Mind Over Ship

“I wasn’t exactly his spouse back then,” Tia said. But Andrea touched her hand again, and she said, “But, if you think so, I mean, why not?”

“Splendid!” Andrea put her cup down and led Tia to the opposite end of Saul’s couch. Like Saul, Tia had no implants, so Andrea opened a new squid for her and helped her put it on. Then she sat between them, casually touching their bare arms as the preffing generator on the table began to whir. She didn’t watch the baseline shapes herself but instead watched her mechanical scouts with her inner sight. She had released a handful of the cockroach-sized explorers on the carpet while Tia was out of the room, and they had spread throughout the house.

The conventional wisdom about Saul Jaspersen seemed to be true: he so distrusted machine intelligence that there was no mentar, midem, or even subem handling his affairs. The only AI she encountered was an ancient and totally unsecured house puter. And all that it seemed to contain were recipes, photos, house hold budgets, and other homey files.

A scout found the courier pouch in a wastebasket in Saul’s study. Another scout found the greeting card from Alblaitor under a stack of papers on his desk. While two scouts pulled it out and propped it open, a third scanned it for her to read. The text supported her fears.

Meanwhile, the preffing session began, and scenarios alternately designed for Saul or Tia were projected above the table. The two glassy-eyed subjects watched with stuporous indifference.

E-P said, At the very least we’ll get some good sidebobs out of this.

The scouts found and scanned dozens of datapins they found in the house, but none of them remotely resembled the one described in the card. After a half hour had passed with no success, Andrea began to worry that Saul had cached it off-site somewhere. She repeatedly dosed him and Tia with the MDMOEP under her fingernails, but the drug’s effect was diminishing. Then she had the inspiration to check Saul’s person and, sure enough, she found the pin in his breast pocket. That, alone, was a good sign of its authenticity.

Got it, she said and inserted it into her sidekick.

We’re safe-cloning it now, E-P said a moment later. It appears to be encrypted, probably to his eyes only. But that won’t impede us once we build his sim.

When E-P finished copying the datapin, Andrea replaced it in Saul’s pocket and recalled her scouts to her satchel. The preffing session was wrapping up. Andrea put her head back and closed her eyes. She wished she could just leave now and return to her tank, but she was obliged to play out the charade. She had to praise Saul and Tia for their cooperation, to share the dinner roast with them that was already in the oven. Its charnel-house stench made her stomach churn. For the remaining few minutes of solitude that she had, she stood at her always room window and watched clouds drift across the Bay. At home, the sun was only a little farther along its daily path than here in Alaska, but much higher in the sky. There was some sort of sailing regatta in progress around Alcatraz Island. Big colorful sails, like the wedges of pie charts.

Meanwhile, E-P built a quarantine space into which it loaded a newly assembled Jaspersen sim and sidebob, a copy of the datapin, and an Andrea sim. It was a completely isolated little universe where the clock ran hundreds of times faster than normal. There was no link between it and real reality, no chance of any malware leakage in case the datapin was booby-trapped. The plan was to let the quarantine world run for six months of local time. That should give Andrea’s sim the opportunity to use the Jaspersen sim or sidebob to open and explore the datapin and for any evil surprise to make itself known. If there was any funny business at all, the quarantine space would automatically implode, signaling those in the real world to its danger.

The Unlucky Colonist

In the space yards, construction accidents were rare, but those that did occur tended to be spectacular. A couple of days following Fred’s meeting with Veronica’s proxy, a railgun that was shooting silver ingots from a decommissioned Oship to one of the Lucky Five malfed, spraying a stream of twenty-five-kilogram metal bricks across a wide arc of space. Most had trajectories that sent them harmlessly away from the station, but several dozen were heading for its most densely built regions. Waste scuppers successfully intercepted all but a handful of these. One ingot slammed into one of the habitation drums of the Chernobyl. It pierced the hull plating but was stopped dead by the outer saltwater jacket that shielded the drums from galactic cosmic rays and asteroid strikes. The escaping water froze and formed an ice plug, just as it was designed to do.

Another silver brick struck the engine of a shuttle, causing a crippling explosion that sent the craft into the path of a construction tender, which in turn took out several more ships in a chain reaction that halted all traffic in the Aria yards for several hours.

A third penetrated Fred’s docking spar several space gates away from his own. He left his proxy in charge and hurried to the accident scene to lend a hand. When he arrived, the russ security and donald dockworkers were engaged in patching two breaches in the spar hull. The ingot had passed through the spar, but the holes didn’t line up. The ingot had been deflected by something inside the spar, and Fred searched the space gate to determine what it was. It turned out to be the belt mechanism that fed the gate’s railgun. Fred swam over just as a gang of donalds was removing a cryocapsule that had been crushed inside the mechanism. The capsule was split along its seams, and the damage was so extensive that there was no doubt the colonist inside was irretrievable.

Something odd caught Fred’s eye — a spot of blood on the belt and more along the capsule seam. He might have missed it, since blood at an accident scene was unremarkable, but the biostatic process that these capsules employed required dehydrating the blood. If he saw blood, it should be in a powder form, not liquid.

When Fred looked up, all the donalds in his vicinity were straining themselves to control their laughter. This was such an odd response to a deadly emergency that he looked around to see what they were laughing at. A lone donald was performing a burlesque of a ballet. At first Fred was confounded by this bizarre behavior, but then he recalled the retroboy’s erotic dance in the method nightclub and his Original Flaw. And, in fact, the donald seemed to be sodomizing himself with his tail as he danced, leaving no doubt as to his meaning. When the clown realized that Fred was watching him, he froze in midair. All of the donalds surrounding him seemed to hold their breath. How did they know about the method? Fred turned back to the crushed cryocapsule. Top Ape, himself, was there with fear in his eyes.

In a state of shock, Fred managed to set aside the incident for the moment, and he glanced deliberately at the ceiling. Top Ape understood and leaped into action. Dock work at the space gate had been suspended during the emergency; now Top Ape got it started again. He formed unnecessarily complicated bucket lines of cargo crates and shells that effectively shielded Fred from all of the fixed security cams. Meanwhile, Fred turned off his TECA sidekick. He pulled a tiny scout from a pouch on his belt and linked it to his Spectre. He placed the scout inside the split seam of the capsule and sent it to explore the interior. What it should have found was biostasis maintenance equipment: pumps, electronics, a liquid nitrogen reservoir. But what it did find was an assault rifle, ammunition, field supplies, a portable medkit.

The supposed colonist, himself, wore a battle suit and was packed into the tight space like a contortionist. As the scout reached his head, which was crushed beyond repair, Fred wasn’t sure who he would see. The member of some aff’s private army? A cloned soldier? What he did see was the biggest surprise of all. The soldier was a TOTE.

Fred recalled his scout. While he waited for it, he swiped the capsule’s control panel, which was redlined across the board. The name that popped up was certain to be counterfeit, but the capsule’s final destination was not — the Chernobyl.

When Top Ape returned, Fred told him to lose the cryocapsule somewhere where it would never be found and to fix all records of it. Then he returned to his own space gate. Along the way, the donalds struggled to contain their mockery.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, as Fred was returning on a shuttle from a scheduled mentar delivery to the Kiev, and an unscheduled visit to the Chernobyl, he received an urgent call from Mando.

“Fred!” his friend exclaimed. “The Fentan has a slot! You still want to go? It leaves in four days. Should I buy it for you?”