Free Stories 2015

by Baen Books

  She just called the consciousness of a little boy an unauthorized upload, and recommends I let them kill him so I don't have to deal with him anymore. I study her face, trying to picture me being her. I can't do it. I update my avatar back to my old self, the young version with the beautiful dark braids. Cook, Najim, and the old Natasha brighten, obviously thinking I'm on board with the proposal. My avatar gives the three of them a disgusted look.

  And flips them the bird.

  This time I seek out the shadows. Instead of darkness, I end up in sunlight. The airfield is as it was the day we visited, same light breeze, same roaring jets, but it's not my memory. My parents are gone and Matthew James stands by himself, his white-blond hair falling into his eyes and a toy airplane clutched to his chest.

  He squints at me in the bright sunlight and smiles. For the first time I see he has dimples. "You came," he says.

  He seems shorter now because I'm at my full adult height. I feel like myself again.

  "Can I talk to you?" I ask.

  He nods and an airplane flies overhead. He looks up and grins back at me, cocking his head toward the plane and raising his eyebrows in delight.

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "You're Natasha," he says, his voice stronger than I'd expect from a little kid. "My dad wanted you to take care of me."

  "I guess you could say that."

  "Are we trapped up in space?"

  "No. We're exactly where we're supposed to be."

  "I don't like little places."

  "It's not little here," I say, squinting up at the sky.

  "But we aren't here," he says. "This isn't real."

  "You're a smart kid." I study him for a moment as he watches the takeoffs. "Big fan of airplanes, huh?"

  He nods. "And flying. When I get big enough Dad says he'll take me hang-gliding." He doesn't give me a chance to respond before he frowns and tosses his toy plane to his feet. "I heard that old lady. I know I'm dead."

  "You're no more dead than me." I reach out my hand. "Want to help me explore Goldilocks?"

  The metal shell that has encapsulated us for decades creaks open and a slit of light expands to the entire brilliant blue sky. Our six-foot-tall robotic probe uncurls and we stand upright. The tingly itching of our sensors fades away to processing the real input of a cool sixteen degree Celsius breeze with the warmth of Alpha Centauri B warming our gray synthetic skin. My processors translate the chemicals to smells as they were trained to do back home—earthy dirt, grassy and something pungent-sweet I can't place, but that my chemical analysis translates as carbon-rich. The rolling landscape is filled with high grass swaying in the wind like a purple ocean.

  We didn't need Mission Control's authorization to land the ship, but they gave it to us anyway. Now that I know Matthew James is there, the extra noise in my processes make sense. He's less scared now, which helps our underlying feeling of panic, but it doesn't make up for everything. We spent two days getting to know each other and teaching our mind-construct how to deal with two uploads. At our processing speeds we had the malfunctions under control within hours.

  We reach down and collect a sample of the candy-colored grass for the Little Guys to analyze later.

  Back at Mission Control, Commander Cook watches us explore our alien world, brow furrowed. "Remember your protocol, sample collection should wait until after all your systems are online."

  "They're online already," I tell him. My avatar—back to her old self—stands beside the Matthew James avatar on the Mission Control screen.

  His blond hair falls into his avatar's eyes just as it did in life. "We're the pinnacle of scientific advancement for our time," he says, borrowing a line from a marketing video in my memory banks.

  Cook almost cracks a smile.

  A month after our landing we walk over squishy orange moss to the edge of a four thousand foot cliff and see the ocean far in the distance. Below us is a valley of plant-covered rock formations filled with fins and spires like a massive purple castle.

  One part of us imagines that exploring it will be like a giant jungle maze with imaginary pirates and dragons, while the other is already working on a theory that it'll provide a shelter base for a human settlement, perhaps even a city one day.

  "Valley survey commencing," I tell Mission Control and Matthew James' excitement zings through us as he realizes the plan.

  Mission Control pipes in. "But, how—? No, no, no, no, no. Your flight ability is for emergency use only. Find another way down."

  We leap and extend our sails, catching an updraft. Forty-two thousand useless sensors light up so it almost feels like the wind is hitting real skin. The "oh-man-this-is-so-blasting-awesome" part of us gets guidance from the "let's-be-sure-we-land-safe" part.

  And we fly.

  The 100 MPG Carburetor and Other Self-Evident Truths

  by Robert Buettner

  Robert Buettner worked as an international lawyer for the Marathon Oil Company. His life experiences inform this story, but only the ridiculous parts are true. During the early 1970s Muammar Khaddafi’s Revolutionary Command Council overthrew the Libyan monarchy, nationalized the oil holdings of companies including Marathon, and tried to use the proceeds to buy H-bombs from China. Those events rapidly precipitated the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, from the industrial democracies of the West to the Middle East’s Islamic theocracies. The echoes of those upheavals continue to shape world headlines today. Robert knows where Big Oil has hidden the 100 MPG carburetor, but if he told you he would have to kill your hybrid.

  “Rathole? They better not still be making rathole!” MacRoy shook his head, leaned back in his chair and blew cigar smoke toward the three of us seated around his conference room’s table. He said to Faris, “That’s a misprint. Can’t you goddam read?”

  Opposite MacRoy Faris, MacRoy’s drilling operations vice president, ran his finger across the perforated newsprint Morning Report telex. The report came from a drilling rig in the Libyan desert, five time zones east of us. In Libya, it was still May 10, 1970, which was good. However, despite the report’s title, in Libya it was no longer morning, which was very bad.

  Faris cleared his throat. “No misprint, Hugh. They haven’t made an inch below twenty-one feet since yesterday.”

  Shade and I, facing each other between MacRoy and Faris, swiveled our heads from Faris back to MacRoy like we were tennis spectators.

  MacRoy lurched forward, slapped his hands against his mahogany tabletop. “Well won’t that be about the best Mother’s Day present Colonel Khaddafi ever got? And a goddam catastrophe for us!” MacRoy’s cheeks flared Canadian bacon pink and he shook his head. “That sneaky midget goat rapist.”

  MacRoy snatched his cigar from between clenched teeth, then pounded it into each corner of his massive marble ashtray until the cigar crumbled.

  I shrugged across the table at Shade.

  Maybe MacRoy feared a midget goat rapist had snuck into his ashtray someplace.

  In his frenzy MacRoy had pronounced “about” “a-boot.” Dr. Gilbert Hugh MacRoy, unlike the bacon his cheeks resembled, actually came from Canada. His doctorate, however, did not. It came from the London School of Economics.

  Faris said, “We still got 'til midnight in Tripoli, Hugh. It’s noon there now.” Faris pronounced the operation commencement deadline “mid-naht.” Faris’ petroleum engineering doctorate came from Texas Eye & Am. In MacRoy’s universe that justified questioning whether Faris could goddam read.

  MacRoy was Senior Executive Vice President of International Exploration for the mid-major Marathon Oil Company. Marathon was the only mid-major anything headquartered in Findlay, Ohio on Sunday, May 10, 1970. Or ever before. But I’ll get back to that.

  You ask why making rathole on Mother’s Day, 1970 constituted a present for the fledgling revolutionary government of diminutive goatherd’s son Colonel Muammar al Khaddafi, and a goddam catastrophe for us? Well, it had nothing to do with animal sodomy, MacRoy’s allusi
ons notwithstanding.

  It had everything to do with the Petroleum Concession Agreement between the Kingdom of Libya, now Colonel Khaddafi’s People’s Republic of Libya, and Marathon Petroleum Libya, Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Marathon Oil Company.

  I swallowed.

  MacRoy’s reaction boded ill for the attorney who had authored the agreement last aforesaid. Who was also the Corporate Secretary of Marathon Petroleum Libya, Ltd. Who was also me.

  In oil well drilling, rathole was a second, shallow hole drilled prior to, and alongside, the main hole. When the drill pipe string was periodically withdrawn from the main hole, the string’s topmost section was lowered into the rathole and set aside, in the way that a sword was lowered into a scabbard, when the sword wasn’t poking something.

  Making rathole was just as vital to oil drilling as a scabbard was to swordplay. But making rathole was just as ancillary to poking a meaningful hole in something.

  Therefore, making rathole was expressly not “timely commencement of Operations, defined for purposes of this Concession Agreement as actual penetration of the Earth to find commercially recoverable hydrocarbon substances.”

  If no actual well, as opposed to a mere rathole, was commenced by midnight local time at Tripoli, Libya on Mother’s Day, Marathon would lose its rights under the concession agreement. So far, those rights amounted to most of a billion barrels of oil in the ground that Marathon had discovered for Libya. In 1970 the price of one barrel of oil was $3.18, and the three billion dollar value of a billion barrels of oil was twice the value of the entire Rockefeller family fortune.

  For lack of the right sort of hole in the ground, a vast fortune was about to become a windfall to a novice head of state who, despite standing five feet four inches tall, give or take a shoe lift, had ousted the Libyan monarchy by coup d’etat nine months earlier.

  MacRoy ran a hand through his hair. “What the hell’s cocked it up out there?”

  It was a fair question, even from MacRoy, who asked fair questions only when he lacked time to think up snotty ones. Oil wells were routinely drilled miles deep. Drilling a crummy fifty foot deep rathole through desert sand was normally even less difficult than dating a goat. Not that I had personally attempted either.

  Faris ran a finger across the telex flimsy again. “They tore up two bits but couldn’t get below twenty feet.”

  MacRoy frowned. “Why didn’t the idiots try a bull-nose diamond bit, then?”

  Faris shook his head. “They did. Scrubbed the stones out of the matrix in two hours.”

  MacRoy cast his eyes to the heavens while he unwrapped a fresh cigar. “Do I have to think of everything? Just have 'em twin the bloody hole.”

  If a drill hit a boulder or other impenetrable problem near the surface, the borehole could often be moved a few feet one side or the other, maybe the rig itself could even be skidded sideways, then a second, “twin” hole could be drilled alongside the difficult one.

  Faris released the perforated newsprint sheet and it drifted down onto the polished table. “They already tried. They moved eight feet left, then used up their last diamond bit grindin’ at the same depth. They’re gonna just spud the main borehole without a rathole, then come back to it.”

  MacRoy puffed life into cigar number two. “How long’s that gonna take?”

  Faris cocked his head, did the math. “Too long, prob’ly.”

  MacRoy frowned, turned toward Shade. “What do you think, Shade?”

  Shade sat with his bony shoulders hunched. His round, widow’s peaked head angled down above the hotshot pocket calculator the company had bought him, and he pressed a single key on it.

  Shade said, “I think they won’t make the deadline. I think we can salvage the concession, but it’ll be expensive. I think the obstruction sounds interesting.”

  MacRoy pointed at Shade’s calculator. “That thing tells you that?” “That thing” was no bigger than two packs of Marlboros, ran on flashlight batteries, and could add, subtract, multiply, divide, extract square roots, and display the result in glowing red numbers. The amazing thing was that it did all that for about the price of a family’s twenty-five inch color console Zenith.

  Shade kept his head down, shook it. “No. I wasn’t using it for that.”

  I knew what Shade was using it for. He did most math in his head, anyway. So he had rewired his calculator so that all it did now was count down, with a single button press, the number of days left until MacRoy retired.

  The concept was mine, the execution Shade’s. To remind us both that we took MacRoy’s profane bullying now so we could remake the world later. Shade was MacRoy’s heir apparent. Once Shade took over MacRoy’s job, the two of us were naïve enough to think we would then nudge the company toward saving the world.

  MacRoy asked, “Then how the hell do you know all that, Shade?”

  “Tripoli radio reported a Khamsin started blowing in south central Libya an hour ago. Even if the sand storm blows out in a few hours, which it could in May based on historic weather patterns, the rig crew’ll be cleaning up 'til well past midnight.”

  “Oh.” MacRoy pouted. “But you think we can save the concession?”

  Shade nodded without looking up. “For now, yes. Khaddafi knows three out of four Libyans can’t even read, much less engineer, construct, and operate wells, pipelines, natural gas plants, and marine tanker terminals. Mobil, Esso, all us foreign concessionaires, are building infrastructure that Khaddafi desperately needs, but that his work force simply can’t create. He’ll accept an additional percentage from us now in exchange for a modification of the agreement, so he doesn’t spook all his foreign investors. Then in a couple years he’ll nationalize everything. Then—” Having answered MacRoy’s question, Shade cut himself off.

  I knew what Shade had almost said, because Shade had whispered it to me as we walked down the hall to this meeting. Shade believed that Khaddafi’s nationalization of us in a couple of years would trigger similar realignments across the oil-producing world. The result would be the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, from the West’s democracies to the Middle East’s Islamic theocracies. It would reshape the next century.

  MacRoy’s immediate vision stopped short of the next century. He crossed his arms, grunted, then addressed Shade’s final pronouncement. “Why’s a boulder interesting?”

  Shade shrugged. “How is an eight foot wide diamond not interesting?”

  Shade’s title was Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President of International Exploration. But he also held the ceremonial rank of Vice President of Marathon’s Libyan subsidiary, like I was its corporate Secretary.

  Shade’s doctorate was from the same place as the rest of his formal education, the University of Nonexistent. But as Special Assistant his real job was troubleshooter, and he had risen from clerk to the job by demonstrating such intuitive genius that he seemed to see the future. Most people just called him “Shade” because that was all the name he introduced himself by. But also because people expected someone with Shade’s gift to go by one name, like “Merlin,” or “Houdini.”

  I helped Shade close on his house, so I knew his birth-certificate name was “Prometheus Robin Shade.” He had decided at age three that was too long to write out in cursive. He said his mother named him Prometheus because she was a small college classics professor, and Robin because he was born on the first day of spring.

  At the time I asked Shade why anybody who worked for MacRoy, who fired minions like he discarded cigars, would risk buying a house. Shade replied that he was an optimist in all things. Me, I rented.

  MacRoy narrowed his eyes, pointed his new cigar at Shade, his troubleshooter. “Get your ass over there and unscrew this pooch.”

  The more MacRoy characterized and metaphored, the more it occurred to me that the profession of domesticated animal in Canada must have been dodgy business. Maybe it was the winters. At least MacRoy hadn’t linked me to the contract language that had
brought us low.

  MacRoy shifted his gaze, then aimed his smoldering Macanudo between my eyes. “Take the shyster with you. He screwed this pooch in the first place.”

  Shade removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Are you sending me with a free hand, Hugh?”

  MacRoy nodded. “Make any deal you have to. The shyster, here, will make it legal.”

  I raised my eyebrows. A free hand?

  Arranging transatlantic phone conferences was slow and cumbersome. Telex was worse. And neither, coming out of Khaddafi’s Libya, was entirely secure from eavesdropping and decryption.

  So international executives like Shade typically were elected corporate officers empowered to bind their corporation with a pen stroke. And they took along a lawyer who was an elected corporate secretary to write up a deal and to attest their signature. But everybody in every oil company knew the team really didn’t dare sell the farm without approval from the boss back home. Unless the boss expressly gave you a free hand before you left.

  In this case the reason MacRoy was giving Shade and the shyster a free hand wasn’t communication difficulty. MacRoy wanted somebody besides himself to blame if the pooch remained screwed.

  Shade said, “Hugh, our negotiating position will be weak. Khaddafi’s the one with the machine guns and the dungeons.”

  I swallowed.

  Those were excellent reasons why the shyster should stay safely at home.

  I shook my head. “I can’t go. I’m scheduled to be in Washington in the morning.”

  Khaddafi’s business may have been revolution, and America’s business may have been business. However Washington’s business was, first, to be shocked – shocked! – about problems about which it could and would do jack squat, and, second, to then find someone besides itself to blame for them.

  MacRoy snorted. “That horseshit hearing?”

  For once, MacRoy was right. Horseshit underdescribed the vacuity of the Senate hearing I was scheduled to attend. It had been convened because average voters, whose economics degrees came from the same place as Shade’s, readily believed that thirty-six cents per gallon was a suspiciously high price to pay for gasoline. But then, voters also readily believed that the American oil industry had purchased, then hidden, the prototype of an automobile carburetor that enabled even the most gluttonous Oldsmobile to wring one hundred miles per gallon from regular gas.