Rurumi spoke up. “Um, hey, it’s Gregor. I’ve got an idea …”
★
“Hello, hello?” Elfrida said nervously. “We’re from UNESCO and we’re here to ...”
“Just keep going,” a voice on the radio cut in.
Mendoza raised his eyebrows. Elfrida shrugged. They drove deeper into the cavern, leaving the sunlight behind. The headlights illuminated rubble on the floor.
“Keep going.”
The floor of the cavern began to slope down.
“Mind the drop,” said the voice.
Mendoza’s knuckles whitened on the steering yoke. He nodded speechlessly at the navigation screen. The rover’s radar had automatically reconfigured itself into single-direction pulse mode. The returning pulses sketched a representation of the topography inside the cave. They were driving down a ramp that wound around … and around, and around, and around … a stupendous void, or shaft, inside Rheasilvia Mons. According to the radar, the shaft was five kilometers deep.
“Now I know why they call it the Big Dig,” Elfrida breathed. “Oh my God!”
Headlights flashed, rising towards them. The headlights were several meters off the ground.
“Pull over! Pull over!” a robotic voice blared on the public channel.
“Susmaryosep!” Mendoza yanked the wheel over.
To the right.
While the oncoming vehicle also veered to the right.
“Careful!” Elfrida shrieked.
“Collision imminent!”
“I said mind the fucking drop!”
Mere meters from a head-on collision, Mendoza swerved even further to the right, and braked.
The oncoming vehicle scraped past. A tractor the size of a three-storey house pulling an articulated dolly laden with post-processing slag, it was so long that it took three minutes to pass. The whole time, it scolded them to maintain an appropriate distance between vehicles. Two minutes and forty-two seconds into this ordeal, a lump of slag sticking off the dolly tapped the rover’s side, displacing it to the right. The rover’s right rear wheel dropped several centimeters.
“Oh help,” Elfrida whimpered, fumbling her EVA suit’s helmet over her head, in hopes that it would act as a crash helmet when they tumbled to the bottom of the Big Dig.
“No one’s ever fallen off that ramp,” the voice on the radio said unhelpfully.
The rubble-hauler passed.
Mendoza gunned the rover back to the center of the ramp. Behind them, chunks of basalt crumbled into the abyss.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the voice demanded. “Why’d you pull over to the right?”
“We drive on the right,” Mendoza said, his voice shaking. “Like everyone else in the solar system. Except you, apparently.”
“We were founded in the Former United Kingdom,” the voice said after a moment, not quite apologetically. “Thought you knew that.”
“Yes, but …” Mendoza sighed. “Just warn us if there are any more surprises ahead.”
“Oh, lots. But we hope you’ll think they’re nice ones! I’m Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir, by the way. Stakeholder relations coordinator here at the Big Dig.”
Sigurjónsdóttir directed them down the ramp, which flattened out five kilometers below the cavern entrance, four and a half kilometers below the floor of Rheasilvia Crater. The scale of the Big Dig was inhuman. The shaft jinked to the north and then plunged down again, this time at a steep angle. Their radar showed that it bottomed out another nine kilometers below.
“Don’t go down there,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “Lots of robots, the largest diamond-toothed roller cone bit in the solar system, debris flying at the speed of bullets. Look over to your left; there’s an off-ramp. Follow the glowstrips.”
The rover trundled along a horizontal tunnel illuminated by overhead glowstrips, which made it feel reassuringly like a highway tunnel on Earth. It opened out into a cavern the size of a football stadium. They confronted an amazing sight.
At the far end of the cavern, enclosed walkways linked a village of rigid multistorey habs whose walls were muraled with colorful images. And above the village, struts suspended a large farm-in-a-bottle, the colloquial term for a hydroponic farm contained in its own hab bubble.
This bubble was transparent. As they drove closer, Elfrida could see small fish darting among the roots of the plants. UV light rippled down through the farm. Watery shadows quivered on the floor, giving an impression of weather, although the cavern was in hard vacuum.
A golf-cart-sized vehicle whizzed towards them. It had come from a cluster of expandable habs on the far side of the cavern, connected like curvy Legos, bearing the Virgin Atomic logo.
A woman with the same logo on the chest of her EVA suit jumped out of the golf cart. “Hi. Sigurjónsdóttir,” she said over the radio, waving.
Elfrida and Mendoza scrambled into their suits and got out of the rover. “Nice to meet you,” Elfrida said, matching Sigurjónsdóttir’s bow. “I’m Goto, and this is Mendoza. We’re from UNESCO.”
“Well, that explains it,” said the other spacesuit who’d got out of the golf cart. “Just joking.”
“Pay no attention to my colleague,” said Sigurjónsdóttir. “Well, it is nice to meet you, and you’ve come all this way to …?”
“To inspect your educational and training facilities,” Elfrida said. “I understand that you run an apprenticeship program at this site?” This information came from Lovatsky.
“We do,” Sigurjónsdóttir confirmed.
“That’s very laudable, and I’m sure that your apprentices learn a lot, since you’re on the cutting edge of asteroid engineering here,” Elfrida improvised. “But UNESCO does set certain criteria regarding apprenticeship programs, and we just want to confirm that those criteria are being met, which I’m sure they are, but you know.”
“And of course this has nothing to do with any recent goings-on in the Bellicia ecohood!” Sigurjónsdóttir teased merrily. “No, no, pretend I didn’t say that. We’ll be perfectly happy to show you around, of course.”
“Well, that’s great,” Elfrida said.
The other spacesuit stepped forward. “I should introduce myself,” he said. Did Sigurjónsdóttir make a small gesture, as if to stop him from speaking? If so, he ignored her. “I am in fact the leader of the Virgin Atomic apprenticeship program here. My name is Jimmy. Nice to meet you, and I look forward to cooperating to resolve any concerns you may have.”
There was something off about his diction. It sounded a bit stilted. Robotic, even. After their experiences at the refinery, Elfrida was suspicious. Could Jimmy be a phavatar? Some phavatars were made to resemble EVA suits. She reserved judgement. If he was a phavatar or some other kind of bot, she’d know soon enough.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
Something moved in the golf cart. It was a four-legged pink spacesuit about the size of a terrier. It bounded to Jimmy. Over the public channel, they heard: “Yap! Yap! Yapyapyap!”
“Sorry,” Jimmy said. “This is my beloved dog, Amy.”
Movement blurred in Elfrida’s peripheral vision. Rurumi—whom they’d told to stay in the rover—raced to the EVA-suited dog and knelt to enfold it in her arms. “A real doggie! Kawaiiiii!”
Sigurjónsdóttir moved almost as fast as the phavatar. She whipped a plasma pistol out of a thigh holster. Rurumi looked up. A laser targeting dot floated on the phavatar’s forehead.
Elfrida instinctively lunged forward. Because the left knee of her suit was still fossilized at a 120° angle, she fell flat on her face.
“Oh, cheese,” Sigurjónsdóttir exclaimed, pointing her pistol at the ground. “Are you OK?”
“Yes—yes, I’m fine …”
“I’m very sorry, but you can’t bring a phavatar in here. I’ll have to ask you to leave it in your vehicle.”
“Let me guess,” Mendoza said, helping Elfrida up. “Information security?”
“That’s right,” Sigurjónsdóttir sa
id. She had not yet holstered her weapon. “Phavatars are a significant information security risk, as their uplink functionality can’t be disabled.”
“We can’t get a signal down here, anyway,” Mendoza said. “That’s just the MI proxy. That’s why it acted so dumb. It must have startled you. Sorry about that.”
“No, no, I overreacted. I’m sorry. But our corporate policy …”
Elfrida interrupted, “Not a problem at all! We’ll leave her in the car.” To Rurumi, she transmitted mockingly: “Move it, Ru-chan. Hayaku nori-nasai! Deccha dame yo!”
Rurumi climbed into the rover.
“Jolly good!” Holstering her laser pistol, Sigurjónsdóttir reverted to professional cheerfulness. “Now, can I interest you wayfarers in a cup of tea?”
xv.
Back in the Bellicia ecohood, Dr. James’s bail hearing had been scheduled for SecondLight, and then rescheduled for ThirdDark on account of the crowds outside the community hall. The postponement was supposed to deter the protestors. It didn’t.
Come ThirdDark, when there was usually not a light to be seen in the habitat, a ring of torches bobbed from the koban to the community hall. This was Justice For David Reid (as Shoshanna had renamed their group), plus a couple of hundred supporters. They surrounded the car which was carrying Dr. James to the community hall.
This car—a Hyundai Robby, resembling a soap bubble on wheels—was the only one on Vesta, for a good reason. In micro-gravity, it was quicker to walk. The protestors easily kept up with the Hyundai, squirting it with pre-recorded taunts from a frequency-hopping transmitter, so the grim-faced peacekeepers inside had no choice but to hear.
Outside the community hall, the protestors closed in. A portable projector unfurled a gigantic holograph of David Reid in his hospital bed. The peacekeepers hustled Dr. James up the steps, to the sound of “No bail for the shooter James!”
“Pretty good turnout,” Shoshanna said, surveying her troops.
“Vigilante! Cowboy! Lock him up and throw away the key!”
“Of course, a lot of them are just here to rubberneck.”
The protestors surged into the community hall, an auditorium without seats. An area in front had been cordoned off and this was where Dr. James now stood, alone but for a young man in a business suit, his Virgin Atomic lawyer. On the stage, Dean Garcia stood behind a lectern. The dean doubled as lay judge in Bellicia’s rare criminal proceedings. Catcalls and chants filled the hall. The holograph of David Reid flickered above the crowd as the person carrying the projector was jostled.
“I wish they hadn’t brought that thing,” Shoshanna said. “It’s in bad taste. Plus, it might remind the dean that … well, never mind.”
Cydney knew what Shoshanna had been going to say: the protestors weren’t squeaky-clean, either. But there had been no suggestion of proceedings against the individuals who’d participated in the raid on the astrophysics lab. For one thing, no one would step forward to identify them. For another, Cydney sensed that the whole community was passively on their side—and she was sure Dean Garcia sensed that, too.
“Order,” boomed a peacekeeper over the PA system. “Order in the court!”
The protestors quieted down. The prosecutor, a meek man who ran a Goan restaurant in town, read out the charges. “The community of Bellicia,” he said, “opposes pre-trial release on the grounds that the accused represents a substantial flight risk.”
Cheers greeted this statement. Cydney used her earlobe camera to zoom in on Dr. James’s face, capturing his dejected expression. She subvocalized commentary. This was great stuff. So hokey!
Shoshanna nudged her. “I’m gonna step out for a few minutes. Can you keep me updated? If I don’t get back before the verdict, let me know which way it went.”
“Sure, or you can just access my feed. Cydneyblaisze.cloud.”
“Oh,” Shoshanna said. “OK.” She scriggled away through the crowd.
~So, I’ve often wondered. Maybe you have, too, Cydney said to her fans. ~What happens when you commit a crime in paradise? How does that criminal-justice thing work when there’s no government? Well, this is how it works in the Bellicia ecohood: the UN is represented by a prosecutor appointed by the Interplanetary Court of Justice. And given that crimes are pretty rare here, the prosecutor’s job is a part-time gig. Hence, I give you the spectacle of a mild-mannered restauranteur going up against a corporate lawyer with a five-figure hourly rate.
The Goan restauranteur laid out the prosecution’s case. He called only one witness: David Reid himself, who appeared as a phavatar to recount how he’d been shot. The Virgin Atomic lawyer challenged him repeatedly to explain the circumstances of the confrontation. The crowd grew restive. Finally, Dean Garcia shut down the lawyer’s line of questioning on the grounds that it was irrelevant. The phavatar—Win Khin’s second-best one—tottered off the stage and was seen no more.
Then came the defense’s turn to explain why Dr. James should not be denied bail.
“Your honor, I’d like to call a witness as a surety for the defense.”
“Yes? Who?”
“Elfrida Goto.”
★
Five kilometers beneath Rheasilvia Mons, Elfrida had no way of knowing that her name had just been called. She and Mendoza were drinking tea in Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir’s office, which was decorated with photographs of Sigurjónsdóttir’s two small daughters. “They live with their father in London,” Sigurjónsdóttir explained. “I miss them awfully.”
It was possible to use personal information as a weapon. If you didn’t mind revealing it, you could instantly put the other person at a disadvantage by forcing them to respond to remarks which had no correct answers.
“Do you have any children of your own, John?”
“I’m not married,” Mendoza said stiffly.
“Elfrida?”
“Me neither.”
“Well, you’re young. There’s still time! Children really light up your life.”
“We’d like to talk about your apprenticeship program,” Mendoza blurted, making no pretense of a polite segue.
“Oh, well, of course!”
Elfrida flashed a grateful smile at Mendoza.
“Let’s see.” Sigurjónsdóttir gestured, and one wall of the office turned into a screen. “We launched the apprenticeship program in 2283, as a part of our commitment to holistic stakeholder involvement …”
They sat through an hour of powerpoints with a high spin-to-information ratio. Elfrida, suppressing yawns, blinked over to slebsandplebs.cloud, only to have her contacts return the message NO SIGNAL. Oh. Of course. Duh.
The final vid in Sigurjónsdóttir’s presentation featured the model village that stood on the other side of this cavern. Elfrida sat up. “So that’s the dormitory where your apprentices live? Wow. That’s pretty luxe. Could we have a look at it in the flesh?”
Sigurjónsdóttir hesitated.
Aha, Elfrida thought, and glanced at Mendoza. It was frustrating that with no access to the cavern’s wifi environment, they couldn’t communicate privately.
“I don’t see why not,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. She floated to her feet. “Jimmy!” she said into an implanted throat mic. “Ms. Goto and Mr. Mendoza are coming over for the grand tour! Make sure Amy’s on her leash.” She hesitated again. “I do have to make one request, I’m afraid.”
“What’s that?”
“As I mentioned earlier, we have a rather strict information security policy here at the Big Dig. Now, while I would never suggest that UN agents might be complicit in IP theft, I also haven’t got the authority to exempt you from the checks that we do ask all visitors to undergo.”
“Checks?”
“Oh, just scans. The usual, really.”
It was not usual at all to scan visitors to a corporate facility. In fact, since they had no way of knowing for sure what scans had been administered, it might be an invasion of their privacy. But obviously this was the price of getting any further.
>
Elfrida left the decision up to Mendoza, since he was the one with a BCI. He fingered the port hidden in his hair over his left ear. “All right,” he said at last. “Meta only?”
“Meta only,” Sigurjónsdóttir confirmed.
They stepped in turn through a full-body scanner. On the other side of the scanner, they passed the open doors of offices where people were working, goofing off, and joking around.
There was another airlock at the back of the hab cluster. Sigurjónsdóttir provided them with Virgin Atomic EVA suits from a communal locker. Elfrida was getting more and more frustrated by her inability to communicate in private with Mendoza. She wanted to say: Is it just me, or is it weird that they have to put on EVA suits to walk a hundred meters to the apprentices’ dormitory, and then take them off again? Why not join all the habs up?
They walked towards the model village. People gathered in the airways that connected the mini-skyscrapers, staring down at them. As the trio approached, the pictures on the exterior walls rippled into life. Elfrida jumped. Giant girls flicked their shiny black hair. Titanic athletes showed off their running shoes. Snazzy electronic gadgets demonstrated their functions. And text was everywhere, scrolling and leaping and flashing. Only a very small proportion of the text was English, or indeed roman script. Nearly all of it was Chinese.
The blitz of images stopped both Elfrida and Mendoza in their tracks. “WTF?” Elfrida blurted.
Sigurjónsdóttir chuckled nervously. “Contributions from a few of our corporate partners! Don’t you think they liven the place up?”
“I know what this is,” Mendoza said. “It’s advertising.”
“Adver-what?” Elfrida said.
“We’ve got it in the Philippines. Not in a major way, but some vids, some feeds, you have to watch a bunch of this stuff before you get to what you want.”
“Why?”
“To make you buy things you don’t need,” Mendoza said. “It’s illegal in the UN, I know that.”
“That’s correct,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “And I’d like to stress that this isn’t, quote, advertising, unquote. These Your Homes! were donated by some of our corporate partners, including Empirical Solutions and Huawei Galactic, as you can see there, if you read Chinese. They come like this. It’s decoration.”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 12