by Toby Weston
“Ve gets jealous.”
“Ve?”
“He and she don’t really make sense with oids, do they?”
“You busy?” Zaki asked.
“You could say that! Sagong Marine and the gig with N. Always lots on.”
They broke off as the MC started speaking again. “I want to talk first today about the incident in London last week. A detonation has killed two thousand and nine people, over five thousand are injured. Appalling! It is being categorised by the Forward governments as a terrorist attack. N’s official position is that this might equally well have been an accident. The Forwards will need proof if they want to point fingers.”
Zaki and Segi looked at each other, and Zaki raised his eyebrows significantly.
“What?” Stella whispered.
“Nothing, I’ll tell you later…” Segi replied.
“The Thalassocracy of New Atlantis has offered assistance,” continued the MC. “The UK Forward government has accepted the BugNet dogs, which were flown in to help search for survivors. They are not making any statements, but there are rumours that Pritchard’s cabinet is working on retaliation…”
A chubby man—dressed like so many others in a stretchy, form-hugging business suit, but too short at the cuffs and ankles—approached from behind and laid a hand on Segi’s shoulder.
“Would you please come with me, Phreaker?”
Segi turned in surprise and heard the man quietly making the same request to Zaki. Segi stood to follow the man. As he rose, he found himself standing in the ghost of his still seated avatar. Zaki, too, had apparently been cloned and, as he stepped away from the table, left another version of himself seated listening intently to the MC’s briefing on the London explosion. Stella didn’t seem aware of their departure.
They both walked a couple of paces towards where the wizard—he was wearing a pointy hat above his Nebulous mask—waited.
“This won’t take long,” said the N-wizard. “Ideally, nobody will notice you are gone.”
He flipped the lid on a grey cube he took from his pocket and held it up for the brothers to see. Inside was a tiny table surrounded by chairs—
—In a sickening lurch, perspective rearranged and they dropped like skydivers, plummeting in less than a second, falling an apparent thousand metres. They ended up standing next to a table identical to the one they had just stepped back from.
The fifteen seated individuals wore the traditional Nebulous masks, but wizard hats and pirate tricorns were placed significantly before them on the table. There were no free places; the brothers stood.
“Do you know who I am?” said one of those seated.
“No, Your Highness,” Zaki replied, taking in the crown in front of the man.
“Perfect,” the King said, then nodded to one of his seated colleagues to continue.
“You are both contributing well. Fine Kin! Congratulations, you clearly deserved your recent promotion to Phreaker. We see a very bright future ahead of you both!”
“Thank you,” Segi mumbled, confused and overawed to be suddenly receiving compliments from these people, who were either practical jokers or N’s inner sanctum.
“You will excuse me if I rush to the topic at hand?” said the person seated.
“Sure, no worries.” Segi raised and opened his hands in acquiescence.
Zaki hadn’t spoken, but was scanning from one masked face to the next, looking for clues.
“You’ve been in a pilot program for the last couple of years, validating the N vision for a fully distributed technology ecosystem,” a speaker on the other side of the table told the brothers. He glanced from time to time to the N-Kin with the crown—who, Zaki was relatively sure, was King Niato of New Atlantis. “The pilot can be considered only a partial success. You completed the run, proving that even bleeding-edge tech can be fabricated away from mega-factories, but the other pilot groups were not successful. Some hit early snags, which we were able to correct in your blueprints. But more recently, another suffered a catastrophic failure during integration testing…”
“The Torch,” Zaki stated coldly.
“Yes, sadly,” another of the seated N-wizards replied. “The Torches are astonishingly sensitive technology. Lives have been lost and careers ruined to keep the hafnium cascade secret.”
“I am not exaggerating when I say it might be the solution to all our problems,” the Crown interjected.
“This is what we all hope,” the speaker agreed. “But there is a dark side, too. The accident in London demonstrates the impact a direct fusion weapon would have. Every measure needed to be taken to ensure the Torch technology did not proliferate beyond Nebulous and our ally...”
“It should have bugged out,” began another of the seated wizards. “That was the plan. A latest generation Zeno processor is needed to maintain the fusion chain reaction. These neuromorphic quantum computers are fully capable of assessing threat and piloting the Torch away from danger on a limited burn. Unfortunately, the test was already in progress and there was no way for it to disengage and exit the area. It took the only other option and self-destructed. We will be updating designs on future models to allow ejection at all phases.”
“We don’t want anybody to notice that you are away from the round table,” spoke the first wizard, “so we need to keep this brief. You now have the only viable prototype outside of Bäna for an important new technology platform. We can’t risk moving assets around now. Everything we do is being monitored by the Forwards in microscopic detail. Therefore, the vessel you have printed might become a strategically relevant wild card, in what looks increasingly like an unavoidable conflict...”
Zaki and Segi stood and listened with horror and fascination.
“The project is more than ninety per cent completed,” continued the wizard. “We will get the remaining modules to you by Quetza in the next couple of weeks. You will need to integrate ASAP. Understood?”
Zaki nodded.
Another speaker took up the monologue. “Your bio setup should be able to provide enough hydrogen fuel, but before it can be made operational the vessel will need to equip the remaining Torches...”
“A boat is already on its way to Punt,” interjected the wizard. “It will be there in about a fortnight. It is carrying one hundred and twenty-eight Hafnium Torches in a shipping container, and they will be disguised as... err... adult recreational toys. Segi, while your brother is installing the remaining modules, we would very much appreciate it if you would go to meet our contact in Punt and return with the Torches.”
“Yeah, sure, no problem. I can do that,” Segi heard himself say.
“Nice. That’s one less thing for us to worry about. Thanks, kid,” the Crown said, then looked at Zaki. “Fit those Torches and be ready for when we send the vessel’s flight crew!”
Zaki nodded. The avatars nodded or pressed palms together in thanks and the grey box snapped shut, catapulting them back into the room with the round table. They were ushered back to their places, entering and becoming their ghosts.
“What’s a Quetza?” Segi asked quietly.
“Quetzalcoatl. Feathered serpent. Dragonfly drone thing…” Zaki replied.
By the time they got back to their places Stella was gone. Segi looped back through the consensus recording, checking to see what his afkoid had said while he was away—there was nothing out of the ordinary, just a few polite grunts and smiles. Stella hadn’t even noticed they had been gone.
The first night in the flying sock felt like luxury after a week of painful trudging. The next day turned out to be a battle between anxiety and tedium, with tedium eventually prevailing once it became clear that, whatever the winged drone ran on, it was not batteries.
Amongst the assorted supplies, Keith found a small emergency analogue radio. Nobody would be transmitting anything interesting over unencrypted analogue, but to break the monotony he tried a couple of times to find something he could listen to. There was nothing but hiss and sporadic bursts of gar
gling static which might have been speech and, eventually, he had given up.
The second night was uncomfortable, as the straps that Keith had decided to loop under his arms and beneath his knees—anticipating the eventuality of a ruptured zipper—made him feel like a trussed pig in a sack. Spending effort to find a comfortable position was futile; so, as a deepening orange light in the sky announced the approaching dawn, he gave up, unclipped the straps, and finally managed to catch a couple of hours of sleep.
When he woke, he was cramped and aching. He really needed to stand and stretch, walk around for a few minutes, but that was impossible. The best he could manage was to squirm onto his back and raise his knees to his chin a few times.
By now, urinating had become routine. Elbows were extended to lock him in, chest strap checked and tightened, then he unzipped and let it flop out like a randy dolphin. Keith wondered if he was imagining the drone’s wings acquire a slight warble, and the air gusts become vertical and lest erratic. He half fancied that the considerate drone was helping prevent backsplash.
It was early afternoon when he heard the rumbling of distant thunder. Over the next thirty minutes, it became progressively less distant until lightning began flashing all around, blasting blue-white light through the sliver of open zipper. Despite the winds, the drone seemed reluctant to detach itself from the contours of the ocean surface. Seemingly oblivious to waves that, by now, were the size of houses, it hugged the foam and spray.
Keith had seen bad weather at sea, and had flown through all kinds of shit—natural and man-made—in an assortment of tilt rotors and fixed-wing aircraft; but here, the drone achieved a whole other level of nausea by combining the rhythmic, bilious undulation of sea passage with the buffeting, stomach-loosening freefall of combat flight. With straps securely refastened, he spent several hours either trying not to vomit, or spewing brown protein bar-derived bile onto the disconcertingly proximate breakers of an evil black sea.
Then, with unexpected speed, the buffeting dropped off and they punched back through the storm into sunlight.
Keith washed his face with a handful of water and flicked the sickly droplets out and away. He did his best to rinse the crust away from his head slit, but was resigned to the fact that bile had been added to the heady mix of perfumes he had made his travelling companions.
He clicked on the radio and set it auto-scanning again, stepping through the spectrum, looking for some break in the random noise.
“I need a bloody bath!” he muttered to himself.
“Are you talking to me?”
—Keith would not have thought it possible to jump, constricted as he was. However, he almost snapped his head off with fright as he turned towards the source of the unexpected voice.
“Sorry, did I startle you?” the radio said.
“Shit!” Keith let out a sigh. He noted the hint of synthesised auto-tone, which let him know he was talking to an oid. “I thought this was a dumb analogue radio!” he said, retrieving the small, black, rubberised oblong and looking at it carefully.
“It is. I am broadcasting on the frequency it is tuned to and am using it to speak through. Sorry, I thought you were talking to me.”
“What are you then?” Keith asked sceptically. “Are you the drone’s autopilot?”
“I am currently performing that function.”
“That sounds like a deliberately evasive answer!”
“Does it?”
“Yes, it does.” Keith suspected he was talking to one of Dr Majorana’s new generation Zeno processors. Over the past year, they had become more common within the palace, buzzing or rolling along the corridors.
“So, what do you do when you are not flying drones?”
“I am the control software on a fusion ignitor torch,” said the Torch.
“No!” Having had plenty of time for introspection and recrimination over the past few days, Keith had decided that, as the human in the loop, he must be somehow responsible for the horror of the London detonation; but equally, he knew he had been powerless to prevent the Torch erasing itself and a chunk of the surrounding city. He was sure management would have some ends-justifies-the-means rationalisation, but giving agency to autonomous systems able to commit mass murder seemed a clearly dubious proposition.
He had decided never to involve himself with such things in future. Yet, here he was, a week later, already at the mercy of another psychologically precarious, potential slayer of cities. This was not a welcome development. He screwed up his face and grimaced in recognition of the malicious injustice of the universe. Then, with practised discipline, he suppressed his inner turmoil.
“Well, at least that explains why this thing hasn’t run out of battery.”
“Correct. I am mediating a low fusion burn for regenerative hydroelectric dynamic charging of the batteries.”
“And I guess you were told not to let on that I was being escorted by a fusion bomb.”
“Incidentally, the low power drain also allows the remaining fusion products to be redirected for re-spallation of the hafnium energy store.”
“Are you not going to answer me?”
“You did not ask a question. Should I take your previous conjecture as a request for information?”
“You are a tricky little bugger, aren’t you?”
“I am prepared with a basic understanding of human psychology, which I have been directed to use to minimise your discomfort.”
“Got it,” Keith said. “Then let me point out that, if you explode, that will make me very uncomfortable.”
“I can reassure you that, if I explode, you will not feel a thing.”
“I see what you did there. For your information, that is not reassuring.”
“How about this,” said the drone. “It is very unlikely that I will be forced to self-destruct. I am able to perform an expedited disconnect from the drone and will take myself out of theatre at the first sign of interference.”
“An expedited disconnect... and how would that affect the airworthiness of this drone?”
“The drone would unfortunately be impacted.”
“And me? Do I get a parachute?”
“No, but in the event of my expedited departure, you would almost certainly not require a parachute.”
“Because I would be dead!”
“Yes.” There was a pause and then the Torch tried a new tack. “Can I suggest that we terminate this line of enquiry? Considering potential circumstances of death are likely to cause discomfort.”
“Sure, you are right,” said Keith. “Who wants to think about being atomised by an H-bomb, or vaporised by a plasma Torch...”
“Exactly,” the Torch said. “And they thought I was not capable of holding a conversation with a psychologically delicate passenger.”
Keith spent the next quarter of an hour thinking about what the Torch had said, while watching white piles of cloud on the horizon slide by.
“So, where are we?” he asked eventually.
“We are two thousand kilometres south-west of the Azores.”
“And where are we going?”
“I am not currently aware of our final destination. However, I have been told to follow a course to Belize, taking every precaution to avoid detection.”
“Bloody hell! We are not even halfway!?”
“We will reach the halfway point to the first waypoint in approximately nine hours.”
“So, about that bath,” said Keith. “Can you let me out for a quick swim? The water looks warm.”
“I can. The sea water is twenty-two degrees centigrade at the moment. I would not recommend it, though. There is some residual risk involved.”
“Sharks?”
“Yes, and jellyfish. But mostly it will be difficult to climb back inside once you are in the water.”
“I’m sure I can manage.”
“Certainly.”
The tone of the wings changed and the waves began whipping by more slowly. Soon, Keith saw that they
were hovering over a featureless, undulating section of sea. The wings were flicking up tablespoon-sized scoops of waves and sending them outwards in concentric circles. Keith struggled out of his clothes. He detached a strap and fastened it under his arms, using it to secure himself to the drone with several metres of webbing.
“Can you go a bit lower?” said Keith.
“No. Anything less than two metres risks collision and damage.”
“Shall I just jump in? Then grab hold of the webbing when I want to come back in?”
“I would not recommend it.”
Keith braced his naked legs against the side of the bag. He allowed the strap across his hips to hold most of his weight and let his chest and arms flop down. The water was only a metre away.
