“Just come to the conference dinner!”
Idris was now crumpled up in a ball on the floor, and he watched in horror as the main text started breaking up.
“Not the vague appeals to future research!” he shouted. “You wouldn’t!”
“That depends, doctor,” roared Whitney
“TELL”, stamp, “US”, stamp, “YOUR”, stamp, “DIETARY”, stamp, “REQUIREMENTS!”.
Idris’s eyes were clenched in pain, but his shaking hands were slowly extending towards his precious work. He knew there was no choice, now. Perhaps there would be one free drink?
“HEY!” a new voice rang out over the concourse.
Mann and Whitney froze in mid-stomp.
“Leave that abstract alone!”
Very slowly, the two giants turned around. In the middle of the concourse, a woman was standing definitely in a brilliant white trouser suit. Idris opened one eye.
Whitney sidled up to her, gentle as a tsunami.
“And you hare?” he said.
“Karen G. Arianne. And that researcher you’re harassing is on my panel.”
Arianne stepped closer to the hulk of sour-faced muscles. Whitney simply flipped out a tablet from his breast pocket and scanned her. A readout appeared, and Whitney rapidly paled, straightening up and backing away slightly.
“Dr. Arianne! So sorry!” he said, “I thought I’d already logged all of our class 9 attendees.”
At these words, Mann also looked stricken and jumped to attention.
“Clearly not!” snapped Arianne, marching straight past the two towards Whitney. She knelt down to offer a hand to the researcher-shaped pile of bones on the floor.
“Just play along,” she whispered.
Acting was clearly a skill that Idris had not mastered, but it mattered little, since he could hardly have looked more confused and terrified.
“I’m so sorry,” said Mann, “We didn’t realize -”
“I’d stay quiet if I were you,” said Arianne. “These people are our guests, and they should be treated with more respect than this.”
The two conference gangsters were now visibly cowering.
“Of course, if there’s anything you need -” started Whitney.
“Mann, Whitney,” barked Arianne, “don’t you test me!”
They jumped again.
“Come on now, Dr. Idris,” said Arianne primly, placing an arm around Idris and leading him away. “We’ll be late for our panel.”
The two researchers began marching away down the corridor, leaving the two towering twins in stunned silence. After a few paces, Idris snapped out of his shock.
“What? Who?” he began.
“Just keep walking,” hissed Arianne.
“I can’t thank you enough! I’ve - I’ve never met a level-9 attendee before.”
Behind them, a beep from Mann’s tablet wrenched his gaze away from the marching couple.
“You still haven’t,” said Arianne.
Mann’s brows slammed together like tectonic plates.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Stop, thieves!”
“Run!” squealed Arianne and they both started pelting down the hall, pursued by laserfire.
Chapter 11
Arianne and Idris raced around the corner, narrowly avoiding the bright red beam that cut through the floor behind them.
“Who are you?” shouted Idris.
“A concerned reviewer,” Arianne shouted back. “Left here!”
They turned a corner and dodged past a group of attendees piling into a seminar room. Another set of security twins at the door looked up from their tablets. On seeing Arianne and Idris race past, they whipped out weapons from beneath their coats and aimed them. Arianne put a few of the attendees between her and the lasers, and she saw the meaty titans dip their guns in frustration.
“Keep running!” shouted Arianne.
They ran on, past more seminar rooms and more security guards who joined in the chase. Arianne was just thankful that their enormous bodies seemed entirely unsuited to moving quickly.
Arianne sent a message through her ebrain to Holt.
Arianne: Target acquired – pick-up ETA?
Holt: Delay in purchasing unregistered ship, sorry. Now en route. 5 minutes.
“Sweet spacing serenity,” thought Arianne. She suddenly realized that she was sweating and was almost offended. Here she was in the future, spaceships, lasers and all, pursued by a galaxy-spanning organization and her current plan was run away using legs.
The security guards were firing at the roof now, bringing down thick chunks of stone around them. Up ahead a fire door was descending across the corridor. She grabbed Idris by the scruff of the neck and hurled him through, sliding herself just underneath. She ended up tangled with Idris on the floor, but the corridor behind them was blocked – they had at least a few seconds to think.
Arianne pointed towards a row of service closets along one wall. The two raced over, opened the door and piled in to a small dark space. And now, thought some distant part of Arianne’s brain, the plan is to hide in a closet?
She locked the door behind them and Idris attempted to ask questions while catching his breath.
“Who are … huff … you? Why is everyone … hah … shooting …?”
“Shhh!” said Arianne, racing to try and access the security feeds through her tablet.
Idris frowned, then reached for the door handle to leave. Arianne grabbed him by the shirt and forced him back against the door.
“There are dangerous people out there,” she whispered through gritted teeth.
“And who are you exactly?” said Idris. Arianne took a breath and tried to sound calm and reassuring.
“I just want to talk.”
Behind Arianne, a small voice piped up.
“Thank you so much for coming.”
Arianne and Idris turned to look behind them. A small, wizened woman was standing about two feet away from them at back of the cupboard.
“I didn’t think anyone was going to come,” she said shyly.
Arianne couldn’t work out what was happening. Was she one of the cleaning staff? Did they have human cleaning staff any more? Then she noticed that on the wall behind the woman there were a dozen bits of paper, arranged to form a rectangle. The pages made up a single image – some kind of presentation of information.
Arianne looked above her head and read a sign.
POSTER PRESENTATION HALL ZZ-776b: VAGUE SOMEBODY CLASS
The old woman took a breath and began to speak, gesturing towards the makeshift poster behind her.
“My research is on cross-linguistic strategies for interjection. We start-”
“What!?” demanded Arianne.
“For example,” nodded the woman. “Our hypothesis is that …”
Footsteps sounded somewhere outside.
“Shh!” hissed Arianne, making motions to be quiet.
“Yes, that’s another good example,” said the woman before continuing. “Our hypothesis is -”
“Shut up!” pleaded Arianne.
“I see you are an expert in this area!” said the woman. “Then you’ll be familiar with the hypothesis that -”
Arianne could now hear the sounds of several heavy pairs of boots outside together with doors being wrenched open. Arianne grabbed the woman by the shoulders and shook her.
“Look!” gasped Arianne, trying to keep her voice as quiet as possible. “I am a fugitive being hunted by the conference mafia out there who will kill me on site for kidnapping him and, more seriously, not having a name badge.”
The woman’s eyes widened.
“He,” continued Arianne, flicking her head back at Idris, “started a full-on collapse of civilization.”
“Wait a min-” began Idris defensively.
“And now the insurance company mob is trying to kill him and anyone he talks to. So unless we all keep very quiet, we’re about to experience a very major inter-fucking-jection.”
The old woman looked shocked, but began to nod slowly. Arianne relaxed her grip.
“Then I’ll just skip to the conclusions?” said the old woman.
“Grrghshhh!” gritted Arianne, but Idris had started to read the poster.
“It’s about the convergence,” he said.
The old woman’s eyes lit up and she stood to attention next to her work.
“That’s right,” she said, “for as long as we have records, humans have been able to use 3 major types of interjections to repair problems in conversation.” She indicated to the first table in the poster which read:
“Huh?” Meaning: I didn’t hear or understand, please repeat.
“Who?” Meaning: I didn’t hear or understand this bit of information, please repeat just that.
“Sibby’s sister?” Meaning: I bet it’s that trollop at it again, right?
“But now,” said the old woman, “we’ve observed a new type of interjection: ‘meh’.”
She swept her hand to the next section of the poster and continued explaining.
“We’ve observed meh in 15 communities, and we analyze it as meaning I didn’t hear or understand, but there’s no need to do anything because I’m not very invested in this conversation and let’s have lunch now.”
“Yes, this is very much in agreement with my findings,” mused Idris.
“You’re studying the convergence too?” she asked.
“I kind of created it,” he said distractedly, still perusing the details of the poster.
The woman’s face drained itself of color.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Arianne to the woman, “he’s a dangerous man. And a Panini Presser.”
The woman now looked actively ill.
“I’m not a member of the Active Theory Alignment group,” said Idris, gravely. “I came to tell them the truth.”
“About how you stole data from Proxima insurance?” spat Arianne.
“Wait,” said Idris starting to quiver again, “the insurance company knows it was me?”
Arianne’s left eye winced slightly.
“I came to warn you,” she said, “they’ll be here any minute.”
Idris was positively quaking now.
“Look,” said Arianne, trying to sound reassuring, “I’m working for CAFCA, I’m just trying to solve the convergence. I’m going to get you out of here.”
Idris met her eyes, and she saw a primal flicker of understanding. He gulped and nodded. They were interrupted by a meaty voice shouting outside.
“Check the poster closets!”
Arianne needed to act. She threw her eyes around the tiny space in a desperate hope that an escape plan would appear in her visual field. To her amazement, it worked. She lunged towards the ventilation hatch on the back wall and levered it open.
“In!” she called to Idris. “Poster session is over!”
“Oh,” said the old woman in dismay as Idris politely barged past her and flung himself into the ventilation shaft. Arianne jumped in after him. As she crawled along the shaft she called back: “You left out a determiner in section 3.”
The old lady’s swearing was cut short by a large explosion behind them.
“Keep going!” shouted Arianne to Idris up ahead.
“Some rescue, this is!” Idris shouted back. “Do you even have an escape route?”
“No.”
“Any weapons?”
“No.”
“Well what do you have?”
“A PhD in emergent communication systems,” shouted Arianne. She ignored Idris’s confused swearing to speak to Holt through her ebrain.
Arianne: Need evacuation NOW!
Holt’s ebrain voice came back:
Holt: Still 60 seconds out.
They spilled out into a large atrium open to the sky. Narrow walkways crisscrossed the space above ten stories up and dozens of stories down. On their level, several walkways jutted out into the empty space and converged in a central island with a small ornamental fountain. Arianne led Idris towards it. A squadron of guards appeared from the exit to their left, backed by a hulky armored robot. They started firing in Arianne’s direction. She shoved Idris’s head down below the low wall of the walkway and they began to scamper along. Stone and rubble flew around them as the lasers tore into their scant cover. A small shrub burst into flames up ahead and she saw that another group of guards was approaching way ahead of them.
Idris was struck by a flying piece of blasted stone. It burned his face before bouncing off. Arianne kept him upright and moving forward. They reached the central island and Arianne impulsively dove over the fountain’s lip. She hit the shallow water, but slipped on the slimy bottom and fell on her shoulder. Idris piled in on top of her and she went under. In the brief second that her head was beneath the water, the distant part of her brain spoke up again, almost with relief: Oh! I know this one! FIND AIR.
Arianne surfaced and tried to still the flailing body next to her. The lip of the fountain was being systematically disintegrated, now with the help of high caliber bullets. The column holding the upper basin of the fountain was severed by a ridiculously wide beam of green laser. Arianne felt the heat of molten rock, then saw the whole basin tip towards her.
She grabbed any part of Idris that she could and launched them both awkwardly across the water. She felt a twinge from her ankle as the basin smacked down behind them, causing a mini tsunami that pushed them against the edge of the fountain. Arianne’s face banged against stone. She instinctively let go of Idris and clutched at her jaw. She felt an oily welling beneath her fingers.
Arianne: Holt!
Holt: What’s happening there? Scanners show a firefight.
Over him, Kotlin’s voice snarled.
Kotlin: You were only supposed to talk to him!
Idris grabbed her arm and wailed incoherently. She shook him free and tried to look around. The entire horizon above the fountain’s edge was crisscrossed with laser beams. East: no way out. West: no way out. There appeared to be new guards appearing from every possible doorway.
“I just wanted to give a presentation,” moaned Idris.
Holt: Arianne! Incoming from above!
Arianne looked up to see a fridge-sized missile hurtling down. It was leaving a dark tail of smoke in its wake, leading all the way up out of sight. It was heading almost directly for them. She turned to Idris to try to say something, but couldn’t articulate the combination sorry!/duck!/help!
Resister: Space Funding Crisis II Page 10
