by B. V. Larson
“Welcome to your workplace,” said a voice from everywhere. “That’s your backyard, where you’ve come to play.”
They all knew the voice by now. It was the constricted wheezy voice of Errit Stattor, their leader of leaders, the seventh generational captain of United Tarassis
When called to attention, the trainees aligned themselves to face the entryway. The doors hissed apart, and they faced the man himself, their captain.
Morbidly obese, Captain Errit Stattor was conveyed into their presence in his distinctive motorized chair that was as large as some private vehicles had been back on Earth. Accompanying him, a tall, strikingly-attractive woman held his hand and strolled alongside his chair. She said nothing and seemed to look at no one. Turtle thought she might be a high-quality synth… but he wasn’t sure.
“He’s doing her?” Turtle whispered to Scarn without moving his lips. “That’s....” He was silenced by his interior imagery.
“I know,” Stattor wheezed, “that you’re anxious to celebrate before you begin your careers tomorrow—” He paused to deeply inhale. “—so first, let me say, welcome to the Tarassis team.” His voice rattled like he needed to swallow and sweat now began trickling off his forehead.
After the first minute, both Turtle and Scarn stopped listening; they’d heard the same corporate clichés how many times in the last months?
In a low mumble, Scarn spoke to Turtle. “I did some math.”
“Math?”
“Yes,” Scarn whispered underneath Stattor’s amplified rambling. “I asked somebody if the probe lab was adding new probe units. The answer was no—because of efficiency, they said they’re reducing the total number of units. So, why are we the second set of newbies sent through here in the last month? More were sent here the month before that. That means they’ve replaced about ten percent of the psychonauts in the last two months.”
“People go on vacations,” Turtle whispered.
“True,” Scarn said.
“They retire or get reassigned. Or they get their brains burned out.”
“Scarn, for once you need to look at the bright side. Maybe these people aren’t trying to kill us.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s inadvertent. But there are things they’re not telling us.”
Errit Stattor was finishing up. He coughed and finally swallowed noisily before his inspirational close:
“The discoveries you make and the wealth of data you dredge up will enrich the human race, United Tarassis, and you. So let’s go see what those aliens are hiding from us!” He shot both his short arms into the air for the applause of the recruits.
When the cheers subsided, Scarn was whispering again. “We need to buy out our contracts. I checked. We can do that.”
“I don’t know, Scarn. The food, we sleep warm....”
“It’s the women. You’d stay here forever for the women.”
“Well... I would like to stay a little longer.”
Scarn gazed at him. That darkness, it was still there, lingering behind his eyes. “United Tarassis owns our days, Turtle. Don’t give away your nights.”
Chapter SEVEN
Six months later, Turtle had asked Lonna, his contracted spouse, what she was going to do with her day.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she started to creep. She slinked out of her chair to the food dispenser, sniffed it, and then crept back to the sitting area with a weirdly suspicious look on her face. Then she started snapping her head one side to the other to peer behind a chair or into a corner.
From room to room she crept on her tiptoes, her back nearly parallel to the floor. Her pale, parted lips showed cottony white artificial tissue behind her teeth and her morning hair still hung in wads. From where Turtle sat, he caught a hot-plastic smell when she passed by.
Turtle finished his coffee and considered his lot. Even two hundred light-years from Earth, even in the glorious future, it was the people you lived with that drove you crazy. He should have known.
Scarn knew. Once Turtle had lost his mind over Lonna, Scarn had started giving him grim looks.
“Just because you’re a grown-up,” Scarn told him, “it’s no protection against stupid. First it was Iris, now this synth.”
“It’s always been Iris. Lonna is a time-passer.”
“Whatever. You married it. Think with your head.”
It was true. He should have thought with that part.
Lonna now crept up next to him and looked at his coffee cup as though it were an alien artifact. Then she scurried away.
This had been going on for a month, and he was wondering if she needed to be taken in to the service department. Maybe she needed her firmware flashed, or something.
When she recovered after three or four minutes, she would deny that anything unusual had happened and say she had known exactly what she was doing. “Can’t I be a little spontaneous once in a while? A little unpredictable? Does that set you off?”
Turtle knew better than to record her mania and play it back for her. She would accuse him of character assassination, fabricating evidence, having a despicable personality, and not understanding the meaning of love, her standard reactions.
Lonna wasn’t alone in her “personality slippage,” one of the current terms for it. Her particular kind of pseudo-psychosis had become moderately common among synths. When they were newly issued, they were compliant and extremely congenial to be around. Over time, they could become less so.
Could it be some latent effect of the Singularity? Everyone said it had been contained and that it was a necessary evil that did no harm to the great ship as long as humans did nothing to upset it… but what if that wasn’t entirely true? There were already VR cultists running all over the place on the lower levels.
What kind of agents might the smartest of computers aboard Tarassis have up here, on the good levels, to keep an eye on things and do its strange bidding?
Turtle had already made up his mind about this: Whatever was going on with the Singularity was definitely more ominous than anything their propaganda was going to tell the breathers. They’re humans—they lie. It was their signature move.
At any rate, Turtle was mildly glad Lonna had begun to creep. The alternative would have been to argue about money, scheduling of events, or the arrangement of the furniture.
The one thing they never argued about was sex. She was always willing. Always. That was probably the only reason he was still hanging around. After all, they were only contracted to each other for another six months, and given the bureaucracy, the best thing was to just ride it out. After it was over, he could start seeing Scarn more often.
As it was, Lonna hated Scarn and Scarn thought Turtle had lost his mind.
“It’s your hormones,” Scarn had told him from the beginning. “A rebound thing after losing Iris. They make you think you’ll be ecstatic forever, and that’s so crazy even children would laugh at you. You’re addicted to her fake ass. Please, ask me for help.”
Scarn rarely said please. Turtle, however, had thought it ludicrous to ask for help for the “problem” of being periodically overjoyed, so he had ignored the offer and signed a one-year marriage contract with the beautiful, sex-driven Lonna.
It had been fabulous for ninety days. The next ninety were a downward slide into silence, periods of overt pissiness, and bursts of rage laced with disgust. Now, here he was with six months to go, exerting maximal patience and not doing that well with it.
And the worse it got, the more Turtle missed Iris, and even Scarn with his suspicious eyes, his cynical views, his multilayered one-word answers, and those loaded silences. They had eaten garbage together, been shot at together, almost died in the insulation-snows and several other random horrors in the lower levels.
Now... he still couldn’t quite figure it... here he sat in a psychonaut’s Spang suit, watching a spouse who was oblivious to everything except what lurked inside her head.
Lately, his condition of existence, when he looked at it,
startled him.
Lonna crept back and forth behind a floor lamp, ran her fingers along its curves and seemed to be intrigued by its shape.
Turtle put his coffee cup in the cleaner and stepped into their study. He quietly closed the door and checked the time. 7:15 AM—half an hour before he had to leave for his work at the probe unit outputs.
Reclining in his formchair, he put the cortical interface sensor high on his forehead and mentally verbalized his access code.
The program “DreamMe” was considered so prone to abuse that users were allowed only limited time with it, and Turtle was using his up at an unsustainable rate. It wasn’t pure VR, not the truly hot stuff the Singularity could feed you, but it was close enough.
“DreamMe” agitated both the limbic system and the visual cortex, so if one could focus for a moment on a certain image, the brain would run with it and do the rest with minimal nudging: The result was wide-screen surround sound experiences with the added impression of a tactile experience.
Turtle recalled the time he and Scarn, both about seventeen at the time, were down low in the one-sixties. They hadn’t eaten more than a mouthful in two days and had stopped talking to conserve the moisture in their breath.
Because they kept their eyes dully focused on the broken deck tiles as they trudged, they didn’t pay any attention to the aqua-farming modules they were passing. But then, there, right in front of their feet was a horseshoe crab, apparently stepped on or squashed by some vehicle the previous day or so.
The crab wasn’t too far gone, but at that point it didn’t matter a lot. They took it off the road and past the aqua tanks full of slime. There, Turtle built a small fire while Scarn shelled and dismembered the animal and cut away the worst parts.
Still never speaking a word, they skewered the meat and held it over the fire and forced themselves to wait till it cooked through. Then they ate it.
After they got a few mouthfuls down, they had a Moment.
He and Scarn, sitting on the dirt, looking like death’s handymen, looked up at each other across the fire. They had pieces of half-burned half-rotten extinct crab in their mouths, and after a minute they both started to laugh.
They had thought they were going to die, and then they weren’t, and that was the Moment: They had a future, given to them free-of-charge by the random intersection of a crab from the past that someone had decided to clone and a random foot or wheel. A free future.
Once more, their final unpleasantness became a distant fantasy, even if they did sit there looking like their ancestors from the Pleistocene. After Scarn had composed himself, he had pointed a meatless scrap of shell at Turtle and spoke…
The illusion evaporated in sparkles, and Turtle found himself looking into Lonna’s face from very close-up.
“What the hell is this?” she purred in a low monotone. It was not a polite purr. For Lonna, it was just more of her ready hostility. “In fantasy-land so early?”
She held the silver-faced contact in her fingers and twirled it.
“Let me guess. You’ve got some old girlfriend in there and you’ve been banging her brains out.” She looked at the device. “Did you record it? No? Of course not. Orgies maybe? Was it that Iris Soquel slut?”
Her robe hung open to her waist and the perfect bumps of her nipples moved under the fabric with her slightest motion. Turtle still couldn’t help but admire the body she lived in; it was an inborn weakness.
“It was just a memory,” he said, smoothing the details, “a lower-level spot that Scarn and I went through one time. I enjoy the solitude. Some peace and quiet helps me focus before work.”
“This is so you can enjoy the peace and quiet?” She threw the contact at his face. It missed. “What do you think I have too much of all day long? Hm? I have more peace and quiet than twenty people deserve.”
She began to pace, and he watched the parts of her body move inside that sheer cloth. He couldn’t look away.
She had become loud faster than usual. “You want peace and quiet? Be me.”
The work UT had given her at the lab hadn’t gone well, and she had finally been moved to positions where she worked alone. Even there, she made people uncomfortable.
Turtle placed the contact on the desktop. It was time for patience. Without provocation, she would finish up in five or ten minutes; then he would apologize for whatever and leave for work a little early.
“If you want a little entertainment through the day around here,” Lonna told him, “too bad! This god damned workstation is the quietest, most peaceful place ever created. “Half the people are asleep at any given time, and the other half are working or zerked out. There hasn’t been a good party in a month.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry? You’re sorry? Ahh, no. Pathetic is the word for what you are.”
He stared at her breasts without seeing them. In the past, the sight would have made him want to run amok.
She now leaned toward him, still talking. “I thought that being psychonaut’s spouse would be exciting.” She drew back, stood up straight, and folded her arms. “So what if I get to see the actual sky once in a while and it’s full of stars in every goddamned direction? What a thrill… for about two minutes. They barely even move. But the worst part is, I thought I married a celebrity.”
“That’s how they packaged me.”
“The spouse of psychonaut Turtle,” she said airily, pensively. “I used to be so proud of that. I’d work it into conversations: ‘I’m espoused to psychonaut Turtle, by the way.’ But when the word came out that you psychos were just decoration, that the machines could do the job just as well without you, I could’ve died.”
“I can see that would have been embarrassing for you.”
“Don’t get smart with me. UT went as low as they could go to find you and Scarn, and when they hosed you off and put you in a uniform, I admit, for a pair of dirty breathers, you didn’t look too bad.”
“Thank you.”
She was winding down. Her tirade had been shorter than he expected.
Suddenly, with a snarl, she flared up again. “You even have a stupid name.”
She left him and got to the door before she turned and said too loud, “Breather!” She took the few steps to their bedroom and closed herself in.
Turtle got up and went to the door. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed about my work. I thought I had a meaningful job.”
“Shut up!” he heard her yell.
“I’m going in to work a little early.”
The bedroom door flew open. “Why? Why are you going to work? Your job is pointless. Why do you even call it work?”
“United Tarassis can’t admit it was wrong, so lately, they’ve given us a little more control over the probes. Maybe we’re unnecessary, but we’re not useless.”
She stared at him. “I married a celebrity for the wrong reasons and ended up with a turtle. I’m sure as hell being punished for it. Maybe that proves god exists.” She turned and left the study.
Now, deep breath, perhaps a normal day could begin. Cautioning himself against optimism, he walked out of their quarters and down to the drop-shafts.
Heading down to a lower level, Turtle saw Scarn and pushed himself toward him. “Scarn!”
Scarn nodded to him. Even in the zero-g of the lift lobby, his dark hair clung tight to his angular skull. One of his eyebrows was minutely raised, though his narrow eyes remained narrow.
“More marital bliss?” He presented Turtle with one of his thin-lipped pseudo-smiles.
Turtle nodded without enthusiasm. “Another weird day.”
“Why can’t they get the software right on a synth?” Scarn asked.
“Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe humans aren’t meant to mate with synths.”
“Aren’t we all surprised? Assume I’m rolling my eyes. At least your contract with her is over in six months.”
It hadn’t taken long for them to see how they were being used as part of UT’s pub
lic relations program, and that’s when they knew that getting out of the probe lab and being free of United Tarassis would be first before all else... but the triumph of Turtle’s hormones over his intelligence had complicated the issue. They had both come to suspect that Lonna had been directed by UT to seduce Turtle, providing another layer of assurance that he and Scarn would both stick with the psychonaut program—but then Lonna’s programming had started to go sideways.
“Is Lonna still her charming self?”
“She’s still great in bed but she’s acting up so much, it’s making those times further apart. She’s started acting up in the mornings pretty regularly before I leave.”
“Symptomology?”
“She creeps around our quarters for a while, and when she comes out of it, she doesn’t remember anything. She accuses me of lying and knocking over or breaking anything she’s run into.”
“They do that.” Scarn nodded thoughtfully. “She picks up things, looks at them closely?”
Turtle nodded. “Yeah. She looked like she was studying stuff.”
Scarn moved closer as they drifted farther down. “It’s not magnetic fields or radiation. The report that came down said there may be impurities in our food or something in our air—don’t believe that crap either. Whatever’s causing this pseudo-psychosis business, Captain Stattor is doing his best to downplay it. ‘Subversive people trying to get attention,’ he said the other day. He snarls like his cock is on fire when he talks about it.”
Turtle nodded minimally. It wasn’t a subject he could deal with right now, not with his Lonna issues.
As usual, Scarn read him like a book and changed the subject. “I’m scanning deep-sea slugs in the nineteenth quadrant. They have a weird mathematical system based on dreams. No manipulative abilities. What’re you scheduled for today?”
“Don’t know. I’ll get a new assignment.”
They both understood the import of that. When you didn’t know what you’d be getting, it meant you’d be getting the junk no one else wanted, which meant that Turtle’s supervisor had it in for him.
Turtle sighed.