LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  I’m not so sure about the men behind her though. Mindless corporate killbots I expect, here to make sure Jezebel does her job as much as to watch her back.

  I force myself to be calm. Screaming or running or begging or pleading aren’t going to make a difference here.‘So shoot me,’ I say.

  She smiles back at me.‘That’s the idea.’

  I smile too– I hear smiling makes you feel good, and it gives me something to do while I try to remember her from the Company. Fleeting glimpses. Snatches of dialogue. Never had much to do with the Analysis crowd, except the odd profile from time to time. Cut my teeth on profiles. Give me a good history file on your man and I’ll tell you what the book says makes him tick. Give me five minutes of conversation with him and I’ll tell you whether the book was right.

  Trouble is, right now I’ve got a big blank for a file and I need those five minutes and for the killbots to go away.‘We could do this another way, you know,’ I say.

  She snorts and looks away. Careless.‘Spare me.’

  Bad move, attempting to negotiate as though we’re equals from a position weakness– such a classic mistake I almost deserve to get shot. I need to tell her right up front what I’ve got that she wants. Then we deal and I get those five minutes to get inside her head. Give me that and I walk out of here alive. Maybe that’s over-confidence, or maybe you just don’t have the first clue how much psych-code I have running in my head.

  Then again she probably knows all that already. Could be she’s just testing the merchandise to see if I’ve lost it.‘I have something I can offer,’ I tell her.‘It could be good for you, good for me, good for all of us.’ I take my eyes off her for an instant to glance a grin at the killbots. Makes them feel uncomfortable when you actually notice they’re there like that. Start a conversation with them and they’ll panic, probably run away. Or actually, if they’ve had a half-decent brief and know what I can do, they’ll shoot me.

  The gun in my face doesn’t move. Never took the Analysis desk-jockeys for killers, but I could be wrong. It happens even to me. Sometimes.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Me.’

  She laughs.‘You? What possible use can the Company have for you now?’

  I keep the smile.‘You’ve already thought of that. I cut deals. That’s what I do. You made me very, very good at it. Now you can use me for all the things you’d never dare risk a salaryman on. And you can pay me what I’m worth, too.’

  She laughs so much the gun begins to shake. Mistake number two. From my sleeping seat on a bus five years in the future, I smile to myself. If I’d been Jester in that bed, she’d have been dead twice already, killed by her own gun. But that’s not what I do and it’s hard to make out you’ve got an ace or two when you’re huddled naked in the corner of a bed, with only a thin white sheet between you and a gun pointing at your eyeball.

  ‘Who do you think you are?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m Constantine. I’m the best negotiator you ever lost.’ I keep thinking how I want to have sex with her. It’s distracting. The gun’s still there and I’m already past the point where she shoots the killbots for me. I’m seeing her half-dressed, that shirt still on but unbuttoned now, the shadowed curve of her breasts hanging over me, begging me to lick them. And it’s going to happen, too.

  ‘And you think you can come back? Everything forgiven? I’ve read your file, seen your work. You’re not that good. You broke your contract, Tyler, and that’s all that matters.’ She levels the gun again.

  I’m seeing myself sit up, licking her cleavage, my teeth and tongue and fingers touching little shudders from her as my hand snakes down between her legs. There’s a but. Somewhere in what she just said there was a but. A lie, a half-truth, something missing. My key, if I can find it.

  ‘You think I want in again? You don’t know me.’

  ‘Which is as it should be. Cut to the chase or you’re high-protein pet food.’ She wants me to think some excuse to save myself. Maybe she’s taken in by my winning personality, though somehow I doubt that. In my fantasy I have a finger inside her now, then two, rubbing her clit, gentle at first but growing more urgent.

  I sigh. I have it. She’s read my file. She does think I’m that good. The Company doesn’t agree, but fuck the Company.

  I know what she wants. I let my smile spread. In my fantasy she comes for me, a long staggering orgasm. I’ve had my five minutes. We can do business now.‘Who said anything about the Company? Let’s just say I’m freelance for now. From the outside I can do anything, get anything, fix anything. I can do things I could never do before. You pay me, I’ll do them for you. Enough cash and enough time and anyone can. But I can do it quicker and cheaper. And you know it.’

  She smiles and the gun comes down.‘I believe you.’

  It’s what she’s been after ever since she came in. A tiny flush of victory in her cheeks. She’s vulnerable now, perhaps.‘Of course, if no one else knew I was still alive, you could take the credit for all my success.’

  ‘Get dressed and we’ll talk. Convince me and I never found you but if you think I’m going to rez your files just so I can watch your dust you’re wrong. You stay on Cestus and you stay where I can find you or the exterminators get your last known whereabouts. You’re mine, Jack Tyler. I own you.’

  I’d like her to suck my cock now. Next time. Next time she comes to me we’ll make those fantasies real.

  I’ll never figure out who got the better part of our bargain. Truth is we got on rather well after that. Outside of my lips and fingers between her legs and my cock in her mouth, we built up something more than simple business. Sometimes I wonder if there’s even a hint of trust there, something which could never have happened if I was a salaryman always watching my back to see which ambitious Company man was going to be next to try and claw his way past. It worked for a time, our arrangement. It kept me solvent enough to keep the apartment and all the other little luxuries I’d never quite been able to throw away. And she got what she came for. Real dirt. Quality, fast, first-line hard core intel and a really, really good fuck. If the Company wanted something done, something found, something hidden, quiet, no fuss, they went to Jez and Jez came to me. I knew people who’d never give her the time of day because of who she worked for and what she did, but they’d take my money and I’d take my cut, the Company got what it wanted, Jez got the prestige, the promotions, the power, and everyone was happy. The rest? Hey, they put the code in me that lets me get inside your head and understand your wants and drives and desires. I get inside you. It’s what I’m meant for. You think I’m not going to use that?

  Maybe I should have known better than to cut deals on the side. But when you’re that damn good, when there’s no Company noose hanging around your neck, people get to hear about it. They come, they slither to you, poison smiles and cash in hand. It seemed such a small thing. Every question Jez asks, I pass on to some nameless black hole in the net. Just the questions, never anything more. Money mysteriously arrives. Good money. Jez never knew. But someone did. And that’s the trouble with the Company. Doesn’t matter who you are or how good you are, ultimately you’re expendable.

  And the trouble with me, too, with the code in my head. Hubris.

  I’m walking down gleaming marble steps towards the mirrored glass doors that’ll take me out of the Bottomley clinic for the rich and back onto the streets of the merely well-to-do when I get a call. My head is buzzing from the new hardware it’s been given– a nerve implant. Flesh and bone did the species well enough until a couple of centuries ago, but not anymore. Ninety five percent of the planet got some kind of implant– mostly eyeballs, but there’s no shortage of other shit.

  I sigh, twitching, waiting for the software to adjust itself to me, for that smooth blend of man and machine they say happens. I need this booster. Too many bad guys already wired up.

  I take the call. Voice only of course.

  ‘Get out!’ The phone goes dead. Less than a second. Probably too
quick for any kind of trace but I try anyway.

  The world goes funny. I’m lying down and my body feels cold and numb. The ceiling above me is blue and there are clouds in it.

  In the glory days I was so sure I could talk my way out of any pile of shit no matter how deep it got. Now? Not so much.

  ‘Yo, Charlemagne, you in there?’ asks a voice. I stare at the sky. Where the fuck am I? And who the fuck is Charlemagne?

  I wake with a start, back in the bus. Outside the sun is beating down. Everyone else is dozing, slugged by the stultifying heat, but I’m awake. I am very awake. I’m remembering Charlemagne and what he did.

  Vishmir,V. ‘The Artificial Intelligence Timebomb’. AI News, 60, 1216-1218 (2322).

  Interesting, if only because Vishmir is one of the great names in AI research and here he is frothing about the dangers of unstable AIs. Not that there’s anything new here, but nothing’s been heard of Vishmir since he wrote this. Maybe he had a bad experience? Maybe he knows something we don’t? Maybe he said too much.

  Six – The Space Anemone

  Night falls. I welcome its cool obscuring shadows. The springs in the seat beneath me squeak and squeal with the potholes– I feel it more than I hear it over the droning hum of the engine and the howl of the air-conditioning. The bus is still here and I’m noticeably not blown up, not even a little bit. I figure this means the Bratstva lost me in Shithole. For now, a wrinkled old man has spotted me for a foreigner and is asking if I want to buy a tourist plug for K’Tial, cheap, special rate. I’m about to turn him away then remember I’m alone and take one to pass the time. I slot it into the hole behind my ear and lean my head against the plastic window, frosted with a decade of scratches that run and merge into the web of some methdriven glass-fanged spider. I wait for the second it takes my brainweb to recognise the wafer, figure it’s not trying to screw with my synapses, and offer me a guided tour through the ruins of K’Tial.

  The vibrations of the road run through me. I’m fucked. I can hide, I know I can hide, I’m an adept in the art of disappearance, but properly vanishing takes money, and thanks to GZW I have none. Now that he’s gone I could really do with having Mr Cray around with his hidden data and his secret accounts and enough shitting fucking cunt-bitching to keep me distracted and sane.

  What I have instead is the plug. K’Tial. Number one alien monument in this part of the Rim. The plug wants me to believe there’s no greater sight in the galaxy. I try to be impressed, but I’m more concerned about how many tourists I’ll have to hide among. It tells me this is high season, which is good. But the plug doesn’t know about the cold war in orbit above us, about the Stars advising their people to avoid Szenchzuen. Perhaps they have designs on the rest of the planet as well. Can’t see why. Nothing here but wildlife and poor people and relics of an alien race that never made it out of the stone age.

  Maybe the Perot incident actually happened. Maybe they want K’Tial and the other relics– Sikkut, Coehn, the Suspiria stones. Far as I know, no one’s quite figured that one out yet. Perhaps there’s some deeper meaning the rest of us don’t see, but more likely any imagined deeper meaning is a stinking pit of bullshit. That’s the Stars for you. Everywhere has their cults, but the Stars has them as though it’s something to be proud of.

  I shrug. What do I care? Why is this planet so damn ragged anyway? There are places in the Dust Sector doing better than this.

  I skim through the plug. Best I can make out there used to be a race of giant squid things living in the oceans right up until ten thousand years ago. Then some bad shit happened that wiped them out, along with everything else in the sea that didn’t need a microscope to be seen. Climate change or something. Dropped the temperature by twenty degrees. Then we show up and piss around with the climate some more before anyone even realises there might once have been more to the place than somewhat toxic giant ferns. Most of the native wildlife was long ago driven to extinction by GZW-engineered organisms… Ah, here we go. Originally intended to be a global paradise, the Rim government pulled the project when the Stars threw rocks at the First Republic. Guess they redirected their resources at not being the next in the line. The plug doesn’t actually say it, but the implications are clear enough. Terraforming left half done, the planetary ecology unstable and prone to violent fluctuation, recurrent insect plagues that sort of thing. All very old testament. Something about recovered tissue samples from the squid-things petrified in ocean mud, plans to re-engineer the species in some more peaceful future. For Rim propaganda it’s muted in its damnation of the Stars. I guess because it’s Stars tourists that keep the world on its tottering feet.

  I put the plug away. I don’t give a damn about this planet, I just want to get off it. K’Tial has an orbital ferry port all of its own. All I really want to know is if it’s still running.

  A newsflash comes in, kicking the seat-back screens to life. I don’t catch the first few seconds. Then I see what’s going on. Soldiers in armoured spacesuits are flying down a corridor. Tiny rockets flaring here and there as they alter course. They’re in zero-g. Other figures are adrift. A gobbets of blood smears itself across the camera lens. Some of the dead are wearing vacuum suits, some aren’t. I see guns in the hands of those that are. The bloodstained suits with the big bullet holes in have United Stars patches.

  I ask for sound.‘… currently barricaded into the auxiliary control room. Rim marines have secured the power plant and the main control room, making this the last major objective to be seized. This is Antoine Choi from the Lagrange Three orbital over Szenchzuen where Rim forces are striking back to reclaim the territory stolen by the United Stars three months ago.’

  Maybe this makes life harder for the Bratstva. I suppose it does. Yay for the Rim then. The picture changes to a camera view from spinspace somewhere. Everything is grey but just ahead the camera focuses on a bulbous ship. Maybe it’s a crossover from the K’Tial plug but it reminds me of a squid, a fat round body, twelve long silver tentacles trailing straight out behind it.

  ‘… view of the PSS Administrator Macoy just before entry into normal space…’

  The tentacles unfurl like a stop motion film of a flower opening. In perfect harmony, they curl out and around, until their tips are facing forward. More like an anemone than a squid now. The greyness around the ship distorts ahead of it. Ripples race through the inverted light of spinspace. Stars shift and flicker, more and more of them. Sometimes where the ship should be, I can see blackness, points of light. Normal space…

  The greyness convulses; the ship is gone.

  Change of viewpoint. A ship in normal space somewhere, staring at the Lagrange Three orbital. Quiet. A few shuttles moving to and fro. Takes a moment before I get it– they’re replaying the attack as a montage.

  The universe shudders as a dozen ships appear. I feel my spine tingle as space bends and vomits them up, and for a moment I’m lost in the dream of being there, staring out the front as it happens. Three of them are like the Administrator Macoy, plasma flaring from the end of their tentacles, decelerating them as they hurtle towards the orbital.

  A shuttle gets in the way. Tentacles whip around in an eye-blink. Twin jets of plasma engulf the shuttle for an instant. A flash and it’s gone. The tentacles smoothly return to their positions. The ship continues on, course unchanged. I see their purpose quickly enough. Less than thirty seconds out of hyperspace and they’ve rammed into the orbital. The tentacles spread out, latching onto the orbital’s skin where they can. A silvery sheen blossoms between them, hiding the body of the craft until the orbital looks as though three grotesque mechanical insects are pupating against its skin.

  That’s how the soldiers got on board so fast…

  The rest of the dozen Rim ships I recognise from my time with the Company. Escorts mostly. The narrator tells me that the scene at the other orbital is similar. I watch as a Stars destroyer exchanges fire with one of the escorts, but the destroyer is quickly outnumbered and barely escapes into s
pinspace. Momentary flares speckle, missiles manoeuvring towards their targets, flashes as they’re shot down. The voice-over tells me that the Stars forces withdrew after a few minutes, losing a dozen small craft while the retribution force remained untouched, a glorious victory for the righteous return of the Rim. From what I’ve seen on the screen, Mr Narrator is a bit of an optimist. Apart from the shuttle I haven’t seen a single Stars craft go down. I switch the screen off. It’ll all be over by the time I get to K’Tial. Best remember not to use a Stars identity.

  Rednik, Z. & Karadovich, I. A. ‘A Complex Computer Model of Human Memory’. Nature, 468, 3045-3102 (2323).

  Two psychologists at the university of Szeget. They built a whole simulated person by carefully reconstructing a lifetime of experiences and feeding them into an AI brain. The effect was very like recording and copying the subject’s personality. The AI actually believed it was that person, and clearly remembered making the conscious decision to go through with the experiment. The point wasn’t to copy people but to look into the way the human mind works. But Rednik and Karadovich accidentally stumbled onto a method for making a stable AI, of sorts, far more reliably than has previously been possible and with a fully functional personality to boot. There’s been a lot of excited discussion in the AI press about this ever since. They were sponsored by Voortek and the Commission of the Old Worlds Union.

  Seven – K’Tial

  The point of coming to K’Tial is for the live submersible tour of the alien ruins, but there’s no shortage of virtual tours for anyone wanting to relive their memories on the cheap. Or if, like me, you just can’t be arsed. It’s dark, it’s a place to think while I figure out how the hell I’m going to get off this godforsaken hole without a ferry ticket or the money to get one. I take it.

  The actual ruins are way out into the ocean, some twelve miles or so and built on a reef, but the tour starts at the coast, a view from the surface of the sea looking back at the orbital ferry port, panning up and down as a steady stream of shuttles come and go, occasional waves lapping over my vision in a disconcerting way that has the animal half of my brain convinced that I’m drowning. I tell it to fuck off and catch up with the twenty-fourth century. If the simulation’s to be believed then there’s a shuttle going every minute or two. I don’t believe it, but there’s no virtual menu, no help system, no way to ask awkward questions.