Brave New Worlds

One of which Pepper had just flattened.

Stanuel knew they no longer had an hour now.

Pepper squatted in front of the hatch. 'It's good I'm not claustrophobic. '

'This runs all the way to the restaurant at the tower. It's the fastest way there. '

'If we don't choke on fumes and grease first. ' Pepper scraped grease off the inside.

Stanuel handed him a mask with filters from the tiny utility closet underneath the pipe. He also found a set of headlamps. 'Get in, I'll follow, we need to hurry. '

Pepper hauled himself into the tube and Stanuel followed, worming his way in. When he closed the hatch after them the darkness seemed infinite until Pepper clicked a tiny penlight on.

Moving down the tube was simple enough. They were in the hub. They were weightless. They could use their fingertips to slowly move their way along.

After several minutes Pepper asked, voice muffled by the filter, 'so how did it happen? Haven was one of the most committed to the idea of techno-democracy. '

There were hundreds of little bubbles of life scattered all throughout the asteroid belt, hidden away from the mess of Earth and her orbit by distance and anonymity. Each one a petri dish of politics and culture. Each a pearl formed around a bit of asteroid dirt that birthed it.

'There are problems with a techno-democracy, 'muttered Stanuel. 'If you're a purist, like we were, you had to have the citizenry decide on everything. 'the sheer amount of things that a society needed decided had almost crushed them.

Every minute everyone had to decide something. Pass a new law. Agree to send delegates to another station. Accept taxes. Divvy out taxes. Pay a bill. The stream of decisions became overwhelming, constantly popping up and requiring an electronic yes or no. And research was needed for each decision.

'The artificial intelligence modelers came up with our solution. They created intelligences that would vote just as you would if you had the time to do nothing but focus on voting. ' they weren't real artificial intelligences. The modelers took your voting record, and paired it to your buying habits, social habits, and all the other aspects of your life that were tracked in modern life to model your habits. After all, if a bank could use a financial profile to figure out if an unusual purchase didn't reflect the buyer's habits and freeze an account for safety reasons, why couldn't the same black box logic be applied to a voter's patterns?

Pepper snorted. 'You turned over your voting to machines. '

Stanuel shook his head, making the headlamp's light dart from side to side. 'Not machines. Us. The profiles were incredible. They modeled what votes were important enough — or that the profilers were uncertain to get right — so that they only passed on the important ones to us. They were like spam filters for voting. They freed us from the incredible flood of meaningless minutiae that the daily running of a government needed. '

'But they failed,' Pepper grunted.

'Yes and no. '

'Quiet. ' Pepper pointed his penlight down. 'I hear something. Clinking around back the way we came from. '

'Someone chasing us?'

'No. It's mechanical. '

Stanuel thought about it for a moment. He couldn't think of anything. 'Rover?'

Pepper stopped and Stanuel collided with his boots. 'So our time has run out. '

'I don't know. '

A faint clang echoed around them. 'Back up, 'Pepper said, pushing him away with a quick shove of the boot to the top of his head.

'What are you doing?'

'We've come far enough. ' Four extremely loud bangs filled the tube with absurdly bright flashes of light. Pepper moved out through the ragged rip in the pipe.

Another large wall blocked him. 'What is this?'

Stanuel, still blinking, looked at it from still inside the pipe. 'You'll want the other side. Nothing but vacuum on the other side. ' Had Pepper used more explosive they might have just been blown right out the side of Haven.

'Right. ' Pepper twisted further out, and another explosion rocked the pipe.

When Stanuel wriggled out and around the tube he saw trees. They'd blown a hole in the lawn of the gardens. They carefully climbed out, pushing past dirt, and the tubes and support equipment that monitored and maintained

The gardens and soaked the roots with water.

'Now what?' Stanuel asked. 'We're going to be seen. '

'Now it gets messy,' Pepper said. He pulled Stanuel along toward the large elevator at the center. 'I'm going with a frontal assault. It'll be messy. But. I do well at messy. '

'There's no reason for me to be here, then,' Stanuel said. 'What use will I be? I failed to get you there through the exhaust pipes. Why not just let me go?'

Pepper laughed. 'Not quite ready to die for the cause, Stanuel?'

'No. Yes. I'm not sure, it just feels like suicide, and I'm not sure who that helps. '

'You're safer with me. ' Pepper launched them from branch to branch through the trees. Now that curfews were in effect, no families perched in the great globe of green, no kids screaming and racing through the trees. It was eerily silent.

Pepper slowed them down in the last grove of trees before the elevators at the core of the gardens. As they gently floated towards the lobby at the bottom of the shaft three well-built men, the kind who obviously trained their bodies up on the rim of the wheel, turned the corner.

They carried stun guns. Non-lethal, but still menacing.

Stanuel heard a click. Pepper held out a gun in each hand. Real guns, perfectly lethal.

'I'd turn those off,' Pepper said to the men, 'and pass them over, and then no-one would get hurt. '

They hesitated. But then the commanding voice of Pan filled the gardens. 'Do as he says. And then escort him to me. '

They looked at each other, unhappy, and tossed the guns over. Pepper threw them off into the trees. 'You're escorting us?'

The three unhappy security men nodded. 'Pan says you have an electromagnetic pulse weapon. We're not to provoke you. '

Stanuel bit his lip. It felt like a trap. These traitors were taking them into the maw of the beast, and Pepper, as far as he could see, looked cheerful about it. 'It's a trap,' he muttered.

'Well of course it is,' Pepper said. 'But it's a good one that avoids us skulking about, getting dirtier, or having to shoot our way through. ' the mercenary followed Pan's lackeys into the elevator. He turned and looked at Stanuel, hovering outside. 'And Pan's right. I do have an E. M. P device. But if I trigger it this deep into the hub, I take out all your power generating capabilities and computer core systems. '

'Really?' Stanuel was intrigued.

Pepper held up a tiny metal tube with a button on the end. 'If I get to the tower,' Pepper said. 'I can trigger it and take out Pan, while leaving the rest of the station unaffected. '

Stanuel had weathered five days of his beloved Haven under the autocratic rule of Pan, the trickster.

He'd travel with Pepper to see it end, he realized.

He pulled himself into the elevator.

For five days Haven's populace had a ruler, a single being whose word was law, whose thoughts were made policy. Pan stood in the center of the command console, its face lit by the light of a hundred screens and the reflections off the inner rim of Haven's great wheel.

Pan wore a simple blue suit, had tan skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. His androgynous face and thin body meant that had he stood in a crowd of Haven's citizens, he would hardly have been noticed. He could be anybody, or everybody.

He also flickered slightly as he turned.

'My executioner and his companion. I'm delighted,' Pan said. 'If I could shake your hand, I would. ' He gave