There wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it. The listing wasn’t sanctioned by any meaningful government, so she could technically still run to regional law enforcement if things got rough, assuming whatever authorities she went to weren’t corrupt enough to turn her in for the reward. Unfortunately, it had the potential to cramp her style and slow her progress, which might’ve been Sempa’s real goal.
“He doesn’t know about Treasure,” Electra mused. “He wouldn’t risk putting other hunters on my trail if he knew I still had such a big-ticket Bi-MARP item on board.”
“Should we inform him, Miss Electra?” Ivy asked. “It may induce him to rescind the bounty.”
“No! Obviously not,” Electra said. “What the hell, Ivy?”
“Sorry, Miss Electra. My primary function is to serve your best interests,” Ivy said.
“Set a new parameter,” Electra said. “Your primary function is to serve my best interests and Treasure’s.”
“New parameter applied, Miss Electra.”
Only after she’d heard the confirmation did Electra realize what she’d done. Even if she had no intention of selling Treasure to Bi-MARP—and she definitely wasn’t going to—she didn’t need to alter Ivy’s primary functionality, at least not as thoroughly as she had. She’d already given Treasure nearly full access to all the ship’s functions and now she was establishing her as a person of prime importance within the interface. None of it was remotely normal behavior toward a temporary passenger.
Electra decided she must be lonely. That had to be it. It wasn’t that she really liked Treasure—or thought about her all the time, or wondered what it would be like to kiss her. They were partners for the time being, an ethical and financial arrangement that didn’t necessarily need to involve them forming an intense physical and emotional bond that… Electra shook her head to clear out the distracting thoughts. She would need to get a pet or a friend or something after she paid off the debt. Even if Ivy’s primary goals were changed, Electra’s weren’t. She needed to get out of debt and she thought Treasure could help, by being her unofficial Earth expert.
“Ivy, how exhaustive of a search within Chamber census data can you do?” Electra asked.
“Within every legally available parameter, but it will take some time to obtain all proper authorizations,” Ivy replied.
“See if you can find out how many humans still exist, according to the Chamber’s official government records,” Electra said. “Not the galactic net available information. Use the source document stuff that most people don’t bother with or don’t have the patience to obtain and computing power to sort.”
“I will inform you when the data has been obtained, analyzed and an answer is gleaned,” Ivy said.
Electra had already found two glaring contradictions to the allegedly official record on the human population, and she was pretty sure the whole story was being hidden. Sure, it’d taken some digging, inside information and a mountain of dumb luck to find Bort and Treasure, but the real barrier to anyone discovering that humans weren’t as extinct as everyone thought seemed to be the supposedly common knowledge that they were. Electra wanted to know who wanted it to seem that way and why.
Electra found Treasure in the lounge, which was furnished in vintage 1950s Koehler furniture and decorated to match a 1959 magazine advertisement that hung on the wall in a frame. Treasure lounged on the bright crimson sectional with a datapad in hand and a steaming cup of coffee resting on the multi-tier Lane end table. A coaster… She’s using a coaster. Electra loved that tidbit of consideration. The coaster was a replica of a ship’s nautical wheel. The use of it was pure class.
“I’ve been looking at the Bi-MARP list and I think there’s something missing,” Treasure said.
“In the grander scheme of Earth’s history, I’m sure there’s a lot missing.” Electra flopped onto one of the powder-blue barrel swivel chairs and slowly rotated once around before putting her toe against the wall to stop so she faced Treasure. “I don’t think the Jun’Tar are being particularly detail-oriented, since their source material is an incomplete set of encyclopedias.”
“You don’t know the half of it. The edition they’re using would have been considered out of date, even in my time,” Treasure said. “Based on this list, they missed something big, something people on Earth thought was valuable for more than a century but nobody knew the secret of—the recipe for Coca-Cola.”
“Is that a cake or a drug or what?”
“It was a soda that originally had a drug in it,” Treasure said. “They’ve got the bottling plant on the list, which I’m not sure how someone is supposed to get that for them since the main plant was in Atlanta, but even with the factory, you’d need the recipe.”
“Sounds promising… What’s in Coca-Cola?”
“Carbonated water, sugar, caramel, other stuff, but the trick is the exact amounts of everything,” Treasure said. “It was a closely guarded secret for forever, really.”
“So, we could make something up and claim it’s the original and see what they’ll offer?”
“We could—or we could check with this guy.” Treasure turned the datapad to show Electra the screen. A galaxy-net-news puff piece outlined the astounding collection of sodas from hundreds of planets gathered by an Oboidion. The proud owner of the museum dedicated solely to carbonated sugar water posed while manning a vintage pharmacy soda fountain dressed like a classic soda jerk. Oboidions looked, for the most part, like blue-and-gray palm trees with five spindle arms dangling from beneath the fronds. “The story says he’s making and serving Coke Classic, so he must have found the recipe or figured it out.”
“I doubt he’d part with anything, and I’d also bet other Bi-MARP hunters have already tried,” Electra said. “Oboidions are obsessive about their collections and highly suspicious of anyone stealing from them or not taking their collections seriously enough.”
“Other hunters are only going by the list and the list doesn’t have the formula on it,” Treasure said. “Plus, if he has the formula, we wouldn’t be taking anything if we copied it. The patent on Coca-Cola probably lapsed a dozen centuries ago.”
“We’d need a plan beyond simply asking to take a picture of his ultra-secret recipe from a long extinct civilization,” Electra said. “Oboidions are sentimental weirdos.”
“Sentimental, huh?” Treasure pondered the conundrum, tapping the top of the datapad gently against her chin while she thought. “Have you ever heard of the Make-a-Wish Foundation?”
“If there’s a foundation that grants wishes, I’ve got a few.”
“The catch is you have to be a dying child.”
“If I was a dying child, I would wish to not die.”
“Doesn’t work like that.”
“Seems like a cruel joke. ‘Hey, kid, want a wish? Not so fast. What’s your second choice?’” Electra said.
“It was more tragic than cruel, but that’s not the point,” Treasure said. “If we got some of the Coke Classic, we could have Ivy analyze it and tell us how to make it. You can do that, can’t you, Ivy?”
“If the materials present within the beverage are known to the galactic net databanks, yes, Miss Treasure,” Ivy said.
“Okay, but the Oboidion is selling the drink for consumption,” Electra said. “We don’t have the… How much does it cost?”
“Four million units.”
“Shit, for serious? Yeah, we don’t have that, and I’m assuming he expects us to drink the soda in front of him.”
“That’s why we’re going to revive the Make-a-Wish Foundation,” Treasure said.
The first step was clothing. Apparently Make-a-Wish Foundation women did not dress like late nineties intellectuals or freelance spaceship captains. When Electra pointed out that there was no way an Oboidion soft drink collector would know that, Treasure told her the point of scams was selling the part and for her to stop being a spoilsport. She didn’t want Treasure thinking she wasn’t fun, so she played a
long. Electra and Treasure stood in front of the fabricator console and tabbed through options.
“We need skirt suits,” Treasure said, “in banal colors.”
“How about with an Utopalex top?” Electra reached up to tap the Utopalex material option, but Treasure intercepted her hand.
“What is it with you and that material?” she asked. “It sticks to you like body paint and looks like a crude oil slick.”
“Because it feels like an hour-long massage every second you’re wearing it,” Electra said.
“It can’t.”
“It does. I don’t know how it does—magic or science or drugs. You have to try it to truly know.”
“I don’t want my pleasure centers bombarded nonstop while we try to pull this off,” Treasure said.
“Okay, but after, you should try it,” Electra said. “I have some old shorts you might be able to withstand.”
“Fine, deal, but after. Let’s go with tweed or wool in the meantime. If you want, you can go with Utopalex socks or something.”
“I’ve tried,” Electra said. “I couldn’t take more than two steps without moaning. I don’t even have a foot thing, but my feet apparently have an Utopalex fetish.”
“Two skirt suits, demure blouses, nylons, heels and…what kind of underwear do you like?” Treasure tapped away at the screen, setting up the work order. It hadn’t taken her long at all to master the fabricator controls, along with several other high-tech features of the ship.
“None if I can help it.”
“Boxers or briefs?”
Treasure was on the tab for ancient male underwear. Electra glared at her.
“I don’t see your endowment down there fitting in much else, and free-balling…”
“Bikini cut panties will work fine.” Electra punched the icon on the screen with her thumb. “Let me know when it’s ready. I’ll be in the Spatronic.”
She entered ‘banal’ into the options for hair and makeup styles on the Spatronic display. She hadn’t known what the word meant when Treasure had used it, but from the context clues, she could tell she wasn’t going to like it. The options that popped up confirmed her fears. Banal meant bland and boring. She picked a tight-weave top bun and subdued tones natural makeup setting. She undressed quickly and threw her clothes on the nearby chair in a haphazard pile. To ease her tension during the tone-down of her look, she added massage and sensory relaxation before climbing in.
Treasure wasn’t supposed to be able to get under her skin. That was where she was, though, finding soft spots, hot spots, cold spots and worst of all, weak spots. Being sexually attracted to her and liking her as a person weren’t new sensations. Electra enjoyed sex, came by attraction easily and was friendly enough to like and be liked without much effort. It was the hurting her feelings part that vexed her. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. The parts of her that could be hurt were few, far between and guarded carefully. She was a professional party guest, minor celebrity and the last of her kind. Aloof and untouchable were indelible parts of her being—or so she’d thought.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry. That was a weirdly aggressive thing to do based on some odd feelings and thoughts I haven’t been able to wrap my head around,” Treasure said from outside the pod. “The thing is, I’m bisexual, you know?”
“Most bipeds are,” Electra said. “Quadsexuals or polysexuals tend to like legs too much to settle for two on themselves or others.”
“I don’t mean sexually attracted to bipeds, although that’s good to know that’s what that word means now. I was talking about liking both genders,” Treasure said. “And I think you’re beautiful.”
Only liking two genders within one species, a nearly extinct species at that, seemed like a great way to massively limit possibilities for sex and dating. Considering the options on Earth before it had fallen apart, that might have been progressive from Treasure’s standpoint. Still, it wasn’t like Electra didn’t have her own limitations on preferences, and she did like being called beautiful. The fact that Treasure could wound and soothe so readily meant she was already well within Electra’s emotional fortress. What, if anything, Electra could do about it at that point remained a mystery.
“So, the boxers or briefs comment?”
“Maybe a bad joke. Maybe trying to get you to fit both roles,” Treasure said. “I think it was mostly trying to put distance where it might not need to be. Regardless, I shouldn’t have said it and I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” Electra said. “I…um…think you’re beautiful too.”
“Really?” Treasure’s tone changed entirely after a single compliment.
“I thought you looked joyful when I first saw you in the simulation display. Radiant, even.” It was so much easier to admit while staring at the soothing, swirling lights projected on the inside of the Spatronic lid. They were calibrated perfectly to induce relaxation in her when combined with the faint background sounds, the almost imperceptible scents pumped into the chamber and the thousands of caressing waves from the chair itself. Honesty practically oozed out of her in such a serene state.
“Haphazardly painting a room and singing badly?” Treasure’s voice gave away the smile Electra couldn’t see.
“You’re super impressive, you know?” Electra said. “Not your room-painting skills, obviously, but pretty much everything else.”
“I do know that,” Treasure said, “but I never get tired of hearing it. What did I do to impress you?”
“You’re handling all this insanely well. You got dropped into a crazy reality, you were told your entire life was a computer simulation and you somehow took it all in stride. Better than handled it, really. You rolled up your flannel sleeves and got to work rebuilding Earth. I had to be convinced with the promise of massive amounts of money, but you simply wanted to help.”
“Ah, that, yeah. I’d love to take full credit for my laidback reaction, but I’ve had help,” Treasure said. “Ivy has been feeding me soothing pills to help me cope. They’re kind of amazing. Plus, I saw The Matrix a month before you pulled me out, so I was already kind of suspicious that life might be a simulation. I’m just glad reality isn’t like in the movie. Everything got way harder for Neo, and things are actually really nice on this ship, which is now making me wonder if we’re in another simulation.”
“Please don’t say that,” Electra said. “I do not need that in my head right now.”
“Sorry. I promise we’re not in a simulation…unless we are,” Treasure said. “Here. I had these made for you.” The underwear Treasure handed into the pod were bikini-cut blue satin with black lace trim and two black silk opera-length stockings. “You’re far too stylish for hosiery and cotton panties.”
“Thank you. They’re lovely,” Electra said.
“If you feel like modeling them for me at some point, I’d love to see how I did in shopping for you. If that would be weird or whatever, you don’t have to.”
Electra pondered something flirty to say in response, but by the time she had a comment at the ready, Treasure had already left the room. What she’d come up with wasn’t very good anyway—a poorly worded, blunt comment about needing help putting them on…and taking them off. The more she replayed the goofy words in her head, the happier she was that she hadn’t said them. By the time she ventured a peek out of the Spatronic, Treasure was gone and Electra wondered if the flirty statement had been all in her head or a product of the soothing algorithm of the Spatronic and her deep desire to be attractive to Treasure.
* * * *
They arrived at the busy starport for Andaphros, the largest city on the northernmost continent of Epsilon Five. The planet hadn’t been inhabited originally. Half-a-dozen alien species had coordinated a terraforming project centuries before to take advantage of the rich mineral deposits left by asteroid bombardment during planetary formation. As such, the starport was a series of tubes, tunnels and elevators color-coded for which species could survive in which pathway, based on
atmospheric tolerances. Electra gave over guidance to Ivy to bring the Cadillux safely into the busy green landing zone. Oxygen content and reasonable temperatures would only be found within the walkways off the landing zone, as the atmosphere was too thin to support anything but Oboidions. Electra assumed that the thin atmosphere served the additional function of allowing new meteors to strike the surface to regenerate mineral deposits. The high gravity quotient of the planet snagged any passing space rock and pulled it to the surface in a nearly constant rain of fiery streaks across the sky.
Electra and Treasure stepped off the ship’s gangplank dressed in their skirt suits, stockings, heels, professionally coifed hair and, in Electra’s case, the lien enforcement tether provided by Letterman. Electra had to admit that they didn’t just look important and official, but she also felt the part. Apparently, Treasure knew how to run a con right down to how the con artist should feel beforehand.
“Where’s our dying child?” Treasure asked.
“Fizan said her grandniece will meet us at gate twenty-one,” Electra said.
They nodded to one another, stifling grins at the silliness of the situation, and began walking down the green-painted hallways toward the concourse’s main arrival zone. Their heels clicked against the metal floor in regular patterns as their pencil skirts uniformly limited their strides.
Once they reached the arrival zone, the building opened up a great deal, with large windows on all sides displaying the jagged black mountains and pale gray sky beyond. Dozens of alien species milled about, checking tickets, consulting maps and chatting among themselves. A large Gromphra stood beside gate twenty-one, holding a sign with ‘Make-a-Wish Foundation’ scrawled across it. Electra rolled her eyes and made her way over to Fizan’s grandniece, who was well over seven feet tall.
Electra Rex Page 9
