Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t see why they want slaves in the first place.’

  Father Declan put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. ‘Come, come, Brian,’ he said. ‘You grew up there. Slavery is part of their ideal. The United Nations doesn’t allow them to practice it—it has even forced them to end the system of bonded labour—but the Dominion regards that as a concession. Having manservants and maidservants is part of what they regard as their right. And machinery just doesn’t cut it, psychologically—not in the way that having a creature of flesh and blood, indistinguishable from a human, that you can treat or maltreat any way you like, is.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I take the point. But you’ll have a hard time getting the evidence. The place is sealed tighter’n an ant’s butt.’

  The priest sniggered at my vulgarity.

  ‘We have a plan to get around that,’ he said. ‘If you’re serious, I can explain it to you—after you sign a non-disclosure agreement.’

  He opened his desk drawer and took out a piece of paper, and shoved it and a pen across the desk. I looked over the agreement. A straightforward promise, with horrendous penalty clauses, not to reveal anything about the job, whether I was accepted for it or not.

  I signed. ‘It’s funny,’ I said, passing the paper back, ‘but it feels a bit like selling my soul to the Devil.’

  Declan laughed. ‘From the viewpoint of the Reconstruction Church,’ he said, ‘what you’ll be doing is the exact opposite of that.’

  And he told me the scheme. Brain-state copies of every member of the party—including him—were to be uploaded. The uploads would inhabit a virtual environment in a very small, dense computronium spacecraft that would be slung into a slingshot orbit from a spinning ESA tether, loop around Venus, land on Mars, sneak up on New Bethel, hack into the city’s systems, make new copies of our personalities, and download them into custom-made synthetic bodies inside the city. That way, we would find out how Synths were really treated in New Bethel. Provision would be made for getting our reports back to Earth. As for getting back ourselves—that was a bridge we’d have to burn when we came to it.

  The really neat thing, from my point of view, was that I (in the flesh) would get half the total pay for my part in the job. The rest would be shared between any surviving copies that got back.

  ‘So after you take the copy,’ I said, incredulously, ‘I walk out with a hundred thou, for nothing?’

  ‘For the price of your soul,’ Declan chuckled.

  Naturally, I went for it. I knew that one of me was going to regret this. I was the one who regretted it.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I told my first instance, from inside a computer. How could that bastard have done this to me? It was such a totally depraved thing to do.

  ‘At least you can be sure you’re not going to Hell,’ Brian Henderson told me.

  ‘Point,’ I admitted.

  ‘You can’t say that!’ the first instance of Father Declan hastily said, crowding his face into the cam. ‘The Catholic Church acknowledges that you have a soul.’

  ‘The Reconstruction Church doesn’t,’ I said. I grinned at them both, out there in the mortal flesh. ‘And you know as well as I do that’s the only Church I’ve ever had a moment’s worry might be right after all.’

  #

  Her name was Geneva Channing. Black hair, brown eyes, cheeky face. Long padded coat, open, over a sleeveless low-cut top, cropped denim skirt, bare legs, pixie boots. One thumb under the strap of her shoulder bag, the other hooked in her belt. Weight on one leg. That’s how I first saw her. That’s how I remember her.

  At first I thought she was a whore, until she stuck out her hand and introduced herself. Whores don’t do that.

  ‘Warren Dutch,’ I said, as we shook hands. ‘And yes, I’m newly hatched.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  She caught my elbow and walked briskly up the street, in the direction of the city. Others on the sidewalk—the time was mid-day, the small sun high—spared us barely a glance. At one point, a heavy black vehicle, all fullerene armour and thick diamond windows, whined slowly past. It didn’t need the big lettering along the side to proclaim that it was POLICE. A blank, visored gaze from within swept past my eyes, and went on. Geneva’s grip on my elbow tightened for a moment.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ she said. She gave me a sideways nudge. ‘In here.’

  In here turned out to be nowhere exciting. A narrow lunchtime diner that looked like it was going out of business. Two customers, near the counter. Geneva patted a tall stool near the door.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘My treat.’

  I could read the chalked board at ten metres—one advantage of an optimised genome.

  ‘Black coffee, large, and a hot beef roll.’

  She dumped her satchel, which struck me as a trust gesture, and sauntered to the counter. My gaze followed her ass, and met her eyes as she returned with a tray. She sat down and made her card disappear.

  ‘Thanks.’ I sipped the black java, and tore into the hot, sauce-dripping roll with my teeth. She sucked green liquid from a tall glass through a straw, whorishly, watching me.

  ‘First food and drink in that stomach,’ she said.

  I laid the mug down, licked sauce from the web of my thumb and the corners of my lips.

  ‘I’m not big on refinement,’ I said.

  ‘What were you,’ she asked, ‘before you were Warren Dutch?’

  ‘Is that a polite question?’

  ‘No, but I’m asking.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I was a student. I needed some money. I saw the Dominion recruitment ad—five thousand dollars for a copy of my brain-state, plus a thousand at the other end, and a chance to earn some money and send some back. Not that I’m going to send that bastard a cent - I can’t believe I was callous enough to send a copy of myself here.’ I shrugged. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. You?’

  ‘For me, it was a good idea at the time,’ Geneva said. ‘I was an addict. My life was a mess. Probably stayed a mess, back there. I took the same deal.’ She grinned. ‘I’m not just clean, I couldn’t get hooked again even if I wanted to.’

  ‘What are things really like here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I’ve heard…rumours.’

  ‘Oh—slavery and all that?’ She smiled, made a flicking-away motion. ‘Forget it. As long as you don’t mind doing crap jobs for people who despise you, it’s all right. We don’t even get hassled by the church. No souls to save, see?’

  ‘What about laws, the Dominion’s cops?’

  ‘They patrol. They keep order. Surveillance is everywhere. That’s about it. No laws for the likes of us. Not even ID checks.’

  I couldn’t imagine a place like this without laws. It seemed far too peaceful. As for ID checks—

  I looked down at my hands. Wrinkles at the knuckles, hair at the wrists, the first dirt accumulating under the fingernails…

  ‘What’s to stop any of us passing as citizens?’

  Geneva wrinkled her nose. ‘We have a distinctive body odour. We can’t smell it ourselves, and it isn’t offensive to citizens—we have to work for them, after all—but it’s unmistakeableunmistakable. So I’m told.’

  ‘That’s clever,’ I said. ‘Limbic.’

  She didn’t know what I meant, so I told her.

  ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ she said. Already she sounded bored.

  ‘Why were you waiting outside the body-shop?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t waiting!’ she said, too vehemently. ‘I work around here. Just happened to be passing.’

  She saw my doubt. ‘No, really,’ she said. ‘Whenever I see someone come out of a body-shop and stare at the city with their jaw hanging down, I say hello.’

  ‘And give them coffee?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ She smiled. ‘If they look interesting.’

  ‘Oh. I hope I’m still interesting.’

/>   ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re an interesting liar.’

  She slurped the last of the green liquid. ‘Let’s move on.’

  I followed her out. She led me around corners, into narrower and deeper alleys. Eventually, she stopped. We were in some kind of back yard, but without grass or garbage or doorways, an architecturally accidental space of left-over square metres. Frayed bucky-sheet walls of buildings like stacked cardboard boxes towered to a slit of pink sky above.

  ‘It’s safe to talk here,’ she said.

  ‘You said there’s surveillance everywhere.’

  She shook her head, irritated.

  ‘We’re not important enough to spy on. The Dominion only cares about the streets and shops and places like cafés.’ She shrugged. ‘Sure, there are camera-beads and dust-mikes scattered all over the place. Fuck ‘em. No way can the Dominion keep track of all that, even with AIs. So talk, Mr Warren Dutch.’

  I allowed myself to frown. ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Who you really are. What you’re up to.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘For one thing, what makes you think I’m not who I say I am? And for another, how can I know you are? If the Dominion wanted to keep tabs on newly-arrived Synths, someone like you would be a good way to do it. Doing things just like this.’

  Geneva’s bitter laughter echoed up the chasm.

  ‘If you were who you say you are,’ she said, ‘you’d be coming on to me. If you were a trained agent, you’d never have followed me here. If I was a spy for the Dominion, I wouldn’t have let you follow me here. Do you think these bastards need admissions? They don’t even need torture.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ she said, patiently, ‘lots of countries wanted’—she shook her head, as if she’d misspoken—’want to know what the fuck the Dominion’s up to here. I mean, the Dominion’s official purpose is to conquer the world, so the rest of the world’s bound to worry about a closed Mars colony. What’s the easiest way to send spies in? The only way, really? The way you came. So the Union and the Europeans—the Confederacy doesn’t have the capacity—and so on have sent in dozens. Big mistake. There are, let’s see, about ten thousand Synths in this place. A hundred thousand citizens—’

  ‘What!’ I cried. ‘Already?’

  I knew that the Dominion was launching nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars from Nevada, but I’d had no idea the numbers had been ramped up to this extent.

  Geneva frowned, then nodded, and raised a hand.

  ‘I’ll explain. Let me finish. The citizens are the best and the brightest of the Dominion and their kids, all thoroughly screened. The Synths are body doubles of desperately poor people, or rabble, adventurers, scum. Most of them work for citizens, doing menial chores because that’s the only work there is—or they try to turn a penny in the Synth fringe. A spy doesn’t have a chance here, because most Synths will cheerfully turn them in—there’s a good bonus—and anyway, working undercover in the city doesn’t get you close to any secrets. It’s not like you can get a job as a confidential secretary, or a lab technician, or anything like that. Cooks, cleaners, porters, butlers…none of them have access to anything.’

  ‘How about concubines?’ I said.

  Geneva shook her head. ‘There’s a bit of that,’ she said. ‘Male and female. We’re not human, so it doesn’t count as adultery or fornication. And we’re not beasts, so it doesn’t count as abomination. There’s nothing in Leviticus about Synths. Synths and humans aren’t interfertile—well, Synths here are infertile in any case, but you know what I mean—so no complications. And from all I’ve heard, no pillow talk. Wham bam thank you ma’am. No emotional attachments. They despise us, and they despise themselves for screwing us, or for otherwise indulging their kinks with us.’

  Something in her tone told me this wasn’t just something she’d heard.

  ‘Opportunities for blackmail there,’ I mused.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? It’s no sin.’

  ‘I get that all right,’ I said. ‘There’s still shame.’

  She thought about that. ‘Yeah, for some kinks. The chances of hitting on the right person and the right combination of circumstances are pretty slim, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Uh-huh. What happened to the failed spies?’

  ‘Interrogated and exchanged, as far as I know.’

  Well, that sounded like one way of getting back…not that I wanted to try it.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You tell me what you do, and I’ll tell you what I do.’

  She worked, she said, in the Fringe, doing odd jobs for various businesses. One of the odd jobs was seeking out new arrivals and pointing them to a particular employment agency. She could never be sure when new arrivals were going to emerge from the body-shops, so now and again she hung around outside one on the off-chance. She’d picked up quite a few customers for the agency that way. She never went into the city herself any more, not since…well, she wasn’t going to talk about that.

  I told her I understood.

  And then, without mentioning that anyone else was involved, I told her about my mission. She laughed in my face.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I asked.

  ‘I lied,’ she said. ‘Just to see if you were telling the truth. You must be. You have no idea—’

  ‘What did you lie about?’

  She hesitated, as if unsure where to start.

  ‘For one thing,’ she said, ‘there aren’t ten thousand Synths and a hundred thousand citizens.’

  Beat. Oh.

  ‘…There are a hundred thousand Synths, and a million citizens.’

  Oh, God.

  I knew what those numbers meant, and for an irrational moment I didn’t want to know.

  ‘How long?’ I said at last. ‘How long has this place—’

  ‘Fifty-seven years,’ she said.

  I couldn’t speak. The number rang through my mind like a pealing gong.Fifty-seven years fifty-seven years fifty-seven years…my mission had failed before I had so much as hatched from the drexler trough.

  ‘Fifty-seven Mars years,’ she added.

  And then she cried.

  I took her in my arms, and she took me to her place.

  #

  It wasn’t a bad place, a small third-floor apartment a few streets away. It had two rooms, running water and all its amenities, a waste recycler, a drexler, a microwave, and a comms centre. There were chairs and tables. There were cushions and throws. By the standards of Brussels it was decent; by the standards of most of humanity it was palatial. Geneva saw it by the standards of New Bethel, by which it was a hovel.

  I told her she had nothing to apologise for.

  At that, she cried again. I found myself acting the host, sitting her down, finding something to wipe her eyes and nostrils with, something comforting to drink. We ended up facing each other across a table, hands clasped around mugs.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘There was a war,’ she said. ‘Another war. Between the Dominion and everyone else. On Earth and in space. This is all hearsay and rumour, but…as far as we know, everybody lost. There have been no new ships or colonists since then. Building a radio transmitter can get you shot, but some people have built radio receivers, with big dish aerials. They sometimes pick up signals from the sky—almost incomprehensible, probably coming from post-humans, maybe descended from all those uploads and copies and AIs that were knocking about the solar system back then. Nothing from Earth at all. The citizens don’t talk about the Dominion as anywhere but here. As far as they’re concerned, they won. This is the Dominion. And the citizens are the human race.’

  I could see it all—human civilization, already battered by one nuclear war, could hardly have survived another in the same century. The Dominion had inherited most of the remaining nuclear arsenal of the former United States. That remainder—even allowing for all the nukes let off under the shockplates of the gigantic Mars-bound colony arks—would
be more than enough to devastate the world. No doubt, the world had had something to say in reply. For all sides, it would have been Armageddon. Why should they hold back?

  Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world is grown grey with thy breath…

  I must have murmured or mouthed the words.

  ‘What was that?’ Geneva asked.

  ‘Nothing significant,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want significant,’ Geneva said.

  She stood up and swivelled, deft as a dancer, around the side of the table, to me.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  That was the last coherent utterance from either of us for the rest of a long, hazy, ruddy afternoon. What can I say? We both had young bodies, we were attracted to each other, and we needed some consolation. In the course of the evening, as we fucked or recovered from fucking, padded around or sat about, and ate and drank and drowsed and watched the screen with half an eye, we talked and talked.

  ‘It’s strange,’ she told me, as we sat in bed drinking something vile and alcoholic she’d concocted in the drexler, ‘but I should be grateful.’

  ‘Why?’

  She held out and flexed a hand. ‘For this body. It won’t get old for a long time, it won’t get sick, it won’t get addicted. It gives me more pleasure than anything I ever had before.’

  ‘I’d noticed.’

  ‘And it hardly ever gets tired.’

  ‘I’d noticed that, too.’

  We smiled complicitly at each other.

  That was when it struck me.

  In the virch, I had become, I won’t say blasé, but used to having a body much better than the flesh I’d left behind. Of course, it was a virtual body, whose existence was entirely in software, but the whole point of our having these virtual bodies and not others was that they emulated the bodies we were going to have, not the bodies we had been copied from. We even thought more clearly, though no less fallibly.

  And so did everyone here. We were all slightly more rational than the human. No wonder there was no trash and no grafittigraffiti in the Synth Fringe! Peace, without laws enforced!