InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  It saddened Corinne that Walt considered what she did journalism. She hoped he was only being polite.

  “Any updates to my calendar?” Corinne asked. Her schedule showed nothing for days but more of the depressing same.

  “A few more ‘twenty years after’ interview opportunities. Some talk-show appearances in the works. Nothing definite, Corinne.”

  “Thanks, anyway, Walt.” Her last impression as he dropped the link was of a centimeters-long ash being tapped off his virtual cigarette. What a curious affectation.

  She picked up the pace, angling toward the activity near the lake. Twenty years … that was the problem. These anniversaries always reminded her of where her life had gone awry.

  New Beginnings was now well on its way to Alpha Centauri. Centaurs too long away from home comprised much of its crew; humans the rest. And she could have been aboard.

  She knew many who were: ICU specialists. Her fellow abductees on the ill-fated lifeboat cruise. Those who like her had survived ….

  Seven years ago, she had come to a crossroads. She could have gone on New Beginnings, on the adventure of a lifetime. Instead she had chosen to remain behind. Staying home made Corinne the highest profile witness still available to the Himalia Incident and the destruction of the Centaur starship, Harmony. Famous. Sought-after. Transformed from journalist to celebrity.

  Once again, she hated herself for that moment of weakness. For surrendering to the fear of another adventure.

  Huffing now, Corinne neared whatever she had glimpsed from ninety stories above. Cars with strobing light bars encircled the lake. Inside the ring, behind a barrier of sawhorses, a skirmish line of flamethrower-wielding figures in hazmat suits, advancing slowly, were sweeping the ground with jets of fire. Just as she caught a whiff of something nasty, a cop wearing a breather mask waved her off.

  A puddle of shadow hinted at a ditch lased through the access paths, isolating the perimeter road. Beyond the gap, smart-tar shimmered and seethed. It was not supposed to do that.

  The nanites that autonomously resurfaced the roadway supposedly couldn’t hurt living things. The grass alongside the rogue pavement looked normal—

  And the workers doing battle with the road all wore hazmat gear.

  Corinne veered from the path to jog uphill on the lawn. Something tickled the back of her mind. That this incident was news, and she ought to be reporting it? Nope. Nanotech flare-ups were boringly common: a local-interest story, at most. She was better than that.

  Then what? What else had she been musing about? New Beginnings. Centaurs. Himalia survivors. None of those felt right, either.

  The ICU members of the crew? That wasn’t quite it, either.

  She reached the crest winded, and slowed to a cool-down gait. Something about the ICU, she thought. Not anyone who was starship crew. Not anyone she knew from the long-derelict Harmony. Something more recent about the ICU.

  Breathing heavily, Corinne plopped onto a park bench. It finally came to her. Two high-visibility anniversaries fell this year. The twentieth anniversary of the Himalia Incident. And later in the year, the 175th anniversary of the ICU.

  A tie-in? She could manage that. It would give a fresh spin to the old rehash. Maybe that was all. Something about the ICU anniversary had been all over the net of late, though she didn’t recall the details. There were days she couldn’t stand to follow the news anymore. Real news only reminded her of everything she had lost. Abandoned. Squandered.

  She queried the infosphere for recent stories about the ICU.

  And after skimming the headlines, Corinne knew what kept nagging at her. A warmth suffused her, and not because the breeze had faded and sunlight now streamed between two towers east of the park. She formulated a task, a true journalistic research assignment, for Walt.

  Maybe, Corinne decided, I have one more real story in me.

  CHAPTER 3

  “You need a job,” Aaron blurted out.

  No one on Earth needed a job, Joshua thought. Ubiquitous nanotech synthesis, nearly lossless recycling, and literal oceans of fusion fuel provided a comfortable standard of living to everyone on Earth essentially for free. Automated factories provided most of the few things people couldn’t synth for themselves. When recycling fell short, AI-operated probes delivered raw material from the limitless reserves of the main Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. Much less did anyone in the Matthews clan need a job. The family trust fund had seen to that.

  Many more people wished to work than could serve any productive purpose. Or even unproductive purposes like concierge. Most people with the vocational urge moved off-world. Joshua didn’t see the point. Modern tech would catch up with them soon enough.

  Wanting work or needing it. Perhaps only historians still drew any distinction. And ex-historians.

  Joshua knew his little brother meant well. Aaron was among those with the compulsion to work. He operated an interior-design boutique, mostly custom programming of holo sculptures and digital wallpaper. For decades now, AI art had been indistinguishable from human efforts. Double-blind experiments reconfirmed that regularly. Some people nonetheless paid for human designs.

  Joshua admired the view, only partially as a delaying tactic. They stood on a graceful, cantilevered balcony that projected from the cliff face in a remote part of the Grand Canyon. Layer upon layer of red rock, eons congealed in stone, stretched as far as the eye could see. The Colorado River, far below, was a trickle. The canyon floor must have been brutally hot; convection currents upwelling from the gorge blurred the opposite wall.

  Behind Joshua, living quarters burrowed into the rock. Aaron’s lodge was hand-built with supplies flown in on hovercraft. His getaway went far beyond anyone’s slice of the family trust fund. Some people paid very well for human designs.

  “Joshua!” Aaron rapped the railing. “Did you even hear me?” And more softly, “Are you okay, Bro?”

  Joshua’s young nephews shrieked inside, oblivious to maternal shushing. Tina’s whispering skills needed practice: the boys had to be quiet so Daddy could have some “special alone time” with Uncle Joshua. Scenery changed, but never the treatment. Parents, friends, sisters, and now his brother—everyone felt the need to express concern, scope out his presumed instability, and nudge him back toward respectability.

  Rather than “helpful” hints, he wanted support. He wanted belief. A girlfriend might have given him that, but he’d been between girlfriends when—whatever—had happened.

  Joshua suspected he would be a long time between girlfriends.

  Friends, parents, and sibs, but not yet Grandma Matthews. Somehow, he had let her down the most. He couldn’t imagine what he would say to her. And he couldn’t duck her calls and messages forever.

  “Joshua!”

  “I’m fine, Aaron, if still confused.”

  Aaron waited.

  There was no mystery what everyone wanted to discuss, over and over. “It’s the damnedest thing, Aaron. It’s as though those weeks never happened.”

  “The police found no sign of you,” Aaron said.

  By every account, his brother had pestered them enough to be authoritative on that point. And, assuming Joshua possessed any aptitude at reading body language, had pestered them enough to piss them off. That was one theory, anyway, for Joshua’s case ending up on the bottom of the stack even before his reappearance.

  He meant well, Joshua kept telling himself.

  Aaron was suddenly shocked to discover the cold beer in his own hand. He bustled indoors to set the glass on a table in the living area. “Sorry about that.” Awkward silence. “And your doctor?”

  It always came to that question. Comprehensive testing said that Joshua had had a bit too much liquor and, mostly, an allergic reaction to crab.

  Joshua knew as much going in. Crab (the natural stuff, far worse than the common synthed version) always got to him. He had to be soused not to avoid crab. So he knew one thing about where he had been—it was someplace with u
pscale hors d’oeuvres.

  “I’m fine, Aaron. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s no evidence I was held against my wishes. And Bro, there was also no sign of alcoholism”—no matter what most people seemed to believe—“just, obviously, some alcohol. Reclaim your beer. Better yet, find one for me.”

  Aaron ignored the suggestion. “And the … other kind of doctor?”

  And then it always came to that question, couched in sympathetic hesitance. “I’ve been analyzed and hypnotized. It’s strange. My memories weren’t repressed and they weren’t damaged. I simply have no memory of that time. Not even my neural implant has data between the party and my reappearance.” Had he turned off the implant, its audit log should have recorded the shutdown event. Not that anyone had access to the inside of his skull, but Joshua knew: there was no such annotation.

  Suppression fields kept neural interfaces from functioning. Police and prisons used suppressors legally, keeping prisoners from conspiring over the infosphere. As for anyone else …

  Officially, the police considered his disappearance a cold case. In practice that status differed from closed only as a matter of semantics. What should he do next? What could he do? The only idea that ever came to Joshua’s mind was hiring a private investigator. That approach seemed more melodramatic than useful.

  “I feel for you, Joshua. It’s just so weird.” Aaron studied the remote depths of the canyon. “We have to move you past this. So about that job?”

  Aaron had to work. Joshua had to know things. He had worked because some things couldn’t be found on the net. Not the public net, anyway. The subjects that most fascinated Joshua were best explored at the ICU. The salary that came with the job supported a nice home, but doormen and concierges did not motivate him. Few of their relatives grasped the distinction. Was it worth getting into now?

  But maybe he could postpone that discussion. The mind’s ear trill that only Joshua could hear signaled an incoming call. “Accept,” he subvocalized.

  A famous visage popped into his mind’s eye. Round face. Tight brunette curls. Dark, lively eyes. Engaging smile.

  Corinne Elman opened the conversation with three simple words that overwhelmed Joshua: “I believe you.”

  • • • •

  The concierge netted precisely on the hour to announce a visitor.

  Joshua Matthews’s punctuality did not surprise Corinne. Mid-level bureaucrats and middle children: two breeds that followed all the rules. Her guest was both.

  She was an only child. Of the people Corinne knew who weren’t also only children, most had just one brother or sister. It verged on child abuse in this era to make someone a middle child.

  Corinne’s grandfather had a favorite proverb. The nail that sticks up gets pounded down. Whether or not Joshua Matthews knew the adage, the public record showed he lived by it.

  Until very recently. And then he had gotten hammered. In every possible sense of the word.

  Matthews had leapt from obscurity directly to notoriety. He was without credibility now: a laughingstock. The video clip of his reappearance was everywhere on the net. Dazed. Puking his guts out—ad nauseam, as it were.

  It wasn’t like the vid itself was noteworthy. People did stupid things every day, after all, often enough in public. What didn’t get caught on camera every day was the scion of a prominent family publicly losing it. The rich and famous enjoyed many advantages—but the opportunity to screw up in obscurity wasn’t among them. As of the evening before, the last time she had checked, Matthews’s vid had topped ten million hits. Not even cute kittens could compete. For two days after his reappearance, not even hacked celebrity selfie porn could compete.

  She was almost certainly kidding herself that anything useful could come of this meeting—and desperate to prove herself wrong. Desperate to be a reporter again.

  There was a tentative knock at Corinne’s door. She picked up a full wineglass before opening it. “Dr. Matthews, thank you for coming.”

  “Just call me Joshua,” he said. “And I was happy to get out of Charleston.”

  I’ll bet you were, she thought.

  “And call me Corinne.” She waggled her glass. “Something for you?”

  “Ice water, if you don’t mind.”

  Corinne filled his glass at her minibar, allowing him to reconsider. He didn’t. First test passed, she thought.

  Matthews was more than a head taller than she, easily 185 centimeters. He was stocky but soft-looking. Bureaucrat, she thought again. His face was all lines and planes: broad forehead, straight nose, thin lips, and square jaw. Clean shaven. His eyes were an unexceptional blue—and his gaze guarded. His blond hair was close-cropped with long sideburns. His nanornaments offered a trace of tan and no personalized design that she could see. His shirt and slacks fabrics were programmed in uninteresting grays. His avatar and net bio had previewed all that, of course. He seemed way too healthy for someone supposedly just back from a month-long debauch.

  Happy to get out of town, was he? Corinne could imagine the sidelong glances and furtive whispers as he moved around his neighborhood. She would want to be elsewhere, too.

  She opened the French doors onto the rooftop terrace. Potted plants—dwarf Japanese red maples and staked Centaur bluefruit vines—lined the balustrade. He followed her outside into warm afternoon sun. She said, “Let’s start at the party, Joshua.”

  He studied the park far below and the Manhattan skyline, quiet for a long while. “It began, at least for humans, nearly one and three-quarters centuries ago.”

  Something about him (the brooding gaze? the careful selection of every word?) conveyed great intelligence. His 175 years presumably referred back to the founding of the ICU. This was going to be a long conversation if his speech was always this oblique.

  “The party?” she tried again.

  His brow furrowed in mock concentration. Never mind that Joshua was in his mid fifties, he had a boyish charm. She sensed he had it to a fault. He struck her as an underachiever.

  Data diving had shown considerable family money. Riches to rags in three generations: that was the rule of thumb. Joshua wasn’t impoverished, but neither was he distinguished. Still, maybe she could cut him some slack. Despite the trust fund, he had chosen gainful employment.

  “Joshua, I’ll save us both some time. I know it was a happy-promotion party. I know this was somehow—or so you believe—about the ICU. I know this, too.” She netted a complex graphic, a lopsided, multicolored data tree, into their consensual space. Each main bough was a timeline, a concise summary of dealings with a particular InterstellarNet species. Color-coded leaves clustered and clumped on the branches: dialogue milestones; AI trade-agent version upgrades; technology announcements, auctions, and publicly disclosed transactions; rumored commercial conflicts. Only the branches for Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star showed a red leaf, representing physical contact. “I did my homework before netting you.” Her point made, she dropped back to reality.

  “I see you’ve discovered the family ties,” he said.

  Walt had annotated the “leaves” with IDs of key participants. The Matthews name appeared all over, back to the Leo contact, predating even the founding of the ICU with Joshua’s umpty-great-grandmother as secretary-general. Another past secretary-general, his grandmother. Three former chief technology officers. Many mid-level bureaucrats. Entrepreneurs working interstellar trade from the private side. Throw in some kin not named Matthews, and there was even an interstellar journalist in the family two generations back. Data Jockey to the Stars, that one had called himself.

  Corinne swirled the wine in her glass. “It’s not a deep secret.”

  “I guess not.” He exhaled sharply. “Since you researched the ICU so thoroughly, you’ve doubtless researched me. You know what I’ve been going through. You’ll understand I’m in no mood for games. I want to hear, no holds barred, what you think happened.

  “I don’t know where I was. I don’t know what I was doing. B
ut I do know myself, Corinne. Whatever anyone else may think, I was not drinking myself into oblivion. And however much they sugarcoat it, my own family doesn’t believe me. Why would you?”

  “Reporters have connections.”

  And police, as much as anybody, often got a kick out of doing favors for celebrities. This was hardly the first time a cop had let her peek at the file from an active investigation—however nominally, in this instance, the label active applied. And with Joshua’s reappearance, her source admitted, they had bigger fish to fry. Including minnows and tadpoles.

  She continued, “The cops are sure you panicked after winning the new job. That you found yourself in over your head. And that disappearance and faked amnesia are your cover. It’s an easy explanation.”

  Joshua coughed. “I asked what you thought.”

  So he had. “The police confirmed they found no signs of you. Not an access to your financial accounts. Not one encounter with a friend, relative, neighbor, colleague, or acquaintance. Not a single appearance on a public-safety camera. Not one digital trace anywhere on the net. All the while, infosphere messages, no matter their urgency, piled up undelivered on servers.

  “I find all that intriguing. A month-long bender without ever touching your money? A nonstop binge without as much as a mention on a police blotter for a bar brawl?” Corinne patted her right arm where her personal ID chip was implanted. Stores, restaurants, cabs, elevators: they polled her chip—everyone’s chip—countless times each day. Such chips made it all but impossible to go unnoticed in the modern world—and Joshua had. And yet, he hardly seemed the type to find an identity launderer, or to have diverted enough untraceable wealth to hire one. “Even if you were on a drunken spree, something more was involved.”

  She took Joshua’s hand. “All that said, there’s a chance the police have it almost right. That you vanished on purpose, maybe living off someone else’s money, and then, somehow, truly got amnesia. Are you certain you want to find out?”