Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  “You have only to ask.”

  “Right. Number one,” she opened, holding up an index finger. “Where am I?”

  “We are in a private apartment suite in the Kestrel StalkPlex. Let me show you.” He pointed to the wall to her left and a window appeared to melt into existence, or so she was being led to believe. Lou swallowed, thinking about the tech involved, and saw a view from up high, facing southwest, looking out over the expensive part of Stalktown and towards the distant ocean. She guessed it was late, near midnight. There were very few lights visible. She saw whole city-blocks on fire, burning out of control, orange smoke billowing into the night sky.

  Suddenly a hov shot past the window, close enough for light from this room to reflect off its field-shimmering hull, even as the fusion dazzle from its stuttering lateral thrusters gave Lou and the man momentary strobing shadows. Lou saw a few other hovs in the distance, cop-hovs with searchlights slicing through the night, watching for looters and thieves, and “public nuisances”. One of the distant hovs launched a volley of cannon fire into the street below. The tracer rounds were vivid streaks of electric yellow. Lou felt chilled.

  “How many days is it since your guys captured Dog and me?” she asked, not taking her eyes from the window display.

  “It is five days.”

  She turned to face the man. “Five days? Five days? But an infusion takes only four…”

  “Sometimes three,” he said.

  “Five bloody days! What happened?”

  “There were unforeseen irregularities.”

  Looking around for a door. “Dog must be out of his mind with worry.”

  The man looked grave and reassuring. “Your dog is calm and feeling no undue stress.”

  This was getting strange. No way would Dog be feeling calm after five days.

  Unless Dog was so sedated out of his mind he really didn’t feel any anxiety.

  Unless Kid had stopped sending that psychic feed.

  Lou thought about how far an enterprising DNA thief could get with a large human baby, having to stop and take care of it, keep it fed, and clean. Kid could easily be on the Orbital by now, or en route to anywhere else via hypertube transport, depending on the tube weather situation.

  As for the bio chop shops, it was bewildering even to think about the sheer number simply up in the Orbital — secret black clinics specializing in the harvest and distribution of choice, valuable, human tissues. And Kid was probably some kind of quality merchandise, or at least parts of him might be. Lou didn’t know. Maybe the kid did have some kind of data stored in the nucleus of an artificial cell buried deep in his body, data encrypted in the nucleotide sequences. She knew the chop shops had scanners that could locate the tiniest such cells, too. Then the bastards would just need to find the key to the crypto, or maybe they even had access to forbidden military quantum crypto machines, that would sort out the problem in literally no time.

  Five days? The entire thing could be over by now. And she’d never had a chance, because this bastard was having existential angst issues!

  She swore under her breath, thinking about the joys of her life.

  And only a few days left until the Bastard arrived, too, she thought. Probably missed Sheb. That hurt. She wanted to have a proper goodbye. He was a great friend to her all this time. Damn it all!

  So, she thought at last, in the event there’s still a glimmer of hope regarding the kid, how to recover from this five-day delay? Step one: get the hell out of here. Step two: find Dog. Step three: find Kid before he gets nanotomed down to individual cells.

  A snap!

  Lou looked at the man. He seemed unconcerned. Thinking about it, Lou realized he probably had up to half his brain replaced with neuroid structures and software; he could be pulling in every data feed from human space into his brain, via tight radio links. There might even be a transformer in there converting back and forth between brain cycles and data cycles. An actual goddamn interface.

  He could be reading my thoughts, translating brainwaves to language/image in real-time.

  “Okay,” Lou said at last, trying to keep her mounting panic under control, “I want to know … just who are you? Who is the ‘we’ you mentioned?”

  The man took a breath, as if part of a very slow meditation process. He gave no sign of concern or distress. “It is your turn to answer my question.”

  She winced. Damn. “Oh, okay. You wanted to know about death.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sort of asking the wrong person, in a way,” she started, not sure what to say. “I was not conscious all the way up to my transition to Stage One. Once the tissue necrosis was clearly moving faster than the treatment could handle, and I was approaching terminal mode, I was placed into a coma. It would spare me the trauma of transition, the docs said. I just fell asleep … and then woke up.

  “In Stage One.”

  “That’s right. When I woke up I was ‘clinically dead’, at least according to several different bioethical standard measurements.” She allowed herself a small smile at the absurdity of her life.

  “What did you dream about while you were comatose?”

  Lou frowned, staring hard at the beautiful man. She noticed she could not tell how old he might be. It was even difficult to see exactly what he looked like, no matter how hard she stared. She could no longer say for certain whether or not he had hair, though she’d seen his hair earlier; nor could she say what color his eyes were, though she thought they might be dark. “I … don’t recall dreaming. Which I’m kinda pissed off about, actually. I wanted a full-on OOB, you know? An out-of-body thing? Floating around, looking down on everyone.” She shrugged. “But not for me.” She managed a weak laugh and wondered if he could tell she was not telling the whole truth. She did dream, a little. But it was nothing she clearly remembered, and she was glad to wake up, feeling frightened.

  “The nanovirus continues to break down your tissues, even after the condition has killed you,” he said. Lou noticed the man asked very few questions; he simply stated things on which she could comment.

  “That’s right, yeah. And the treatment costs a fortune, too, so I’m always falling to bits and giving off this stink all the time. All that. Plus the weirdness of not having a heartbeat, a pulse, that’s creepy.”

  The man sat and thought about her answers. When Lou saw he wasn’t going to answer immediately, she stared out the window again. How do I know, she thought, this isn’t a recording, or even a bloody sim?

  I don’t, she realized. I don’t know a damn thing. Glancing at her hands, flexing her fingers, she looked at her fingernails, all neatly trimmed and buffed. She had to admit, they did nice work, no matter how creepy. Lou looked at the man, but he was still in serene thinking mode. Lou stuck her right index finger in her mouth a little way, bit down on the nail, and wrenched her head to the side as hard as she could stand.

  The pain was not as bad as it might have been. She remembered when this sort of maneuver would have taken off most of the finger.

  What’s better, she thought as she pulled a hunk of sheared nail out of her mouth, is the sight of glistening gray nano-tink fizzing out of the nailbed.

  The man interrupted her. “You are concerned that this environment is not fully real. That it might be a kind of dream in itself.”

  Lou watched the fresh tink knit her nail back and felt nerve-ends tingle and burn; there was a surge of heat in her finger. It had been so long since she had fresh tink in her body, she’d forgotten what it was like and how fast it could work.

  So, this proved one thing: she was physically real, regardless of anything else going on. The beautiful man might or might not be real. Though what he was, if not real, she didn’t know, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. The view from this window, though compelling, could be real or sim or transmitted from som
ewhere or even recorded. Thinking about it, she realized that even her single sheet of crappy Active Paper, if she deleted all the files, could handle at most only a few seconds of this display, and then only if she compressed the hell out of it.

  Which made her think about the small card of Paper she found in Tom’s bag, along with that phage launcher.

  I bet Tom’s fuming over that. This made her smile.

  “I don’t know,” Lou said, “what to think about this ‘environment’, and I don’t know what to think about you. You can’t tell me you went to all this trouble and expense just to ask me some stuff about death, which you could have gotten from any technical knowledge base, or from any of hundreds of academic journals, documentaries, online sources of all kinds. So don’t give me any of this coy crap.”

  “My sincere apologies,” he said with grave tones and a solemn expression. He said nothing for a long while, as if to register a moment’s silence for the death of the lie. Then, “I say only what I am asked to say. I was instructed to ask you about death, from a personal perspective.”

  Lou scratched her ear. The sound of her finger scratching was surprisingly loud. “Well, there you are. Now answer my questions.”

  “I have one more question for you.”

  She waved at him, irritated. “Get on with it.”

  “We do know, as you rightly observe, a lot about the experience of death, as discussed and recorded in countless documents, sources, and such. We tell the truth, however, when saying that we have never physically encountered a person in your situation.”

  “We?” She was getting more annoyed by the moment, but didn’t know quite what she might do about it.

  “Ms. Meagher: what can you tell us about the status of your immortal soul?”

  She stared at him. This question was different. Real. Perhaps the thing his people actually wanted to know about.

  She coughed out a kind of laugh, surprised more than anything. Lou eased to her feet, expecting the usual joint pain and stiffness; it wasn’t there. Standing, she felt a moment of giddy panic, a sense that she might not stop getting up, that she could take off and fly away. Her new strength, after so long with so little, was shocking. She found herself pressed against the wall behind her, hands flat, fingers spread, looking at her feet, making sure she was still anchored. This wasn’t what she wanted. The idea was to temporize, to snoop about for ways out, and to gather clues. This was a locked-room mystery, and she was the corpse. Bloody marvelous, she thought. And the guy wants to know the weirdest things…

  The man remained seated. He looked up at her, curious now in a way he had not been before.

  “Why,” she asked, still buying time, “do you want to know that?”

  “It is a matter of concern to us.” He said it with studied calm; Lou had a sense that she was hearing a profound understatement, which made her curious, despite her unease.

  “You didn’t say who you guys are, by the way. That was the deal. Your turn now.”

  For the merest fraction of a moment, the man looked discomfited. “You are interested in Etienne Tourignon.”

  This was the second time he had mentioned Uncle Etienne. “Yeah, so?” Now she wondered more than ever what was going on.

  “Those for whom I speak … are interested in him, too.”

  Lou took this in, nodding, and began to pace. Up close to the window wall, she touched the surface. It felt smooth, like high-quality display-texture. The way it had appeared on the wall suggested it was mixed into the wall and could manifest on command and then submerge again later. She did like the way the view through the window changed as she moved around the room; that was fancy. She pressed her hand onto the surface and she felt a warm tingle of moving pixons under her fingertips as a hov whizzed by in the imaged distance. So, this wall wasn’t only wood. Her host could probably snap his fingers and a door would appear anywhere.

  “Last I heard,” she said, “Etienne was a shipbuilder on the way out. His business hadn’t survived tubes and stalks and nano. His finances, at least his public finances, didn’t look too good.”

  The man nodded at this. He looked sad for Uncle Etienne. “It is true that the shipbuilding business has been through a paradigm shift. Some made the transition to this new era, while others did not. Etienne Tourignon chose to move in a different direction.”

  Lou thought for a moment, listening. “He moved into your … area?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And what would your” —she made a quotation-marks gesture— “area be, exactly?”

  He smiled but hesitated. “Wealth enhancement. Consulting. Investments. Research.”

  Lou folded her arms, still enjoying the absence of joint pain. “Could you possibly give me a less useful answer?”

  “Your interests and our interests coincide.”

  “Explain.”

  “In due course. First, please tell me your thoughts regarding the status of your soul.”

  “What the hell does this have to do with the Tourignon business?”

  The man shrugged; he barely moved. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. We shall see. Now, please, give me your thoughts.”

  “I don’t have time for this metaphysical crap. I’ve lost five days here. The kid I’m looking for could’ve been ‘tomed down to component cells by now and farmed out across human space!” She ran her hands through her hair and wished these people, whoever they were, would understand about time-pressures.

  “I am aware,” the man said, looking calm and reassuring, “of the urgency of your quest. You will thus appreciate that our quest is urgent, too.”

  Lou leaned against the wall and slid down to sit once more. Frowning, exasperated, she said, “What?”

  “We are interested in what happens to the immortal soul following death.” He said this with something, she thought, approaching awe, wonder — and perhaps fear.

  “Well,” Lou said, “Damned if I know. Sorry.” She wanted to leave. She fidgeted with her fingers, enjoying, despite her agitation, the unhindered movement of smooth knuckles and joints, watching tendons move under her smooth skin. She remembered years ago, when her hands were black, twisted claws, the skin cracked open, broken. The stink of putrefaction…

  “I am sorry you feel that way, Ms. Meagher. This is a matter that is very important to us. The technical documentation and research sources contain little or no information about this issue. We thought you might help us.”

  “To be honest, really honest, I don’t even know if I would know, if something happened to it or not. Hmm, that’s not real clear. I never used to worry much about my,” and she made the quotation-marks gesture again, “soul. It never worried me. My folks were never religious, or not much. Mum says she dabbled in the Separatists when she was young, before she met Dad. But some military outfit busted them up…”

  The man pressed his palms together. He looked at her with great intensity. He asked urgently, “Did you feel any different when you woke up after your transition to Stage One from how you felt before?”

  “I just want my dog, okay? I want to be gone. I’m losing time.”

  “Soon, very soon. Please. Indulge us.”

  Lou glanced around the room. Still no doors visible. “I don’t seem to have much choice.”

  “Did you feel any different, when you emerged? Spiritually speaking.”

  “No. Not that I noticed. I was too busy just dealing with post-death trauma, having a renewed body, no pain…” And her parents, who had begged the doctors to do anything they could to save her, seeing her emerge from the machine, whole and new, their faces a heartbreaking mix of joy and horror. She remembered their reluctance to touch her, even with NanoHazard gloves. The big white environment suits they wore to just be in the same room with her, and the monosyllabic conversation. It was like they
were talking to a stranger.

  They never used the word monster — at least, not right away.

  “Ms. Meagher. I regret the insensitivity of my questioning.”

  She had not realized she was crying again. “I’ll be fine. Just let me go. I’ve had enough…”

  The man looked distressed. He said nothing. Lou tried to put all those memories and feelings away and wiped her nose, her eyes.

  “We appreciate the time you have spent with us. You have helped us very much. Please let us repay the favor.”

  “You’re going to let me go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “In a moment.”

  She winced. “I knew there’d be a bloody catch.”

  “Would you like to talk to Etienne Tourignon?”

  Lou managed a laugh. “Yeah. Sure. Why not.”

  “Excellent. Now, please listen to me. There are some things I need to explain.”

  “This better be damn good,” she muttered.

  “Etienne Tourignon is currently staying at his villa on the Orbital, in the French Quarter. He arrived two days ago. He chartered a high-speed hypertube transport from Ganymede, and made three tube connections.”

  Lou chose to ignore the larger mysteries here, and concentrated on this detailed information. “High-speed transports aren’t cheap to charter. You pay a lot for what they can do with tube topology. And only three connections from Ganymede to here is amazing. When I came out here years ago, we went through about twelve different tubes. Average of four hours between them, looking for a suitable one for the next segment. Unbelievable.”

  “Tourignon travels well for a struggling shipbuilding magnate,” the man said.

  She thought this through. “Obviously, he’s in some kind of new biz. Or, he has interesting associates propping him up.”

  “Ms. Meagher. His people alerted him that you are sniffing around his holdings and making inquiries.”

  “I made some routine searches, nothing penetrating. There was no hacking or anything.”

  “Yes.”

  Lou felt a surge of anxiety. “I’m just looking for this little kid. That’s it. Find the kid, I’m out of the game.”