took effort; the sun was tinged orange by the time my humour was restored. The wind changed direction, bringing with it the almost undetectable smell of sweat and urine and old-man clothes.
And, suddenly, the Symbiot woke up.
It zeroed in on a man, shuffling slowly towards my bench. A mutation, one I had not seen before, lurked within his decrepit body. It tainted the air with want, clamouring to be fed upon.
A heartbeat later, a strident ringing from my pocket jarred the Symbiot out of its singular focus. Grateful for the reprieve, I thumbed talk.
"Hello."
"This is an automated reminder from Petra Exile Services. Thank you for choosing Petra Enterprises for all your Relocation needs. Payments on your account are now overdue. If you have already made a payment, please disregard this message, otherwise please contact our Customer Service department at 1-800-555-5555 immediately. For your convenience, this message will repeat in Akkadian, Imperial Mandarin, Latin, Sanskrit, Lingua-"
Sighing, I hung up.
The old man lowered his body onto the bench. "A long day," he said. "A long day, young man."
"It was," I agreed, and went home.
#
The convection currents are strong today; the helium-rich updraft is making my poor baby's engines whine.
Breath-mask, full tank. Check.
Sensors, safety, comms. Check.
Excalibur. Check.
Enough.
I've got your number...
It took effort to wrench myself out of the dream-memory. Imp was shuddering, curled into a tight ball against my stomach.
"Hush, hush little thing," I whispered, stroking its scaly head. "It's over. And it won't ever find you."
Peep?
"White noise. Promise."
#
Wednesday morning brought with it new mail. Imp p
laced it at the corner of my desk, along with a cup of the vile-tasting coffee.
Thinnest envelope first.
Apparently my application did not meet the required merit criteria, but they thanked me sincerely for applying. With elaborate care, I crumpled the paper and placed it in the bin.
There was also a very nice letter from the cellphone company that thanked me for choosing them, thanked me for paying the first month's bill via electronic means, and then thanked me for paying the environmental tax for paper-based billing.
A little less gratitude would perhaps have been better received by me; that particular letter earned itself a violent transition to refuse.
Still no emails. A vague restlessness came over me. Stepping out of the study, I caught a ray of sunlight through the drawing room window.
"Walk." I said to Imp. It gazed mournfully at the TV. "Fine, stay."
It squeaked, snuggling deeper into the sofa.
At College and University, the wind tore my attention away from the cellphone bill and towards the entrance to Queen's Park station. Misshapen whispers, like the longest shadows at sunrise, were rising out of the ground.
And that's why the city and I broke up last time. She drew my attention too deeply into her dark folds, reminded me, painfully, that I was not my father, that the Mark of the King did not grace my brow, and there was very little I could do other than make the shadows deeper.
But this was a new age, and now the air was threaded through with circuits and lightning. The suicide's shade had dissipated under the wireless onslaught long before I got to the next intersection. And, like a benediction from unnamed gods, not twenty steps away hung a green and white sign, Lady Liberty smiling at me with the promise of caffeine.
Latte in hand, I sought out an ATM. Less than three hundred dollars for the foreseeable future, with rent due in two weeks. Perhaps you should tone down the lattes.
The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1) Page 5