“You both were complicated, or just you?”
“You’re being a little presumptuous, Ryan. And I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
Conn finished her pastrami on rye. Ryan dipped his sandwich, then put it down and pushed the plate away.
“I’ve got to get back. Can I take care of the check?” Conn said.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” Ryan said.
Conn sighed, then looked at him and raised her eyebrows.
“It’s just—” Ryan began. “It’s something I think I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time—but I didn’t, so maybe I didn’t want to tell you. I don’t know anymore.”
“Beat that bush, partner, not around it.”
“You—you said we were even. Right? We’re even. Conn, we’re not even. We’re not close to even, yet.”
Conn frowned at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Conn—it’s me. I’m Grant.”
# # #
“Ryan Stoll got killed falling off a horse three and a half years ago. Marcus Stoll kept it a secret. He got avatar technology from the Pelorians—”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“He got avatar technology from the Pelorians, and cloned his son. At the same time, I was talking to a Pelorian—I don’t want to get him in trouble, but it was your Persisting, one of his avatars—about getting uploaded into a new body. I was so sick of being in and out of the hospital, of all the chemo. I was depressed. I wasn’t recovering; I was never going to recover. Persisting put us together. Here I am.”
“I have twenty-five different questions, but I think I have to be sick first.”
“I agreed to get uploaded into Ryan’s cloned body and pretend to be him if Stoll followed through on his plan to go to Mars and make his son the first man off the lander. He said OK. It almost worked out that way, too.”
“You’re Grant?”
“You’re not hearing a word I’m saying, are you?”
“You’re Grant.”
“I’m Grant. That’s not for common consumption, if you don’t mind.”
Conn shoved some chips in her mouth, and chewed them like they had to die a violent death. “But you’re not really Grant. Are you? The real Grant is dead.”
“I’m as much Grant as he was,” Ryan said, a little defensively, Conn thought. “I was Grant for more than thirty years.”
“Then you became Ryan Stoll. Right? The Grant I knew wasn’t also Ryan Stoll.”
“It’s his body, yeah. Even his brain, even the part that suffered from anxiety. You agree that we’re more than our bodies, though, right? That there’s a difference between our hardware and our software.”
“Don’t we me.” Conn threw her half-empty chips bag on the table. Crumbs scattered. “We’re not the same.” That seemed to hurt, and make him even more defensive.
“I’m as much Grant—” He lowered his voice. “I’m as much Grant as can be right now. What you call the real Grant is decomposing down in Texas.”
Conn rose and shoved her plate at Ryan’s. They clattered. “You have no right—”
“I have every right. I am Grant Loomis. There isn’t another one.”
“What you are is a freak,” Conn screeched. “You keep away from me.” She stalked out.
# # #
“You knew. You knew because you made it happen.” Conn erupted at Persisting the moment she walked through the door.
“I don’t know what you mean, Conn.”
“You brokered the deal that got Grant uploaded into Ryan Stoll’s body. And then you didn’t tell me. You let me date him. You let me sleep with him!”
“Setting to one side your disgust over the idea of someone close to you being an avatar, I had nothing to do with what you’re talking about. I’m hearing it for the first time right now. Ryan is an avatar of Grant?”
“Shit,” Conn said. She had her elbows on the kitchen table, head in her hands. “He said Persisting’s avatar. I don’t know why I assumed he meant you. Of course he didn’t.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I am worried about it,” Conn said. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the way I talked about avatars, too. It’s just—gaahh.”
“It’s just that someone important to you isn’t who you thought he was.” Conn’s eyes filled. “Someone you thought was dead isn’t, and he didn’t tell you.”
Conn sobbed. “He didn’t tell me.” Persisting wrapped his arms around her as she cried.
# # #
Yongpo never regained the use of his hand. It was so dead it had to come off. Fortunately, to be an aerospace mogul he only needed one. “I’ve had to learn to sign my name left-handed,” he told Conn, “and I type a lot slower. With all the adventures we’ve had over the past five years, if this is the worst that happened, I made out pretty good.”
“Maybe Persisting’s other avatar can clone you and upload you into the new body,” Conn grumbled. Though after she said it, it sounded like a pretty good deal. . . .
“Everybody talks about the potential benefits of avatar tech,” Yongpo said. “Nobody seems to realize avatar tech involves cloning tech, perfected. I look forward to growing myself a new hand within the next few years.”
The company christened its world headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and everybody finally had a permanent place to work together. The facility included a state-of-the-art mission control room, where Conn Air people could manage spaceflights no matter where they originated from.
Izzy officially joined Interstellar Aerospace, as its senior astronaut. Her first mission would be a three-person flight to Conn’s capsule Fille to salvage the gravity gun. It was to launch April fourteenth.
She was as surprised as Conn had been to hear about Ryan/Grant. But while Conn felt betrayed, Izzy thought it was romantic.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Conn said. “You didn’t sleep with him.”
“Aren’t you always saying that avatars are people too? The guy went to considerable effort to woo you—”
“Woo me?”
“—to woo you, and you liked the idea well enough at one time. He could have just told you the first time he met you, and expected to pick things up where they left off, or whatever. He didn’t. He won you on merit.”
“Won me?”
“You’re not familiar with the basics of romance, are you?”
Persisting got a place of his own. Conn made him promise to let her know if the other avatars ever showed up. She wanted to have some words with one of them.
FORTY-FOUR
Salvage
April 7 - 14, 2040
Conn had taken two days off and gone to Chicago. The visit with her dad wasn’t as awkward or intense as some. He said he was proud of her. That was something she didn’t get often. She knew it was true without his saying it, but it was nice to hear.
The collapse of the economy and the failure of the banks had hit her dad hard, and like tens of millions of Americans, he’d been subsisting on staples, like beans, rice, and processed cheese. Conn and Cora went grocery shopping for him and got him enough to stuff his refrigerator. The stores weren’t back to being stocked as well as they had been before the Aphelials, but they had real food now.
That evening she and Cora went to the theater to see the hot hit musical Faust. Conn’s treat.
She was at Midway waiting for her flight back to San Jose the next day when Janus Gordon greeted her.
“Just passing through on my way back to Washington,” he told her, as if they’d met by chance. “Nice to see you, Conn. You never brief us anymore.”
“I only really briefed you the one time, when I translated the message,” Conn said. “I didn’t have anything new to say after that.”
“Until after you singlehandedly destroyed the Aphelials in orbit and possibly saved the world,” Gordon said. “You got debriefed hard after that. I apologize for that, it must have been an ordeal.”
“I don’t
think I saved the world,” Conn said. “I think NASA saved the world. What I did just kind of . . . felt good.”
“You sell yourself short as usual, Conn. Do you think the Aphelials, with their fighters and their weapons, would have allowed NASA to take out all those devices? Do you think they couldn’t have replaced them? No, what NASA did only worked because you did what you did first. And that was only possible because of your great work on Mars.”
“So as a reward you’re going to stop spying on me?”
“As a matter of fact,” Gordon said, “the president has . . . asked us to stop surveilling you. And we’re happy to do it, now that there aren’t Pelorian enemies for you to collaborate with. I’m kidding! Anyway, I’m thrilled to be able to deliver that message myself.”
“That’s it? No more spying?”
“We still need to keep up with what the major aerospace companies are doing,” Gordon said. “Congratulations, by the way. It looks like Conn Air is well on its way to becoming a major aerospace company.”
Conn sighed. “Thank you.”
“And one of your employees, he’s a Pelorian avatar, I believe. We’ll need to keep an eye on him, too. But now that he’s not sleeping on your couch, that shouldn’t affect you much.”
They sat in silence for a time. Gordon asked her how Faust was. Conn rolled her eyes and shook her head. Then it was time for Gordon to go. “Like I said. I’m pleased to be able to tell you myself that your days of being surveilled are over. I’m also pleased to have the opportunity in person to say: thank you.”
# # #
There was a rush to get back to the Fille and the gravity gun. The capsule was abandoned, and by law, any company could have gone out to it and taken whatever they wanted. That was why the three-person mission, headed up by Izzy, was scheduled to go as early as April fourteenth. Conn wasn’t going to let what she worked so hard to obtain fall into Dyna-Tech hands. Or even NASA’s.
The crew would include Pete Forth, an astronaut/engineer Conn hired away from Dyna-Tech who had been instrumental in the capsule’s design. Pete, hearing the damage to the systems described by Conn, what was working and what wasn’t, believed he could get the whole capsule down into the ocean. The gash would have to be sealed better, but that wasn’t foreseen to be a problem. Izzy herself was learning selected wiring diagrams and schematics with an eye toward pitching in to help Pete. The third astronaut was a dunker, Sheri Kaczmarek. Sheri would ride the Fille down into the Pacific if the astronauts could get it ready for re-entry. If they couldn’t, they were to salvage the gravity gun and come home all together.
Izzy confided in Conn that sometimes she felt as though she should take a break from spaceflight, maybe even retire from it altogether and be an administrator or instructor. She had had almost as punishing a year and a half as Conn had.
“I think I’m Earthbound for a while,” Conn said. “Jake hasn’t asked me to be on his team anyway, so I don’t think I would have a ride.”
“I’m envious,” Izzy said. “Although—I love space. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t going anymore.”
“I’ll talk to Jake, and we’ll get you at least a few months off from space,” Conn said. “It’s just that this one is important, and I want someone I can trust leading it.”
Izzy smiled. “I’m your gal,” she said.
# # #
Conn’s grounding and Izzy’s continued spacefaring were both interrupted April thirteenth. That was the day a Chicago Loop-sized Aphelial spacecraft appeared in Earth orbit.
Remembering that the first Aphelial spacecraft that orbited the moon passed directly over its eventual target, NASA issued warnings to the governments of Rome and Chicago, which shared the latitude at which the Aphelials orbited. The president prevailed upon the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago to evacuate the city. He didn’t need to twist their arms. Rome and Vatican City were evacuated as well.
The evacuation of Chicago was not an orderly affair. Traffic came to a standstill, before the Department of Transportation closed the inbound lanes of Interstates 90/94, 290 and 55 and made them all one way out of the city. Looting and property crimes were widespread. Many of the poorest residents of the city had nowhere else to go. Conn’s father was one of them—though Cora owned a car, at least.
In the hours after the evacuation was announced, communication by fone or otherwise was almost impossible. The system was overloaded. Reaching Cora for a scant minute and a half, Conn learned that her father was being stubborn, and that Cora was going to his place to drag him out of it if she had to.
“Listen, Cora,” Conn said. “Avoid the interstates. Try and head north into Wisconsin.”
“Conn, my car is at my place. There was no way I was getting it to Dad’s. I’m walking to Wicker Park now. Unless I can get Dad to come back with me, we’re going to have to try and catch one of the buses—”
“You want Dad to walk with you back to the near south side?”
“Conn, what am I supposed to do?”
“Shit!” Conn said as the connection was lost. The buses they were deploying to evacuate those without transportation were getting overwhelmed and in some cases overrun.
Conn tried to hire a helicopter to go get her family, but she couldn’t find a company willing to fly into Chicago. They were concerned not only about the Aphelials bombing, but also stranded Chicagoans mobbing their aircraft. She considered trying to get to her dad’s place herself, but she would do more harm than good adding to the population trying to get out of Chicago.
Feeling powerless on Earth, she ordered the mission launching the next day to proceed, but swapped herself for Izzy.
# # #
For the time being, Conn Air rockets were being assembled in and launched from facilities in Baracoa, on the east coast of Cuba. Rockets were always launched west to east, to take advantage of the velocity boost from the Earth’s rotation, and the technology was such that they needed to be launched over the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico—for safety as well as rocket recovery. The closer to the equator, the better, as well. Conn and Yongpo were mulling relocating their headquarters to Florida, but neither was in a hurry—they both liked northern California. And they had just hired dozens of people in the area.
So it was that Conn flew commercial from San Jose to Houston to Miami and a charter from there to Baracoa hours after the Aphelial spacecraft showed up, arriving in Cuba early in the morning of the fourteenth. Conn explained her decision to Izzy in terms of the mission being more dangerous with an Aphelial spacecraft with who knew how many fighters orbiting a scant 2,500 kilometers away. Izzy sensibly asked why Conn wasn’t concerned for the safety of Pete and Sheri, and why she was still launching the mission at all if safety was her concern, but she stood down, realizing that Conn had her reasons. Even if she was being coy about revealing them.
The whole world held its breath, waiting both for the Aphelial spacecraft to start bombing and for more spacecraft to show up. If more showed up, as had happened on the moon, Conn wasn’t sure what could be done about it. They would likely turn the surface of the Earth to glass. But with a gravity gun, she might be able to take out one of them.
# # #
Conn, Pete, and Sheri lifted off from Cuba at four PM eastern time, some twenty-eight hours after the Aphelial vessel arrived in orbit. Observers recalled that the lead spacecraft that arrived over the moon orbited for at least three days before other vessels appeared. The obvious conclusion was that it had waited for its sister vessels before bombing commenced. People of Earth seemed to almost wish the bombing would start, so they knew no other spacecraft were going to show up.
Not Conn. She wished the thing would keep orbiting forever.
As the astronauts rendezvoused with the Fille, Conn impressed Pete and Sheri with the urgency of getting the capsule fixed and in shape to re-enter. Directed by the “most admired woman in the world” and their boss’s boss, the astronauts got to work at an impressive speed.
By necessity, they had to seal the gash in the skin of the vehicle first. Sheri took point on that, spacewalking out to the damage. She hacked out the quick-repair foam, covered the hole with re-entry-heat-resistant adhesive, and bolted a strip of nickel-steel alloy over the whole thing using nickel-steel alloy bolts. She sprayed the result with a compound that was close enough to the ceramic heat shield on the capsule to be indistinguishable.
There was a chance, Sheri explained, that the edges of the hole, not themselves covered with ceramic heat shield, might melt underneath the alloy and adhesive during re-entry and expand the gash. She was confident though that the alloy strip would most likely prevent any damage.
“What kind of chance?” Conn said. “Percentage?”
Sheri was reluctant to commit.
“Sheri, I need to know. There’s no right or wrong answer. Give me a percentage.”
“Less than five percent,” an obviously pained Sheri said. “Less than five percent chance the metal will melt underneath everything. Less than—less than two percent chance of enough damage to compromise re-entry. Conn, if we had more time—”
“I don’t know if I would be comfortable letting you ride the capsule down through the atmosphere with those odds,” Conn said.
Sheri shrugged. “I don’t know if I am, either. If you told me to, I’d think about it first, but probably go. You could do it a hundred times and only have a problem once or twice.”
Conn hadn’t studied the schematics Izzy had, but there was only room for one astronaut to work in the close quarters of the capsule anyway. Conn handed Pete tools.
While Pete worked, the Aphelial spacecraft sunk through the ionosphere and settled about two kilometers above Chicago. There was little doubt about what would come next.
My home, Conn thought. My school. My anchor. Where my family is. Thousands of miles away, currently on the other side of the world, she felt just as powerless as she had talking to Cora from Menlo Park. It took a massive effort not to yell at Pete to work faster.
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