by Tom Caldwell
“If he’s wrong, I’m going to kill him,” she said quietly to Jacob.
She might not need to, Jacob couldn’t help thinking. Ezra was in bad shape. Unclear on where they were, and he couldn’t pass Jacob’s tests: couldn’t name twenty things that you might find at a supermarket, couldn’t repeat a complex sentence, couldn’t pay attention, couldn’t remember his three words. (Parachute, mansion, roses.)
Something was wrong, and Jacob couldn’t fix it. He couldn’t even diagnose it. Everyone was depending on him and he wasn’t smart enough for this.
Time was passing, and the kids were starting to whine, but then they all turned their heads and looked up. (Ezra didn’t.) The big grey belly of a ship loomed overhead.
The youngest ones started to cry, Will and George and Laura, triggered by the noise. Shruti bent over to hush them, drawing them close, but she looked over her shoulder to stare at Jacob. “It’s here,” she yelled over the sudden wind. “It’s here, we’re okay—”
“Wait,” Jacob yelled back, starting to back up, dragging Mars and Etienne by the collar. He saw the Bija logo on the cargo bay doors. “No, no, wait…”
No one heard.
The ship landed.
Coming down the plank, the crew looked insect-like in their EV suits, tinted screens on their helmets, faceless. All in black. Six of them flanked Magnus Vollan himself, who stood at the open doors of the ship, hands spread, smiling.
“Happened to be in the neighbourhood,” said Magnus, striding down the plank with his goons. “Couldn’t help overhearing multiple distress calls. The Lumen always listens, you know, just like our ad campaigns say. I assumed that meant you’d be happy to see me—you are, aren’t you, Jacob?”
Jacob couldn’t speak. He was holding onto Ezra, and thinking that he couldn’t hold Ezra up while also shielding him with his own body. A chance to be a hero, and Jacob was too weak and exhausted to seize it.
“Bija is exercising its right to salvage, under international planetary law. By accepting rescue, you agree to compensate us for the effort of…coming all this way.” Magnus smiled. “I can’t say it isn’t gratifying just to see your shining faces, but legally, I’m going to need a little more than that in return.”
“No.” Jacob was trying not to yell, trying to be calm, but his throat felt raw. They only needed a little more time, just long enough for Roshan to send his ship, and instead Magnus was here to sweep this little civilisation away. “No. No, you can’t—I won’t let you—”
One of the goons raised a weapon and Jacob shoved Ezra’s semi-conscious body to the ground, diving on top of him, grabbing for any of the kids he could reach. But there was only a strange sound, whffft-thunk, a dull blow and a pinprick in his shoulder.
“Tranq darts. Just for you, Jacob. I know how you let yourself get carried away,” said Magnus, bending over to pat Jacob’s cheek. “Overprotective. It’s just business. Night-night, boys, talk later. Kids…children, please, stop crying…”
Chapter 7
Cúchulainn’s Fight with the Sea
Back at her condo, Natalie kicked off her heels in the front hall and unhooked her bra under her sweater. She pressed her thumb to the sensor on the Lumen panel by the door. Welcome home, Natalie, said the synthesised voice. Natalie couldn’t stand hearing Magnus’s simulacrum talking to her in her own house, so she’d switched to “default female voice,” an uncredited voice actress who sounded nice. Natalie liked her. The actress, not the AI.
How do you feel today?
“Fuck this.”
We hear you. Let’s set your environmental settings to Fuck This (1).
The Lumen dimmed the lights, warmed the tiles in the kitchen, and started a playlist of the songs Natalie usually listened to when her BP was slightly elevated and she started to swear at the devices. Bija algorithms kept track of that stuff. Why not order from your favourite restaurant tonight? Wendy’s is still open and taking—
“Wendy’s is not my favourite—okay, get my usual from them,” said Natalie, walking on sore feet to her bedroom. She shed her bra and rummaged around in her drawers for her favourite t-shirt. The good one. Random swag from a start-up, the print washed off the tags—there was no way now to tell which magical factory had managed to make the best t-shirt in the history of human civilisation. There was also no way to get more of them, while this solitary specimen was getting holes and ketchup stains. It couldn’t last. T-shirts of the floating world. “And call Roshan.”
We see you’ve got your shirt off. Do you want that to be an audio call to Roshan Tehrani?
Natalie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, audio call, I don’t cam for free.” She finished getting into her pajamas as the Lumen placed the call.
Roshan took a few minutes before he deigned to reply; he didn’t like to seem easy to get hold of. But he answered. “Natalie, what’s up, I have some very serious news—”
“In a minute. You know those obnoxious little personal spacecraft that used to be everywhere? Zorya Interceptors, they were Russian. Murdoch used to have one but she sold it.”
“What?”
“They were murder on battery power, but they pretty much never broke down. I think they took M-fuel, but don’t quote me. Still, you could take them really far out if you were good about charging every night. My friends took theirs from Nephele to Lacombe last summer—”
“Natalie, I don’t have time for chitchat,” Roshan said importantly. “I have very significant—I would say, even tragic news.”
“Ezra and Jacob are marooned on Perdigon.”
“Oh, fuck off. Are you—how do you already know?” Roshan demanded. “Did he go to you first?”
“First of all, Roshan, please grow up. Second, Ezra sent a message to Hannah, apparently right before the impact. She didn’t think it was a big deal, so I just found out about it today. Hang on, pause convo.”
The delivery guy was here with Wendy’s, so Natalie went to pay him. When she unpaused the Lumen call, Roshan was rambling aloud to somebody, probably Murdoch. “I can’t believe it. I can’t. How did he do this, how was this—oh my God…”
“Okay, back. What’s going on?” said Natalie as she sat down on the couch with her food. “Roshan, I actually did mean to call about the Zorya Interceptors. Can I still nab one cheap off a secondary market? I’d just get berths on a regular spaceliner but the spaceport on Perdigon must be flattened, so I need something that can land on rough ground.”
“Wait, you called because you want a ship?”
“You know how to fly?” said Murdoch, who must have been in the room after all. She suddenly sounded interested.
“Basically, yeah. I only have my G-class license, but I could handle this. I want to go buzz the wreckage and see if it’s true, so that I can tell Hannah.”
“No,” said Roshan. “Turn on the news.”
Natalie suspected that Roshan was just grasping at straws—anything so that he could be the bearer of dramatic news—but this time he was for real. On the BBC World News, there was Magnus Vollan bringing children on stretchers aboard a ship. Helping with his own hands, being waved away by medics, smiling for the cameras. Poor Jacob was asleep on a gurney, twisted in a thin blanket, gaunt and pale even by Jacob standards, sedated. Former Bija employees rescue children from disaster.
She only got one glimpse of Ezra, who as usual had some kind of anti-charisma on camera—when he fucked up it was hard to look away, and he was always fucking up. He’d lost weight and let his beard grow out, and his stare looked unhinged. All of which was understandable in this situation, but the effect was Rasputin at best and Charlie Manson at worst.
“I gotta make sure PR sends some better clips of Ez,” said Natalie. “Maybe get them to stop running this one.”
“Are there any better clips of Ezra?” Murdoch asked.
“He’s been okay sometimes. Not charming or debonair, but okay. Look at the kids holding onto Jacob’s hands, oh my God. This is heartbreaking.”
“Y
eah, real nice. It looks incredible,” said Roshan, who sounded pained. “That could’ve been me holding Jacob’s hands, it should’ve been me. Magnus looks like Mother Teresa, walking in there and singlehandedly saving everyone’s life. I needed one more day and I could’ve been there.”
Natalie was not unsympathetic to Roshan’s ambitions, and sometimes she liked letting him vent; getting in that headspace could be cathartic. Tonight, though, it was too much. “Well, he got there first. So what? He did save their lives. Even for the wrong reasons. That still counts, even for soulless husks like us, right?”
“Everyone’s a soulless husk,” said Murdoch. “Since souls don’t exist. Here’s my problem with all this. It said that Bija heard a distress signal. But Ezra went straight to Ahriman, and the only other signals he sent were to Hannah and to the head of the Benedictines in Rome. An ansible is the most secure form of communication, unless someone gets hold of the paired device. There’s no transmission of data in a signal from point A to point B—that’s why it’s instantaneous. Magnus couldn’t have intercepted the ansible to Rome or the pings to Ahriman. Don’t know the specs on his message to Hannah, though. He might have used any comm channel for that.”
“So?” said Natalie, working on her fries as she listened and watched the news. “Everyone’s got a Lumen in their house. We all know those things report back to HQ. Bija could have overheard any one of us talking about Taltos.”
“You know that because you’re smart,” said Murdoch. “And I know that because I’m smart, and Roshan knows that because I told him. Other people just live their lives and try not to think about the corporate AI that’s wired into their houses. They think you’re some kind of nutcase if you say it’s not safe, and they just ask if you’ve seen Losing Julie’s Place or The Uptake and you have to say no, those are Lumen Originals, and do I look like the kind of unoriginal dweeb who’d watch the fucking Uptake? I do not.” She paused. “But in this case, it’s still technically illegal, if you’re rich enough to fight in court. I believe the term is corporate espionage.”
“Losing Julie’s Place is really good. But who exactly is Magnus depriving? And how do you quantify it? Like, Magnus scooped Roshan on a Good Samaritan call and got some nice PR.” Natalie shrugged as she ate. “He probably did eavesdrop on one of us, but what are the real damages to you? Magnus is the one who had to pay for the rescue operation.”
There was a slight pause, and Roshan said, “That’s not quite the issue.”
Natalie sighed. “What did you guys do?”
“Ezra…started making contact with Ahriman three days ago,” said Roshan slowly. “Using his implant, just pinging the network again and again until Murdoch noticed. He told us what had happened. I was going to send a ship to…do exactly what Magnus is doing right now. Like, this is exactly how I pictured it. So I asked Ezra for a payment to seal the deal. He sent me a dollar.”
“A dollar for what?”
“The proprietary rights to any and all technologies developed by Taltos, past and present, in perpetuity.”
Natalie was frowning as she listened, watching the news run archival clips about Taltos. Ezra with the Zener cards, the rickety beginnings of Lilith and Ahriman, Jacob breaking the ground on the Perdigon site. “He went along with that?”
“Without a peep. It’s his language, even, he put it in the bank transfer note.”
“I think you guys are gonna need to talk to Newcomen in legal,” said Natalie. Ezra must have had a plan. He wouldn’t have given up his baby for no reason. It had to be another Almond Joy. “Because you might have something there, but it’ll be up to you guys to defend it. Why would you do that and not call Hannah and me right away?”
“It was going to be big news! I didn’t want to leak it,” said Roshan, although he sounded like he knew he’d fucked up. “I thought Hannah would yell at me.”
“She will, because you don’t threaten her investments.” Natalie wasn’t going to waste energy being mad at Roshan for this. Ezra too. Poor communication, high-handedness, conducting business like a pirate—Hannah would be the one to voice all that. She could be the bad guy. “If you want to take on the full financial burden of rebuilding that company, literally from a pile of rubble, knock yourselves out. You’ve got Prima Donna Barany on board. Hannah doesn’t care who runs the company as long as a product gets to market, and it sells. Taltos could do a lot worse, and they still might. But get ahead of this, Roshan, okay? Call Newcomen. Make sure this claim is legit.”
“Yeah, well, I will,” said Roshan. “And we’ll get a product to market when I’m in charge. Ezra and Jacob have been up there on Frog Planet all this time, spinning their wheels, marketing themselves like ass, getting nowhere. They need us.”
“Dude, I’m not even sure that you’re wrong, but have your whole winter-of-our-discontent thing on your own time. Meanwhile I have to figure out which Bija outpost is playing host for Jacob and Ezra,” said Natalie. “They should be under our roof, not Bija’s. Safest that way.”
“Agreed,” said Murdoch. “But I’ll save you the search. Jacob and Ezra are at PPLOS Siddhartha. Private orbital station owned by Bija. That’s what Ahriman said, anyway.”
“Really? He’s getting fast.”
It was difficult to detect pride and joy in Murdoch’s customary monotone, but it was there. She loved Ahriman, if she loved anything at all. “Sweeps the net clean in picoseconds. Ahriman’s gonna swallow the Lumen’s market. They’ll be obsolete before they know what hit ’em.”
“You better be right,” said Natalie. “Because we’re about to make some enemies at Bija.”
Ezra awoke in a place that was already familiar to him from visions: the yellow room. Maybe it was just the light; he didn’t know what planet this was, but it was bright, a furious saffron-coloured sky. Great, calming colour scheme. Just the place for some fucking glass walls and shag carpeting, Ezra thought. His skull was pulsating, his eyes watering involuntarily. Was it the light?
The figure of Magnus Vollan looked dark and small in the bright room, pacing aimlessly, and the movement reminded Ezra of the floaters he got in his field of vision sometimes. The doctor had said they were nothing to worry about yet. Call if they become numerous.
Ezra’s ears were ringing, and he couldn’t hear whatever Magnus was saying. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, whether or not Magnus was still talking. “I need—listen. Not to sound like a drug-seeker, but I need some drugs here.”
Magnus approached, crossed the personal boundary line, and put his hand to Ezra’s forehead. He tisked. “The younger generation,” he said. “Soft. But I don’t want to be a bad host. Lumen, increase dosage.”
“Wait—” said Ezra, because he’d only just discovered the catheter in the vein on the underside of his wrist. It was a sleek apparatus like a silicon wristband, only a little painful when jostled. At Magnus’s command it released something into his bloodstream. It felt cool and heavy, and tasted silvery at the back of his throat.
The pain went away. If there were side effects, Ezra barely noticed them. He sagged back on the couch, and the relief made him break out in a sweat. “What did you do to me?”
“We disconnected that thing in your head. All you’ve got is what Mother Nature gave you.” Magnus smiled, sitting down opposite Ezra. “Which I’m sure was quite a talent. You could’ve had a whole career. Baseball scores. Telling fortunes at a carnival. Consultancy.”
“Magnus, what—where are the kids?”
“Your Dickensian urchins? They’re fine. Lumen, let’s roll some news clips of the Bija rescue mission to Perdigon, please.” Magnus was really hitting the keywords hard. Maybe that was the key to getting voice search to work, Ezra thought.
The Lumen projected a screenful of search results, which all looked jubilant. Magnus the hero. But Shruti didn’t seem to be blinking in Morse code or anything; she looked fed up with cameras, but she also seemed to have had some square meals and some sleep.
Meet Shruti Agn
ihotri, the 19-year-old developer who survived incredible odds to—
‘We thought we would die there,’ say survivors—
How private industry saved the day when colonial government oversight failed to—
“Okay, stop…clicking,” said Ezra. He slid down from the couch to sit on the floor, folding his arms on an ebony coffee table, resting his cheek against the cool wood. “You sent them back to Earth. Right?”
“Bija connected most of them with living relatives on Earth. Two came up with nothing—”
“Océane and Etienne.”
“They’re under Ms. Agnihotri’s guardianship temporarily. She volunteered. But we think they still have a second cousin in Quebec. Human research teams are on the case, not just bots. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this.”
“Uh-huh, yup, that was really good news face,” Ezra said, relieved but refusing to show it. “Virtuous. Good job. What do you want, Magnus?”
“Are you familiar with the maritime laws of salvage?”
Opining on that very topic was Simon Newcomen, Ennead’s corporate legal counsel. Newcomen was a lanky guy with a Jersey accent who made no secret of the fact that he hated everything about his career choice, but Natalie trusted him. Roshan had caught up with him on vidchat, as Newcomen rode a long, empty commuter train to some distant suburb of Portland. Roshan had never even heard of it.
“Maritime salvage laws, wow, good question,” said Newcomen. The video feed was jerky on the train, prone to freezing up, but the audio was clear. “You want the long version or the short version? I’ll give you the long version, I got nothing better to do. So this is ancient law we’re talking about. Anyone who rescues a merchant ship in peril on the sea is entitled to a reward, commensurate with the value of the cargo saved. Rescue a ship full of sheep manure, you get a sheep manure-level reward. Rescue a ship full of diamonds, you get a diamond-level reward. Rescue a ship full of passengers—well, traditionally we don’t put monetary value on human lives, but legal precedent says that if someone faces a real-life trolley problem where they could either save the crew or the cargo but not both—we gotta reward people for making the right call.
