by Lee Bond
It was nuttier than a fruitcake, but the supreme Artificial Intelligence in the whole Universe approved of the ban! What the hell had these Latelians done to deserve this kind of benign treatment?
The only thing saving his bacon was a five-year-old addendum to the laws; in a burst of craziness, the Latelians had opened their Game to all comers, cracking the doors of their locked borders wide once every five years for whoever felt like beating up a new group of strangers. Undoubtedly more than a few of those original visitors hadn’t taken the time to familiarize themselves with the law, getting blown up for their ignorance and causing all sorts of misgivings with the originating systems. In a fit of staunch non-apologetic apologies, the Latelian government had recognized that humans outside their sphere of influence were all crazy-insane with their lust for AI machinery, rewording the entrance laws and no doubt giving birth to a whole new form of industry, not to mention graft.
Garth whistled as he re-read the documents. “Sorry, pal. Trinity’s given these guys the right to do whatever they want within their borders, weird as that is. If I wanna land, you’re going to be sequestered in your own holding pen. You won’t get to access any exterior systems because they’ll be monitoring you day and night. If I want to visit, I need to inform the government. If I or you break any of these laws, they’ll dismantle you and throw the pieces into the sun and probably feed me to these God soldier guys for sport.”
“Then we don’t land.” Huey announced firmly. “We’ll just buzz their planets until this Game thing is ready to go and then I’ll throw you out the airlock. You could make it; you’re pretty tough. For a human.”
Garth narrowed his eyes. “Ignoring the fact that I own you and not the other way around, there is nothing in the world that is going to keep me from landing. I spent a lot of money on you, but don’t think for a minute that we’ve bonded just yet. I am thirty thousand years outside of my own time and if there’s a chance this thing I’m looking for has answers, I’ll sacrifice you if I need to. I’m ain’t saying I will, because I kind of like the idea of an AI pal, but we need to be clear: this ship I’m looking for is of the utmost importance. Understand?”
Huey understood loud and clear. He’d been out of line. “Understood.”
Happy the ‘crisis’ was over, Garth turned his attention back to the space station “What kind of licensing fees are we talking about here?”
“… Nominal.” Another pause. “For a single-person cruiser outfitted with an AI of your class, twenty thousand credits minimum plus additional charges for maintenance on the storage area.”
“That’s pretty high, isn’t it?”
“AI,” the voice began pedantically, “was classified as a source of major danger for human-type societies thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. In addition to data blackouts and critical errors due to malfunctioning personality programs, thinking machines have a tendency, when unchecked, to go insane. When that happens, they try to wipe out all of Humanity. Check out the ADAM Wars if you don’t believe me.”
“ADAM Wars?” Garth whispered to Huey. “What in the hell is he talking about?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.” Huey answered quickly. “Just pay the fee.”
“All right. You and me, we aren’t through talking. This ‘ADAM Wars’ thing wasn’t covered in basic.” Garth connected with the station’s computers and watched his money dwindle further. Q-Tunnel travel definitely was the only way to fly, but it wasn’t anything close to cheap. After all the hopping around and the unexpected ‘fees’, he was nearly broke. “Which planet do I land on?”
“All visitors to Latelian space are required to make their stay on Hospitalis. You’re in a great deal of luck because The Game is being held there this time around, so you won’t have to go through any more than the usual security checks. The Latelian government has already been made fully aware of your tour of duty with this ‘Special Services’ group, and once you register with the proper authorities, you will be relatively free; if you can stay out of trouble, you shouldn’t have to deal with any officials. If you don’t make planet-fall on Hospitalis within a week, God cruisers will be dispatched. If you land but fail to meet with the appropriate people, God Soldiers will be dispatched. If you try to fly towards the Q-Tunnel without completing the …”
Garth cut the link and put the ship in motion. With the threat of imminent death at the hands of a bored space jockey removed, he could relax. He made a promise; at the next possible opportunity, he was going to do whatever it took to make sure he was never in that kind of position again. The casual manner the Latelians approached their mayhem was disconcerting. Even with his sterling service record, Garth felt he was at an extreme disadvantage.
“Another week, eh, boss?”
Garth nodded with feigned satisfaction. He was going stir crazy in the little ship, but he didn’t want to risk upsetting the spastic Latelians by breaking the speed barrier. “Yep. Hey, is there any chatter going on through this volume of space?”
“Tons, boss.” Huey extended a communication node and started scooping in broadcasts.
“Find out everything you can about this Game and why it seems to be so goddamn important. I’m going to catch some shut eye.”
“Roger.” Immensely relieved, Huey went to work.
xxx
For a society that allegedly disparaged religion of any kind, the Latelians showed a disturbing tendency towards worship; while they didn’t believe in gods, big G or little G and had no concept of heaven or hell or purgatory, the Latelians worshipped ‘The Box’. They simply didn’t see it that way because they’d been doing it for so long.
It wasn’t a focal point for their civilization, it was the focal point. When those long ago Latelians had been on-hand for the war between two alien species, their entire way of life had been teetering on the brink of utter collapse; discovery of the ‘Box’ changed all that in staggering leaps and bounds. Claiming their prize and hurrying back to their homestead, they began doing what they could to understand what it was they’d found.
What Trinity had discovered only a little while ago, Latelian scientists had struggled with five thousand years beforehand. The ship -only roughly shaped like an eponymous ’Box’- was invulnerable to harm and impervious to all methods of detection beyond the standard visual range. In short, it was an ‘eyes-only’ piece of machinery, making it a prize beyond comprehension
It had no visible means of propulsion, yet it’d been scooped up traveling at relativistic speeds –just as inexplicable as whatever made it invisible across every spectrum known to Mankind. It was highly decorated, engraved with ideograms bearing no relationship to any written or spoken language. Five thousand years later and unthinkable man-hours of research and The Box was a mystery that still defied explanation.
Reluctant to chalk The Box up to a great, unanswerable mystery, Latelian scientists had turned tack. After only a few years of possession, they’d begun the long, arduous process of discovering just what The Box was made out of; hundreds of years of effort and frustration and tears and a great deal of murderously internecine backstabbing between different departments of the think tank devoted to cracking the secrets eventually yielded ‘the shard’.
The shard was the miracle discovery of the ages.
It was also a great steaming pile of horseshit as far as Garth was concerned, but since his response to that particular bit of history was all instinct and no fact, he ignored it as best he could.
Garth watched with amusement as a very bad actor playing a scenery-chewing scientist discovered a wildly improbable method of shaving the tiniest sliver from the ship’s hull. This shard gave the Latelians –who were by this time so close to self-destruction that not even Trinity had deemed them worthy of salvation- the ability to engineer duronium-1, the first of their almighty alloys. This astonishing discovery allowed the Latelians to hoist themselves out of their downward spiral by force.
Using duronium-1 to construct a fleet sign
ificantly more powerful than those systems nearest them, the Latelians began their reign of terror on those civilizations stupid enough to believe in the morally destroying concept of worship and prayer. They started by raiding systems in their neck of the woods, paying for Q-Tunnel access with profits stolen from conquered enemies. With the rest of the stolen cash, the Latelians began earnestly rebuilding their society.
In short, they became the futuristic equivalent of Mongols except better looking and with a higher standard of personal hygiene.
While all this galactic pillaging and looting was taking place, the government discovered the time to realize how well and truly fucked everything was. By abandoning virtually every other facet of society else to crack one of The Box’s secrets, they’d allowed unemployment to reach a staggering sixty-five percent, suicide had replaced natural causes as the number one reason for mortality, births were way down, with worse man-made societal disasters lurking around every corner. The only people not in a bad way were the ones roaming around space beating up helpless Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers.
Those wise and ancient forebears –quietly and definitely not panicking- decided that their pet scientists had had more than enough time with The Box, taking it away and coming up with the idea of using The Box to distract their people from how truly desperate their way of life had become.
Thus had been born ‘The Game’.
On paper, The Game was a good idea. No, a great idea. It had a solid, workable foundation almost entirely philanthropic in nature. The Romans had done it for decades, and they’d totally rocked for a real long time. The Game was just like the Coliseum, with all sorts of people beating the shit out of everyone else. Anyone wanting a shot at opening The Box was welcome to do so, they just had to not die.
In the beginning, The Game had followed several fairly simple, fairly basic rules; fight until you dropped, don’t kill anyone unless your life is in danger, may the best man or woman win. Nice and easy with a PG-14 violence level, the sort of mayhem that gets peoples’ minds off how crappy life is without getting them worked up enough to blow up a mall when their favorite guy got himself dead.
Over the centuries though, The Game had both evolved and devolved; where once the game had been -more or less- a contest of skill and finesse, it was now an all-out slaughter-fest designed to maximize blood-letting and to get the highest body count. Killing was the rule instead of the exception. Weapons, the flashier the better, were permitted. The more blood the better. It was kill or be killed, thrill the crowds.
Garth suspected those old Romans would politely ask to leave the room so they could quietly cry into their scented handkerchiefs at what happened in Latelyspace every five years.
The whole shebang had rocked on solidly for a few thousand years, everyone enjoying the shit out of all that murder and death until, one fine morning it suddenly dawned on promoters of the systemic event that there was absolutely no way in a non-existent Hell that anyone was ever going to open the fucking thing.
It was as silent and as oppressive as it had ever been, and unless something was done, no one was ever going to want to try and open The Box ever again. Once that happened, everyone would realize how crummy their situation still was; even though things were better than when they’d started, you just didn’t have enough freedom or money or whatever it took to make you happy.
In addition to a chance to open The Box, additional prizes were added; the final winner won a huge amount of money and bragging rights for five years that inevitably turned into any number of endorsement deals that overshadowed the original prize money by the millions. For all but the most obsessive of fans, the fact that no one had ever come close to opening The Box became a footnote barely worth mentioning.
Every five years, the Latelian civilization shut down for the two-month spectacle. Everything except services vital to the continuation of the system shut their doors for that period. As a sign of charity, owners of those businesses enjoyed financial breaks and weekly stipends until things reverted to normal.
Billions of credits passed through Bettor and Bettor every day as gameheads wagered ludicrous amounts of money on the outcome of everything from the starting roster to who was going to wear which shorts on which day. The names of the final thousand contestants were on the lips and in the hearts of the trillion-plus members of the Latelian society for those two months.
At the end of the third such program chronicling the bizarre lifestyle of the Latelians, Garth was positive local dictionaries had bad entries under ‘worship’, ‘idolatry’ and ‘false idols’.
The other thing Garth was positive of after sitting through hours of badly acted crap was this: their ‘Box’ was his.
From the very first holorecording of their much-vaunted, heavily worshipped icon, a shock of recognition had slammed through him, forcing him to sit down and watch the show very, very closely. The credits of that first show highlighted the fact that certain key elements of The Box had been altered to protect their national treasure from prying eyes, but the deception couldn’t fool someone who was intimate with the thing.
Garth didn’t know how he knew it, or why, but he knew he’d helped build The Box. Hot on the heels of that revelation came another; his missing memories were somehow inside, and if he’d thought the urge to find the missing ship had been all consuming before, the impulse now was impossible to ignore.
The ship/Box contained his memories, and once he got inside, he’d be whole.
“Why Meadowlark Lemon?” Huey asked, interrupting Garth.
“Huh? What?” Garth asked absentmindedly. “Oh, the ship.”
“Yes. I can’t find any reference to the name anywhere, so I assume it’s got to be from your own time.”
“Yeah, yeah it is.” Garth leaned back in his chair, then rose. He’d been sitting in the same position for more than ten hours. “Meadowlark Lemon was part of the Globetrotters, who were these guys that did the most amazing things on the basketball court.”
“I see. So I’m a Globetrotter?” Huey rather liked the idea. He had no clue what a basketball was, or why it would need to go to court, but that was fine. He’d done some amazing things, so he supposed it worked. “Neat.”
Garth flipped over to a news channel direct-beamed from Hospitalis to the space station four days behind them.
Even with a two-month long holiday celebration on the horizon, the Latelians as a nation didn’t seem to be doing so well. Hadn’t been for close to a century, as far as he could tell; around a hundred years ago all external military action had ceased, giving a standing army of something like forty million soldiers next to nothing to do. Pressure from the army to keep their boys happy and healthy was beginning to show on the economy in the form of ridiculously high taxes and on the civilian sectors by an increased rate of violent crime and theft. Sandwiched between reports of that stuff –with reporters saying ‘everything’s cool’ in seventeen different ways- there was the occasional bit of inscrutable high-velocity glossing over of a weird underground political movement who’s goal seemed to be an attempt to shed light on underhanded practices of their government. It didn’t bother Garth that he understood maybe half of what the implications being made; he didn’t have a full background on the Latelian structure yet, but once he did, manipulating the goons would be easy. And goons they were; in every show he’d seen so far, Latelians –by and large of either IndoRussian or EuroJapanese stock- were, on average, two to three feet taller than anyone back in Trinityspace. There was nothing on these God soldiers, but it was easy enough to speculate they were bigger still.
As it was, it was obvious many of the newer rules and regulations being instituted were falling out of favor with the locals, just not fast enough for The Old Boys network; comprised entirely of old-guard politicians and businessmen, they were working tirelessly against someone called Chairwoman Doans and her revolutionary policies. Different somehow than the weird-ass underground movement, they still sought the same thing; they wanted
change, just not the change this Doans woman was touting.
Toss in the usual gamut of criminals, political terrorists and loonies, and The Game was more important than ever, if only to stave off implosion for another few years.
“What’re you going to do down there?” Huey asked, unsure if he wanted an answer. Even a normal AI would’ve needed to be completely retarded to miss the malicious gleam in Garth’s eye ever since he’d seen the Latelian’s Box.
Garth singled out an entertainment show that’d especially caught his eye and played it out for Huey. As it ran, he explained. “Hospitalis gets to host The Game this time around, so all eyes will be on this planet once the event gets going. Part of the responsibilities of the host-planet is to do The Game justice, soooo,” here he grinned wide, “whichever planet gets the honor needs to have a museum display of their friggin’ Box.”
“Uh-oh.” Huey watched wide-eyed, goony Museum curators go on at great length about The Box, about the history of The Box, and how awesomely cool it was.
“No,” Garth said with a wicked smile, “not ‘uh-oh’. Yeehaw. Turns out I’m gonna register after all, but only so I can up close and personal without freaking anyone out. It’s the perfect in. I’ll verify that The Box in the museum is the real deal and the rip that bitch off. You know how long it’s been since I stole something? I haven’t done a good museum heist in, like, two whole years.”
Huey ignored the question as rhetorical. He had other worries. “And if it isn’t? If it’s a fake?”
“Well, then it’s gonna be ‘uhoh’ all right, ‘uh-oh’ for the people running this planet, because I’ll tear the whole city up to find that ship.” Garth rubbed his hands together. “It’s also been a fair stretch since I blew something up. Isn’t this exciting?”
DAY ONE:
Livin’ It Up in the Hotel Hospitalis
Anyone lacking Garth’s background in sowing discord would automatically assume everything was fine and dandy in the Latelian system -even if they chose to ignore glaringly obvious problems like a bloated military budget and escalating crime.
