by David Mack
Quickening my steps, I resume walking. I’m hyper-alert now. My eyes scan the windows of buildings on the other side of the street, seeking the tiniest reflection that might betray a stalker in my shadow. I pay attention to olfactory cues, as if an enemy might be flushed out by his overuse of cologne. Most of all I listen, analyzing every bit of audible noise I receive for patterns. Then my diligence is rewarded—I hear the echoed footsteps again.
They are not my own steps coming back to me, of this I’m certain. The intervals between steps deviate from my own by as much as nine-hundredths of a second, and as little as four-hundredths. It is the ostensibly random variance of another person tracking my movements.
Who would be following me? Who could know who I am? Or why I’m here?
As urgently as I wish to know the answers to those questions, I can’t risk a confrontation. If I’m wrong, if this is just a mistake, I’ll do more harm than good by forcing a conflict. No, the best response is the one I’m prepared for: evasion and escape.
I hurry past a sprawling lawn with a white gazebo and past the next building ahead, which claims to be a museum devoted to Pacifican aquatic archeology but which I can tell with a glance inside its lobby is little more than a slapdash fraud devoted to fleecing tourists. I turn the corner and hope I’m at least momentarily hidden from my stalker’s line of sight. I kick off my sandals and start running. Barefoot, I move much faster than in those awkward flip-flops, and more quietly. At my first opportunity I cross the road and veer off across a dark lawn. Then I pick up speed. In the darkness I hear my would-be spy racing to catch up with me. I leap over a tall hedgerow and roll through a somersault as I land on the other side.
It’s a short distance now to the Crown Star, but if I’m being tailed, there might be hidden surveillance devices watching my lodging. Walking in the front entrance suddenly seems like a bad idea. Fortunately, I took the precaution of checking into the adjacent Royal Pacifican Suites under another of my identities, in the unlikely event of a situation such as this. In the twenty seconds it takes me to reach a small copse of palm trees near the Royal Pacifican and take cover behind their broad fronds, I’ve banished the Trill-style spots from my skin, lightened my hair to a dirty blond, and changed my eyes from brown to green. It took me ten years to perfect the chameleon circuits in this body, but right now I feel that was time well spent.
Whoever is searching for me will likely soon return to this island’s strip of hotels in the hope of reacquiring me as a target. My Watcher might already be here. I look at my cranberry tropical-print shirt and baggy beige shorts. These are common-enough clothes on this island, but I can’t risk drawing the Watcher’s attention by waltzing out from cover in a shirt that sets a new bar on the concept of loud. I might as well just jump up and shout, “I’m over here!”
How do I cross the last few meters to the Royal Pacifican without drawing undue attention? I see a honeymooning young Betazoid couple stroll past on their way to the hotel, and I see my chance. I strip off my clothes, distend my abdomen to feign a potbelly, and, as nonchalantly as possible, fall into step a few paces behind the naked newlyweds. Just as I hope, most of the more prudish types in the vicinity avert their eyes, and the rest pay all their attention to the two gorgeous specimens ahead of me. Who wants to stare at a naked fat man?
I walk through the lobby of the Royal Pacifican with my head up, confident, as if I owned the place. The front desk clerk obviously wants so badly to laugh at the sight of me that it’s killing him, but he plasters a stiff, crooked smile on his white-mustached Efrosian face and beholds me with wide, frost-blue eyes as I step up to him and nod. I greet him in a deeper voice than the one I’ve been using next door. “Good evening.”
“Welcome back, Mister Tasker.”
My direct eye contact makes him uneasy, so I refrain from blinking, just to make it worse for him. “Thank you, Kinett.”
He swallows nervously and blinks twice in quick succession. “How may I help you?”
“Any messages for me?”
A shake of his head. “No, sir.” He purses his lips so fiercely they blanch.
“Ah. Too bad.” I press my hands comically to my bare chest. “I’m waiting for a suit to be delivered.” I gesture at myself and shrug. “Laundry day.” I walk away toward the guest elevators. “If and when my tailor sees fit to arrive, send him up to my room, will you?”
“At once, sir.”
I step into the lift and press the button for the twenty-third floor. My ride up is quiet and uneventful, thanks to the discreetly averted stares of the Bolian couple and their three young children who are sharing the elevator car with me. They step out onto the nineteenth floor, and I finish the last few seconds of my ride alone.
The doors open again, and I sprint down the hallway to my room. I adjust my palm print, retinal patterns, and biofeedback profile to the presets for this identity, and step into range of the automatic sensors for the door to my room. “Liam Tasker. Unlock and open.” The door slides open with a soft hiss, and I rush in. Within minutes I’ve garbed myself in a dark suit with a black shirt, and a pair of immaculately polished black shoes. From the drawer by the bed I retrieve a locked duranium case that opens for only one thing: an encrypted, short-range signal transmitted by my positronic matrix. The box springs open, and I retrieve the backup remote command unit for my ship, the Archeus, and its feminine-persona AI, whom I’ve named Shakti.
The device is small and rectangular, sixteen centimeters by nine square, and only five millimeters thick, but it’s my lifeline to my ship—and my ticket to a fast escape. I’ve made only two of them, and I always try to have one with me and the other hidden nearby. With a few simple taps on its smooth interactive surface, I direct the Archeus to beam up all my personal effects from my room at the Crown Star, and then my supplemental baggage from here at the Royal Pacifican. Then I open a subspace channel to the ship. “Shakti, are you there?”
Her silken voice is sympathetic. “Yes, Noonien. You sound upset. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but I need you to do a few small favors for me.”
“I understand.”
“First, power up the warp drive and plot a course away from the Federation.”
I hear the skepticism in her tone. “Do you have a particular direction in mind?”
“Start by taking us toward the Taurus Dark Cloud. I’ll adjust the course en route.”
“As you wish. What else can I do for you?”
The mellisonant hum of a transporter beam turns my head, and I watch my bags and other personal items vanish from my decoy hotel room. I key in new commands for Archeus via the remote and lock my ship’s transporters onto my coordinates. “Please call the front desks at the Crown Star and Royal Pacifican hotels for me. . . . Tell them I’m checking out.”
• • •
Hours later I’m light-years away, and only now do I stop and wonder if I might be the slightest bit paranoid. Reviewing my eidetic memory of the evening’s events, I realize that I never actually saw my Watcher. Footsteps alone were enough to send me on a mad dash. At the time, my analysis seemed reasonable to me, but now I’m doubting myself.
It seems implausible that my positronic brain could have manufactured an auditory hallucination. I tested and refined this body’s sensory components for years; their reliability seems beyond reproach. All my internal diagnostics confirm my systems are free of error or malfunction, but what if the glitch is in my mind? Not a simple misfire, mind you, but one more fundamental and insidious. If I made an error in the structure of my synaptic network, I might have left myself prone to any number of maladies—paranoia being the least of them. Even if I wasn’t mistaken about what I heard, I might have drawn profoundly flawed conclusions.
I open my left parietal flap for access to the diagnostic port of my positronic matrix, and then I unwind an isolinear data cable that is connected at one end to Archeus’s main computer. “Shakti, I’m patching in. Would you be a dear and plea
se run a level-one diagnostic on me?”
“I’d be happy to, Noonien.”
Sometimes an objective perspective is what’s needed to make an accurate diagnosis. I insert the cable’s prong into my diagnostic port. “Ready when you are.”
There is no physical sensation to the exam, but I am keenly aware of the test pulses pinging my various circuits and subprocessors. A swift and steady flow of information courses through me like thread through a needle’s eye. I avert my eyes from the situation monitor on the cockpit’s starboard console; I don’t want to bias the results by observing the intermediate benchmark data. After several minutes of silent probing, Shakti rewards me with her gentle bedside manner: “Just a few moments longer, Noonien. We’re almost done.”
“No hurry. It’s not as if I have someplace to be.”
The digital flood abates nanoseconds before Shakti says, “Diagnostic complete.”
“And? What’s the verdict?”
“All systems operating within normal parameters. No errors detected.” With a smidgen of mockery, she adds, “You’re fine, you old hypochondriac.”
Why I thought that programming my ship’s AI with a colloquial dialogue subroutine and a full range of humanoid idioms was a good idea, I’ll never know. I unplug the test cable from my diagnostic jack, coil it, and put it away. I am reassured by the results of the independent test, but doubts linger. How would I even test for a fundamental design flaw? All that Archeus and Shakti can do is measure my systems’ performance against the parameters that I defined as normal. But what if those parameters themselves are wrong? I might never know.
For now, I’ll have to proceed on faith. If I’m not paranoid, and I was being followed by someone on Pacifica, then maintaining a state of heightened awareness and increased discretion is the best response from now on. If I’m wrong, such precautions won’t do any harm.
I leave the cockpit, head aft to my small cabin, strip off my clothes, and step inside the cramped head. Though I have no need of a lavatory, and briefly considered removing the one on Archeus to make room for some additional storage, I decided to keep it in case I ever need to pass myself off as an organic traveler, or find myself accommodating a biological passenger. Regarding my reflection in the mirror, I watch myself transform with a few simple bits of cybernetic wizardry. I adjust the pigmentation settings in my synthetic follicles, turn all my hair gray from head to toe, then accelerate the growth rates of my facial follicles until I sport a moderately robust gray beard. By strategically deploying synthetic collagen, I simulate the ravages of age upon the circles under my eyes, the skin of my forehead, and the droop of my jowls. My eyes become a hazel mix of gold, green, and brown, and then I shift my skin tone to a warm honey-brown by means of some simple catalytic reactions.
The pièce de résistance: some subtle ridges at the top of my nasal bridge. My Bajoran persona, Taylen Jull, comes to life. I smile at myself. “Hello, there. Nice to meet you.”
Yes, this will do nicely.
I return to the cockpit, walking with a slight limp in my left leg—the lingering aftereffect of an injury poor Jull suffered as a slave of the Cardassians during the occupation, before he escaped and made a new life for himself in the Federation, amassing a significant fortune in the process. “Shakti, please set a new course.” I ease my body into the pilot’s seat with the stiff and measured movements of a man in less than prime condition. “Our new destination is Tessen III.”
“Laying in the new course now.”
Tessen III, a remote but populated Federation world, is where I will begin fortifying the virtual “paper trail” for my latest nom de voyage. I need to make sure there are acquaintances and business associates for people to contact when they investigate this persona, so that I can use it to establish a long-term cover without arousing personal or governmental suspicions.
It will be the first of many stops I need to make over the next few years. I’ve planned my itinerary with great care. Each world on which I build a part of my ersatz history needs to be sophisticated enough that its records are accessible from elsewhere in the Federation, so that my stories can be confirmed with a minimum of effort. However, each world must be remote enough that no one is likely to make the effort to visit it in person, and it must not be so saturated in security technology that I risk having my biometric profile recorded and disseminated.
If I have learned anything from my brush with exposure on Pacifica, it’s that the time for vacations is over. I need to be more careful and less visible. Tempting as it might be to roam the galaxy like some carefree interstellar vagabond, that is not the road I have chosen. I created a legion of disposable identities as a means to an end, and now I must put them to use.
The time has come for me to disappear and let my fictions take on lives of their own.
2368–2369
9
Until I became postorganic, it would never have occurred to me that I might have a day that lasts three years, but that’s the sort of thing I’ve come to take for granted as my paranoia intersects with my artificial body’s lack of a need for sleep. It’s sort of surreal, to be honest. Deep night and daylight blur from one to the other and back again, and I hardly notice the difference. Of course, I spend most of my time sequestered like a lucifuge, expending absurd degrees of effort on not being noticed or recognized. It’s fortunate that most of what I need to do can be accomplished with a minimum of personal contact. I rarely need to risk showing my face in major cities anymore. Usually, it’s enough on most of these lonely balls of rock to check in at some satellite office in a remote territory. Once some underpaid out-of-the-loop minor bureaucrat verifies my credentials, his superiors never even think to question him.
Most of what I’m doing these days is setting the stage for the future. Opening accounts. Moving credits around. My research wasn’t free, after all; it took decades to amass enough credit to live in isolation. I earned a small fortune developing the sophisticated algorithms that govern interstellar credit fluctuations in an economy that has no cash and few fungible commodities. It was an even more boring task than it sounds, but I knew it would pay dividends—both figuratively and literally—as the Federation expanded and opened its borders to foreign investment. Every time the Ferengi carp that the Federation’s economy is “primitive” and in need of their expert guidance, I laugh. The system I helped the Interstellar Commerce Commission put into place was designed to blindside the Ferengi over the course of decades. By the time they realize what has happened, their future will be linked forever to the Federation’s.
And the profits from that transaction will accrue to the Ad Astra Finance Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ceres Finance Group, which in turn is controlled by the Cygnus Capital Group LLC, which is roughly twenty or thirty shell companies removed from the Soong Partners Holding Corporation, to which a staggering amount of interstellar credit flows on a regular schedule. Part of crafting a plan for immortality was realizing that, in the mind of the public, no person lives forever—but corporations go on and on.
I admit, I felt at first like I was doing something wrong. Nesting corporations within one another and hiding the connections in such notoriously secretive banking entities as the Bank of Bolarus, the Orion Depository, or the Ferengi Central Reserve seems on its face to be at least questionable if not blatantly criminal. But the system permits their existence, so I see no reason not to exploit it. After all, what’s my alternative? Should I surrender myself—the first truly self-made man—to the government for analysis and potential vivisection? Don’t be ridiculous.
Instead, I wander the fringes of Federation territory, tapping into its communications and financial infrastructures from the most far-flung and least-monitored points in its domain. One careful trade and transaction at a time, I lay the foundation for a brighter future, for a fortune that will grow and pass from one manufactured identity to another in perpetuity. Don’t misunderstand my intentions; this is not about greed. It�
��s about security. I need to do this so that I can live a private life while wielding subtle influence on the direction of science and politics, to shape a future in which sentient artificial intelligence and synthetic beings can live in harmony with organic beings, enjoying the protections and recourse of the law, and thrive without the burden of discrimination based upon the nature of their origin. It’s a crazy dream, but I believe in it.
But I digress. My mind is a maelstrom since the transition. I can harbor so many trains of thought that I distract myself. One part of me continues as if on autopilot, navigating rote tasks or executing the rigmarole of daily life, while other parts of my consciousness carom away on wild tangents. The result is that I sometimes feel only half-invested in my present moment. My disjointed time-sense, my fine-grain perception and ultra-long-term perspective, feel jarring to me. Time simultaneously streaks past and creeps in its petty pace, leaving me lost in the present. Perhaps it would feel different to me had I been born to such a consciousness, but having spent the first eighty-odd years of my life as flesh and bone, I find this new state alien beyond words.
I blink and I’m on Antos IV, incorporating a dummy company under an assumed name.
A blur of names and faces, a flurry of shaken hands and empty smiles, and I’m on Megara, passing my time on a park bench, waiting for an appointment that doesn’t happen for another eight hours. I spy a tree not unlike a willow with its great crown of drooping boughs, and it triggers a deep memory, of the spot on Omicron Theta where I met my Juliana and knew in the span of a breath that she would be the love of my life.
Even now the details of that memory are hazy, the product of inexact organic engrams that rely on associative triggers—one of the strengths of biological memory, but also one of its great flaws. Tying information recall to sensory triggers creates powerful mechanisms, but it also leads to unexpected activations. Worst of all, the chemical nature of organic engrams leads to inexact recall at best. I compare the lucidity of memories formed after my transition to those from the life I lived before, and there is no comparison. My new brain records its experiences with far greater fidelity and clarity than my human brain ever did, and I am able to relive my post-transition moments down to the finest sensory details. By contrast, my human recollections are like blurry snapshots of frozen moments recorded through a mud-covered lens.
