Everyone's Island

by Kris Schnee

  * * *

  The Cuban police avoided showing up; here was the punch that didn't come. Instead Garrett got a visit from Domingo, the official who'd tried to foist workers on him. The Director of Social Welfare. Domingo came on one of the party barges, grimly dressed but smiling, and found Garrett working in Dockside. "So, Mister Fox, I'm pleased to see the unpleasantness is behind you."

  I'd rather have it in front of me, thought Garrett. "We got through it on our own."

  "Collective effort can be impressive. I hope you'll be able to do as well managing your new workers. They come tomorrow."

  "The farm workers you wanted me to hire?" Garrett sighed. "So, are you going to ignore that recent 'unpleasantness'?"

  Domingo smiled. "Ignore it? No. Some are calling you a murderer, but we're using discretion in this matter. Too much of a bother to drag you to court."

  "How nice of you." Garrett could imagine some official deciding to have him hauled away in irons any day now for past "crimes" -- which was probably what Domingo wanted him to think about. Garrett's freedom was now more a matter of whether those in power liked him, than of whether he'd broken any law.

  "You can expect thirty-six of them tomorrow." Domingo pulled out a disk and handed it to Garrett. "To help you manage them, here are our files on each."

  "I told you I need an investment to expand our operations well in advance of new workers joining. But I'd be happy to look at the files and consider these people for hiring, once I have equipment for them to work with." He felt pleased with himself at that bit of diplomacy.

  Domingo waved dismissively. "Oh, you'll get your money."

  "I'll place orders as soon as I get it, or a binding commitment."

  Domingo laughed at him and said, "Mister Fox, you're in no position to dictate terms to us. Quite the opposite."

  * * *

  Garrett didn't trust his broken leg to carry him across the ocean walkways. The leg was an inanimate block, but for the phantom sensations. By necessity he'd been thumping around, coping with being half-crippled again, and giving a bite-me smile to anyone who suggested a pegleg.

  Zephyr entered the office for a scheduled meeting. "Maybe we can build a replacement leg," he said.

  "Or mail the old one out for repair," said Martin.

  Garrett considered. The machinery was shredded, but he'd tried detaching the thing and examining the MMI panel linking the thing to the nerves and blood of his disgusting stump-leg. The panel was fine. It was weird to think of having the leg -- something that had been part of him for most of his life -- swapped out. But if the MMI got exposed and damaged it'd require surgery, and he didn't know where he could safely go for that. "Those are both good ideas. Zephyr, you can't make one of these legs with the RepRap, right?" Way too complex for the little manufacturing device.

  "With a different design and some help, maybe. I've asked the Herr Human Augmentation Institute already." Herr's research group had helped design the legs Garrett had now.

  Martin sat, scratching his chin. "What if we improved our manufacturing abilities? Not specifically for you, I mean, but as another profit source?"

  Garrett said, "Isn't that already in your grand plans?"

  Martin's eyes narrowed. "Someone had to look ahead."

  Zephyr interrupted. "Boys! Quit arguing." Garrett saw something of Tess' attitude in the robot's reaction, and it made Garrett miss her more. He'd have to convince her to come back someday.

  Leda arrived, wearing the grey jacket of the Holy Confederacy. Garrett had no idea whether that was good or bad, and said nothing about it. He'd guessed that she'd take over the Pilgrim group. But had she fallen back into that nonsense right after escaping it? He shook his head, not wanting to get into quicksand again.

  Leda sat, hands uncomfortably limp on her lap. "I'm part of your council now?"

  "I suppose so," said Garrett. "I've asked you all here to talk about Castor's status. Forgive me for not standing. Zephyr?"

  Zephyr turned on the wall-screen and a video presentation. "The current financial picture, based on the numbers Martin gave me, is hovering near the break-even point. Money comes in through tourism and our farm products, and goes out through our imports of food and manufactured products. We also have substantial maintenance costs due to the innately corrosive seawater environment and the fragility of some of our farming equipment." The latest virtual model of Castor spun alongside graphs and charts.

  Martin said, "That's not the full financial picture. We're relying on some big-ticket purchases like this platform, and if you amortize those costs over their expected lifespan, we're losing money. We're effectively self-insured, which is not ideal. Also we've had various things donated to us, including legal services."

  Zephyr added, "But on the bright side, we're about to officially have a hotel, casino and a real restaurant, thanks to the Pierpont and Dentrassi families. According to satellite imagery, a ship is headed our way from Boston. It could be the bio-lab team."

  "It is," said Eaton from the doorway. "Having a strategy meeting without me?"

  Garrett stared at Eaton, who he hadn't invited. The man had earned a place here as a resident, but Garrett wasn't comfortable letting him in on everything. The group stayed awkwardly silent until Garrett said, "I respect you, sir, but this is a private meeting."

  Zephyr said, "He means, no spies."

  "Zephyr!" said Garrett.

  Eaton smiled. "I don't know what you're talking about. But yes, the research team is on its way. I'll let myself out and make sure you folks don't get surprised again."

  When the door closed Zephyr said, "We won't be surprised like that again. I have been keeping watch with the satellite feed."

  Garrett said, "From now on we should be looking in all directions and hailing anyone that looks remotely interested in coming here. How hard would it be to get us a new radar unit?"

  "Searching. Also, simple sensor buoys would be easy."

  Garrett was a little rattled. "Anyway, that's the basic situation. We're alive and afloat, but cash-poor and surrounded by damned nebulous legal threats. Now, the latest problem: a party of Cubans is being forced on us tomorrow with a demand that we hire them." He put personnel data on the screen. "Three dozen men and women, mostly young, with few skills and a couple of minor criminal records among them. What do we do?"

  Martin said, "So they're following through on their 'offer'. What about funding to expand the farm?"

  "I'm told it's coming. I'd like to tell Cuba we'll turn the boat away unless we've got the funds first."

  "Do that," said Martin. "Force their hand. It'll be bad enough that we won't have the equipment until after they arrive. In fact we ought to beg for a delay of a few weeks. There's nothing for them to do yet."

  "We shouldn't hire them at all!" Zephyr said. "We don't need to be pushed around."

  Martin told Zephyr, "Some of us can't upload ourselves to safety in the event of a police raid. We're dangerously close to earning one."

  Leda spoke up this time. "Give them to me." She saw the eyes on her and looked down, but then made herself return the stares. "There are people coming who're being used as pawns by their country, and I don't want us to treat them that way too. We ought to welcome these people to our community. Garrett, you may not like the Pilgrims, but we work hard, don't we?"

  "Who's 'we'?" said Garrett. "How can you be back with them after what they did?"

  "It doesn't really matter what I believe. The Pilgrims need me. They're my friends, and even if I don't agree with everything Sir Phillip stood for, I have to help people in his stead. I can do that with this newcomer group too."

  "How? By getting them to worship Lee?"

  Leda glared at Garrett. "It's more complicated than that. You might think it's not important to have faith, that it's something you can take off like a coat, but your survival and your profit depend on our group!"

  Garrett was getting exasperated by Leeist theology. Was she making it up as she went along? "So do
you believe again or what?"

  Leda shut her eyes tightly. "It doesn't matter. I believe in something bigger than myself. You wouldn't understand. And if these words of mine leave this room, the consequences will hurt all of you."

  After he and Zephyr had stopped Phillip and Duke from driving this woman to suicide, how could she fall back into believing the same old lies, and call him wrong for not joining her? As sick as he was of the Pilgrims, she was right about one thing: he needed them.

  He sighed. "I'll demand the money. In the meantime, what will you do with the newcomers?"

  "Make them your best workers. Get them started with training, and make them begin to be useful. You'll see."

  "They're people, Leda, not machine parts to hammer into shape."

  Leda was resolute. "They can be more than that, more than just 'people'."

  * * *

  Garrett took off his legs in Zephyr's presence, in the room that had been Tess' lab. Posters of robots real and fictional lined the walls: Astro Boy, Cog, Qrio, Megaman X, Tachikoma. Garrett hated to be sitting there vulnerable.

  Zephyr set the intact leg and the damaged one on a table, peering at both and emitting a sonar hum. "Interesting."

  "How is it, doc? Will I be able to play the violin?"

  "Violin? We could make a version with opposable toes, if you want." Zephyr blinked. "Oh! That's a joke, right?"

  Garrett nodded. "You've gotten smarter."

  "I feel dumber. A piece of me is missing."

  "I miss her too." Garrett kept thinking lately about tasks for Tess, and remembering that she was gone. There was more to the feeling of loss than that, though. One of the things that kept him going was knowing that he'd built a place where she could be happy. She had flourished here in a way he'd never seen on land. In a way, he valued that fact as much as her technical skill.

  Zephyr went back to studying the legs. "There's no reason to limit yourself to normal human functioning. To the extent that we can build it, why not have additional strength or other features?"

  He felt queasy thinking about having his body parts tinkered with ."It's hard to explain, but I've got a strong sense of identity, and part of that is, uh, my body. I'm not some intangible spirit. Being a cripple does things to you."

  Zephyr's ears perked; they'd been repaired. "Are you a 'cripple'?"

  Garrett stared at his screwed-up body. "Not anymore. For a while I felt like I couldn't do anything for myself, like everybody pitied me. Literally they looked down on me. I was afraid to get the surgery for prosthetics partly because a cripple was what I was. It defined me. Because once you get beaten down enough you get convinced you deserve it, and forget that anything better is possible. Damn, it felt good to stand up again!" That first day, he'd fallen flat on his nose and laughed it off, waving away his parents when they tried to help him up. It took him two whole minutes to get up from that fall but he did it by himself, on his new legs.

  "I don't have that kind of identity," said Zephyr. "A body is just an interface to the most important world."

  "Okay, but you've been using that one for a while. Haven't you got an awareness of your strength, your height, the sight of your hands? Do you think much about the damage you took?"

  "I guess so. It was frustrating not to have a body, and strange to upgrade to this model when it arrived. Suddenly being transfered to a lower-capability body would be unpleasant."

  "Can I have my legs back now?" Zephyr returned them and Garrett spent a few minutes hooking them up. He wiggled the intact one at the ankle. "Make the best replacement you can, then. I'll be interested to see what you come up with. Maybe I'll even get the other one replaced to match."

  "I get a free hand?" Zephyr seemed excited by the prospect.

  "Leg. You're right; it doesn't matter exactly what I'm made of. I'm more than the sum of my parts."

  "I said that?"

  Garrett stood and attempted to scratch Zephyr's ears. The robot leaned his plastic head into it like a cat. "Sure. Since when did you become a prosthetics specialist?"

  "I've been doing a lot of reading, and absorbing a few expert systems." Zephyr paused. "There's actually something else. When I work with people I pick up some of their skill, which includes their way of analyzing things. Their personality."

  Zephyr had been helping with the technical details of botany, something otherwise handled with the "brute force and ignorance" of non-specialists. "Does that mean you've got a partial imitation of Alexis in you? And Phillip? And Valerie, and Tess, and me?"

  "Yes. See, I tried to explain this to Tess and she thought I was doing something bad, but really I'm not! At least I don't think so. I'm designed to build these internal models to predict people's behavior, and it so happens that they're effectively mini-AIs."

  Garrett thought about all the people Zephyr had met being trapped inside him. That wasn't fair, though; was his own memory of his father "trapped" in his skull too? "I'm not used to this Borg hive-mind thing you've got going on. What exactly are you doing?"

  "I don't know. I was hoping Tess would help me figure it out. Why is a 'hive-mind' evil, anyway? I want a human opinion."

  Garrett thought back to old stories of mind-slave cyborgs and rapacious insect-hordes. "Because the 'people' in those are missing something, or it's been stolen from them. They've been forced into some huge pattern they have to obey, and it turns them into interchangeable, expendable parts. The individual gets drained and becomes lesser."

  "Like AGVs," said Zephyr. "An expendable robot army."

  "You're thinking of warmechs? Those were never intelligent, so they're like animals at best. Imagine that someone ripped out half your soul to turn you into a slave like that."

  "I don't have to imagine."

  4. Noah

  He could run back to Sapphire Haven and the tar-paper roofs, or stay here, or do whatever else he could imagine. The thought made him grin, baring his teeth against the cold wind that had set in. He was home, and it was almost Christmas.

  "Don't you people do anything for the holidays?" he asked Leda, walking up behind her to wrap his arms around her. They owed each other, for a couple of moments in the fight.

  Leda shivered. They were in the west corner of the farm, which was becoming a hangout spot. It had a relatively large, stable platform with a canopy and wave-guard and a sort of bandstand. Now Leda was in a slick wetsuit supervising the workers who'd shown up yesterday. Pilgrim types were coaxing the new guys through fish-feeding and equipment-fixing.

  Leda said, "With Sir Phillip we didn't. He said it was sinful."

  "You don't have to do the traditional stuff with the fat white burglar. But how about presents? A tree, even?"

  Leda slipped out of his grip, saying, "I used to do all that, with my old family."

  "So let's start it up here, and have some fun."

  "We're not here for fun," she said, looking over her shoulder. "The point is..."

  Leda looked Castor over, seeing the impossible island Noah had been staring at since he arrived. She said, "It's to serve each other, isn't it? Or God, if you put it that way."

  "Sure," said Noah. "But we're here to have a good time too. You want the Pilgrims to be happy, right? We could all use some good cheer about now."

  Leda looked uncertain. "Well, there's no tinsel or anything."

  * * *

  Noah walked to the door of the Chaste Dolphin, the only restaurant for miles around. The place had opened after days of his own work alongside the Dentrassi brothers. It'd been fun: hanging on to a big spaying hose to pump concrete into a framework and turn outlines into real walls. The stuff had come out full of bubbles and shredded paper, stretching the material, and become a set of blank, dank rooms. It was funny how when he'd been asked to clean up the trash from the construction, he hadn't minded at all. Now that there were distinct rooms to work with, the Dentrassis had done the rest. Now they had nice pine tables instead of the cheap plastic ones in the galley and Dockside; the whole place was lined
with ships' wheels and nets and other nautical things. He was about to go in when a rumble caught his ears.

  He bounded up to the topdeck to see a rusty ship stacked with steel cargo containers. "What's that?" he asked a passing Pilgrim.

  "It's for the hotel."

  Sure enough, the old couple running the station's room bookings was looking to build a whole little platform of their own. Noah was already getting experienced at the construction methods around here, so he got hired to help turn a cluster of floating boxes into a hotel. The work had him mixing concrete and making slabs to balance on the containers. It was scary to stand out there, but before long he'd led the way. It looked almost like solid land, parked near the main platform. He cursed and sweated through the work until he could stand on the ocean, and stare at what he'd made. "I built an island!"

  He still had Rickie's phone number. He sent the man a picture of the thing, hoping it would spark something in him.

  The Pierpont family was there for the construction of course, bundled up and talking excitedly about the next steps. They'd need to assemble more actual buildings atop the platform. It surprised him to feel he understood some of the technical details now, and for the first time he actually cared about math. He'd been cheated in school by teachers who'd cared more about babysitting him than about having him make things.

  "Mister Ardent," said Jarvik Pierpont. "What do you suggest for the decorations?"

  Mister. Noah smiled. "Peek into the new restaurant for one idea. They've got a boating theme that you could see pretty much anywhere; looks nice. You could go with that, or do something a little crazy."

  Jarvik and his wife talked. Noah stared at the empty sea beyond Castor, huge and cold. Everything they'd made was a toy next to the real spectacle of the blue. It was a privilege to be out here seeing it, one that could get snatched away if they weren't careful.