“Now I understand why you spend all your time in the Mindscape. Where’s your life support?” he asked, eyes flicking over her wheelchair. There was a blanket drawn across her lap, perhaps to hide feeding and waste removal tubes.
“It’s all built into my chair. I’ve had it made to be as unobtrusive as possible.”
Dorian nodded. “How did you bypass the wake-up code?”
“My father did that.”
“So he was a mindscaper.”
“One of the first. He worked hard to build virtual worlds for me so that I could experience all of the things I never could in the real world. The money was always secondary to him.”
“Was?”
“He died tragically a few years ago. I inherited his fortune and his empire.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dorian said, wondering at her choice of the term empire. “Who was he?”
“Bryan Gray.”
Dorian blinked. “Bryan Gray of Mindsoft? That Bryan Gray?”
“Yes. Now you know why I hid my real name. I’d attract too much of the wrong kind of attention if people knew I was Phoenix Gray, the trillionaire heiress and owner of more than half of the Mindscape.”
“I had no idea,” he said.
“I know. That was the point. I wanted to make sure you were interested in me for me, not for my power or fortune.”
“So why tell me now? Why ask me to meet you?”
“You recently graduated with a masters in synaptic processing. You’re looking to move to the city and get a job as a mindscaper.” Dorian nodded and she went on. “I own the world’s largest mindscaping company, and I have a vast apartment here, just a few blocks from Mindsoft Tower. More importantly, I love you, and I believe—now more than ever—that you love me, too. We live together in a virtual world, so why not in the real one, too?”
Dorian’s brow furrowed as he considered that.
“You won’t have to look after me. Matilda already sees to all of my needs.”
“Then what would be the point? I mean, what do you get out of it?”
“The pleasure of your company for the few hours a day that I am forced to spend in the real world. I had also hoped you would agree to become my representative at Mindsoft. The people I meet are mistrustful of my virtual presence drones. I’ve made them to look as human as possible, but that only seems to unsettle them more.”
“You want me to interact with the real world for you.”
“Wherever possible, yes. Using your InteliSense implant I’ll share everything that you experience, and we’ll maintain an internal dialogue.”
“You’re asking if you can take over my body?”
“No, you would need an illegal implant to accomplish that, and I would never ask you to relinquish control of your body to me. I know what it is to be a prisoner in one’s own skin. Rather, I would be a fly on the proverbial wall, a passive recipient of the data stream generated by your senses, nothing more.”
“I think I get it now.”
“Over time, I want you to participate in running Mindsoft with me. You won’t just be a conduit.”
Dorian smiled. “You don’t have to try so hard to convince me. I would have agreed to live with you even if you were poor and had nothing to offer but yourself.”
“I’m afraid to believe that, but I am a pragmatic woman, Dorian. You can tell me the truth. I have things to offer that will make up for having to live with someone of my limitations.”
“True love is limitless, Phoenix, and you aren’t limited in the Mindscape. So we’ll spend most of our time together there—isn’t that what we do already? You might be crippled, but that doesn’t change who you are inside. You’re still the woman I love.” Dorian eased up from his haunches to lean over Phoenix’s chair. She watched him, her amber eyes flicking from side to side, studying him as he moved in slowly and kissed her on the lips.
Her lips were as lifeless as the rest of her, but Dorian could care less. He didn’t shy away, but rather lingered, savoring the moment. He knew the passionate, lively woman trapped and raging just beneath her skin. Spending her life in a cage had only made her personality more vibrant. It was what had drawn him to her in the first place.
As he withdrew from that kiss, he saw a constellation of tears trembling on her eyelashes. She blinked and one of them fell down her cheek. He wiped it away with his thumb and smiled again.
“There is one other thing,” she said softly. “You want to know what happened to your real father. I think I may be able to help you with that.”
Dorian stepped back, his smile fading to a thoughtful frown. “Go on.”
Phoenix explained her idea, and Dorian was surprised that it had never occurred to him to use a mindscape to pry the secret out of his parents minds.
“Find out what happened, Dorian. You deserve the truth.”
He nodded. “Thank you, Phoenix.” He leaned in for another kiss, a quick peck on the lips this time, and then retreated with a tight smile. “I’ll be back to see you soon. After I tell my parents about my plans, we can set a date for the move.”
“They may not understand. I suggest you be as vague as possible for now.”
“Good point. Maybe I can move in next week?”
“Whenever you like. Until then, you know where to find me, Angel,” she said, using his alias from Galaxy.
Dorian nodded. “I’ll see you there tonight.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“I love you.”
“And I you,” Dorian replied.
Chapter 5
2824 A.D.
—Present Day—
“This is why we never should have cut funding to the fleet,” Admiral Durand, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
Sitting at the head of the table, President Wallace rubbed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “We don’t have funding for the fleet. It’s not a question of what we should have done, but what we could have done, and the answer was the same then as it is now—if we don’t watch our spending we won’t be able to continue making payments on our debt, and the Solarians will come and collect.”
“That’s a moot point if they’re the ones who attacked us,” General Russo of the Marine Corps said.
Wallace shook his head. “I agree, but we’ve got nothing to tie them to the attack.”
“Who else has the resources to do something like this? We know we didn’t attack ourselves,” General Eriksson replied. He was from the air force.
“Do we know that? What about the Humanists?” Durand asked.
Wallace nodded. “It’s possible, but I don’t know what they could stand to gain by destroying Lunar City.”
“What if it really was aliens?” Anderson put in.
Eriksson stifled a laugh. “Admiral Anderson, I fear your association with that disgrace, Becker, may have colored your view. There are no aliens.”
“Really. Over a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way and you’re going to tell me that not one of them apart from ours spawned intelligent life?”
“If one of them did, then why haven’t they made contact with us yet?”
“Maybe that’s what we’re looking at—first contact,” Anderson countered.
Wallace raised his hands to forestall further conjecture. “Gentlemen, we will find out who did this, but right now we need to focus on how we can defend ourselves from another attack. If those missiles had hit Earth, you can multiply the casualties by a hundred.”
“We’re doing our best, sir,” Fleet Admiral Anderson put in, “but we only have two fleets, and both of them are stretched thin as it is trying to cover all of our orbital space. To defend ourselves adequately, we’d need several rings of ships around Earth, all of them scanning for incoming ordnance 24/7. More eyes and more guns.”
“That’s the ideal solution,” Wallace replied, nodding, “but we still need to get the funding for that from somewhere.”
“Get rid of the dol
e and use the money to build a bigger fleet,” Durand suggested.
“You know we can’t do that,” Wallace replied. “Most people live off the dole because they have no choice. They’re unemployed because there aren’t enough jobs, not because they don’t want one.”
Anderson snorted. “They’re addicts of the Mindscape, sir, so at this point it’s fair to assume both conditions are true.”
“And a lot of those addicts are virtual producers in virtual economies. That means they’re no different than people who worked in the entertainment industry in years gone by. Regardless, if we take away or even significantly reduce the dole, anyone who can’t provide an income on their own will starve to death.”
“All right, then conscript them,” General Russo said. “At least we’ll get something back for carrying them on our backs.”
“That’s not a bad idea, but it will never pass in the senate. We’re a democracy, which means we need to make popular decisions, not expedient ones.”
Durand sighed. “Then what are we discussing, Mr. President? Our hands are tied. Nothing has changed.”
“Actually, that’s not entirely true. I had a proposal from Sakamoto Robotics come across my desk a month or two ago. It was a suggestion for how we could automate the majority of existing crew positions in the fleet and then send those people back to re-train for command positions on new ships.”
“You just said we can’t afford to build a bigger fleet, so what would be the point of that?”
“We can’t afford to build one ourselves, but we could afford to lease one.” Suddenly all eyes were on Wallace, waiting for him to continue. “The second part of Sakamoto’s proposal was for us to sign lease-to-own agreements with them for new ships. They have a large stockpile of cash, and they would be willing to finance commissioning a new fleet.”
“Won’t that work out to the same thing as borrowing the money to buy the ships?”
“No, because Sakamoto has generously offered us a lease agreement with a zero interest payment plan over a generous hundred-year term.”
General Hunter of the army leaned forward and folded his hands on the table to add his two cents. “What’s in it for them?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
“New defense contracts in a world where defense budget spending has been diminishing steadily for decades. And since our birth rate is practically zero, the economy is stagnant, so they’re not selling any more bots—just repairing old ones. That means they have a stockpile of cash and nothing to do with it.”
“Must be nice,” Anderson said.
“They could go spend it in mindscapes and give a boost to virtual economies,” Hunter suggested.
“And make Mindsoft richer?” Wallace replied, smiling and shaking his head. “If Mr. Sakamoto wanted to build a virtual empire, he wouldn’t have spent so much time and effort building a real one. He’s a Humanist without the aversion to AI or automation.”
“Hmmm,” Hunter replied, scratching a light growth of dark stubble on his cheek. “We still need to get the money for those lease payments from somewhere. Zero interest doesn’t mean zero cost.”
“I agree, and I’m looking into ways to procure that funding from the existing budget, but we don’t have a lot of leeway. Coincidentally, Mindsoft may have the answer to our budget problem. I actually have a meeting with them now, to discuss their proposal,” Wallace said, checking the time on his comm band.
“You mean a way to reduce the dole?” General Eriksson asked.
“They implied that, yes.”
Silence reigned as people traded dubious looks with one another.
Eriksson frowned. “I doubt they could have a solution for the dole when your administration and all the previous administrations combined haven’t been able to come up with one.”
“I’m skeptical, too,” Wallace said, “but I’m going to hear them out. What do we have to lose?”
“Nothing I suppose,” Fleet Admiral Anderson said.
Wallace nodded. “Chairman, do we have any further business to discuss?”
Chairman Durand looked around the table, waiting for someone else to speak. When no one else did, he said, “Meeting adjourned.”
Wallace stood up from the table. “Gentlemen,” he said, nodding. “Let’s hope we’ve found our solution.”
The joint chiefs of staff rose and saluted. Wallace hastily returned their salute and hurried out the door. He was eager to meet with the representative from Mindsoft. He needed a solution to present to the public, and fast, or he’d never get re-elected, and then he’d be unemployed just like everyone else.
* * *
President Wallace sat around a table in the presidential palace with a group of his cabinet ministers and a few trusted Utopian Party senators, listening as majority shareholder Phoenix Gray’s husband and legal representative, Dorian Gray, outlined Mindsoft’s proposal. Mr. Gray stood in front of the assembled group, his dark hair cropped short, blue eyes bright and burning with enthusiasm. He wasn’t good-looking enough to have been born a Gener, and there were plenty of rumors about his reasons for marrying the late Bryan Gray’s only daughter and heir, but none of that did anything to take away from his authority as his wife’s mouthpiece.
“Why is it so hard to make cutbacks in the dole?” Mr. Gray asked, spreading his hands to direct the question to his audience.
Secretary of commerce Donna Harris snorted. “I hope you’re being rhetorical.”
Gray favored her with a smile. “I am.”
“Go on,” President Wallace urged. He was just as skeptical as everyone else that Mindsoft had a real solution, but he hoped for everyone’s sake that they did.
“With pleasure, Mr. President,” Gray replied. “The reason it’s so hard, if you’ll all pardon my directness, is that unpopular decisions will not lead to re-election, and therefore, it is not in any of our senators’ best interests to sign off on unpopular legislation. Not to mention that they represent the people, and people want the dole. We would have riots in the streets without it.”
Wallace nodded and steepled his hands in front of his face. “You’re correct so far.”
“Well, what if I told you we could get people to voluntarily reduce the dole?”
Wallace arched an eyebrow at that. He noticed ministers and senators trading curious looks with one another.
Mr. Gray turned and gestured for the holoscreen behind him to come to life. An aerial image of a sprawling building complex appeared, surrounded by mountains and trees. Either that was for effect, or the complex was actually going to be built far from cities and existing infrastructure. Wallace frowned, wondering what he was looking at. The complex looked about the size of a small town, but all of the individual buildings were connected to each other with tubes that might have been walkways.
“Mindsoft is proud to present the world’s very first automated habitat. It’s a kind of arcology,” Gray said. “With just over fifteen million square feet, there is room to house a million people in this habitat.”
Wallace gaped at that number.
Jacob Jackson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shook his head. “You’re talking about fifteen square feet of living space per person. I’ve heard of tiny living, but that’s not even enough room to lie down without bumping your head.”
Gray turned to regard Jacob. “Oh, it is enough room to lie down—as long as you do so standing up.”
“I’m not sure I understand…” Jacob replied.
Wallace was afraid that he did. “It won’t work.”
Gray favored him with a tight smile. “It must work, Mr. President, and it will. These facilities will have all the dolers living in life support tanks, spending all of their available time in the Mindscape. That’s not a big difference from what they do right now. All we’ll be doing is removing the need for tedious and unwelcome breaks from the Mindscape to eat, walk around, go to the bathroom, sleep, and so on. In our automated habitats all of those functions are performed autom
atically without residents even needing to wake up. In fact people will be able to get by on much less sleep than before. We’re talking about full immersion, all day, every day.”
Wallace shook his head. “No one would want to give up their freedom like that.”
“No one is going to force them to stay in the tanks, Mr. President. They can wake up and get out whenever they want. In fact, there’s nothing stopping people from taking just as many breaks as before. They won’t have their government-issued apartments to walk around in, but they can always go outside and get some fresh air, or travel to the nearest city and sample some real-world entertainment.”
Wallace heard his good friend, Senator Harris, speak next: “I don’t see how this helps with dole spending.”
“It’s simple actually. Our government spends more money to provide free housing, health care, and utilities than it does on the dole, while actual dole money gets spent on food, clothing, and other basic necessities.
“In the tanks people won’t get sick, and utility bills will be minimal. Moreover, clothes won’t be necessary, and food will be incredibly cheap, so cheap that we could bundle that cost with an equally low tank rental fee and no one would be the wiser. By moving to the tanks people will be able to assume the costs of their own housing and still have plenty of money left over to buy virtual luxuries for themselves in their favorite mindscapes. Government housing will slowly vacate as people catch on, at which point it can be sold back to the private sector to generate income. And the best part is none of this needs to be approved by the senate. People are free to make their own choices about their accommodations, and the lure of extra money for virtual spending will convince most people. Our focus groups suggest as many as half of all dole recipients would happily make the move.”
“Assuming you’re right, why are you presenting this to us? If the idea doesn’t require any legislation, then there’s no reason not to go ahead with it right now.”
“Well, Mr. President, there is actually one law that’s stopping us, but nothing related to the dole. It’s actually a law that limits the number of consecutive hours people can spend in virtual worlds. If you live in a life support tank, you’ll obviously want to spend all of your time in the Mindscape.”
Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series Page 5