Tomorrow- Love and Troubles

by G M Steenrod

  Leera was incredibly popular on Mars, having had 4 number one hits. Her performances sold out the physical space of her venues. Even screen time of the performances had set records.

  It was stardom, but not the super-stardom that she craved. Only the much larger markets of Earth could do that in a short period of time. Leera's performance, driven by hard-rocking, highly physical synth play, had the potential of equaling her total ticket sales on Mars in only a couple of performances on Earth.

  While Kumar hadn't told Leera or her band, the cost of transportation from Earth to Mars had drained the capital set aside for touring in one shot. He was personally funding their living costs while on Earth. It was a small portion of his own capital. He had legally excluded himself from any financial liability for the band, so the living costs were a kindness on his part.

  With the band's funds drained, if the Earth tour was unpopular, Leera and the band would be stuck on Earth, unless they wished to use their personal capital to fund tickets back.

  To Kumar, it seemed a reasonable risk given the opportunity.

  “Hi, hi, Leera!” The screens zoomed out to show Kumar standing in the middle of the domed room. Scenes of the different sites, some being monitored live, were on display around him. He created an imposing figure on the screen.

  “How is Franklin's ankle? Is he healing well?” Kumar followed the suggested script. Franklin was a band mate and close friend of Leera.

  “He is doing well! Thank you for asking!”

  “That's excellent to hear. The practices look like they are going well,” said Kumar. He paused briefly for effect. “I think....it's time to do the first venue.”

  Leera seemed excited to hear the news, and then became curious, “Aren't we supposed to be doing a whole tour?” she asked.

  “Absolutely!” he responded enthusiastically and positively as prompted. “It's the Earthers. We need to do a test show to see what flames and what's great. You know Earth tastes. Earth is so big, that different areas will like different parts of your performance. I can build the venue list and propose a play list for you based on how you do at the first venue.”

  Kumar said as he swept an arm to point out the span of screens.

  Mars was a strange combination of widely varied micro-cultures hatched in a controlled culture of general, very uniform trends. It was a sharp contrast to the tremendous local variations present on Earth. To Leera, it seemed that the culture could change radically on Earth from one street to another. It was frightening, and thrilling.

  “Right, right, right. I have that fully,” she agreed.

  “I've got you and your mates covered, Leera. You do your part and I'll do mine.”

  Leera nodded, and waved the screen off.

  “That went well,” Kumar said to himself. “Fillmore needs to get a couple of more strong possibles. It's all on you, Fillmore.”

  The screen room pulsed yellow. His time was almost up.

  “Time to see sweet Cassie.” Kumar adjusted his pants and picked up a tall walking staff from the corner. It was a recent acquisition from Earth, impressive because it was a single, large piece of Mahogany. Mahogany had gone extinct during the time of the Troubles. While part of its genome had been grafted into other species, at best those recombs had a mahogany-esque quality to them. With a wave, he dismissed the screens and strode out the door—his look somewhere between that of an aspiring holy man and a late 20th century pimp.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  School Marm

  Cassie sat curled up in a large, overstuffed chair. It had a light, yellow and brown check pattern, and the upholstery was slightly worn.

  She wore an oversized, green sweater. It was knitted from a thick yarn made of Alpaca wool. The loops were large enough to provide small glimpses of her skin.

  Kumar peeked through a window, watching her intently. Behind him, there was a hedge with small speckles of sunlight passing through.

  Cassie had a nearly perfect complexion, even without the screen tuning it. On her nose rested a pair of reading glasses with thick black frames. She held a well-worn copy of Shakespeare's collected works. It was a thick tome. The edges of it were worn like the chair. Her already small hands were dwarfed by the massive book.

  Cassie peered intently at a page.

  Kumar shifted from one side of the window frame to the other. He could more clearly see her legs from that angle.

  “Panties? Where did you get panties? Absolutely incredible,” he said in hushed tones.

  Kumar continued to hover at the window, watching Cassie read.

  Cassie smirked as the minutes passed. “Are you done with watching?” she asked turning toward the window, her voice filled with accusation. Kumar reflexively blushed. Cassie's tone had been perfect, and had summoned in Kumar a sense of being a naughty boy.

  Kumar stammered slightly. “Where did you get those glasses and that sweater?”

  “They were my grandmother's. The book too.”

  Cassie shifted her legs from one side to another. The sexual desire in Kumar was becoming hard for him to control.

  The scene was a startling anachronism. Glasses had been unnecessary for over twenty years. Cassie had to peer over the top of them to read the book. Books were exotic. They had started to fade in her grandmother's time as libraries became digitized, and the cost of paper skyrocketed. In only a couple of decades, the quantity of printed volumes had shrunk to the hundreds of thousands as books were recycled for their pulp.

  Cassie had created the scene based on a photo she had seen of her grandmother, Mary. It had been a hard print in a frame kept on her grandfather's desk.

  “What about...” Kumar trailed off.

  “About?” asked Cassie, raising an eyebrow in feigned innocence.

  “The panties. What about the panties?”

  “Silly. I had those tailored. Do you want to see them more closely?”

  Kumar's eyes widened.

  “Yes, yes. Yes...please.”

  ***

  It was evening by the time Cassie and Kumar finished their romp. Her glyph project was a steady tedium, but she had moved it far past her mother's initial start. While Ada had created the technology, Cassie had lived her life building with the emotive glyph. She had much more knowledge about the impact of the glyphs on people and what it meant to live with them. Ada had dead-ended on the project, because of her technical orientation. She had exhausted the logical possibilities, and stopped. As she had realized, she had built most of the skeleton for a marvelous beast that she only part understood, and that she could not fully define as a concept.

  It tired her. It stressed her. Now and then, she would be seized by small depressions flowing from it. Cassie also felt a profound sense of meaning from the work. Cassie struggled to maintain herself and keep her mind in trim. It took fastidious, vigilant support practice to keep her whole. That meant her morning workouts had grown by 30 minutes and were far more vigorous.

  Even with the changes, she had had one high pitched screaming match with Alfie—entirely one-sided, and one high pitched screaming match with Kumar—most definitely two-side. Kumar could handle it, she knew. He was accustomed to dealing with prima donnas.

  Cassie strolled outdoors with Samuel by her feet, basking in the glory of her sexual adventure. The summer solstice would arrive in two weeks, so it would be daylight for at least two more hours. Samuel didn't care for the oppressive heat. His little pug tongue hung further out than usual as he tried to cool himself.

  Cassie looked down at her friend. “Samuel, why don't we go to the river. It'll be cooler there.”

  Samuel headed in the direction of the river, in assent. Cassie trotted after him. As they reached the banks, a cloud of damsel flies swarmed about them. Samuel huffed at the damsel flies, and then put his nose into the water that flowed among the grasses at the river's edge. It was substantially cooler here than at the house.

  Cassie headed up their familiar rise on the bank, leaving Samuel a quick st
ep away. The long summer sun was behind her. It penetrated deeply into the brick walls of the textile mill across the river. A painted sign, advertising a long gone milk substitute, rose up from the crevices of the brick wall there. It was a faded baby picture with a box of the product, now indistinguishable, behind the baby.

  She wondered how many more years the sign would be visible. It had to be a hundred years old now. The orange and gold of the sun part reflected off the glass and part illuminated vague shapes in the building itself.

  What the machinery was like? The hints of it through the glass tantalized her. She had tried to research the building on the Ether. Other than being listed as a derelict, there was no substantive information. That was not unusual. The Ether was a vast repository of information that people were interested in. An old building from a pre-Ether era, during a time when many modern buildings were going vacant, hadn't drawn enough interest for it to be more than a sentence of mention and aerial surveying photos.

  Cassie held her arm up in front of her face, so that her wrist band was on her line of sight with the windows of the building building. With a gesture of her free hand, the band amplified the image. She had gotten a technical band with advanced metrics as a gift to herself last week. Her model was exorbitantly expensive, since it was used only by military and exploratory teams.

  She filtered the glare out of the image and sharpened it. Blobs became recognizable as machines from the turn of the last century. To her, they looked remarkably like the black millipedes that populated the woods. Dusty, giant millipedes, splattered with bird droppings. She shifted the image with a finger gesture. Some of the walls had spots of bare lathe. The floors were unfinished, thick wooden planks. She zoomed in. The planks had scuff marks carved deeply into them. Dust coated them too.

  Samuel nudged her leg and barked. She glanced down at him. The fur of his face was wet and slightly muddy. It was a bark of satisfaction. Cassie smiled at him and returned to look at her wrist band and a the image of a large shoe.

  “Hmmm,” she said. She zoomed it out. The shoe was attached to a large leg. She could make out the profile of a tall man. He had come into the view and only a leg, his back and the rear of his head peaked from around the corner.

  “Are you the same adventurer from before?” As Cassie asked it, she didn't like it. That was months ago, near the end of winter. It could be anyone. The building could have become a teen hotspot. There could be a club that explores old buildings. She still didn't like it. The profile upset her. It felt wrong to her. Familiar and out of place. Her mind raced with the possibilities.

  It seemed an enormous coincidence that the same person would return on the day she decided to wear her new wrist band. It was unlikely to be the same person. It could be anyone, in which case there was no coincidence and she was just being foolish.

  Her heart beat climbed, and she could feel it pulse in her ears.

  She thumbed a star icon on her wrist band twice, and picked up Samuel. He could feel the tension in her body, and glanced nervously about, huffing. She started rapidly, carefully toward her home. A small drone appeared and suspended directly above her head. It was part of her security package, a quick observer to be triggered at a moment's notice. Unobtrusive, and capable of summoning a more aggressive drone swarm within 15 seconds.

  Cassie worked to control her breathing, and keep her mind focused. The small observer drone emitted a continuous audible hum to inform Cassie of its presence. It was otherwise silent.

  Cassie counted back the steps to her door. It was 50 more steps. She scanned the trees around her. The drone's sensor array was superior to human senses, but sensors could be jammed. Then 40. Then 10. Then in.

  Still clutching Samuel, and with the drone over her head, she barked out her orders.

  “Alfie, full security scan now. Activate threat protocols.”

  Silently, Alfie shut the many connections from Cassie's Quantum down to a single, highly protected pipeline. It was a protocol that Cassie had developed consulting with her mother's software. Deep under the house, a large black orb came to life. A tremor, undetectable to most, passed through the walls and bathed Cassie. It was a high intensity sensor pulse. Cassie gritted her teeth and trembled under it. Samuel growled. It continued for 10 seconds, alternating randomly. It was technology used on space vessels to sweep the structure for anything out of place or hiding. Great for locating stowaways and micro-fractures.

  “All clear, Madam,” said Alfie.

  Cassie set Samuel gently down. He sniffed the air suspiciously, on guard. Cassie drew a finger across her wrist guard and pressed a few icons. It was a report with video sent to her security agency. She was documenting the unusual activity at the mill.

  “The difference between being overly suspicious and being dead is whether you act on the information. You should respond and report at all times, Madam.” They had been the words of Xris Jmal, the crop-cut, blue haired owner of the security company. He was a young private in the Black Corp during the attack on the Lunar Base. Normally, colonels and privates didn't mix, but space vessels were small and slow, and it was the Black Corp. He had been assigned to the same vessel as the Colonel and the two had many casual conversations. Xris had come away with an enormous respect for him as a man. He consciously modeled his leadership style on Patrido, and it had served him well both in the Corp and in civilian life.

  Cassie's contacts had directed her to Xris. He could recognize Patrido's bearing immediately when she had come on screen. At greeting, he found himself automatically at attention. After a brief conversation, he took the job. It was his honor to serve her as he had her father.

  When he began his threat assessment, which included a thorough forensic exam of her past, Xris was amazed at the number of coincidences he saw. The family had a subtle enemy at work against it, or fate had a definite plan for her blood line.

  Since he could do nothing about fate, he instead put into position unobtrusive defenses that monitored her and laid in wait for any enemies.

  Cassie could feel nausea from the stress pushing up from the pit of her stomach.

  “Not this again,” she said to the air.

  She tugged at her clothing and it dropped to the ground. It made her feel a little more free. Naked, she strolled quickly toward the Solarium. A workout would burn the adrenaline out of her blood stream and let her relax.

  “Keep it solid. Keep it solid. Keep it solid,” she repeated aloud to herself. Events like this pushed her to the very edge of stability.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pork

  The heat was sweltering. It was one aspect of Earth that Fillmore was certain he would never get used to. How any human could tolerate 38 degrees Celsius was beyond him. Of course, the domes of Mars were atmospherically controlled, and typically vented or heated to be in the 18 degree range.

  Fillmore sat in a small, white, metal chair overlooking the sea. He was outside of an ancient teak bar reconstructed atop a massive dike, part of the system that ringed most of Cuba. Even the sand from the original beach had been transported to the top during the building process. Cuba, destitute, politically crippled, had with a unanimous and schooling-like behavior decided to undertake a massive building project. It had started as a spontaneous matter. A single wrinkled man, alarmed by the news of island submergence, had gone to the beach and started stacking rocks. His was a haphazard affair. Within a week, engineers, construction equipment, and government support had joined the effort. The rest of the world looked at it as being a foolhardy venture. When the low lying areas of Hong Kong were swallowed by the waves, to be reclaimed a decade later by dome technology, Cuba remained dry and secure.

  “What a people,” he said admiring the effort. His admiration was fueled by his second triple mojito. His great size, and the oxygen dense atmosphere made him highly resistant to alcohol. With the alcohol of his second beverage, the heat cooked his innards a little less. It was becoming bearable.

  The wind blew in from
the water. It had a smell of salt to it, and a slight smell of decay. The great scrubbers in the domes cleansed the air with ion fields. The recycled dome air never had the richness or complexity to it that sea breeze did.

  Fillmore grinned into the wind and raised his glass in salute, the glass dwarfed by his hand.

  He was glad to have returned to Earth. The work for Kumar paid well. It had seemed like a straight-forward surveillance and data compiling mission and a lot of the initial ground work had been done by a capable associate before-hand. The mission had gotten complex quickly, though. Jamming equipment and counter-surveillance dogged him after he checked his first site. Fillmore was not technically gifted, but he had been in the business a long time. A less experienced person, reliant on gadgets, would have missed the subtle interference that led him to discover counter-surveillance.

  It was money being spent to foil him. Just tracking his whereabouts to identify target sites would require satellite use and the willingness to violate Earth's privacy laws.