by Holly Lisle
“What experience would this hypothetical interviewer have, and what budget would he need to create these recordings?”
“In answer to your first question, I have no experience whatsoever,” he told her. “I’m still trying to get off my 30-day indigent listing after being dumped here with nothing. But as a crewman on the space transport Longview, I was in firefights during pirate attacks, and under attack when things went bad on the ground, and I was in command of men and women who had to depend on me to get us out of those bad situations alive. I made my way up the ranks to a command position, and carried the highest rating throughout my tour with the Longview. I survived being born on a People’s Home of Truth and Fairness world, and being sentenced to volunteer my death there. I escaped alive.
“I don’t get flustered, I don’t panic when meeting important people, and I want to make Settled Space understand why the brilliant, hard-working, creative people in this city want to see Suzee Delight survive. And most importantly,” he said, “I’m willing to work for the lowest possible wage that will get me off the indigent list and let me start earning my citizenship.
“On your second question, I will make this happen with whatever budget you give me. I suggest asking citizens to come in and talk to me without payment, so that there can be no hint of corruption attached to these interviews.”
She studied him with narrowed eyes. After a long, thoughtful silence, she grinned.
Just under an hour later, Anja had finished walking him through her recording studios. “You’re going to be dealing with some of the most famous people in Settled Space,” she said. “I’ll contact them, ask them to let me know when they can come in to talk about the pending execution of Suzee Delight, and you’ll do the recording.”
She walked into an empty studio, past a plain white chair set dead center in a standard holocorder cube, and through to the control panel on the other side.
“This will have to be basic stuff,” she told him, “because if we’re going to do any good with these protests of yours, we need to get them into the datastream as quickly as possible, and as many out there as possible. So you won’t add image ghosts or sound effects, or sweetening, or play with the lighting. These will have to go out raw, as one-takes.”
“Will famous people do this if they know that?” He thought of the rich and important people he’d crossed paths with during various leaves, and suspected that famous people would want all the sweetening and special lighting they could get.
Her sidelong glance and low chuckle told him she’d come across people of the same sort in her previous life.
“We’re all immigrants here,” she said. “Including our famous citizens. When the oldest of them got here, they had to build their own first homes—little prefab domes. They had to set up their own reconsta stations. They had to live hard and thin.”
She leaned in and said, “The famous folks here escaped torture and imprisonment and censorship and death sentences to get here. Just like you and me. And just like us, they’ll want Suzee Delight to get here too.”
She showed him the buttons for starting and stopping the recording, for presenting the interview questions that would appear on the transparent screen between him and his speaker, and the one that would package the entire interview and send it automatically into the datastream.
“Try to keep each interview to between ten and thirty minutes—but if you’re getting something amazing, let it run,” she said. “Try to complete twenty interviews per day.”
“May I work longer than your regular hours?”
She grinned again. “You definitely belong here. Yes, you can work extra hours, but at the same hourly rate.”
He was fine with that.
He signed her contract, she marked his “Employed” voucher and told him to request a housing transfer to Westside Best Rooms to eliminate his commute, and said she’d cover his first month’s rent.
And just like that, he became an official resident of the City of Furies.
CHAPTER 4
Melie
ABOARD THE LONGVIEW, MELIE—the Two Gold crew on monitoring duty on the bridge—was watching transmissions to and from the ship. The owner, transmitting unencoded, was setting up a meeting in his quarters with someone planetside, and was offering to provide transportation for his guest.
There was the standard encrypted stream setting up a banking link for the upcoming transactions between buyers and sellers. They were docked above a Pact World, so the Longview would be the buyer, and the various prisons would be the sellers. No one was selling people, of course, or buying them. Not on a Pact World. The Covenants demanded that no human being could be sold to another—but was fine with selling commodity wrapped around people. The commodity here was Packaged Criminal Transport and Capital-Crime Disposal Options.
On the slaver worlds, the commodity was slaves who could be executed. No fancy product labeling, no capital letters.
The hypocritical conversion of neat, tidy Options into slaves purchased for torture and slaughter with the simple crossing of a border gave Melie nightmares.
She knew most of the people purchased by the Longview would never be sold, and she believed that overall, her ship and job were not about trading in slaves. She believed the Longview was part of something secret. Special. Good.
But the Longview still purchased some people that it later resold for execution. If its turn-around time on any given purchase was twice to three times that of any other Death Circus ship, it did not change the fact that some people purchased were in fact executed by slavers and those who bought from slavers.
The Longview was docked above a People’s Home of Truth and Fairness moon and in the process of buying Options at that moment, so she was monitoring transmissions.
Crew never took leave on PHTF worlds, so usually the owner’s transmissions and banking details were the only traffic until the Death Circus began and the owner started running records on prospective purchases and began buying those that fit his needs.
This time, however, two burst packets went from ship to surface and from surface to ship immediately after the banking stream closed. They were fast and they were encoded, and they almost looked like the banking stream had hiccuped while closing transmission—which sometimes happened.
If it hadn’t been that the first message was outbound, Melie would have ignored the two blips entirely.
Instead, however, she rolled the ship’s log back to the two transmissions, and pushed them through the standard decode algorithm.
Her screen flashed FAILED.
At that point, she went on alert.
“Shipcom,” she said, “run marked transmissions against all possible encryption algorithms, and use any cracks necessary.”
The ship said, “Working.”
She contacted the captain. “Sir, I have a possible security issue on the bridge,” she said. “Can you come take a look?”
“Right there,” he said.
The shipcom was still working on breaking the encryption when he arrived.
Melie walked him through what she’d seen and what she’d done.
“Isolate the origins of both transmission for me,” he told her. “Meanwhile, I’m going to ask the owner if he had anything going out that we shouldn’t look at.”
She nodded and went back into the log. Tracking back from the transmission port, she was able to isolate the origin of the outgoing burst to Passenger Room 2. Room 2 held five people, and was full at the moment.
She then pulled the pulse map from the log and did an overlay of coordinates. A building not named in the datastream popped up.
The owner’s representative, Shay, arrived on the bridge. “He sends his regards,” she said, “but is preparing to meet with an important contact. What do you have for him?” And then Shay looked at Melie. “You found something else?”
The last time Melie had met Shay, Melie had lost her coveted Crew One position. But she’d still come out of the encounter with a job
, and with savings and investments intact—and for that she had Shay to thank.
Melie said, “You can’t imagine how I wish someone else had found this right now, believe me.”
And she walked Shay through what she’d discovered.
When she finished, Shay said, “What did the messages say?”
“Shipcom is still working on them.”
Shay looked stunned. “Shipcom, how long have you been working on unencrypting those messages?”
“Seven minutes, thirty seconds at the tone,” the ship said. A chime sounded.
“What the hell do they have in there?” Shay whispered. She told the ship, “Turn all but critical resources over to unencrypting those messages.”
“Working,” the ship said.
More than a minute later, the ship said, “Messages unencrypted. Estimate of time to completion at regular speed rounded to three days.”
“Thank you,” Shay said. “Hold results until deck is need-to-know only. I have now linked to the owner’s com. Please connect him to audiovisual and data.”
“Completed,” the ship said.
Shay looked from the captain to the Crew Three man doing routine maintenance testing on the docking controls. “Please tell your Three to leave the deck,” she told the captain. And then she looked at Melie. “You can stay.”
The captain asked Shay, “Are you sure you want her here?”
“The owner wants her here. Twice now she’s demonstrated both a laudable suspicion of small wrong details, and twice has captured information meant to be kept from your attention, the owner’s attention... and mine. So while she might have only rooted out someone’s overprotected invitation to a surprise party, Mado Keyr wants to let her see what she’s discovered.”
Melie felt a little thrill of pleasure at that comment. “Thank you,” she told Shay.
The crewman left the deck, and the hatch locked behind him.
“Let’s see what you found,” Shay said. “Shipcom, report.”
“The send transmission contains lists of Mado Keyr’s investments, properties, and financial holdings, and a note that states the estimated maximum bid he will be able to offer for Suzee Delight. These files are extensive, though incomplete. The received file notes that the Pact World administrators who are backing the bid of an unnamed Death Circus can only go a billion higher than Mado Keyr’s highest estimated bid, and asks for access to Mado Keyr’s larger accounts so that these can be sabotaged.”
The silence on the bridge stretched agonizingly after that announcement.
Shay had her finger pressed to her right ear. She stared off into space, nodded several times, then said, “Yes, Mado. I’ll take care of that.”
Her hand dropped to her side and she turned to the captain.
“The owner has several requests. First, he asks that you block all transmissions to or from the ship except for those originating from or destined for Room 2. When you close off transmissions, please give notice to ground and Needle that we are upgrading to a Convex 8 system, and may be out of touch all day.”
“We already have a Convex 8 system,” Melie said.
She glanced over at Melie. “We do. But neither ground nor the Needle has any way of knowing that, and it makes a nice excuse.”
She returned her attention to the captain. “Mado Keyr is also setting special priorities for the shipcom, and will require that you leave resource optimization off, in spite of the fact that you will see some periods where some of the ship’s functions push critical. He notes that, because we are docked, this should be a minor inconvenience.”
The captain said, “I’ll leave things alone.”
“He further requests that all passengers in Room 2 be invited to join you for dinner tonight in your quarters, and he asks that he be permitted to attend as well.”
“Of course,” the captain said. “I’ll be delighted to oversee this particular dinner.”
Lastly, Shay turned to Melie. “The owner has instructed me that you are to be given a significant reward for intercepting these transmissions. Captain, she is to come with me. Do you need time to cover her position before she leaves the deck?”
“If shipcom is taking over all communications, then her position is covered until we resume regular operation. She can leave with you immediately.”
Shay said, “Melie, come with me.”
Heart suddenly racing, hope rising, Melie followed her.
Kagen
“…AND SUZEE DELIGHT CANNOT BE held accountable for these five deaths. Individuals who are not free to direct the courses of their own lives cannot be judged or sentenced as if they were. Responsibility for any actions they take lands on the heads of those who claim the right to control them. The deaths of the five Pact Worlds Administrations are therefore the fault of those same Administrators. They are guilty of their own murders.”
“Thank you, Berramyn Chase. Berramyn Chase is a citizen of the City of Furies, and the inventor of the Modix, which is an internal cellular regeneration implant that should become available within the next one to two Standard years to individual residents on worlds that permit it. It will be an emergency backup for in-box Medix treatment—people will survive even massive trauma and self-heal from any injury that does not destroy the brain. This implant, like Medix treatment, is already banned on all Pact Worlds to citizens of Order B status or lower under the Legend War Act, Section B: Mandatory Natural Lifespans, and Section C: No Augmented Self-Healing.”
Kagen finished the recording, and as he had done with every one before it, hit the Send To Stream button on his screen.
Then he walked out to shake hands with Berramyn Chase. She was young and attractive—but because the Furies made access to Medix tech a priority for every Furies citizen, all citizens stayed young and healthy, and any who chose to be so were attractive. Berramyn’s true beauty was internal: she was driven, obsessive, ferocious, passionate, and joyful in an oddly intense way.
“Thank you for taking the time to speak for Suzee Delight,” Kagen said.
“I’ve never met her personally, but it’s impossible not to be aware of her work. Whenever I’ve needed to close out the world and focus on regenerating neurons, I’ve looped her Birds Flying instrumental series—it’s incredible music, mathematically perfect but deeply emotional. I cannot believe anyone will really allow her to be executed.”
“I hope they won’t,” Kagen said. “If she’s somehow saved, the story you told will play a part in saving her.”
“I would do more if I could,” she told him. “We all would.”
He’d found himself crying, listening to Berramyn’s story of her own life before the Furies, of how she had managed to find love on a PHTF world, only to have the man she loved ripped away from her and sent to his death before she managed to escape.
He’d heard more than two hundred variations of that story, and as the bidding war to buy Suzee Delight dragged on, he had interviewed once-persecuted, still-hunted luminaries of the sciences, technologies, mathematics, literature, arts. But along with the powerful and famous, he was also recording the stories and protests of general entertainers, traffic controllers, food processors, farmers, city programmers, construction workers, science technicians, full-time parents, shopkeepers, small business owners, and other ordinary people who had fallen afoul of the Pact Worlds’ ever-more-restrictive “protective guidelines” for citizens.
People like him.
Berramyn was his last interview of the day. He was grateful. He was pushing himself harder and harder, working eighteen Standard hours a day and sometimes even more, keeping Anja’s front studio open just so he could make himself available to everyone who wanted to speak for Suzee Delight. Fighting to save her life had become his obsession—drawing the best out of every single guest he interviewed had become his goal. He was directing the interviews, but the interviews were changing him.
After each one, he studied whatever he could about his next guest and wrote down questions—and fo
r people who had no available information, he had a standard set of questions he started with, and he worked out from there.
He ate from the studio reconsta machine, slept on his studio floor, and made use of the WashAll down the street to keep himself and his clothes acceptably clean.
All he could think of was to keep the interviews going out, to flood Settled Space with them, so that someone who had the power to do something would hear the one story that would make him change his mind and let Suzee Delight live.
Suzee Delight could only receive justice from those who shared the same rights she had, and lived under laws they had created jointly, consented to voluntarily, and held in common.
But Suzee Delight had no rights, including the right of consent, and those who sentenced her were bound by no laws. Those laws they created were only to constrain the actions of others.
By that standard, every action the Administrators of the Pact Worlds took had no legal value. Was, in fact, criminal.
His head hurt.
He was tired.
But he dreaded the idea of slowing down. This thing he had put together meant much more than he’d thought it did when he walked into Anja’s studio—and he suspected that he still only understood a part of how much it meant.
When Berramyn left, he started to turn out the studio lights to catch a few hours sleep before his next interview, but saw Anja standing in the corridor waiting to speak to him.
“You’re doing amazing work,” she said. “Incredible, nearly impossible work, actually. So... did you once meet Suzee Delight? Is she a friend?”
He laughed wearily. “Not a chance. At no point in the universe would her circle and mine ever intersect.”
“Are you... a big fan of her work?”
He grinned. “Not that, either. I’m one of the fifteen percent of people who have an aversion reaction to Sensos—I am completely incapable of letting my body relax into someone else’s neural pathways.”
