by Alex Scarrow
The taut, manic smile that she had stretched across her lips felt utterly false and uncomfortable. She wondered how the hell Jez could keep it up for hours on end; one big plastic phoney smile.
But, Ellie noticed, she was right about something. One of the people passing in front of her had looked up, hesitantly met her eyes and smiled uncertainly back.
There it was again, another momentary, faltering, restrained smile from someone she had never met before in her life. Maybe Jez was right. Maybe such a pointless, insincere gesture was all it took; all that stood between her and making a fortune.
‘You’re doing well, girl,’ said Jez still watching her. ‘Now how do you feel?’
How do I feel? Like a damned ploob-head…
No – hang on, she didn’t.
To Ellie’s astonishment, for the first time that morning, she didn’t feel like an utter freak. Grinning like this, like a mindless fool…there was something about this stupid, inane grinning thing that seemed to be cancelling-out her painful embarrassment. It was almost as if her face was telling everyone else;
I really don’t care what you think I look like, I know I look just peachy.
Jez gently nudged her forwards. ‘Okay sales-chik, now it’s all about confidence. Brassing it out. Don’t wander out there and sheepishly ask whether they might like to try a sip. You’ve got to go out there and demand it!’ said Jez. ‘So, come on then.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now.’
Ellie looked once more at her reflection across the street. Yes, now she looked like another person entirely; in a way, a bit more like Jez, like someone who knows exactly who they are and where they’re headed. She felt okay, not the humble, wretched creature she felt like the rest of the time.
Faking it. Faking being confident. But that’s okay. That’s what other ‘super-confident’ people do. Right?
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m ready.’
She took several steps forward towards the river of people passing down the street, the smile still frozen upon her lips, and then she picked out a man walking towards her, his eyes, like everyone else’s, cast down and glazed over. Ellie planted her feet in front of him and at the last moment the man stopped and looked up.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Whuh?’
For a moment the sales pitch that she had spent last night rehearsing and role-playing with Jez had vanished from her mind, but then the opener came to her rescue.
‘Would you like to be one of the first to join me, and make a thousand creds a week?’ she gushed enthusiastically.
‘Whuh?’ he grunted again.
‘Make a tho-u-u-s-a-and creds a week?’ she repeated, mimicking Jez’s drawled delivery.
The man shrugged, suspiciously curious.
Ellie turned uncertainly to Jez, unsure what to say next, but Jez flapped her hands frantically for her to rattle-on with the pitch. She quickly turned back to face him, fearful of losing the momentum.
‘Yes! Of course you would! I’m Ellie by the way, and I’m well on the way to earning that sort of money. And I’m doing it selling this wonderful, revolutionary, new drink - SPECTORA!’
The man looked dead pan. His shoulders shrugged a ‘so what’. She could see with that announcement his momentary curiosity was satisfied. So you sell bottled pop, I get it. Big deal.
‘I want you to try just one sip, sir…..just for me. Because, that’s all it’s going to take to totally change your life. Just one little sip.’
‘Uh no, thanks,’ he said looking to step around her.
Ellie’s smile faltered with frustration. Come on Ellie, think of something girl. Don’t let your first prospect go.
‘One little sip,’ she pursed her lips ever so slightly, the way she had seen Jez do a million times, and winked. ‘I’m sure I won’t disappoint you.’
The man stopped and his eyes darted over her, lingering on her flat chest, her legs and her face, in that order - appraising her in the space of a heartbeat. It made her skin crawl.
‘Okay, guess. Just for you chik,’ he replied cracking the faint beginnings of a smile.
Ellie whipped out a bottle of Spectora, popped the seal and thrust it towards him. ‘With this first taste, I assure you, things will never be the same,’ she said, the foolish leer on her face beginning to cause her cheeks to ache. ‘You and me are gonna be business partners.’
She cringed inside. His eyebrows flickered hopefully, as once more his gaze ran up her legs to her face, in one evaluating sweep and then finally to the bottle of pop in front of him. He reached out for it.
‘Tell me what flavour you think it is, okay?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Whatever,’ and then casually chugged a mouthful from the bottle. He swilled it around his mouth for a moment before his face locked into an expression of concentration.
‘That’s pretty good….what is that? A sort of ice-cream flavour?’
Ellie nodded. ‘Could be….what else?’
His eyes widened with surprise as inside his mouth micro-bacterial war raged and the casualties on both sides began mounting up. ‘Hey, the flavour just changed, now it’s sort of….what?…sort of, fruity I think.’
Oh God! I think I’ve got a customer!
Ellie laughed. ‘Great isn’t it? It just keeps changing from second to second.’
The man took a second mouthful and once more swilled it around his mouth. ‘Boy…there’s another flavour coming through. Its….woah…weird….sort of a savoury flavour?’
Savoury? That was odd, she thought. So far the various sensations she had heard people announcing on trying the drink had all been sweet and sugary. The one bottle from their start-up stock she had consumed last night with Jez had been a kaleidoscope of sugary, fruity, creamy flavours. No savoury ones though.
The man’s nose wrinkled slightly. ‘Euuch….sort of meaty….smokey, like flame-grilled proto-meat. That’s, just…are you sure that’s right?’ The man looked at her with an expression of bemusement, that quickly evolved into nascent disgust. ‘Ughh, this is turning…! It tastes like – like –’ he looked up at her. ‘Like shit!’
‘Oh come on. It’s not that bad, is it?’
‘No I mean it actually tastes like faeces, you know? Really, like shit.’
Ellie’s smile suddenly felt out of place as he spat the drink out onto the ground. ‘You’re kidding me right?’ He sputtered. ‘You’re earning a thousand creds a week selling this bottled arse cream?’
‘Um, yeah, it’s…uhh…it’s really popular,’ she muttered.
‘Achhh. I can still fregging taste it! Have you got any water so I can rinse my mouth out?’
‘Errr…no, sorry,’ she answered. ‘So you umm, you really don’t like it, I guess?’
‘Are you kidding?’ he said, and then retched. ‘Uhhh, this is disgusting. Really…oh man, I think I’m going to hewdle!’
The man pushed past Ellie and lurched to the side of the street. He bent over a pile of rubbish and splattered it with a hosing of vomit.
Ellie looked at Jez, who had frozen mid-sales pitch and watched the man bent double, heaving and retching painfully. Jez looked at her, eyes widened, as if to say what did you just do to him?
The man finally took a moment to fight back the nausea and look up at Ellie. ‘You! You crazy stupid bitch! What the fregg is that stuff?’
Ellie looked back at Jez, wondering what the exit strategy was. A spasm caused the man to shudder and he vomited again. After he had finished jettisoning another load, he turned back and took a couple of menacing steps towards her.
‘I’m going to get a fregging marshal on to you girl! Somebody call a marshal!’ he shouted out dizzily, dropping to one knee and clutching his guts. ‘The bitch just poisoned me. Get a marshal!!’
She looked back at Jez again. This time Jez nodded and both girls turned on their heels and ran.
*
The news on the toob was not something Jez bothered with often, if at all. S
he preferred the shopping channels interspersed with a regular diet of sopa-drams and quizzies. But this evening Ellie had flipped the holo display to New Haven’s main news channel and Jez on this occasion was more than happy to scan the news along with her.
‘Nothing so far,’ said Ellie. ‘Maybe we’re okay.’
They sat on their jel couch in the darkness, lit only by the cyan glow of the toob. For some reason this evening they’d both decided to leave the light off in the main cube and cowered in the flickering blue light of the holo-display like a pair of convicts on the run.
‘Maybe he didn’t manage to call a marshal then,’ said Jez. ‘I mean you can never find one when you want one, can you?’
‘He looked pretty sick Jez. What if I…you know? Killed him?’
Jez looked at the three boxes of soft drink in the corner. ‘You didn’t kill him Ellie. If anything happened to him, like, well…say like he died, then it wasn’t your fault. He might have had some really weird, really rare allergy or something.’
‘Oh crud, Jez. I hope he’s okay.’
‘I’m sure it’s just…’
The news story that had been on, a demonstration by migrants from Celestion down by the southern gate that had turned nasty after some law marshals had arrived and exercised some zero-tolerance attitude, was replaced with a white and orange product logo that silenced Jez instantly
‘Today in the Service Sector a man was taken seriously ill after being sold a bottle of an unapproved soft drink known as ‘Spectora’. The drink, a product of un-licensed genetic engineering, possibly by a factory on Harpers Reach, or off-world, has been noted on several other worlds in this sector. The company behind the drink, Flexegen, has no registered headquarters on Harpers Reach, but is known to be operating here. Administration information on the company has revealed that it is believed to be a commercial money-laundering enterprise, to process and also raise funds for various terrorist groups…’
Ellie looked at Jez, ‘oh crud.’
‘…The man is said to be in a serious but stable condition, but law marshals offered this warning to people today…’ The image on the display changed to show a middle-aged, middle-ranking marshal speaking. ‘This drink is not approved by the Administration and, as we’ve seen today, contains potentially lethal and active genetically engineered ingredients. If you see a bottle of this stuff, or see someone selling it, you should contact the nearest marshal immediately. We will make every effort to find and arrest the organisers behind this illegal product, and the dealers who have been selling it on the street. Thank you.’
Jez muted the toob. It was now showing flickering images of the teen singer Betsy Boomalackah visiting some venue over in Harvest City to promote her latest track. Jez pointed towards the boxes of drink, their Spectora uniforms, the business cards and sales materials. ‘Where’s the nearest rubbish incinerator?’
‘Up two floors.’
‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER 15
Deacon studied the data files that had been compiled for him by Leonard. There were six planets the young lad had short-listed as the most likely places that Mason would have selected for the candidate. For each of these planets Leonard had noted all the paternity requests that Mason had personally checked out and had done something with to do with over the last twenty years. The list of names was long, over a thousand of them, and they were dispersed across five different worlds. And these five worlds were dotted right across Human Space.
He sat back in the leather chair and cursed. What he wouldn’t give to have five minutes alone with that madman Mason, and something sharp to prod him with. When he had started rooting through the old man’s things, he’d had high hopes that somewhere Mason would have slipped up and left a detail, a clue, a fragment of data that would, with a little lateral thinking, lead him directly to the candidate child.
But he hadn’t.
The late doctor had been very careful to ensure nothing that could lead him to the child was digitally stored. Deacon had to respect him for that. His preference for the antique pen and paper had, perhaps, been a far more effective security measure than any number of firewalls, passwords or data encryption algorithms.
Perhaps the secret is in this study somewhere? A secret desk drawer? A fake book spine?
Deacon scanned the antique books along the shelves and the folders of data printouts stacked one atop the other. There was nothing for it; both he and Leonard were going to have to go through all of those to see whether Mason had hidden secret papers amongst them. He was beginning to get a feel for the old man, to get an idea of how his mind functioned. From interviews with the lab technicians that had worked closely with Mason, he had begun to discover many of the old man’s idiosyncrasies, habits. Deacon got up and approached the book shelves and ran his finger along the ancient spines.
Mason fondly loved all things antique; hated all things modern. Technology in general. Strange for a man who worked in the field of genetics. Mason passionately hated computers. He much preferred to think with a pen in his hand. The ink blotter on his desk was testament to that, covered as it was with scribbles and scrawls, many faded by the years.
Deacon could understand the appeal of a fountain pen in one hand, almost as if the intelligence, the wisdom, lay inside the thing itself and the hand teased it out one idea at a time by wafting it closely over paper.
He approached a star chart of Human Space framed on the wall between the book shelves. It was a print he was familiar with, a popular one done in the style of ancient Old Earth maps, looking as if it had had been crafted by some medieval cartographer on papyrus.
He could imagine Mason standing before it studying it intently as he decided where best to send his creation. He could imagine that the old man must have stood right here, looking carefully at the groupings of stars and worlds and the main commercial routes between them for many hours, tracing the routes with his fingers, using his faithful fountain pen as a pointer.
A thought occurred to Deacon.
It was something he had noticed, when looking though some of the data printouts that Mason had read and commented on with his pen. If you held the printouts at an angle to the light, the black ink from Mason’s fountain pen was a little glossier than the derma-jet print ink.
Deacon stood closer to the chart. He lent against the wall and looked obliquely across the star chart so that the glow of Pacifica’s reflected light cast a dull blue sheen across the printed chart.
Oh my.
Glistening on the chart were several faint pen strokes. And the small casual swirl of a loop. With his head still pressed against the wall, he placed his finger on the chart in the middle of the loop Mason’s pen had once upon a time inscribed and then pulled back to look squarely at it.
His finger obscured a world on the star chart. Hoping that it might have the same name as one of the five worlds Leonard had suggested, he pulled it away.
Harpers Reach.
It was one of them.
Mason, lost in deep concentration, must have run his pen casually across the dark printed surface of this chart, not aware that there was a discernible mark being left.
Deacon hurried back across to the desk and studied the list of requests that had come from Harpers Reach. Mason had checked out only sixty-three from this world over the last two decades.
Only sixty-three.
Not a horrendously large number. If he went there himself, with some additional manpower, it could be quickly done. Within a few weeks, he could easily locate each and every child and dispose of all of them. It would be much quicker and more discreet, and certainly more thorough, if he supervised this directly, rather than entrusting it to the local authorities on the world itself. They were bound to ask awkward questions and more than likely, they would screw the job up.
He stepped smartly out of Mason’s study into his lab. Leonard was busy studying the list of a thousand names on another holo terminal.
‘Leonard?’
&nbs
p; ‘Yes…Deacon.’
‘Harpers Reach. We need to make arrangements to head out there immediately.’
OMNIPEDIA:
[Human Universe open source digital encyclopaedia]
Article: ‘The Administration’
The Administration governed Human Space for over seven hundred years. It was formed in the aftermath of the colonial war, a period of devastation and disruption that lasted for just over two hundred years. The colonial war was fought between Old Earth, together with the colonised worlds of the Solar System, and the hundreds of newly settled worlds outside of the Solar System. In the wake of faster than light drives, first pioneered in the 25th century, humans rapidly expanded their presence in the galaxy and many of the more suitable worlds quickly became settled, and mirroring a period of history from over a thousand years earlier, declared themselves independent from Earth government.
The war took a long time to escalate to a point where significant numbers of lives were lost. In fact, for over a hundred years it was a cold war, as both sides mobilized their resources. The worlds of the solar system under leadership from Old Earth took many decades to develop a military force capable of fighting at an interstellar level, whilst the new colonial worlds were busy forging a myriad of complicated alliances and readying their defences.
However, once the war began in earnest, within the space of fifty years several dozen planets had been permanently rendered uninhabitable and many, many billions of lives were lost. Fifty-six years after the first military campaign was launched, the loose alliance of newly colonized worlds was all but crushed, whilst Old Earth and the worlds of the Solar System were crippled economically by the cost of prosecuting the war.
And so, a peace accord was finally struck. A new form of government was formed called the Colonial Administration. This authority was based on Liberty, one of the first worlds to be colonised outside the Solar System, and would be designed to govern ALL of Human Space.
