by Lee Bond
Nevertheless, those people would be very wrong. There was something roiling beneath the skin of Hospitalis, and it had nothing to do with crime rates or bored soldiers.
Garth had spent enough time in hostile territory looking for ways to exploit situations to his benefit to listen to his gut.
His gut told him Hospitalis was ready to pop like a boil.
On the surface, everything was fine. The view during planet-fall gave him a broad overview of a sprawling city-state straddling a Pangaea-shaped continent; unlike most planets, city planners working on Hospitalis had operated from an actual plan, sketching out far in advance the directions their world would take as the population grew, as opposed to letting things grow willy-nilly. A lot of planets on the other side of the Cordon –indeed, roughly half the ‘new’ planets in Trinityspace at any given time- looked as though settlers had just closed their eyes and started building in every direction at once.
Hospitalis, though, formed six distinct city-sized districts. From the way five of the districts radiated outwards from a central hub, Garth assumed –he would find out later correctly- that the city in the middle was the governmental and economical capital for the entire Latelian system. Each of the sub-cities were connected to Central by means of what later turned out to be freeways that allowed travel speeds of up to a thousand kilometers an hour. Radiating outwards from each of these sprawling city-states were the more familiar conurbations like suburbs and smaller adjunct cities, themselves filled with the hustle and bustle of urban life.
Although each ‘city’ was large enough to contain an entire planet’s population, it was interesting to see that Nature still carried a predominant voice on the planet. A principally industrial civilization like the one he was entering could -and had- easily destroy the natural balance of a world in less time than it took to make a decent pizza. Forestation along the southern and eastern sectors of the city’s furthest outskirts was heavy, the perfect spot for natural game preserves and other idle pursuits. An expanse of Himalayan-esque mountains stretching back across the westernmost portion of Hospitalis almost completely overshadowed that section of the huge mega-city; so wild and untamed were these rocky formations that no one would survive crossing them, making the expanse the perfect home for hidden military bases. As he got closer to the surface, the vast region to the north of the final city turned out to be an immense agricultural project producing enough vegetation and livestock to feed the entire planet.
Those industrial or otherwise ecologically damaging businesses operating on the planet’s surface were strictly confined to ‘Port City’, where poisonous emissions and other noxious byproducts were controlled by the same air-scrubbers that kept the environment otherwise clean and shiny.
At first blush, Hospitalis was a perfect world going about its perfect day in total and utter tranquility. A thriving metropolis equal to any outside their borders.
Garth knew enough about ‘perfect’ to know that the shinier something looked, the more tarnished it was; being cooped up in Meadowlark Lemon with no one but Huey for company provided him ample opportunity to brush up on Latelyspace through their one major export: television.
While he wasn’t a hundred percent certain about everything he’d sat through just yet, it was very clear now that more than half the population hated a Chairwoman Doans with passionate gusto. The vagaries of Latelian politics made it seem that while she was almost universally hated, there was nothing anyone could do about her, so that pressure was pushed back out into the streets.
The gloss and shine of the joint was like that of an awesome car whose fresh paintjob hid a chassis made almost entirely from rust. One kick on a side panel and the rot would spill out.
During the long flight, Garth had decided to be friendly, giving whoever was in charge of The Box one chance to do the right thing. Once that was over and done with –nothing he’d learned of the Latelians said they’d roll over and say yes, even with exhaustive proof-, they’d better hold on to their collective hats because it was gonna get windy: Hospitalis was ripe for exploitation.
Pastoral beauty and excellent civil planning aside, Latelians were still madly in love with duronium, even after four thousand years. Matter of factly, they had no reason to treat their miracle plating any other way: it was cheap to make, stronger than anything except stuff in use by Trinity Military Services, and was ridiculously easy to apply to any surface with the simplest of electroplating techniques. As a people who’d spent so much time, effort, and human life on crushing their enemies into the dust, paranoia dictated they prepare themselves for unexpected attacks; Trinity regulated who came and went through a Q-Tunnel, and It was of the mind that if you couldn’t protect yourself properly, maybe you didn’t deserve your own solar system.
The flip side of that preparedness coin meant that much of the world looked like it’d been dipped in chrome.
As he entered the atmosphere, Garth followed the directions beamed to him by the spaceport’s computer systems to the letter. Shortly after getting close enough to the planet’s surface to begin making out specific items, one of the first things he caught sight of were kinetic missile embankments and rail-cannon stations arranged in a tidy ring around the entire city. Anyone deviating from an assigned path would make landfall as a scattering of dust. Besides an armor-plated city, Hospitalis could defend itself from just about any level of invading forces save perhaps the biggest and nastiest Trinity might deploy.
“Oh yeah.” Garth griped, guiding Meadowlark Lemon into the specially constructed parking area with a deft hand. “These people are real nice.” He touched down with the gentlest of bumps and turned to Huey’s icon. “So.”
“So.” Huey said softly.
“Well,” Garth said, rising from the pilot’s chair, “I ain’t gonna apologize for what I said earlier, but I wasn’t bullshitting when I said I’m going to need your help. I’ll come back as soon’s I can.”
“No need.” Huey replied brusquely. “I wouldn’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
Feeling absurd, Garth put a hand on the monitor. “Listen, little buddy, in case you haven’t noticed, these people aren’t exactly friendly. From what I’ve learned about this Game, they’ve only recently started letting outsiders fight. Most of the people out there think we’re all God worshipping AI-implanted maniacs who want to reproduce with whatever we can. Plus, they have a major hard-on for their Box, which is gonna make my life difficult. If they won’t give me access I’m gonna have to take it, and that means planning.”
‘What’re you saying?” Huey asked, his voice rising slightly.
“I’m saying that on the hundreds of missions I went on, I almost always had an AI filling me in on shit I missed. And … and I kinda miss a lot every now and then.” He cocked thumb and forefinger at his brain and pulled an imaginary trigger. “You think I’d have been nearly successful if I didn’t have some kind of machine mind helping me out? I can barely tie my own shoes.”
“Well…” Huey thought of something. “I won’t be able to help you in the field. I’ve already examined the systems already in place around me, and there’s no way I’ll be able to breach them without drawing attention to myself.”
Garth shook his head. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll acquire Intel, bring it back here, and we can work on it together. Offworld Elimination trials don’t even start until the rest of the gomers get here and that’s not for another four days. I’ve –we’ve- got all kinds of time.”
“You’ve got something in mind already, don’t you?” Huey asked slyly. “You expect them to say no.”
“Shit, man, what do you think?” Garth replied as he made his way to the airlock. “I spent a week in this tub with you. I had all kinds of time to lay my groundwork. I’ll be back.”
“All right, boss. Have fun and don’t get into trouble.”
Huey rightly suspected the warning fell on deaf ears.
xxx
Exiting the elevator a
t the ground floor, Garth noticed a subtle shift in architecture the further towards the entrance he got; the spaceport proper -where ships landed- was crafted exclusively of the metallic composite. The surrounding buildings started favoring woods and other artificial elements that were far superior from a design standpoint; just ‘cuz you can build something out of metal doesn’t mean you should. Either the subversive elements working against the government were winning their fight to bring real culture into their world or they were running out of the necessary elements to make the alloy. After four thousand years of extensive production, it was entirely likely; the ores and compounds were essentially common and could be found pretty much wherever you found earth, dirt, and volcanism, but still. Four thousand years. That’s a long time to be doing anything.
So far, the Latelians he’d run into were decent but obsessive. The level of gung-ho, in your face, patriotism and ego resurrection the Latelians had evoked to come back from the brink of collapse was intense and still very much alive.
They were insanely keen on themselves, but Garth was so thoroughly the center of his own Universe that he hardly noticed. Dismissive of the not-so-subtle anti-everyone rhetoric hammering down at him from all sides, Garth was introduced to two of Hospitalis’ finest examples en route to the lobby.
The Port Security specialist was a very tall, very thin, very dark woman with an extremely paranoid worldview of both AI systems and the people who used them. After taking one look at Meadowlark Lemon, the security expert added another ring of speaker-like devices to augment and channel the dampening beams into destructive ones should Huey try to connect with so much as a telephone. Escorting Garth to the next station, mentioning in barely hospitable tones that he was putting everyone out by having shown up too late or too early for the next series of Offworld additions to the Game, the security woman had announced with pedantic precision the dangers AI presented to humans.
Garth was baffled to learn that an AI could go insane fiendishly quickly, whereupon it would attempt to become a God without as much as a by your leave. There was literally no middle ground. To hear the tall woman talk about it, the moment an AI was activated, it started devising ways to ascend to some sort of super-galactic deity and from there, the only worthwhile goals seemed to be eating people. Armed with the intimate ‘mental’ connection into machinery their supposedly unstable personalities possessed, even the stupidest AI ever made could destroy a planet in less than fifteen seconds. The woman displayed an extraordinary passion as she proselytized about ‘Evils of the Machine’. By the time the next station came into sight, she’d been frenzied on the subject. Pointing out that an artificial intelligence turned super-galactic monstrosity, by being ‘artificial’, would gain absolutely nothing in the way of essential vitamins and nutrients from eating people won him exactly minus three thousand New Visitor Points.
After that, it’d been a desperate struggle to keep from asking why an AI would destroy a planet full of people when it was far more logical and saner to turn everyone into batteries to fuel their gigantic robot armies. Hundreds of millions of converted cyborg-cannon fodder was a way better idea.
The Security Official’s parting shot was something to the effect that she thought Garth was probably okay, but his whole world would be pain if his AI tried anything remotely resembling world destruction.
The Customs Official, only slightly shorter than his counterpart, was pale as an anemic ghost and borderline emaciated. Garth gathered from the look on his face that although the young man was sincerely bored, he nevertheless looked at the intrusion of an unscheduled visitor with deep suspicion. Unlike the Security Official, the Customs kid chose to go on the anti-religion rap, pointing out that anything sounding tenuously religious would result in him, a Trinity dog, being shot full of holes. Garth learned from his new friend the Customs Official that there were religious zealots hiding under every rock, behind every tree, and sometimes inside your own brains, inciting normal-thinking people into riots and worse. He too deviated from what was surely a government-approved diatribe to visitors by covering an extensive list of words, phrases, acts, concepts and artwork deemed subversive to rational thought. By the time they made it to the Information Desk to which he’d been directed by Port Authority before landing, Garth was physically and mentally drained. The act of not laughing his ass off had nearly killed him.
Groaning miserably at the sudden realization that he’d have to endure that sort of treatment every time he came to visit Huey, Garth sighed and started rubbing his forehead. If this ‘The Box’ wasn’t his …
The portrait of perfect concern, Naoko asked sweetly, “Is everything all right with you, sa?” Naoko smiled impulsively.
“Uhh, yeah, thanks.” Garth answered noncommittally because he didn’t trust himself with anything involving more than one syllable: the woman in front of him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. His few friends in Basic Training would agree, because even with the relatively low standards everyone in Special Services maintained, the Information Desk woman was easily the most stunning woman in the system. A hair over seven feet tall, Naoko Kamagana was a delicate sculpture of EuroJapanese breeding mixed with the boilerplate of Latelian genetics. Her skin was a vibrant, dusky color that effused health from every pore. Long black hair graced her shoulders with a gentle kiss of curls before disappearing behind her back. Her eyes were jade eggs, her mouth, a tiny frisson of lipstick. Garth grinned with embarrassment and shifted to hide his boner. “Thanks for asking.”
Naoko -who knew everything there was to know about Garth from the records sent from Smash All Infidels- was instantly stricken by the fact that this Offworlder was very different from the others. Though Garth was there for The Game and logically someone who enjoyed violence, more than a third of the others – ostensibly, a group he was a part of- had required serious medical attention before leaving the foyer.
Garth Nickels didn’t seem like a rowdy Offworld contestant at all. He looked and acted like the tourist his entrance visa proclaimed him to be.
The newest contestant was also shockingly handsome; six foot two and muscled as only someone who takes his physical health seriously, Garth exuded an aura of casual danger that Naoko found intensely exciting. His hair was raven black and cut raggedly off at the neck, as though he’d taken a knife to it. He didn’t have a kind face, but it was honest and strong, and she knew when she looked into his eyes -which were chips of cold blue ice- that he was someone she could trust with her life. If it was at all possible to imagine such a thing. “Did you find your walk … informative?”
Remembering the caustic hour walk from his parking spot with the Security Officer and the twenty-minute rant with the Customs Official drew a snort from Garth. He nodded. “More or less, yeah. I’d like to imagine that I understand enough of the rules by now to get through the next few months.”
“Just so you understand.” Naoko said empathetically. “Si Ayumo and Sa Marku may have come off a little strong, but our way of life is… different. We’re not used to letting people from Trinityspace in, so many of us don’t really know how to behave. For example, our dislike of ‘religion’ is changing; we used to despise people who believed in a power other than that which we can see or hear or touch, but now … now some of us are beginning to imagine that a belief in ones’ self is far more important. And as far as AI is concerned, well, it has been proven that machine minds are susceptible to malfunction.”
“You seem fine.” Garth leaned on the countertop, eyeing Naoko’s trim frame surreptitiously. The curves of her body were absolutely mesmerizing. He hated it when his tongue wagged without his permission because now he felt all awkward.
“Yes, well,” Naoko responded, feeling Garth’s eyes on her, “I interact with many different people on a daily basis.” She felt flush because she didn’t know what to think or to feel; the man’s attention on her was absolute and incredibly flattering. “You are Sa Garth Nickels?”
Garth bowed. “I am.”
“I need to go over some of the particulars that you provided to the officials on Smash All Infidels, if that is okay with you?”
Garth would have agreed to just about anything to spend some more time in Naoko’s presence. By the way he just kind of nodded, he was pretty sure Naoko was picking up on that vibe.
“You are from the Goddart-12 system, Nova 9?”
“Yep.”
“You are here for the Game, correct?”
“Absolutely.”
“You are not affiliated with any military organizations that are known to be anti-Latelian, nor are you a Trinity representative attempting to infiltrate our society, correct?” Naoko risked a quick glance up from her proteus, and caught Garth in a piercing stare. She blushed furiously as a bout of coughing drew him away from the counter.
“No, and not on your life.” Garth said once he started breathing normally.
“Excellent.” Naoko flashed Garth a smile. “Now that those formalities are out of the way, I have some more for you.”
“Go right ahead, pretty lady.” Garth groaned inwardly, wondering where in the hell the line ‘pretty lady’ had come from and hoping it went back there and never showed its horrid face ever again. He was here to steal the planet’s most important historical object, not get into some woman’s pants. Even if she was perfect in every way possible.
“When we’re done, I’ll give you a Sheet that will hold all the information I’m going to give you, so don’t worry about forgetting anything.” Naoko smiled.
“Okay.”
“Under normal circumstances, you’d be required to immediately visit the Registration Offices for the Game, which are located in Central, but since you’ve arrived after business hours, you can, you must, take care of that first thing tomorrow. Offworld contestants are required to take their lodging at the Hotel Hospitalis, a facility specifically set aside for non-Latelian people. This is more for our safety than yours.”
