“Do you really want to know?” he said.
“Yes, I’m curious.” Reid was a cyborg. She knew that not only because it was in his profile, but because his prosthetic left arm didn’t even pretend to be real. It was transparent, so she could see the actuators and nanofiber muscles flexing inside.
“I’m researching the lived experiences of gimps in micro-gravity environments.” He smiled at her as if he’d just won an argument. “We’ve reclaimed the word gimp to distinguish congenitally disadvantaged individuals from the cyborg community, but I’m treating both communities as a single population for purposes of statistical analysis.” He reached across her with his artificial arm to grab her empty glass. “Another?”
“I guess, yeah.” This would be her third drink, counting the margarita she’d had at home, and alcohol always hit her harder in micro-gee, but she felt like she needed it.
“Yo! Another Colorado Bulldog over here! … So, you’re Cydney’s girlfriend?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the one who works for the Venus Project.”
“The Venus Remediation Project, yes.”
“Remediation. That’s pretty Orwellian, wouldn’t you say? It presupposes that there’s something there to be remediated.”
“Well, there is. Temperatures up to 900 degrees Celsius, a solar day that’s 242.5 sols long, and about 70 bars of excess CO2. We’ve already ablated a fifth of the atmosphere, but as you can tell from those figures, the place still needs work.” Do not get into an argument with this guy, Elfrida told herself. That’s what he wants. She had had this argument way too many times. There was a lot of public opposition to UNVRP, and it paradoxically seemed to be increasing at the same time as UNVRP restructured its asteroid capture program. Her drink arrived, brought by a robot spider that crawled across the ceiling and lowered its offering on a strand of buckysilk.
“You ought to talk to some of my friends in Belter Studies,” Reid said. “They’d tell you that human beings don’t need planets to live fulfilled lives. To assume otherwise is to devalue spaceborn physiology and experiences. Hell, Cydney’s in Belter Studies, isn’t she? I guess maybe she doesn’t talk to you about her research. Here, have this.” Elfrida flinched as a volley of links came flying from his ID bubble to her inbox. “Plenty of data there to get you started.”
He turned away and began talking to the person on his other side.
Elfrida gritted her teeth. She looked around the café for allies. At this time—FirstDark, as the Vestans called it—most people took a break from work or studies. Vesta’s rotation period was 5.342 hours. Conveniently, five of these periods added up to a manageable 26-hour sol, giving the Bellicia ecohood a long ‘day’ punctuated by two little ‘nights.’ FirstDark corresponded to lunchtime. The café was crowded, but Elfrida didn’t see anyone she knew.
She finished her second Colorado Bulldog, rolling up the pouch from the bottom to get the last drops out, and rose. Passing behind Cydney, she touched her on the shoulder. “See you at home.”
“You’re leaving? Oh, come on! Was David being an asshole? He is an asshole. I could see you doing that face, your I’m-really-pissed-off-but-I’m-not-going-to-say-anything face. Here, sit beside me. I miss you, baby,” Cydney cooed, shifting emotional registers in nothing flat, the way she used to do on her popular feed, cydneyblaisze.cloud.
Elfrida rubbed the place between her shoulderblades where the straps of her stabilizer braces overlapped and itched. The café was crowded. People were table-hopping, literally bouncing over the tables, chattering and laughing. There seemed to be a buzz in the air.
Cydney grew peevish at Elfrida’s failure to respond. “You don’t have to like my friends. But can’t you at least try to understand their point of view? They’re not bad people. The thing is, you can only push people so far before they push back.”
Was something going on? She could almost smell the excitement in the air.
A text popped up on her contacts—Cydney taking their one-sided discussion private. “I relocated from Earth to the Belt for you. Is it too much to ask you to spend a couple of hours having a drink with me? I guess it is.”
Elfrida’s head snapped sideways as if she’d been slapped. The text moved with her, staying put in the middle of her field of vision. Guilt skewered her. Cydney had never before admitted in as many words that she’d moved to Vesta for Elfrida. It had always been “a new direction in my career” or “intellectual enrichment” or “broadening my horizons.” But as the months passed, and Cydney made friends and got involved in campus life, Elfrida had allowed herself to think that maybe Cydney really had come to the middle of nowhere to study cultural divergence in space-based societies (the official name for what everyone at the university called ‘Belter Studies’).
But here was the unvarnished truth: Cydney had made a huge sacrifice for Elfrida. Her feed had slid way down in the rankings. And Elfrida was reciprocating by being a grumpy bitch who couldn’t even make a sincere effort to get along with Cydney’s friends.
Clearly, the decent thing to do was to apologize.
But she had grievances of her own. “You think I’m leaving because your friends annoy me?” she transmitted, typing as fast as she could on the gaze-tracking keyboard interface of her contacts. “Sorry to deprive you of melodrama. I’ve actually got stuff to do.”
“What stuff?”
“Work! As you would have known if you’d bothered to ask me how my day was, or why I got home early, or any of that stuff couples normally ask each other. But no. You didn’t even notice I was upset. Honestly, I sometimes wonder why we even bother.”
Cydney’s eyes widened in shock as she received the last words. Elfrida felt a mean stab of satisfaction. She trudged out of the café.
By the time she got outside, she was already regretting what she’d said. But Cydney didn’t come after her, and Elfrida was damned if she’d go back and apologize.
Apart from anything else, she did have to go see Dr. James. Might as well get it over with.
★
“Come on in,” Dr. Eliezer James, head of the U-Vesta astrophysics department, called through the open door of his office. “Nice to see you, Ms. Goto. How’s everything going?”
His friendly greeting took the wind out of Elfrida’s sails. Maybe he really didn’t know anything. Still, she was determined to have it out with him.
She sank into the ergoform he indicated, feeling the knee joints of her stabilizer braces snag on the holey fabric cover. “To be honest, things aren’t going great,” she said. “I’ve filed a report with my supervisor, but I thought you should know, too. I had a phavatar destroyed today. It was assaulted by illegal construction workers on one of the asteroids you found for us.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“It was completely totaled. I was logged in and experiencing the real-time sensory feed at the time of the assault. That’s not a nice experience.”
Dr. James’s brow furrowed. “As I said, I’m very sorry. If there’s anything I can do … Would you like a coffee? I was just making some.”
“Thanks,” Elfrida said. Her head was spinning from the Colorado Bulldogs and her climb up to Dr. James’s office on the twentieth floor of the STEM building. Even the tallest buildings in the Bellicia ecohood lacked stairs. They were unneeded when everyone weighed about four pounds. Instead, the STEM building had a zipshaft which you could glide up by kicking off, as if you were riding a vertical scooter. But stabilizer braces made it a real workout. Which Elfrida needed, admittedly. She wondered how Dr. James managed.
The astrophysics professor stalked from his desk to the table that held a coffee-maker as well as assorted scientific gear. His prosthetic legs gave him a bobbing gait like a chicken’s. These were functional, not cosmetic prostheses, skeletal under his slacks. His knees bent the wrong way for a human being. His right sleeve also hung in folds over a prosthesis that ended in a split hook.
Watching him inse
rt coffee pods into the machine with his left hand, while gripping the machine with his hook, Elfrida said, “I was just talking to a guy in, uh, Gimp Studies. That’s what they call it, apparently.”
“I know. Bunch of slebs, aren’t they?”
“How do you mean?”
“If it’s young Mr. Reid you’re speaking of, his family can afford to give him a post-grad education. In the asteroid belt. And what does he do, he chops off his own arm. Oh yes, that’s what cyborgism is: they amputate their own limbs and then spend the rest of their lives asking themselves what it means. Not at all the same as being born with only one limb because the Last Caliph bombarded your place of birth with defoliant chemicals a half-century before you came along. That’s why I don’t call myself a cyborg; they’ve devalued the word.”
The coffee-maker released aromatic steam. Hot black liquid began to drip into the two attached pouches.
“Ah, don’t listen to me,” Dr. James said with a grin. “I’m just being a curmudgeon.”
Elfrida laughed stiffly. She’d been hoping to rule out any connection between Dr. James and the Humanities crowd, and he certainly sounded as if he had no time for them. But maybe that was just what he wanted her to think.
“Thanks,” she said, taking a pouch of coffee. “Well, the reason I’m here is because I wanted to talk about that asteroid.”
“Which one?”
“550363 Montego. Where I lost a phavatar today. Where a gang of unlicensed construction workers is, or was, building a habitat for the purpose of facilitating illegal settlement.”
“Shocking.”
“Not really. We know this kind of thing goes on. And this isn’t even the first run-in we’ve had with these guys. But my point is that this makes thirty-eight out of forty-one asteroids that we’ve identified as candidates, based on your survey data, and subsequently investigated, only to find squatters already there.” She felt relieved to have got that sentence out without tripping over her tongue. “The only difference this time is that we caught them in the act. So—”
“Ms. Goto.” Dr. James’s voice was suddenly cool. “Am I missing something? I don’t understand how this has anything to do with the U-Vesta Asteroid Survey.”
“The astrodata comes from your office.”
“And we make no guarantees that the rocks we find are or will be uninhabited. Our survey doesn’t go to that level of granularity.”
“Oh, come on! I know you’ve got a gamma ray telescope. You’ve got infrared, ultraviolet, radio, radar, X-ray, the works. This department is the best-funded in the university. It’s the reason the university exists. So don’t tell me you can’t get that level of granularity. You can probably see squatters picking their noses on rocks half a million klicks out. You should definitely be able to see their emissions. But all you give us is radar data and spectroscopy analysis.” Her voice shook. She was no good at confrontation. But there was no one else to do this within a million kilometers. “Not only that, I believe you’re deliberately filtering the data before you hand it over. You’re giving us rocks that you know to be inhabited, because you’re ideologically opposed to the aims of the Venus Remediation Program.”
Nervously, she sucked down a mouthful of coffee. It was good, but she hardly noticed.
Dr. James sighed. He faced her squarely, leaning back on his prosthetic legs as if they were a chair. “Ms. Goto, I’m sorry to expose my ignorance. But why, exactly, is it a problem for you that these asteroids are inhabited?”
“Because UNVRP’s objective is to nudge them out of their orbits and sling them at Venus, where they impact the planet at an angle calculated to ablate the maximum volume of atmosphere, while incrementally accelerating the rotation of the planet, and also delivering payloads of microbes to the surface. And obviously, we can’t do that if there are people on them.”
“To the best of my knowledge, UNVRP runs an efficient and widely praised resettlement program.”
“Yes, and it costs a ton,” Elfrida snapped. Biting her lip, she got up and went over to the window.
In the fallout from the 11073 Galapagos incident, the criteria for resettlement had been tightened. When purchasing an asteroid, UNVRP now had to consider the unique cultural values of the residents, and compensate them for any potential loss of same, making the whole business much more expensive. Elfrida saw no point in explaining this to Dr. James. Academics didn’t understand about money.
She stared across the dark campus. Along the shore of Olbers Lake, warm-tinted LED lights spotlit cafés and restaurants. Was Cydney still at the Virgin Café, or had she gone home? Elfrida looked up. Two or three kilometers overhead, oblong constellations drifted through the darkness. They resembled stars, but they were actually the warning lights around the edges of Bellicia’s floating farms. These vast spongy mats, with their self-replenishing sprinkler systems, provided legumes, greens, and root vegetables sufficient to meet 80% of the ecohood’s calorie and micronutrient needs. The dominant crop was high-yield Glycine max, which was why locals called the floating farms ‘soyclouds.’
“Ms Goto,” said Dr. James, behind her. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But many asteroids are inhabited. That’s been the case ever since the Clean Revolution made a trip to the Belt as cheap as a trans-Pacific flight. For your information, I’m fully cognizant of the trade-offs involved in living out here, and I do support terraforming, broadly speaking. But most likely, human beings will continue to seek independence and freedom from government supervision, so migration to the Belt will continue. Therefore, to assume that you can run an asteroid capture program without resettling people … Far be it from me to tell you your job, but it sounds like you may need to reexamine that assumption.”
“We don’t assume that. My point is, how do you explain the fact that thirty-eight out of forty-one candidates …” She trailed off. She felt like she was losing, even though she had a winning argument. “It’s statistically unlikely. Scratch that. It’s statistically impossible.”
“Then maybe there’s another explanation,” Dr. James said. “Could your own data management be less than secure?”
Elfrida flushed. “I bet our information security is better than yours.”
The lights went out.
vii.
The floor vibrated. Elfrida, standing by the window, pressed her fists against her mouth. In her memory, the robotic voice of the Botticelli Station hub said, All personnel, remain where you are.
“We’re under attack!” she exclaimed.
“No, we’re not,” Dr. James said. But he didn’t sound too sure.
Trembling, Eflrida poked her head out of the window. The businesses along the lakeshore were still lit up. Only the building they were in had gone dark.
“What’s going on?”
“Maybe a power cut. We’ve had some issues with lumpiness in the electricity supply.” Dr. James clicked up beside her and looked out the window. “Everything seems to be all right, doesn’t it?”
“How would you know?”
“Ms. Goto, this is the most secure habitat in the asteroid belt. Our founders may not have had the PLAN in mind when they constructed the Bellicia ecohood, but I promise you, no toilet rolls are getting through three kilometers of solid rock.”
“They could hit your power plant on the surface. Maybe that’s why the electricity’s gone off.”
“Except it hasn’t. It’s just us.”
“The building’s shaking! It feels like we’re taking impacts. Or being pushed from side to side. Oh God, what is it?”
She felt exposed, and yet she didn’t want to move away from the window—a potential escape route. The tremors continued. Panicking, she blinked out a query to the internet, always a last resort: Will I be OK if I jump out of a window approx 70m up under 0.22 gees? She tried to remember how the Space Corps therapist on Earth had told her to cope with stressful situations. Breathe deeply. Yeah, that was going to help.
“I’ve just pinged Facilities Managem
ent,” Dr. James said. “They confirm that this building has stopped drawing power, but they don’t know why. Doggone it! Ali Baba needs to run around the clock.” He was referring to the supercomputer in the astrophysics lab, dubbed Ali Baba by the researchers who tended it. “It’s got backup batteries, but they can only power it for a couple of hours.”
The wall shook again. A black shape with a white face burst in through the window, shrieking, “Yaaaah!”
Elfrida screamed. The invader’s foot hit her in the ribs, knocking her against Dr. James’s desk. As she fell, a steely grip fastened on her arm. She struggled, until she perceived that it was Dr. James. Gripping her arm with his hook, he pulled her towards the door. “What do you want?” he shouted at the invader.
Invaders.
Another person hurtled through the window. Landing on his/her feet, he/she raised a weapon and fired. There was a loud phut. One or more projectiles crunched into the wall to Elfrida’s left. She smelled a sweetish, pungent odor.
She was already throwing herself backwards through the door. She ran along the hall, following Dr. James. With his reverse-jointed legs and blade-feet, the professor had a stunning turn of speed. She assumed he was heading for the zipshaft, until he vanished into a door ahead of her. At the end of the hall, more black-garbed figures burst out of the zipshaft.
Elfrida plunged after Dr. James. Behind her, shouts of “Yaaah!” and “Get them!” mingled with the phut-phut of more projectiles being fired.
She cannoned into a table in the dark, rebounded, and scrambled under it. They were in the astrophysics lab. Dr. James had rushed to the defense of Ali Baba, his precious supercomputer. But the invaders were already in here. She heard Dr. James shouting, the wordless battle cries of the invaders, and the long-drawn-out crunches of accelerators, high-spec printers, neutron traps, and other expensive pieces of equipment being thrown around as if they weighed less than the boxes they’d come in. She fumbled to unfasten her stabilizer braces so she could move better. She didn’t give a hoot about the supercomputer. She cared about getting out of here alive.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 4