It worked out as well as you could hope for.
I missed my Dad. My sister, who had only been two years old, I didn’t miss nearly so much, which I knew was horrible of me.
I asked the cops loads of questions. And, surprisingly, considering grownups were always so busy and had no time to talk about anything, they answered everything.
It was inevitable, you might think, that at some point one of the officers suggested to me: “You know, we’re always looking for good people. And you could do worse than join the Police Service. The pay’s not great, but you get an education, you get accommodation, and benefits. Give it some thought.”
It was all downhill from there. I remember turning up at the recruitment office one horribly cold Monday morning, and submitting my application, all the while feeling surreal. I couldn’t believe that me, of all people — someone more inclined to go to protest demonstrations — was really here trying to sign up for something like this! My friends couldn’t believe it either and mocked me mercilessly; they were not the kind of friends who last, of course. Not that it really mattered since they had never really existed outside the factory sims.
I’ve thought a lot about my transition to “real” life, in the years since learning about my “sinister secret”. In the course of my police training I’d had numerous routine medical scans — none of which detected my factory origins. Was I so perfectly created that I could fool even the most sophisticated Police medical scanners? Or, was all that preliminary testing handled while I was still in sim mode?
It did make me wonder, though, about those times later in my life when I’d needed medical scanning for some damn thing. The pathology services I had visited might have been paid by the Police Service Executive to give me a “normal human” report. Or, suppose I had some kind of nanobot transponders buried deep in my flesh, deliberately transmitting signals to scanning machines, so that I would always test as normal, no matter which pathology service I might use.
It made me want to peel my skin off, it was such a horrible thought. I felt cold and revolted just thinking about it.
Three long years after my recruitment, I graduated, and a year after that I was a junior constable running the office and making tea and coffee in the Eighth District Station on Feldspar Street. A year later I was paired up with Senior Constable Halle Jervais, and we patrolled Winter City’s vast, ugly and run-down Stalk Base Complex — the foot of Ganymede’s only space elevator — which was always a haven for the city’s villainous element.
I’m sure my transition from simulated memory to real life was somewhere in those couple of years. Then again it also occurs to me, on lonely and dark nights, that I might still be in the simulator and who knows what’s going on outside in the “real” world!
But what mattered, now, as I sat there in the gathering dusk, idly watching the artificial sun darkening, was that now there was one other individual in the universe who understood something very personal about me. This Kell Fallow person might hold the answer to all my questions … and he was in trouble.
I knew just the guy to ask for a little expert assistance.
CHAPTER 2
Gideon Smith was tall, well filled out, and looked good for his very considerable age. He also looked like someone who would enjoy working as a librarian, or tending roses and he wore tweeds and affected a professorial manner that concealed a sharp sense of humor. Gideon also had the most alarming set of white, bushy eyebrows, which like his silvery hair, always looked unruly. I knew he was more than 130 years old, but at best I would say he looked about my age, which, if you believe these things, was fifty-ish. I didn’t know my real age of course, but I suspected it was less than that.
Gideon, as it turned out, knew a hell of lot more than I did. He had seen a lot more of human space and had worked at a variety of colorful occupations, including one career working as a trade diplomat with the now-defunct Home System Community’s Foreign Service, in which he claimed, mischievously, to have seen more astonishing things than he could ever tell me. “Not without having to kill you afterwards,” he would say. “And that’s too much paperwork for me at this time in my life!”
We met each other here at Serendipity a few years ago, during Orientation Day, when PR types escorted new arrivals around, making introductions, and going on and on about the wonderful, efficient, personal services the habitat offered its clients. Gideon saw the stricken look on my face and came over, dismissing the PR officer and offering to give me “the real” orientation tour. The first thing Gideon Smith ever said to me was, “Christ, you look bloody awful!” Which was exactly how I felt, and suddenly, I knew I could relax with this guy.
I think he sensed something of my panic, and just as I had worried about other cops learning my secret, I now worried that all these retired people would find out about me, too. Gideon took an interest in me and introduced me around to all the usual suspects and made sure I felt at home. Of course, idyllic, perfect scenery aside, I wasn’t comfortable in the least — I didn’t feel old enough to be retired — but at least I could control how often I interacted with the locals who were very nice, though obsessed with age, death, and gossip.
It wasn’t like being a copper, surrounded by fellow officers all day long, and frequently in such extremely close quarters that you could quickly tell who’d farted because you recognized the odor.
Here at Serendipity I mainly kept to myself, and caught up on a lifetime of reading, going through all the great books I’d always wanted to read but had never quite had the time for. There had always been more bloody police crap to read, or training courses to attend, or reports to write, or just being exhausted after pulling a double-shift.
Gideon and I got on very well, for some inexplicable reason. It helped that we shared an Australian ethnic heritage and cultural view, which was to say neither of us took anything too seriously and openly mocked authority figures. Besides, when you’re retired, you figure you’ve earned the right to be cranky and rude.
Early on we started having dinner together once a week or so, and had done so these past few years. I think I only missed one occasion when I was ill, and on that occasion he brought dinner to me — not that I felt like eating. He enjoyed his carbonara while I sat in bed, hunched over a bucket, aching all over. I remember telling him he was a bloody bastard, and him telling me, grinning, that I had always liked that about him.
Serendipity offered an embarrassing profusion of places to eat catering to every price-range and taste, so deciding where to eat was never a problem, and frequently Gideon picked the restaurant. I’ve never known a man so swift and sure in his decision-making.
This night he’d fallen back on one of our favorites, the Anchorage Tavern, nestled in the marina retail ecology. It was an unpretentious place, featuring nautical decor, with food that was cheap and plentiful. As I came in I saw Gideon sipping iced mineral water, standing by the teak-inlaid bar with its fishing-nets-and-dead-lobsters motif.
Gideon sauntered over to me. “Good God, who let you out looking like that, McGee? Somebody call the Fire Service!” He smiled and took me by the arm.
“Well, aren’t you the tallest, skinniest streak of pelican shit I ever saw.” I wasn’t in the mood for our usual banter, but for the moment I was prepared to make an effort, so I forced a grin and let him guide me to “our” table, the one with the spectacular view out over the nodding yacht masts in the marina, past the seawall, and out to the brass-colored sea.
“Now don’t you go mocking the pelicans, McGee. You know what they say about pelicans?” He steered me to my seat, the one with the better view.
I knew this routine, of course. “And what’s that they say about pelicans?”
“Their beaks,” said Gideon, looking wise like the ages, while simultaneously gesturing to indicate the capacious size of pelican beaks, “hold more than their bellies can!” He flashed a daz
zling smile and sat, careful to check the cutlery for blemishes, stains, and improper positioning. After a moment, he appeared content. The universe was in order.
I forced a smile and looked outside. The view outside was sublime. It always struck me that you could never tell, just from looking at it, that we were inside a vast, artificial habitat. The sea and the sky looked so real.
A disposable drinks waiter appeared. Gideon ordered an espresso; I joined him.
Gideon, settled back into his seat, and seeing the look on my face suddenly grew concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Of course. Just a little tired.”
“McGee, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. If I’ve told you once…”
I was keeping an eye on the time. We’d been here a little over half an hour. I was still thinking about the Hermes VI, docking at 2100 hours. I was also still thinking about Kell Fallow, secreted inside a cargo container. “I got an interesting call this afternoon, Smith…”
“Do tell.”
“Well…” I started to tell him about the incident, but I skirted around the telling detail, that Fallow knew about my colorful past. This naturally created problems.
“Why you?” Gideon asked, sipping his coffee.
“He’s someone I used to know,” I said, telling an isotope of the truth. I hoped he wouldn’t notice the start of my blush, or my efforts to get biostats to clamp it down.
“And he’s hiding in a shipping container, trying to get here?”
“That’s right.”
“To see you? A disposable wants to see you?”
“That’s what I said.”
“A disposable? You used to know a disposable? Know it well enough that it should actively seek you out for some kind of help?”
“Maybe some disposables are a lot smarter than anybody knows,” I said. It had been demonstrated that some nanofacturers produced units with superior cognitive capabilities, so-called “high-function” models that were often in demand as temporary personnel.
Gideon leaned back, surprised, but said nothing.
Our meals arrived. I hardly tasted mine. Gideon enjoyed his steak, but I suspected he enjoyed thinking about the puzzle of Kell Fallow even more.
“All right,” he said when we had finished. “Suppose this guy Fallow is just a regular dumb disposable. But let’s say somebody sent him to find you.”
I hadn’t considered that. “Interesting idea. It would explain the facts a lot better.”
“Could be this is an elaborate ploy to settle an old score with you, McGee?”
I swore quietly, and started feeling foolish for so easily buying into Fallow’s story. “You’re right. God knows there’s enough people out there who told me they were going to come and get me one day.”
He nodded, and looked more like his usual affable, wily self. “So, the question then arises: how long has he been in the box? What’s he living on? What’s he doing for life-support? I mean, aren’t those containers vactight?”
I read Gideon the PortMind report I’d gotten earlier: “Before coming here, the freighter stopped at the big Trinity hab in Wolf 359, huge quantity of mixed cargo offloaded, another huge load taken on, including some antique furniture. So it could have been there. Before Trinity she stopped at New Norway’s Amundsen Station for three days. Engine refit, minor damage repaired, six crewmen swapped, and she took on fuel. Before that…”
Gideon interrupted. “New Norway?”
“Yeah. What about it?” It meant nothing to me.
Gideon was frowning; his mighty eyebrows struggling impressively. “Not sure. Just a hunch maybe.”
“How long could a guy stay alive inside a container, assuming minimum life-support?” I asked, thinking about how to frame a sniffer query for the infosphere.
“Fourteen to eighteen days,” Gideon said automatically, “depending on exertion and optimal hypertube weather patterns of course.”
I stopped dead, staring at him. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Ask no questions, McGee.” He waggled his eyebrows and smiled.
I’d come up against this with Gideon before. He’d turn out to know some amazingly unlikely fact, but then refuse to tell me where he’d learned it, other than sometimes referring to things he picked up while working as a trade diplomat for “the firm”.
Which reminded me of something else. “Have you been reading the hypertube reports lately?”
Gideon nodded, not looking pleased. “Yes, of course. But I don’t know if there’s anything to them just yet.”
I had heard the rumors and unsubstantiated news reports that had been filtering through the infosphere over the last few months, all of them claiming that the hypertubes were disappearing. We relied on these unique naturally occurring wormholes for almost all of our transportation and communication. If the hypertubes really were disappearing human civilization would be in big trouble.
“You’d think the extra mass would show up,” I said, thinking about Fallow in his container. Even a freighter with a two-million-tonne capacity would still monitor every gram of its cargo. Ships were known to lose containers in freak accidents.
“Good point, McGee. Every time the ship went through port scans, before and after loading, and for refueling purposes…” I could see Gideon working numbers in his head. “Your guy would have to have access to the ship’s manifest database, so he could alter the details.”
“Clever guy,” I said, thinking about it.
“Very clever. For a disposable, he must have some pretty good tech in his head.” Gideon looked puzzled but intrigued. The mystery of a disposable android this intelligent was irresistible to him. The irony of the situation was not lost on me.
I checked the time. We had less than an hour before the Hermes VI docked. Which meant the ship would almost be here, moving only a few meters per second and still braking hard. I imagined Fallow sitting in his container, monitoring the final approach on his headware, sweating with tension, watching the motion of the Serendipity habitat and that of the freighter come together at exactly the moment of docking.
“We should be getting down to the docks,” I said.
Gideon dabbed his mouth with his napkin and smiled. “Lead on, McGee.”
CHAPTER 3
We took the train, and shared the car with several couples. I tried hard not to stare at the older ones who’d been through rejuvenation therapy. They were dressed formally, heading out for a night of theater, dancing, and elegant dinners. I envied them their social lives; in fact I envied them practically everything. I’d never learned to dance, and was always too busy working and recovering from working to do much of anything. Now that I was retired, I frequently had no real idea what to do with my time. When I reflected back, trying to remember what I did when I was young, before I became a cop, I remembered a typical sort of young-person-life-experience. And then I remembered that it was all a fake. Perhaps the real reason I never had much of a social life was because it would have been too hard to implement in units of my type.
Gideon, on the other hand, chatted effortlessly with a few of them, finding out what shows they were planning to see, and recommending a few himself.
I sat and brooded, realizing that I had more in common with Kell Fallow than I did with the people around me, even Gideon.
Gideon and I had known each other four years, but we’d never been intimately close. We saw each other occasionally, and sometimes we saw a play together, or, if my knees were up to it, we might attempt a bit of fitful and embarrassing tennis.
I wondered though, could I trust him with my secret? Even addressing the issue explicitly like this made me feel suddenly like an anxious teenage girl, wondering if she should or shouldn’t tell some spotty, gangly boy that she likes him. Which, when I stopped and thought about it, was ridiculous
. I’d spent years studying corpses and peering at stray flecks of blood on walls and weighing the significance of tiny scraps of paper, or odd bits of gravel stuck in a shoe. I’d spent more time watching postmortem examinations than I could measure; I thought I was unshockable. Anxiety had never been a problem for me when it came to difficult decisions.
This, however, wasn’t just a difficult decision. This was of a magnitude greater than anything I had dealt with before.
In my line of work I was always having to model situations in order to understand how unlikely-looking things must have occurred. How did the victim wind up there, in that position? Why was there a bloody handprint on the floor in that room, when the murder happened all the way over here? Why didn’t this person fight back? How did the killer get the victim to cut her own throat? Why is this window broken when there’s no sign of struggle anywhere? Questions like this, all the time, round and round, forever and amen. You developed a sense, after a while, of the way people’s minds work.
So now I was modeling the idea of telling Gideon about my little secret. First, I figured there would be disbelief. For one thing, everybody believed that disposables weren’t really conscious, like a regular human. At no point were they supposed to have any kind of awareness of their own thoughts. A disposable android would never walk into the kitchen, open the pantry and stand there, thinking, Now why did I come in here? Whereas I did that at least once a week, and Gideon knew it, because I was always telling him about all the stupid, forgetful things I did. We both commiserated about old age, and he’d tell me about all the dumb things he did because his memory wasn’t as good as it once was, and he’d tell me that it’s good to be nearly a century and a half old, but not so great if you don’t remember much. “There’s only so much your brain can store, McGee,” he once told me. “After a certain point, you have to get extra storage implants to carry the load.” And I knew he’d had neurocortical implants installed, not in his head where there was no more room, but near his kidneys.
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