Unstable Prototypes

by Lallo, Joseph

  "Attention Passengers. The flight will be leaving dock in approximately sixty seconds. You will experience a few moments of weightlessness while the ship orients itself for transit. Please secure any belongings and fasten safety harnesses or utilize hand grips now. Refrain from utilizing sinks, showers, or drinking fountains until gravity is restored, and be sure that all open beverages or food containers are closed securely. VectorCorp thanks you for your cooperation, and for helping to keep this spacecraft safe, clean, and orderly."

  Lex pulled a strap from the back of the couch and clicked it in place across his chest. Finding no simple way to do the same for Ma, he scooped her up and held her on his lap as the audible count down reached zero. The gravity dropped away instantly as inertial inhibitors kicked on and the ship detached from the station. It maneuvered itself out of the station area, shifted its orientation, and increased its engines. Some very large or very luxurious ships used gravitational generators to provide their patrons with an uninterrupted sense of "down." Most were instead designed with the thrusters pointing off of the bottom of the ship. This, coupled with very finely tuned inertial inhibitors, could knock the acceleration caused by the engines down to 1g, giving everyone the feeling of gravity until it was time to stop, at which point there was a short weightless moment while the ship was flipped over, and then the deceleration took over. Lex's own ship didn't have either, because fine tuned inertial inhibitors were still too rich for his blood, and the lowest nonzero inertial value of a crude one couldn't knock the faster than light acceleration down to a survivable level. Thus, during FTL he set it to zero and got by with harnesses and weightlessness during his flights. It had never really bothered him.

  After the ship had jockeyed into position and entered the transit lane, it activated something called a Carpinelli Field – the techno-magic that made faster than light travel possible – and they were off. The gravity faded back in, the PA announced that it was safe to move about the cabin, and the last interesting moment for the next twenty or so hours had ended. This was unfortunate, because the relative calm was giving Lex a moment to allow the severity of the task at hand to sink in. He'd gone up against long odds before, but that was different. That was VectorCorp, or at least one very small, very crazed portion of it. They had to at least give the appearance of operating within the bounds of the law, and as his currently unmolested status as a passenger on one of their vessels would indicate, either didn't hold a grudge or perhaps didn't know what its more shadowy corners had been up to. A terrorist group was all shadowy corners, and they didn't care one bit about law or public image.

  "You are exhibiting signs of stress," said Ma. She was still in his lap, looking him in the eye.

  "Yeah. Yeah I am," staring vaguely at the opposite wall.

  "Are you aware that you are stroking my tail?"

  "Oh! Oh, Jeez, I'm sorry," he said, suddenly realizing his absent-minded faux pas. He stopped and rigidly straightened in his chair.

  "Is that inappropriate?" she asked, tilting her head inquisitively.

  "I... don't know. I mean, if you were a lady, a human lady, that would be inappropriate for sure."

  "Humans do not have tails, Lex."

  "I know, but, you know, the same... region. Listen, never mind!"

  For a moment the pair were silent. Ma tipped her head again, eyes wandering in thought.

  "I once suggested that increasing your knowledge, decreasing your unknowns, was a potential route to reduce anxiety and stress. Observation suggests that the opposite is true, a concept axiomatically described as 'Ignorance is bliss.' At that time, and in the present situation as well, increased situational awareness has been directly proportional to vexation."

  "I think that probably says something about the state of my life."

  "Indeed. I shall endeavor to delay any additional stress inducing behaviors until absolutely necessary."

  "That's a good plan, I like that plan."

  He sat silently again for a minute. A thought occurred.

  "Hey, it strikes me I'm not even sure where this ship is going."

  "For the purposes of stress-reduction, that information shall be withheld."

  "... Great..."

  Chapter 5

  Michella Modane was sitting in a dimly lit church, in a pew near the front, and she had been for the last twenty minutes. She, through sources as trustworthy as she could manage, had arranged a meeting here, and her contact was late. That was to be expected, though. She would have been suspicious if he had been otherwise. The best sources of information were close enough to the root of the story to be at tremendous risk if they were to be discovered, so they were cautious, and caution took time.

  She was supposed to be attending a two week convention for broadcast journalists. Indeed, she was a speaker at no less than three panels, so she couldn't really afford to miss it. When the call had come in informing her that there was a man willing to meet her, she certainly couldn't afford to miss that. So she had adjusted her travel plans to include a short, unaccompanied shuttle ride to a space station a few hours away from Golana. It had cost her the only time she'd been able to set aside to visit Trevor, but opportunities like this didn't come along very often. Trevor would understand.

  "Don't turn around," came a voice from behind her, suddenly.

  She nodded once.

  "You're the reporter."

  Another nod.

  "Okay. Let's get on with this."

  "I want to thank you for meeting with me," she whispered.

  The man behind her made a sound that, while not exactly a word, managed to quickly convey the message that the gratitude was appreciated but unnecessary, and that he would very much prefer that future gratitude be dispensed with in the interest of speed. It was a very efficient sound.

  "My sources tell me that there has been a break-in at a local military facility. Can you confirm this?"

  "No, not a break-in. A breech."

  "Can you explain?"

  "No one broke anything. No hacked systems. No blown doors. Security would have been able to stop that. No one would have been able to get anything that way. Someone walked in, took what they wanted, and walked out. They had codes. They knew patrols. This was a security breech. Someone inside."

  He spoke minimally, and his voice was hushed. The sentences were quick and crisp in the distinctive fashion of a soldier.

  "What was taken?"

  "Don't know. Research wing. Storage depot."

  "A weapon?"

  "No. No weapons research here. Engineering. Logistics."

  "Can you provide any details? Any at all."

  There was a short silence. Finally, as though he'd finished running his answer past an internal censor and redacted anything sensitive, he replied.

  "Something unfinished. Abandoned. Wasted. Nothing slated for deployment. At least, not yet."

  "I've received reports of similar break-ins, er, breeches in military facilities and bases across the galaxy; Earth Coalition, Orion United Consortium of Planets. Virtually every major military organization. They may have been going on for years, escalating in recent months. Do you think that this is the start of some sort of insurgency?"

  Again there was silence. Michella continued.

  "What do you suppose could be the cause of this rash of rebellion? What could be causing these men and women to betray their governments?"

  This time there was a seething breath.

  "Soldiers aren't betraying their governments, Ma'am. Governments are betraying their soldiers. Moving too slow. Getting too comfortable in what they have. They aren't keeping up. It gets people killed. Makes civilizations weak."

  "I don't understand."

  "You will. You'll understand very soon. Good luck with your story, Ma'am. Don't look back until you hear the door."

  "Wait. I need something. A name, anything."

  "A name? Fine. Ned Ludd. From Anstey. Right idea, wrong motivation."

  Whereas the entry had been silent,
the exit of her informant was punctuated by the steady, thudding footsteps of boots. Michella made sure she'd jotted down all of the relevant information, what little there was. It was a good thing she would be heading to that convention. A number of her colleagues would be there, and many of her contacts. While her informant didn't add much new information, he did confirm some things, and that was her first real breakthrough for this story. The rest was chasing down details. She was good at details.

  #

  Lex had learned a number of things in the last few hours. First and foremost, he had learned that it seemed to be physically impossible for a human being to be within arm's length of a cute fuzzy animal and not pet it. Virtually any time he let his mind wander, he realized that he was scratching the head or stroking the back of Ma, who had remained on his lap. She eventually encouraged him to continue, reasoning after a brief consultation with a health site that interaction with an animal led to a lower heart rate, decreased blood pressure, and a general sense of well being. He had suggested that said health benefits might not have taken into account the possibility of the animal in question being an artificial intelligence that he respected as an equal, but she remained unswayed.

  The ship flipped and decelerated, made a stop to pick up and drop off passengers, then accelerated onto the next leg of its trip. In the hours that passed, he tried to get some sleep, and learned that computers, it would seem, talk in their sleep. At first he thought he was imagining it, but as her little body twitched a leg or flicked an ear periodically, he heard a low level hiss of static on his earpiece, accompanied by quiet snips of voice. It sounded a bit like the sort of audio one gets when skipping through a digital recording; little more than a word or so at a time.

  "I … we … straightforward … trust … deserve … confident … lives … thank," she whispered amid the static.

  When each had slipped into and out of the amount of sleep their bodies were willing to provide, he learned yet another thing. Ma was rather fond of games, but seldom had occasion to play them. This was because, with her typical level of processing power, it was difficult to find an opponent who was a match for her. In her current state, she found games of chess against Lex genuinely challenging. They played by hooking their slidepads up to the flatscreen in 3D mode, which rendered a digital table near the center of the room. It was worth pointing out that, challenged though she might be, she didn't do an awful lot of losing.

  "I believe that is checkmate," she remarked.

  "... Yeah," said Lex, tipping over his virtual king.

  "Another game?"

  "No, I think I'm done with chess for a while. I'm gonna stretch my legs and get some food. I've never been to a first class dining area before."

  "I will join you," she replied, hopping down to have her leash clicked on.

  The pair left their cabin and headed for the dining area. When they had boarded, they had been the only people in first class, but that was hardly unusual. VectorCorp was still under investigation for nearly causing pan-global destruction in the Bypass Gemini Incident. This had led to mandatory increased oversight and transparency, which had cost the company a tremendous amount of money, even by their standards. They had thus used this as an excuse to increase prices to offset the cost of the security measures. People couldn't exactly stop using their service altogether, since in most places they were the way to get from one star system to another, but they could certainly drop down to a cheaper ticket. This had the dual consequence of first class being a ghost town and Lex modifying the SOB to have a second seat, for increasingly popular chartered single passenger flights.

  Evidently the previous stop had added three more people to first class. The dining area was a narrow room featuring three diner-style booths on one side of the aisle and a small counter with a flesh and blood waiter sitting on a stool, waiting to take orders. One of the booths was occupied by a man in a highly visible orange jumpsuit with stenciled lettering. He was older than Lex, but still a few years away from earning the unenviable descriptor of "older gentleman." One hand was cuffed to a hand grip on the wall by a daunting set of restraints. He was trying, with great difficulty, to eat a plate of fried fish with his single free hand and a plastic spork. Despite the frustrating activity, he didn't seem particularly upset. Indeed, he had the sort of face and overall attitude that suggested that he had never, at any point in his life, been anything less than perfectly content. His hair was a blonde crew cut. He had a mustache and beard, each cropped and shaped fastidiously into something that would have looked appropriate on one of the musketeers. His physique suggested he devoted a similar amount of care to his workout regimen. The two men sharing the booth with him were armed, uniformed guards. Unlike their prisoner, they both looked as though the concept of contentment or joy was entirely alien. They sat silently, eyes carefully locked on the blond man as he thoroughly enjoyed his meal in a highly animated fashion. When he noticed Lex, his face lit up.

  "Well! It seems that the recent fiscal instabilities have not entirely frightened away the proud and noble members of the aristocracy!" he proclaimed in an impeccable British accent.

  "Do not address the general public," warned one of the guards.

  "My dear man there is nothing general about him. The very fact this man has seen fit to expend a not insubstantial portion of his precious wealth to afford himself comfortable lodging during this journey clearly proclaims him to be part of the gentry. After all, not everyone can rely upon state sponsored travel arrangements the likes of which I so regularly enjoy."

  "Either you behave yourself or this meal is over," growled the second guard, slipping a "stun rod" a few inches from its holster.

  "Given such an ultimatum, I must regrettably acquiesce, as it would be a shame to cut short so sumptuous a feast," he remarked, enthusiastically digging into a pile of unidentifiable greenery.

  Lex made his way to the waiter, passing the table along the way. As he walked by, Ma tapping along with him, the charismatic prisoner glanced first to the furry little creature, then to Lex, and back again. It was subtle enough that the guards didn't seem to notice, and even Lex wasn't sure it had happened. A limited menu was produced for him, depicting the typical "meat/fish/veggie" trifecta that at some point in history had been determined to be suitable dietary variety for long distance travelers. On the plus side, this being first class, the food was included in the price of the ticket, and today the role of "meat" was being played by filet mignon.

  "You want anything?" Lex whispered under his breath.

  "No. The food in your bag will be sufficient. I'm sorry, but I must excuse myself. I will be in the cabin, if you would kindly remove the leash."

  "Uh... okay?" he said, unfastening it and watching her pace back to the room.

  Once she had reached their cabin down the hall, where she was hidden from view for all but Lex, a few blinks of the light on her neck prompted the automatic door to open, and she slipped inside. He looked up to find that everyone in the room was staring at him curiously.

  "Very well trained. Cost a bundle," he explained.

  This seemed to be a sufficient explanation. Lex sat at a booth to await his meal while the prisoner finished his. When the last of his meal had been cleaned from the plate, and the unreasonably cheerful man had made a few suitably satisfied smacks of his lips, he decided that it was time to antagonize his escorts once more as they removed the restraint from the hand grip and affixed it properly to his other hand behind his back.

  "You know something, Gents, despite our close quarters during this sojourn I haven't learned a single thing about you. For instance, what sort of music do you like?"

  "Mouth shut," replied a guard, standing him up and leading him back toward the cabins.

  "Classical suits my tastes, personally, although I am recently reminded of my former fondness for funk," he remarked. His final word was delivered as he briefly made eye contact with Lex.

  Lex tried to keep his expression neutral. Shortly afterward
, his steak was delivered, along with a draft beer. He asked if he could eat it in his room, was assured that he could, and made his way to the door, nudging the door's open button with his elbow. Once inside, he discovered that Ma was nowhere to be seen.

  "Ma?" he called, flipping a collapsible table out from beside the couch and setting his food down.

  There was a flush, and a moment later Ma nosed open the door to the bathroom and jumped onto the couch.

  "Yes, Lex?" she asked.

  He palmed his face. "I used to have a normal life. I swear I did. I miss those days."

  "Is there something wrong?"

  "There are several things wrong, Ma. The list is getting pretty long at this point, but currently one thing is way on top," he replied, lowering his voice. "That fellow with the fancy orange suit out there. Is he the one that we're meeting with?"

  "That is correct. Through what means did you deduce this?"

  "I think he recognized you. He used the word funk in a very pointed way."

  "Astutely observed, Mr. Alexander."

  "Why didn't you tell me that we would be meeting with a convict?"

  "For the purposes of stress-reduction, that information was withheld."

  "So when were you going to tell me?"

  "When it became necessary for you to take action."

  Lex didn't say anything. It wasn't that he didn't want to say anything. He had quite a few choice words lined up, in fact. Unfortunately, this was one of those rare situations where screaming profanity wouldn't solve anything. For one, regardless of whether he was fond of the idea or not, chances were very good that if Ma had come up with it, it was necessary. For another, Ma did not respond well to hostility, and the last thing he needed was the one person who knew what the hell was going on to become bitter and resentful. Thus, rather than stringing together as many four letter words as he could, he slowly attempted to regain his composure. Sensing his dismay, Ma spoke.

  "I apologize if I have mishandled this. You have been extremely helpful thus far, coming to our aid when we needed you, despite no obligation to do so. I was not entirely straightforward, and for that I am sorry. Your trust was implicit from the beginning, and I may not have done all that I should have to deserve it, but I am confident that you will see your way clear to continue to lend your aid, on behalf of the lives that are at stake, and if not, I thank you for what you have done, and following the completion of this next stage, will gladly send you on your way with whatever reward you desire."