The Softwire: Wormhole Pirates on Orbis 3

by P. J. Haarsma

  Max nodded slowly.

  “Let’s try and remember these things a little more, everyone,” Charlie announced. “If you want to be Citizens one day, it’s important to fit in and act as if this place is your own. You wouldn’t want anyone stealing from you, would you?”

  “We don’t have anything to steal,” Dalton spoke up.

  “You will, eventually. You won’t always be . . .”

  “Knudniks?” I said.

  “I don’t like that word either, but yes — knudniks.”

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to report this,” he said. “You should feel proud of yourselves for helping to catch a thief.”

  But I didn’t. Acting like I belonged on Orbis had never done much for my popularity. In fact, it only aggravated Citizens like Dop. Things were better when I kept to myself. I turned to the O-dats and watched the thief celebrate with his tracker. I knew there was more to that thieving alien than just the stolen stridling. The marking I had seen on his arm told me that. He was a wormhole pirate; I was certain of it.

  Ketheria, however, wasn’t worried about it. “When do we eat?” she asked.

  “Right now,” Charlie said, and grabbed the portable O-dat. “What are you hungry for?” Charlie looked up from the O-dat, straight at me. I could feel his disappointment in me. I could see it in his eyes. I didn’t like feeling this way.

  “I want to be surprised,” Ketheria said, relishing the coming meal. “But surprised in a good way.”

  “Coming right up, young lady.”

  While we waited for Charlie’s surprise, Max and I huddled at the opposite end of the table with Theodore. Dalton, surprisingly, was already there.

  “How come you didn’t tell us about the stridling, Dumbwire?” Dalton hissed, trying his best to act like Switzer.

  “Don’t call me that,” I told him. “I never did anything to you.”

  “Switzer’s gone,” Max added. “You don’t have to be like him anymore.”

  No one spoke. We stared at Dalton for an uncomfortably long time.

  “You can join us if you want,” I said.

  Dalton huffed as if he were going to turn and walk away, but instead he sat next to Max.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Forget about it,” I replied.

  “How could a wormhole pirate be playing Quest-Nest?” Max whispered.

  “A wormhole pirate?” Dalton exclaimed.

  “Shhh! We don’t know that,” Theodore argued.

  “I saw the marking,” I reminded him.

  Dalton seemed confused. “On who?”

  Theodore shook his head. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “I don’t think so. I just want to know how he got here.”

  “Or why he’s here,” Max added.

  “Who?” Dalton pleaded, a little too loudly.

  “Shhh,” Max hushed him. “The alien that stole the stridling is a wormhole pirate. We saw the marking on his arm.”

  “The skull thing?” he said.

  Max cringed. “Yes, but keep it down.”

  I wasn’t listening anymore. Max had asked a good question. Why was he here? I couldn’t imagine he was here only to play Quest-Nest.

  “We should find out,” I said.

  “How?” Theodore asked.

  “I’m gonna join the conclave,” I announced.

  Dalton almost choked. “Ha! This league?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Theodore protested, but that was normal.

  “I’m gonna need a partner,” I said, looking to Max.

  “Wait, you can’t be serious.” Dalton took Theodore’s side.

  “I make good bait,” Max said, and then she winked at me. What does that mean? I felt my face get hot, and I had to look away.

  “No, stop. You can’t do this.” Theodore pleaded. “You don’t know how to play the game.”

  “We’re better than these guys,” I assured him, recovering myself.

  “But you don’t know how to play the sort,” Dalton argued.

  “Vairocina can help him figure it out,” Max said.

  Our food arrived while we were still talking. Actually, Theodore wasn’t saying anything anymore. He just sat there staring at the table and shaking his head. The aliens surrounded our table, carrying four large trays.

  “What is it?” Ketheria said with obvious excitement in her voice.

  “It’s called pizza,” Charlie told her proudly.

  “Why is it round?” Grace asked.

  Charlie smiled. “I don’t know why exactly. I never thought about that before.”

  The servers placed the four pizzas on our table. They smelled great.

  “What planet are they from?” Max asked.

  “Earth,” Charlie replied.

  “What a crazy place,” Ketheria cried. Charlie put a piece of the pizza on her plate, and she picked it up to bite into it.

  “Careful, it’s hot.”

  We watched two more matches of Quest-Nest while we ate the earthly concoctions. Ketheria made Charlie order two more pizzas once he explained to her that she could select any type of ingredients she wanted. Anything except toonbas, that is. The restriction gave Ketheria a slight pause before she reordered.

  I couldn’t eat any more. I was stuffed, and my mind was full of questions. What was the wormhole pirate doing here? Was he the one the bandit on the shuttle was talking about when he said, “Tell him”? Watching Ketheria devour the pizzas, I also couldn’t help but wonder what other things I’ve missed from Earth. Things I’d never know about because I hadn’t set one foot on my own home planet. Charlie was right. Whether I liked it or not, Orbis was my home now. It’s the only home I ever had besides the Renaissance, and that was only a spaceship.

  Ketheria offered Max a bite of her pizza.

  “It has pineapple!” Ketheria cried.

  I watched Max lean over and take a bite of the pizza. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and I quickly looked away. What was the matter with me? Weird.

  Even though I felt like my stomach would burst, I absentmindedly took another chunk of the pizza, or a slice, as Charlie called it, and watched a new tracker select WATER from the sort. The labyrinth filled with liquid. The other tracker selected WEAPONS, and now they fought on boats.

  “We never did that on the Renaissance,” Max said.

  She was right. I was definitely going to have to brush up on the Orbisian rules of Quest-Nest before my match with Dop.

  The next cycle, I was dragged out of my sleeper by Nugget.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “Ketheria. Ketheria’s not good,” he said, grabbing my feet and swinging them around.

  Ketheria was in the corner of the room, curled up in a ball. Her hair was soaking wet, and she was shaking.

  “Charlie!” I screamed as I bolted to her side.

  Charlie said Ketheria was sick because she had eaten too much pizza. I wasn’t so sure. I had never seen her sick before. In fact, I couldn’t recall any of us ever being sick. I needed to be patched up a few times, especially when I lost my arm, but none of us ever woke up feeling unwell. Even on the Renaissance.

  “She’ll stay home with me this cycle,” Charlie said.

  “I stay too!” Nugget yelped, and sat next to her. She was sitting up with a glass of water Charlie had given her. “She’ll be fine by the time you get home.”

  Ketheria didn’t smile when we left; she just leaned against the wall, in the corner of the room, curled up in a blanket. Charlie tried to get her into the sleeper, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “Do you want me to stay?” Grace offered, but Charlie shook his head and nudged us toward the light chute.

  “Really, she’ll be fine.”

  “Charlie has his hands full,” Theodore said as we emerged from the chute and strolled across the plaza.

  “I think he can handle it,” I said.

  “Handle what?” Riis asked, waiting
for us outside the Illuminate.

  “Ketheria’s at home with Charlie,” Max informed her. “She’s not feeling well.”

  “Your Guarantor is looking after her?” she asked, somewhat surprised.

  There was that attitude again. Not quite insulting, but passively implying that we were not worth the attention.

  “Not big on compassion around here, are you?” Dalton said, walking past Riis and into the Illuminate.

  I looked at Max. “Never saw that before,” I said.

  “Come, we get the placement results this cycle,” Riis informed us.

  “Don’t be disappointed,” Theodore said to her as he walked inside. “I think I did really well.”

  Riis couldn’t help but smile. Once inside, I could feel the anticipation in the air. I walked past more than one student projecting sample questions from the exam using their neural port add-ons. They circled the images, frantically debating the answers.

  “It’s really important to some of these people,” I said.

  “A lot more than it should be,” Riis remarked.

  Each of us grabbed a tap and headed for the lockers.

  “We went to the Quest-Nest matches last night,” I told her.

  “The what?” I guessed that the central computer did not translate my word for the game.

  “You know, the game in the Labyrinth with the trackers and the baits?”

  “You mean Wor’an’ain,” she said. This time the computer did not translate her language.

  We stopped in front of the storage lockers, and I called Vairocina.

  “Yes?” she said, gathering the light around me and appearing in holographic form.

  “The central computer is not translating a word for us,” I informed her.

  “I could add it to the memory base if you want,” she said.

  I still wasn’t used to Vairocina’s “older” form. I missed the little girl I met on Orbis 1.

  “Who’s that?” Riis wanted to know.

  “That’s Vairocina,” Max told her.

  “JT rescued her from the central computer,” Theodore added.

  Riis was staring. “I thought Vairocina was a program.”

  “I am a real life force. If I could generate a physical form, you would not say that,” Vairocina said defiantly.

  Riis ignored her and asked me, “You can talk to her whenever you want?”

  I tapped my head and said, “Softwire, remember?”

  Riis didn’t have a response. She just gawked at Vairocina. It was the usual response.

  “What do you call the game?” I asked Riis.

  “Wor’an’ian,” she said, never taking her eyes off Vairocina.

  “We call it Quest-Nest,” I told Vairocina. “Could you add that to the translator?”

  “Absolutely,” she replied. “Done.”

  I looked at Riis. “What do you call the game again?”

  “Quest-Nest,” she said. The computer translated it perfectly.

  “Thanks, Vairocina. I’ll see you later.”

  Vairocina scattered, sending the light back into the environment. Riis waved her hand through the air where Vairocina had stood.

  “Nice pixels, huh?” Theodore remarked.

  Max’s chin dropped. “She’s a hologram!” Max exclaimed.

  “Yeah, but she still has nice pixels,” he replied.

  Max shook her head and walked away.

  I caught up with Riis as we headed to the pods. I needed a few questions answered.

  “How do you join the conclave?” I asked her.

  “You’re not thinking of joining, are you? You don’t even know how to play the game. The kids here will crush you.”

  “No, I mean the professional league. The one we saw at the Labyrinth.”

  “The pro conclave? Are all humans as crazy as you?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Why?”

  “I enjoyed watching, and I just want to know a few more of the rules.”

  Riis looked at me. She turned only slightly, since her eyes were already close to the side of her head. “Well, that depends. A Citizen can simply try out, but unless he or she belongs to a team, it’s pretty hard to place as an individual. Knudniks, on the other hand, can only play if their Guarantor enters them. Any winnings go to the Guarantors. Some Citizens own stables of knudniks they train for the games. Be glad you don’t belong to them.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  That meant I would have to get Charlie to sign me up. He’d do it; I was sure of it. I just had to ask. But how could a wormhole pirate enter? They were neither Citizen nor knudnik. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Can anyone else enter? I mean someone who is not a Citizen, not even a knudnik?”

  “No,” she said. “Anyone entering the conclave must have Citizenship or belong to a Citizen.”

  We paused at the entrance to the pods.

  “After the results of the exam are announced, specific programming will be arranged for your . . . level. Chances are we may not even be in the same theater after this,” Riis informed us.

  “Because knudniks will place poorly,” I said.

  Riis didn’t answer me. She just smiled slightly, trying to be polite. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what you meant.”

  “Listen to me, Softwire. Dop was correct. I volunteered to show you around the Illuminate. I choose to do that, and my reasons are my own business. But I didn’t make the rules on Orbis, and I definitely don’t agree with how Citizens care for their knudniks — so quit treating me like I do.”

  Her words slashed at me, and I felt my face redden. All I could say was, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll meet you at the lockers after the spoke,” she said quickly, and slipped inside.

  You’re such a split-screen. I was the one treating her poorly. She didn’t treat us like Dop or Weegin, or any other Citizens for that matter. I took out my frustrations on her because she was the only Citizen of Orbis who spoke to me. I used her to get what I wanted and then dismissed her because she was a Citizen. I was doing exactly what the Citizens did to me. She did not deserve that. I felt foolish.

  “Good luck,” Max hollered, taking a pod with Grace.

  Theodore and I took the next one.

  “I think I did pretty well,” Theodore assured me. “There were 720,000 questions and I answered 425. That’s more than half a percent. Pretty good burn rate, if you ask me.”

  I liked Theodore’s optimism. It was rare, but then again, he was always confident when the numbers added up. I hoped I placed well, if only to disprove the theory the Citizens held of us. But the truth was there were too many questions on the exam that I couldn’t even understand, and I didn’t think half a percent was very much.

  The pods drifted into place, and Theodore and I linked up. The white screen exploded with images of Citizens excelling at whatever they tried to do. I watched one alien control a spaceport on the moon Ki. Another reclaimed a planet devastated by war. Every image showed Citizens winning against all odds.

  The propaganda then faded to some sort of ceremony. An alien, dressed in a black velvet robe similar to the Keepers’, with an oversize Citizen’s crest mounted on some sort of metal thing that hung from his shoulders, stood up in front of the small crowd sitting in attendance. He looked like he was going to make a speech. I also noticed a telepathic headpiece bolted to his smooth head, just like the one Ketheria wore. The alien drew a deep breath, taking his time. He reeked of confidence. This Citizen was important, and he knew it, or at least he acted like it.

  The theater fell silent, eager to hear every word this alien had to say. Floating in front of him were several O-dats from which the alien read to the audience.

  “Great Citizens of the Rings of Orbis, your fledglings have labored for placement this phase, and I am . . . privileged to share their results.” His tone was far drearier than I had expected.

  The students in the th
eater, however, cheered loudly.

  “I guess this guy had a bad cycle, huh?” Theodore whispered.

  “I think he has better things to do — or at least he thinks he does,” I replied.

  “Throughout each cycle, our children on the Rings of Orbis have illustrated their excellence using the placement exam. It has primed many for lustrous careers in this universe, and each cycle the students who placed the highest have gone on to noble accomplishments.”

  The alien paused and consulted another alien near him before continuing. His face scrunched up as if he were filled with anger.

  “Show us!” someone shouted from one of the pods.

  “Once again your children have excelled,” the speaker continued, regaining his composure. “These scores were higher than any cycle before.”

  The students erupted in response.

  “Please don’t show our scores,” I moaned. I didn’t need any more ridicule.

  “As an example of our benevolence and understanding of all cultures, and in an agreement with our noble Keepers, this rotation saw the admittance of several children from our labor caste,” he announced.

  The crowd jeered and thumped on their pods.

  “That’s a nice way to put it,” Theodore remarked.

  “Citizens, be proud of your kindness. Be proud of your gracious acceptance of those who can only dream of such stature, for you are the chosen ones.”

  The students didn’t know how to respond to this. Some cheered while some still thumped on their pods. Obviously this wasn’t a normal speech.

  “In observance of tradition,” the speaker said. “I would like to announce the student who succeeded above all others and placed first in our exam.” The alien next to him handed the speaker a small clear screen. “This rotation’s honoree is Theodore Malone from our labor caste. Property of Charlie Norton.”

  Theodore? I couldn’t believe it. I knew he was smart, but Theodore? Then the other students in the auditorium erupted, screaming and banging on their pods, and I forced myself to concentrate on the huge O-dat in front of me. Walking toward the speaker to accept his honor — was Theodore! Larger than life, he stood next to the speaker and took the clear screen scroll the Citizen offered up. Theodore waved it above his head and smiled. The speaker avoided any eye contact with Theodore and immediately departed the podium.