The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  The only thing worse than being arrested, she realized, was being arrested—and being jeered at by spaceborn commuters who thought she was the bad guy.

  xxi.

  Grumpy Doug towed Elfrida through the crowd. Upstream from the stone bridge, an inflatable raft floated on the sewer. It supported a large cage. Inside, a dozen people sat, lay, or paced.

  “Feel like spending a few days in there?” Grumpy Doug said. “Does that look more comfortable than the cabin?”

  The street bulged into a plaza lined with shops. Mirrors coated the overhang of cliff. A blue light reflected off the mirrors, revolving atop an octagonal koban with glass walls. Grumpy Doug thrust her inside.

  It was just like a koban anyplace (well, any poor place) on Earth. Uniformed police officers worked at screens, drank coffee, consoled a lost child, gave directions to the confused. They all rose to salute Grumpy Doug. He greeted them by name, cracked a joke or two, and guided Elfrida down a spiral stair in the middle of the koban. They landed in a security center below street level, which was more what she would have expected from a clone-run tyranny. Thousands of surveillance screens.

  A female officer strip-searched Elfrida and scanned her with every type of ray known to man. They took her contacts.

  At least she wasn’t handcuffed again afterwards. She rubbed the weals on her wrists, reminding herself of Earth and its laws. Laws that would save her, if she could only figure out how to invoke them.

  Grumpy Doug waited for her in an office as empty as his eyes. A single vid hung on the wall, showing an antique helicopter lifting off a rooftop. Bullets ripped in slow motion through American flags at the edge of the roof, over and over.

  Elfrida sat on a broken ergoform, which didn’t conform to her body, but retained the impression of someone else’s skinnier thighs.

  “Well?” Grumpy Doug said.

  “Hab Horror: 10,000 Enslaved by Clone Gang on Mercury.” Elfrida listened to how the words sounded, and then shook her head. “The media always gets it wrong, don’t they?”

  “Which is why we try to stay off their radar.”

  “I’m not a threat.”

  “To us? No. But you are a threat to someone.”

  Elfrida started to ask who, caught it back. There were so many candidates.

  “Made any enemies on Luna lately?”

  “Luna? I have some friends there.” She thought of Mendoza. “People I know from work. That’s all.”

  “So you don’t know anyone at the UN Leadership in Robotics Institute?”

  “LIRI? No, I never—wait, I once attended a conference that was chaired by a LIRI guy. But that was months ago.”

  “So, you don’t know why we would have been asked to eliminate you as a favor to LIRI.”

  “No, I—what? Eliminate me?”

  “Yup.” For the first time, Grumpy Doug’s expression held something other than hostility. “Sorry.”

  “You can’t mean this. You don’t mean it.” She sprang up and backed into the corner of the office.

  Grumpy Doug followed her trapped gaze to the vid of the helicopter in the wall frame. “Know what that is?”

  “N-no. You can’t …”

  “The fall of Washington. Our founder, the first Doug—Founder Doug, we call him—escaped in that helicopter when the Soy Latte Party of New York overran Washington in 2170. He hooked up with his rich friends. Commandeered what was left of NASA’s fleet, and fled into exile. They ended up taking refuge in the American colony here. The rest is history, as folks say.”

  “Wrightstuff, Inc. is a listed corporation. You’ve got shareholders, partners, you’re subject to UN law, you can’t do this. You can’t hurt me.”

  Grumpy Doug pushed the black wing of his fringe back. “The UN’s got it all their own way these days. Technology gives them total power over everyone on Earth, directly or indirectly. Ever heard of the ISA? Yes, of course you have. With the exception of a few luddites like yourself, they can not only read all your communications, they can read your freaking thoughts, or what you choose to store in your BCI, which is the same thing for most people. Sure, there’s encryption … but how many people bother? And even then, how do you know the ISA hasn’t figured out how to crack the latest free-speech app from Thumbsucker Corp.? You don’t. What it comes down to is this: As they used to say in America, love it or leave it.”

  Elfrida trembled.

  “So we left it.”

  Doug approached closer to her.

  “Once upon a time, people thought technology would be the new equalizer. Power to the people. An end to government control. Well, it turns out that governments can use technology too, and they have bigger budgets.” Grumpy Doug sighed. “The US government wasn’t great at technology, surprisingly enough. And look what happened to them. The Big Disconnect. Secessionist movements from coast to shining coast. All leading up to a hipster gunman raising a soy latte in the Oval Office, proclaiming an end to tyranny.”

  “Don’t hurt me.”

  “The new equalizer, Ms. Goto, is the same as the old equalizer. Distance. Once upon a time, people emigrated to the New World to escape repression. Now, they emigrate to the Belt, to the Jovian moons … or to Mercury. The ISA can’t read your comms if you aren’t using the internet. And, even if they do hack your intranet, which ain’t happening here … because, as you mentioned, we’re a listed company, with a ten-figure market capitalization, and IT capacity up the wazoo … the cost of taking action rises proportionately with distance from Earth. So they don’t. Move.”

  “Oh my Jesus, forgive me—no, that wasn’t it. Mendoza taught me. Why can’t I remember? Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins—yes—save us from the fires of hell, and—”

  “Move.”

  It came to Elfrida that what he meant was, actually, move.

  She moved.

  Grumpy Doug touched the wall. It concertinaed. The floor ended in a drop into darkness. The reek of sewage drifted up, stronger than ever.

  “Are you gonna jump, or would you rather be pushed?”

  ★

  Elfrida stumbled along a narrow walkway beside a sewer. Grumpy Doug followed her, as silent as Death with a better haircut. His flashlight illuminated the damp stone ledge, the gleam of rushing sewage below. She felt the pulse of industrial motors in her breastbone.

  A sensor-triggered blaze of light drowned Grumpy Doug’s flashlight. The current vanished under a filth-splattered regocrete platform. On the far side of the platform, grilles jerked up and down. The sewer poured through them, and the solid waste got caught in the grilles. Comb-like attachments scraped it off into an overhead chute, which slanted down to a giant hopper at the far end of the walkway. Elfrida saw figures servicing the hopper, assumed they were bots, and realized after a second that they were humans in hazmat coveralls.

  “Help,” she screamed. “Help.”

  The noise of machinery crushed her voice.

  Grumpy Doug grabbed her arm and pulled her along the platform. “Not another word.”

  The hopper loomed over them. Shit-caked hoods peered over the edge. The workers were sorting the refuse, separating recyclables for separate processing. And now Elfrida knew what was going to happen to her. One 67-kilo load of refuse coming up. Classification: BIOWASTE.

  She struggled in Grumpy Doug’s grip. His voice seemed to come from a great distance.

  “Put the damn coverall on.”

  Orange fabric puddled on the catwalk.

  Grumpy Doug was stepping into an identical garment.

  “Those’re gecko boots? EVA-rated? Keep ‘em on. The coverall seals to them.”

  Elfrida fumbled with the preternaturally slippery fabric. The recycling workers watched in silence. When she had the coverall on—it was made for someone much taller—Grumpy Doug led her back to the filter grilles. The nearest one wheezed open. Sewage rapidly built up behind it, oozed across the catwalk, and started to spill over the top of the grille.

  “Hurry up!”

&
nbsp; Without waiting for her to move, Grumpy Doug picked her up and tossed her through the gap above the grille. She landed on her hands and knees in fast-rushing liquid filth. It came up to her elbows, chilling her flesh through the coverall.

  Grumpy Doug landed with a splash beside her. The grille slammed back up to the ceiling. The secondary scraper grille recommenced shuttling up and down.

  They stood in a shallow delta of wastewater, barred with shadows that made an almost pretty pattern on the water, like silk.

  “Watch your footing,” Grumpy Doug said. “It’s slippery.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Elfrida asked through the mesh covering her face.

  “Nope. You got a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  “What?”

  Grumpy Doug walked faster. “Your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  Twists of toxic foam flowed past. The current rilled against the backs of Elfrida’s legs. Her shins ached from the cold, although her feet, in her own EVA boots, were fine.

  “What’s my mother got to do with anything?”

  “You didn’t mention that she works for the New Holy Roman Empire’s intelligence service.”

  ★

  Elfrida nearly said, No, she doesn’t.

  The accusation stunned her.

  But then she thought about it.

  Why was her mother always so paranoid about ISA surveillance? Why had she been able to search an ISA database and find Elfrida’s name there, as she’d mentioned during their last talk?

  Goto, you are a chump.

  There was no way a mere clerk in the Rome prosecutor’s office would have access to ISA databases. Not in a million years.

  Grumpy Doug had to be telling the truth.

  Her mother was an agent of the New Holy Roman Empire, the cobbled-together state known for its permissive laws on religion. And all her life, Elfrida had never guessed.

  Does Dad know? she wondered, but that was a question for later.

  “How in God’s name do you know that?” she said.

  “Because I’m an NHRE agent, too.”

  ★

  Elfrida lost her footing. She went down on her ass. The icy water melded her coverall to her body, seeping in through leaky seams.

  Grumpy Doug’s flashlight beam swung over the walls and ceiling. He helped her up.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t do God. But the great thing about the NHRE is you don’t have to do God. They don’t require belief in anything or anyone. That’s very different from us, here. We require belief in Doug.”

  Elfrida’s teeth chattered. “Why should I b-b-believe you?”

  “Because I didn’t shoot you?”

  “There is th-th-that.”

  “You OK?”

  “I’m fine. Explain to me how that works, that you’re President Doug’s clone, but you’re also a—a ….”

  “Say it,” he prompted. “A spy.”

  “A spy.”

  “Oldest game in human history, Ms. Goto. All the fancy eavesdropping technology in the universe can’t replace HUMINT.”

  “But why?”

  “President Doug is nuts.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Others have noticed, too.” Grumpy Doug strode on, splashing through the water. “We’re a member of the Sovereignty Forum, a debating society for sovereign and would-be sovereign entities. It’s a diverse membership. At one end of the spectrum, you got the NHRE, a dysfunctional theocracy-lite run by the Vatican for the protection of religious minorities. At the other end, you got us, a remnant of a defunct hyperpower, run by a dynasty of clones for the protection of ourselves. But we see eye to eye on some things.” His mesh faceplate briefly swung towards her. “Liberty and all that jazz. To make a long story short, other members of the Sovereignty Forum represented to me that they were increasingly concerned about Doug. The NHRE expressed those concerns most convincingly in terms of moral realism.”

  “And?”

  “I realized they had a point. When your game plan involves arming geeks with lethal weapons, based on computer models that get them slaughtered 99 out of a hundred times, you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “I tried to talk the president out of it. So did Bashful Doug.” Elfrida understood that he meant the clone who had saved her life in the water mine.

  “I’m going to have to call you something else,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Grumpy Doug doesn’t really seem appropriate anymore.”

  “Works for me. I’m still the fourth-generation product of a reproductive cloning program. My momma was forced to gestate a mini-me of a long-dead governor of New Jersey. Yeah, I’m grumpy.”

  “New what?”

  “New Jersey. Used to be a state.”

  “Wasn’t your Founder Doug the last president of America?”

  “That’s what we want you to think. Nope, he was just a governor. But he would have become president, if the federal government had lasted a few years longer.”

  “He had leadership ability?”

  “Vid his speeches. They make the Nuremberg Rallies look like a Toastmasters meeting. Liberty? Independence? Dignity? Snort. Patriotism; well, maybe a little.”

  Elfrida didn’t get most of Grumpy Doug’s references. She reflected that when people came to live in space, they brought their era with them. There was a kind of cultural relativity at work in the solar system, over even small distances. Only a few kilometers of vacuum separated UNVRP HQ from Mt. Gotham, but it was like she’d passed through a time warp from the modern universe into the United States, circa 2170.

  And she wanted to get back home.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “That was the primary filtration system back there. Coming up, secondary filtration.”

  The tunnel dead-ended in a fine-mesh filter. A giant bot arm sliced through the beam of Grumpy Doug’s flashlight, vacuuming silt out of the mesh. Machinery throbbed. The current pulled at Elfrida’s legs, trying to pull her under.

  “Up,” Grumpy Doug said, pushing her at a ladder splarted to the wall. “Maintenance shaft.”

  They climbed into a large room full of desks. It was empty. Screens monitored data, infrared, and optic feeds.

  “I told the guys to knock off early.” Grumpy Doug opened a locker and took out an EVA suit in the Wrightstuff, Inc. colors of red, white, and blue. “Change into this.”

  Little waste had clung to Elfrida’s coverall: the liquid-glass coating let everything slide off. Her clothes underneath were a different story. That leaky seam had let in a lot of wastewater when she fell, and she was also smeared with ordure from the first leg of their journey through the sewers. Shivering, she pulled the EVA suit on over the mess.

  “Uh oh,” Grumpy Doug said, staring at one of the screens.

  “What? What?”

  Grumpy Doug clicked his fingers. An explosion rang out, echoing. Inside Mt. Gotham.

  The screen showed an angle up from the edge of the chasm. The hab’s 24-hour cycle had reached evening. The dimmed sun-lamps mauved the trees overhanging the chasm.

  A fiery trail arced across the roof. Another explosion shook fragments of rock down past the camera.

  “President Doug is upset,” Grumpy Doug said. “This is how he works off his stress. Holo targets. But the rockets are real.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “Ain’t about you. I bet I know what it is about.” He clicked away to a news feed. “Yup. Look at this. With two hours to go until voting closes, our gal Patel has conceded.”

  “The election? It’s over?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Wait—but I—I thought it wasn’t until tomorrow!”

  “You slept for a day and a half, honey. Medibot gave you a sedative. You needed it.”

  “Oh. God.” Elfrida’s brain reeled, absorbing the new information. “I thought I would still have a chance �
� the campaign … Dr. Hasselblatter …”

  “Currently on 0.4 percent.”

  “Who’s winning, then?”

  “Guess.”

  “Mork Rapp? Pyls O. Mani?”

  A familiar face appeared on the screen. “Angelica Lin.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Vote-counting software doesn’t lie.”

  Elfrida wheeled away from the screen. “I have to get back.”

  Grumpy Doug led her down a short corridor to an airlock.

  “You’ll find your way home,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just be safe.” Grumpy Doug reached into a pocket. “Almost forgot. Your contacts.”

  She popped the baggie of sterile fluid and fitted them into her eyes. “Thank you.” A cherub greeted her. You have one new email, from … “George Washington? Is that you?”

  “Not my real name, obviously. Keep me posted.”

  “Will you be OK?”

  “Sure. I can always talk him down. I’m gonna go do that right now.”

  The airlock valved. Grumpy Doug lifted a hand in farewell.

  Elfrida stumbled out onto the floor of the crater.

  Looking back and up, she saw the night-vision-green massif of Mt. Gotham burgeoning over her. A chartreuse rectangle at ground level, recessed beneath an overhang, was a vehicle airlock, the hab’s official entrance. No one would ever guess what lay within. 10,000 Trapped In Hab Horror … or 10,000 More-Or-Less-OK Colonists?

  She still didn’t know. But she did know that she was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.

  xxii.

  Jake Vlajkovic-Gates went next door, carrying his baby sister. The street of sandcastles looked as bad as he felt. The lights had been switched on a month ahead of schedule. They hadn’t been serviced, so half of the lights had burnt out the minute they were switched on. In this murk, the sandcastles looked like giant turds. A squirming horde of rats blanketed a dead cow in the alley.

  Jake turned away from the nauseating sight and knocked on the privacy screen of the next-door sandcastle.

  “Mrs. Aaron?”

  She came out, face drawn and wet. She’d lost someone, too.

  “Could I leave Bette with you? Just for a while?”