Earth-Net

by David J. Garrett

  “That won’t be necessary,” Prudence suggested calmly.

  Luckily, before Jonah could action his plan, a coughing fit took hold of him after which he slumped into sleep for a spell. Prudence gradually bought him around and during his lucid moments, she continually reintroducing Ray and Bones. Ray was thankful he didn’t mention Cousin Beatie again.

  A couple of hours later, Ray sat halfheartedly reading her book. A dog-eared western that had been passed around most of the population she suspected. Jonah had been sleeping since Prudence and Bones had left. She looked at up at him as she had done routinely throughout the night, but this time found him wide eyed, alert and watching her intently. His face was calm but there was aggression behind his eyes. Ray smiled and waited for him to initiate. After a pause, throughout which Jonah continued to stare, Ray relented. She turned the nearest monitor towards him and wrote in large letters, ‘Pain?’

  Jonah looked at the word and pointed at the keyboard making a beckoning motion. Ray frowned in confusion. Jonah shook his head and made a tangle of strange signs with his fingers. Ray typed,

  “I don’t understand.” At which Jonah pointed more animatedly at the keyboard and made to get up out of bed. Finally, Ray understood, motioning him to lie back down. Jonah flinched a little as she reached towards him. Moving a little slower, Ray unlocked the wheels on his bed and rolled it so he could reach the keyboard. Jonah typed one fingered,

  “NO PAIN.” and sat back still frowning at Ray as if trying to figure her out.

  Ray frowned back and typed, ‘I’m not deaf. You can talk.’

  Jonah’s nervous expression faded slowly and gave way to an embarrassed grin.

  “Oh Shit,” he said, then grinned again. “Stupid,” he added.

  ‘Drugs,’ Ray wrote and pointed towards the infusion pump.

  “That must be it,” Jonah responded,” I do feel a bit weird.” He looked around the room as if taking it in for the first time, his expression of discomfort and the frown from before returned as his eyes scanned the room. Ray thought she detected a glint of green coming from his eyes and speculated he was trying to engage his VI. This was technology that Ray knew from media, but had never actually seen in real life.

  “How much do you remember?” Ray inquired and added. “Can you tell me where you are?”

  “I’m on Diana,” Jonah answered before Ray could finish typing. “I am sick from hypersleep but I’m going to be OK.” He phrased the last sentence like a statement. “You are Ray,” he added after a pause.

  Ray nodded, secretly pleased he remembered her. She made the sign for “Ray” at which he frowned and shook his head, not understanding. She wrote ‘Ray’ on the monitor and signed in front of it. Then she wrote ‘Sun Ray’ and signed, right finger drawing a horizontal circle by her right shoulder followed by the sign for Ray towards her hair. Finally, she wrote ‘Red’ and ‘Sunset’.

  Jonah’s confused frown vanished, “that’s your name…Ray” he said the name out loud and repeated the sign. “After your red hair, red like a sun ray.”

  Ray nodded.

  “That’s so cool,” Jonah added slumping back into his pillow. “I have no idea what Jonah means. There was some guy in the Christian bible who got eaten by a whale but I’m pretty sure I’m not named after him…Do many of you have red hair?”

  Ray shook her head no and held up one finger.

  “Only one.” said Jonah, “I guess that makes you pretty special huh? What’s my name in sign language?”

  Ray wrote “No word. Have to spell it” which she proceeded to do in signs.

  “That’s no fun,” Jonah complained. “You’ll have to give me a better one than that.”

  Ray thought for a second then held up her right fist, knuckles facing Jonah. She pushed her hand backwards, past her right ear and opened the fingers like a spray. She followed this with her pointer finger hooked on her chin.

  “What does that mean?” Jonah asked.

  “Wale Food,” Ray wrote.

  Jonah burst out laughing, eliciting a coughing fit that doubled him up for a while. Ray grabbed a tissue and handed it to him to spit the sputum he’d coughed up into. “Whale food, I like that.” he gasped, surveying the room.

  “How long will I be in here?”

  Ray held up seven fingers.

  “A week huh?” Jonah surmised. “Aymes is gonna give me hell.”

  Ray wrote, “She scares me.”

  “No shit she scares you,” Jonah agreed. “She’d scare a wildebeest. One time, when we were on patrol, I didn’t notice her hat on the pole and barged in on her while she was on the bogger doing her business. She just stood up, fatigues around her ankles and knocked me out. One punch and gone. I woke up on the dirt outside. Totally pissed myself as well.”

  Jonah noticed the slightly embarrassed half smile on Ray’s face and desperately tried to back pedal. “I didn’t look or anything…besides she was that hairy I couldn’t see…”

  Ray’s eyes creased, her smiled widened and her shoulders shook in the Dianian equivalent of laughter. Jonah shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked together and stared at her, clearly worried that she was having some sort of seizure. His concerned and confused frown only served to make Ray laugh harder.

  Once she managed to bring herself under control they stared at each other for a while, both blushing, before Jonah spoke again.

  “I don’t suppose we could start over, I’m not usually this much of a clod. Hi, my name is Jonah”

  “Hi, my name is Ray,” Ray signed.

  “It’s truly lovely to meet you Ray,” Jonah replied extending his hand. Ray shook it, smiling easily. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jonah lay awake in his pod/bed ruminating on the events of the day. He had come to at some point during the night. The first thing her remembered was talking to the Dianian girl, Ray. She was not what he’d had expected at all. No flaxen hair. No olive skin. Her eyes were green, not blue and she was a redhead with freckles everywhere. The last thing he had imagined as his introduction to the Dianians. He wondered if she was one of the descendants of the girl born to his great, great, great grandmother. Unlikely, he surmised.

  She had gone now, and her mother was looking after him. He couldn’t be too badly off because she had gone away somewhere and left him alone. Jonah stared at the ceiling. The mask over his nose and mouth was uncomfortable, his chest ached, and he felt like he couldn’t get a full breath. His eyes wander around the plastic-coated mud walls. The walls were bare and a single, old fashioned electric light hung from the cieling. The antique monitor beside the bed was frozen at the user interface and didn’t tell him anything interesting. Not the most auspicious arrival.

  Apparently, he was the only one on the Golden Hind that had gotten sick. A fact that Jonah found embarrassing. All those underweight scientists and techies and it was one of the marine leaders that ended up getting sick. He needed to get well ASAP and get back to his unit.

  For the umpteenth time, out of sheer force of habit, he flicked to his V.I. and got nothing but the “No Network” cursor fading into his peripheral vision. Jonah felt his chest constrict a little more in panic. He felt completely cut off. Normally his proximity awareness systems would be informing him of the location of everybody within a wide radius. Sometimes up to hundreds of meters under the right conditions.

  Most of the marines had their proximity sensors set to give a visual representation of the area around them but Jonah found that distracting. He had opted for a passive emotional interface. It took time for the brain to get used to, almost a year in Jonah’s case, but now the interface made him feel like he instinctively knew where everybody around him was. Similar to the way you know where your bedroom furniture is when the lights are off.

  Jonah had also linked his proximity system to his VI. It constantly scanned for other VIs in the vicinity and made the users’ profiles available if they were public. He had linked his emot
ional recognition response to the profiles of almost everybody he knew and, a large number of other people, chosen for a variety of reasons. That way Jonah went through life with the comforting impression that he always knew instinctively exactly where his friends (or enemies) were standing, even if he couldn’t see them. Great for combat of course but great for socializing too.

  The problem on Diana was that nobody had any bio enhancements, and his proximity system primarily used the wireless communication field of such devices to locate and ID people. His VI had infra-red sensitivity, like everybody’s, but through these thick earthen walls he was getting nothing. When one of the Dianian women entered the room, it gave him a fright every time.

  His proximity system flared a warning that an unknown person had materialized dangerously close to him. On Earth, a person in a metropolitan city with no bio enhancements could be trying to avoid detection and might be dangerous, so Jonah had his system set to flag them with a muted fear response.

  He needed to change that, while living here, or he would end up a nervous wreck. NOBEs (short for no bio enhancements) were not exactly rare on Earth but they were a vast minority. A number of social groups remained unenhanced, because they believed it interrupted their chi, or the government was spying on them, or some other flaky reason. Mostly they were just poor.

  Jonah speculated that his response to NOBEs on Earth, must be tempered by the constant stream of other information coming in, because it didn’t feel anywhere near as intense as it did on Diana. He shut his eyes and forced himself to relax. In and out as deep as his recovering lungs would allow. The lack of information made him feel like he was in a prison or that everybody had vanished, and he was the only person left in the universe.

  To distract himself, he pulled up the menus for his proximity sensor and started looking for a way to remove the threat response for unknowns. He hadn’t changed anything in years and struggled to find what he needed. The system was primarily designed for combat, so deactivating the threat response was clearly discouraged in the UI.

  To Jonah’s relief, Aymes appeared in his awareness about thirty meters out, walking towards him with the CDSE translator. As a member of his unit, Jonah had access to Aymes’ bio-status which appeared as she got a little closer. He immediately called up a trace of her heart beat just because he hadn’t had a real connection with anybody since he woke up, and he needed some actual feedback that a real person was approaching.

  Jonah could see that she was awake and alert but not under physical stress. He checked to see if she was live streaming, so he could see through her eyes and get a first glimpse of Atlas and Diana. She wasn’t, which he supposed wasn’t surprising as there was no network here to broadcast onto and Aymes typically didn’t live stream unless they were in combat.

  He heard two pairs of boots clomping down the resin flooring of the hallway as he felt the two women move closer to the door of his room. Aymes let herself in, and Prudence followed, a respectful distance behind. Aymes nodded at Jonah, hands hanging loosely by her side.

  “Fielding…I heard you woke up. Twelve years not enough sleep for you?”

  Jonah allowed himself a smile, “Good to see you too Master Sargent.” Aymes had dropped what the layer of fat she usually carried, during hypersleep, and appeared gaunt to Jonah. Her eye sockets were hollow and bruised looking. She nodded curtly at Jonah’s joke, her face giving away nothing, and scanned the room.

  “The doc says you will need two weeks recovery before you are going to be any use to me, so rest up Fielding.” Aymes’ eyes roamed back to Jonah and looked him up and down as if making her own assessment. She turned to Prudence, “Wait outside, I need a minute.” Prudence frowned, slightly confused, but her body backed out the door as if Aymes had her on remote control. Aymes shut the door behind her and turned back to Jonah, her face a little more relaxed now that the outsider was gone.

  “How’re you feeling then?” she asked.

  “Much better,” Jonah lied, “I’m hoping to get out this afternoon.

  “Don’t rush it OK, no point in relapsing. Do what the Doc says...” Aymes looked around again, checking the corners of the room. She lowered her voice. “I want to get you out of here, but we don’t have a Medbay that can support you yet… Don’t get too close to these NOBEs…Things could get pretty ugly before long.”

  Jonah frowned, confused, Aymes continued.

  “Seems as soon as we landed Spiranos started making moves to hand most of the real decisions over to Jager.”

  Jonah’s frown deepened. “What’s the point in that? Why come all the way out here just to hand over.”

  Aymes shrugged, “I don’t know. But I have a theory. Spiranos is old, he has nobody on Earth apart from us. Maybe he just wants to retire.”

  Jonah looked skeptical, “What’s Jager like? Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “Seems to,” Aymes replied. “I don’t know much about him to be honest. He came up through intelligence, so I’ve never met him or talked to anybody that has seen him in action.

  Seems like one of those rule by fear types.” Aymes paused and looked around the unit again. This was a habit of hers, she barely ever sat still, and she constantly scanned her surroundings wearing a half scowl. As a military man, Jonah understood the habit, but he knew civilians usually got the impression that she disapproved of everything around her.

  Aymes’ focus returned to Jonah. “He’s pretty close with Pfeffer it seems. The CDSE boss lady.”

  Jonah waited for Aymes to elaborate but she simply stared disapprovingly at the bedside table. Jonah jumped as the door swung open and a NOBE threat materialized in his peripheral awareness. His system gave him a subtle, but tangible poke in the Amygdala making his pulse quicken and his muscles bunch. The older Dianian woman stood in the doorway smiling uncertainly at Aymes who had stepped back into a ready stance and bunched her right fist. Clearly Aymes’ proximity sensors were struggling in this environment too.

  She recovered quickly. “Well, I’d better fuck off,” she eventually offered still looking at the woman. “Get better Fielding…That’s an order.” She nodded to the Dianian nurse on her way out and collected Prudence from outside the door. Jonah felt her moving off down the corridor.

  The woman started to move about the room in the efficient manner she had, checking on equipment and supplies. He watched her as she moved. She was much more Dianian looking than the other one, and older. She had the olive skin and white hair, but her eyes looked more European than the model on the interactive he had studied so often before flying out here. She carried a little more weight than the younger one but was still slim by Earth standards.

  “How long will I be here?” Jonah asked suddenly. Bones jumped at his voice, which sounded like a dog barking in the quiet of the room. She smiled to herself and turned to the console and keyboard. “3-5 days,” she typed then, “depends.”

  “Depends on how I do?” Jonah surmised, to which Bones nodded.

  “You will be weak. It will take time to get your full strength back. Don’t rush,” She typed

  Jonah lay back and stared at the ceiling. “Will Ray be back today? The one with red hair?”

  She stopped what she was doing and cast a shrewd assessing eye over Jonah. After a pause, she answered via the keyboard.

  “Yes…My daughter.” She waited, still looking at him, clearly waiting to judge his response.

  Jonah picked up the tension and attempted to appear nonchalant despite his sudden nervousness. “Nice girl. She made me laugh. Gave me a Dianian name” Bones didn’t ask so he carried on, delivering his version of the sign language for: “Whale Food.” Ray’s mother relinquished a reserved smile at that. Jonah relaxed a little, feeling that he had dodged a bullet. Bones turned to the Keyboard again, “Call me Bones.”

  “Bones,” Jonah repeated out loud. Bones nodded and demonstrated the sign language version.

  Jonah made a gallant attempt to copy her, drawing another reserved smile.
<
br />   She typed again. “Time to get up now. You need to move.”

  Jonah sat up immediately and made to swing his legs out of the bed. Bones leaned over and grabbed his arm with one hand making a patting movement with the other. The sudden change in blood pressure, from sitting up too fast, almost made him faint.

  “Too fast,” he observed and then noticed he was also still attached to lines from the retort stand. Bones unhooked him and then offered a shoulder for him to steady himself. He stood up more slowly this time, waiting for his body to adjust to a vertical orientation for the first time in twelve years.

  His feet and legs were like jelly and the cold of the floor on his feet was shocking. He felt like a marionette, forcing his legs to move by sheer will. Bones guided him out into the corridor and passed several rooms eventually reaching the door to a wash room, complete with a shower cubicle. Bones indicated the CDSE issue soap and a plastic chair.

  She indicated that he should sit, and he did gladly, shocked at how tired he felt after such a small amount of effort. Bones started the water and checked the stream a few times until the flow got up to temperature. Bones made the universal sign for, OK? Her eyebrows asking the question.

  Jonah nodded, and bones pulled the curtain aside revealing the emergency call button for him to use if he felt faint again. She smiled and vacated the room, leaving him to enjoy the warmth of the steam that had started to fill the small space, fogging up the mirror over the basin.

  Jonah sighed heavily and sat back against the chair with his eyes closed. He was here, and he had survived. He suddenly thought of his mother and resolved to ask Bones about getting a message to her. He levered himself to his feet slowly and held on to the plastic for a moment while his balance returned. He used the hand rails, conveniently placed around the walls, to maneuverer himself under the warm jets. He couldn’t remember enjoying a shower more. Sometime later, Bones had to knock on the door to make sure he was OK.