Foreign Devil (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  “Uh, huh?” Hamburgers and dead gangsters drained out his left ear, replaced by a big ball of confusion that seemed doomed to grow bigger every time Herrig opened his mouth. The man was clearly excited, and was having a difficult time staying on track.

  “The Trinity government purchased your technology for a rather hefty sum, and in accordance with Its laws, has also seen fit to provide you with a contract outlining royalties and bonuses.”

  “Can they … It … do that?”

  “Yes, It can. Especially if the design is one that aids in the betterment of mankind. This …” Herrig read the memo again, “This gravnetic shield generator? What, exactly, does it do?”

  “Oh, it’s kind of cool, I suppose.” Garth said nonchalantly. “These generators … well, they’re more like distributors, really, they manipulate local gravity, bending it into a kind of shield that can be dense enough to deflect damn near anything. The original design was a complete fluke, and a one-off to boot, but once I knew it was possible, I figured out a way to reproduce the effect, except better. The newer ones’re small enough to be worn as a personal device, and much less dependent on direct AI supervision. Each one’s usually good for about three or four shots, which is all you really need, because after that, direct engagement ain’t in the cards. It’s mile-long cannons and dropping shit from space onto target zones.”

  “I would think, sa, Trinity went in the opposite direction.” Herrig tapped his temple meaningfully. “Planetary maintenance. Emergency protocols. Think larger.”

  Garth’s eyes narrowed into pinpricks as he considered Herrig’s words. “That would work, for sure. Just … just go in the opposite direction, build big-ass distributor columns at key points around a globe. Of course, you’d have to figure out a way for it to run without an AI, or minimal AI supervision, and there’s just no way it’d run off normal power sources. Oh yeah, that’d work for sure. The damn thing’d probably slow down the rotation of the planet in the process of protecting it … I bet … I bet you could use superdense materials or even some kind of artificial black hole to power everything. Hell,” Garth said with a shrug, “at that size, I’d say that once everything was up and running, the actual power drain would be practically non-existent. Wish I’d thought of it.”

  “According to the document you are not reading,” Herrig outlined a few passages of the contract for Garth to skim over, “Trinity believes you did, and is paying you very well for it. For every planet outfitted with your shields, you receive a percentage of that planet’s net profits. There are clauses indicating bonuses depending on how well your devices work during, say, a planetary attack, and so on. It’s a very lucrative deal, sa, even at sometimes less than one percent return.”

  “How does that work?” Garth took a sip of water to conceal his confusion. A businessman born he was not. “I mean, I don’t understand any of this.”

  Herrig understood Garth’s uncertainty. The chance of someone simply stumbling into this kind of wealth and this kind of exposure to Trinity was, well, impossible. In most Conglomerate instances, the CEO would probably only hear from the governing AI once or twice in their entire lifetime, and usually in the form of a warning.

  “I would say that what you have experienced is one of the last true miracles of this age, sa. If I were to look for the number of businesses that have pulled off something as … as earth-shattering as you, the number would be very small. No more than ten, and that is being overly optimistic. Even then, you’ve come off remarkably lucky. Typically, Trinity simply takes what it wants under the auspices of Human Safety, and that is, as they say, that. If I were to hazard a guess, Trinity has done this because it hopes you will continue on developing new technologies.

  Whether you intended it or not, your … er … ‘gizmo’ has replaced several different protocols. Now, I am no scientist, but this report claims you’ve increased the level of planetary protection by a factor of twenty while decreasing maintenance costs down to two and one half times the current rate; not only does your shield provide an invaluable level of protection, it is also easier to maintain and operate. It’s safe to assume, at least from Trinity’s standpoint, that a planet protected by one of your shields will always be a productive member of Trinity. Any profits left to a planet after taking care of its own problems goes directly to the AI; you are receiving a percentage of Trinity’s take, and will continue to do so as long as no one else supplants your technologies.”

  “How many planets are using the shields?” There were almost as many planets under Trinity’s direct control as there were grains of sand on a beach, with a hundred times that many on the other side of the Cordon.

  “That information is classified, sa, but in the time we have been speaking, your balance has jumped twice and doubled once.” Herrig looked Garth in the eye. “Eventually, you’ll reach a plateau, but I doubt that will come for some time yet.”

  “Wow.” Garth was dumbfounded.

  He went back to that day, musing aloud. “You know, it really was a complete and total accident. There were four Special Services teams involved in that SNAFU. We’d been hired for a long-term civil action, but our Intelligence was fucked from the get-go; someone somewhere missed the illegal Gamma Plateaus –I don’t know if you know what those are, but they are planet killers- that the insurgents had picked up on their local Black Market –we never did find out how they’d gotten into that system. More than two thirds of our operatives got vaporized the moment we hit dirt. My dropship managed to slam a semiBAM into atmos before getting the hell out. That screwed the Plateau’s telemetry up pretty good, giving us few survivors a couple seconds to think.

  Well, we hightailed it out of the immediate area, but it wasn’t long before we were caught on radar by ground and air support. They called in our location, and the Plateau’s operators honed in on our hovertank; since we were using Trinity energy packs, the damn thing was a high-tech beacon. It’s hard to miss a moving target over hostile terrain with those kinds of weapons, but the morons working those cannons pretty much did; instead of vaporizing, they turned a quarter-mile of farmland into melted glass. They did manage to hit half our tank, turned the fucking thing into slag. Except for one AG turbine. Somehow, it’d been turned into a perfect standalone generator, a free-floating two-foot wide sphere of antigravity. It’s sitting in a lab at SpecSer HQ right now. Anyhow, that little violation of physics got me thinking. Same time as this was going on, our BattleSystem was yammering that we had fifteen minutes or less before the Gamma Plateau’s cannons came back on line.

  I had to do something because there was just no way we could get out of the blast radius this time; we were lucky that the first blast hadn’t been dead on the money or you and I wouldn’t be talking right now. I ordered the men to tear out the busted AG nodes because it was beginning to look my idea was going to go from my brain to the real world in a lot less time than I’d planned. I told the BattleSystem to start thinking on how to explain how the mistake had happened so I could make a bigger one. It told me to go screw. Not in those terms, you understand, but not polite. It advised me to send some guys out to distract the cannon so the rest of us could run the other way. Theory was we’d eventually get ourselves far enough away from the heat to get a call through to the pick-up squad hanging out by the moon. It was either that or play hopscotch with the things until a ship with space combat weapons rolled in to blow it up.

  Obviously, this was not what you’d call a wicked cool idea, so I … I took matters into my own hands. Now, the Battlesystem had been old, and had been on the tank, so it’d gotten pretty knocked around its ownself. I took a portable plasma cutter and started cutting the living shit out of that AI to get at the innards. Now, I know you know a fair bit about the dangers of messing around with Artificial Intelligence and their brainbuckets. Everyone does, but I didn’t have a choice. Lucky for me, SpecSer equipment is basically as old as the hills, so the internal defense mechanisms on Thor –our BattleSystem- were nearly depleted.
Still nearly died, or at least that’s what I’m told; I’m hazy on everything after being zapped by purple lightning. Records show I built the first gravnetic generator in fourteen point four minutes and, going from first principles alone, it worked flawlessly. That first design worked off the power core of the AI, which killed it dead. The new designs draw power from gravity waves. Nearly got court-martialed for that. Would’ve, too, if I hadn’t been … un-court-martial-able.

  Same time as this, the cannon operators fired again, only they missed by a mile, thinking we would’ve started hauling ass in the other direction. The next clear memory I have is of telling the men I was going to turn the machine on, and that they had to be inside a relatively small radius. Lost a handful of men who ignored my warnings about the shield radius, but in war, that’s Acceptable Losses. Naturally, the orbital cannon operators detected the surge and maneuvered to fire down on top of us for maximum effect. I can tell you with utter confidence that being fired on by a cannon designed to raze cities to the ground is alternately the most terrifying and beautiful thing in the world.

  Lucky I was wearing my horseshoe underwear and my four leaf clover socks, because like I said, the bloody thing worked. The energy beam bounced directly back at the cannon, crippling its AG stabilizers. After fifteen minutes of pyrotechnics, the friggin’ thing crash-landed right on top of some goddamned massive military bunker where they were storing nuclear weapons, if you can believe that craziness. After that, there was an Explosion of Massive Proportions. Everyone and everything outside my makeshift shield was carbonized and more than half the planet was rendered uninhabitable. That was a Very Long Day. Got a medal and everything.” Garth chuckled dryly.

  “Wow.” Sa Herrig whispered, astonished, amazed … astounded. He was sitting across from a bona fide hero, a man who’d done the impossible. “Take my free legal advice, Sa Garth. Keep the money. You’ve undoubtedly saved the lives of trillions of people. Also this: the next time you invent something, don’t sell it! Build the factories yourself. Conglomerate. You have the money now, and a trillion credits will be in your account by the end of tomorrow, and that is nothing compared to what you will have. Do you follow?”

  “Sure, sure, yeah.” He was rich, really, really rich, and was going to get richer. Garth read the plaque Herrig had indicated at the beginning of their meeting. “Say, you really an attorney? You can represent me?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Well,” Garth grinned craftily, “since you’re non-Latelian, I can at least run this by you so you can tell me how it sounds …”

  xxx

  Garth looked at the picture displayed on his Sheet, and then again at the ‘wares shop he’d chosen. Like the advertisement for the Hotel Hospitalis, appearances were not only deceiving; they were downright full of crap. It was as if the Latelians had only gotten half the brochure on Tourism for Trade 101: they’d gotten through the part about having a fancy brochure and big claims, but had skipped the whole bit about truth in advertising.

  Whatever the case, while the wares shop was a step up from Hotel Hospitalis in terms of cleanliness, it was still a far cry from ‘the best place on earth to fulfill your protean needs’. The World of Protean Might was just like any other place, on any other planet, in any other system, and the sooner Latelians got used to the idea that everywhere really was the same as every other where, things would be just dandy.

  Garth hesitantly pushed his way through the heavy glass doors, preparing for a reception similar to the one at the bank, or worse, the hotel.

  He was immediately pleased that the interior was at odds with the outside. Soft music tinkled indiscriminately from well-hidden speakers. The shop itself was laid out tastefully with ranks of kiosks displaying the multitude of protean devices available to the public. Wandering unmolested for the moment, Garth saw that proteus designs ran the gamut from simple machines that were part nanny for young children all the way up to heavy-duty data processors for insane science geeks.

  “Hello, sa. I see you are interested in the Protipal.”

  “The say who now?” Garth realized he’d been staring so intently at the most complex proteus in the place that a salesman had managed to sneak up on him. Now he ‘got’ to deal with high-pressured sales pitches and indefatigable speeches.

  “The Protipal.” Sa Turuin smiled expansively as he gestured at the silver-and-chrome proteus that had caught Garth’s eye with enough savoir-faire for a dozen salespeople. “The manufacturers wanted to call it the Protean 5000 Megamachine, but that was a little too much for the industry folks to stomach.”

  Garth’s lips quirked thinking about the sort of Latelian who’d come up with a name like that; shorter than normal, skinnier than was healthy, and very, very lonely. “What’s it do?”

  Turuin pointed to the Sheet mounted next to the demonstration prote. The Sheet was three times standard size and each virtual page was densely packed with information. “The boys at Protean Designs threw everything they could at this one. It’s the most complex device a layperson can own. For anything, well, ‘better’, you’d have work for the government or the military. Regardless, there are some out there who believe that the Protipal is one step closer to AI, and to them, I say ha! Everyone knows that you need diamond optics for that. As I said, though, it is a very powerful tool.”

  Garth wasn’t really sure if that was true or not –his insistent instinct said there was more than one way for a machine mind to say ‘hey, I’m me’- but knew it was safest to go along with everyone’s opinion until he could prove otherwise. Garth touched one of the hyperlinks on the Sheet, read the info. “Says here that it can manage all of my personal data. I have a lot of personal data.” He said, thinking of his ridiculously bloated dossier.

  “That it can, that it can. As you can see here,” Turuin accessed the specifics concerning storage for Garth with a few quick swipes of his finger, indicating the section he wanted, “the Protipal can store up to seven and a half thousand hours of real-time footage, complete with high-definition video and audio. And that’s just the standalone! Working in conjunction with the primary unit, I doubt you could ever come close to reaching the limits of the machine. Some of the boys at the manufacturing labs claim their take on the storage designs mimics the holographic memory core of an AI, but of course, we can’t know for sure.”

  “Of course.” Garth murmured, pecking through the different screens of info.

  Turuin fluttered a manicured hand. “I’d like to say, sa, you show wisdom, good taste, and excellent judgment by choosing to buy a proteus.”

  “Really?” There was no way to get a handle on the Latelian people. They were so hell-bent on some things, and on others, they just flat out didn’t give a damn. Weird fuckers.

  “Absolutely, sa.” Turuin saw a doubtful gleam in his customer’s eye and hastened to set matters straight. “I’m not spinning you a line to get the sale. Port City is home to around thirty thousand Offworld immigrants, and of those, less than three percent have chosen to purchase a proteus. For you to buy one –and I hope I don’t upset you- even though you’re not likely to be given citizenship, well, it just speaks to your character.”

  “Huh. Uh, what else does this do?” Garth drew Turuin’s attention back to the proteus.

  “In addition to being a semi-autonomous functionary, it can link to the world netLINK with far more functionality than a mere Sheet! These devices keep us in touch with our friends and loved ones or to work from home if we can. It really does depend on what you want from it, sa. The possibilities are endless. Oh yes, and this particular model is outfitted with a small Q-Comm transceiver.”

  Garth’s brow rose at that. “I suppose that it’d cost extra to use those functions, eh?”

  “Sadly, yes. There was some talk of Protean launching their own Q-array, but sales have faltered this quarter. They’ve assured us all that it’ll happen next quarter.”

  Garth stroked an imaginary beard, and then pushed another link. “Says here I can
program this thing however I want. Izzat so?”

  “Sa!” Turuin pulled up his sleeve to show off his own Hunter green and metallic blue proteus. “This is mine, and I’ve spent years customizing it. The creators don’t care how you program it, so long as you leave the primary operating system alone; tinkering with that will violate all your warranties and leave you susceptible to hacking. Of course, all proteii come with a basic set of programs, but you can download all types of software from different netLINKs. Everyone starts coding their own sooner or later.”

  “Sounds interesting.” Garth touched the screen of the demonstration model thoughtfully. Out in the back of his mind where hidden memories hung loose, Garth felt the beginning whispers of an idea that could help Huey with his jailhouse blues.

  “It certainly is.” Turuin straightened his shirt. “I myself uploaded a series of programs the other day, sa, and they’ve been accessed by no less than eighty-three people!”

  Garth shook his head, utterly bewildered. “Are these Protean boys the only game in town?”

  “No, no.” Turuin shook his head. “Protean is simply the largest on Hospitalis. Other planets, other companies…”

  “A … friend … of mine told me,” Garth savored the memory of Naoko’s luminous green eyes for a second, “that when you buy a proteus, you get a larger primary system as well.”

  “Your friend told you no lies. A proteus is a magnificent tool as a stand-alone device, but without the power of the home netLINK to rely on, it is rather limited. Is your friend a si, or a sa?”

  Garth wrinkled his forehead. “Si, my friend, si.”

  “Well done!” Turuin glanced over his shoulder at the other salespeople. Both Marin and Ham-Za were gnawing their hands in jealousy; the sale of a Protipal would put him in the lead for sales over the month. “As I was saying, once you purchase a proteus, you do in fact get the primary system at no additional charge. The two units are automatically netLINKed and capable of long-range data traffic via any of the communications systems we use. If you wanted to operate from a non-terrestrial locale, you would of course need to use a Q-Comm, the cost of which is fairly prohibitive. Furthermore, seeing as you are from Outsystem, your new proteus netLINK can be modified to operate in that new environment, after purchasing the design specifications. I’ve looked at the specs for it, and while it might be costly to make those modifications, I can assure you that it would be well worth the cost. I understand Trinityspace has nothing quite like a protean system.”