by M. D. Cooper
The power in the voice subsided a little, curling at the edges with an impression of surprise. The speaker seemed to be getting a look at Crash. He probably wasn’t what they had expected.
Xander laughed. His voice sounded human-sized now. The tank crowding the avenue had become a man sitting at bistro table.
Crash said. That would be all the information a connected SAI would need to know his story.
Xander whistled.
Crash said.
Crash had the feeling of the AI sitting beside him on the plascrete branch, shifting his view so Xander could look down on the crowds with him.
Crash supposed being called ‘interesting’ was a compliment. Xander’s presence had a world-weary edge.
Crash said.
The AI laughed.
There was a cruel edge to the AI’s words. Crash didn’t let them make him more angry. He held the interesting emotion inside, turning it like a shiny marble, something the ravens might secret in their nests. None of the birds on Cruithne had time for anger; they were too busy with survival.
Truthfully, he hadn’t planned to do anything with the transmission’s solution beyond fitting it into the ongoing puzzle of the world. Crash observed similar mysteries—mysterious to him, at least—every day.
Crash said.
Crash expected a burst of data, some recording from the Neptunian moon. Instead, he experienced a rush of motion. He was falling, and then flying over the great grey-blue waves he had first seen in Shara’s mind. A powerful airstream pulled him forward. All he had to do was spread his wings and soar.
In the distance, a green smudge of land appeared, which rapidly became a coastline covered in a great city with a forest in its streets. The monolithic stone towers came right to the ocean’s edge.
Crash continued over the rounded shoulders of the city, gazing down into tree-lined streets filled with humanoid beings. Some looked like typical humans, while others seemed born from the most twisted dreams. Collections of glimmering sparks, gels, mechanized beasts like beetle-elephants…all going about their business. It was the Night Park Bazaar become a wonderland that exceeded any human’s dreams of body modification.
The wind drew Crash down to street level, where he swooped among the pedestrians. Few paid him any attention. Did they think he was one of them? He felt dwarfed by the immensity and apparent age of the place. He couldn’t absorb everything all at once.
It was only as he floated to land on the balcony of one of the smooth walled stone towers that he noticed the first oddity about the city: he smelled nothing. Unlike Cruithne, which constantly taunted his nose with a smorgasbord of subtle, delicate, and offensive odors, this place was blank. Also, the stone under his claws lacked the texture and solidity of actual stone, something even the plascrete fountain communicated every time his claws wrapped around a gouged branch.
A man with spiky black hair and wearing a purple suit stood on the balcony.
Crash recognized Xander immediately and squawked in greeting. “Hello!”
The man gave him a smile.
“Maybe!” Crash answered, still using his real voice. “I don’t! I don’t!”
Xander grinned. “I like your sense of humor, Parrot. Are you reminding me you have a body? That you don’t need a place like this? An expanse? I have a body, too. It’s a lovely chunk of metal and silica.”
“Pretty boy!” Crash said. He bobbed his head and picked at his chest feathers. At least his own body felt real in the dream world.
Xander laughed. “Aren’t I?” He stepped out onto the balcony to stand beside Crash at the railing.
Crash turned and they looked at the city together.
Crash remembered the name ‘Psion’ was printed on the curly-haired woman’s coat back on the Hesperia Nevada. He looked at the people below with renewed appreciation.
With effort, he said in his real voice: “I know Psion!”
Crash bobbed his head, nodding.
Crash bobbed his head.
Xander smiled.
Xander barked a laugh.
PART IV:
THE INFO JUNGLE
THE HOARDIE
STELLAR DATE: 03.20.2979 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Port Authority
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Eight (or so) years later…
The airlock opened and Fugia Wong tasted the familiar atmosphere of Cruithne station’s Lowspin Docks: a mix of oil, caramel, and ozone riding a foundation of human sweat. She had been gone for more than twenty years, and the smell brought all the ugliness of her childhood rushing back in a swell of fear and anger that made her square her shoulders and hold her head a bit higher as she walked through the narrow corridor into the station proper.
Her black hair was cut in a bob with straight bangs. Stylish without getting in the way. She wore a highly updated version of her old visor on top of her head, which also helped keep her hair out of her eyes. The visor served a range of functions, from enhanced Link transmission to active scanning, but often looked like a wide silver headband to anyone who didn’t know better, and was the only flashy piece of her outfit, which was otherwise slim-fitting and utilitarian.
Fugia wore a compact, military-style backpack that was loaded with a few pieces of clothing and other belongings. She had been living out of the backpack long enough that she barely noticed its weight as she walked down a metal gangway to the main corridor, joining the flow of people passing maintenance bays and single arrival ports.
She had arrived on a general transport from Mars 1, where she had lived for the past six weeks since leaving the Insi Ring on Ceres and the Anderson Collective. Being back on Cruithne brought back a flood of memories from her childhood, from growing up poor in the Lowspin, of all the hustles, all the indignities and minor victories. She couldn’t help thinking of Ngoba Starl, which brought her to the last time she’d seen him on Ceres. She had almost been in love with him; but being in love with him meant owning her past, and she hadn’t been ready to do that. Now…she didn’t know if anything had changed.
The longing on his angled face had a special place in her memory, one of those images that created a whole series of imagined futures. In reality, she had only heard from him once, a year after he left Ceres, and she hadn’t answered.
Fugia had been busy. The SAI she’d come to know on the Insi Ring, Sylvia, had proved to be a member of a group who called themselves the Data Hoarders—or DH, Hoardies, Data Heads, Crammers, Archivists, Librarians, etc etc, depending on the members’ level of self-importance—and were devoted to maintaining a massively redundant storage system they called the Mesh.
Fugia had fallen into their ongoing drama of data acquisition with surprising comfort. After focusing so much energy on getting away from Cruithne, it felt strange and wonderful to find herself welcomed into another family.
The key tenet of the Hoarders was that one didn’t talk about the Hoarders, most of all the location of the Node Ships making up the Mesh, as their second goal beyond acquiring data was securing data. That was ensured by the Protection division through secrecy and redundancy.
Fugia had cut her teeth on redundancy projects headed by Sylvia. The Luddite Anderson Collective proved to be the perfect cover for data collection schemes. Now Fugia had graduated to Acquisition, the cloak and dagger side of the operation.
It was the Hoardies who had first received and verified the call to Proteus. Now a new encrypted message had been located, and factions throughout the group were racing to solve the puzzle first. These sorts of data-driven mysteries were better than drugs to Librarians.
Fugia had come to Cruithne because she had an ace up her sleeve named Crash the parrot. She had managed to crack the data headers on the message, which tied it back to defunct Psion Research. She remembered Crash mentioning Psion from before he came to Cruithne; they had installed his Link. It was likely he still had access to their encryption keys.
The current race to unlock the data set had political ramifications. Leadership of the Hoarders was in question, and whoever solved the data set first would immediately rise in prominence among both Acquisition and Protection.
Dropping her visor over her eyes, Fugia blinked as the HUD focused, scanning the world around her. The familiar process of identifying the info jungle created a matrix of separate search sectors, then identified every electromagnetic transmission. Radiant lines indicating broadcasts became visible. As her onboard cracking systems read the signals, layers of code base started to emerge. The process continued until everything around her was covered in layers of foundational code, broadcast spectrums, and other bits of floating information her scripts identified as interesting.
Fugia had learned in her career as a hacker that despite the continuous changes in technology—sometimes getting more capable, sometimes stumbling back—she could always count on the human factor to provide a way through it or around it, or to manipulate its purpose to her will. Nothing existed in a vacuum, and often the latest security was poorly designed, hindered by budgets, or suffered basic flaws in logic because someone had been in a rush. Sometimes you could get around a lock by pulling the pins out of the door’s hinges. Sometimes an entire critical system depended on a single point of failure protected by mere trust.
She’d been asked why she didn’t just get eye augmentations. Firstly, she was constantly updating her visor. Secondly, she’d learned the value in stripping away technology and looking at a problem with her naked human eyes. Often the answer to a problem lay somewhere between technology and humanity.
Her efforts paid off, and in a few seconds she had the local TSF and Port Authority networks, as well as several security keys of passing administrators who had left their personal tokens active. Scooping up data as she walked, she idly glanced at the small changes in this section of the docks, which she remembered from when she, Riggs, and Ngoba had run the area as kids.
It was hard not to let her mind wander back to those times. She adamantly reminded herself that she wasn’t a round-faced teenager named ‘Fug’ anymore. She had killed the nickname when she left Cruithne, and since then, anyone who even hinted at mispronouncing her name (Fyoo-jya, dammit) got a stereo earful of her wrath. Maybe it was petty of her to still hate the nickname, but some childhood teasing had hit too close to home.
Everything she was now, all the power she could execute with a thought, had been born from that teased little girl’s deep insecurity. Her history was in her posture, her presence, her voice, her sarcasm and her cynicism. She was Fugia Wong now, the hacker who had nearly bankrupted Rack Thirteen with a Crash game hustle.
Enough with the mental masturbation, she chastised herself. Those days were gone. Rack Thirteen was ancient history now, and she had a mission that was more important than petty syndicate wars.
She paused at a vendor selling brilliantly dyed silk scarves, and relished running her fingers over the smooth fabric. The stop also gave her the opportunity to scan for any tails she might have picked up since leaving the transport.
Sure enough, her HUD highlighted a thin woman twenty meters back, paused beside a support pillar. With a cat-like face and silver-streaked purple ha
ir, she looked like a club kid who’d woken up in a pile of trash. Fugia marked her in the passive scan, bought a scarf with minimal haggling, and continued walking.
The visor transferred updates to her Link, providing Fugia with a floating mental image of the tailing woman, who was doing a poor job of not staring directly at the back of Fugia’s head. Slowing down when the corridor thinned of people and then speeding up her steps as the crowd gathered prior to the lifts, Fugia felt confident the woman was in fact following her. Facial recognition brought back a dockworker’s ID with a name, Kassie Fillis, and a stated birthplace of only Greek Asteroids. Had they found her in an escape pod?
Well, Kassie, Fugia thought. I’ll make sure you don’t get bored.
Fugia hung back as the crowd around her entered the lift, then squeezed aboard at the last moment. She looked through the closing doors to smile at Kassie Fillis, who was hurrying to catch up. Fugia felt a flutter in her stomach as the lift rose, reminding her of Cruithne’s inconsistent gravity, then pinned Kassie’s facial ID and turned her attention to her destination.
She was headed for Night Park to see a parrot about a math problem.
* * * * *
The knot in Fugia’s stomach loosened as she walked away from the lifts. She let her mind wander across the differences between Mars 1, Ceres, and now Cruithne. She enjoyed finding the little details that made a place what it was, even a trash heap like Cruithne.
Everything around her looked repurposed from something else. A shipping container became the front of a small kitchen, where a tiny woman stir-fried vegetables over blue flames. The nose of an ancient shuttle formed a canopy over a bar. Unlike the planned spaces of Mars 1 and the forced austerity of the Anderson Collective, Cruithne was alive, everything moving, people everywhere. She had to admit to herself that it felt right. It felt good to be surrounded by people with motives she fully understood.
After years of the Andersonian doublespeak, she found herself slipping back into the rapid local dialect like a pair of old shoes.
