(Not strikebreaking in legal terms, anyway. Some of their sapp kin saw him and Babs as scabs.)
The morning after the Surprise party found him, as it often did, checking on an archived wing of the family e-state, Whine Manor by name. The simulation, his original online home, was an off-brand work of fan art built by Crane’s Batman-obsessed creators. Stalking the empty halls of the mansion in his butler’s uniform, he glanced into each of his charges’ empty rooms in turn, inventorying their virtual possessions in case they were out of place or had stalled mid-update.
Mer Frances had moved one of her model Spitfires from her desk to a window position.
Crane stepped into the simulated room, dusted off the warplane, and replaced it. Frankie had attached a message for him, link to a snippet of footage from the Surprise party.
He loaded the bookmark, taking in her conversation with Miss Cherub about the portal expansion. The transcript read like an innocuous exchange—both women were gifted elliptical speakers—but it was clear to Crane that Miss Cherub had finally accepted Frankie’s suspicions about saboteurs within the Bootstrap Project.
As he considered the ramifications, there was a sound in one of the Whine Manor guest rooms. Luciano Pox’s toon padded out into the hallway, barefoot and clad in pyjama bottoms, looking much like an ordinary human just tumbled from a real bed.
Crane’s stock-in-trade included being unflappable: he conjured a tray with orange juice and a serving of buttered toast. “Good morning, Mer Pox. May I offer you breakfast?”
Luce rubbed a pale, stubbly chin. “Virtual food for a virtual friend? Why would I—”
“I have answered that question for you on numerous occasions. If you wish—”
“You’re just fucking bored, is all. The IMperish Foundation can’t print a working body for a sapp—”
“That statement assumes I desire EMbodiment.”
“Can’t run your companies. All your codesibs pissed you’re still ordering laundry and hashing spam for the kid—”
“If by kid you mean Mer Frances, I would note she is nearly thirty.”
“Still a scabby-kneed, hot-tempered troublemaker, ain’t she? Nose-first in all the wasp nests?”
“Indeed.” Crane set the tray down and produced a straight razor. “Would you prefer a virtual shave for your virtual facial hair?”
To his surprise, Luce shuddered, raising both hands to his face, as if to claw his own flesh. Crane vanished the razor quickly. This was a stress tell he hadn’t seen on his friend in over a decade.
Pox shook it off. “Wanna catch some #newscycle?”
“Of course.” Crane made a gesture—follow me—and led Luce into a replica of a bachelor’s parlor, with dark furniture, leather couches, and a built-in cabinet for a large, old-style TV screen, circa 2020. He handed him a remote control—the metaphor authorized Luce to direct the household datastream—and waited.
Pox promptly pulled up the Bootstrap Project lobby.
“It’s too early for the daily press briefing,” Crane said.
“They’re going ahead with the sixth and seventh portals, right? That’s today’s big announcement.”
Crane confirmed this by sharing the Rubi-Frankie snippet.
Pox snorted. “Yet more danger duty. Rubi hadda know the kid would say yes. Parking her on the comms project was like begging her to go rogue.”
Crane nodded. Why give Frankie a chance to back out of hazard duty at all? The obvious answer: to warn her there was trouble brewing.
Onscreen, the Project Bootstrap briefing room was scrolling preliminary infographic as reporters and fans tooned in. Prominent among the images was a map of the solar system. Graphics showed the carousel of portals, a one-way loop connecting Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the stations at Europa and Titan. Half-ghosted images filled in the proposed expansion. Portal6 would be out at Alpha Centauri. Seven would give Earth an exploration beachhead, an outpost over eleven light-years out, running on energy harvested from Procyon A.
Luce slid this infographic off to a corner of the display, expanding a map of the noninterference zone, the wide berth offworlders had agreed to give the solar system while the Solakinder attempted to develop the collection of technologies now commonly referred to by the generic handle #supertechs.
Luce fiddled the remote, threw it on the couch with a growl, and pulled the portal map out of the wall. Crane converted it to a scroll of blueprint paper, maintaining the #mancave metaphor as his friend slapped it down on the coffee table and stabbed a finger at the projected station at Alpha Centauri.
“So, you get a portal here, you can hop over in your crappy, bug-ridden FTL … What do you call the prototype ship?”
“Jalopy, Mer Pox.”
“You start hopping Jalopy back and forth to the portal at Proxima Centauri. Suddenly, you’ve got a self-made trade route to civilization and the Exemplar races. That’s the idea, right?”
“We object to the civilized/noncivilized binary, but—”
“Stupid!” Luce said.
Crane paused. Considered how to ask Pox what was wrong without making him worse or putting anything incriminating into the public record. Wished, as he did hourly, that Master Woodrow was still alive.
“Sorry. Désolé,” Pox muttered.
Before Crane could accept the apology, Babs manifested in the doorway of the #mancave. She had eschewed the Horatio Nelson uniform and gone back to her default—a sleek dress from the nineteen thirties.
“Uncle Luce,” she said.
“I’m not your fucking uncle, babysapp.”
Babs’s tail fluffed. Gently, she ventured, “You skipped our party.”
“I’m not allowed to socialize with Ember, remember? In case I accidentally leak technical information about wormholes, or growing even better processing tish, or reveal how to put artificially intelligent beings into Mayfly™ bodies without them decohering.” He put extra stress on the word Mayfly, then tossed a piece of toast away to free up his hand for making the standard sign for the trademark symbol. “I gotta respect the precious cone of silence.”
Attempting witty repartee would heighten his anxiety. Crane broke in: “Mer Pox was reflecting that once the Solakinder expand to Portals6/7, we can argue we’ve met the criteria set out to qualify us as an advanced species.”
“Portal schmortal.” Babs tsked. “We should’ve put our chips on getting the bugs out of the FTL saucers.”
“Be that as it may, he’s here to congratulate us—”
Sardonic bark from Pox.
“—on our imminent success.”
The offworlders who initially reached out to humanity—for it had been humanity then, before AIs were recognized and accorded citizenship rights, before all Earthborn sapients had become, collectively, the Solakinder—had initially hoped for a bloodless coup and a new colony for their empire.
Those first offworlders had sent Luce ahead with a team of sapps, bearing friend requests and a hostile agenda. The advance guard was meant to disrupt Sensorium politics and #newscycle, and to recruit homegrown power brokers who would favor handing over sovereignty.
It might have worked, if the AI community hadn’t shredded most of the advance guard, and if Luce hadn’t defected to Earth’s side.
The offworlders had caught humanity in the midst of a global reckoning, attempting to heal wounds caused by nationalism, colonization, capitalism, and centuries of genocidal racism. In a referendum that essentially became a vote over outside subjugation, the populace had voted no.
Those first would-be invaders, the Pale, had been used to easy wins. They’d made a second, rather ludicrous attempt to seize the solar system ten years later, during Second Contact. When that fizzled, they’d sulked off. Diplomatic, led by Rubi Whiting, had jumped into the void they left, negotiating the noninterference agreement before any other Exemplar races decided to show up with battleships.
“Yeah,” Luce said now, picking up on Crane’s hint. “I came to warm up for the collec
tive victory lap. Done deal. Good work, team! Welcome to the civilized fucking universe.”
Babs perched on the couch, dragging her claws thoughtfully over its leather surface, deliberately leaving marks. Crane muted an annoyance notification. He could reset the sim once they left.
Good work, team! indeed! It would be as obvious to his codedaughter as it was to Crane that this was a warning. Something was about to go wrong. Perhaps catastrophically so.
This would be why Miss Cherub gave Frances a heads-up. She’s going to be eleven light-years from home with no safety net. Beyond rescue …
The official announcement was three minutes away.
It must also be why Luce was so fragile, Crane realized. If offworlders established control of local government, they might extradite him. Package him up as a traitor and send him back to the Pale.
The expansion had to go forward. No Alpha Centauri portal, no trade route. Without trade, there was little chance Earth could pay the debt it had had racked up as it reverse-engineered the #supertechs.
Frances, on Emerald Station. Eleven light-years away. Working a mission she’d always suspected was rife with saboteurs, and too far away to rescue. The idea filled Crane with heated urgency, a sense of scorched feathers, burnt relays smoking at their solder points. All alarms firing, all safety subroutines go go go! He wished his striking sapp kin were speaking to him.
Instead, he had Pox, there with hints and warnings.
Onscreen, Project Bootstrap officials were assembling for the press conference: project managers, augmented pilots in snappy flight suits, portal technicians. Frances was excluded; she had a tendency to offer unfiltered opinions at inconvenient moments.
Among the gathered speakers was Luce’s sibling, of sorts—the entity known as Allure18.
Allure18 had been another of Luce’s original infiltration crew and she had emphatically not betrayed the Pale cause.
The number tagged to her name indicated she was on her eighteenth EMbodiment—her consciousness was resident in a printed Mayfly™ body. The fresh-grown tish of her body gave her the look of a fit and healthy thirty-year-old, clad in vintage business dress, fashions popular in Beijing at about 2062. After the Pale’s second takeover had failed, she’d worked with the IMperish Foundation—the research hub printing Mayfly™ bodies—for a number of years. Now she was Earth’s liaison to Global Oversight’s offworlder bankers, the Kinze.
“EMbodiment! For everyone! Forever!” Babs chirped, tone sarcastic, as she quoted the IMperish motto and threw in the relevant hand signs to go with the trademarked terminology.
Pox sat up straighter as a pair of EMbodied volunteers stepped onstage with the others. “They’re sending ghosts to do tech support for Frankie?”
“I believe the preferred term these days is digital imMortal.”
Luce snorted to indicate his opinion of the euphemism.
Babs posted Whooz data. “Teagan9 and Cyril10,” she said. “Crosstrained as a medic and bot tech in her case. Cyril’s a portal traffic controller and space station development engineer. Frankie knows Teagan9 from training.”
Last-minute substitution from Frankie’s @CloseFriends pool, in other words.
The techs’ bio data expanded. They were an old-school monogamous couple; their friends apparently called them Teacakes. The pair of them had made heroic gives during the colonization of Europa—in fact, they had only retired because Cyril’s eighth death in the line of duty nearly made his personality decohere.
“Bona-fide heroes,” Luce said.
And despite being IMperish Foundation clients, their history in the colonies made their loyalties unimpeachable.
“Vintage explorers. Horning in on the glory of the Portals6/7 launch, are they? Haven’t they collected enough quest badges?”
“Hardly, Mer Pox. I rather think the point is that if the portal doesn’t launch on Procyon, they can reboot at home, from backup,” Crane said slowly. “They don’t require rescue.”
“They’re expendable?”
“I doubt they’d say so,” Babs said.
“Why can’t they send a MayflyTM pilot?”
Babs sent Crane a tiny heart moji behind Pox’s back. He could curse and bluster all he liked, but at the heart of this bombastic attempt to warn them was genuine affection for Frankie.
“You know better than anyone how delicate Mayfly™ bodies are,” Babs said, tone gentle. Luce had EMbodied once or twice himself, a decade before, only to #crashburn after a few months. These days, like the sapp community, he existed in VR fulltime. “Piloting’s physically hard work, and printed people can’t even survive implant surgery. But Frankie’s got the oldest implant, so…”
She didn’t finish the thought: Frankie was expendable too, in her way.
“What they really need is a sapp out at the station to support them,” Crane said.
“Someone clever to run things,” Babs agreed, sounding thoughtful.
“But as we are all on strike,” Crane said the expected thing, for the public transcript: “They shall have to make do with the standard station OS.”
Luce bounced up suddenly. “I’ll show myself out. Thanks for the imaginary toast.”
With that, he vanished.
Crane picked the heart moji out of the feathers at the base of his neck, transforming it to a question mark, wondering what he’d missed. Babs and Frances were chosen siblings; he had always found Gimlet’s angry young daughter perplexing, but his own codechild understood her, to her bones.
Babs mojied a sigh. “Look, Pops. Party snaps.”
She dismissed the press conference and pulled out a little party purse, extracting a bundle of images from the Surprise party, styled as Polaroids. Laying them on the table over Pox’s blueprint, she filled the #mancave with footage from the night before, the Feral5 in clinches with various friends, not to mention their many parents, aunts, and uncles.
Frankie dancing on Surprise with her protégé, Hung Chan. Frankie at the edge of the party, with her arm around Ember. The two of them wore an expression of mirrored solemnity. Scheming, then.
Finally, down in the Surprise hold, quick glimpse of a family friend, an elderly hoaxer named Jackal. Frankie had pinged him, presumably. She’d started hatching plans as soon as Rubi warned her.
And so must we.
A sapp to run Emerald Station, Babs had said. She would be meaning to get an instance of herself loaded onto the station helix.
“A lot to unpack here,” she said, shuffling the images, bringing up herself, cosplaying as Nelson, with a bulldog puppy at her feet. The dog was clad in a leather jacket emblazoned with the Union Jack, and as Crane processed its image, it animated, scampering behind Babs’s greatcoat, tail wagging as it vanished from the picture.
Oh.
Crane looked around the mancave sim, tapping one wingtip onto a rack of poker chips.
She replied with a cool shrug, “If now’s not the time to gamble, Pops…”
There was no way to argue with that.
“I’ll get you whatever you need,” Crane said, opening a secret wall at the back of the #mancave so the two of them could make a proper descent into the family archives.
CHAPTER 3
PORTAL CAROUSEL, MOON-BOUND
The first time Maud Sento laid eyes on Frankie Barnes, she was nine years old, mad as hell, and neck-deep in trouble.
Frankie had been gigging for the Department of Preadolescent Affairs back then, working as a peer advocate for at-risk kids. She’d pelted through Maud’s Mandarin classroom at a hot run, spark of righteous anger in full flight, with a heavy-footed security officer on her heels.
Maud remembered wondering, uneasily, if the unknown kid was a bad girl. If she was slated for surgery. She’d been having nightmares about that, about surgery …
Frankie roared in Teacher’s face, causing her to shrink back in shock rather than making a grab for her. She vanished through the door, slamming it as she went, and the guard scrambled after. About
thirty seconds later, alarms screeched overhead, harbingers of full-fledged pandemonium.
The police raid had begun about ten minutes later.
It was all over in an hour. All the adults who hadn’t been botomized were arrested for hoarding, kidnapping, and conspiring to hand Earth over to offworlders. The kids were offered counseling for something they called abduction trauma. They were given new tracking chips, new identities. Maud was taken from the man she knew as Daddy and returned to Nata, a parent she barely remembered.
Extraordinary privacy provisions had been enacted for kids rescued that day, from the people Maud had known as @Visionaries. The kids had been given rights to fully locked therapy services—a chance to lick their wounds, out of the spotlight. But Maud had suspected the psychologists of trying to get her to talk …
… about the surgeries, for example …
The only offer of rehabilitation she had taken was speech therapy aimed at reforming what Daddy had sometimes, snidely, referred to as her garbage accent.
When she met Frankie again, in London at a tall-ships regatta, Maud recognized her instantly. The fury had been papered over with a swashbuckler grin, but behind the immaculate performance of a fun-loving, sometimes-mouthy daredevil, Frankie’s dark, diamond-chip eyes carried the same high-voltage charge.
Young Franks had been mad and scared as she ran from that guard, all those years before. She had also looked exhilarated.
This adult version of Frankie had long since been broomed from the ranks of the kiddie cops. She had been waterbombing forest fires in NorthAm, leveling on the piloting track. She flew firefighting shifts out of the King’s Cross VR lounge, dousing blazes and then surfacing to take Maud out sailing and dancing … or just off to the nearest pop-in where they could cosplay erotic fanfic sims and screw their brains out.
Maud rubbed at the remnants of a temporary tattoo, a pod of dolphins she’d put on to go with her sailing outfit, for the Ferals superversary party five days before. I should have guessed, even then, that flying planes remotely wouldn’t be enough for her.
Dealbreaker Page 2
