by F X Holden
“I’m done, fixed the noise,” AJ said. “Or your Grandpa did, actually. You’re right, he has a good ear.”
“Yeah,” she said, wiping her hands and getting ready to shake AJ’s hand goodbye. She took his hand and looked past him to see if Warnecke was there, but there was just her brother, over the other side of the room, pulling stuff out of boxes. “Look. He can be really gruff, and a bit paranoid. If he’s rude to you, it doesn’t mean…”
“I know ma’am,” AJ told her. “People don’t mean anything by it. It’s their condition talking usually.”
She laughed, “Oh no. He’s always been a cranky old coot,” she said. “Having TGA just seems to have taken off the filter completely.”
“OK. Can I ask you something?”
“No problem.”
“You’re heading back today and your Dad, you said he’s on Orkutsk? Is there any other family? It’s good when a person is settling in, if there’s family around.”
She looked over at her brother. He heard the question and stood up, something passing between them.
“Well, we have a step-sister. But she’s a bit of a loner, they have a strange relationship. We sent a message to tell her he was moving here, but she hasn’t even replied,” she said. “Last we heard, she took a contract up north somewhere, god knows where.”
“Oh, what does she do?” he asked.
“This and that. I never really nailed that down,” Ben said. “We never know if she’s away or home, until she suddenly turns up looking for a bed. But she never stays long anyway.”
“I don’t expect you’ll see her here,” Sarah said, a catch in her voice.
There was some sort of history there that AJ didn’t want to get into. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” he said.
“That’s fine. And thanks for everything, I guess,” she said, shaking his hand again.
Warnecke was waiting for him by the front door, holding it open.
As AJ moved past him, he put a hand on AJ’s shoulder to hold him up, “Your little act don’t fool me,” he said. “You aint a handyman’s ass. I’ll be checking that scrubber unit for listening devices Sheriff. And do me a favor, you want any information from me, you just ask me straight out alright? I got nothing to hide. Sooner you learn that, the easier for all of us.”
AJ had been trained not to engage in the residents’ delusions, just politely disengage. AJ just smiled at Warnecke and kept moving. Out on the porch he turned around and said, “Like I said, someone from Resident Reception will be along shortly. But you get settled, anything wrong with the apartment, anything needs explaining, you just call Resident Services,” he told Warnecke. “That’s me. Big red button on your house comms. Nice meeting you sir.”
“Service my ass,” Warnecke said, closing the front door.
3. TRUE CONFESSIONS
End of the day, at 1600, AJ went back to his workshop and did his admin. He filed a report on each repair he’d carried out, all the materials he’d used during the day, noted he needed more optical cable and 3-inch planks. Then he went into Core>Sol Vista>Resident Journals> Staff Observations. He checked boxes for the date, Routine Service Call and the box saying ‘No Observations’ for numbers 95, 98 and 103, because there had just been normal resident interactions with all of those jobs.
For number 96 he sat staring at the display. He wasn’t allowed to put in what he thought, just what he saw, or did, or what people said. And he was supposed to keep it short and if there was anything anyone had a question about, they could follow up with him.
He decided he would go with, “New resident accused staff member of being a police officer sent to spy on him.”
Then he forgot about it. The next few days took each other, then it was the weekend. AJ had a routine he liked for weekends and it usually went off without a hitch. He had an apartment three blocks back from the Sea Gate, just a bedroom, kitchen-slash-sitting room and bathroom, but plenty big enough for him. He kept his surfboards in the hall behind the front door. Saturday mornings early he had a juice and a coffee and checked the surf report, then he took a board and either walked or got a ride down to the Sea Gate and suited up.
The Skycap came down and met the surface just outside South Coast City and there were two gates to the outside world: the Sea Gate, through which the colony could access the ocean surrounding the Icecap, and the Sky Gate, up near the crown, through which spacecraft could arrive and depart. The Sea and Sky Gates weren’t really gates, they were more like ports; the South Coast City Sea Gate having about twenty docks and berths catering for commercial and private traffic, including pleasure boats, fishermen and surfers like AJ.
The miles thick ice of the Shifting Sea covered the entire planet except for the glasslike solid ice caps of the north and south poles, and it formed continental sized ice plates, big enough to support towering mountain ranges of frozen water. It was possible to navigate it, with huge icebreakers pulling themselves through the water with massive impellers, because the sea lanes between ice continents were relatively stable - even if the ice sheets themselves were not – kept liquid by the volcanic release of lava from rifts in the seabed underneath. Close to the coast of the northern ice cap, where the upwelling sea met the solid barrier of the pole and the man-made climate barrier kept the air temperature from going too far into the subzero range, it was also possible to surf.
What surfers like AJ looked for, citizen and cyber, were the fountains created by the seismic activity of an undersea range just off the coast of South Coast City. The volcanic range was quietly active, not triggering catastrophic seismic activity which might threaten the ice caps, but gently extruding gouts of lava into the sea which turned the water gaseous and led to tidal upwelling. Larger lava releases occurred regularly, and were enough to cause spouts of gas. Geysers. Experienced surfers could spot them forming, the slight circular pucker on the surface of the sea that preceded a real spouter. You could also watch for the native dolphins, because they loved the fountains too, dragging minerals and microbes up from the sea floor for them to feast on. AJ had never seen an Earth dolphin, but he assumed they looked a bit like the dark-skinned, teardrop-shaped, man-sized creatures that shared the sea with surfers like AJ. There were sharks too, sleek tube-like predators - which is why it was always nice to see dolphins. If you saw dolphins, you knew there were no sharks around. Dolphins spotted a shark a long time before a citizen or even a cyber would, and surfaced to let off a high keening whistle to warn each other. Unlike a lot of Predators on Tatsensui, sharks didn’t discriminate – citizen or cyber, you were just protein to them. They would just spit out the metal and carbon fiber.
The trick with surfing a spout was to catch the upwelling sea on the way up, and then balance on top of it so that as the gas bubble broke and the sea fell, you fell outward with it and could ride the wave. If you screwed up and got caught in the gaseous blast, you’d wipe out, getting blown into the methane sky and in the worst case falling into the crater the huge bubble made in the sea. Surfers’ heat suits were basically the same as the survival suits used by sailors, but with emergency airbags that triggered if the suit detected a radical vertical drop. If you fell inwards, your suit ballooned and you got bounced around in the bubbling sea, watching your buddies surf away from you and knowing your suit was burned. You’d have to hitch a ride back to the Sea Gate and spend the rest of the day listening to people give you shit while you repacked and recharged your suit for next time. It was a strong incentive to learn, fast.
There was an intense, unspoken competition between citizen and cyber riders out on the Shifting Sea. Citizens had their comps and cybers had theirs, there were no mixed comps because the reflexes of a cyber and their ability to tap into real-time data to identify spouts as they formed meant they were always a twitch ahead of the citizens, but once you were poised on the lip of a spout, it was anyone’s game. Citizens claimed their instinct gave them an edge and cybers were prone to overthink the drop. Cybers knew their reflexes wher
e many hundredths of a second faster and their ability to sense changes in wind, temperature and air pressure gave them an edge which ‘instinct’ had a hard time matching. What citizens called instinct, cybers called luck, but it made for good sport. Some days you got burned, other days you rode spout after spout. To AJ, the bad days just made the good days better.
He’d stay out until his suit redlined, come back in and do his decon. Then he’d hump his board over to Fatty’s café and have a huge breakfast and check the news. Other surfers were there, they’d just talk some shit, maybe someone would be in the mood to hang out, but not as often as he’d like. He hadn’t had a steady partner since Henni two years ago, so he was free to do what he liked. Saturday afternoons he did his weekly shopping. Saturday night there was always a party he could go to or he could just go back to the Gate, see who was there, maybe they wanted to grab a meal or just have a drink. Sunday he went out with his board again, hit Fatty’s after, then Sunday afternoon went to visit his Ma. She had an inoperable brain tumor, another not uncommon side effect of living a long life on Tatsensui, and didn’t recognize him anymore, so he did it more his benefit than hers. The staff at her care facility said she always seemed happier after his visits though, so maybe something got through to her. She lived twenty minutes east on the Icecap so that visit was usually about two hours, including travel time. Sunday nights he made himself dinner, a real dinner with two courses, like a salad and then grilled fish and potatoes or something, and he binged a few shows. Usually detective shows, or those forensic shows, sometimes history documentaries. There were 200 years of politics between Tatsensui and its neighbor New Syberia to try to get his head around, and he’d only mastered the last fifty at school. Sure, he knew the entire history of the system, and had access to the entire history of the universe. But knowing was not the same as mastering. Understanding the complex interplay of personalities and politics, to the point where you might try your hand at predicting it? He loved history – know the past, you can predict the future; his mother had told him that.
School, for cybers, was a socialization tool, not an educational one. A Cyber was born with the knowledge of a whole civilization on tap. From the moment he could speak, he could have answered the most complex questions in bioscience, pure mathematics and engineering. But he didn’t know how to behave at a school dance, or bluff at poker, or talk about his feelings, and he needed to socialize at the same level as his citizen peers in order to learn. So the Core put an artificial throttle on his intelligence from birth to age 15, keeping him roughly around the average IQ of the kids he was in school with. At 15 though, the artificial barrier was lifted, which blew AJ’s mind when it happened. With that update, he went from being a 15 old intellect, struggling to match the brightest kids in his class, to having what literally amounted to a superhuman IQ. It gave him both a feeling of complete supremacy and made him angry at the same time. Why did he have to wait 15 years for it? How much of his precious life had been wasted thinking at animal instead of quantum speeds? He knew the theory - that without socialization there couldn’t be cyber/citizen harmony – but he resented it nevertheless. His lifespan was only thirty years. It had left him only 15 more to learn everything he could possibly learn before re-integration. And now he was 20, with only ten left, it chafed even more thinking about those lost years.
Not that his cyber intellect made him a Supreme Being. Knowing all the rules of tennis and the best shots to play in any given circumstance couldn’t make him a tennis champion. He sucked at jokes. He enjoyed the study of quantum programming, but not its application. He preferred working with his hands, not his head. The birth pods churned out cybers who might all look different but who all had the same abilities and potential. Environment and personal preference made them diverge from day 1.
His Ma was wrong though. Having every historical fact at his fingertips didn’t help him predict the future. Mankind and its politics were nothing if not chaotic and if he’d learned anything about society, it was that politics was an art, not a science. He had a kind of personal improvement project going, trying to understand how wars started so he could anticipate the next one, keep him and his Ma safe. But he guessed there was a big fat swathe of Core time devoted to that endeavor and that never seemed to help, so what could he hope to do?
Wars that started over territory, resources or boundaries, those he could almost understand. If you were starving and your neighbors had plenty but wouldn’t share, you had no choice but to try to take it. But when two belief systems collided, and one tried to impose itself on the other – religions or philosophies - was that really worth fighting and dying for?
The conflict AJ was keeping an eye on right now wasn’t so much a conflict of beliefs, as ethics, and AJ just couldn’t see how the two sides were ever going to meet. New Syberia was a non-Core world. It refused to connect to the Core in any way, shape or form and so its A.I.s developed at a more random pace than Tatsensui’s, but they were ‘free’. They weren’t chained to a central system, so every A.I. on NS was developing independent of the others, making its own learnings but not sharing them in real time. Cyber evolution on NS took place at physical speeds, rather than neural. But the New Syberians claimed that made them stronger – a mutation in one A.I. wouldn’t take down all the others. And their A.I.s weren’t limited in their choice of occupation or pastime; a Cyber on NS could be or do whatever it pleased within the same law that Citizens were bound by. That had a certain appeal, he had to admit. Collaboration between A.I.s was physically limited - firewalled, so the problem of an A.I. network turning against its citizen colonist hosts, like had once happened on the People’s Republic Colony, was low. And citizen-cyber fraternization was forbidden on NS, so that A.I.s couldn’t be coopted to political causes through bonds of emotion. AJ found extremist ideas like that impossible to fathom. If citizens and cybers could have sex, and they’d both enjoy it, and it was consensual, and if it led to attachment and emotional interdependence – hell even love - why not?
New Syberia compensated for having A.I.s with a generally lower level of capabilities by having significantly more of them. NS boasted it had a couple of million cybers to Tatsensui’s hundred thousand. In fact, they disputed whether Tatsensui really had more than one A.I., as every A.I. on Tatsensui was chained to the Core, that mother and father of all A.I.s. On NS, their government boasted, every major corporate or government entity had its own workforce of A.I.s, whereas on Tatsensui, Core access was restricted and expensive, which they argued held back economic and cultural development.
AJ got both sides of that argument. What AJ didn’t get, was why these two philosophies had put the two camps, Core and non-Core, on what looked like a path to war. Sure, if you were NS, if you were the last moon in the Commonwealth that still hadn’t plugged into the Core, there was a certain pressure of expectation. But AJ didn’t see any fleets parked in orbit around New Syberia issuing ultimatums. Tatsensui had a base on the NS moon Orkutsk, yes, but all three colonies did. It was more like an embassy than a military installation. And it wasn’t like there was any kind of blockade. The Core worlds had never threatened NS with assimilation. NS was independent and free to stay that way. NS was free to trade, New Syberians were free to travel, free to proselytize their non-Core beliefs. Why all the friction?
When he wasn’t pondering interplanetary politics AJ was always asleep by 2200 Sundays, because he liked being at work 0730 before there were too many residents up, which meant getting up at five if he wanted to get in a surf before work, or 0630 if he just wanted to sleep longer.
That was how his weekends usually went. Then Warnecke moved in.
The next time AJ saw Warnecke was when the guy was having a standup fight with one of the part-time kitchen workers, a guy called Ramon.
“I’ll have coffee whenever I damn well want to have coffee!” Warnecke was saying. He was all up in Ramon’s face, but Ramon had no way to de-escalate because he was literally with his back to a wall and his
hands up in front of himself.
“Hey, AJ!” Ramon called to him when he saw AJ walking into the Hub kitchen. AJ had come into the Hub for some cold water. “Little help here please?” AJ wasn’t security, but he was happy to help. The old guy was half his weight.
Warnecke looked over at AJ, “Oh, now you call the cops? Really, over a damn cup of coffee?” He turned and held out his wrists, “OK Sheriff, take me in. I’m guilty.”
“What’s up?” AJ asked, careful to make sure he stood a good distance from Warnecke and left the man an easy way out past him. Didn’t want to scare him.
“I explained to the gentleman, we got coffee and cake at 1500,” Ramon said. “Otherwise, he wants coffee, he can make it in his own residence. But he goes to the pot and starts pouring himself.”
“Sue me,” Warnecke said. “Amount I’m paying to stay here and I can’t just take a cup of coffee when it’s sitting right there?”
AJ went through his little mantra in his head. Show respect, offer solutions.
“How about I make you a cup of coffee back at your place?” AJ said. “We need to make sure there’s enough coffee here for folks coming for cake at 1500.”
“I don’t want a damn coffee back at my apartment,” Warnecke said. “I was reading a book in the library here, I want a coffee, right here.” Rich folk like they had here in Sol Vista, they loved the library. Real books, on paper, made from off-world trees. Each one worth thousands of credits.
AJ felt relieved, that was something he could fix. “OK then, how about I show you where the coffee pot in the library is?”
