by Andrew Lane
“Can I help?” Marc said into the air. Trying to inject a sense of Go away please into his tone. The house AI took his words and replayed them outside the front door.
“Anson Greenaway,” the man replied. He was staring away from the house, towards the hills. “I’d like a moment of your time. Please.” He had a deep, easy voice and an American accent that for all its relaxed tone also spoke of power. This was no door-to-door salesman.
Marc paused for a second. His brain was still considering the art installations – tweaking details and thinking about the surroundings that would display them to their full advantage. He didn’t want any distractions, even if it led to a sale. Darla would kill him for even thinking it, but he had more than enough work on at the moment. “I’m busy,” he said eventually. “I suggest you see my agent.”
Greenaway smiled; lips closed, not showing his teeth. Maybe it was the resolution of the imaging system, but the smile did not reach his eyes. “I’ve come a hell of a long way to see you.”
“And without an appointment,” Marc replied. Over the man’s shoulder he could see a rental jitney parked on the road. “It won’t take more than forty minutes to Cardiff Airport, another half hour to London and then the ramjet to New York.”
“Why do you think I came from NYC?”
“Cut of your suit,” Marc replied. “Different to those laser cut by the million in Shanghai. It’s pure New York, in the lapels and the scalloping of the trouser legs.” He didn’t say that only the seriously rich and powerful wore suits. Most people wore casual clothing, often fashion and fad free.
The visitor frowned, and glanced downwards. “I had no idea I gave so much away.”
“Are you interested in buying one of my pieces?” Marc asked after a long pause during which the other man made no move towards his jitney.
“If necessary.”
Marc sighed. His mood was ruined, but there might be some money in it. Besides, the nanoforms might not do anything interesting for hours. Or days. Or ever. Sensing the intent in his gesture, the house AI opened the front door. Greenaway’s throat moved as he sub-vocalised: probably signalling to his own AI chip that Marc’s house AI could have limited access to it.
A few moments later he heard Greenaway approaching the studio. The delay had given Marc enough time to type instructions into the sepia tattoo on his forearm, instructing his own AI to check out his visitor. He could have set the AI to accept sub-vocalised instructions, like most people, but he didn’t like the idea of having someone else around him all the time, even if it was just a listening presence. Typing instructions suited his isolationist streak perfectly. For similar reasons, he didn’t have a visual or aural avatar for the AI either. Darla had told him once that he had a problem with someone else’s artistic interpretations being shoved into his mind. That might have been true, but her barbed comment had started him thinking about developing a range of surreal or abstract virtual avatars for people to use. For a hefty price, of course.
As Greenaway appeared in the doorway, guided by arrows the house projected into his retinas, and looked around, amazed, at the artworks on display, Marc was reading the results from the projection on his own retinas, words hanging in mid-air and glowing slightly. There was some general background information, like the man’s age and credit rating – sixty-six, triple A – but that was all. Strange.
Glancing back at Greenaway, Marc noticed that the man was looking him up and down. It was only when he glanced down at himself that Marc realised he wasn’t wearing any clothes apart from a pair of socks that kept his feet from getting cold on the solid stone floor.
“Not much to say about your choice in clothing,” Greenaway said.
Marc shrugged. “I haven’t seen another human being for a week or so. What’s the point in wearing anything?”
Greenaway indicated Marc’s socks. “There’s an old joke about the world’s most beautiful woman going to visit the world’s greatest artist. ‘Would you like to paint me naked?’ she asks. He pauses for a long time, looking agonised, then says, ‘Can I keep my socks on? I need somewhere to keep my brushes.’”
Marc frowned, confused. “Brushes?”
“Never mind.” Greenaway glanced around, and his gaze fastened on a chair.
“Sit down, please,” Marc said. “I’ll fast-chill some wine.”
“Not for me,” Greenaway said. “Alcohol and the flight back would send me to sleep for the afternoon. I hate that.” He looked around with interest. “I saw one of your pieces in Munich. It had cockroaches crawling up and down a wall. Chips were embedded in their brains, right? And linked to video camera pointed into the gallery so people suddenly found their faces reproduced on the wall by a thousand crawling insects.” He smiled slightly. “I would say ‘immortalised’, but the pictures only lasted a few seconds. I doubt the cockroaches lived more than a couple of weeks. Didn’t you win an award?”
Marc winced. “The cockroaches were a nightmare. Damn things have some kind of biological aversion to doing anything in a coordinated manner. They kept fighting the remote control. Left to themselves they’d have been off in all directions, so I had to ramp up the power but that burned their brains out after a few days. Well, I say brains, more like a bunch of nerves coming together in a nexus. And they were supposed to be sterile, but I kept finding new ones turning up, without chips or antennas. I was never sure if they were reproducing or if others were creeping in from outside, curious about what was going on.”
“Still, it was impressive. An insect lover would say ruthless.” Greenaway paused, and smiled. “Wasn’t there some animal rights group that tried to claim the prize should have gone to the cockroaches, not you?”
“That,” Marc admitted, feeling a faint blush of guilt, “was my agent’s idea. She’s as much of an artist with publicity as I am with life forms.”
“You spent a few years Out There, didn’t you?” Greenaway asked unexpectedly.
“It’s no secret. You sound like you’re not sure.” It felt as if the man was playing him.
Greenaway shrugged. “They don’t keep records.” He paused again. “That is, none we can access easily.” He’d unconsciously come to dominate the room – in the sense that domination obviously came naturally to him. “Not accusing you. Only curious.”
Marc’s hand absently brushed his input tattoo. “It was only a few years, and there was a girl involved. Teenage rebellion.” Which was the story Darla had invented for him. “Other than that, not really your business, is it?” Who did Greenaway mean by “we”?
“Humour me,” Greenaway said. “Please.” His voice had deepened. “Did you find the freedom Outers are always talking about?” The Outers claimed the city states were far too dependent on alien technology. They did use off-world tech, but claimed to do so sparingly. But who knew what alien goodies were really hidden Out There?
The memories were still raw, and Marc shied away from them. “Yeah, freedom to fucking starve. In an artistic sense, at least. The food was actually quite good.”
“I’ll bet you were overfed politics,” Greenaway observed. “Outers do like to talk. Still, now you belong to the civilised world. Doing pretty well for yourself, too.”
It felt as if he’d been threatened but Marc couldn’t figure out precisely how. “I don’t belong to anyone. If you don’t understand that you’re wasting my time.”
“You have degrees in genetic engineering and computing,” Greenaway continued, ignoring Marc’s flash of temper, “but you ended up an artist.”
“A prize-winning artist.”
“That’s true. So what pushed you in that direction? It’s not in any of your bios that I can access.”
Marc shrugged and looked away, out of the large window. The question made him feel even more uneasy. At the same time he found himself wanting to answer the older man, if only to make him go away. “You like old jokes, right?” he asked. “You’ll know that one from precontact times? NASA, if you remember who they were, deci
de that after years of just sending monkeys up into space, they’d finally send a man. So the next flight they fire a man and a monkey into space. A few minutes after launch the intercom crackles, and a voice says, ‘Monkey, fire the retros.’ A little later, the radio voice says, ‘Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.’ The astronaut is getting a bit pissed off by this stage, so he radios NASA and asks: ‘When do I get to do something?’ NASA replies, ‘You’re just there to feed the monkey.’ I looked at the way the world was going and I realised that within my lifetime AIs will be writing all the code and controlling all the machines. It’s just a fact of technological development: they can do tasks like that faster than us, and with fewer errors. I knew I had a choice – feed the monkey or go into a field that AIs can’t manage, like art, the military, philosophy, or politics. Art was the one that appealed the most. I had a talent for it.”
“And you’ve done well.”
“Thank you.” Marc stared at Greenaway for a moment, still trying to work out what the man wanted. “Why are you here?”
“I wasn’t lying,” Greenaway said. “I will buy one of your works, if it motivates you to join our little team. Less trouble than putting you on the payroll. Just a one-off, tax-deductible transfer of funds.”
Marc’s brain had snagged on the word “payroll”. “You want me to work for you? I don’t even know what you do – it’s not in any bio that I can access.”
“EarthCent. GalDiv.”
Government, then, and one concerned with alien affairs. “Jesus,” he said, “is this some long-term fallout from the Eridani that followed me around? Does it want a refund or something? Does GalDiv really pay tax?”
“Even if the snake did want its money back, it couldn’t tell us. And no, we don’t.” Greenaway shrugged. “We can’t even communicate properly with dogs, chimps or dolphins past ‘Where’s the ball?’, ‘Give me the banana,’ or ‘Jump for the fish,’ and we share DNA and a world-view with them. People were too optimistic when they talked about establishing grammatical constructs with alien visitors, or comparing triangles and getting excited by Pythagoras. Forty years, billions of virtscrip spent, and we still put things on a table side by side to compare their value.”
“But they like art. Apparently. Well, my art.”
“You think? Listen, wanting is not the same as liking. We don’t know what they do with your artwork when they get it back home. Wherever the hell that is.” Greenaway seemed lost in a momentary reverie, and pulled himself back with an obvious effort. “You ever think about going Up?”
Up as in into space. It was a time of short euphemisms. Just as the phrase “Out There” referred to any part of Earth not controlled by the city states, “Up” referred to space travel, whether to the moon, solar system, any of the colony worlds or exploring the wider galaxy. People went Up as casually as they went to the corner shop for milk. Such a little, dismissive word helped gloss over that space travel was not human-invented, but gifted.
Marc shook his head.
“But your family went Up fifteen years ago,” Greenaway pressed. “To a very pleasant world not too far away. You could visit.” His eyes were watchful, as if he was expecting an admission.
“I’ve seen the brochures,” Marc said quietly and looked away. “The images they’ve sent back. I suspect life there is harder than it’s portrayed, but optimism and that old settler spirit won’t let them admit it, even to themselves. No, I like it here on Earth. It might be crowded, but it’s fun.” He wondered if Greenaway knew why his family had emigrated, and how Marc himself had found out they’d gone. And that Marc was far more uneasy about the emigration than he’d admit to anyone, let alone a stranger.
“They’d be pleased to see you I’m sure.”
Marc shook his head. “Not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
Marc sighed. The man wasn’t going to give up. “Because I have an imagination, all right?” he snapped. “I know the facts. We’re dependent on the Gliese for netherspace drives, which we don’t understand and can’t repair. We’re no better than some early settler in a canoe setting off in the general direction of wherever he or she wanted to go and trusting to luck and maybe the stars to get there, with gravity gradients and twisted space instead of tides and currents. One in every forty spacecraft vanishes. Lost or broken. I’m perfectly happy on Earth, thank you. I’ll wait until going Up is more like taking a bus than trekking in the Wild.”
Greenaway stared at him for a long moment. “I can’t fault your analysis of the situation,” he said. “But it’s too bad. And irrelevant. And they’re not spacecraft but space utility transports, SUTs. GalDiv has an aversion to naval metaphors; that’s why we use randomly generated trifecta identifiers rather than names for the transports.”
“What do you mean by irrelevant?” Marc had a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Because we’ve lost something out there, in deep space, and we want you to go and find it.”
Marc saw the ruthlessness beneath the polite façade and understood that Greenaway could and would make Marc do whatever he wanted. For a moment he wanted to punch the man, then he noticed how Greenaway was standing, the air of total control, and, ever the pragmatist, he decided the other man would probably win. But he’d be damned if he’d surrender without a fight. “And if I still say no?”
“Then you lose all this. Shall I tell you why?”
Marc shook his head. “Don’t bother. Only too happy to go Up for GalDiv,” he said through gritted teeth. Maybe it was time he gave something back – wasn’t that what successful people did? And he could do with a break from art.
He decided not to ask for a fee.
3
Not the first time she had woken in someone else’s hotel bedroom. It was the first time she’d woken alone. The dark-haired woman was gone.
< Good morning, dear. She’d let her new avatar choose its persona based on its perception of her personality, and it had decided to sound like someone’s not-too-bright mother; an awkward choice given the circumstances. < It’s 06:30. You have to go home and change before work.
The blonde was woozy from joss fumes – what the hell had they smoked? – too little sleep and too much sex. She was awake enough to be curious, though. > The woman who had this suite…?
< I’m afraid, the avatar interrupted, sounding sad, < I can’t help. Some of my memories have been wiped. And all manner of hotel security data just vanished. That poor hotel AI is beside itself. It’s all so wrong.
> There must be something.
< A cash payment for the suite at 05:30, nothing more.
> We’ve got DNA, she thought, pulling back the sheets.
< Do you have any idea how hard it is to interfere with an AI’s memory? Twice?
> No.
< You don’t want to annoy the people who can, dear. Now, be a good girl and get dressed.
The vid screen snapped on as she got out of bed. An update news story about a group of pharmaceutical executives stung to death by killer hornets. The nest had been discovered and destroyed. “Like I really care,” she muttered, then tried to remember details about last night’s lover, and had gotten as far as one that made her tremble when a white-hot spike pierced her brain.
< You okay, dear? her avatar asked. < You whimpered.
> Headache.
A few minutes later she stood under the shower, thinking that a woman who could subvert an AI’s memory might also do bad things to the human mind. But given the chance, she’d go with the mystery woman again.
* * *
The Berlin shuttle was full of business people and bureaucrats talking numbers and jargon. Kara, wearing a dark, no-frills business suit, feigned sleep in her window seat wondering what exactly GalDiv wanted with her. Her thoughts were cut short when the shuttle banked sharply to starboard. A moment later the pilot explained they’d had to avoid an unscheduled space-departure from an antique oil-rig platform in the North Sea. An unknown group with updown-f
ield generators and presumably a netherspace drive had gone exploring.
It could be the free spacers, those modern-day equivalents of Elizabethan buccaneers, explorers and traders – and sometimes pirates – without any official backing. It was an open secret that they often worked with factions from Out There. Or it could simply be someone who’d got lucky with an alien trade, and had painstakingly built themselves a space-going vessel to go a-wandering, and would probably die out there cold and alone.
“Bloody free spacers!” complained the man sitting next to Kara. “So why are you going to Berlin?” He was in his early thirties and smoothly blond, with the self-possession of a man protected by a corporation or a government department. He obviously assumed the attractive young woman wearing a sober business suit was part of the same bureaucrat-executive cohort and that she’d naturally take this opportunity to network with him.
“You know,” Kara said quietly, “that’s none of your business,” then settled back and closed her eyes, remembering the night before. The blonde had been enthusiastic but unimaginative and for a while she’d regretted not including the man. Then a special joss had worked its magic and she’d finally become the partner Kara needed. And after that she’d imported an illegal program into the blonde’s AI to ensure that it wouldn’t want to remember Kara in the morning.
The memories were far too distracting to be carried into a meeting at GalDiv. Kara opened her eyes again and glanced out of the shuttle’s viewport. She could see the trail left by the recently departed and unauthorised space utility transport: a gash in the atmosphere filling in gradually with water vapour. Seeing the trail sparked a chain of thought about the trade in netherspace drives, and where they came from.
The Gliese controlled the trade in the sideslip-field generators – known as netherspace drives – the technology that allowed the user to “slip” from normal space to the weird realm of netherspace and back again. Sideslip-field generators came in three “strengths”, each enclosed in a large sphere of an alloy that human scientists said was impossible, but plainly wasn’t. The weakest drive powered a transport the size of a large truck, the second one the size of a ferry, the third an aircraft carrier. No one, Earth Central’s Galactic Division included, knew how they worked, only how to use them. Any attempt to examine the drive usually resulted in it melting. The few times this hadn’t happened the drive appeared to be nothing more than an empty box.
