by Nigel Foster
Before, all you got was a reminder to mind the doors, make way for other passengers and have a nice day. Sometimes, if the train unexpectedly halted, a garbled message from the conductor that no one could understand, which somehow made it more reassuring. Greenaway always felt a little cheated because the woman behind the announcements was a mass of electronics, not flesh and blood. It was time that AIs developed their own voices and stopped using human ones. He thought this again, then wondered if people in the city would think he was anti-AI. From what he’d seen, the city states were keen on establishing that AIs were individual, autonomous beings.
It wasn’t that he was anti. He simply didn’t believe in Artificial Intelligence, the clue was in the name. Artificial meant unnatural, false, pretend, phony. The Wild in general distrusted the breakneck speed at which the city states were developing ever more complex technology derived from trading with aliens. Not that the Wild ever refused a trade. They were just far more careful about using technology they didn’t understand. Years later Anson would remember the Wild as it had been: innocent, altruistic. Until circumstances had made it adapt and change, become even more high tech than the city states, although careful to hide it. The thing about AIs was that they mimicked human intelligence. If that was all they had, then they were nothing more than copies. If they had another life... if their real personas were very, very different, then they were suspect. It was an attitude that he would never lose.
“We’ll be leaving in five minutes. Our average speed will be three hundred kilometres an hour and with eleven stops to make we’ll reach Central in one hour ten minutes. At the end of the car is a vending machine dispensing a select variety of exciting hot and cold drinks, plus delicious and nutritious snacks. Just before departure the front of this car will reconfigure into what I like to think of as a compressed-air cow catcher. Enjoy your journey and the conductor will soon be round to take your fares. Any questions?”
He couldn’t resist it. “What if we crash?”
“We never do.”
“You mean you never have. Doesn’t mean...”
“Here’s the conductor,” the AI interrupted. “Ask him.”
It was the conductor who asked the questions, as he was taking Anson’s money. Specifically, had Sir seen a well-built, middle-aged man near the station? Could have been dressed like a farmer. Luckily the conductor was searching for change, so never saw Sir’s worried expression. By the time he looked up, Sir had composed himself and said that no, he hadn’t seen anyone – and why?
The conductor tapped a booze-reddened nose – pores like tiny bomb craters – and said the Protected Territory Police were looking for the middle-aged man. Apparently he was considered very dangerous, had been spotted in the local area.
The conductor lowered his voice and bent closer. He had recently been eating onions. The fugitive was insane. Homicidal. Escaped from a secure asylum. Except it obviously wasn’t. Secure.
Anson said he’d keep a lookout, aware of the dead man’s effects in his pocket.
The conductor smiled reassuringly. Not to worry, the train AI would take care of everything.
Anson didn’t ask how. He wouldn’t believe the answer.
Left alone he wondered if the AI was watching. AIs were said to be obsessed with preventing harm to a human being. How could the train AI do that unless it watched him all the time? So it had seen him wash his face, would know the graze was recent. But it didn’t mean he’d been in a fight, did it? But could the AI have seen Barnes’ death? Some sort of enhanced electronic vision extending far in front of the train? Then why hadn’t it said anything? Because he’d been attacked, only shot back in self-defence? Did AIs make judgements like that? Anson shrugged. A man could grow old wondering pointlessly about artificial intelligence. And why shouldn’t the same man check his wallet in the safety of an AI-protected train?
There wasn’t much. The 3D visor. A pack of the joss-sticks that had replaced cigarettes, guaranteed to prevent cancer and clear your lungs. Barnes’ choice had been crystal meth (NO SIDE EFFECTS! REFRESHES YOUR LUNGS!! SMOKE EASY, SMOKE FUN!!!). A few coins. An old, well-worn, twin-bladed pocket knife with the smaller blade snapped off halfway. Had to have sentimental value, which awkwardly made Barnes more human. A pack of mouth fresheners, and Anson thought of the onion-loving conductor. Raw onions, at that. In the wallet an old photo of a young Doug Barnes together with a man and a woman in front of what could be an early n-space drive ship – back when spacecraft were still streamlined with curves. A couple of used maglev tickets. Two receipts from local inns. A thickish wad of bank notes that Anson didn’t check in case the AI got curious. A single phone number scrawled onto a scrap of paper. And one other photo of a man in his early thirties, smiling into the camera.
Everything changed again.
Anson knew the face very well. Most days he shaved it.
He took out the alien’s trade. A box made of dull silver metal. For all he knew, lethal to the possessor in some weird way. Although most alien trades didn’t actually kill anyone, not directly. Some did nothing, some were the key to a new technology and a few had a curious effect on humans.
As with the five-metre-high and two wide, sort-of-yellow-metal arch traded by something like a very large butterfly, in exchange for a bag of groceries from a Tesco in Yeovil, part of the Frome Free State in England. An arch that hummed and turned blue when you walked through it. True there was a mild tingling throughout your body, but doctors and scientists could find no ill effects. In fact, the reverse was true. That arch made humans healthier. Cancers vanished. Asthma was forgotten. People looked and felt younger. The couple who’d made the trade – this was before GalDiv took over human/alien business on Earth – got very rich very quickly, which was good because six months later they began to change sex. So did everyone else who’d Walked the Arch. Not unknown, scientists said, clownfish and a few other animals do the same. This was of little comfort to men whose bodies and minds began to change as if nature was correcting an original mistake. Although after the first few months – it took around a year – the change felt entirely natural. It was also total, as if a person’s DNA had been altered – which turned out to be the case, although in a very complex way that defeated human science. Males lost bone mass and height. Their sexual characteristics atrophied and vanished, replaced by a female’s, perfect in every detail. If young enough at the start of the process, they could become pregnant and suckle their young. They ended up feeling related – but not too closely – to their original selves. For women, the reverse. Breasts replaced by abs, ovaries by testicles, urethra and clitoris melded into one – and capable of fathering a child. Smaller and slighter in build and far less hairy. Curiously, the change that caused the most concern – never for long – was developing an Adam’s apple. For men it was PMT or the menopause, depending on how old they were. Women who changed were happy to be rid of both. And then discovered male middle-aged angst and realised that nature always gets you in the end.
The major concern, that people hadn’t been asked if they wanted to change sex. The obvious answer, that no one had known they would, somehow missed the point. A sex change without permission was as bad as sanction or derision, and those two belonged to the dark ages. The alien arrival had created a world where anything went. Other than in a few small, backward city states, you were whoever you wanted to be. The Arch’s very perfection threatened to affect this. No current human medical techniques could compete. So while you could transition to the opposite sex, here was alien tech to emphasize that you hadn’t, not really.
It was never discovered who was responsible: old-time religious fanatics; alien tech haters; people wanting to prevent unhappiness and hurt. One night the Arch was attacked with explosives and while apparently undamaged, never glowed blue again.
* * *
Anson put the box back into his pocket and tried not to think of the daughter he’d left behind. A year old, once the light of his life, but only a reminder of
the woman he’d lost. Grief takes people in strange ways. For now he couldn’t even say his daughter’s name to himself. Whenever he remembered her, he saw the three of them happy together. So now the daughter was with the grandparents and if Anson came back, such a big if, maybe one day he’d delight in holding her close again.
People got on and off as the train drew closer to the city. No one spoke to the man who stared out of the window with a fury so intense it might even shatter the glass. Outside the villages grew closer together. Mount Cook loomed in the north. When the rain reached Gresham the man seemed to relax a little, looking out at the city instead of through it. The track followed the old MAX light rail route into the centre and stopped at Pioneer Square. The man got off, mingling with the sparse crowd walking towards the concourse.
* * *
The two men waiting for him took Anson efficiently. He barely felt the hypodermic and was unconscious before he hit the ground.
* * *
Anson woke up with a raging thirst in a room flooded with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows filling two of the walls. There was a large bottle of water on the floor next to the couch. He sat up, the room only spinning for a second or so, and gulped half the water. Then asked himself the obvious question: What the fuck is going on?
Whoever had drugged him wanted Anson alive. More, they weren’t exactly against him, otherwise he’d have been tied up, and no water. So unlikely to be the family of the man he wanted to kill. Then who? And why?
The room was simply but well furnished, with that sense of being just right, effortlessly, almost by accident. Nothing so common as designed. Probably part of an expensive apartment high over the city.
He heard the door open and stood up.
The man who walked in was around Anson’s age. Not always easy to tell, Asians often looked so young.
“Hi. My name’s Tse.” His tone was warm and friendly. “Sorry about the invite. We had to get you out of there quickly. You have enemies, Anson. They’re also ours.”
“You know why I came?”
“I assume it’s to avenge your wife. Which you still can. We’ll even help you.”
Anson Greenaway would never understand why he’d trusted Tse. But he did, the trust deepening into a deep and abiding friendship.
“What do you know about it?” Anson asked.
It seemed that Tse knew more about Sara’s death than did her husband. But first he led Anson onto the penthouse terrace overlooking the Williamette River. Coffee, cold meats, fruit and warm rolls. Anson ate and listened.
At first it was nothing to do with Sara’s murder.
“You know about pre-cognition?”
Anon did. The Wild was home to all the psychic beliefs. City states preferred hard science. He gave a guarded yes.
“Do you know how it works?”
“Not the details.”
Tse said, “Let me tell you.”
Pre-cognition was seeing where you were now in life, the present, and where you wanted to be, the future. Or where you would be unless you were lucky enough to avoid it. Pre-cognition showed all the main stages between what you wanted or feared. Often these stages, events made no obvious sense. But since they were part of the overall possibility/probability state of the universe, and so were related to an infinity of other events, no human could expect to understand. Be content with knowing if you do this then that happens... maybe. Oh, also forget past, present, future, because in the pre-cog world, in that which lies above and below the universe, they don’t exist. It’s all now and time is only a zip code.
“That could be annoying,” Anson said, “for a pre-cog.”
“You learn to cope. At least, some of us do. Others long for an ordered existence. No surprises. Total control.” He paused and looked over the river. “Aliens have pre-cogs, too. And somewhere out there,” pointing to the sky, “is an alliance, an empire of order-loving pre-cogs who do not like humanity. But. I’m ahead of myself.”
“Must happen a lot,” Anson said and felt a little guilty at the joke, weak as it was. This was no place for humour. He had a wife to avenge.
Tse half smiled. “So. Pre-cogs on Earth got organised around three thousand years ago. We learned not to stand out in a crowd. No more public divination. No more trusted advisor to a monarch.”
Anson wondered if there really was a secret Council of Five, as beloved by conspiracy theorists, who secretly ruled the world. He was only half joking.
Tse smiled wearily and explained.
Not all pre-cogs were good guys. Many of history’s murderous bastards had a pre-cog alongside, helping them to destroy millions of lives. How else had a failure called Hitler got to cause World War II? No coincidence that Nazi Germany was such a disciplined state. Hitler’s pre-cog daemon was one who loathed the freedom, the creativity of the human world. Same with Pol Pot. On the other hand, pre-cogs had been there to work alongside people like Da Vinci and Einstein.
Another thing: aliens had been dealing with humans for millennia. But with enough sense or experience to keep it secret. And here pre-cogs were also useful: they could see, sometimes, how a good trade could be made without knowing why.
Then the Gliese went public when they painted the moon and everything changed. The Gliese were the emissaries, the servants of a pre-cog empire in the galaxy that, like many of their human equivalents, hated randomness, disorder and creativity. And they wanted to either destroy or absorb Earth. Which would, in time, lead to the humans fighting each other, most unaware they were mere ignorant foot soldiers, even those who believed they were leaders.
The alien pre-cogs would win.
Unless.
A slim hope, at present barely formulated. It seems that there are certain individuals alive who somehow can help defeat the enemy.
Here’s the thing: Anson Greenaway’s daughter is one of them.
There is a strong possibility that one day she will be instrumental in destroying the pre-cog galactic empire.
Some of Earth’s own pre-cogs have been in regular contact with various pre-cog aliens for centuries... and have built family fortunes as a result. Many would welcome Earth being subsumed into the greater pre-cog empire.
Others loathe the idea, but are often torn between loyalty to their own kind and loyalty to the human race.
Tse is one of them. Untorn.
Order-loving human pre-cogs, aware of the danger that Greenaway’s daughter probably would become, arranged the killing. It went wrong, with only Sara murdered. The rape was part cover-up, part anger. Better for people to believe an arrogant city state youth than an attempted assassination.
“You’re asking me to believe one hell of a lot,” Anson said. He wondered why he felt so calm, then understood he still only had room for hate. And yet with that a sense almost of relief, as he began to understand why his wife had been murdered. Never knowing why would lessen the satisfaction of revenge.
“I know exactly who murdered my wife. A twenty-four-year-old kid from here, wealthy parents, who came into the Wild looking to cause hell.”
Tse merely looked at him.
Anson knew a moment’s unease. What if he was wrong? No. The young man had been the only stranger in the area. All Wilders accounted for. “How is my daughter so important?”
“We don’t know,” Tse said. “Only that she is and must survive if we’re to defeat the alien pre-cogs. This means giving her a new identity. I’m sorry, but she has to leave the Wild. You may never see her again.”
“Sara would never forgive me... and she’s my daughter!”
“Sara knew. She was pre-cog.”
Anson felt strangely light-headed. “I know. She told me.”
“What?”
“Years ago. Except she didn’t call it pre-cog, just a sense of the future. She had a rough idea of some of what you just said. Sara was from Seattle City, know that? She came to the Wild because she sensed danger to herself and her yet-to-be-born child. Knew that our daughter would be special.
She told me before we married. Later on she got some idea of this conflict you talk about. We felt part of it without knowing how, other than our daughter.” He still couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
“You believed her?”
“We’re open-minded in the Wild. Besides, she proved it a few times.” He stopped for a moment. “If we’d known... why didn’t you warn us?”
“We didn’t know the probabilities had changed,” Tse said. “Before, your daughter wouldn’t be in danger until she was grown up. And we did keep an eye on you all.”
“So you didn’t know Sara would be killed?” A test question to which he already knew the obvious answer.
“I knew she might be, but not for years.” He paused, then: “The markers we see, the events that lead to an outcome often change. Sara’s death was never as certain as your daughter’s importance.”
“She dies so our daughter lives?”
“You too.”
“Why not tell us?”
“We learned long ago that if someone knows their possible timeline, it very often changes. Your daughter wouldn’t be a saviour. Earth gets taken over.”
“The Wild can protect her.”
“Only by changing the probability line. And the alien pre-cogs win.”
Anson shook his head. “That’s a fantasy fact too far.” Tse nodded. “Of course. But there’s someone who you might believe.”
“I doubt it.” And was aware of someone coming onto the terrace, turned round and could only stare in shock.
“Sad to meet like this,” said the woman known throughout the Wild as Cleo. “You have our sympathies. We share your anger and sorrow.”
Anson had grown up knowing the Exchange ran commerce throughout the Wild. Some said it regulated the Wild itself. Cleo had been the Exchange’s local representative for as long as Anson could remember. A tall woman, austere, who always looked to be in her fifties. People joked that the Exchange had discovered the secret of eternal middle age.
“You’re part of this?” he asked.
“The Exchange is. All that Tse has told you is true. Your daughter is vital. She cannot remain in the Wild. You must not have any contact with her for many years. Only then can she know you are her father. I can promise she will be happy and secure. She will want for nothing.