by Tom Caldwell
“Proof of concept. Bija wanted to try their psi-shielding materials before they committed to the design. It works pretty well, actually,” Ezra said, reaching up to tap at the glass beside him. “My head’s so quiet.”
“Can you still see?” Jacob asked. “I mean, does the shielding stop the visions?”
“No, that’s not what I mean by quiet. I’m seeing—way too much,” said Ezra. Once that would have excited him, but now he just seemed tired. “Decades ahead, the better part of a century. But I don’t feel the static. No noise, just signal.”
The conversation reminded Jacob of the time when his mother’s boyfriend Todd had tried to clear a wrens’ nest from the disused attic of their house. Five years old, Jacob had watched from the bottom of the ladder as Todd lifted the panel away from the hatch. A shower of dirt, twigs, tiny brown feathers, and speckled eggshells rained down, and then Todd stood head and shoulders in another world.
Jacob’s mom had called worried questions up at him: some of that could carry disease, what if it’s not just birds, are there termites, are there rats?
Todd had replied to each question in his laconic way: naw, just birds, he’d said, his voice echoing through the strange space.
Jacob could only take his word for it. He never got to see the attic for himself.
“The nurse said there’d been accidents,” he said to Ezra, resisting the impulse to reach up and touch his face, to turn his gaze back down to the living world. “You didn’t—is that true?”
“They got spooked,” Ezra said with a shrug. “It’s easy to freak someone out. When they already know they’re doing something wrong. The whole mad prophet act didn’t faze Magnus, but it worked on the staff. I probably should’ve been nicer to them, but…I don’t know. Don’t worry, like…everything’s the same as it was, Jacob. Just—more so.”
“I’m not scared of that,” Jacob whispered. He’d never found Ezra’s abilities unnerving, per se. It was just the thought of losing him that was impossible to bear. “I’m worried about everything else.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t really sign that agreement for Magnus, did you?”
Ezra’s attention finally snapped back to the present. “I didn’t sign anything. A consent form for surgery, because my head was fucking exploding, but—what, did he forge my signature on something?”
“An agreement to compensate rescue workers, he said.” Jacob closed his eyes in Ezra’s lap. “But the document was too thick. I didn’t read it all, but—it looked too dangerous to sign. I knew you wouldn’t give in to him. I knew you never would.”
Ezra didn’t reply, and for a long time he was so silent that Jacob felt alone in this tiny room.
Finally, he said, “We can never build it.”
“What?”
“The tech. We can’t build it. As far as I can see—nobody ever does.” Ezra’s gaze was fixed, his pale eyes clouded. “There just isn’t any way to stimulate the visions without—without this,” he said, gesturing at the incisions, the mirrors, the hospital gown. “There’s never going to be a consumer market for living this way. Hell, I’d pay someone to make it stop, at this point. If I could. But Magnus has a better idea. He’s just gonna breed more of me.”
“You mean—wait—” Jacob sat up. Ezra had never been able to see so far in advance, but Jacob didn’t doubt him; it had the sick feeling of inevitability. “You mean a genetic program. Right?”
“It’s viable. A set of genes that encode…” Ezra paused, still half-distracted by something Jacob couldn’t see. He opened and closed one hand, an inarticulate gesture. “Um, ion channels in the cells. They produce a predisposition to develop psionic abilities. Along with hemiplegic migraine, certain forms of epilepsy and autism, episodic ataxia, mild GI issues, stuff like that.”
That alone was a historical discovery, apparently just plucked whole from a future timeline. Jacob’s guts felt cold. “But this could be—I mean, that’s such an incredible advance, if you’re right. Magnus can’t just drag science to a dead halt and declare ownership of—they’re your genes.”
“Yeah, you can’t patent human genes, but you can patent a process for modifying them. That’s where Magnus plans to cash in.” Ezra’s voice was detached. “He’ll industrialise it. That way he can fill a factory floor with rooms like this one. Hundreds of precogs, caged like battery hens, watching the markets all day. A psychic sweatshop. Not even just precogs—it’s just a genetic predisposition, and it can express itself in different ways. Different psionic abilities. The military, the deep state, private contractors, they’ll all pay to have sweatshops of their own. Reproductive rights are fucked up on a lot of colonial planets, so that’s where he’ll get his warm bodies. And then…”
Jacob waited for him to finish the sentence. “And then?”
Ezra shook his head, as if to dislodge something. “You don’t want to live in that world.”
“So what do we do?”
“Jacob, I’m done with trying to change things.” Ezra drew his knees up in front of him, self-protective, resting his head against the glass. “If I were any good at it, we wouldn’t be here. I tried—I nearly let it kill me—and this is where we ended up. Trapped on a Bija space station with, with a tacky fake Buddhist name. Okay? I’m not fit to make these decisions.”
“Ezra…”
“Roshan and his lentils, the boy in Rome, Alcuin of York, Magnus’s ship—this is my fault. I was scheming and orchestrating even when I could barely see six inches in front of my face, and look.” Ezra tapped the glass again, harder, banging on it with his wrist. “It's all a fucking failure like everything else I've ever tried to do. I'm not smart enough for this. Le nez de Cléopâtre—you know that line from Pascal? If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. Longer or shorter. By a millimeter. It's so easy to get everything wrong.”
“If it intimidates you, even more reason to keep this tech out of Bija’s hands. Magnus Vollan isn’t fit to make these decisions.”
“Why not?” Ezra said. “I’m not any better than he is. He’s not dumb, he’s just short-sighted and shallow and selfish. Me fuckin’ too. And I should have the right to decide what other people should experience? That’s bullshit, of course I shouldn’t. It’s like—like that story you tell with the sick rabbi, the beauty sinking into the earth. All these plans and arguments and ideas, they’re nothing. They don’t matter. Useless fucking chatter, mental masturbation. People are real. Suffering is real. I don’t think anything else is.”
“Fine, maybe. But at least you care.” Jacob pushed himself back up from Ezra’s lap, bracing his weight on one arm. “At least you know that—”
“No. Knowing isn’t enough,” Ezra interrupted. “Jacob, if the only way I could have saved you was by letting twenty people on Bonaventure die, I would’ve done it. It didn’t come to that, in this timeline, but it could have. And you know what? That’s not romantic, it’s fucking nepotism. It’s not romantic to those twenty people who just get written off by some freak who’s—”
“I really don’t like it when you call yourself that.”
“—declared himself the arbiter of life and death.”
“Any more than if you called me a freak. I don’t like it.” Jacob was angry, and he didn’t know where to direct it. At Magnus, of course, but maybe also at Ezra. “What’s your alternative, exactly? Of course it’s not fair that you have to make these choices. But you do. Otherwise…what? We just let it all happen? All those kids with your genes who are going to grow up as Bija’s property—they’re on their own, is that it?”
“Look. All I wanted to do was build my stupid little music app, and now—”
Jacob couldn’t accept that. “We’re talking about an entire generation of people. Being exploited, being violated—”
“So yell at Magnus, not me.”
“I’m not yelling, and I don’t mean that it’s your fault, but if you can stop it—” Jacob stoppe
d because he wasn’t even sure anymore. Was Ezra responsible, if he saw this and did nothing? “The man I married would stop it,” he finished.
“Great, thank you, that’s really helpful, please tie the success of our marriage to this massive humanitarian disaster that you expect me to prevent—Christ, Jacob, what the fuck do you want from me?”
At least he was getting angry now, Jacob thought. “I want you to do the right thing with whatever power you have. I don’t—listen, I don’t expect you to do the impossible, Ez, but you have to do something. You have to try. There must be a way to get ahead of this.”
“With what?” Ezra demanded. “We have no company, no product, no funding, no offices, no employees. We’re lucky Natalie even gives a shit about us.”
“But we still have you,” Jacob said softly, reaching out now for his hand. “And you have me. Can’t you find a future where this doesn’t happen? The way you did on Perdigon?”
Ezra curled up tighter in his corner. “Jacob…”
“If it were our kids—if it were Shruti or Océane or Laura—”
“Stop.”
“—forced into pregnancy, or shut up in a box like this, practically enslaved—”
“I said stop,” said Ezra.
Jacob stopped, and waited.
Ezra was pressed against the mirrored walls of the narrow space. He didn’t look at Jacob, but after a couple of minutes he spoke again. “All I can do is buy some time. I can keep it from happening for twenty or thirty years—then it all happens anyway. Is that worth it?”
Jacob didn’t pause to consider it. “Yes. Of course it is. What do we do?”
“Bija’s research team hasn’t discovered the right gene-modification process yet. But they will,” said Ezra. “I know what that process is, I can see it. I could file a patent on it as soon as we get out of here. Then we sit on it and do nothing. That’d fuck Magnus over for twenty years, until the patent runs out. Bija might be out of the race by then, but somebody just as bad will grab the baton. You can’t kill an idea—best you can do is make it unprofitable.”
“I’ll take it,” said Jacob. “That’s another twenty years before Bija gets the world in a chokehold, Ezra, it’s—don’t say it doesn’t matter. It matters.”
Ezra laughed, a little. “You think we’re not choking already?”
As Natalie had predicted, Hannah was furious. She’d almost raised her voice, leaning over her desk with her palms planted. Roshan was cowed and silent, like an eighth-grader getting chewed out by the principal.
“Mr. Tehrani,” said Hannah. “You are here to tell me that you acquired one of our start-ups, without first notifying the board, in a deal that you made over an ansible connection, for the sum of one dollar. Is that correct?”
Roshan was wilting in his chair. “Well—it was actually for more than that. I was meant to send a ship to Perdigon, so…the cost of that. Whatever that would have been. The dollar was a symbolic transfer of title. Which—”
“—Makes no difference, for our purposes in this discussion,” Hannah snapped. “Whether the price was one dollar or whether it was for an undetermined transport cost, I put it to you that you offered Mr. Barany an exceedingly low price for his intellectual property and his data, at a time when he was in no position to refuse.”
“He actually suggested this deal, so—” Roshan stopped when he saw Natalie shaking her head at him. “I mean. I…understand if Ennead felt…maybe somewhat out of the loop.”
“‘Out of the loop’ is a poor descriptor. What happened,” said Hannah, “is that you threatened our investments. You ought to have done it to my face.”
Roshan glanced Natalie’s way, then decided to shut up.
“Ennead would have every right to contest this sale on the basis that the question wasn’t put to the board. Nevertheless,” said Hannah, putting her glasses back on, “we do not find Mr. Tehrani to be an inappropriate candidate for CEO, if that is the recommendation of Mr. Barany and Mr. Roth. Ennead is sympathetic to the argument that Mr. Barany is emotionally over-involved in the product, and Ahriman is an impressive technology with the potential to synchronise very well with the Taltos IP. Given that Mr. Tehrani was one of the original developers of Taltos’ codebase, we are amenable to working with him again. And Ms. Murdoch has always enjoyed Ennead’s respect.”
Natalie felt her shoulders relax. “I think we can revisit the particulars of this deal once Ezra and Jacob are back on Earth,” she said, trying to nudge the conversation away from Roshan’s sins. “Which we’ll need to do anyway, to settle up and get the insurance process started for the losses on Perdigon.”
“Indeed. You leave in three hours,” Hannah told them, sitting back down behind her desk. “I’ve engaged a Juno-class vessel to take you to Siddhartha station—ugh,” she said, distracted momentarily by the awfulness of the name. “Two days away at warp. I hope your calendar is clear.”
“It is now,” said Natalie, pasting on a smile. She nodded slightly at Roshan, who forced one of his own. “We’ll get this straightened out, Hannah. I really do think that when the dust settles, this is going to be a positive thing for Taltos—”
Hannah was impatient with people repeating the obvious. “Yes. Retrieve Mr. Barany and Mr. Roth, please. Be sure that they haven’t left any protected technologies aboard the station. Document any injuries or items of suspicion. Should you encounter any resistance from Bija, you may threaten them with the full brunt of Ennead’s legal department.”
“I think there’s definitely going to be resistance, Hannah.”
Hannah adjusted her glasses but didn’t look up from her tablet screen. “Mr. Vollan is welcome to try.”
Chapter 9
Une Folle Entreprise
Roshan followed Natalie out of Hannah’s office, then waited for the door to click shut again, making sure that they were out of earshot. “Is that all she’s offering us? Lawyers? I have lawyers of my own, Natalie. Expensive lawyers. Ahriman could Bleak House the fuck out of Ennead in court. But Magnus owns that space station, it’s private property. All he has to do is snap his fucking fingers and his security team will shoot us in the face.”
“A man’s home is his castle,” Murdoch agreed dryly, from her chair in Hannah’s waiting room. Being a lowly engineer, not involved in the affairs of kings, she didn’t attend these meetings unless Roshan insisted, loudly, at high pitch for an hour. “Or his lair, whatever.”
“You don’t do that in business, Roshan,” said Natalie, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. She usually tried to avoid talking to these two as if she were a mean ex-girlfriend—it was beneath her, as Hannah would have said. But she had too many things to think about right now, and busting a dumb stereotype was low on her list of priorities. “He could shoot normal civilians, sure. He can’t do that to business rivals without starting a goddamn war.”
“Ezra and Jacob were business rivals too,” said Murdoch as they headed for the elevator.
Natalie punched the button. “Were.”
“They still are,” said Roshan. “The data exists, the company exists—we’re obviously going to take Ezra and Jacob back. Magnus must know that, he must be expecting it. Ezra would’ve gloated to him about pulling that stunt with Ahriman and the ansible, you know he would.”
“Of course he would.” Natalie had her cigarettes out, tapping one against the package impatiently as the elevator took them down. Hannah’s building had glass elevators, taking full advantage of the view: below, the flat rooftops of Portland were all planted with sagebrush and agave, blocks of desert gardens outlined by their white walls, sometimes interrupted by fields of black solar panels. “When has Ezra ever had a good idea that he didn’t immediately fuck up?”
“Great, this is good, we’re agreeing,” said Roshan. “Now if you could…explain why we’re walking right into this with nothing but legal threats to defend ourselves with?”
Natalie snorted. “What do you want, an army?”
“I me
an, ideally. Magnus has one.”
“Roshan, you’re always telling me that Ahriman can stand up to the big boys,” said Natalie as the elevator doors opened onto the spaceport level. She lit up on the moving walkway, knowing that she had fifteen minutes to get rid of it before anyone would stop her. “If you think you need a private army then hire one, okay? But I don’t. All we’re doing is walking in to collect our people. Magnus won’t shoot us in the face, because that commits him to a course of action that he doesn’t want to take, and it tanks his reputation. Ennead has allies, and the allies have allies. It would make a mess, and Magnus doesn’t want that.”
Murdoch was watching Natalie in her sidelong way, with no change of expression. “He doesn’t have to shoot us in the face, as my excitable colleague said. He can still just lock his doors. Why would he let us dock at his station at all?”
“The same reason he usually lets strangers in to ogle the place,” said Natalie, her free hand thrust in her jacket pocket as the chill set in. The spaceport was vast and echoing, smelling of wet concrete and rubber. “He wants to look like Francis of Assisi in front of a camera. So we’ll bring cameras—I’ll hire a crew to follow us to Siddhartha.”
“A camera crew?” Roshan repeated.
“Yeah. We tell them we’re making a documentary about…about the rescue,” said Natalie, getting her phone out to skim through her contacts as she smoked. “We say it’s part of the planned relaunch for Taltos under Ahriman’s aegis. Telling the company’s story, incorporating it into the brand, all that marketing junk. It’s not even a lie, because that’s exactly what you should do with any useful footage we get.”
“I don’t think it’s legal to use snuff films as part of a marketing campaign,” said Liz.
Roshan was warming up to the idea, though. “That actually…that would be a sweet thing to have in our back pocket as we’re rebuilding. We could really leverage the disaster if we tug on the heartstrings, play up the underdog stuff. Can we get the girl from Bonaventure, the coder?”
