The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  She stopped in front of two young men. Their spaceborn legs spilled off the ends of their couches. This had to be them. If they were miners, they’d have brought footrests.

  Interplanetary regulations forbade interrupting an operator during a telepresence session. It could cause physical and mental disorientation. But the two phavatars Elfrida’s team had encountered on the scarp had refused to talk to them. Hadn’t even identified their operators, which regulations also forbade. So Elfrida felt justified in pulling one of their headsets off.

  “You tried to interfere with our legitimate campaigning activities,” she said to the pimply young face she uncovered. “That was totally out of line. And you copied our idea. Who hired you to do that?”

  She knew already. Didn’t want it to be true. Had to ask.

  The youth stared up at her, his eyes wide and wild. Then he let out a roar, exploded off his couch, and punched her in the nose.

  ★

  “Oh my God! Baby! What happened?”

  Cydney rushed out of the radial corridor leading to the VIP suites. Elfrida stood in the foyer, holding a wad of gauze to her nose. A medibot had sprayed congealant into her nostrils to stop the bleeding, and given her a painkiller, but she could feel her nose puffing up.

  “Had a heeling I’d hind ‘ou here,” she said.

  “What happened to your nose?”

  “Yo’ went-a-t’ug punched m’.” Cydney frowned, unable to make out what she was saying. Elfrida articulated harder. “I asked him who hired him to mess with our banner campaign. And he punched me. But he didn’t mean to. He was disoriented. And he was really apologetic afterwards. And he told me that you hired him and his friend to copy our banner campaign, and take down our banners, too.”

  “What a liar!” Cydney squealed. “I never said to take down your banners!”

  She covered her mouth.

  “Whoops,” Elfrida said. People were staring. She didn’t care. “I told you about the banner campaign, Cyds. I asked your advice on fonts. I didn’t know you were going to steal the idea.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Someone told Angelica Lin about it. Someone’s been spending a lot of time up here. And now I know why.”

  “Would you believe, for the hot showers?” Cydney said with a sickly smile.

  “Lin declared her candidacy a couple of days ago. You had the scoop. I didn’t put two and two together at the time, but now I understand. You’re helping her with her campaign. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I knew you’d think I was competing with you, but it’s not like that.”

  “You can be really self-destructive, Cyds,” Elfrida said. “This is at least the second time you’ve fucked up your own career.”

  Angelica Lin came into the foyer, her hair down, wearing a loose black pantsuit. “Oh God,” she said, catching sight of Elfrida’s face. “You’re bleeding! Sit down.”

  “I don’t stand with my nose,” Elfrida said childishly, but she sat down on a red velvet hassock.

  Angelica Lin sat down on the sofa opposite her. Cydney sat beside her. Elfrida realized that Lin’s pantsuit was actually pyjamas.

  And suddenly she knew the truth.

  It felt like a deluge of cold water, stealing her breath, quenching her righteous anger. When she was capable of speaking without screaming, she said, “Let’s go home, Cyds.”

  Cydney shook her head. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do. You should go home and get some rest.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Which makes it weird that she’s wearing pyjamas.”

  “They’re comfortable,” Lin said. “Laugh.”

  “Laugh. Fucking har-dee-har-dee-haw.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lin said quietly.

  “You’re sorry? You are sorry?”

  “Don’t, Ellie,” Cydney squealed.

  “What? I’m not doing anything. You’re the one who—while my back was turned—”

  Cydney jumped to her feet and darted behind the sofa. “Well, what am I supposed to do when you’re spending all your time with Miiike?!?”

  Elfrida lurched upright. She kicked the hassock she’d been sitting on, so hard that she hurt her foot. “How could you, Cyds?”

  “Goto, stop this,” Lin said. Her authoritative tone gave Elfrida pause.

  Cydney filled the momentary silence. “So what if I am sleeping with her!” she shouted. “Sex is meaningless! Isn’t that what you said after you fucked John Mendoza? It was only sex! Sex is meaningless!”

  The foyer was dead silent.

  Elfrida heard a titter from somewhere behind her.

  Lin shrugged humorously, for the benefit of their growing audience. “There isn’t really much I can add to that. Except I hope we’re all mature enough that this won’t affect us professionally.”

  “You’re mature enough, anyway,” Elfrida mumbled. “You could be her mother. All that surgery isn’t fooling anyone.”

  “Put it in a campaign spot,” Lin said tartly. “You’re onto a winning line of attack there.”

  “I hate this fucking campaign!” It was a desperate appeal to Cydney, who only giggled nervously.

  “So go home,” Lin said. “Really. Think about it. You can quit anytime.”

  Elfrida launched herself at Lin and grabbed a handful of her shiny black hair. Cydney screamed. So did everyone else in the foyer.

  Lin grabbed Elfrida’s wrist, twisted it until she let go of her hair, and sidestepped.

  Two of Zazoë Heap’s bodyguards and the receptionist from the front desk dragged the women apart.

  Since Elfrida had been the aggressor, they pinned her to the floor. Her nose started bleeding again, and a maidbot rushed in and sprayed sanitizer in her eyes.

  ★

  A few hours later, Cydney edged up to the little sandcastle jammed between two larger ones. Neighborhood children stared at her. Hydrosquitoes landed on her hair. Ugh, this whole set-up was so revoltingly quirky.

  “Ellie?”

  No answer. Cydney pressed her finger on the fingerprint reader of the concertina door.

  She knew she was in the wrong. Sleeping with Angie had been a betrayal. She shouldn’t have done it. Guilt was a novel sensation, but strangely, not unwelcome. It clarified everything.

  I have to talk to her, she thought. Apologize. Beg for forgiveness.

  NOT RECOGNIZED, blinked the fingerprint reader.

  “Oh my God! You bitch!”

  Elfrida had obviously changed the permissions to lock Cydney out.

  “All my stuff is in there!”

  Tears sprang to Cydney’s eyes. She blundered through the village, weeping, and escaped into the darkness.

  By the time she got back to L1, she had managed to stop crying. She fixed a rigid smile on her mouth.

  Bad enough that vid of their earlier fight in the foyer was already percolating through the gossip feeds. She didn’t want to give her rivals—or Angelica’s—any more ammo.

  As she swept past the reception desk, the groupies and stringers sat up, but all they got was footage of her rigid back, the straight shoulders of a chieftain’s daughter.

  The door of Angelica’s suite still recognized her, anyway.

  Roughs for new banners flickered on the whiteboarded walls. Angelica reclined on the bed, eyes wide, pupils moving rapidly. She was simming something. But she must’ve had a window to reality open, because she sat up when Cydney came in. “Have a look at this.”

  “What?”

  “Hasselblatter’s released a promotional sim. Now you can personally experience the future of Mercury, when herds of robot bison roam the nightside, and a city on rails chugs majestically around the planet.” Angelica’s voice dripped with derision. “It’s already been picked up by all the major new-release curators. Need I say this is bad for us? It’s a disaster.”

  Cydney sat down on the floor, her legs splayed out. “I don’t care about the campaign.”

  Angelica slid off the bed and knelt in front of her.
“This is all Hasselblatter’s fault, you know. You do know that?”

  “I’ve lost her! She’ll never trust me again!”

  “But it’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. Sex—what is it? Like you said, it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Cydney nodded uncertainly.

  “It’s Hasselblatter’s fault. She’s been working for his campaign pretty much full-time, hasn’t she? He does this. I’ve seen it before. He picks someone out of the ranks and favors them. Flatters them. Listens to them. Recruits them into his inner circle. And that is what he’s doing to Elfrida. If you don’t act now, you will lose her … to him.”

  “That … actually makes a lot of sense. She is totally in the tank for him.”

  “Yep. So you have to disillusion her. Make her see that he’s a opportunistic fraud. The only thing Abdullah Hasselblatter cares about is Abdullah Hasselblatter. His policy positions are whatever happens to serve his career. There is nothing and no one he won’t betray to get ahead. And what’s more, he’s stupid.”

  Cydney was about to object that you couldn’t get appointed to the President’s Advisory Council if you were stupid. Then she reconsidered. Yes, you could.

  “He’s deeply stupid. And that is how we’re going to take him down.”

  “I don’t understand. What can we say that we haven’t said already?”

  “There’s a way.”

  “Angie … the voters are stupid, too. That’s why they’re buying his crap.”

  “They won’t buy it anymore, after this.” Angelica sat back on her heels. She pushed her shiny black hair behind her ears. The light shone into her pupils, turning them silver, the color of the retinal implants at the backs of her eyes. “I didn’t want to resort to personal attacks. But now we have no choice.” She hesitated. “It just so happens I know something about Dr. Hasselblatter that almost no one else does.”

  She told Cydney what it was.

  “Oh. My. God,” Cydney said excitedly. “This is going to bury him.”

  xv.

  Numbed by Cydney’s betrayal, Elfrida took refuge in work. She had to report the altercation on the Rowling Scarp. Sitting in the HR office—which had been transformed into a satellite campaign headquarters—she bashed out a report. But she hesitated to send it. She didn’t want to get the children in trouble. She decided to go see Dr. Seth in person.

  Although Dr. Seth was the acting director of UNVRP, he shunned the plush executive suites on L1. She presented herself at his modest office in the Life Support block. He didn’t even have a secretary.

  “Coffee, Ms. Goto?”

  While Dr. Seth fussed with the coffee-maker, Elfrida stared through the open door to the right of his desk. Staffers monitored surveillance screens and telematics displays. She accepted the cup of coffee Dr. Seth handed her.

  “Genuine Idaho beans,” he winked. “Now, how can I help you?”

  “Well, I just sent you a report, sir. Basically, there was an altercation on the Rowling Scarp. I’m afraid it was my fault. Some of the miners were using UNVRP phavatars for campaign activities, and we ran into each other and, uh, had a frank exchange of views. And one of the phavatars fell off the scarp.”

  Dr. Seth let out an explosive grunt. His round, almond-brown face was so wrinkled that it was hard to read his expression. But his eyes twinkled with amusement. “And what happened to your nose?”

  “Oh.” High on painkillers, Elfrida had forgotten that her nose currently resembled a squashed tomato. “Yes, sir. That happened, too. But it was my fault, really.”

  “Has the phavatar that, er—fell off the scarp—been recovered?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Elfrida had last seen it lying in a heap at the bottom of the Rowling Scarp. After she talked to Cydney’s rent-a-thugs, they had promised to take their one remaining phavatar and try to recover it.

  “Salvage efforts are in progress, but I’m afraid it may be extensively damaged. And I just wanted to make sure you knew, sir, that it was entirely my fault. The children named in my report are too young to know better. They’re too young to be operating phavatars on the surface of Mercury in the first place.”

  “Children grow up fast in space, Ms. Goto.”

  “Yes, obviously. But it would be unfair to punish them as if they were adults, and that’s why—”

  “That’s why you’re nobly attempting to take the blame.” Dr. Seth put on a pair of old-fashioned interface glasses . He leaned back, reading her report. Elfrida stared mindlessly through the connecting door. Several staffers had clustered around a single screen. Others continued to monitor life-support functions on screens cluttered with old-fashioned graphs. All this could be automated, and if Dr. Seth had his way, she thought, it would be.

  “I see … I see.” Dr. Seth took off his glasses. “Well, Ms. Goto, I’m afraid there’s no way to avoid some form of disciplinary action. The involvement of UNVRP phavatars puts their operators—and in fact, UNVRP itself—in violation of UN campaign law. Why did you allow it?”

  “It wasn’t because Dr. Hasselblatter is my boss, if that’s what you’re thinking, sir. I would’ve let them campaign for anyone—for you!—if you were the one promising to let them stay here. All they want is to stay in their home, the only place they know!”

  She glared at the old scientist, challenging him to admit the truth.

  “I expect Vlajkovic has told you it’s because they’re purebloods. That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Riiight,” Elfrida sneered. “Purebloods are people, too, you know! My father is a pureblood.”

  “How nice. So am I, as it happens. One hundred percent Jain. It beggars belief that a religious minority can be considered a racial subgroup, but that is how the PLAN sees it. They destroyed New Kolkata in ’62, reducing the total Jain population of the universe by half. Anyway, the personnel requirements of the Phase Five ramp were determined by a straightforward cost/benefit analysis. But your suspicion is widely shared. And if the workforce is evicted, that suspicion will harden; the perception will turn into the truth.”

  Elfrida stared at him in confusion. Whose side was he on, anyway?

  “Regarding the phavatars,” Dr. Seth said, changing the subject. “They’ll all have to be brought in soon, anyway. You can tell Vlajkovic that I have the firmware updates he’s been expecting. They are ready to be installed at any time.”

  “Was there some issue with the firmware, sir?”

  Dr. Seth smiled secretively. “There are always issues with the firmware. Ask any engineer.”

  Laughter erupted in the other room. Elfrida and Dr. Seth peered through the connecting door. Everyone had crowded around a single screen.

  Dr. Seth levered himself out of his chair. “What’s all that chortling about?” he called.

  “Sir … uh, you might want to see this.”

  Dr. Seth hobbled through the crowd. Though Earthborn, he had been in space so long that he was severely decrepit. He needed crutches or a mobility chair, Elfrida thought, following on his heels.

  The screen everyone had been looking at displayed a vid grabbed from the internet. It showed a bedroom that looked like it should be roped off in a stately home on Earth. But it wasn’t on Earth. You could tell from the way the people in the bedroom were bouncing around.

  Stark naked.

  People?

  Half a dozen people … and as many bots.

  Fascinated and grossed out, Elfrida looked closer. The guy operating the screen tapped one of the wincing, sweating human faces.

  “Oh. My. God,” Elfrida said.

  She hadn’t recognized him instantly, since he was not only naked, but being diddled by a maidbot. But it was unmistakably Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter.

  ★

  In the year 2288, sex with robots was one of the last taboos. Mainstream society perceived it as disgusting, risky, and above all, sad. It was the resort of freaks who couldn’t get a real person to sleep with them.

  In
vain did personhood activists protest that they weren’t just fetishists, that they loved their sexbots.

  Society sniggered, knowing better. What did sex have to do with love, anyway?

  ★

  All too aware of this context, Dr. Hasselblatter held a press conference that same evening. Elfrida joined the audience. Her unicorn displayed a scroll in the corner of her eye: 650,849,295 … 652,388,101 … This was an estimate of the number of people who had seen the scandalous vid so far.

  A standing-room-only crowd filled the lobby of Hotel Mercury, which was a bubble of thick glass sintered to the inner wall of Tolkien Crater. Rarely used these days, the lobby still had the original décor. A giant mural proclaimed, “On this spot, the first human being set foot on Mercury.” This was not quite true; the first explorers had touched down about seven kilometers to the north. But it had suited Hotel Mercury to claim the historical distinction, and now it formed a backdrop for Dr. Hasselblatter’s livestreamed statement to the solar system.

  Everyone had brought their carpets, and the lobby was hot as well as crowded. Shorter than the locals, Elfrida jumped up and down, trying to see. She had no idea how Dr. Hasselblatter was going to wiggle out of what the news feeds were calling ‘Sexbotgate.’

  “This isn’t about my hurt feelings,” he declared. “This is about my supporters, my fans and followers, and the people who work for me. The Space Corps performs indispensable services throughout the solar system. Their accomplishments cannot be tarnished by any underhanded political stunt.

  “Most of all, this is about my friends and family.”

  Two paces behind Dr. Hasselblatter stood his wife, demure in her burka, holding the hand of his small son.

  “Why should they be made to suffer for my youthful indiscretions?”

  Not bad, Elfrida thought hopefully. The youthful-indiscretion line was the only one possible to take, under the circumstances. Dr. Hasselblatter’s delivery was measured, his voice low and remorseful. Having his family on stage helped, too.