What should I tell Gideon? Was he the kind of man who would react poorly to learning the strange truth about a friend? Or was he instead so open-minded, so generous of spirit, and so welcoming that nothing I could tell him would bother him, because I was a friend first, and a weird freaky android second? I didn’t know. He was very old, and very sophisticated. He’d been everywhere, and seen everything in his hundred and thirty years. And yet I knew so little about him. He claimed to have had a terribly dull life as a civil servant, working his way up through the Home System administrative bureaucracy — but then he’d tell me some weird thing like the time he and the Foreign Minister of New France were playing strip poker while stuck in a decaying orbit around some neutron star. It was hard to know if he was telling me the truth or having a laugh at my expense. It drove me nuts, but that was life with Gideon.
Yet a troubling thought impinged on me: What if he only thought he’d been everywhere and seen everything? What if he’d been decanted from a nanofabrication chamber, say, ten years ago, already looking like an old man, and full of programmed memories akin to my own, the kind that are so realistic and plausible that you can’t pick the moment where your simulated life transitioned to your “real” life? What if he was no more “real” than I was?
I held my head; I was getting a thumping screaming headache just from thinking about this crap. Absently, I got my headware biostats to take care of the headache. The status display informed me I was running low in supplies of key chemicals. It then went on to list a range of foodstuffs known to be high in those chemicals, and offered to order them from the market and deliver them to my condo. I blinked it away, and found myself hunched over, clutching my head, feeling wretched.
Gideon said, “McGee? God, if you looked any worse I’d have to flush you down the toilet.”
“Lots on my mind,” I said.
“Well, come on then, spill your guts!” He smiled, enjoying himself.
I sat up and looked at him, wishing I knew which way he’d react if I told him.
Also, I wondered if I could deal with whatever was waiting for me at dock 12 without Gideon’s help.
I couldn’t believe I’d just formulated such a thought! I was Zette McGee, the toughest old bitch of a homicide cop who ever slogged through the muddy streets of Winter City! Nobody liked me except crazy bastards like Gideon, a man who had once said: “I am enchanted by your dainty approach to the niceties of everyday existence, McGee…” Remembering this, I smiled, despite myself.
Serendipity Port was so vast it was impossible to see all of it in one glance. Much of it simply wasn’t visible, or was lost in a haze of sheer mind-boggling size. Distances were measured in tens of kilometers. Whole capital cities could be planted in here, side by side, with room for sprawling suburbs. I knew the port offered more than twenty-five berths of varying capacity, catering to vessels from relatively small personal yachts like Gideon’s to unutterably mammoth freighters and passenger liners.
The place was cold and clammy, with brisk fluctuating winds that stank of powerplant coolants, the stale exhaust of worker machines, burned thruster fuel, and — unpleasantly — farm animals. There was also the disagreeable and vertiginous sensation of artificial-gravity that you get from non-spin grav generators. Give me spin-g any day.
Tonight the port was not that busy, only operating at about half-capacity. Even at that, everywhere we looked, on every surface, we saw thousands of busy and noisy support bots, tending to several different colorfully-marked ships. At least a kilometer long, these immense ships consisted of a small operations module at the bow, then a long rigid polydiamond core on the end of which was a huge powerplant and drive module. The drive cores were wrapped tight in a folded superfluid mesh which, when deployed, would spread out into something like a spider-web many kilometers across, dumping the tremendous heat from the engines with almost perfect efficiency.
Like most people, Gideon and I rode the zipway network threading through and around the dock complex. I never cared for zipways as a way to get around megastructures like this. I always thought that there was a reason God invented taxis. Gideon on the other hand, objected that taxis around the port cost too much. Gouging the tourists, he insisted. So there we were on the zipways, hanging on for dear life. You’re assured as you snap in that nothing can possibly go wrong or hurt you, but the whole thing feels far too much like an old-fashioned roller coaster ride for my taste. Tonight, with a few annoying exceptions, the network was working properly, whizzing passengers with gritted teeth and white knuckles around the inconceivable immensity of the dock complex as quickly as possible. We only had to change zipways a few times because of bots doing noisy and ozone-stinking maintenance.
The Hermes VI had arrived. Her cargo was busily unloading and stacking itself on the wharf, and she was taking on fresh helium-three fuel. Nearby, in much larger berths, were two big white luxury cruise liners. Fusion tugs were helping to ease one in to her berth, while other tugs gently nudged the massive vessel out towards the port’s inner airlock space-doors whose sheer size and mass one could not appreciate except from a great distance.
More impressively, there were also two other big freighters. One was a high-capacity live animal transport on a refueling layover eventually destined for one of the Muslim habitats. The other freighter was a rare sight, a super-carrier; Horvath Lines’ Exeter Delta, fifteen million tonnes of heavy-duty capacity, the sort of ship you’d use to move habitat structure components. She was more than five kilometers in length and bulged with massive swivel-vectored Romanesko drive cores. She was so enormous that you could not really tell what you were looking at; her great dark bulk extended in every direction, looking more like a slightly tube-shaped mountain range than a starship. As we zipped our way to the Hermes, the sight was awe-inspiring.
Next to the Exeter Delta, the Hermes VI looked like a pleasure boat, even though we knew the Hermes was fifteen hundred meters from bow to stern. She was a spine-loader — a freighter with a modest crew module at the bows and huge Horvath Technics drive core modules aft. I watched as cargo containers, riding individual floatfields and steered by attitude jets, locked themselves to the ship’s spine and, taking account of the masses of their individual cargoes, organized themselves into a rigid, evenly balanced load consisting of layer upon interlocking layer.
Dock 12, once we got down there, was a complex the size of a small nation-state featuring mighty towers of containers, each one colorfully marked by owner, lessor, lessee, and insurance underwriter. The boxes were covered with handling and route codes, and wrapped in folded self-loader articulation limbs like thin and bony fingers. The containers, designed to handle themselves onto and off a ship, had a considerable degree of individual machine intelligence. Once assembled into a load, however, they developed a simple emergent hive consciousness and worked, like a colony of bees, to find the best storage array on the ship or on the dock to facilitate easy transfer back and forth. Chaos however, had a way of intervening; disasters happened; cargoes were sometimes ruined. Insurance premiums were high.
Gideon and I peered up at the beetling skyscrapers of containers, some up to half a kilometer high. It was a strange thing to understand that this tower, and these containers, were quite possibly aware of us standing here, and would be aware of all the vehicles, bots and other machines and people working around and over their surfaces.
“We may have a problem locating your friend,” said Gideon.
Kell Fallow had not indicated his container’s ID. He might not even have known it. It would depend on how much time he’d had to smuggle himself into the right sort of box going to the right destination. All the same, standing there watching hundreds of thousands of big reinforced boxes crawling like spiders from the ship’s spine and then taking to the air to fly themselves down onto the dock, we couldn’t help but wish we had some sort of clue.
You should always be care
ful what you wish for.
Sirens drew our attention.
We only barely heard them, but we both knew all the standard habitat emergency services codes, including the one for a Fire Emergency.
We snapped into a zipway and shot off, dodging around square kilometers of dockside container-towers and soon arrived, breathless, at the scene in time to be told by a group of black-and-yellow-clad Emergency Services guys that there was nothing to see, that the situation was under control and we should go about our business.
The air stank of burnt metal, ozone and fire suppressant chemicals. Already a big and blocky red lifter hov, yellow emergency lights spinning and lift-motors howling, was carrying what was left of the burned-out container away to wherever Emergency Services people did their forensic examinations. Nearby, I also noticed a white ambulance hov taking off — without spinning lights and sirens.
I swore, watching it go.
Gideon grabbed a passing firefighter and asked what had happened. After the firefighter informed Gideon that civilians shouldn’t be in this area, and after Gideon impressed upon her that he would really like to know what had happened, the firefighter looked at him, and then at me. Her expression shifted, seeing me, and the look on my face. “Spontaneous explosion in a box,” she said. “Loader techs went to crack the box and the bastard exploded. We lost two guys, plus the poor bastard inside. The Chief figures it was a stowaway.” She shook her head and looked numb as she walked away to rejoin her unit.
“What sort of explosion?” Gideon called after her.
The firefighter, who’d already turned away, looked back at him. “What?”
“What sort of explosion was it? Was it a bomb? Exploding oxy tank? What?”
The firefighter swore. “Looked like a fluorogen bomb, about half a kilo, maybe less. You a cop or what?”
Gideon looked stunned. “Not exactly. McGee?”
I stepped forward. “I’m interested in the guy who died. He was a client.”
The firefighter nodded, but looked suspicious. “Sorry for your loss, ma’am,” she said, and turned away to rejoin her unit.
Gideon turned to me. I was now watching the ambo-hov dodging around the towers of containers as it left the port. “Hospital?” Gideon said to me.
I nodded, feeling grave. “Hospital.”
CHAPTER 4
“I’m not authorized to give you that information, ma’am,” the hospital’s beautifully presented female PR disposable said, when we asked for details about the man who had died — who had been killed, I reminded myself — in the cargo container.
We were in the luxurious and stylized lobby of Serendipity General, an expensive commercial hospital located on the habitat’s “mainland”, in the heart of teeming Serendipity City. The PR disposable sat in a white island module in the center of an expansive room whose gleaming white and navy blue decor was designed to connote both high caliber medical expertise and facilities almost too expensive to use. Several bots, all gleaming white and chrome with reassuring big red crosses on their torso units, came and went, looking determined and busy. Small cleanerbots whirred discreetly across every surface, removing even rumors of dirt. Occasionally, as we stood there struggling with the PR drone, we saw a patient go by, lying on a floatbed, the intelligent bed knowing with every fiber of its photonic brain where it had to go.
I took a deep breath, got my biostats watching my blood pressure, and asked again: “Is there anything at all you can tell me about the man? Has he been taken down to your morgue? Have you been able to identify him from his remains?” Sometimes the hardest thing in the universe is trying to remain civil while talking to a disposable PR drone. They can’t be bribed; they can’t be convinced by a good argument, and you can’t threaten them. They never tire, they don’t wear out or give up if you keep at them. They simply smile at you — and it looks like such a genuine smile you almost believe it. Even if you destroy them — as often happened — you still don’t get your information, and before you know it a replacement drone appears to take its place. In fact, the only thing you can do is try and hack your way past the drone’s headware defenses. In a situation like this, with confidential patient information at risk, the data-protection ranged against system intrusion attacks was vicious and all but impregnable. We’d need military spyware to crack our way in.
Which wasn’t an impossible task these days, with every military organization in human space trying to scale back their interstellar operations in the wake of the Silent Occupation. There was a lot of military surplus gear out there, if you knew where to look. I had neither the time nor the money to choose that option. Instead, knowing it was fruitless, knowing that guy Sisyphus had better future prospects than I did, I asked the drone anyway. You never knew. There was an astronomically remote but finite chance of a system error or some damn thing.
The PR flack raised a dainty, pale and very clean-looking hand. She exuded a faint perfume that smelled like some vigorous kind of soap. She said, sweetly and yet with firm authority: “I am only authorized to provide this information to the family.”
“All right,” I said, very annoyed now, and yet I was starting to feel weird because surely, as a disposable, this PR drone was one of my own people.
I shook my head. No. Not the same! The thought stuck there.
Grimacing, I forced myself back to business, since it also occurred to me that maybe I could approach the matter from the disposable angle: Kell Fallow was a disposable, I was a disposable, therefore, we were “family” of a sort. There were obvious problems with this approach. To say nothing of the fact that we still didn’t know if we were even talking about Fallow. Taking a new tack, I said, “All right, then. Who’s the doctor in charge of the case?”
“Once again…” she opened, but I interrupted her.
“Stop right there. I asked about the doctor in charge of the case. Not the name of the patient, and not where or in what condition the poor bastard might be. Surely you can give me the name of the bloody doctor!”
“I’m sorry, but that information would allow you to infer other details which you are not entitled to know, unless you are a family-member.”
Keep calm, keep calm. “All right. What if I was a cop?”
“There is some information which I could provide to a Serendipity Police Service officer. I would of course need to see some current Serendipity Police Service identification.” Again, the sweet smile that suggested, in telling me these things, she was doing me a kindness. I was starting to feel like I could tear her head off and jump up and down on it.
I wondered if I could lean on some friends I had in the local Service to help me out, coppers helping coppers, solidarity of the badge, that kind of thing.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to get them involved. This was my problem.
Damn.
“I did tell you this would happen, McGee,” Gideon said, quietly.
I muttered under my breath. “You got any better ideas?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then went up to the exquisite disposable. “Excuse me, I think I’ve cut my hand. Would you mind having a quick look…?”
Obediently, she engaged her triage mode and bent to examine Gideon’s hand. She took his hand in both of hers and inspected it closely, all over, and tested his fingers, before releasing the hand and saying to him, “Your hand appears to be in good condition, sir.”
“Thank you for your time,” Gideon said, and led me away down a wide, quiet corridor decorated in earth tones and tasteful-but-expensive fittings. I’d seen shabbier five-star hotels. Over my headware I could hear faint, tinkling, and very reassuring music.
“What the hell did you do? Even I can see there’s nothing wrong—”
“I hacked her headware while she was holding my hand, McGee,” he said quietly, looking around f
or anything that might be listening.
“Well aren’t you a man of surprises!” I was impressed, very impressed indeed. “How the hell did you do that?”
“Ah,” he said. “An ancient secret of the mystic East.” He looked smug and, somehow, mysterious. The thought crossed my mind that maybe Gideon actually had some of this military spyware in his headware. Which was a crazy thought. Old geezers didn’t get around with stuff like that in their heads.
“All right then, you smug bastard, what did you find out?”
“Follow and learn, follow and learn.” He waggled his bushy eyebrows mischievously.
Presently we threaded our way through the hospital’s corridors, dodging support bots, disposable nurses and orderlies, a few actual human doctors, and occasional milling human patients in white bathrobes, looking young, pale and confused, blinking at everything. Most of these were elderly men and women who had been receiving nano-based anti-aging treatments. You could always tell if someone had the treatment. They looked like teenagers but with skinny arms and legs, moving like old people, and blinking at everything because their eyes were fully restored and their headware was helping them adjust to everything. The thing with anti-age treatments was that it took quite some time afterwards to learn how to use your new body.
We passed ornamental gardens, ponds, small parks, as well as gift shops selling flowers and snack treats. The PR voices in our heads told us which route to take to get to our destination.
Ten minutes and half a kilometer later, after dodging scores of scurrying bots, we’d descended three levels into the chilly sub-basement complex beneath the hospital, where we found the only morgue serving the whole habitat.
It wasn’t a big facility because for the wealthy of Serendipity, death was strictly optional. You would have to be catastrophically unlucky to die during surgery here, and deaths by “natural causes” were a largely forgotten phenomenon of simpler times. When people suffered sufficient trauma that it brought about what once was considered “death”, it was usually because of some terrible accident, often incurred while doing something crazy and recreational with your newly-restored youthful body. Even then, there was still a great deal that medicine could do by way of bringing people back. And for people who had suffered massive, brain splattering trauma there was still extraordinarily expensive hope — if they had taken time during their stay at Serendipity to arrange a sufficiently complete quantum-level scan of their brain and nervous system. These scans could then be fed into neurotissue nanofabricators, which would then set about rebuilding the patient’s brain to match the scan, restoring every quantum state of every particle. It was a staggeringly pricey undertaking, requiring a great deal of system storage, even by current standards. The result, however, in which more than ninety-five percent of patient memory could be restored, was well worth it.
Hydrogen Steel Page 3
