Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  No one had come to the counter.

  “Hello? Rina? Socrates?”

  She leaned over the desk. Either Rina or her boss had to be near, because the computer was on, and the screen unlocked, the mindbase database open. All the times she’d come here to pick Rina up after work, closing the mindbase program was the first thing Rina did when leaving the desk, for security reasons. Apparently the StatOp enforcers loved doing spot checks.

  “Anyone here?” she called again.

  There was no sound.

  Strange. Really strange.

  Behind the desk, a door led into the back of the premises, where the labs were.

  Melati walked around the desk and looked into the corridor with its gleaming polished floor. Signs on the ceiling read, Lab A, Lab B, and Emergency Exit. The light was on in the office at the very end.

  “Hello, is anyone here?”

  There was no answer, so Melati padded into the corridor, into the ever-present scent of hospital and the soft hum of equipment. The doors to the labs on either side were closed, but each had a small window looking into labs shrouded in semidarkness. Pinpricks of light blinked green. In those labs, people’s bodies were kept alive and breathing while their minds travelled on the FTL bullet probe to their swap body.

  The lit room at the end was Socrates’ office, with comfortable meeting chairs and a wall screen displaying a field with flowers that changed to mountains with snow as Melati looked in.

  “Socrates?”

  There were a number of computers on the desk—all showing scan-entry screens.

  On the desk stood a container with a half-eaten lumpia, and a cold-food smell filled the room.

  This was weird.

  Back in the front office there was still no sign of anyone. A message light blinked at the bottom of the screen on Rina’s desk. You have twelve messages. Two are urgent.

  Now it was kind of creepy.

  The business with Keb was also kind of creepy. Melati didn’t like creepy things, especially when they happened together like this.

  Melati walked around the desk and bent over the chair so she could read what was on the screen. Several menus. Lists of available contracts. Requests for visits to certain places. She tapped her finger on that link and the list came up.

  Luna wanting to visit Europa.

  New Pyongyang wanting to visit New Jakarta.

  That sort of thing. Of course, New Pyongyang was close enough that you could get there via normal ship transportation in less than two weeks—faster than the bullet probe to Luna—but mindswapping was far less expensive. It had no life-support costs.

  There was a list of names containing people on-station. These were people wanting to travel to certain destinations, usually for family reasons. It was Rina’s job to pair them up with a swap body at the destination. Socrates, and the medical staff, provided the actual swap.

  Most of the would-be travellers were barang-barang, but also some tier 1. Melati knew some of the construct men did this as a joke, a holiday. All sorts of lewd stories circulated about going into the body of a woman, and about how you could trick the mindbase exchange into accepting a male-to-female exchange.

  All just silly stories, including the ones about the rampant sex.

  She glanced at the clock. Why was no one here? Seeing as the database was open, she could, of course, check the system herself, and no one needed to be any the wiser about her inquiries. The notion that Keb’s mindbase fragments might have come from here was ridiculous anyway, since there were no computer links between the station proper and the ISF base. It was just that what Keb had said—looking for someone else who’d run off with his body—sounded a lot like what the mindbase exchange did.

  She sat down at Rina’s desk and studied the options on the unfamiliar screen.

  Waiting list.

  Probe queue (outgoing)

  Probe queue (incoming)

  Lists of completed transfers.

  That sounded interesting. One touch on the screen brought up a long list of names, most of them barang-barang.

  She scrolled a number of days back, but the only Grimshaw she could find was someone named Troy, and he had travelled back from an exchange with Mars base.

  Melati was about to get up when there were footsteps and voices outside the office. A hand on the door handle. She gasped and jumped up from the desk.

  The door opened and the mindbase exchange owner, Rina’s boss Socrates Finlay, came in.

  He stopped, still half into the office. “Good afternoon, miss . . . er . . . how can I help you?”

  The door started to rumble shut behind him, sensed that he was still close to it, and opened again. He stepped forward, out of the sensor’s range, and glanced into the docking area.

  Socrates had a strict rule that Rina’s friends and relatives were not to visit during business hours, so Melati said, “I came here to see if Rina was ready to go home.”

  The door shut properly this time. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. She’s gone home.” He had his hands firmly jammed into the pockets of his jacket and with one hand was fidgeting with something inside the pocket. “She had a headache, you know.”

  Melati knew. Rina often suffered bad headaches that lasted for days and made her cower in her room in the dark, because light hurt her eyes. “When did she leave?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Oh, all right, I’ll go and see her there, then.”

  She hesitated.

  Damn the eternal standoff between ISF and the station’s management. If she asked him about his database and mindbase transfer procedures and how he thought rogue mindbases might end up where they were not supposed to be, he might report her to StatOp, along the lines of ISF thinks we’re an incompetent bunch of hacks who can’t even keep track of the mindbase exchange, and StatOp Commander Jocar Bassanti would highfoot his complaint to Major-General Sandy Cocaro, and the next thing, she would chew a piece off Dr Chee for not investigating through official channels. And there was nothing to investigate; she just wanted to talk and that was not worth all that trouble. She’d ask Rina later. Melati edged towards the door.

  Socrates halted at the entrance into the corridor. “Rina is a good worker. Tell her that if you see her.”

  “Um. Sure. Did anything happen?”

  “No, no. Not at all. But we have to appreciate our staff, don’t we?”

  Headache, hell. This was starting to look like they’d had another argument. Sometimes Melati didn’t understand why Socrates hadn’t sacked her cousin yet. By tier 1 standards, Rina confirmed all the stereotypes of the barang-barang. She was often late, failed to let her boss know if she couldn’t come and gave privileges to her extended family they shouldn’t get.

  “Please, tell her there is a lot of work for her to do.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Tell her that we’ve had requests from Mars. She likes those because the tier 1 pilots and overseers like to take part in those swaps.” He chuckled. “She thinks they’re cute. Unlike me, huh?” He patted his paunchy stomach. “You know they say that when a man gets old, his hair grows everywhere except his head? That’d be me. You tell Rina to look after herself and come back as soon as she’s better.”

  “Certainly, Sir.” What had gotten into him? Not only was he not the type for small talk, he was extremely bad at it. “You’re sure nothing is wrong?”

  “No, no, no. Just saying.”

  Melati went to the door before he could say any more. Or before he noticed how he’d mistakenly left the database open and asked about what she’d been doing with their system and accused her of being a spy. “I’ll tell her right away.”

  She felt like she could only properly breathe when she had left the office.

  There were quite a number of people on the dockside walkway, many in white uniform with the Taurus Army logo. A group of them stood around the access tube to one of the soft-docks. A tall, dark-skinned man was arguing with them, spreading his hands i
n a theatrical gesture of frustration. With his greasy-glistening black ponytail, short beard and many chains and rings, he looked like the typical New Hyderabad merchant, trader or con man, briber or smuggler. She had to restrain herself from giving the enforcers the thumbs-up.

  Melati was so occupied with trying to see what the fuss was—or if she knew any of the New Hyderabad criminals—that she almost crashed into two other enforcers coming towards her. Oops.

  Melati sidestepped them, muttering an apology, but the men ignored her, obviously in a hurry. She watched, curious where this lot was going.

  They went to the mindbase exchange office. The door opened, they went in and the door rumbled shut behind them.

  Interesting. Since when did enforcers use the mindbase exchange?

  Just as she was about to leave, the door to the mindbase exchange opened again, and a hand took the sign on the door, pulled out the card, flipped it around and re-attached the magnetic sign. It now said closed.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  WHAT THE. . . ?

  Melati stared at the closed door, feeling like something important had just slipped through her fingers. Should she have alerted Socrates that the database was left open? Was he now in trouble with the enforcers because of her?

  In the back of her mind, she heard Uncle’s voice: Do not get involved. They do not care about you. They do not understand us and we don’t understand them.

  Yet one thing she understood better than Uncle or most barang-barang: Socrates was Rina’s boss, and Rina needed her job to avoid a fate like all other girls. Love or hate the tier 1 constructs, they provided solid work that was fair, gave people real opportunities for education, didn’t line the pockets of some criminal Chinese-run racket and took its rules and regulations from proper ISF law and not the say-so of the New Hyderabad mafia.

  But even if she were to get involved, what could she do now? If Socrates was in trouble, it was too late for her to change anything.

  From the docks, she continued toward the B sector and found her way blocked by a crowd, mostly miners in dirty overalls. Now what?

  Melati wasn’t tall enough to see what the holdup was, but glimpsed white tier 1 enforcers’ uniforms at the heavy fire doors between the BC block and the B sector.

  “Hey, do you know what’s going on?” muttered one of the miners waiting near her.

  “Checkpoint,” his mate replied. “Went up this morning about halfway through the shift change. Everyone has to show ID.”

  “You’re kidding. What about the workers who don’t have ID?”

  “Can’t work, eh?”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “Do enforcers ever have a point?”

  “Good point.” They both laughed.

  “It’s not funny, lo,” a third man said. “My son, he doesn’t have ID, and they told him he can’t work anymore. The boss is not happy, and neither is his wife. They allowed him to go to the Registration Office, but there they told him there’s three-week wait. He can’t survive that long without working, so he complained to Wahid.”

  The other man snorted.

  “Yeah. Wahid says he’ll bring it up at the next StatOp meeting.” He shook his head. “He’s trying way too hard to please the tier 1 bullies.”

  “Living in their pockets, more like.”

  Melati bit her lip while shuffling towards the checkpoint. People always thought Wahid just needed to complain to StatOp and that would magically fix all their problems. Never mind that the StatOp council had other members representing all groups at the station: ISF, the Taurus Army and the independent constructs, mostly retirees from the Taurus Army. Besides, Jocar Bassanti, head of the StatOp council, was not known for being either fast or compassionate.

  At the front of the line she presented her arm. The enforcer scanned it mechanically, without speaking or looking at her. His machine made no protest, and she was allowed into the B sector.

  In the central corridor, or Jalan Jakarta, or JeJe, the air enfolded her with the smells of cooking and spices. The walls were scuffed and scraped, decorated with the graffiti of four generations of tier 2 worker-class people. There were no harsh commands issued in Standard here; instead, the air hummed with the soft words and syllables of B3, bahasa barang-barang.

  People were everywhere: men and women in grubby mining suits just returned from the daily flotilla to Sarasvati’s ice rings, men in sarongs, mothers in kebayas, children in bright batiked shirts that, if you looked closely, were just recognisable as regulation shirts from station stores.

  A grandmother was carefully applying melted batik wax to a shirt in preparation for dyeing. A group of young children ran up, shouting, “Hey, Melati!” They held out grubby hands, palm up.

  The old woman shook her head and muttered something about the youth of today.

  “Melati, Melati! Cousin bring any napkins, sachets or sweets?” Those little items she took from the soldiers’ mess were always popular.

  “Not today. Sweets are bad for your teeth.” Only yesterday all staff at the ISF base had attended a general assembly where Base Commander Major-General Cocaro had ranted about pilferage from the ISF stocks, pointedly looking in her direction. Because everyone knows that small brown people steal.

  “Gitu loh, Melati?” Who cares?

  “I care.”

  The children giggled and ran off.

  Of course the boys would never get bad teeth from anything she brought; they sold whatever she gave them to the black market shops of JeJe that she could see all around her, displaying bags of chicken feathers, bits of broken electronics, sheets of the blue plastic used for packing istel cargo—anything they could lay their hands on, mostly illegally obtained. A group of men rummaged in a bowl full of screws, nuts and bolts of all sizes. If she looked close enough, Melati could probably tell by the type where they had pilfered the material. She didn’t look that close; she’d rather not know. These people were her family. Many small brown people did steal because they had no other way to get what tier 1 took for granted.

  Up ahead, Uncle’s rumak came into view. Like other rumak owners, Uncle had his supplies stacked in the thoroughfare so as to fit as many tables and chairs as he could into the tiny main room of what was normally a residential unit for one family. People queued up outside Uncle’s place, further holding up the traffic in the already crowded passage of JeJe. Some of the waiting patrons held bunches of carrots or eggs or pastry by way of payment for the meal; that was how things worked. Where they got the carrot plants and the chickens, well, nobody asked about those, either.

  Melati pushed past the line, into the murmur of voices and the tangle of tables and chairs in semidarkness punctuated by feeble lights dangling by illegal wiring from the ceiling. There was barely room to move. The air was heavy with the scents of cooking oil and sweat.

  The room only had spots for twenty-five people. Most were locals—mining families, and three hypertechs dressed in customary black and wearing gloves, their faces covered by VR masks and veil, who spoke to each other in low voices. The light on the back wall reflected in the headpiece of the hypertech facing Melati, a flicker of light playing across the insectoid visor. Melati wondered what they saw inside their visors, but you could never find out unless you became a hypertech, and then you couldn’t tell anyone.

  Melati zigzagged between the tables across the room. Patrons waved and nodded. Hey, Melati. Not the hypertechs. They always ignored everyone.

  Two other people didn’t greet her—men, sitting in the far corner, with a screen on the table between them. They wore station suits, and one had a beard.

  New Hyderabad. But surely no New Hyderabad merchant would have the hide to come in here?

  They were engrossed by the screen; the glow silvered their faces. The screen showed blocks of graphics—girls’ pictures, probably, or men to match up with them. Why were they conducting their filthy crimes inside her family’s business?

  Melati turned away, tears o
f anger pricking her eyes. She wrestled her way into the kitchen, into the smells of cooking and—from pots dangling from ceiling wires—coriander and lemon grass, that the station ventilation was never designed to cope with.

  Uncle turned as if sensing her. His head brushed the bottom of a pot that swung close enough over his head for its breeze to move his hair.

  “Hey, Melati.” He wiped his hands on his apron. “What’s going?” Under the apron he wore his favourite shirt, with Paris on the front and some strange pointy structure. Melati doubted his claim to have received the shirt from an istel pilot—they were aloof and never ventured away from the docks.

  Grandma turned from her work at the table, dark eyes cloudy and watery. “They keep you at work longer and longer, lo? Next we know you be turning into one of them whiteshirts.” Her voice dripped with Why were you not at prayer? accusations.

  “What’s cooking, Grandma?”

  A basket holding bright red birds-eye chillies sat on the table beside a plate with discarded stalks and seeds, and another with the red chilli flesh. Grandma wore gloves like those Laura Jennings used in the surgery—who knew where she’d gotten them—and was cutting red pulp into mush. The white gloves had gone orange with chilli sap.

  In the corner, against the wall, sat her cousin Ari. He was wearing a pink shirt, the sleeves cut off, and several arm bands; and he’d bleached the front locks of his shoulder-length hair carrot red.

  “Hey, Melati,” Ari said, grinning. He’d lined his eyes with a kohl pencil.

  “Has Rina come in today?”

  Ari shook his head. “Haven’t seen her.”

  “Not yet,” Uncle said. “Then again, the young wild daughter’s avoiding me nowadays.” He laughed, and then grimaced.

  “I went to see her at work, but Socrates said she’d gone home sick.”

  “Not that I heard,” Uncle said.

  “Ah, dear daughter will turn up when she gets hungry,” Grandma said. “Sure she’s not too sick for that, lo.”

  Grandma was right. No matter what, everyone in the family came here at the end of the day. Melati should stop worrying. Rina was just being Rina, and Socrates was nervous because he’d had a disagreement with her—not for the first time, either.