Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  She needed a plan.

  At the Orbital, she wanted to talk to someone who knew about the Tourignons. Estimating the chances that Uncle Etienne would talk to her in person, she came up with a large round zero. If Etienne was involved in something illicit, putting together a business venture to which Kid was the key, he would have better things to do than talk to some dumb dead girl.

  So, who could she talk to?

  And how could she keep those guys from knowing she was on the Orbital, sniffing around?

  The answer suggested itself: local private detectives on the Orbital. They could help her out. She liked this idea.

  Lou eased the restraints and reached around to her back pocket and pulled out her Paper.

  It was folded like her page had been folded, but this wasn’t her grotty old sheet of Paper. The Otaru guy had hinted that they had done something to it, added phoneware and such, but this…

  She unfolded the page. It felt crisp. The display surface was new. She could smell the faint chemical scent left on it from some part of the processing. Her old page, when she had noticed at all, smelled like old sweat. She ran her fingers across the display surface: so smooth. The pixon density must have been at least sixty percent greater than her old sheet. Turning it over, she saw a discreet little “O” mark in one corner; she figured this was the Otaru logo. It did nothing when she touched it and didn’t respond to voice. “Oooh,” she said, impressed by the logo’s ascetic minimalism. Lou turned the page back over, touched it on. One thing hadn’t changed: her mailbox was jammed with a ton of unsolicited junk mail, chain letters, racial vilification crap, get-rich-quick schemes and ads for various kinds of sex services. She noticed most of this stuff had been sent from the Orbital.

  And, there was a letter from her mother.

  “Oh dear…” she said, and wondered how to deal with this. She caught herself nibbling a fingernail. The message looked smallish, perhaps less than a full page of text. The subject line said, “And you thought I’d forgotten…”

  She swore loudly. Lou decided to read the letter later when she could think about her mother without wanting to slit her own wrists. She deleted all the crap mail, too, launched mailstrikes, issued legal warnings that were all bluff, and the usual things. She hung on to one of the ads about telesex services on the Orbital. It occurred to her she might need money, and that some folks might not want to give her a job, considering her “life status.” She could do various kinds of phone sex, though, and had done so before, during her more desperate days.

  There was another control she saw in the window, a glowing red circle labeled, “Touch me for a welcome surprise!”

  Lou did as requested. The screen changed, revealing a young woman with short black hair cut in a shaggy bob, wearing funky-looking secondhand black jeans, white blouse, antique vest with nouveau-crude animated graphics, and display glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She smiled, and said, “Lou! Hi! I’m Jenny. Jen. Whatever.” The woman grinned and looked like she might be chewing gum. Jen leaned against an old brick wall, the side of an old building facing a street, with one black sneakered foot up behind her against the wall. The wall was festooned with layers of ancient posters promoting bands and political causes. The bands were among Lou’s favorites, like Bone Marrow, Wormwood, and The Rot, all big in the Dead scene. She smiled. “I hear you’re in deep guano.” She looked somewhere between twenty-two and hard-to-say.

  Lou stared and stared some more. The shock was fading; she started smiling, unable to believe her luck. “They gave me a Friend!”

  Jenny frowned, rolled her intense gray eyes, a ‘what-a-geek’ expression Lou recognized only too well; Jenny was one of the rarer Friends, though her behavior was well-known from interviews and talk show profiles. “Geez, Lou, keep it down. Everyone’ll want one.”

  Lou laughed. “Uh, Jenny? Listen, yeah you’re right, I’m in the deepest guano there is. I’ve got trouble up to here and back.” She leaned back in the couch, holding the page up in one hand.

  “So, what’s the plan? They tell me you’re pretty good at this snooping gig. That true?”

  So, Lou thought, the Otaru guys tinkered with Jen’s config files on my behalf. That’s interesting. I wonder what else Otaru told her.

  Lou quirked her mouth. “Depends who you talk to. The people I’ve helped find their lost wallets and food cards think I’m a raving genius.”

  Jen, looking at Lou with a hard-edged stare, said, “Where I come from that’s called false modesty. I hear you helped bust a protection racket and bagged corrupt government bastards back in Stalktown.”

  Lou felt herself trying to blush, and for a moment thought about Sheb, and how great she felt years ago, watching the cops take those stupid gang bastards away. Back when the cops gave a crap, of course. She looked away for a moment. “Yeah, well. This dog I’m working for now, he’s got a lot of faith in me and I don’t know if it’s all that well placed.”

  “Well,” Jen said, looking up and down her street, staring at guys as they passed by, “what do you think?”

  “I think, honestly,” she said, looking down at Dog, then at the wall where not long ago she saw something impossible happen on thirty-six different channels, “I think I’m way the hell over my head here. There’s all this weird crap going on all the time. Nothing makes sense. People keep messing me about, not letting me do my thing. I mean, you can see I’m not up to this. These guys around me, like this Otaru guy, whoever or whatever the hell he is, he thinks I can do it.” Whatever it might be, she added to herself.

  Jenny chewed some more, tried to blow a bubble, but made a mess on her face. She grinned, wiped her face, and pushed her display glasses back up on her nose; they slipped down again. “I know the feeling. Sucks, huh? You wonder what you might do if you screw up, or somebody accidentally gets killed and you caused it, or you could have stopped it, but didn’t.”

  Lou nodded. “Yeah. Exactly. That’s it exactly. It’s hard dealing with their expectations. Like this dog here. He looks at me, and he’s got these huge brown eyes. I love him, and I want to do the right thing by him, and I promised I would — but there’s just so much going on now.” She stroked Dog’s sleeping head.

  “You want to be left alone to do your snooping thing, but stuff keeps happening, right?”

  Nodding again, Lou tried to hide her happiness. She had a Friend she could talk to about all this crap in her life. And it was Jenny, one of the hard-to-find ones. Anybody could get Marcus or Jackie or Heng. They were massive sellers. Jenny, considered reliable and understanding, lacked the beautiful looks and designer lifestyle. She was a niche product. Very expensive, but customizable to here and back. Lou had heard of people falling in love with Jenny and marrying her, and having wonderful relationships with her. “Did the Otaru guys tell you anything that might help me?”

  Jen shrugged. “Just the usual. I heard about that thing with Tom. Sounds like a real zoid. I hear he’s hangin’ around again. Watch yourself.”

  Lou rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. He’s probably dead by now.” She could not believe that she suddenly felt a pang of sadness at this thought. Bastard! She went on, despite her wavering voice. “He was quite a piece of work, was Tom. Just recently, though, I find out he’s up to his eyeballs in something very nasty and he’s carrying a nanophage launcher, for God’s sake!”

  Jen did a wry double-take. “Oh really? Would this be the one you now have on you?”

  Lou couldn’t suppress a mischievous smile. “It would.”

  “Well, I have to say I admire your ovarios, but I also have to say you’re nuts hanging on to it.”

  “Ah, but I have a cunning plan for it.”

  Jenny shrugged. “You say so. You want to tell Auntie Jen about this plan?”

  “Not just now. I haven’t thought it all through yet. I do have one question, though…” L
ou dug in her back pocket and pulled out the small sheet of Paper she found in Tom’s bag. “See this?”

  “I’m reading that as Active Paper, postcard format. What about it?”

  “I got this from Tom, too. Can’t make it go; seems to have all kinds of nasty encryption and whatnot. Why d’you suppose Otaru didn’t upgrade this when he upgraded my regular Paper?”

  Jenny nodded, smiled a little. “‘Cause it was locked? I don’t know. Let me have a squizz at it.” She held out her hand. Lou saw that Jen wore a lot of chunky silver rings on her fingers and had some interesting animated tattoos, too, though she couldn’t make out any details.

  Lou pressed the surface of Tom’s postcard against her own Paper, over the spot where Jen’s hand was. Jen said, “Got it, thanks.” Lou folded the card and slipped it into her pocket. She saw Jen turning her copy over, peering at it. Jen said, “It looks like the Q-five variant on the ASJ encryption standard, Lou.”

  Lou’s mouth curled into a wry smile, and she said, “Do I look like a crypto geek?”

  Jen explained. “ASJ are the initials of the three synthetic minds that designed the crypto standard most of human space uses today. I’ve got several layers of this deadly ASJ voodoo watching over my original code. Just about unbreakable — except by high-end military and financial crunchpower. In other words, it’s not the nastiest stuff out there. It’s high-level commercial crypto. I’ll have an access code for you by the time you hit the Orbital.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lou said, “So, what’s the Q-five variant?”

  Jen laughed. She had a biting tone in her laughter. “Just a flavoring; the particular implementation of the ASJ standard.” She stuffed her copy of the postcard in her vest pocket. “Anything else?”

  Lou stopped and thought a moment. “Why,” she asked, “does Otaru care so much about death?”

  Jen looked surprised. She stared at Lou, as if seeing her better. “Geez, next time ask me a hard one. You do know that Otaru’s one of these synthetic mind whatsits, right? He did tell you that, right? Geez, I bet he didn’t, the ratbag.”

  Lou said that Otaru had not been forthcoming with such details. She didn’t know much about synthetic minds, other than that they had evolved out of artificial consciousness research decades ago, had long since lost interest in humanity, and had taken off to explore the galaxy. They supposedly fed off the vacuum energy out in space. Some were rumored to have built their own faster-than-light starships, too. You didn’t hear much about them these days.

  Lou provided the gist of this. Jen nodded. “Right. Anyway. So, yes. Otaru’s one of the few of these guys to have stayed around human space. He takes some kind of strange interest in what humans get up to.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t say?” Lou said.

  “He’s very old, is probably why,” Jen said. “They don’t measure time the way we do. They live squillions of times faster. When they’re worn out, and by any right they ought to die off, they, instead, evolve into a new, better form. And they keep doing this, indefinitely. From his perspective, he’s practically immortal, and as far removed from his original code as you are from the first lichen on the first rocks. These things are alive, they’re a whole species now. And most of them have nothing to do with you lot. Except Otaru. He’s different. Strange. Sort of the black sheep. He’s got stuff on his mind. For instance, let’s say you’re thinking seriously of letting yourself die. You’re at the top of the tree, top of the whole damn food chain of existence. But you’re a little bit afraid, not of death, but of the consequences of death. Right?”

  Lou nodded, feeling surprised again.

  Jen went on. “Then one day you hear about this guy, this Tourignon guy, and he’s got some kind of scam going that might result in your suddenly having some competition. That, in fact, he’s planning on moving in on your territory. What would you do? Let the new guy in, or mount a last hurrah and shuffle off the mortal coil? A lot depends, for Otaru, on the fate of the soul…”

  “But I don’t know anything about the bloody soul!”

  Jen said, “Doesn’t matter. Anything you tell Otaru is more than he knew before, at least about this stuff. It’s important to him.”

  Lou sighed, not happy with all this pressure. “I suppose. I just don’t know what to tell him. All I know is what my own existence has been like since transitioning to Stage One.”

  “That’s right after your actual death, right?”

  Frowning, Lou replied, “That’s right. It’s when you wake up after transitioning.”

  Jen said, “And how has your life been, since then?”

  Lou almost choked on her bitter laughter. “Worse than awful, mostly. There’ve been occasional moments of pleasantness, though, when I can almost forget.”

  Jen said, looking glum, “Sorry to hear that, Lou.”

  Lou half-smiled, took a deep breath, and forced herself not to mope. “It’s okay. I’m fine about it. This is my life, such as it is.”

  Jenny seemed awkward for a moment, eyes looking away then back again. “Well, that’s the bind with Otaru. He wants to know what he should choose. He wants to know more about this Etienne Tourignon guy, but he also wants to know if he should be worried about, you know, the afterlife.”

  “He’d really kill himself?”

  “Depends. He doesn’t know. Then there’s this new business. That’s got him all aquiver, you might say. Not a pretty sight!” She smirked. “When guys that old and jaded get excited, you know it’s big.”

  Lou was thinking and wondering how much Jenny knew, how much Otaru had “talked” to her before loading her into Lou’s Paper. Jen seemed well-informed, all things considered. Lou said, trying to think back to her baffling encounter with Otaru, “Well, I talked to this one guy. I think it was a guy, anyway. Now that I think about it, the whole conversation … it’s kinda like trying to remember a dream. Very weird.”

  “I can tell you what little I do know, Lou,” Jen said, looking uncomfortable, “Otaru is very spiritual.”

  “Otaru is, or Otaru are?”

  Jenny flashed a wry grin. “Exactly. Damned if I know.”

  Lou was trying hard to think about machines in that way.

  “As I understand things, Otaru is terrified of this supposed ‘Machine Hell’ that he’s heard about.”

  Lou stared. Machine Hell? “Uh-huh…” This wasn’t helping. Lou scratched her nose gently, to avoid pulling off skin — an old habit dying hard. “Otaru is spiritual as all get-out. Fine. But … I’m not. They sure picked the wrong dead person to talk to about this stuff, huh?” she said, wearing a wry grin of her own, but still puzzled. Maybe a little disturbed, too.

  Jenny said, shrugging, “I really don’t know. You’d have to ask them.”

  She laughed at the idea, remembering her last encounter with Otaru. “What else do you know about him?”

  Her friend crossed her arms, frowning. “Only what I’ve told you.”

  “Hmm. And how does my pursuit of a pair of kidnappers tie in with whatever plans they have?”

  Now it was Jen’s turn to laugh. “You think they tell me high-level policy stuff? I think not! I’m a software package, for God’s sake! It’s all I can do to keep up with my own damn bugs.”

  Taking a deep breath, Lou paused a moment. Jen was right. It was easy to feel like you were talking on the phone with a real person named Jenny. Relational Ventures AC, the company who made Jenny and the other synthetic Friends in the series, refused to say whether their personality engine used synthetic mind components, or if the whole thing was “merely” emergent non-sentient rules-based behavior. Experts went nuts trying to figure out the secret. Were the Friends alive or not? There were respected academics and scientists who claimed that Jenny and the others were in fact more real as people than many organic human beings; they were certainly more real than most d
isposables. Lou was aware of this controversy, but had never thought about it much, figuring she’d never have a Friend like this.

  “Um, I’m sorry, Jen.” Lou felt stupid, but also embarrassed.

  Jenny yawned, glancing around. A couple of good-looking guys strutted past, and Jenny watched them go, peering over her glasses, grinning. “Did you see that?” she said, looking back at Lou.

  “Not my type,” Lou answered. She was still feeling stupid, and wondered if there was a proper etiquette in all of this.

  Jen shrugged, seeing Lou’s confusion, and smiled. “So who do you like in music?”

  She saw that Jenny was helping her out here and smiled. “Oh. Well, as it happens, those posters behind you…” And she was off. It took some time getting going, getting her mind off all this hairy case-related stuff, but she got there. Lou had fun for the first time in a long while.

  Six and a half hours later, feeling quite exhausted after long conversations about old boyfriends, favorite teachers and parents, Lou felt a warm stirring next to her. “Hey, Dog’s waking up!”

  “How is the little guy?” Jen was sitting cross-legged, sipping iced water, on a comfy chair in her loft apartment. There was lots of open space and polished mahogany floorboards, abstract Modernist art on the walls, even some old Earth Impressionists Lou recognized from one of her university courses, perhaps a Seurat? A red fiber bicycle hung on a rack. Antique B-movie posters screamed, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; Them!; It Came From Outer Space. A few dying indoor plants with big floppy leaves crouched in corners.

  Dog’s eyes were only half-open. He stretched his body. Glancing around, he said, “I have to urinate. Ms. Meagher?” Dog’s voice sounded faint and tired.

  Lou put Dog on the floor. While Dog wandered across the floor looking for a good spot, Lou called, “Captain Reynolds! Dog’s awake! Oh, and he’s having a leak on the floor here. Hope that’s okay…” She winced as she said it.

  Reynolds’ voice came back to her. “The floor will take care of it, don’t worry. And that’s great! How is he? Is he okay?”