Resister: Space Funding Crisis II

by Casey Hattrey

  Arianne sighed and took another look around. A scurrying movement stole her attention. Two bots were dragging large objects along the concourse. One was about a foot high, with some kind of extendible arms piled on top of tank tracks, painted a servile yellow. The other was an arachnid bot with eight legs, jet black and covered in sharp protrusions. They were clearly from a different manufacturer and probably a different part of the galaxy, thought Arianne. Perhaps even made centuries apart. The spider bot was carrying a chryo chamber while the yellow bot was maneuvering a huge white box the size of a small room.

  The bots reached an exit gate with their cargo, and the yellow one levered an arm up to press a button on the portable chryochamber. Various hissing sounds escaped from the chamber and the glass defogged to reveal the outline of a human standing frozen inside: a traveler arriving at the transport hub, probably flown a few decades or more, suspended in vitrified sleep.

  The yellow bot jabbed at another few buttons, but nothing happened. It turned to the spider bot and did a kind of mechanical shrug. The spider bot sagged a bit with exasperation, then began hitting buttons on a console halfway up the pod. Lights inside the pod came on and cycled through disco colors, but nothing happened. The yellow bot pushed its spidery friend out of the way and began jabbing more buttons. Red lights began blinking as an alarm fired up. Levels projected onto the glass began falling. The bots jumped back in panic.

  Arianne took a seat and enjoyed watching them race around the chamber, arms flailing in all directions. The bots froze as the whole chamber appeared to turn off. They turned to look at each other, then jumped back as the lid of the chamber levered open. The bots seemed elated at this turn of events, and began a kind of excited dance. The yellow one barely managed to catch the naked human as he tipped forward out of the chamber.

  They now began the process of dressing the man and trying to set him up as he’d been standing as he’d been zapped asleep at his journey’s beginning. This involved an epic voyage of discovery for the two bots. It appeared that they did not share any kind of communication protocol, and were not used to any of the clothes that they were charged with. Arianne watched with delighted fascination as they tried to set up a basic language. The spider bot first attempted to convey a kind of octal base code by tapping its legs while the yellow bot tried to mimic some kind of written language. However, they were both soon forced to resort to pointing and pantomime, the spider bot making an ingenious use of the man’s own index fingers. Slowly, the bots began compiling the man-clothes construct. They discovered the difference between trousers and jackets, that ordering of clothes mattered and spent a good quarter of an hour apparently discussing which bits of the human should poke outside the folds of cloth. Under the careful direction of the spider bot, the yellow bot now began to place the body into the right position for re-animation. This itself involved several rough sketches lasered into the floor and a minor fracas when the spider bot thought that “upside down cactus lollipop” was a slur directed at its own good self. During this the man was ragdolled around violently between the two bots, and Arianne had to step in and set them back to work.

  Eventually they appeared to agree on a posture - the man was halfway through a step and gazing straight ahead with iron purpose. The yellow bot used a dozen sets of extra mandibles to hold all the limbs in place and, under the careful direction of its friend, used near-translucent tendrils to pull face muscles into the right pose. Finally, the eyelids were drawn open and the spider robot gently held a circular device to the back of the man’s head. It beeped twice and suddenly the man came alive, stepping across the floor as if un-pausing a video feed. The robots rapidly drew back in a salute, since this was someone who now had the precise gait, the grim bearing and indeed the uniform of a military man. He jumped slightly at seeing the bots, since from his perspective they had just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. His hands came up in an automatic salute, but faltered as he realized that he had just made a hub cryosleep transition.

  He walked straight into Arianne. He drew back, excusing himself, before looking into Arianne’s eyes.

  “Sergeant Holt!” smiled Arianne “Fancy bumping into you!”

  Different parts of Holt’s face went through the barest flickers of apprehension, horror, suspicion and anger. Some dark part of Arianne enjoyed seeing memories of a crisis flash across his face.

  “Dr. Arianne. You weren’t on the schedule.” said Holt carefully.

  “Hey,” said Arianne, feigning reproach, “that’s no way to greet someone who helped you save CAFCA’s HQ from murderous cyborgs.”

  Holt frowned, then looked away.

  “It was saved,” Holt began, “... but not for me”.

  Holt sidestepped and began walking towards the center of the transit hall. Arianne fell in step beside his shiny shoes.

  “La Quana took all the credit and put the blame on you, eh?” she said, plodding along in her flats. Holt simply gave a single nod.

  “Well,” she said, “at least you’ve been catching up on your culture canon quotes.”

  This drew half a sideways smile from Holt.

  “Well, doctor, thankfully my new agenda involves more human relations. At least my squad ...”

  Holt stopped dead in his tracks and turned around. He scanned the area and looked increasingly worried, locking onto the large white box.

  “Where are they?” he said through clenched teeth “The protocol should have …”. He snapped out his terminal and began reading off reams of text.

  “Relax, Holt. Your team’s pod arrived at the hub”, said Arianne calmly “But the bots here are useless - they’re probably in the reanimation queue. Your cargo seems to have bubbled up to the top, though.”

  Holt drew half a calming breath, but then turned turning towards Arianne with a dark anger.

  “Wait. You knew we would be here?”

  “Not exactly,” said Arianne, confused at Holt’s sudden turn, “I put it together from some public CAFCA accounts, some searches on local transport networks - keywords like fundie, convoy, you know -.”

  “Spinning space quarks!” hissed Holt, “This is bad. If you know we’re here ...”

  He started quick-marching back to the huge white box. Arianne was taken aback and shouted after him.

  “Well maybe I should have just searched social media feeds for cranky ungrateful military type?”

  Holt reached the box - it was about half a meter taller than he was, and about two meters on a side. The surface was matt white with rounded corners and it was lying on a hydraulic cart. Holt opened an access panel in one side and tapped at a screen.

  Arianne walked up behind him, still confused.

  “So,” said Arianne, “I have a question -”

  “Spacing hell, Arianne!”, said Holt, “You don’t understand - this is a prize from the funding lottery.”

  Arianne still didn’t get it. Why did Holt look almost nervous? Holt turned towards her, gritting his teeth as he continued to tap away at the console.

  “Look,” he said, “a while ago, there was some big news thing about unfair procedures for grading funding applications. A lot of people got angry because the grades didn’t seem to match up with the quality of the application. Someone started a #BetterChanceOfWinningTheLottery tag.”

  “A natural reaction,” said Arianne.

  “Right, but then some big fundie took it seriously and actually set up a radding funding lottery. No application form, you just buy a ticket, then the whole pot goes to a randomly chosen holder. A recipe for disaster.”

  Holt was now glancing around the concourse, which had become oddly quiet.

  “This,” said Holt, slapping a frustrated hand against the box, “is one of the first prizes to go out.”

  “Oo!” said Arianne, “who’s the lucky department?”.

  “University of Ganymede department of Cognitive Linguistics, but not everyone’s happy about it. Some institutions invested a lot of money into buying tickets, a
nd even more into economic research to develop strategies for how many tickets they should buy. When they didn’t win, they blamed the randomization procedure, called for a re-draw, the winning institutions fought back, things got ugly.”

  Holt darted around to the other side of the box. Arianne followed, noticing now that there were absolutely no people around - the cafe opposite was totally deserted. Holt was looking down the long concourse. Above the hum of ventilation and empty escalators churning away, the sound of squealing tires started filtering through.

  Holt turned to Arianne.

  “We’re being hijacked!”

  Tearing around the corner at the other end of the concourse, a tactical combat tank appeared. It was composed of a dark metal sphere held up by multiple legs with wheels at each tip and two forward arms with machine guns attached. It was driving very fast towards them. Suddenly, the ceiling 30 meters in front of them burst open sending squares of tiling material in all directions. A dozen black ropes unfurled, and dark figures in masks began rappelling down from them. Before they hit the ground, they started firing their rifles.

  Sparks leapt up off the floor in front of Arianne, and she instinctively rolled aside, scrambled along the length of the box and took cover behind it. Holt appeared from the opposite side, crouching to peer around the corner. A further burst of fire forced him to duck back towards Arianne.

  “Holy hyperdrives, Holt - I’m with you for two minutes -”

  A clatter and squeal indicated that the tank had pulled up alongside the ground assault team. A loudspeaker boomed out in Standard Academic:

  “THIS IS THE UNIVERSITY OF GANYMEDE LINGUISTIC COGNITION DEPARTMENT! SURRENDER! YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED!”

  Arianne and Holt looked at each other in confusion. Holt remained crouched down, but shouted around the crate.

  “This is Sergeant Holt of CAFCA grant enforcement agency. I believe that this crate is intended for you.”

  “PAH! HOW DARE YOU CONFUSE US WITH THAT HIVE OF VIPERS! WE ARE THE LINGUISTIC COGNITION DEPARTMENT, NOT THE DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS.”

  Arianne, breathing hard, turned to look at Holt. He was studying the ground in front of him intently.

  “Holt!”, she said standing up, “I don’t really know what’s going on, but we don’t have a stake in this – my gut is telling me just to wave the white flag.”

  Arianne moved to break cover, but Holt grabbed her arm and pulled her down to a kneeling position.

  “Not a good strategy!” he hissed, “There’s no way they’d let us walk away from this - it represents millions of credits of top-grade research funding - people kill for this kind of thing.”

  More shots were fired, slicing into the ceiling above them and showering them with plaster.

  “STEP AWAY FROM THE RESEARCH EQUIPMENT” the voice boomed.

  “Got an escape route?” coughed Arianne.

  “No.” Holt was surveying the ground around them - they were completely in the open, too far to dash to the cover of the perfume store.

  “Weapons?”

  “No.”

  “Great planning, Holt,” said Arianne without thinking.

  Holt made an exasperated snarl.

  “I had a seventeen-part cascading plan,” he said, “I just didn't count on my squad disappearing.”

  On the other side of the box, they could hear the careful advance of heavy boots and the cold creaks of machine guns being braced.

  Arianne impulsively gripped his shoulder.

  “And they didn't count on you having a linguist,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You said Ganymede Cog Ling, right?”

  Holt gave a distracted nod. Arianne drew back a bit to take in the whole box, then turned to scan the floor behind them.

  “There!” she said, pointing to a small part of the floor tiled slightly differently to the rest. “Help me drag this thing closer to that access hatch!”

  Holt simply shook his head. “Good idea, but this is a high security area - there are no service ducts to hide in. We need another strategy.”

  But Arianne was already pulling on the hydraulic cart carrying the box. On hearing Holt’s words, she stopped and grabbed him by the lapels instead.

  “Holt! Do you trust me?”

  Holt considered this seriously for a moment, and answered sadly.

  “No,” said Holt, “not really, I suppose.”

  “Ach!” shouted Arianne. “Remember the last time we had this conversation? When cyborgs were killing everyone? And I saved the day?”

  Holt looked directly into her eyes.

  “Just work with me for a moment,” she said.

  On the other side of the box, the team of mercenary psycholinguists were advancing slowly. Their prize suddenly started inching away from them like a shy tortoise. A few of the team let off a spray of shots.

  “Hold fire! Hold fire!” shouted the commanding finance officer. “We can’t damage the cargo!”

  They inched forward in a tight arrow formation, pacing forwards with guns skirting around the right side of the box, with the tank covering them from the side. Their target was still creeping away from them, but only at a child’s pace. In a few steps they had drawn level with the box, and it stopped moving.

  A pair of hands crept out from the other side. All guns swiveled towards it.

  “We surrender! Don’t shoot!” cried a small voice from behind the box.

  The commander gave the signal to halt, and the team froze.

  “We’re stepping away from the box!” said the voice.

  Two figures emerged, hands raised above their heads. They stepped away from the box at an angle.

  “Stay where you are!” the commander shouted. He gave a signal to close on the targets.

  Arianne looked from left to right: the metal tank; the group of armed linguists huddled together; the big white box; the thick cable running from the box to a service hatch.

  A high pitched whine started emanating from the box. The linguists hesitated, tilting their heads towards it. Suddenly the whine reached a peak and cut out. The linguists’ heads swiveled around to the other side as the tank’s legs groaned. In the blink of an eye the tank was wrenched off the ground and leapt sideways towards the box. It twisted as it smashed into the team, carrying them with it as it landed, splayed tightly against the side of the box. It writhed there, held by an invisible force. Above the sound of static pops and grinding metal, the light crunch of bones could be heard.

  A loud beep emanated from within the box, and the tank was released from the invisible grip, crashing heavily onto the floor, limbs limp and covered in unconscious bodies.

  Arianne lowered her hands, placing them on her hips. Holt still had his hands above his head.

  “What the hell was in that box?” he said.

  Arianne walked up to the box and tapped it affectionately.

  “A 12 Tesla electromagnet. Strong enough to image white matter tracts in the brain. Or, you know, lift a tank.”

  She smiled, and Holt lowered his arms, but he did not look impressed. Something with sirens was approaching - the hub police finally catching up to what was going on. Holt sighed, raised his arms again and started walking calmly towards them.

  “Wait here,” he called back to Arianne, “I’ll go mediate.”